The consensus among liturgical scholars in the twentieth century was that prayer morning and evening formed the historical foundation of Christian practice, based on a similar pattern in Judaism, to which other hours of prayer were gradually added.1 It also became customary to draw a distinction between what were called ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ patterns of daily worship in fourth-century Christianity, a distinction which is based not simply on variations in the external forms of the worship but also on significant differences in the inner spirit expressed by those divergent forms.2 Furthermore, the advocates of this particular classification sometimes tended to go on to suggest that what was needed in today’s situation was a restoration of a ‘cathedral’ pattern of the daily office, in place of the essentially ‘monastic’ model which the churches had inherited from their medieval past. The implication of this is that the ‘cathedral’ tradition of the fourth century with public celebrations morning and evening was the authentic expression of Christian daily prayer and stood in direct succession to the practice of Christians in the first three centuries, while the ‘monastic’ tradition was a deviation from this straight line.
All of this, however, is open to question. Although the emphasis on the twofold nature of the divine office was a perfectly proper corrective to earlier scholarship, which had only been conscious of the existence of a single type – the monastic – yet in the end this simple dual classification fails to do full justice to the historical evidence, which reveals not just two but at least four different patterns of daily prayer in the early Church. Moreover, the daily devotions of the Egyptian desert ascetics and also the ‘cathedral’ office itself are both alike modifications of the pattern of prayer practised by Christians in earlier centuries. It is not therefore self-evident that a re-creation of the ‘cathedral’ model in the twenty-first century would be the restoration of the truly authentic form of Christian worship and the panacea for all the contemporary difficulties which surround the celebration of what the Roman Catholic Church now calls the Liturgy of the Hours. Let us then review the historical evidence for these early Christian prayer practices.
Pattern 1: Daily prayer before the fourth century
The earliest references to a specific Christian pattern of daily prayer are not to one twice a day but three times. The Didache, probably compiled around the end of the first century, directs that the Lord’s Prayer be said three times a day (8.2–3), but does not specify which particular times, presumably expecting those already to be familiar to its readers. Clement of Alexandria a century later, even though advocating the practice of constant prayer himself, also reveals familiarity with a threefold pattern of daily prayer that he says some Christians observe, and specifies the third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day as being the times for this (approximately 9 a.m., 12 noon, and 3 p.m.).3 His compatriot Origen too, later in the third century, recommends that prayer be offered not less than three times a day and again in the night. He cites the biblical precedents of Daniel praying three times a day (Daniel 6.10), of Peter praying at the sixth hour (Acts 10.9) as an instance of the middle of the three times, of the words ‘the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice’ (Psalm 141.2) as an instance of the third, and of the verse ‘At midnight I rose to give thanks to you because of your righteous judgements’ (Psalm 119.62) together with Paul and Silas praying at midnight while in prison (Acts 16.25) as instances of prayer in the night.4 Finally, Edward Phillips has disentangled from the multi-layered text known as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus a recommended pattern of daily prayer at the third, sixth, and ninth hours and at midnight. Phillips suggests that while some communities followed the natural rhythm of the day and performed their threefold prayer in the morning, at noon, and in the evening, others adopted the third, sixth, and ninth hours instead.5 It may well be that these variations reflect differences between rural Christians, whose pattern was determined by the movement of the sun, and urban Christians, who would have heard the public announcement in cities of these major divisions of the Roman day6 and adopted them for their prayer.
Threefold daily prayer also seems to have Jewish antecedents. Although the attempt to make prayer in the morning, the afternoon and the evening a general imposition on Jews (the first two hours being associated with what had been the times of the daily sacrifices) does not appear to have begun until well after the destruction of the Temple, there are signs that prayer three times a day, but not yet linked to the Temple hours, was being practised by some pious groups well prior to this, including those at Qumran.7 Prayer in the night may also have been part of the Qumran cycle, but in any case would have been a natural development for Christians expecting their Lord to return ‘like a thief in the night’.8 The fact that Christians also faced east whenever they prayed, like some Jewish groups, suggests that the roots of their regular times of prayer lay in encouraging a state of constant eschatological readiness.9
On the other hand, the writings of the third-century North African authors Tertullian and Cyprian attest to a more developed pattern of daily prayer there. They are aware that the only absolute apostolic injunction binding upon a Christian is to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5.17), but they both recommend that, in order to fulfil this, one should pray five times each day – in the morning, at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, and in the evening – and should also rise from sleep in the middle of the night to pray again. It looks as though the two versions of threefold daily prayer – prayer in the morning, at noon, and in the evening, and prayer at the third, sixth, and ninth hours – have been combined in this region to create this more extensive pattern.
Tertullian attempts to find biblical precedents for these particular times. The third, sixth, and ninth hours, he says, ‘can be found in the Scriptures in established use. The Holy Spirit was first poured out on the assembled disciples at the third hour. On the day on which Peter experienced the vision of everything common in that vessel, he had ascended to the housetop at the sixth hour in order to pray. He, with John, was going up to the Temple at the ninth hour, where he restored the paralytic man to health.’ Tertullian goes on to admit that these are simply statements, ‘without a precept of any observance’, but hopes that they are sufficient to ‘establish some presumption which may both enforce a command to pray and as if by law drag us from business for a while for such duty’, so that ‘we may worship not less than three times each day’. As he cannot find similar precedents for morning and evening prayer, he is reduced to describing them as ‘our obligatory prayers, which without any command are due at the beginning of daylight and of night’.10 He refers elsewhere to prayer in the night when raising as one of his objections to mixed marriages that a Christian wife will not be able to escape her pagan husband’s notice when she rises during the night to pray.11
Cyprian also traces prayer at the third, sixth, and ninth hours to biblical precedents. Like Tertullian, he believes that the three times of prayer observed by Daniel were at these times, and refers also to the descent of the Spirit on the disciples at the third hour and Peter’s vision at the sixth hour, but adds to these the period of Christ’s crucifixion from the sixth to the ninth hour. ‘But for us, dearly beloved brethren, in addition to the hours anciently observed, both the times and the symbolic aspects of praying have now increased. For prayer must be made also in the morning, so that the resurrection of the Lord may be celebrated by morning prayer . . . Likewise when the sun sets at the ending of the day it is necessary for prayer to be made again.’ He goes on to affirm that there is no hour when Christians ‘ought not constantly and continually to worship God’, and so should not cease from prayer ‘even by night’.12
Most scholars have sought to distinguish the status of the morning and evening hours mentioned here from the other times of prayer, and seen the former as obligatory for all Christians at the time and the latter as merely ‘recommended’. However, an unbiased reading of the texts suggests rather that all the occasions for prayer referred to by writers of the period, including the night, are considered as having equal importance to one another, as means towards the fulfilment of the end, a life in constant communion with God. There is, of course, no way of knowing how many ordinary Christians actually did manage to maintain this extensive daily schedule, but it should be remembered that the initiatory practices of the Church at this period demanded a high level of commitment from those seeking admission to the faith, so that it was more akin to what we would think of as entering a religious order. Moreover, this pattern of prayer was probably not felt to be quite as demanding as it appears to modern eyes. Rising in the middle of the night for prayer, for example, is not as difficult in a culture where there was little to do except sleep between sunset and sunrise and where it was common for people to wake for a while part way through the night before returning to a second period of sleep.
It is impossible to describe in detail the content of the daily prayers from this period, since there are very few extant early prayer-texts at all and none of them belong to these occasions, but from the allusions made by ancient writers it would seem that third-century Christians maintained the character, if not the form, of prayer reflected in New Testament documents, and especially the Pauline Epistles, and derived ultimately from Judaism, of praise and thanksgiving leading to petition and intercession for others.13 Such prayer seems generally to have been offered either by individuals on their own or by small groups of family and friends and not in formal liturgical assemblies, which appear to have been limited chiefly to the celebration of the eucharist on Sundays and to services of the word at the ninth hour on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the daily prayers were thought of as being merely private prayer. As Cyprian makes clear, each person’s prayer was seen as being a participation in the prayer of the whole Church: ‘Before all things the Teacher of peace and Master of unity did not wish prayer to be made singly and individually, so that when one prays, he does not pray for himself alone . . . For us prayer is public and common, and when we pray, we do not pray for one, but for the whole people, because we, the whole people, are one.’14 Such intercession was not only for other Christians, but for the whole world: according to Tertullian, it included prayer ‘for the emperors, for their ministers and for all in authority, for the welfare of the world, for the prevalence of peace, for the delay of the final consummation’.15 Moreover, Christians also viewed their acts of prayer as a sacrifice offered to God and as the true fulfilment of the ‘perpetual’ (tamid) daily sacrifices of the Old Testament (see Exodus 29.38–42; 30.7–8; Numbers 28.3–6).16 Here then, indeed, was the royal priesthood of the Church, though dispersed, engaged in its priestly task – continually offering the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to God on behalf of all creation, and interceding for the salvation of the world.
Finally, we should note two things which were seemingly not characteristics of the hours of prayer at this time. They did not usually involve the recitation of psalms, for Tertullian tells us that the more assiduous were adding to their prayers those psalms which included an Alleluia, to which those present could make the response,17 thereby clearly implying that other people did not. Instead the psalms were generally used in connection with community meals, whether eucharistic or not, where various individuals sang either one of the canonical psalms or a hymn of their own composition to the others.18 Nor again did the hours of prayer generally include a ministry of the word, not because the reading of the Scriptures was not valued by the early Christians, but because this was normally done in other contexts, in the corporate assemblies for worship on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, alluded to above, and in occasional catechetical classes intended for new converts. This restriction was inevitable for purely practical reasons: when one considers the difficulty – and high cost – of providing additional copies of the Scriptures, to say nothing of the low level of literacy among many converts, it will be apparent that studying the Bible at home can only have been possible for a relatively few educated and wealthier members of the Church.
Pattern 2: The fourth-century ‘cathedral’ office
After the Peace of Constantine in the fourth century, when daily communal assemblies for prayer became a more realistic possibility, evidence from a variety of sources points to the conclusion that in most places they were held only twice each day, in the morning and in the evening, this choice seemingly being governed primarily by the practical problems associated with meeting together during the working day or in the middle of the night.19 It was of course hoped that individuals and families might still continue to pray at the other hours on their own,20 but only the exceptionally pious appear to have done so in the less disciplined environment of fourth-century Christianity. Thus daily prayer for ordinary Christians now differed in two important respects from the practice of earlier times: it had gained more of a corporate expression but its frequency was effectively reduced.
Although the shift from individual to corporate praying was in one way only making explicit what had been implicit in the previous century – that Christian prayer was always the prayer of the whole Church – yet an important difference of ecclesiology underlies it and was to have significant consequences for the future history of daily prayer in the Church. The vision of ‘church’ reflected in the practice of the third century was one in which each individual was equally responsible for playing his or her part in maintaining the priestly activity of the body. This was replaced in the fourth century by a more centralized, hierarchically ordered, institutional model of the Church, still involving the whole body in prayer but with much more stress on the community than on the individual. Worship was led by a number of different ministers, each charged with a specific task – the bishop or presbyter to preside and pronounce the orations, the deacon to proclaim the biddings, the cantor to chant the verses of the psalms – and the ordinary individual was now merely one member of the congregation with no specific responsibility of his or her own. What mattered was that the Church should pray as an assembly, and the presence or absence of one person from the gathering did not significantly affect that activity. Except when it was their turn to perform one of the liturgical functions, even ordained ministers had no special obligation to be there above that of anyone else.
The corporate nature of daily prayer also gave rise to other differences in its form and character. Psalms and hymns, which (as noted above) had earlier been a characteristic of the less frequent communal meal gatherings, now assume a central place in the daily services. Moreover, because of the increased size of the assembly and consequently the need for a more regular and formal structure, these are no longer freely chosen and sung by individual members of the community, but are now fixed and are performed by an officially appointed cantor. The psalms of praise, Psalms 148–50, seem to have become the universal core of morning prayer every day of the week, together with the canticle Gloria in excelsis in the East. Evening prayer appears to have a less generally accepted form: the hymn Phos hilaron, connected with the ceremonial lighting of the evening lamp, is widely attested in the East but not the West. Psalm 63, understood to refer to morning, and Psalm 141 with its reference to evening are also found at those hours in many Eastern rites. Even the concluding ritual seems to have undergone a transformation: whereas formerly the participants at a Christian prayer-gathering apparently exchanged a kiss with one another as ‘the seal of prayer’,21 the cathedral office ends instead with an imposition of hands by the presiding minister on each of the worshippers – a further illustration of ecclesiological shift which had taken place.
Some things, however, remain constant from the prayer patterns of earlier centuries. Prayer is still considered as a sacrifice offered to God, though the twice-daily ‘perpetual’ sacrifices of the Old Testament are now seen as finding their fulfilment not in the ceaseless prayer of Christians but more literally in the morning and evening assemblies themselves.22 The cathedral office still centres around the praise of God – but now expressed in a small number of psalms and hymns repeated every day – and intercession for others, though as time went by this activity tended to focus more on the needs of the Church than those of the world, perhaps because the boundaries between the two were much less obviously marked than they had been before the Peace of Constantine. And finally, the ministry of the word still does not feature in the normal daily worship but continues to be mainly restricted to the Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday assemblies, and to catechetical instruction held during Lent and Easter week.23
Pattern 3: The worship of the desert ascetics
There had always been some whose spirituality was not satisfied merely with frequent times of prayer during the day but who wished to fulfil more literally the apostolic injunction to ‘pray without ceasing’. Such was, for example, the attitude of Clement of Alexandria,24 and it was inherited by the desert ascetics of the early fourth century. As the Church moved out from under the risk of persecution and became socially acceptable, they found its standards becoming too lax and lacking the sort of challenge for which they were looking. They therefore took to the Egyptian and Syrian deserts in order to live a rigorous life as hermits, set apart from the rest of the Church. Their aim was to maintain as near as possible a ceaseless vigil of prayer, punctuated only by the minimal interruption for food and sleep. The semi-anchorite communities that sprang up in Lower Egypt also prayed individually in their cells during the week, assembling together only on Saturdays and Sundays. Rising very early every day, apparently at cockcrow, they worked while they prayed and prayed while they worked. With the emergence of the coenobitic life in the communities founded by Pachomius in Upper Egypt, however, more formal rules of prayer began to be established. While still expecting the monk to persevere in praying throughout his waking hours, these prescribed two communal gatherings each day, on rising in the morning and before retiring to bed at night.25
Though there may be some similarity with regard to the number and times of the assemblies for daily prayer between this last institution and the cathedral office, what we have here in all the desert traditions is radically different in character from that worship, and equally a deviation from the prayer-life of Christians of earlier centuries. What is retained from the spirituality of former times is the ideal of prayer without ceasing, and the emphasis on the responsibility of each individual to engage in prayer. What is new, at least compared with the mainstream of earlier Christian prayer, is the attempt to give ceaseless prayer a more literal interpretation: whereas from New Testament times onwards Christians had viewed the whole of their life as constituting an unceasing prayer offered to God,26 these desert ascetics, on the other hand, were determined that prayer itself should constitute the sole content of their life. As Alexander Schmemann has said, ‘This is not the illumination of life and work by prayer, not a joining of these things in prayer, not even a turning of life into prayer, but prayer as life or, more properly, the replacement of life by prayer.’27
What is also new is the nature of the prayer in which they engaged – reflection on the mighty works of God and supplication for spiritual growth and personal salvation. The substance of the praying of these desert fathers, whether done alone or with others, seems to have been the continual alternation of the recitation of a psalm and a period of meditation.28 The twice-daily assemblies in Pachomian monasticism involved a similar alternation, but here consisting of a series of biblical passages read aloud by one of the brothers while the rest listened and engaged in silent prayer between each one; only on Sunday mornings were psalms sung.29 Now of course remembrance, anamnesis, of what God had done in Christ had always been central to Christian prayer, but here it took on a somewhat different character. Mainstream Christianity had recalled God’s works in order to offer praise and thanks for them, whereas the primary purpose of the extended meditation here was formation: the monk meditated on the Scriptures, and especially the psalms, in order to grow into the likeness of Christ,30 and prayed for the requisite grace for that growth. Like the movement towards more truly ceaseless praying, this again is something with its roots in the early Alexandrian tradition, which, while not denying the legitimacy or efficacy of intercession, regarded petition for spiritual rather than material gifts as the higher way. Monastic rules obliging monks to engage in prayer at certain prescribed hours or to say a particular number of psalms and prayers, therefore, sprang from what might be called a pedagogical rather than a liturgical motive: it was designed to further ascetical growth towards what was thought of as ‘spiritual freedom’.
Although it has to be admitted that formation is necessarily involved in all liturgy, and regular participation in any rite has a significant effect upon individual spiritual development, yet by making it the principal aim of daily prayer rather than a secondary by-product, the Egyptian monastic tradition seriously distorted the nature of the activity and led to an impoverishment and narrowing of its focus. Since such prayer was essentially individualistic, it obscured and lost sight of the ecclesial dimension which had implicitly undergirded the prayer-life of early Christians. Whereas prayer on one’s own had been the result of necessity in earlier times, this was not so for those who had voluntarily withdrawn to the desert. It was the same prayer which was performed in the cell as in the community gathering, and neither setting was seen as superior to the other. There was nothing inherently corporate in the worship, nothing which might not be done equally as well alone as together. Although a communal assembly offered an element of mutual encouragement in the work of prayer, and afforded opportunity for supervision and discipline over the possible weakness and indolence of the more junior brethren, nevertheless the presence or absence of other people was ultimately a matter of indifference.31
Not only did the ecclesial dimension disappear from prayer, so too did what might be called the cosmic dimension. Whereas earlier Christians had been very conscious of their mission towards the whole world and so concerned to pray for all God’s creation, prayer here became orientated inwards instead of outwards. The monk’s primary responsibility was towards his own soul and not the salvation of others. In other words, the sense of a vocation to the royal priesthood of the Church had been eroded. For, as J. G. Davies has observed, a priesthood is
never established for itself, so that for the royal priesthood to celebrate its own cultus for its own needs is to deny its very raison d’être; it would cease in fact to function as a priesthood. An introverted cultus performed by the covenant people is therefore a contradiction of their office, a rejection of their commission and a failure to participate in the missio Dei. It makes nonsense of the whole idea of covenant and priesthood. This means that only a cultus which is outward-looking and related to the world can be regarded as an authentic act of Christian worship. If it is not worldly, in this sense, then Christians are not exercising their baptismal priesthood.32
From all this it can easily be seen why it came to be thought vitally important that each individual fulfilled personally whatever was prescribed in the community’s rule. It was not enough, for example, that the rest of the community maintained a regular time of prayer on rising each morning: if the individual did not participate in it, then he would derive no spiritual benefit from it. Nor did it particularly matter if he said this prayer earlier or later than the rest of the community: as long as he did it at some point, he would still have fulfilled his duty. Here then lie the roots of the idea that missed prayer can somehow be ‘made up’ at a later time, that what matters is that the work should eventually be done by each individual, rather than that the body of the Church should remain in constant communion with God through a regular cycle of prayer-times.
Finally, one other important new development in this tradition needs to be noted, and this is the use of the Psalter, the whole Psalter, and almost nothing but the Psalter in the daily devotions. As we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, there is no evidence to suggest that any more than certain selected psalms, mainly those in which Christological prophecy could easily be seen and/or which expressed praise and invited the response ‘Alleluia’, were ever used in early Christian worship, and certainly nothing to support the notion that the whole Psalter was read through in its entirety. Similarly, there is no evidence of the widespread use of psalms in Jewish worship, or of any preference for these canonical texts over contemporary compositions either in more informal Jewish gatherings or in similar Christian assemblies.33 The claim frequently made, therefore, that in saying the psalms we are praying the prayers that Jesus himself used, lacks any sure foundation.
The use of the psalms in the prayer-life of the desert ascetics, on the other hand, stands in sharp contrast to this. Here the Psalter was elevated to the place of honour in religious formation: the novice was expected to learn the whole Psalter by heart, and it came to be regarded as a great and worthy accomplishment to recite all 150 psalms in the space of twenty-four hours.34 There seem to be several reasons to account for this striking development. First, because of their supposed Davidic authorship the psalms were regarded as especially inspired: they were ‘the songs of the Spirit’, in contrast to ecclesiastical compositions, which were dismissed as ‘the words of mere mortals’.35 This attitude was greatly encouraged by the fact that at the time hymns were often used as a means of spreading and popularizing heretical beliefs.36 Second, the tradition of Christological interpretation37 made them particularly attractive to those who were attempting to form their lives into the pattern of Christ: what better way was there to become more Christlike than to meditate on the words of the psalms, and allow their sentiments to shape one’s spirituality? Third, since the whole of life needed to be filled with such meditation, then more than just a small selection of psalms was required. Finally, since time and seasons were of no consequence, but only eternity mattered, there was no reason to try to arrange the psalms according to their appropriateness to specific hours and occasions, and they were thus recited in their biblical order.38
Pattern 4: The prayer of urban ascetics
Not everyone who wanted to live a rigorous and disciplined spiritual life in the more relaxed Christian environment of the fourth century retreated to the desert. Pious individuals approached bishops and other Christian leaders for an appropriate pattern of prayer that they might practise while continuing their daily life in the cities of the Roman empire,39 and ascetic communities also began to be formed within urban settings in Cappadocia, Syria, and elsewhere, who again sought a rule of life from their bishop. Their cycle of prayer has often been treated merely as a variant of Egyptian monasticism. This, however, is misleading, for its foundation is quite different. These individuals and groups usually prayed early in the morning; at the third, sixth, and ninth hours; in the evening; and again at some point in the night. Those living together in communities generally prayed in common (and in some cases might even join with the local church for certain hours), but they could also observe the times of prayer individually if circumstances prevented a corporate assembly.40 Moreover, unlike Egyptian monasticism, they did not dispense with all outward ceremonial: as Gregory of Nyssa reveals in his moving account of the death of his sister Macrina, the lighting of the evening lamp with its prayer still formed a part of the daily ritual of her religious community.41 This pattern is thus the direct descendant of the Christian prayer of the third century, and in particular of the more extended daily cycle first attested in North Africa. While the cathedral office had moved away from this pattern in one direction and the desert monks in another, these communities had persevered in the old family prayers of former times: they were not innovators, but conservatives in a world which had changed.
On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the spirituality of the desert fathers had considerable influence on them as they developed, and in most of the sources available to us a substantial vigil for a part of the night is included in their daily pattern, either appended to midnight prayer or beginning at cockcrow and lasting until the morning office.42 This, however, seems to be a secondary addition to the cycle, and is not part of the Cappadocian pattern outlined by Basil of Caesarea: the vigil he describes appears to be an occasional event rather than a regular daily night office.43 Chrysostom implies that the element of intercession for others in the daily services also gave way to prayer for personal spiritual progress, no doubt again under the influence of the same source: ‘They ask nothing of things present, for they have no regard for these, but that they may stand with boldness before the fearful judgement-seat . . . and that no one may hear the fearful voice that saith, “I know you not”, and that with a pure conscience and many good deeds they may pass through this toilsome life and sail over the angry sea with a favourable wind.’44
The evidence suggests, however, that, with the exception of their extended prayer in the night and a weekly all-night vigil,45 such communities were conservative in their use of psalmody, and at first continued to employ a selective rather than a consecutive approach in their other hours of prayer. The remains of this can still be detected even in later Western monastic rules, where the Egyptian way of praying was more extensively imitated than in the East, strongly encouraged by Cassian’s idealization of it. Indeed, while the cathedral tradition had developed communal refrains appropriate to each psalm, the monastic tradition originally tended to adhere to the more primitive custom of the Alleluia response alone, and did not restrict this to the Easter season as ecclesiastical usage came to do.
Conclusion
As I indicated at the beginning, it has become fashionable to regard the ‘cathedral’ office as the normative expression of early Christian prayer, and as the model for today’s Church to follow. Our review of the evidence, however, has attempted to show that the former is not the case. The ‘cathedral’ office was but one development among others in the fourth century, continuing the traditions of earlier times in some respects but modifying them significantly in others. It is not self-evident, therefore, that it constitutes the ideal form which should necessarily be imitated today; and indeed there are grounds for questioning its appropriateness for many modern situations. It is formal in style and for its celebration requires a community which is able to assemble together regularly every single day, with a number of ministries represented in each assembly – bishop or presbyter, deacon, cantor. However fine this might be as a liturgical expression of the nature of the Church, relatively few Christians today find themselves in a situation where such is a real possibility. For the great majority, the ‘cathedral’ office is something which can only be celebrated occasionally, usually just on Sundays and festivals. It does nothing to meet the need for a pattern of daily praying.
For that, I would submit, we would do better to look to the pattern evidenced in the third century and continued to a large extent in the urban monastic communities of the fourth century onwards. Here we have a much more informal style of prayer, which is best done communally, but can also be performed individually if necessity dictates. It does not single out morning and evening as the occasions when one ought to pray, but simply emphasizes the desirability of frequent prayer at whatever times that is possible. Nor does it require the presence of ordained ministers for its celebration: in the monastic gatherings the leader of the community (who was not ordained) generally presided and said the orations – as the head of the household had done in Jewish and early Christian domestic prayer – and each member of the community took an equal turn in chanting the verses of the various psalms to the others. The only documented exception to this is in fourth-century Jerusalem, where, according to the pilgrim Egeria, presbyters and deacons were required to attend the monastic night office in order to pronounce the orations after the psalms,46 although some unease about usurping what had come to be seen as the episcopal and presbyteral prerogative of extemporizing prayer in a communal setting also seems to have been felt in other places, and hence the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was used there instead of a collect at the end of the services.47 The prayer of the small group, therefore, is not merely a more practical alternative to the ‘cathedral’ office, but also witnesses itself to some important truths about the nature of Christian prayer. It testifies that the prayer of the Church is not restricted to certain fixed hours and forms, however valuable they may be, but that the only absolute rule is to live a life of communion with God, punctuated by specific moments of prayer, whenever and wherever possible. It also testifies that prayer in the name of the Church is not confined to certain deputed individuals, but that on the contrary every member has both the privilege and the duty of acting as prayer-leader on behalf of others.
On the other hand, it is not without its dangers, as the history of monastic prayer shows. The Egyptian model exercised an increasingly powerful influence upon it, and still continues to shape much of the spirituality of the daily office today. Monastic communities rapidly came to adopt a cursus of psalmody which, one way or another, sought to incorporate the whole Psalter in worship, and meditation on the psalms with petition for spiritual growth replaced the praise of God and intercession for the world which were characteristic of the older concept of prayer. The absence of any liturgical expression of the ecclesial nature of the act of praying also encouraged individualism and an excessive stress on the obligation and need of each person to perform the full pensum of prayer.
This style of prayer, therefore, does need to be counter-balanced by the ‘cathedral’ office, for both have something significant to contribute to Christian prayer-life. For instance, the ‘cathedral’ office stands as a reminder to us that, because we are sharing in the Church’s prayer, we are never really on our own when we pray, and even on occasions when we may be unable to participate in prayer ourselves, the Church’s work of prayer still goes on, and does not remain for us to have to ‘make up’ at some later time. Above all, it reminds us of the kind of praying that we are called to do: it is the prayer of the Church, the royal priesthood, participating in the prayer of Christ, the great high-priest, offering the sacrifice of praise and interceding for the salvation of all. However valuable meditation on the psalms and other portions of Scripture might be as a means of stimulating and feeding our prayer, it should never be allowed to displace that primary focus.
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1 See, for example, C. W. Dugmore, The Influence of the Synagogue upon the Divine Office (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1944); reprinted as Alcuin Club Collections 45 (Faith Press, London 1964).
2 See further Paul F. Bradshaw, ‘Cathedral and Monastic: What’s in a Name?’, Worship 77 (2003), pp. 341–53.
3 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 7.7.40.
4 Origen, De oratione 12.2; see also Contra Celsum 6.41.
5 L. Edward Phillips, ‘Daily Prayer in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus’, Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1989), pp. 389–400. For the critical questions surrounding the Apostolic Tradition, see above, pp. 46–50.
6 See Tertullian, De ieiunio 10.
7 See, for example, Daniel 6.10; Sarason, ‘Communal Prayer at Qumran and Among the Rabbis’, pp. 151–72, here at p. 157 and n. 24, and at p. 167 and nn. 64, 65.
8 See Matthew 24.43–4; Luke 12.35–40; 1 Thessalonians 5.2–11; 2 Peter 3.10; Revelation 3.3; 16.15.
9 Tertullian, Apologeticum 16; Ad nationes 1.13; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 7.7; Origen, De oratione 32; cf. Josephus, Jewish War 2.128; Philo, De vita contemplativa 27, 89. See further Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, pp. 37–9, 57–9.
10 Tertullian, De oratione 25.
11 Tertullian, Ad uxorem 2.5.
12 Cyprian, De Dominica oratione 34–6.
13 For further details, see Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, chs 1–3.
14 Cyprian, De Dominica oratione 8.
15 Tertullian, Apologeticum 39; see also ibid., 30–2.
16 See, for example, Tertullian, De oratione 28; Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 4.18.6; Origen, Homiliae in Numerorum 23.3; Contra Celsum 8.21–2.
17 Tertullian, De oratione 27 (MECL 78).
18 See Clement, Stromata 7.7; Tertullian, Apologeticum 39; Cyprian, Epistula 1.16 (MECL 61, 74, 94).
19 For details of primary sources, see Robert F. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville 1986; 2nd edn 1993), pp. 31–56.
20 See John Chrysostom, Expositio in psalmum 133; Homiliae in Acta Apostolorum 26; De Anna sermo 4.5.
21 So it is described by Tertullian, De oratione 18.
22 See John Chrysostom, Expositio in psalmum 140.3.
23 See Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, pp. 90–2.
24 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 7.7.
25 John Cassian in his account of Egyptian monastic practices in his Institutes seems to have confused the practices of Upper and Lower Egypt. As Robert Taft has indicated (The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, p. 58), Cassian was not simply writing as a disinterested observer: he was using the example of the Egyptian monks as an ideal to promote a reform of monasticism in his native Gaul. Hence, discrepancies between his description and evidence obtained from other sources may be signs of a desire to furnish Egyptian precedents for those Gallican practices which he favoured, and so his testimony needs to be treated with great caution. In particular, his claim that 12 psalms were recited each morning and evening cannot be accepted uncritically as the original practice. Instead, this appears to have its roots in a tradition that 12 prayers be offered each day and 12 each night, in other words that one should pray at every hour or constantly. Thus the grouping of these prayers into two daily synaxes of 12 psalms each seems to be a later development: see Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, p. 72; Veilleux, La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pâchomien au IVe siècle, pp. 324–39.
26 See, for example, Romans 12.1; 1 Corinthians 10.31; Origen, De oratione 12.2.
27 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Faith Press, London/American Orthodox Press, Portland, ME 1966), p. 107.
28 On this, see further below, pp. 119–20. Frans Kok, ‘L’office pachômien: psallere, orare, legere’, Ecclesia Orans 9 (1992), pp. 69–95, challenged the scholarly consensus and argued that the daily services did include psalmody in addition to other biblical readings and prayer, but he has not won support for his position.
29 See Veilleux, La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pâchomien au IVe siècle, pp. 307–15; Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 62–5.
30 On this, see below, p. 118.
31 See Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 66–73.
32 J. G. Davies, Worship and Mission (SCM Press, London 1966), p. 95.
33 See James W. McKinnon, ‘On the Question of Psalmody in the Ancient Synagogue’, Early Music History 6 (1986), pp. 159–91 = idem, The Temple, the Church Fathers and Early Western Chant (Ashgate, Aldershot 1998), VIII; and below, pp. 122–3.
34 See Joseph Dyer, ‘The Psalms in Monastic Prayer’, in Nancy Van Deusen (ed.), The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages (SUNY Press, Albany, NY 1999), pp. 59–89, here at pp. 59–60.
35 See Joseph Gelineau, ‘Les psaumes à l’époque patristique’, La Maison-Dieu 135 (1978), pp. 99–116.
36 For the use of hymns by Arians, see Socrates, Historia ecclesiastica 6.8 (MECL 218).
37 On this tradition, see further below, p. 118.
38 Stig Simeon R. Frøgshov in a recent article, ‘The Cathedral–Monastic Distinction Revisited, Part I: Was Egyptian Desert Liturgy a Pure Monastic Office?’, Studia Liturgica 37 (2007), pp. 198–216, has tried to argue that such a thing as a pure monastic office with the recitation of psalms in a consecutive manner never actually existed but is the creation of modern scholars. However, the evidence for the use of selected rather than consecutive psalmody in early Egyptian monastic offices that he cites to support his case comes from a somewhat later period, when developments and changes to the original pattern had very likely taken place, and (as he himself admits) from an urban rather than a desert context, even if it subsequently spread to the latter.
39 See, for example, Jerome, Epistulae 22.37; 107.9; 130.15.
40 For details, see Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, pp. 99–106; Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 75–91.
41 Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Macrinae 22, 25.
42 Pseudo-Athanasius, De virginitate 20; John Chrysostom, Homiliae in epistulam I ad Timotheum 14.4; John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 3.4–6.
43 Basil, Sermo asceticus 4; Regulae fusius tractatae 37.3–5; Epistulae 2; 207.2–4. See Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, pp. 99–102; Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 39–41, 84–7.
44 John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 68.3; ET from NPNF, First Series, 10:400.
45 For the latter, see Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, pp. 89–90.
46 Egeria, Itinerarium 24.1.
47 See, for example, Adalbert de Vogüé, La Règle de Saint Benoît, 5, Sources chrétiennes 185 (Éditions du Cerf, Paris 1971), pp. 493–4.