The emergence of penitential prayer
‘How can we who died to sin still live in it?’, asks Paul in his letter to the Romans (6.2). But some of them did, and in the churches that he founded Paul quickly developed a procedure for dealing with those who committed what was regarded as serious sin after they had been baptized. In 1 Corinthians 5 he instructs the community to assemble with the presence of his spirit and deliver a man who had been living with his father’s wife ‘to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus’ (1 Corinthians 5.5). And he warns them to separate themselves from Christians who are guilty of immorality or greed, or were idolaters, revilers, drunkards or robbers (1 Corinthians 5.11), just as elsewhere he had commanded his readers to keep away from any believers living in idleness (2 Thessalonians 3.6, 14). It appears that it was out of this practice that the penitential disciplines of early Christianity developed.1
What, however, of less serious sin in the Christian community, of the kind that did not warrant such drastic measures? Here we know rather less about what went on in the first few centuries. Some early Christian writers in their comments on penitence and conversion appear only to have in mind pre-baptismal sin, and make no reference to failings after baptism. Others appear to refer solely to the post-baptismal sins that require episcopal intervention and the imposition of penitential disciplines and do not acknowledge the persistence of lesser faults among the members of the Church, while still other writings are ambiguous with regard to the object of their remarks: though they may be treating of the daily imperfections of the baptized, it is not obvious that this is so, and hence their evidence is not helpful to the building up of a picture of the existence of penitential prayer within early Christian congregations. Nor is it a subject which many other scholars have studied in any detail, and so here we shall be entering relatively uncharted waters.
Earliest signs
Some scattered references do exist among the earliest of Christian writings. There are a few New Testament texts that speak of prayer being made on behalf of those sinning, principally 1 John 5.16 (‘If anyone sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not mortal’) and James 5.16 (‘confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed’). There are two references in the Didache to the confession of sin in the assembly prior to prayer and the celebration of the eucharist (4.14; 14.1), but these are unique in early Christian literature.2 And there is mention in 1 Clement of seeking forgiveness for sins that have been committed. Here the context is the expulsion of their leaders from office by some in the Corinthian church, and the author is writing from the church at Rome, apparently around AD 96, and appealing for those involved to acknowledge their wrongdoing rather than harden their hearts.
The Lord, brothers, is in need of nothing. He desires nothing of any one, except that confession be made to him. For, says the chosen one David, ‘I will confess to the Lord; and it will please him more than a young bullock which has horns and hoofs. Let the poor see it, and be glad’ [Psalm 69.30–2]. And again he says, ‘Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay your vows to the Most High. And call upon me in the day of your trouble, and I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me’ [Psalm 50.14–15]. For ‘the sacrifice of God is a broken spirit’ [Psalm 51.17].
(1 Clement 52)
The quotation of the verse from Psalm 51 is interesting here in view of its later prominence in Christian daily prayer. Although apparently by another author and from a different and presumably somewhat later context, the document known as 2 Clement also calls upon Christians to practise repentance (see, e.g., 8, 13, 16–17).
The third century
When we reach third-century Christian authors, references to penitential prayer become a little more plentiful, and appear in the various treatises on prayer that have survived from this period. Thus, Tertullian, writing in North Africa at the beginning of the century and working through the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer in his treatise De oratione, refers briefly to the clause ‘forgive us our sins’, and appears to imply – though does not explicitly state – that his readers should engage in regular prayer for pardon, especially as he expected the Lord’s Prayer to be recited whenever a person prayed (7; 10). In his treatise De paenitentia he enlarges upon the subject of penitence, but only in relation to the possibility of the remission of serious post-baptismal sin through the discipline of penance, and does not mention prayer for forgiveness of other sins. There is, however, a further interesting passage in his treatise on prayer, where he is discussing whether one should stand or kneel to pray. He asks: ‘Who would hesitate every day to prostrate himself before God, at least in the first prayer with which we enter on the daylight?’ (De oratione 23.3). This seems to suggest that it was customary, in his region at least, to begin each morning’s prayer with some form of expression of penitence that required kneeling as its accompaniment.
In the similar treatise written by Cyprian of Carthage around half a century later, the author more obviously suggests that regular penitential prayer is needed. ‘How necessarily, how providently and salutarily, are we admonished that we are sinners, we who are compelled to supplicate for our sins, so that while pardon is sought from God, the soul examine its conscience! Lest any one should flatter himself that he is innocent, and by exalting himself should more deeply perish, he is instructed and taught that he sins daily while he is told to pray daily for his sins’ (De Dominica oratione 22).
Such practices do not appear to have been confined to North Africa. In the anonymous Syrian church order known as the Didascalia Apostolorum, the author, having asserted that there is no one without sin, is primarily concerned with those who have committed serious sins that require episcopal intervention, but suggests in an allusion to the Lord’s Prayer that all Christians need regularly to pray for pardon: ‘And again he taught us that we should be constantly praying at all times and saying, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors”’ (7). The theologian Origen, in his treatise on prayer, insists that kneeling is the necessary posture when praying for forgiveness (De oratione 31.3), and that penitence is one of four topics that ought to feature regularly in everyone’s prayer – following praise and thanksgiving and before intercession: ‘After thanksgiving it seems to me that he ought to blame himself bitterly before God for his own sins and then ask, first for healing that he may be delivered from the habit that brings him to sin and, second, for forgiveness of the sins that have been committed’ (ibid., 33.1).3
Fourth-century daily prayer
In the light of these earlier references, we would naturally expect that among the more extensive writings on prayer and liturgical practice that survive from the fourth century the theme of penitence would be much more prominent, especially in the changed circumstances in which Christianity then found itself, with many new adherents lacking the same high degree of ethical motivation and testing that had marked earlier converts.4 But this is not quite the case.
On the one hand, the need for a penitential aspect to daily prayer is strongly stressed by a number of Christian authors of the period. John Chrysostom provides an excellent example of this when he dwells on it at some length in his instructions to candidates for baptism written around 390:
And I urge you to show great zeal by gathering here in the church at dawn to make your prayers and confessions to the God of all things, and to thank him for the gifts he has already given. Beseech him to deign to lend you from now on his powerful aid in guarding this treasure; strengthened with this aid, let each one leave the church to take up his daily tasks . . . However, let each one approach his daily task with fear and anguish, and spend his working hours in the knowledge that at evening he should return here to the church, render an account to the Master of his whole day, and beg forgiveness for his faults. For even if we are on guard ten thousand times a day, we cannot avoid making ourselves accountable for many different faults. Either we say something at the wrong time, or we listen to idle talk, or we think indecent thoughts, or we fail to control our eyes, or we spend time in vain and idle things that have no connection with what we should be doing. This is the reason why each evening we must beg pardon from the Master for all these faults. This is why we must flee to the loving-kindness of God and make our appeal to him.5
On the other hand, this penitential tone does not appear to be reflected in the actual contents of the daily ‘cathedral’ services in which ordinary Christians took part. Nearly all accounts of the forms that morning and evening prayer then took lack any reference to the occurrence of an expression of penitence within them, and instead imply that they focused exclusively on praise and intercession. Thus, for example, Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the first half of the fourth century and our first witness to the now public celebration of the morning and evening times of prayer, speaks of ‘hymns, praises, and truly divine delights’ being offered to God at those hours, and implies that Psalm 141 was used regularly in the evening (Commentarius in psalmum 64.10) and elsewhere that Psalm 63 was its counterpart in the morning (Commentarius in psalmum 142.8); the pilgrimage diary kept by Egeria of her visit to Jerusalem in the 380s mentions only that psalms and hymns and intercessions were used in the daily services there (Itinerarium 24) but describes them as being always ‘suitable, appropriate, and relevant’ to the hour of their celebration (ibid. 25.5); and a Syrian church order from the same period, Apostolic Constitutions, fleshes out the contents a little more fully, stating explicitly that Psalm 63 was used each morning and Psalm 141 each evening, and providing full texts of the intercessory prayers for those services (2.59; 8.35–9).
John Chrysostom admitted that Psalm 141, which he said was sung every day, was appropriate to the evening, but claimed:
Not for this reason, however, did the fathers choose this psalm, but rather they ordered it to be said as a salutary medicine and forgiveness of sins, so that whatever has dirtied us throughout the whole length of the day, either in the marketplace or at home or wherever we spend our time, we get rid of it in the evening through this spiritual song. For it is indeed a medicine that destroys all those things.
The morning psalm is of the same sort . . . For it kindles the desire for God, and arouses the soul and greatly inflames it, and fills it with great goodness and love . . . Where there is love of God, all evil departs; where there is remembrance of God there is oblivion of sin and destruction of evil.6
It does not seem likely that this explanation for the choice of these psalms is historically accurate. Psalm 141 is a plea not to be tempted to commit sin, rather than a confession of sins already committed. Had the intention been to articulate the latter, more suitable psalms exist that could have been selected, but this is one of the very few that refer to evening. Similarly, the Septuagint translation of Psalm 63 referred to ‘early’ in its first verse and to ‘in the mornings’ in verse 6, which would have made it seem suitable for the morning. Hence Chrysostom’s interpretation looks very much like reading his own spirituality into the rite.
Of course, the absence of any explicit reference in the various descriptions cannot of itself be considered as conclusive evidence that penitence had not yet made its way into the rites, as these sources tend to be rather brief and do not purport to give every detail – none of them, for instance, explicitly mentions the use of the psalms of praise, 148–50, which scholars generally believe formed the core of daily morning prayer throughout most if not all the ancient Christian world7 – and so it is conceivable that some penitential prayer did exist in them but was simply not mentioned. However, the reconstructions that have been made by scholars of the oldest strata of some later liturgical texts do lend support to the supposition that there were no penitential elements at the time.8 Only in Cappadocia is there evidence for the use of the penitential Psalm 51 at the beginning of each day; and the significance of that anomaly will be considered a little later.
Monastic influence
What then are we to make of the apparent discrepancy between the penitential disposition towards daily prayer recommended by Christian authors and the seeming almost total absence of the expression of penitence in the early liturgical rites themselves? The answer appears to lie in the ascetic and monastic movements that developed in the Egyptian and Syrian deserts in the early part of the fourth century. As we saw earlier,9 their existence became one of almost ceaseless prayer, broken only by the briefest of intervals for sleep and food. While the content of the meditation on which their praying was based was the recitation of all 150 canonical psalms, in their biblical order, psalm alternating with prayer all day long, yet their prayer itself was suffused with a strongly penitential character as they wrestled against the temptations and power of evil.
This same outlook towards prayer seems to have continued even when the desert ascetics formed themselves into monastic communities there. Thus, for example, the Regulations of Horsiesios, when speaking about the daily morning and evening assemblies in which this same alternation of reading and prayer occurred, included this counsel for the moments of prayer: ‘Then once we are prostrate on our face, let us weep in our hearts for our sins’ (8). This attitude was also adopted by the many pious individuals and small groups of ascetics who remained in the cities but wanted something more demanding for their daily diet than mere attendance at morning and evening prayer with other Christians. What the bishops to whom they turned for guidance recommended to them was the observance of the full round of hours of daily prayer that had been the common practice of ordinary Christians in the third century, but was falling into neglect in the changed circumstances of the fourth. Because many of these bishops had either spent time as monks in the desert themselves or had been influenced by the spirituality of that tradition, it was very likely they who encouraged a more penitential approach towards daily prayer among all Christians (just as we saw in the case of John Chrysostom above, who had lived under the tutelage of a monk earlier in his life), and incorporated it into the rules of life that they drew up for the pious.
Thus, Basil of Caesarea in his Longer Rules counsels that at the end of the day at evening prayer not only should thanksgiving be offered for what the worshippers have received during the day or for what they have done rightly, but also ‘confession made of what we have failed to do – an offence committed, be it voluntary or involuntary, or perhaps unnoticed, either in word or deed or in the very heart – propitiating God in our prayers for all our failings . . .’.10
An even more pronounced penitential tone suffuses the directions about prayer in the anonymous Greek treatise De virginitate, once attributed to Athanasius but now thought to be of Cappadocian origin and dating from around AD 370, which directs its readers to pray at the traditional hours of the day (in the morning, at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, in the evening and in the middle of the night) though adding to that pattern a vigil between midnight prayer and morning prayer. At the sixth hour the virgin is told to
make your prayers with psalms, weeping and petition, because at this hour the Son of God hung on the cross. At the ninth hour again in hymns and praises, confessing your sins with tears, supplicate God, because at that hour the Lord hanging on the cross gave up the spirit.
(Pseudo-Athanasius, De virginitate 12)
Similarly, for the prayer in the middle of the night and the vigil of psalmody that followed it, she is instructed:
first say this verse: ‘At midnight I rose to praise you because of your righteous ordinances’ [Ps. 119.62], and pray and begin to say the fiftieth psalm [i.e., Psalm 51] until you complete it, and let these things remain fixed for you every day. Say as many psalms as you can say standing, and after each psalm let there be a prayer and genuflection, confessing your sins with tears to the Lord and asking him to forgive you . . .’
(ibid., 20)
It is interesting to observe the use of Psalm 51 at what was for this group of female ascetics the beginning of their day, immediately after they had said their midnight prayer. This seems to be a continuation of the practice described by Tertullian of kneeling for ‘the first prayer with which we enter on the daylight’ mentioned above. It is not surprising to find this tradition, which had once been intended for ordinary Christians, being preserved only within this urban monastic setting, However, whether the use of Psalm 51 itself went back to Tertullian’s day or whether the tradition known to him of beginning each morning’s praying with a penitential prayer of some sort stabilized only at a later date into this particular psalm is impossible to know.
It is true that one other fourth-century source records Psalm 51 as forming the beginning of morning prayer, but that is also of Cappadocian origin, a letter written by Basil about the same time as the De virginitate. He describes a vigil service which begins with penitence (‘among us the people go at night to the house of prayer, and, in distress, affliction, and continual tears making confession to God, at last rise from their prayers and begin to sing psalms’) and concludes at dawn, when they ‘all together, as with one voice and one heart, raise the psalm of confession to the Lord, each forming for himself his own expressions of penitence’.11 The mention of ‘the people’ might seem to suggest that Basil is describing the practice of ordinary Christians here. However, it is very probable that these particular people were for the most part the especially devout: it is unlikely that many of the average churchgoers of this period would have regularly spent a night in corporate prayer, especially as Chrysostom complains that his congregations could not be persuaded even to engage in the traditional hours of prayer at the third, sixth, and ninth hours or to study the Bible at home.12 This suggests that Psalm 51 may after all not have been a customary part of normal ‘cathedral’ usage but had been introduced under the influence of ascetics.
Support is lent by some other sources to the supposition that it was a later addition. John Cassian in an account of the monastic prayer he had experienced in Bethlehem describes how in his own day (the 380s) an extra morning service had been added to the traditional daily round so that the monks should not go back to bed for too long after they had finished the nightly vigil and the original morning office (which centred round Psalms 148–50) but instead get up again for this service, which, he says, consisted of Psalms 51, 63, and 90.13 These psalms thus appear to have been imported as secondary elements from other regions where they were already associated in some way with the morning and were not part of the indigenous tradition. Similarly, John Chrysostom does not seem to have been familiar with the regular use of Psalm 51 in the mornings at Antioch. Not only does he not mention it explicitly, in spite of his emphasis on the penitential dimension of daily prayer, but when he is describing the pattern of prayer followed by monastic groups there, he refers to Psalms 148–150 as forming the conclusion of the nightly vigil, and says that after a short period of rest, ‘as soon as the sun is up, or rather even long before its rise, [they] rise up from their bed . . . and having made one choir . . . with one voice all, like as out of one mouth, they sing hymns unto the God of all, honouring him and thanking him for all his benefits . . .’.14 This seems to indicate that this service began immediately with praise rather than penitence.15
Cassian even adds that ‘throughout Italy’ Psalm 51 came after Psalms 148–50 each morning16 and not before them as one might have expected. Robert Taft believes he must be mistaken here,17 but if Cassian were accurately recording the practice, then that sequence too might imply that Psalm 51 was at first a secondary appendage to the rite and only subsequently found its place at the very beginning of the service.
Later developments
It is only later that we see signs of a somewhat pronounced penitential dimension in the rites of morning and evening prayer more generally, apparently as the influence of monastic spirituality took greater hold. Thus, eventually Psalm 51 tended to be inserted at the beginning of the morning office throughout the ancient Christian world, although some exceptions seem to have persisted. In southern Gaul in the monastic rules of Caesarius of Arles and his successor Aurelian in the sixth century it still came at the beginning of nocturns, as it had done in De virginitate; and the Council of Barcelona (c.540) directed that it was to be said ‘before the canticle’ at the morning office (canon 1) – the need for such a direction being a sure sign that its use was still not yet universal in Spain.18
A penitential element was eventually also added to the evening office, especially in the East. Before the end of the fourth century the morning and evening services had come to be understood as the spiritual counter-part and fulfilment of the morning and evening sacrifices of the first covenant (see, for example, John Chrysostom, Expositio in psalmum 140.3), and from the fifth century onwards a literal offering of incense began to make an appearance in some regional rites in accordance with Exodus 30.7–8.19 While the offering of incense in the morning offices was generally interpreted as symbolizing the prayers of the saints rising to God, as it is in Revelation 8.3–4, in the evening it came to be thought of in a number of traditions as an expiatory oblation for the sins of the people, as in Numbers 16.46–7, and attracted to itself substantial penitential material.20
Penitential days?
Even though, to begin with, penitential prayer does not seem to have featured much in the ordinary daily services of the ‘cathedral’ tradition, what about those particular days that were set apart in the annual calendar for fasting? Were they also days of penitential prayer? As early as the Didache, Christians were instructed to observe every Wednesday and Friday as fast days, so that they would not be like ‘the hypocrites’ (i.e., the Jews) who fasted on Mondays and Thursdays (8.1). Opinion has been divided as to whether these days were chosen by Jewish Christians simply to distinguish themselves from other Jews or whether this was already a variant Jewish tradition, perhaps linked to the solar calendar of the Essenes.21 The same pattern is also mentioned in some other early Christian sources, indicating that it was not just a peculiarity of the tradition behind the Didache, but was more widely practised.22 The various references to it, however, do not imply that it had a particularly penitential character. Among Latin authors, the days were known as stationes, times of being ‘on sentry duty’ or ‘on watch’, suggesting eschatological vigilance rather than penitence as such.23 Although special services came to be held on those days, usually services of the word at the ninth hour, being the end of the normal working day after which the fast would be broken and the main meal of the day consumed, these do not seem to have contained any specially penitential elements as far as we can judge from the limited evidence available.24
As for the season of Lent, one of the oldest extant references to a period of forty days does concern those who were undergoing penitential discipline, but the emphasis both in this case and in other early sources falls upon the commemoration and symbolic sharing in Jesus’ forty-day fast in the wilderness and upon resisting temptation rather than contrition for sins.25 Although some may argue that fasting necessarily always involved some element of penitence, yet once again this is not a note that receives any particular emphasis in the early Lenten liturgical rites themselves, as far as we know them.
The eucharist
Perhaps the most surprising discovery of all is that penitential prayers appear to be almost completely lacking from early eucharistic rites. Although our very ancient source, the Didache, referred to above, seemed to have implied the need for confession of sins within the assembly prior to a celebration of that rite, reference to such a custom is not found again in this connection. Any indication of a penitential note is absent from the description of eucharistic practice given by Justin Martyr in the middle of the second century (First Apology 65–7), although that might be accounted for by the fact that his account was intended for a pagan audience and so would not necessarily have included every detail of the rite. But it is also absent from all other references to the eucharist, until the Lord’s Prayer, with its petition for forgiveness, makes its first appearance in some, but apparently not all, eucharistic rites in the second half of the fourth century, being placed after the eucharistic prayer and before communion.26 Robert Taft has suggested that the reason for the addition of that prayer to the eucharist at this time was precisely in order to introduce a petition for forgiveness into the liturgy in association with the new notes of fear and awe that were beginning to be attached to the eucharist in the course of the fourth century.27 But a sense of unworthiness to receive the eucharist had been prevalent among Christians since much earlier in the century and had led many to abstain from communion for long periods of time – in some cases as much as a year or more.28 Why then was penitence so slow to find a place within eucharistic celebrations, and why, when it did, was it such a limited expression as a line in the Lord’s Prayer?
It seems most improbable that Christians regularly practised some form of confession or penitential prayer before or within their eucharistic celebration throughout this long period but somehow no one ever mentioned it in their writings about the eucharist. Yet, given the various references to the need to ask for forgiveness for one’s sins found in early Christian writers, it seems odd that it was so late in emerging in connection with this central rite. Could it have something to do with the ancient tradition of celebrating the eucharist only on Sundays? There was a general prohibition from both fasting and kneeling for prayer on that day of the week.29 If kneeling was thus forbidden, that meant that penitential prayer could not be offered. It is interesting to observe that ancient forms of morning prayer that begin with Psalm 51 on weekdays generally do not do so on Sundays. It is usually replaced on that day by the canticle Benedicite (Daniel 3.35–68), a song of creation especially appropriate to the first day of the week.30 This would seem to support the hypothesis that Sunday was considered an inappropriate day for penitential prayer. As a result, the absence of any opportunity for confession and absolution before receiving communion, unless one entered upon the rigorous process of canonical penance intended for truly serious sins, may well account for the prolonged abstinence from communion that we encounter being so often adopted at this period. And if lay people were commonly not receiving communion, that in turn may account also for the continuing lack of penitential prayers within eucharistic rites for several centuries afterwards, even when the eucharist was celebrated on weekdays.
Thus, although brief penitential notes are occasionally sounded in some eucharistic prayers that may go back at least in part to the fourth century (for example, a petition for forgiveness of sins in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, a reference to the worshippers as being ‘sinners and unworthy and wretched’ in the Egyptian version of the Anaphora of Basil, and a similar reference to ‘us sinners’ in the Roman Canon of the Mass),31 penitential prayers proper do not appear in the texts of eucharistic rites until the ninth or tenth centuries in either East or West. These, however, were merely the formalization of an older tradition of informal preparatory prayers that clergy and other communicants had engaged in for some centuries prior to this, and are found both at the very beginning of the rite and immediately prior to the reception of communion.32 Because laity now made their communion infrequently, they did not need to be involved in these devotions on a regular basis, and, on those few occasions when they did receive communion, especially in the West, they were increasingly expected to make their confession and receive absolution well beforehand each time, as well as undertaking a prior period of fasting or abstinence. Later still, however, pre-communion devotions for the laity of a penitential kind were introduced into the rite itself.33
Conclusion
Thus, there appears to have been a dichotomy between the counsel offered by many Christian leaders and spiritual writers in the early centuries of Christianity and its emerging liturgical traditions. While the former strongly advocated within every individual an awareness of sin that needed frequent confession, the rites themselves focused almost exclusively on praise and intercession. It was only very gradually, initially apparently through the increasing influence of monasticism on liturgy, that some expression of penitence began to appear both in the daily services and in the eucharist. It is small wonder, therefore, that in modern rites there is uncertainty as to whether every act of worship should always include such an element, and if so, where in the rite it should be located.
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1 For the development of what came to be known as the sacrament of penance, see James Dallen, The Reconciling Community: The Rite of Penance (Pueblo, New York 1986); Joseph A. Favazza, The Order of Penitents: Historical Roots and Pastoral Future (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville 1988).
2 On these references, see Aaron Milavec, ‘The Purifying Confession of Failings Required by the Didache’s Eucharistic Sacrifice’, Biblical Theology Bulletin 33 (2003), pp. 64–76; Jonathan A. Draper, ‘Pure Sacrifice in Didache 14 as Jewish Christian Exegesis’, Neotestamentica 42 (2008), pp. 223–52; and Carsten Claussen, ‘Repentance and Prayer in the Didache’, in Mark J. Boda, Daniel K. Falk, and Rodney A. Werline (eds), Seeking the Favor of God, vol. 3: The Impact of Penitential Prayer beyond Second Temple Judaism (Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta 2008), pp. 197–212.
3 ET from Origen, translation and introduction by Rowan A. Greer (Paulist Press, New York 1979), p. 169.
4 See Michel Dujarier, A History of the Catechumenate: The First Six Centuries (Sadlier, New York 1979), pp. 78–111.
5 Baptismal Instructions 8.17–18; ET from Harkins, St John Chrysostom: Baptismal Instructions, pp. 126–7.
6 John Chrysostom, Expositio in psalmum 140.1; ET from Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 42–3.
7 See Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 191–209.
8 See, for example, Gabriele Winkler’s reconstruction of the ancient Armenian evening office in her essay, ‘Über die Kathedralvesper in der verschieden Riten des Ostens und Westens’, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 16 (1974), pp. 53–102, here at pp. 78–80.
9 Chapter 7 above, pp. 108–13.
10 Basil, Regulae fusius tractatae 37.4; ET from Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, p. 86.
11 Basil, Epistula 207.3–4; ET from NPNF, Second Series, 8:247.
12 See John Chrysostom, De Anna sermo 4.5; Homiliae in Matthaeum 2.5.
13 John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 3.4–6.
14 John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 68.3; ET from NPNF, First Series, 10:400.
15 Pace Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, pp. 82–3.
16 John Cassian, De institutis coenobiorum 3.6.
17 Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, p. 128.
18 Ibid., pp. 107, 158.
19 The earliest explicit reference seems to be Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, Quaestiones in Exodum 28, written sometime after AD 453.
20 For further details, see Gabriele Winkler, ‘L’aspect pénitentiel dans les offices du soir en Orient et en Occident’, in Liturgie et rémission des péchés: conférences Saint Serge XXe Semaine d’Études Liturgiques, Bibliotheca Ephemerides Liturgicae Subsidia 3 (Edizioni Liturgiche, Rome 1975), pp. 273–93.
21 See for example Annie Jaubert, ‘Jésus et le calendrier de Qumran’, New Testament Studies 7 (1960), pp. 1–30; Willy Rordorf, Sunday (SCM Press, London 1968), pp. 183–6.
22 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 7.12; Origen, Homiliae in Leviticum 10.2; Didascalia 21.
23 Shepherd of Hermas, Similitude 5.1; Tertullian, De oratione 19; De ieiunio 10; 14.
24 See Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, pp. 91–2.
25 See Maxwell E. Johnson, ‘Preparation for Pascha? Lent in Christian Antiquity’, in Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman (eds), Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1999), pp. 36–54, here at pp. 44ff.
26 In the Mystagogical Catecheses attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem (5.11); apparently alluded to by Ambrose of Milan (De sacramentis 5.24); and at Antioch according to John Chrysostom: see F. van de Paverd, ‘Anaphoral Intercessions, Epiclesis and Communion Rites in John Chrysostom’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 49 (1983), pp. 303–39.
27 Taft, ‘The Lord’s Prayer in the Eucharistic Liturgy: When and Why?’, p. 153.
28 See, for example, John Chrysostom, Homiliae in epistulam ad Hebraeos 17.7; Ambrose, De sacramentis 5.25; and for discussion of the reasons for such abstentions, see above, pp. 34–5.
29 For the earliest references to this rule, see Tertullian, De corona 3; De oratione 23.
30 Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, p. 89.
31 For ET of these prayers, see R. C. D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (Collins, London 1975), pp. 28, 31, 108.
32 See further Robert F. Taft, ‘Byzantine Communion Rites II: Later Formulas and Rubrics in the Ritual of Clergy Communion’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 67 (2001), pp. 275–352; Annewies van den Hoek and Stefanos Alexopoulos, ‘The Endicott Scroll and its Place in the History of Private Communion Prayers’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006), pp. 145–88; Joseph A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite (Benzinger, New York 1951), I, pp. 290–311; II, pp. 343–50.
33 Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite, II, pp. 363–4, 367–74.