Daily Liturgical Prayer

Origins and Theology

Gregory W. Woolfenden

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351946544
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Théologie et religion
• Categoria: Religion

Tracing the origins of daily prayer from the New Testament and Patristic period, through the Reformation and Renaissance to the present, this book examines the development of daily rites across a broad range of traditions including: Pre-Crusader Constantinopolitan, East and West Syrian, Coptic and Ethiopian, non-Roman and Roman Western. Structure, texts and ceremonial are examined, and contemporary scholarship surveyed. Concluding with a critique of the present tenor of liturgical revision, Gregory Woolfenden raises key questions for current liturgical change, suggests to whom these questions should be addressed, and proposes that the daily office might be the springboard for an authentic baptismal spirituality. The author explores how prayer and poetic texts indicate that the thrust of the ancient offices was a movement from night to morning - from death to resurrection.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction and Survey of Research

The introduction to the section on the Divine Office in the most recent edition of The Study of Liturgy¹ has a definition of the office that neatly encapsulates present-day understanding of this liturgical form. It says: ‘The divine office … may be defined as a pattern of non-sacramental services to be celebrated or recited at intervals during the day (and night)’. This seemingly unexceptional statement begs the questions as to whether (a) the exclusion of any concept of sacramentality, and (b) the obvious bias towards what has been called the ‘sanctification of the day’, can leave us with a correct hermeneutical principle for understanding the concept of prayer at set times of day and night.

The modern Western, and to a certain extent, Eastern, concept of sacramentality has tended to narrow it down to seven, or even only two, ecclesial acts. This medieval development grew out of a desire to make ever more precise distinctions between ‘the sacraments of the new covenant and the broad ‘‘sacramental realm’’ of natural sacraments, Old Testament sacraments, consecrations resembling sacraments, and blessings’.² An older understanding of sacraments was much broader; Hugh of St Victor (+ 1142) even included the sign of the cross and the ‘opening of the hands in charity’ as sacraments, and, unsurprisingly, concluded that the sacraments were too many to number.³ God is not tied to certain specific acts but rather there are many potential ways in which ‘ritual activity symbolizes the presence and activity of God in the faith of the Church’.⁴

The narrowing tendency has never taken over completely in the Christian East, as Bishop Kallistos (Ware) has said: ‘we must never isolate these seven from the many other actions in the Church which also possess a sacramental character’.⁵ Similarly, Christos Yannaras points out that ‘The whole life of the faithful, every turn of his life, is a preparation for participation in or an event of participation in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in the refashioning of life.’⁶ Alexander Schmemann was anxious not to reduce the whole of liturgical life to the Eucharist, nor to extend the concept of sacrament too widely,⁷ but while respecting his concern, we shall maintain that there is, in liturgical forms at evening and morning, an act which is at least quasi-sacramental. Most recently, Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev) has shown how, as late as the thirteenth century, Eastern theological thought was unconcerned about the number of the sacraments.⁸

This leads to the second presupposition, that the offices are more or less arbitrary attempts to Christianize day and night, whereas we shall try to show that the rhythm of day and night, or rather, night followed by day, is fundamental to the whole concept of prayer at particular hours.

The daily symbols of night and day are basic to any symbolic understanding of reality. The cycles of birth and death, winter and summer may be encapsulated in the daily passage from light to darkness, through that darkness, and back again to light. Mircea Eliade, speaking of initiatory symbolism said: ‘initiatory death is often symbolized, for example, by cosmic night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster’.⁹

Symbols were essential to the expression of Christianity from its very beginning, and symbols are recognized rather than created: ‘They grow out of the individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being.’¹⁰ Human beings symbolize their relationships with each other, the task of those who explore symbolism is to identify the symbolic ways, not to invent them. Symbolic phenomena interpret context, and not the other way round; symbols in fact throw light by which we may discern the true nature of reality.¹¹

We shall stress the dynamic of the office from the beginning of the night to the full light of day, because it ensures that the celebration of daily prayer enables participation in the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. In the chapters on the traditions of daily prayer, we will first explain their structure, then examine the scriptures they use and how they use them, and finally how the meaning of these services is explicitated in hymn and prayer texts. This method demonstrates the interplay between ritual, visual action, the scriptural proclamation and the lex orandi, and is inspired by the work of David Power on sacraments.¹²

Research on the Subject

A number of books have examined the history of the daily office in recent years, and have advanced the discussion well beyond the works of older scholars. One of the earlier scholars, Batiffol concluded that the order of evening, night and morning offices was the origin of daily prayer,¹³ a vigilial form that spread from weekly to festal, and ultimately to daily, use. Jules Baudot¹⁴ and Suitbert Bäumer¹⁵ again also mainly examined Western, and particularly Roman, forms in a similar way.

A major development in the understanding of the Divine Office and its history was Anton Baumstark’s positing of the now common distinction between the ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ offices.¹⁶ For Baumstark, the cathedral rite comprised only two services, at morning and evening, with a vigil on Saturday to Sunday night. These services used only a small number of psalms, chosen for their suitability for the time of day; whilst monastic prayer became characterized by the use of the whole psalter in course, from 1 to 150, in some set period of time, most often, a week. Monastic offices were multiple; Terce, Sext and None became communal, and forms of prayer late at night, midnight (distinct from the pre-dawn vigil) and at the first hour (Prime), became part of the daily cursus.¹⁷

Baumstark’s principles of comparative liturgy became the framework for modern scholars, a first wave of whom included Juan Mateos,¹⁸ whose findings became widely influential. Mateos summed up his view of the nature of the office in an English-language article. Emphasizing the popular nature of the ‘cathedral office’, he enumerated the now familiar elements: a typical morning office of cathedral type had psalm 50 to open it, then psalm 62, an Old Testament canticle, hymn, a New Testament canticle accompanied by incense, the praise psalms and prayer. The evening office comprised a lamp-lighting ritual, evening psalm or psalms, evening incense and prayer.¹⁹

Mateos’ popular articles of the 1960s accompanied a time of liturgical change everywhere, but he did not convince the revisers of the Roman offices in 1964.²⁰ They, and many others, followed the path of what Stanislaus Campbell has called ‘eclectic traditionalism’ which justified reforms by isolated precedents;²¹ and clearly distrusted liturgical scholarship.

The Orthodox scholar Alexander Schmemann alerted the West to the findings of older Russian scholarship and was convinced that Vespers and Matins were commonly celebrated in the third century and did not have a monastic origin.²² Other writers also popularized these views about the origin of and importance for the modern church of the ancient cathedral office.²³

It was increasingly recognized that prayer at the beginning and end of the day is common to most religious traditions, including Judaism, and as with other Christian acts of worship, such as baptism and the Eucharist, many efforts were made to try and establish Jewish origins for Christian daily prayer.²⁴ However the idea that we can trace a direct line between synagogue worship and that of the early church is now largely abandoned.²⁵ Jewish scholars also were increasingly pointing out the dearth of evidence for a recognizeable syn...