Have Breviaries, Will Travel

To-morrow I leave for my European holiday; I'm finalizing packing, and have decided to take with me not just my brick of a Breviary (the F.S.S.P. reprint, 50×120×180mm, weighing nearly a kilogram), but – that I may have a pocket prayerbook, not necessitating a backpack – the 1956 Dominican Diurnal I bought while in Rome last time: it only weighs 150g, and measures a much more convenient 25×88×130mm, including slipcase.

The other day, for the feast of St Stephen, I prayed Matins from my full 1962 Dominican Breviary, mainly because he is my confirmation patron, and I knew that the Office of the Friars Preachers includes proper Matins antiphons for his feast (as for St John's and the Holy Innocents'); the Lessons, by the way, are slightly shorter than the Roman, so the Hour would have been about the same length overall.

(This is not my Diurnal!)

Why not just bring the Breviarium S.O.P., midway in size and weight between the two?  Well, I will be catching up in Italy with a priest I know who sometimes likes to say parts of the Office in common...  So I can have a little book of Horæ Diurnæ S.O.P. on my person, and have the full Roman Breviary either back at my lodgings, or bring it along if I know it will be needed.

Only one tedious task has been involved: I've just had to pencil in all the changes to the Dominican Office between 1956 and 1962!  One must follow the rubricks.

I confess

It makes me feel lazy and therefore ashamed, but I must admit that this week I've left aside Matins, and only used the Day Hours of the Breviary.

Unfortunately, I have found reading the nine psalms of Matins and its lessons - while ideally excellent - to be too much of a burthen, and a source of anxiety and restlessness.

I do hope in this (as in much else) that I have not entirely succumbed to acedia - that is, to that form of sloth which is the vice of finding religious devotion repulsive.  (Aquinas warns that this vice, often linked to the effects of pride, lust and gluttony, is closely related to despair - quod Deus avertat.)

On the positive side, I haven't been assailed with a foolish mania to read the Office as if it were some duty binding upon me, construed in a pharisaical manner (like tithing mint and dill, yet not practising charity), but rather, I hope, I have looked forward as my daily nourishment to delighting in the psalms given us by the Holy Ghost through the sacred writers, and the prayers of the Church composed under the guidance and governance of the same Spirit.

St Benedict defined the hoped-for effect of the Prayer of the Church as mens concordet voci: "may the mind accord with the voice" - that is, the desired result is that the heart may be lifted up to the Lord by striving to be of one mind and soul with Him through participating in the very words of Divine Revelation and right doctrine.  To this I say, Amen.

Monastic versus Roman Day Hours

I've been exercised about the pros and cons of the Monastic Office compared to the Roman - and of course, the one thing we all want to know about is, Which is longer?

Breviarium monasticum juxta regulam s. patris Benedicti, ad usum Congregationis ss. Vitoni et Hydulphi Ad usum congregationis SS. Vitoni et Hydulphi. Pars Hyemalis-Autumnalis. By Benedictines

(Not having mine own copy of the Breviarium Monasticum, I made use of Google Books for the purposes of making certain comparisons.)

Well, the short answer is, the Psalmody of the Day Hours of the Monastic Breviary is about 4% longer on average, but of course the Monastic Office lacks certain elements of the Roman - it has only two short responsories a day as against five, no Nunc dimittis at Compline, and, at least in the Farnborough Abbey edition, there is no Officium Capituli at the end of Prime.  On the other hand, it does have Kyrie and Pater noster at every Hour, which is much to be desiderated.  So overall the two are roughly the same length within the limits of this rough measurement.

Short answer to question: The two are each just about as long as the other. 

The longer answer is that the devil is in the detail!  

For a start, Monastic Lauds is almost twice as long as the Roman, and no wonder: every day it consists of Psalms 66 and 50, then two variable psalms and an Old Testament canticle (on Saturday, the canticle is so long it's broken into two, and only one psalm accompanies it), and then Psalms 148, 149 and 150 sub una Gloria Patri, for a total of seven psalms and a canticle.  Prime, on the other hand, is exactly the same length in both rites, despite having quite different psalms allotted to it.  Still, of the 289 psalm verses on average in the Monastic Diurnal's psalmody each day, 148 of them - half - are got through at Lauds and Prime, which makes their recitation rather daunting!  (I try and say Roman Lauds and Prime before work; I doubt I'd be able to if I used their Benedictine equivalents.)

The Rule of St Benedict wisely provides that Terce, Sext and None be short; they are in fact each only about two-thirds as long as the comparable Roman Hours.  What a relief after Lauds...

As for Vespers and Compline, Roman or Monastic, their length is almost the same. 

My final reflection: while Traddies do tend to deprecate the psalter reform of Pope St Pius X, he did make it possible to get through all 150 psalms in the week* - which remains no mean feat even with the '62 Breviary, I can assure anyone: you need to devote an hour a day at least to it! - and did so by using each psalm only once, rather than repeating psalms on different days (as is done at Lauds, the Little Hours and Compline in the Monastic Breviary, and as was done even more in the pre-1912 Roman Breviary, which included such fatiguing joys as praying the whole of Psalm 118 every day).  As a result, even if one only prays the Day Hours of the Roman Breviary, one is exposed to 115 of the psalms, over three-quarters of the total - whereas, because of its repetitions, the Benedictine Diurnal only includes 72 psalms, just less than half of the Psalter.

*Recall what the Holy Patriarch St Benedict said in his Rule (chapter xviii):

We especially impress this, that, if this distribution of the psalms should perchance displease anyone, he arrange them if he thinketh another better, by all means seeing to it that the whole Psalter of one hundred and fifty psalms be said every week, and that it always start again from the beginning at Matins on Sunday; because those monks show too lax a service in their devotion who in the course of a week chant less than the whole Psalter with its customary canticles; since we read, that our holy forefathers promptly fulfilled in one day what we lukewarm monks should, please God, perform at least in a week.

What then of the Night Office?  (Which is called Matins, rather misleadingly, in the Roman, and Vigils in the Monastic terminology: both contain one or more Nocturns.)

It is said that an angel revealed to a desert Father that twelve was the appropriate number of psalms for the Night Office, and this is the number adhered to in the Monastic Nocturnal.  Be that as it may, in the Roman the number nine - no doubt in honour of the Nine Choirs of the angelic host - was settled on for feasts long ago, and since 1912 this has been the number of psalm-portions for each night.  Note how much longer Monastic Vigils must be: it must get through 78 psalms (some divided in twain) each week, and each Hour begins not just with Psalm 94, but with Psalm 3 beforehand.  Most holy, but very lengthy...  Whereas the Roman arrangement since 1912 has only had to cover 35 psalms a week, or 5 a night (again, breaking longer ones up into parts, as in the Day Hours as well), plus the prefatory Invitatory (Ps 94).

Again, I find Roman Matins quite long enough, and quail at the very idea of attempting Monastic Vigils.

Monastic Diurnal Tutorial

Aaron, Fr's stalwart server, occasional M.C., and general factotum (sorry to tease you, mate!), came round for dinner to-night.  As well as having a good chat over curry with Mike, James and myself, he had driven over for a reason: he's in process of taking up the Monastic Diurnal, and wanted some advice on the mechanics of it...

To explain - Aaron has been coming to the Pro. for the last three years or so, he told us over dinner, and from liking the solemnity, the chant and so forth, but not understanding it, he's learnt how to follow the Mass, then how to serve at it (both Low and High), and has been reading the Little Office of Our Lady daily for over a year.  Last year he did an Ignatian retreat in Sydney directed by the Flavigny monks, and at that time bought a bilingual Diurnal put out by Farnborough Abbey, which he's decided it's time to turn to using.

Now, Aaron wanted to consult with me about all this, since he knows I say the Roman Breviary, and thought I would hopefully be able to help.  I've also put him onto Terra, since she is a worthy partisan of the Monastic Office!  But in the meanwhile, we had a look at setting up the tags and working out how to operate the Diurnal.  

We had a preliminary discussion about whether it were fitting for a layman to recite the Monastic Office.  I opined that, say, if one lived near a monastery, and customarily went there for Mass and Vespers, it would seem perfectly reasonable to take up their Breviary; and if one has some association with or interest in or perhaps vocation for monasticism, then it appears good to pray their way.  While I use the Roman Breviary, I have some past connexions to the Dominicans, in fact have a set of the Dominican Breviary, and even if I am not in a Dominican parish at present, it would seem allowable to pray that edition of the Breviary.  Basically, so long as one is not being eccentric about it, to pray any form of the Divine Office is to be joining in the prayer of the Church Catholic, and surely there is no sin in taking up the Monastic rather than the Roman Office...

I must say though, compared to the Roman it seems much more complicated!  The reason I say so is that in the Roman Breviary, the Hours for each day of the week simply follow each other - Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, and so forth through to Compline, then back to Matins of the next day and so on - whereas in the Monastic Breviary (of which the Diurnal is the excerpt containing all the Day Hours, as the name suggests, but omitting the psalmody and lessons of Matins), first comes Prime for each day but Sunday, then (Matins and) Lauds for each day, then Sunday Prime, Terce, Sext and None, then Monday Terce, Sext and None, then the set Terce, Sext and None for the rest of the week, then Vespers for each day, and finally the invariable Compline.  

The reason for this is that the Monastic Office, stedfast in obedience to Holy Father Benedict who drew up its peculiar method for reciting the psalms, arranges the Hours according to the rough order of the psalms, and basically Prime Monday through to Saturday runs through the first twenty psalms, Matins (in the full edition) runs through the next eighty or so, Lauds - despite being largely fixed, and a collection of psalms from all over the Psalter - comes next as allied to Matins, the three sets of the Little Hours follow this because they are drawn from Psalm 118 and the succeeding Gradual Psalms, and finally Vespers runs over the remaining residue of the psalms; Compline is placed last as the last Hour of the day.

We identified salient differences between the Little Office and Roman Office on the one hand, and the Monastic on the other.  These are most pronounced at Lauds, involving Psalm 66, the Laudate psalms, the short responsory and the Lord's Prayer. Firstly, after the usual Deus in adjutorium, St Benedict has Psalm 66 sung every day in directum, since, as his Rule provides, monks arriving during this may join the choir, but those so tardy as to come even later cannot and must penance do for their fault.  Secondly, as has been done in both East and West down the ages in all rites, and was done throughout the Roman Rite until the Breviary reforms under St Pius X as implemented at the start of 1912, less than a century ago, every day in the Monastic scheme Psalms 148-150 are sung together as one as the last 'psalm' of Lauds, from whose use that Hour derives its very name and special characteristic of Divine praise.  Thirdly, unlike in the Roman Office (where they are used instead at Prime, the Little Hours, and Compline), and unlike in the Little Office (where they are not used at all), in the Monastic Breviary short responsories are sung at Lauds - and Vespers - after the little chapter (the reading) and before the hymn.  Fourthly, while in the Roman Office the Lord's Prayer is only said at Lauds and Vespers when the preces are used, and while in the Little Office only Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison was said before the Collect, in the Monastic Office both this threefold Kyrie and a Pater noster is said at every Hour prior to the Collect (the Dominican does much the same).

Monastic Compline is wholly unchanging, and famously lacks the Nunc dimittis that later came to be an integral part of the Roman version of that Hour.  Prime, apart from having different psalms appointed for each day of the week, is unchanging but for its psalm-antiphon, which makes it easy.  The Little Hours each have the same format, and each has only three sets of psalms - one for Sunday and one for Monday (covering Psalm 118 broken up into 22 octonaries), and one for the other five days (taken from the Gradual Psalms).  However, the psalm-antiphons can change, and so can the chapter, versicle and collect.  Vespers is like, in that its psalms vary each day of the week - but it only has four psalms, not the Roman five.  It is noticeably shorter than Lauds.

Since Aaron is well-practised with the Little Office, the structure of the Hours is thus familiar enough; what he has to adjust to, and what we tried to work through a bit, is finding where the relevant changeable parts are for each liturgical day.  To-day is a feria of Advent, so he has to turn to both the Ordinary of the ferias of Advent for the chapters, Lauds and Vesper responsories and hymns, and versicles, and for the Collect (taken from the Sunday) and to the exact day of Advent to obtain the proper Benedictus and Magnificat antiphons.  For St Damasus on the 11th, all he has to add is the appointed commemoration (antiphon, versicle and collect) at Lauds - which he is familiar with doing since his edition of the Little Office has a fixed commemoration at Lauds and Vespers.  For St Lucy on the 13th, proper antiphons and the rest are supplied, and he must follow the rubrics and use the Sunday psalms (and Sunday festal canticle) at Lauds, and the psalms from the Common of Virgins at Vespers.  And as for the feast of Doubting Thomas on the 21st, all that is not proper comes from the Common of Apostles out of Paschaltide.

Ah, the noble simplicity of the Divine Office...

(Thanks, mate, for letting me post a bit about this!)