The Daily and Weekly Cycles
Beneath the year there are two smaller cycles that carry most of the Church’s actual prayer: the day, ordered by the eight services of the Horologion, and the week, ordered by the eight tones of the Octoechos and by the fixed themes of its days. This file sets out the logic of both — and notes the fact that matters most for the rest of this collection, that neither cycle is affected by any calendar dispute whatsoever.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
Scope
The services themselves — their structure, their psalmody, their history — are treated at length elsewhere and are not repeated here. For the daily office see Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle of Services and, in full, The Psalter and the Daily Office, particularly Matins, the Hours, and the Liturgical Day and The Evening and Night Services. What belongs here is why the cycles are shaped as they are, and how they stand in relation to the year.
The Day
The liturgical day runs from sunset to sunset, and it is filled by eight services: Vespers, Compline, the Midnight Office, Matins, and the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours. In full observance they mark the day at intervals; in parish practice they are consolidated into an evening gathering and a morning gathering (see Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle of Services).
The scriptural warrant is old and explicit. “Seven times a day do I praise thee” (Psalm 118/119:164); “Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud” (Psalm 54/55:17); Daniel prayed three times a day at his open window (Daniel 6:10); the apostles are found at prayer at the third hour (Acts 2:15), the sixth (Acts 10:9), and the ninth (Acts 3:1). The Church inherited a Jewish habit of fixed-hour prayer and filled it with the Passion and the Resurrection.
Each hour then acquired a commemoration: the Third Hour the descent of the Spirit, the Sixth the Crucifixion, the Ninth the death of Christ, Compline the descent into Hades, the Midnight Office the Bridegroom’s coming, Matins the Resurrection (see the table at Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle of Services). These associations are theological rather than merely mnemonic: the effect is that a person who keeps the hours passes through the whole economy of salvation once every twenty-four hours.
Historically the picture is less tidy than the received schema suggests, and it is worth conceding. Robert Taft’s work established that what the Byzantine tradition transmits is a synthesis of two originally distinct patterns: a cathedral office of the whole assembly, selective in its psalmody, ceremonial, and centred on praise at morning and evening; and a monastic office aimed at continuous prayer, running the Psalter through in course. The eightfold Horologion is the fusion of these, effected over centuries and finally in the neo-Sabaite synthesis (Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 2nd rev. ed., Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993, pp. 31–56, 273–291). Earlier accounts, including Fr Alexander Schmemann’s, presented a more schematic development that Taft’s evidence corrected; this collection follows Taft on the history (see The Psalter and the Daily Office).
The Week
Above the day stands the week, and the week is the oldest specifically Christian unit of liturgical time — older than the Paschal computus, older than any of the calendars this collection will discuss.
Sunday
Its hinge is the Lord’s Day. The Christian week is not the Jewish week with a change of day; it is a week with an eighth day, on which the Church stands rather than kneels, does not fast, and celebrates the Eucharist (see Time Sanctified and the Eighth Day). The prohibition of Sunday fasting is canonical, not merely customary: Apostolic Canon 64 deposes a cleric found fasting on the Lord’s Day or on a Saturday, with the single exception of Great Saturday (The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. Cummings, Chicago, 1957, Apostolic Canons — the numbering of this canon varies between 64 and 66 across collections, and the Rudder’s numbering is followed here; the collection of Apostolic Canons is received by Quinisext canon 2). The rule is a doctrinal fence in disciplinary dress: a day that is a weekly Pascha cannot be a day of mourning.
The Eight Tones
The week’s musical and textual variety comes from the Octoechos, the “Book of Eight Tones,” which supplies a complete set of hymns for every day of the week in each of the eight ecclesiastical modes. A tone is assigned to each week, and the cycle of eight runs continuously, beginning with Tone 1 in the week after All Saints Sunday and repeating every eight weeks until it is interrupted by the Triodion (see Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar; The Octoechos, Triodion, Menaion, and the Typikon).
The system is traditionally attributed to St John of Damascus. The attribution should be handled with the usual care: the Damascene’s contribution to the Octoechos is real but the book as it stands is the product of a long development in Palestinian and Constantinopolitan usage, and the traditional ascription compresses centuries of work into one name (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992, on the development of the hymnographic books; and see Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar, which makes the same qualification).
The Themes of the Days
Each weekday carries a fixed commemoration, which the Octoechos supplies for every tone:
| Day | Commemoration |
|---|---|
| Sunday | The Resurrection |
| Monday | The Bodiless Powers |
| Tuesday | St John the Forerunner |
| Wednesday | The Cross and the Theotokos — a fast day |
| Thursday | The Holy Apostles and St Nicholas |
| Friday | The Cross and the Theotokos — a fast day |
| Saturday | All Saints, the Martyrs, and the Departed |
The pattern is a miniature of the year: Sunday is Pascha, Wednesday and Friday are Holy Week, Saturday is Holy Saturday and the memory of the dead. A Christian who keeps only the week already keeps, in small, the shape of the whole.
Wednesday and Friday
The weekly fast is the oldest dated ascetic structure in the Church’s practice and its earliest witness is explicit and polemical. The Didache instructs: “Do not let your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on Monday and Thursday; you, however, should fast on Wednesday and Friday” (Didache 8.1; trans. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). The commemorations later attached to the days — the betrayal on Wednesday, the Crucifixion on Friday — are secondary to the practice and interpret it (see The Fasting Seasons and Their Logic; Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods).
Notice the shape: the week already contains fast and feast, and holds them a day or two apart. This is the pattern the year enlarges (see Feast and Fast as One Rhythm).
Why This Matters for the Calendar Question
One observation from this section governs everything that follows, and stating it early prevents a great deal of confusion.
The daily and weekly cycles are calendar-independent. They are counted, not dated. Sunday is the seventh day after the last Sunday on every calendar in the world; Wednesday is Wednesday for a Greek in Athens and a Russian in Jordanville on the same civil day; the tone of the week is the same tone in both places. The Julian and Gregorian calendars differ in how they number days, not in the sequence of days themselves, and the sequence of the week has run unbroken through every calendar reform, including 1582 and 1918. When Pope Gregory XIII deleted ten days in October 1582, Thursday 4 October was followed by Friday 15 October: the dates jumped, the weekdays did not.
The consequence is that the entire dispute treated in sections 04 through 07 of this collection touches only the dated cycles: the fixed calendar of the Menaion, and the interaction of that fixed calendar with the movable cycle. The office is untouched. The tone of the week is untouched. Wednesday and Friday are untouched. Sunday — which is to say, the Resurrection, the eighth day, and the weekly Pascha — is untouched, and is kept in common by every Orthodox Christian on earth.
That is not a small thing to hold onto before entering an argument about dates.
See Also
- The Fixed and the Movable Year — the two dated cycles, where the dispute actually lies
- Time Sanctified and the Eighth Day — why Sunday is what it is
- The Fasting Seasons and Their Logic — the weekly fast enlarged into seasons
- Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle of Services — the eight services in detail
- The Psalter and the Daily Office — the office in full, with its history
- The Divine Liturgy — the Eucharistic rite, deferred to throughout
References
- Didache 8.1; in Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
- The Rudder (Pedalion). Trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957. (Apostolic Canons; canon numbering varies by collection.)
- Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
- Taft, Robert F. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West. 2nd rev. ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993.
- Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
- Typikon (Ustav), chapters on the ordering of the daily and weekly services.