The Jerusalem Typikon

The liturgical book and rule associated with the Great Lavra of Sabbas is the Typikon of St Sabbas — the Jerusalem or Sabaite (Hagiopolite) Typikon — which orders the whole round of services: the daily cycle from Vespers to the Hours, the all-night vigil, and the coordination of the fixed calendar, the movable Paschal cycle, the Psalter, and the eight tones. This liturgical order grew out of the cathedral and monastic practice of Jerusalem and the lavras of the Judean desert, crystallized at Mar Saba, and became the foundation of the Byzantine and Orthodox order of worship still in use today. A point of source-critical honesty governs the whole subject: the surviving written Typikon of St Sabbas is not Sabbas’s autograph but a later redaction, the codified deposit of a tradition centuries in the making, of which Sabbas stands at the head rather than as its sole author.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; founder of the Great Lavra)

What a Typikon Is

A typikon (Greek typikon, from typos, “pattern” or “model”) is the regulating book of an Orthodox monastery or church — the rule that governs the order of the services and, in many cases, the disciplinary and administrative life of the community as well (Taft 1992, 56–66, 78–84). The word is used in two related but distinguishable senses, and the distinction is essential to understanding what “the Typikon of St Sabbas” means. In the first sense a typikon is a foundation rule (a ktetorikon or diatyposis): the charter a founder leaves his community, prescribing the number of monks, the manner of their life, the discipline of the table and the cell, and the framework of their prayer. In the second and more familiar sense a typikon is a liturgical ordo: the detailed book that tells the community precisely how to celebrate the services on every day of the year — which psalms, which hymns, which readings, in what order, and how to combine the several overlapping cycles when they fall together (Taft 1992, 56–66; Schmemann 1966, chs. 4–5).

The liturgical Typikon exists because Orthodox worship is built from several independent cycles that must be coordinated day by day. There is the daily cycle of the fixed hours — Vespers, Compline, the Midnight Office, Matins, and the four Hours — repeated every day (see The Daily Cycle). There is the weekly cycle of the eight tones (the Octoechos), which assigns to each week one of eight musical and textual “tones” and to each day of the week a theme — the Resurrection on Sunday, the Cross on Wednesday and Friday, and so on. There is the fixed yearly cycle of the calendar (the Menaion), with a commemoration for every day. And there is the movable cycle governed by Pascha (the Triodion and Pentecostarion), which shifts each year. On any given day two, three, or more of these cycles coincide, and their texts must be interwoven in a determinate order. The Typikon is the book that resolves these coincidences: it is, in effect, the algorithm of Orthodox worship (Taft 1992, 56–66, 78–84; Schmemann 1966, chs. 4–5; on the Psalter and the tones as ordered in practice, see The Daily Cycle).

The Hagiopolite Root: Jerusalem and the Judean Lauras

The liturgical tradition codified at Mar Saba is properly called Hagiopolite — “of the Holy City,” from Hagia Polis, Jerusalem — because its deepest root is the worship of the church of Jerusalem itself (Taft 1992, 56–66). From the fourth century the holy places of Jerusalem drew pilgrims from across the Christian world, and the stational liturgy of the Holy City — services celebrated at the sites of the events they commemorated, on the days and at the hours of those events — became famous and was imitated abroad. The pilgrim Egeria, writing of her journey to the East in the early 380s, has left a detailed description of the daily and festal services of Jerusalem as she observed them, and her account is the earliest extended witness to the Hagiopolite cursus from which the later Typikon descends (Taft 1986, 48–56; Taft 1992, 56–66). The Armenian and Georgian lectionaries of Jerusalem, which preserve the readings and chants of the Holy City’s liturgy from the fifth to the eighth centuries, are further early witnesses to this cathedral tradition before it was absorbed into the monastic books (Taft 1992, 56–66).

The monasteries of the Judean desert lived in the orbit of this Jerusalem worship. The lavras and coenobia founded by Euthymius, Theoctistus, Theodosius, Sabbas, and their disciples were a day’s journey from the Holy City; their monks were formed in its liturgical idiom, kept its feasts, and brought its usages into the desert (Binns 1994, 142–183; Patrich 1995, 174–203; see The Judean Desert). What the desert added was the framework of the monastic office: the long psalmody, the night vigil, the canon, and the disciplined daily round that the cathedral cursus did not by itself supply. The Sabaite tradition is precisely the marriage of the two — the cathedral worship of Jerusalem fused with the monastic office of the Judean lauras — and it is this synthesis, hammered out in the weekend synaxis of the desert houses, that the Typikon of St Sabbas would eventually codify (Taft 1992, 56–66, 78–84; Binns 1994, 142–183; on the synaxis itself, see The Lavra and the Cenobium).

Mar Saba as the Crystallizing Center

Among the desert houses the Great Lavra of Sabbas became the center where this synthesis crystallized and from which it was diffused. Several reasons converged. The Great Lavra was the largest and most influential monastery of the Judean desert, the head of a federation of houses whose archimandrite was set by the patriarch of Jerusalem over all the lavriote monks of the patriarchate (Cyril, Life of Sabas 30; trans. Price 1991; Binns 1994, 142–183; see Founding Mar Saba (483)). It survived — through the Persian sack of 614, the Arab conquest, and the long centuries under Muslim rule — when many neighboring houses did not, so that it became the surviving repository and the living transmitter of the desert’s liturgical practice (Binns 1994; Patrich 1995, ch. 9). And it was, from the eighth century, the home of a school of hymnographers — John of Damascus and Cosmas of Maiuma above all — whose compositions furnished much of the very hymnody the Typikon would order, so that at Mar Saba the rule and the texts it regulated grew together (Taft 1992, 78–84; see The Sabaite Liturgical Legacy, and the sibling collection St John of Damascus).

The institutional form of the lavra was itself the engine of liturgical development, as the lavra’s own rhythm required. Through the working week the monks lived alone in their cliff-cells; at the week’s end they converged on the central church for the great all-night vigil joining Saturday evening to Sunday, the Divine Liturgy, and the common meal (Cyril, Life of Sabas 18, 28; trans. Price 1991; Patrich 1995, 174–203; see The Lavra and the Cenobium). It was in this weekend office — the agrypnia that knit Vespers, the night office, and Matins into a single unbroken service — that the usages later codified as the Typikon were worked out and fixed in habit before they were ever written down. The form of the community generated the rite (Patrich 1995, 174–203; Taft 1992, 78–84).

The Crucial Source-Critical Point: Sabbas and the Written Typikon

Here the subject demands the strictest honesty, for the popular account — that “St Sabbas wrote the Typikon” — collapses two very different things. Sabbas (439–532) gave his lavra an ordering of its services and a discipline of its life; Cyril of Scythopolis reports that he left his community a settled manner of life and appointed its observances, and the desert tradition remembered him as the legislator of its worship (Cyril, Life of Sabas 76; trans. Price 1991). But the written book that bears his name — the developed liturgical Typikon transmitted in Greek and Slavonic manuscripts and printed in the received editions — is not a sixth-century autograph. It is the deposit of centuries of growth, reaching anything like its classic form only well after Sabbas’s death, transmitted and repeatedly edited as it passed through the hands of later generations (Taft 1992, 56–66, 78–84).

[Disputed: the traditional attribution of the liturgical Typikon to St Sabbas personally is hagiographical and customary — Sabbas gave the Great Lavra an oral and customary ordering of its services (so the desert tradition, reflected in Cyril of Scythopolis, *Life of Sabas* 76; trans. Price 1991), and the book is named for him as the head and legislator of the tradition; the surviving written *Typikon of St Sabbas* is, however, a much later redaction — the codified and elaborated deposit of the Hagiopolite-Sabaite tradition, reaching its developed form centuries after Sabbas and edited through successive transmissions — so the text is a later witness to the tradition Sabbas anchored, not his autograph composition (Taft, *The Byzantine Rite: A Short History*, 1992, 56–66, 78–84; on the monastic office of the Judean lauras, Binns 1994, 142–183; Patrich 1995, 174–203).]

The relation, then, is one of authority and codification rather than of authorship in the modern sense. Sabbas stands at the head of the tradition as its remembered legislator and its naming patron; the book is the elaboration of the customary rule he established, grown by accretion as the Hagiopolite-Sabaite office absorbed new hymnody, settled new feasts, and resolved new coincidences of the cycles over the centuries (Taft 1992, 78–84). To say “the Typikon of St Sabbas” is to name a tradition by its head, exactly as “the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom” names a rite by an authority who stands at its source without having composed the text in the form we now have it. This is the normal pattern of liturgical attribution in the East, and it is no diminishment of Sabbas to state it plainly (Taft 1992, 56–66; METHODOLOGY §3.5, on pinning hagiographical claims to their attestation).

The Daily Cycle in the Sabaite Order

The Sabaite Typikon orders the eight services of the monastic day, each tied to a moment of salvation history and to an hour of the natural day (Taft 1986, 273–291; Schmemann 1966, chs. 3–4; and the table at The Daily Cycle). The liturgical day begins not at midnight but at sunset, on the biblical pattern of Genesis — “there was evening, and there was morning” — so that the evening service already belongs to the following day (Schmemann 1966, ch. 4; see The Daily Cycle).

Vespers (hesperinos) opens the liturgical day at sunset: a service of thanksgiving for the day past and expectation of the day to come, built around Psalm 103 (104) of creation, “Lord, I have cried” with its stichera, the ancient lamp-lighting hymn “O Joyful Light” (Phōs hilaron), and the Song of Simeon (Taft 1986, 273–291; see The Daily Cycle). Compline (apodeipnon) follows after the evening meal, before sleep, associated with death and the descent into Hades. The Midnight Office (mesonyktikon) is kept at midnight, recalling Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane and the expectation of the Second Coming “as a thief in the night.” Matins or Orthros (orthros) greets the dawn as an image of the Resurrection — the longest and most complex of the offices, with the Six Psalms, the kathismata of the Psalter, the Polyeleos and the festal Gospel, and above all the Canon, the nine-ode hymnographic centerpiece that the Sabaite hymnographers did so much to furnish (Taft 1986, 273–291; Schmemann 1966, chs. 3–4; on the Canon and the Sabaite hymnographers, see The Sabaite Liturgical Legacy). The four Hours — First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth — punctuate the day at roughly the third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth hours of antiquity, each tied to a moment of the Passion and the descent of the Spirit (see the table at The Daily Cycle). And at the center of the festal day stands the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharist toward which the whole office of prayer is ordered (see The Divine Liturgy).

The texture of all these services is overwhelmingly psalmodic and hymnographic. The Psalter is divided into twenty kathismata and recited through in the course of the week (twice weekly in Great Lent), the recitation distributed across Vespers, Matins, and the Midnight Office according to the Typikon’s tables (Schmemann 1966, ch. 4; see The Daily Cycle). Around this psalmic skeleton the hymnography of the eight tones, the Menaion, and the Triodion-Pentecostarion is fitted, and the Typikon’s chief labor is precisely to specify, for every day, how these are to be combined.

The All-Night Vigil: The Sabaite Hallmark

The signature of the Sabaite order — the thing that most visibly distinguishes it as monastic and as the office of the desert lavra — is the all-night vigil (agrypnia, “wakefulness”). In its full form the vigil joins Great Vespers, the night office, and Matins into a single continuous service running from the evening through the night to the dawn, the spiritual climax of the lavra’s week (Taft 1986, 273–291; Patrich 1995, 174–203; see The Lavra and the Cenobium). The vigil arose directly from the lavra’s institutional rhythm: because the hermits gathered at the central church only at the week’s end, that weekend synaxis became a long and solemn assembly, lengthened to fill the night that the dispersed brethren had come together to keep (Patrich 1995, 174–203). The prolonged psalmody, the full canon, the festal Gospel read in the night, and the unhurried scale of the whole are the marks of an office shaped by men whose ordinary prayer was solitary and whose corporate worship was therefore rare, intense, and protracted.

The all-night vigil is the element of the Sabaite tradition that most directly shaped the later worship of the whole Orthodox world. In Slavic practice the vigil was received as the All-Night Vigil (Vsenoshchnoye Bdeniye), combining Great Vespers, Matins, and the First Hour into the single great evening service that remains the characteristic Saturday-night and festal office of the Russian Church and others — explicitly under the influence, as the Russian liturgical tradition itself records, of “the Typikon of the Jerusalem (Sabaite) tradition as received through the Studite synthesis” (see The Daily Cycle, on the origin and structure of the Vigil; on the transmission, The Sabaite Liturgical Legacy). What is prayed on a Saturday evening in an Orthodox parish today is, in its structure, the descendant of the vigil kept in the gorge of the Kidron.

What the Typikon Coordinates

The practical genius of the Typikon lies in its coordination of the cycles. On a given day the Typikon must say how to combine, for example, the Sunday Resurrection texts in the tone of the week (from the Octoechos) with the commemoration of a saint (from the Menaion) — and, in the Paschal season, with the texts of the Triodion or Pentecostarion as well — so that the several layers are sung in a determinate order without omission or collision (Taft 1992, 56–66; Schmemann 1966, chs. 4–5). It ranks the feasts (great, vigil-rank, polyeleos, and lesser) and assigns to each rank the corresponding solemnity of office. It governs the fasts and their relaxations, the use of “Alleluia” in place of “God is the Lord” on penitential days, the appointment of the kathismata, and the hundred small decisions by which an abstract order of service becomes a concrete celebration on a particular morning. The received printed Typikon of the Orthodox Church — the book in use in the Greek and Slavic churches alike — is, in its substance, this Sabaite ordo, grown and edited but recognizably the office of the Holy City and the Judean desert (Taft 1992, 56–66, 78–84; Schmemann 1966, ch. 5).

References

Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. American Essays in Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (The formation of the Byzantine liturgical synthesis; the Hagiopolite and Sabaite roots; the cathedral worship of Jerusalem and the monastic office of Palestine; the developed Typikon as a later codification of the tradition rather than a single founder’s composition; the Studite reception of Palestinian material.)
Taft, Robert F. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1986. (Egeria and the early Jerusalem cursus; the structure and history of the daily offices — Vespers, the night office, Matins, the Hours — in the Eastern and Palestinian traditions.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. London: Faith Press / Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966. (The structure of the liturgical day and the several cycles; the function of the Typikon in coordinating them; the synthesis of cathedral and monastic worship.)
Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Sabas, in The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Primary source for Sabbas as legislator of his lavra’s life and worship, and for the weekend synaxis; the settling of the community’s manner of life at ch. 76; the lavriote rhythm at chs. 18, 28; the headship over the lavras at ch. 30.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The Judean desert monasteries in the orbit of Jerusalem’s worship; the monastic office of the lauras; the survival and influence of the Great Lavra.)
Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to Seventh Centuries. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 32. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995. (The daily and weekly horarium of the lavriote; the all-night vigil of the weekend synaxis; the liturgical life of the Great Lavra and its later transmission.)