Matins, the Hours, and the Liturgical Day

Matins (Orthros) is the longest and richest service of the daily cycle, the greeting of the dawn as an image of the Resurrection. The Four Hours — First, Third, Sixth, Ninth — punctuate the daylight with brief psalmody, each recalling an event of the Passion or of Pentecost at the hour it fell. Together with the evening and night services they make up the full cursus whose whole meaning is the sanctification of time. This file walks Matins and the Hours and gathers the theology of the round.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Matins (Orthros)

Matins (Greek Orthros, “daybreak”; Slavonic Utrenya) is the service of the morning and, in its meaning, the service of the Resurrection: the greeting of the dawn of the new day as the image of the morning on which Christ rose. It is the longest and most complex of the daily services, and its movement, from darkness to full light, enacts the passage from death to resurrection that is its theme (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle).

Its principal movements are:

  • The Six Psalms (3, 37, 62, 87, 102, 142), read in stillness and near-darkness — the passage from the cry of distress to trust in the coming light (see Which Psalms Anchor Which Services).
  • “God is the Lord” (from Ps 117 (118):26–27, “God is the Lord, and hath appeared unto us; blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”) with the troparia of the day. In Lent this gives way to a solemn “Alleluia,” marking the penitential days.
  • The kathismata of the Psalter, with sessional hymns.
  • On Sundays and feasts, the Polyeleos (Pss 134–135), at which the church is fully lit and, on Sundays, the resurrectional troparia “The angelic host was amazed” are sung; the festal Magnification and the Matins Gospel follow. On Sundays one of the eleven Resurrection Gospels is read, cycling through the accounts of the risen Christ’s appearances, and the people sing “Having beheld the Resurrection of Christ.”
  • Psalm 50, the psalm of repentance, and then the Canon — the great hymnographic composition in nine odes built on the Nine Biblical Odes (its poetry is treated in The Akathist & Orthodox Hymnography; its scriptural foundation in The Kathismata, Psalm 151, and the Nine Odes).
  • At the ninth ode, “More honourable than the Cherubim,” the Magnificat of the Theotokos (Luke 1:46–55) with its refrain.
  • The Praises (Pss 148–150) with the festal stichera, rising into the Great Doxology, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace” (based on the angelic song of Luke 2:14), sung in full at Sunday and festal Matins with the church ablaze with light.

So Matins moves from the darkness of the Six Psalms to the blaze of the Great Doxology — from night to resurrection morning. It is the office in which the Church most fully enacts the Paschal mystery in the course of an ordinary day (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966).

The Four Hours

Between the great morning and evening services stand the Four Hours — brief services of three psalms each (see The Fixed Psalmody of the Hours and Typika) that sanctify the daylight and bind the passing hours to the Passion. Their commemorations follow the ancient Christian reading of the day (Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 1993, on the “little hours” and their historical meaning; hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle):

  • The First Hour (c. 6 a.m.), attached to Matins, prays at daybreak and recalls Christ led before Pilate at dawn; it asks that “the light of thy countenance” be sealed upon the new day.
  • The Third Hour (c. 9 a.m.) recalls the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which fell “at the third hour of the day” (Acts 2:15); it is the hour of the Spirit.
  • The Sixth Hour (c. noon) recalls the Crucifixion and the darkness that came “over all the land” from the sixth hour (Matthew 27:45); its Psalm 90 arms the soul against “the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”
  • The Ninth Hour (c. 3 p.m.) recalls the death of Christ, who “cried with a loud voice” and gave up his spirit “about the ninth hour” (Matthew 27:46–50); it is the hour of the Cross’s victory.

The Hours are the humblest of the services — short, read rather than sung, easily overlooked — but they carry a profound intuition: that the ordinary intervals of a working day are not neutral, that nine o’clock and noon and three o’clock are hours the Lord has already sanctified by what he did in them, and that the Christian who pauses to pray at those hours steps into the rhythm of the Passion. In the fuller life of monasteries the Hours keep the whole day marked by prayer; in parishes the Third and Sixth are read before the Liturgy and the Ninth before Vespers, joining the little hours to the great services (hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle).

The Whole Cursus: The Sanctification of Time

Set out in full, the daily cycle comprises: Vespers (sunset), Compline (after supper), the Midnight Office (midnight), Matins (dawn), and the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours through the day — eight services in all, to which is joined, on the days it is served, the Divine Liturgy, which stands outside the cycle of time because it opens onto the Kingdom (treated in The Divine Liturgy). The tradition assigns each service both an hour and a mystery:

Service Hour Mystery
Vespers Sunset Creation, the Fall, the expectation of the Messiah
Compline After supper Death, and the descent into Hades
Midnight Office Midnight Gethsemane; the Second Coming
Matins Dawn The Resurrection
First Hour c. 6 a.m. Christ before Pilate
Third Hour c. 9 a.m. The descent of the Holy Spirit
Sixth Hour c. noon The Crucifixion
Ninth Hour c. 3 p.m. The death of Christ on the Cross

(The correspondences as in the hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle, following Schmemann.)

The theological principle beneath the whole round is the sanctification of time. All time belongs to God, and the Church’s ceaseless prayer redeems it hour by hour, so that no part of the day or night is left profane. Where the ancient world measured time by the sun and the working day, the Church re-measures it by the mysteries of salvation: this hour is the hour of the Spirit, that hour the hour of the Cross, this the hour of watching for the Bridegroom. The daily office is the instrument of that re-measuring — the means by which the Christian, and above all the monastic community, offers the whole of time back to its Giver as unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17). This is the deepest answer to the question of why the Church prays so much and so regularly: not to earn anything, but because time itself is to be filled with God, and the psalms are the words with which time is offered up (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; see Reading the Whole Psalter and the Cell Rule).

See Also

References

  • Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. 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.
  • Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. Various editions.
  • The Horologion (Book of Hours). Standard English service texts.