The Evening and Night Services

The liturgical day begins at sunset, on the biblical pattern of Genesis, and so the daily cycle opens with the evening and night services: Vespers, the thanksgiving of the day’s close and the memory of creation and fall; Compline, the prayer before sleep in the face of death; and the Midnight Office, the watch kept for the Bridegroom and the Second Coming. This file walks each, its shape and its theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Day Begins at Evening

The Orthodox liturgical day does not begin at midnight or at dawn but at sunset. The pattern is biblical: in the account of creation each day is measured “and there was evening, and there was morning” (Genesis 1:5), evening first. So the Church’s day opens with Vespers on the preceding evening, and Saturday evening’s Vespers is already the beginning of Sunday (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, chs. 3–4; hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle). This is not a mere calendrical convention but a theology of time: the Christian day is born out of darkness into light, as creation was, and as the new creation dawned from the darkness of the tomb. To keep the feast one must come to its Vespers, for the celebration has already begun.

Vespers

Vespers (Greek Hesperinos, Slavonic Vechernya) is the first service of the liturgical day — the thanksgiving for the day now closing and the expectant turning toward the day to come. Its structure carries a whole reading of salvation history within the compass of an evening (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; Hapgood, Service Book):

It opens with Psalm 103 (104), the hymn of creation at nightfall, during which the priest reads the silent Lamplighting Prayers; the tradition sees in the opening of Vespers the memory of Paradise, and in the closing of the Royal Doors after the psalm the shutting of Paradise after the Fall (see Which Psalms Anchor Which Services).
The Great Litany and the appointed kathisma of the Psalter follow.
“Lord, I have cried” (Ps 140 with 141, 129, 116) is sung with the changing stichera, and the church is censed — “let my prayer be set forth as incense before thee” (Ps 140:2).
At Great Vespers (the eves of Sundays and feasts) comes the Entrance with the censer, and the singing of “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hilaron, Slavonic Svete Tikhiy) — one of the oldest hymns of the Church, already old when St. Basil quoted it in the fourth century as a text whose author was unknown (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29.73). The hymn greets Christ as the light that shines as the sun sets: “O Gladsome Light of the holy glory of the immortal Father… now that we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening, we praise God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Here the setting of the natural light becomes an epiphany of the unfading Light.
The Prokeimenon of the day, the Old Testament readings (paremiai) on feasts, the Litany of Supplication, the Aposticha, and — sealing the whole — the Song of Simeon, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace” (Luke 2:29–32), the prayer of the old man who, having seen the Light of the nations, is ready to die in peace. Vespers thus ends as the day ends, with a soul at peace before God.

The theology of Vespers is the theology of the evening: gratitude for the light that has been given, sober recollection of the fall into darkness, and the lucernarium — the kindling of the lamps — as a confession that Christ is the true Light who never sets. It is the office in which the Church takes the failing of the day up into praise (Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 1993, on the lucernarium and evening thanksgiving).

Compline

Compline (Greek Apodeipnon, Slavonic Povecheriye) is the prayer said after the evening meal, before sleep — and sleep, in the mind of the Fathers, is a nightly rehearsal of death. Its dominant themes are repentance, the forgiveness of the day’s sins, and the commending of oneself to God against the dangers of the night and the fear that one may not wake.

Small Compline, the ordinary form, gathers Psalms 50, 69, and 142, the Creed, the Canon to the Theotokos, and the prayers before sleep — including St. John of Damascus’s stark meditation, “O Master, Lover of mankind, is this bed to be my coffin, or wilt thou yet enlighten my wretched soul with another day?” and the commending “Into thy hands, O Lord Jesus Christ my God, I commend my spirit” (Horologion, Small Compline). The service teaches the Christian to lie down each night as if for the last time, forgiven and at peace.

Great Compline is the longer, penitential form of the weekday evenings of Great Lent and the eves of Nativity and Theophany. Its three parts (see The Fixed Psalmody of the Hours and Typika) build to the triumphant chant “God is with us” (from Isaiah 8–9), so that the deep penitence of Lent is set against the certainty of Emmanuel, “God with us.” On the first four nights of Lent the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete is read at Great Compline, and its theology of death-and-descent is why the service is also associated, in the tradition, with Christ’s descent into Hades (hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle).

The Midnight Office

The Midnight Office (Greek Mesonyktikon, Slavonic Polunoshchnitsa) keeps the watch of the middle of the night. Its governing image is the parable of the Ten Virgins: “At midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him” (Matthew 25:6), and with it the warning that the Son of Man comes “as a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). To rise at midnight and pray is to keep the lamp trimmed against that coming — the office is eschatological, a nightly readying for the Second Coming and the Judgment.

Its weekday psalmody is the seventeenth kathisma, Psalm 118, “Blessed are the blameless in the way” — the long night-meditation on the law of God; on Saturdays the ninth kathisma, and on Sundays a Canon to the Holy Trinity in place of the psalmody, for the Lord’s Day (see The Fixed Psalmody of the Hours and Typika). The weekday office closes with a poignant commemoration of the departed, joining the midnight watch to the prayer for the dead. In parishes the Midnight Office is rarely served, but it is kept in monasteries, and once a year it comes to the whole Church: on the night of Pascha it is served over the shroud (epitaphios) as the last office of the tomb, before the shroud is carried into the sanctuary and the paschal procession goes out into the night to sing “Thy Resurrection, O Christ our Saviour” (Pentecostarion, the Paschal service; hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle).

The Movement of the Night

Taken in order — Vespers, Compline, the Midnight Office — the evening and night services trace a single arc. Vespers gives thanks for the day and confesses Christ the unfading Light as the sun goes down; Compline forgives the day’s sins and lays the Christian down to sleep as toward death; the Midnight Office rouses him at the darkest hour to keep watch for the Bridegroom. The night is thus not surrendered to sleep and forgetfulness but claimed for prayer, and the passage through it is made a passage from the light of one day, through the little death of sleep and the vigil of expectation, toward the dawn of Matins and the Resurrection it proclaims (see Matins, the Hours, and the Liturgical Day).

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.
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 29.73 [PG 32:205]. Trans. NPNF II/8. (The Phos Hilaron cited as an ancient hymn of unknown author.)
The Horologion and The Pentecostarion. Standard English service texts.