Cathedral and Monastic Office

Modern liturgical scholarship distinguishes two ancient types of daily prayer: the cathedral office of the people’s churches — ceremonial, sung, with select psalms suited to the hour — and the monastic office of the ascetics — the continuous recitation of the whole Psalter as a discipline of unceasing prayer. The Byzantine office is a fusion of the two. This file sets out the distinction (Baumstark, Mateos, Taft), the sung office of Hagia Sophia and its survival at Thessalonica, and the ways the neat binary has since been refined.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Two Types of Daily Prayer

The single most useful tool for understanding the history of the office is the distinction, developed by the comparative liturgist Anton Baumstark and refined by Juan Mateos and Robert Taft, between the cathedral and the monastic office (Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, 2nd ed., 1993, esp. chs. 2–3, 12; Mateos, La célébration de la parole dans la liturgie byzantine, OCA 191, 1971). The two arose from different settings and served different purposes.

The cathedral office (Taft’s term for the “people’s office,” the office of the secular churches under a bishop) was the public morning and evening prayer of the local church, gathered in its cathedral or parish. Its marks: it was ceremonial and communal — sung, with clergy and ministers, light and incense, processions and litanies; it was selective in its psalmody — it used not the whole Psalter but particular psalms chosen because their words fit the hour (the morning-praise psalms 148–150 at dawn, the incense-psalm 140 with the lamp-lighting at evening); and it was built around a fixed daily core with the people as its subject. It sanctified the two hinges of the day, morning and evening, and it did so with the whole community (Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 1993, ch. 2, on the cathedral vigil and morning and evening praise; Mateos, La célébration de la parole, 1971).

The monastic office arose in the deserts of Egypt and the ascetic settlements of Syria and Palestine, and its purpose was different: not the public sanctification of the day’s hinges but the ascetic’s pursuit of unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Its marks: it was built on the continuous recitation of the whole Psalter in order (Latin lectio continua, psalmi currentes) — the monk prayed through all 150 psalms, day after day, not selecting but submitting to the whole; it was meditative and often silent or plain, with the psalms interspersed by silent prayer and prostration rather than by ceremony; and its subject was the individual monk or the small community keeping vigil. Where the cathedral office asked “what psalm fits this hour?”, the monastic office asked “how much of the Psalter shall we pray before the next?” (Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 1993, chs. 4–6, on Egyptian and Palestinian monastic prayer; on the Egyptian usage described by John Cassian, Institutes II–III).

The Byzantine Office as Fusion

The office the Orthodox Church now serves is neither purely cathedral nor purely monastic but a fusion of the two, and much of its apparent complexity is the trace of that fusion. Within a single Matins, for instance, one finds both types side by side: the continuous kathismata of the Psalter (monastic) and the selective fixed psalms — the Six Psalms, the Polyeleos, the Praises 148–150 (cathedral inheritance). The tension between “how much Psalter” and “which psalms” that runs through the whole office is exactly the seam where the two traditions were joined (Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 1993, chs. 12–15, on the Byzantine synthesis; and see The Sabaite, Studite, and Neo-Sabaite Synthesis). Understanding this is the key to reading the office historically: its elements come from two different worlds of prayer, later woven into one.

The Sung Office of the Great Church

The purest surviving witness to the cathedral office of the Byzantine world was the sung office (Greek asmatikē akolouthia, “the chanted service”) of the Great Church of Constantinople — Hagia Sophia — and of the other great secular churches. This was a fully ceremonial, antiphonal office in which the psalmody was sung responsorially by two choirs with refrains, quite different in character from the monastic recitation. Its structure and texts are preserved in the Typikon of the Great Church (the tenth–eleventh-century cathedral Typikon of Constantinople, edited by Juan Mateos, Le Typicon de la Grande Église, 2 vols., OCA 165–166, 1962–63) and were reconstructed in the twentieth century by Oliver Strunk, Juan Mateos, and Miguel Arranz (Strunk, “The Byzantine Office at Hagia Sophia,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9/10, 1956; Arranz, various studies of the asmatikos office).

This cathedral rite was gradually displaced in Constantinople itself by the monastic (Sabaite–Studite) office in the centuries after the Fourth Crusade’s sack of the city in 1204, but it did not vanish at once. It survived longest at Thessalonica, where it was still celebrated into the fifteenth century and was described in detail by St. Symeon, Archbishop of Thessalonica (died 1429), the last great witness and defender of the sung cathedral office, who lamented its passing and wrote to preserve its memory (Symeon of Thessalonica, On the Sacred Prayer / On the Divine Temple; discussed in Taft, Liturgy of the Hours, 1993, and The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, 1992). With the Ottoman conquest of Thessalonica shortly after Symeon’s death, the living cathedral office effectively came to an end, and the monastic office became universal. The Orthodox office today is therefore, in its skeleton, the monastic office — though it has absorbed and preserved many elements of the cathedral rite within itself.

Refinements and Disputes

The cathedral–monastic distinction is a powerful and widely accepted heuristic, but it is a model, and recent scholarship has qualified it in important ways.

[Disputed: how sharp and how early the cathedral–monastic distinction really was. (a) The classic model — a clear typological opposition between a selective, ceremonial "cathedral" office and a continuous, ascetic "monastic" office, with the Byzantine rite a later fusion — is the framework of Baumstark, Mateos, and Taft, and remains the standard teaching (Taft, *The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West*, 2nd ed., 1993). (b) The refining view — that the two "types" were never wholly separate, that "mixed" or "urban-monastic" offices existed early (notably in Jerusalem and Cappadocia), and that the binary risks imposing a tidy scheme on a messier reality — has been urged by later scholars including Stig Frøyshov, Gabriel Bertonière, and Stefano Parenti, who stress the hybrid character of the Palestinian and Constantinopolitan material and the role of Jerusalem's own cathedral usage in shaping the "monastic" Horologion (Frøyshov, articles on the early Horologion and the Jerusalem office; Bertonière, *The Historical Development of the Easter Vigil*, OCA 193, 1972). The distinction remains indispensable as an analytic tool; the debate is over how far it corresponds to two historically separate institutions rather than two poles of a single, always-interacting tradition.]

A related and still-open question concerns the very origins of the “monastic” Horologion: whether its select fixed psalmody derives purely from monastic practice or preserves, in fact, elements of the cathedral office of Jerusalem — a possibility that would further blur the binary and that the Georgian and early Palestinian witnesses have been used to argue (Frøyshov, on the Jerusalem roots of the Horologion; see The Sabaite, Studite, and Neo-Sabaite Synthesis). What is not in dispute is the broad shape of the outcome: that the office now served across the Orthodox world descends, in its framework, from the monastic tradition of the Christian East, and that it carries within it, fused and half-hidden, the inheritance of the great cathedral rite that it displaced.

See Also

References

  • Taft, Robert F. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. 2nd rev. ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993.
  • Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
  • Mateos, Juan. La célébration de la parole dans la liturgie byzantine. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 191. Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 1971.
  • Mateos, Juan, ed. Le Typicon de la Grande Église. 2 vols. OCA 165–166. Rome, 1962–63.
  • Strunk, Oliver. “The Byzantine Office at Hagia Sophia.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9/10 (1956): 175–202.
  • Bertonière, Gabriel. The Historical Development of the Easter Vigil and Related Services in the Greek Church. OCA 193. Rome, 1972.
  • Frøyshov, Stig Symeon R. Studies on the early Byzantine Horologion and the Jerusalem office (various articles, incl. in Studia Liturgica and Oriens Christianus).
  • John Cassian. Institutes II–III (on the Egyptian office). Trans. Boniface Ramsey, ACW 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.