The Octoechos, Triodion, Menaion, and the Typikon

Onto the fixed skeleton of the Horologion and Psalter the office grafts changeable propers drawn from four books: the Octoechos (the eight-week cycle of tones), the Triodion and Pentecostarion (the movable seasons around Pascha), and the Menaion (the fixed calendar of saints and feasts). The Typikon is the rulebook that governs how these interlock and how they are combined when they coincide. This file treats the mechanics of the interlock and the authority of the Typikon, deferring the hymnographic content to its own collection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Three Cycles of Propers

The changeable texts of the office move on three overlapping cycles, and the propers books are organized to serve them:

The weekly cycle of the eight tones — served by the Octoechos.
The fixed (immovable) calendar of the year — served by the Menaion.
The movable cycle around Pascha — served by the Triodion and the Pentecostarion.

On any given day, one text-slot in the office may need to be filled from two or three of these at once — the tone of the week, the saint of the date, and (in season) the movable day — and it is the Typikon’s task to say how. The books themselves supply the raw material; the Typikon assembles it (Getcha, The Typikon Decoded, SVS Press, 2012; Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, 1992). The content of the hymns in these books — the poetry of the canons, kontakia, and stichera, and its authors — is treated in the hymnography collection; here the concern is the mechanics of how the books interlock (see The Akathist & Orthodox Hymnography).

The Octoechos

The Octoechos (Greek Oktōēchos, “eight tones”; Slavonic Osmoglasnik, and in its fuller form the Paraklitiki) provides the propers for the weekly cycle in each of the eight musical tones (ēchoi). The Church’s ordinary time runs in an eight-week rotation: each week is sung in one tone, and after the eighth the cycle begins again. Within each tone the Octoechos supplies proper texts for every day of the week, and the days carry fixed thematic dedications: Sunday is the Resurrection; Monday, the Bodiless Powers (the angels); Tuesday, St. John the Forerunner; Wednesday and Friday, the Cross (and the Theotokos); Thursday, the Holy Apostles and St. Nicholas; Saturday, all the saints and the faithful departed (the Octoechos, as printed; and see the weekly dedications summarized in Getcha, The Typikon Decoded, 2012). The resurrectional material of the Octoechos — supremely the Sunday texts — is the richest, and the eight resurrectional “Dogmatic Theotokia” and the eleven Sunday Matins Gospels rotate through its cycle (see The Bodiless Powers, for the Monday angelic commemoration). The Octoechos is traditionally associated with St. John of Damascus, though the attribution and the book’s layered growth are questions treated in the hymnography collection.

The Triodion and the Pentecostarion

Two books serve the great movable arc around Pascha, and while they are in force they largely override the Octoechos.

The Triodion (Greek Triōdion, “three odes,” from the abbreviated three-ode canons characteristic of its weekdays; the Lenten Triodion in English) covers the pre-Lenten and Lenten season — from the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee, through the weeks of preparation and the forty days of Great Lent, to Holy Saturday. It carries the penitential hymnography of the fast, the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, and the proper texts of Holy Week (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1978).

The Pentecostarion (Greek Pentēkostarion; the Flowery Triodion in Slavonic use) covers the fifty days from Pascha to the Sunday of All Saints — the paschal season, Bright Week, the Sundays of the Myrrh-bearers, the Paralytic, the Samaritan Woman, and the Blind Man, the Ascension, and Pentecost. It carries the paschal Canon of St. John of Damascus and the joyful hymnography of the Resurrection (the Pentecostarion, standard English texts).

Together the Triodion and Pentecostarion govern roughly the third of the year that pivots on Pascha, and because Pascha is movable, the days they govern shift each year relative to the fixed calendar — which is precisely why their interaction with the Menaion requires the Typikon’s rules.

The Menaion

The Menaion (Greek Mēnaion, from mēn, “month”; Slavonic Mineya) serves the fixed calendar. It is published in twelve monthly volumes, one for each month of the year, and it supplies the proper texts — stichera, canons, troparia, kontakia — for the saint or feast of each calendar date, September 1 through August 31 (the Byzantine liturgical year beginning in September). Alongside the twelve monthly volumes stand two practical reductions: the Festal Menaion, gathering the propers of the great feasts (trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, 1969), and the General Menaion, which supplies “common” services by category of saint (a martyr, a hierarch, a monastic, and so on) for use when a saint’s own proper texts are not available. The Menaion is the largest of the office books precisely because it must cover every day of the fixed year with its own commemorations (see The Holy Prophets and Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar, for the calendar the Menaion serves).

The Typikon and Its Authority

The book that governs the whole is the Typikon (Greek Typikon; Slavonic Ustav) — not a book of texts but the book of rubrics, the ordering that tells the officiant how, on any given day, to combine the fixed skeleton with the propers of the three cycles. Its most intricate provisions, the “Mark’s chapters” (Markov glavy), resolve the collisions that arise when a fixed feast of the Menaion falls on a movable day of the Triodion or Pentecostarion — for example, when the Annunciation (March 25, fixed) coincides with Great Friday or Pascha (see The Sabaite, Studite, and Neo-Sabaite Synthesis). The received Typikon of the Orthodox Church is the neo-Sabaite (Jerusalem) Typikon in its printed recensions.

The Typikon’s authority is real but must be rightly understood. It is a regulating and canonical book, not a dogmatic definition: it prescribes the good order of the services and carries the weight of the Church’s received tradition and, in many jurisdictions, of synodal approval, but it is a discipline of worship rather than an article of faith, and it has always admitted of adaptation. This is why more than one Typikon is in force in the Orthodox world without any breach of unity: the fuller monastic (Sabaite) Typikon is followed in monasteries and by those who serve the office in full, while the modern Greek parishes follow the Typikon of the Great Church of Christ compiled by George Violakis (1888), an adaptation of the same tradition to cathedral and parish conditions, and the Russian Church follows its own printed Ustav of the same neo-Sabaite descent (Getcha, The Typikon Decoded, 2012; Taft, The Byzantine Rite, 1992). The differences among them are matters of good order — how much may be abbreviated, how feasts of different ranks are kept — not of doctrine. The plurality is not a sign of disorder but of the Typikon’s own character as a servant of the office: the rule exists for the prayer, not the prayer for the rule (see The Office in English and a Sober Assessment).

The Whole Library

Assembled, the office library is: the Horologion and Psalter (the fixed skeleton), the Octoechos (the weekly tones), the Triodion and Pentecostarion (the movable paschal seasons), the Menaion (the fixed calendar), and the Typikon (the rules that bind them). To serve a full Vespers or Matins is to hold several of these open at once and to weave from them, under the Typikon’s direction, the single service appointed for that day — an act of liturgical craft that is itself a form of tradition, handed down and learned by doing.

References

Getcha, Job. The Typikon Decoded: An Explanation of Byzantine Liturgical Practice. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012.
Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.
The Pentecostarion. Standard English service texts (Holy Transfiguration Monastery and others).
Violakis, George. Typikon of the Great Church of Christ. Constantinople, 1888.