Abbreviation, the Vigil, and the Old Rite

The office the books prescribe is a monastic rule, and parishes have always served it in abbreviated form — not from decadence but from the mismatch between a monastic office and parish life, a tension centuries old. On Mount Athos the office is still kept in its fullness, above all in the all-night vigils (agrypnia) that run from dusk to dawn. And the Old Rite communities preserve the fuller, pre-abbreviation usage. This file surveys the spectrum of contemporary practice, from the shortest parish Vespers to the unabridged Athonite vigil.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (with notes on Athonite and Old Rite practice)

The History of Abbreviation

The full daily office is monastic. When, in the neo-Sabaite synthesis, the monastic office became the universal usage of the Orthodox Church and the old cathedral office of the cities was lost (see The Sabaite, Studite, and Neo-Sabaite Synthesis), the parishes inherited a rule designed for monasteries — for communities of celibates keeping vigil through the night, with the leisure and the numbers to sing the whole. Ordinary parishes could not serve it entire, and so, from the beginning, they abbreviated it. The abbreviation of the parish office is therefore not a modern decline from a golden age of full observance; it is a centuries-old and structural feature of Orthodox life, the necessary consequence of a monastic office serving a non-monastic people (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966, on the monasticization of the office and its consequences for parish worship).

In practice, abbreviation takes standard forms. The kathismata of the Psalter — the continuous psalmody that is the office’s bulk — are the first to be reduced or omitted in parishes; the canons of Matins are shortened, many of their troparia dropped; and the whole daily cycle is consolidated, the eight services collapsed into two gatherings, an evening service and the morning Liturgy (see Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle). The Russian All-Night Vigil (Vsenoshchnoye Bdeniye) is itself, in parish use, a great abbreviation: what in the monastery genuinely lasted the night is compressed, in the parish, into an evening service of an hour and a half to three hours, combining Great Vespers, Matins, and the First Hour (hub, Orthodoxy: The Daily Cycle). On ordinary weekdays many parishes serve nothing at all, the daily office having in effect become a Sunday-and-feast phenomenon for most of the laity. The scale of abbreviation varies enormously by jurisdiction, parish, and custom, from parishes that serve a nearly full vigil to those that offer only a short Vespers.

The Vigil on Mount Athos

Where the office is still kept in something like its fullness is the monastery, and nowhere more completely than on Mount Athos. The Athonite houses preserve the full daily cycle, and at the many feasts of the year they keep the all-night vigil (Greek agrypnia, “sleeplessness”) in its literal sense: a service that begins in the evening and continues, with the appointed pauses, until the dawn — commonly running eight to twelve hours or more, and joined at its end to the Divine Liturgy (see Mount Athos; the agrypnia is described in the accounts of Athonite liturgical life). In the Athonite vigil the elements that parishes drop are kept: the full kathismata of the Psalter, the complete canons, the unhurried psalmody and the long stretches of chant, the reading of the synaxarion and patristic homilies in their places. The monks reckon the hours by the old Byzantine clock (the day beginning at sunset) and structure their whole life around the office, so that the vigil is not an exceptional exertion but the native rhythm of the mountain. Athos thus preserves, as a living reality, the office that the books describe and that the rest of the Orthodox world serves only in part — a standing witness to what the abbreviated parish service is an abbreviation of.

Other monasteries across the Orthodox world keep the office more or less fully according to their strength, and pilgrims to them encounter the daily cycle at a length and completeness rarely met in parishes. The monastery remains the place where the office is at home.

The Old Rite

A further preservation of the fuller office is found among the Old Rite communities — the Old Believers (staroobryadtsy) who separated from the Russian Church in the schism that followed the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century, and the Edinovertsy (“same-faith” Old Ritualists) who keep the old rite in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR (the history of the schism belongs to the study of the Russian Church; here the point is liturgical, noted factually). The Old Rite communities retain the pre-Nikonian recension of the service books and, with it, a fuller and less abbreviated practice of the office: the complete kathismata, the older redactions of the texts, the znamenny chant sung without the later polyphony, and a general resistance to the shortenings that entered mainstream practice. Their services are correspondingly longer, and their observance of the full daily cycle more tenacious. Whatever one’s judgment of the seventeenth-century controversy — a genuine and painful dispute within the Russian Church, not adjudicated here (METHODOLOGY §4.2) — the Old Rite communities are, as a matter of fact, an important surviving witness to the office in a fuller form than the reformed parish practice, and their preservation of the old psalmody and chant is valued even by those outside their communion.

The Spectrum of Practice

Taken together, the contemporary practice of the office runs along a wide spectrum. At one end stands the Athonite and monastic vigil, the office entire; near it the Old Rite fullness and the fuller monasteries; then the more complete parishes, ROCOR and others, that serve a substantial Saturday vigil and a weekday cycle; then the ordinary parish, serving an abbreviated vigil on Saturdays and feast-eves and the Liturgy on Sundays; and at the far end the parish that serves little beyond the Sunday Liturgy. Most Orthodox laypeople live somewhere in the middle of this range, encountering the office chiefly in the vigil before the Sunday Liturgy and in the great services of Holy Week and the feasts. This is the honest picture: the office is universally owned by the Orthodox Church as her prayer, and unevenly served across her life — kept whole by the few, abbreviated by the many, and, for a portion of the faithful, barely met at all. The recovery of the office as living parish prayer is precisely the concern of the movements treated in the next file (see The Office in English and a Sober Assessment).

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.
The Horologion and the standard accounts of Athonite liturgical practice (the agrypnia).
Getcha, Job. The Typikon Decoded. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012.
On the Old Rite: the standard histories of the seventeenth-century Russian liturgical reforms and the Old Believer communities.