The Office in English and a Sober Assessment

As Orthodoxy has taken root in the English-speaking world, the whole office has been translated into English, and a serious effort has been made to recover it as the living prayer of parishes and not merely the duty of clergy and choirs. This closing file surveys the Englishing of the office and the twentieth-century recovery movements, and offers a sober assessment: honest about the unresolved tension between a monastic office and a lay Church, and clear about what endures — the psalms as the Church’s prayer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Office in English

The spread of Orthodoxy through the English-speaking world has required the whole office to be rendered into English, and over the past century that great labour has largely been accomplished. Its foundation was Isabel Florence Hapgood’s Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church (first published 1906), long the standard English service book across jurisdictions. In the later twentieth century a fuller library appeared: the Psalter According to the Seventy, the Great Horologion, the Menaion, the Octoechos, and the Pentecostarion from Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston; the Horologion and A Psalter for Prayer from Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville; and, in more contemporary English, the Festal Menaion and Lenten Triodion translated by Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (1969, 1978), which remain the most widely used English versions of those books (see the collection’s README for the editions). Alongside the printed books, digital resources now generate the full daily propers in English for any date, putting the assembled office — once the preserve of those who could handle several books and the Typikon at once — within reach of any reader.

The translation of the office is not a merely technical task. It raises real questions: how to render the Septuagint psalms into an English at once faithful and prayable; whether to keep a traditional, hieratic register (as the Boston and Jordanville texts do) or a more contemporary idiom; how to fit English words to the melodic formulae of Byzantine and Slavic chant, which were shaped for Greek and Slavonic. These questions are worked out differently in different jurisdictions and communities, and the English office remains, in places, a work in progress (see The Office in English, on the parallel challenge for the hymnography). But the essential fact is settled: the office exists, entire, in English, and an English-speaking Orthodox Christian who wishes to pray Vespers, the Hours, Compline, or the Midnight Office, or to read the Psalter in the kathisma cycle, can do so from books in his own tongue.

The Recovery Movements

The availability of the office in the vernacular has coincided with a movement to recover it — to restore the daily office as the living prayer of the parish and the lay Christian, and not merely as a clerical or monastic duty performed on the people’s behalf. The great theological impetus came from the twentieth-century liturgical-theology movement, above all from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, whose Introduction to Liturgical Theology diagnosed the “monasticization” of the office and the loss of its participatory, communal dimension, and who called the Church to rediscover worship — including the daily office — as the corporate act of the whole people of God (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; For the Life of the World, 1973). In that spirit, many parishes have made deliberate efforts to serve Vespers and Matins as genuine parish services with congregational participation, to teach the faithful the Psalter and the shape of the office, and to encourage the laity in a domestic form of the daily prayer — a “little office” of morning and evening prayer built on the psalms, adapted to lay life (see Orthodoxy: The Prayer Rule).

The recovery has real limits and real successes. It cannot simply restore the lost cathedral office, which is gone; nor can it make monks of laypeople. But it has restored to many communities a genuine experience of the office as prayer rather than performance, and it has put the Psalter back into lay hands as a book to be prayed. The reader-led services — Typika, the Hours, Vespers served by laity where no priest is available — have proved especially valuable in mission and diaspora settings, and were widely rediscovered in seasons when the faithful could not gather (the reader’s service is provided for in the books precisely for such need; see The Fixed Psalmody of the Hours and Typika).

A Sober Assessment

An honest assessment of the office today must hold several things together (METHODOLOGY §4.1, without triumphalism).

First, the tension is real and unresolved. The office is monastic in its bones, and the Orthodox Church has never fully reconciled that monastic inheritance with the life of ordinary parishes and families. The neo-Sabaite synthesis gave the whole Church a magnificent office at the cost of the participatory cathedral rite, and the parish has lived ever since with a rule it cannot fully keep. This is not a problem to be solved by a rubric; it is a standing feature of Orthodox liturgical life, and pretending otherwise — whether by romanticizing an abbreviated parish Vespers as the “full” tradition or by dismissing the monastic office as impractical excess — serves no one.

Second, the office is kept whole where it is loved whole — on Athos, in the monasteries, among the Old Rite, and in the more observant parishes — and there it is manifestly alive, not an antiquarian survival but a living discipline of prayer that forms those who keep it (see Abbreviation, the Vigil, and the Old Rite). The office has not died; it has concentrated.

Third, there are the perennial dangers at both extremes: the danger of formalism, the office served or attended as a duty discharged without attention, against which the whole ascetic tradition warns (see Orthodoxy: The Prayer Rule); and the danger of loss, the office quietly abandoned until the Sunday Liturgy stands alone, cut off from the round of prayer that once surrounded it and gave it context.

And fourth, beneath all of this, what endures is the Psalter. Whether kept in the twelve-hour Athonite vigil or in a layperson’s few psalms said morning and evening, the office is at bottom the praying of the psalms, and the psalms remain what the Fathers found them to be — the prayerbook of the Church, the mirror of the soul, the prayer of Christ in his members (see The Psalms as the Prayer of Christ). The forms of the office may be served in fullness or in part, in Greek or Slavonic or English, in the monastery or the parish or the home; but wherever an Orthodox Christian opens the Psalter and prays, the daily office is, in its essence, being kept, and the Church’s ceaseless prayer goes up. That is the enduring reality this collection has traced, and the ground of a hope that is neither complacent about the office’s condition nor despairing of its future.

See Also

References

  • Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
  • Hapgood, Isabel Florence. Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. 1906; various later editions.
  • The Great Horologion; The Psalter According to the Seventy. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery.
  • The Festal Menaion (1969) and The Lenten Triodion (1978). Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber.
  • A Psalter for Prayer. Trans. David James. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2011.