The Divine Office & Ceaseless Prayer

Note's on Robert Taft's The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West

Christian prayer arises out of a ceaseless thanksgiving that fills our lives both as individual believers and members of the Body of Christ (cf. The Liturgy of the Hours East and West, cf. 11, 29, 332). Thus our liturgical tradition supplies fixed hours of prayer wherein that thanksgiving is celebrated. Contrary to popular opinion, the Liturgy of the Hours is not exclusively monastic in origin, nor does it pertain primarily to clergy, but is the prayer of the whole People of God celebrated in both the monasteries as well as the cathedral churches (the centers of diocesan liturgy) by the bishop, his clergy, and the people (cf. Taft 55). The Office as we have it today is a composite distilled from both the monastic and cathedral usages (90, 54, 276-277).

The “day hours recall the passion…the third hour is also a memorial of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Night prayer is eschatological, like the watch of the virgins for the coming of the bridegroom, and the unceasing praise of angels that will one day be ours too” (28-29). But the principle hours are those of morning and evening prayer—Orthros and Vespers—which “at the setting and rising of the sun, the Church is reminded of Jesus’ Passover from death to life” (ibid.). This theme of the principle hours has a particularly rich expression in the symbolic use of light, incense, and processions that accompany the chanted Psalms, antiphons, and hymns (cf. 32).

Indeed, the high point of the Vespers (Ἑσπέρα, meaning ‘evening’) service is the Entrance (if at Great or Festal Vespers) and the hymn the Phos Hilarion (Φῶς Ἱλαρόν)—O Joyful Light which celebrates Christ as the Light of the World (28; also John 8:12, 1: 9; Luke 2:32) This hymn predates Christianity and stems from the salutation of the lighting of the evening lamp practiced in the ancient Greco-Roman world in thankfulness for this light as the world transitioned into darkness (cf. Taft 14, 36-37). This idea seems to have been Christianized very early resulting in Lamp-lighting Psalms (Pss. 140, 141, 129, and 116 intercalated with strophes) which culminate with the Phos Hilarion. In this celebration, the Church, “for over sixteen centuries, day after day, without variation or change, has proclaimed that the light of the world is not the sun of creation by day, nor the evening lamp by night, but the eternal Son of God, “the true light that enlightens everyone,” in the world of the prologue of St. John’s Gospel (1:9)” (Taft 286).

Likewise, Orthros (Ὄρθρος, meaning ‘daybreak’) is also infused with the theme of light, not so much in Christ as the light in creation, but Christ in the Light of the Resurrection. This is particularly true of Sunday Orthros wherein a portion of the service is derived from the ancient vigil at the Tomb of Christ in the Church of the Anastasis (Resurrection) in Jerusalem. As adapted into Byzantine Orthros, Ps. 118 (LXX) with the refrain “Blessed are You…” (v. 12; Gre. Ευλογητάρια—Evlogitaria) is intercalated with troparia describing the visit of the Myrrh-Bearing women: hence the Evlogitaria of the Resurrection.

Also, there is a solemn reading from a cycle of Resurrection Gospels each with its own graduals and prokeimena. Significantly, this reading is done from within the Holy Place not at the solea (except on feast days) which is reminiscent of the reading of a Resurrection Gospel from within the tomb of Christ at the Anastasis Vigil. After the reading, the paschal ode Anastasin Christou (Ἀνάστασιν Χριστου) is chanted. “The basic symbol of both services was light. The rising sun and the new day with its change from darkness to light recalled the resurrection from the dead of Christ, the Sun of Justice. The evening lamp recalled the Johannine ‘light of the world’ shining amidst the darkness of sin” (Taft 56). Thus ultimately, it is the Paschal Mystery that provides the interpretive key to the Hours; that is, the ordinary course of the day lived in the mystery of Salvation (cf. 334-335), for “liturgy is Christian life” (336)—life in Christ and the lived experience of the Church (cf. 284).   

“This is liturgy at its most basic,” says Taft, “taking the ordinary but universal fears and needs of the human life and turning them into theophany, signs of God. The fear of darkness is a basic fear; the light that dispels it is a need felt by all. ‘God is light,’ says the first letter of John (1:5), and this light shines in our world through the transfigured face of Jesus Christ” (287). This is a reality that we do not simply believe or hold as a pious truism, but a truth we shout, chant, and hymn as it is “woven into a scenario of poetry and procession, movement and rest, darkness and light, smoke and symbol and song” (290) that “marks the rhythm of the hours in the Byzantine Office, evoking in the faithful a nostalgia for the divine vision which they are allowed to glimpse symbolically here in earth” (288). For, “in the East, liturgy is not just a service. It is also the place of theophany” (285).

Work Cited

Taft S.J., Robert. The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993.