Canonical hours
In the practice of Christianity, canonical hours mark the divisions of the day in terms of fixed times of prayer at regular intervals. A book of hours, chiefly a breviary, normally contains a version of, or selection from, such prayers.
In the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, canonical hours are also called officium, since it refers to the official prayer of the Church, which is known variously as the officium divinum, and the opus Dei. The current official version of the hours in the Roman Rite is called the Liturgy of the Hours or divine office.
In Lutheranism and Anglicanism, they are often known as the daily office or divine office, to distinguish them from the other "offices" of the Church.
In the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches, the canonical hours may be referred to as the divine services, and the book of hours is called the horologion. Despite numerous small differences in practice according to local custom, the overall order is the same among Byzantine Rite monasteries, although parish and cathedral customs vary rather more so by locale.
The usage in Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and their Eastern Catholic and Eastern Lutheran counterparts varies based on the rite, for example the East Syriac Rite or the Byzantine Rite.
Development
Judaism and the early church
The canonical hours stemmed from Jewish prayer. In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelite priests to offer sacrifices of animals in the morning and afternoon. Eventually, these sacrifices moved from the Tabernacle to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.During the Babylonian captivity, when the Temple was no longer in use, synagogues carried on the practice, and the services of Torah readings, psalms, and hymns began to evolve. This "sacrifice of praise" began to be substituted for the sacrifices of animals. After the people returned to Judea, the prayer services were incorporated into Temple worship as well.
The miraculous healing of the crippled beggar described in Acts of the Apostles 3:1, took place as Peter and John went to the Temple for the three o'clock hour of prayer. The practice of daily prayers grew from the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at set times of the day known as zmanim: for example, in the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Peter and John the Evangelist visit the Temple in Jerusalem for the afternoon prayers.
Psalm 119:164 states: "Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws". In Act 10:9, the decision to include Gentiles among the community of believers, arose from a vision Peter had while praying about noontime.
Early Christians prayed the Psalms, which have remained the principal part of the canonical hours. By AD 60, we find the Didache recommending that disciples pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day; this practice found its way into the canonical hours as well. By the second and third centuries, such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian wrote of the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, and of the prayers at the third, sixth and ninth hours.
From the time of the early Church, the practice of seven fixed prayer times, being attached to, have been taught; in Apostolic Tradition, Hippolytus instructed Christians to pray seven times a day "on rising, at the lighting of the evening lamp, at bedtime, at midnight" and "the third, sixth and ninth hours of the day, being hours associated with Christ's Passion."
In the early church, during the night before every feast, a vigil was kept. The word "Vigils", at first applied to the Night Office, comes from a Latin source, namely the Vigiliae or nocturnal watches or guards of the soldiers. The night from six o'clock in the evening to six o'clock in the morning was divided into four watches or vigils of three hours each, the first, the second, the third, and the fourth vigil. The Night Office is linked to : "At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous judgments."
Christians attended two liturgies on the Lord's Day, worshipping communally in both a morning service and evening service, with the purpose of reading the Scriptures and celebrating the Eucharist. Throughout the rest of the week, Christians assembled at the church every day for morning prayer and evening prayer, while praying at the other fixed prayer times privately. In the evening the faithful assembled in the place or church where the feast was to be celebrated and prepared themselves by prayers, readings, and sometimes also by hearing a sermon. Pliny the Younger mentions not only fixed times of prayer by believers, but also specific services—other than the Eucharist—assigned to those times: "they met on a stated day before it was light, and addressed a form of prayer to Christ, as to a divinity... after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble, to eat in common a harmless meal." This vigil was a regular institution of Christian life and was defended and highly recommended by St. Augustine and St. Jerome.
The Office of the Vigils was a single Office, recited without interruption at midnight. Probably in the fourth century, in order to break the monotony of this long night prayer the custom of dividing it into three parts or Nocturns was introduced. John Cassian in speaking of the solemn Vigils mentions three divisions of this Office.
Around the year 484, the Greek-Cappadocian monk Sabbas the Sanctified began the process of recording the liturgical practices around Jerusalem, while the cathedral and parish rites in the Patriarchate of Constantinople evolved in an entirely different manner. The two major practices were synthesized, commencing in the 8th century, to yield an office of great complexity.
In 525, Benedict of Nursia set out one of the earliest schemes for the recitation of the Psalter at the Office. The Cluniac Reforms of the 11th century renewed an emphasis on liturgy and the canonical hours in the reformed priories of the Order of Saint Benedict, with Cluny Abbey at their head.
Middle Ages
As the form of fixed-hour prayer developed in the Christian monastic communities in the East and West, the Offices grew both more elaborate and more complex, but the basic cycle of prayer still provided the structure for daily life in monasteries. By the fourth century, the elements of the canonical hours were more or less established. For secular clergy and lay people, the fixed-hour prayers were by necessity much shorter, though in many churches, the form of the fixed-hour prayers became a hybrid of secular and monastic practice.Byzantine Rite
In the Byzantine Empire, the development of the Divine Services shifted from the area around Jerusalem to Constantinople. In particular, Theodore the Studite combined a number of influences from the Byzantine court ritual with monastic practices common in Anatolia, and added thereto a number of hymns composed by himself and his brother Joseph.Western rites
In the West, the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia was modeled on his guidelines for the prayers on the customs of the basilicas of Rome. It was he who expounded the concept in Christian prayer of the inseparability of the spiritual life from the physical life. St. Benedict set down the dictum Ora et labora – "Pray and work". The Order of Saint Benedict began to call the prayers the Opus Dei or "Work of God".By the time of Saint Benedict, author of the Rule, the monastic Liturgy of the Hours was composed of seven daytime hours and one at night. He associated the practice with Psalm 118/119:164, "Seven times a day I praise you", and Psalm 118/119:62, "At midnight I rise to praise you". The fixed-hour prayers came to be known as the "Divine Office".
Initially, the term "Matins" from Latin matutinus, meaning "of or belonging to the morning", was applied to the psalms recited at dawn. At first "Lauds" derived from the three last psalms in the office, in all of which the word laudate is repeated frequently, and to such an extent that originally the word Lauds designated the end, that is to say, these three psalms with the conclusion. The Night Office and Lauds are grouped together as a single canonical hour to form a total of seven canonical hours.
By the fourth century the word "matins" became attached to the prayer originally offered at cockcrow. and, according to the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, could be calculated to be the eighth hour of the night. Outside of monasteries few rose at night to pray. The canonical hour of the vigil was said in the morning, followed immediately by lauds, and the name of "matins" replaced that of "vigils". Gradually the title "Lauds" was applied to the early morning office.
Already well-established by the 9th century in the West, these canonical hours consisted of daily prayer liturgies:
The three major hours were Matins, Lauds and Vespers; the minor hours were Terce, Sext, None and Compline.
As the Divine Office grew more important in the life of the Church, the rituals became more elaborate. Praying the Office already required various books, such as a Psalter for the psalms, a lectionary to find the assigned Scripture reading for the day, a Bible to proclaim the reading, a hymnal for singing, etc. As parishes grew in the Middle Ages away from cathedrals and basilicas, a more concise way of arranging the hours was needed. So, a sort of list developed called the breviary, which gave the format of the daily office and the texts to be used.
The spread of breviaries eventually reached Rome, where Pope Innocent III extended their use to the Roman Curia. The Franciscans sought a one-volume breviary for their friars to use during travels, so the order adopted the Breviarium Curiae, but substituting the Gallican Psalter for the Roman. The Franciscans gradually spread this breviary throughout Europe. Eventually, Pope Nicholas III adopted the widely used Franciscan breviary to be the breviary used in Rome. By the 14th century, the breviary contained the entire text of the canonical hours.
In general, when modern secular books reference canonical hours in the Middle Ages, these are the equivalent times:
- Vigil
- Matins
- Lauds
- Prime
- Terce
- Sext
- None
- Vespers
- Compline