The Canticle of the Dawn

The Benedictus is the Gospel canticle of the morning. In the Western Divine Office it crowns Lauds, the office of daybreak, every day of the year, standing to the morning as the Magnificat stands to the evening and the Nunc Dimittis to the night, and the assignment is no accident, for the canticle's closing image of the dawn from on high visiting those in darkness makes it the natural song of first light. It is sung with ceremony, the congregation standing and signing themselves as at the Gospel, and it carries a proper antiphon that changes with the feast, so that the fixed text is continually reframed by the calendar around it.

The Book of Common Prayer appointed it for Morning Prayer after the second lesson, giving the canticle a continuous English choral tradition alongside its Latin one. The office of Lauds for the dead gave the Benedictus a place in Christian burial, and its verses about being freed from the hand of enemies to serve God without fear have sounded over graves for centuries. Behind its liturgical career stands its theological one, for the canticle is a bridge text, a Jewish psalm of covenant and redemption standing at the threshold of the Christian story, sung by a priest of the old Temple about the forerunner of the new, which is why the church has never begun a morning without it.