Liturgy of the Hours

The Divine Office rests on a conviction older than Christianity: that prayer belongs to fixed hours, not only to spontaneous need. The psalmist's seven times a day I praise you, the temple's morning and evening sacrifices, and the Jewish hours of prayer that the apostles are shown keeping in Acts, at the third, sixth and ninth hours, all flow into the Christian practice. By the fourth century two streams were visible and historians of the liturgy still describe the office as their confluence. The cathedral office was the public morning and evening prayer of city churches, popular, ceremonial and selective in its psalmody, with lamps, incense and fixed psalms of praise.

The monastic office, born in the Egyptian desert, aimed instead at continuous prayer, reciting the whole psalter in course, and its ideal of completeness gradually absorbed the cathedral's simpler round. The Western synthesis was fixed by the Rule of St Benedict in the sixth century, which distributed the hundred fifty psalms across a week of eight daily hours and legislated the office's shape so durably that the phrase the work of God, opus Dei, meant this and nothing else in a Benedictine house. Around the psalms stand the other constants: the Gospel canticles, Benedictus at dawn, Magnificat at evening, Nunc Dimittis at night, scripture read in course, hymns proper to each hour, and intercession, the whole forming a liturgy that consecrates no single event but the day itself.

The office's history after Benedict is a history of compression and recovery. The medieval hours grew so elaborate that the travelling clergy of the new mendicant orders needed the whole apparatus in one portable book, the breviary, and with portability came privatisation: an office designed as the church's common prayer became, for most clergy, a daily obligation discharged alone. Trent standardised the Roman Breviary in 1568; Pius X redistributed the psalter in 1911; and the Second Vatican Council ordered the deepest reform since antiquity.

The Liturgy of the Hours promulgated in 1971 renamed and restructured the cycle: Lauds and Vespers were declared the two hinges of the day, Matins became an Office of Readings usable at any hour, Prime was suppressed outright, the psalter was spread over four weeks instead of one, and the vernacular was admitted, changes aimed at returning the office to parishes and laity rather than leaving it a clerical burden. The other traditions ran parallel courses.

The Byzantine East never broke its cycle, keeping vespers, compline, the midnight office, orthros and the four little hours in the Horologion. The Book of Common Prayer distilled the old offices into Morning and Evening Prayer, and choral Evensong remains Anglicanism's most distinctive liturgical gift. The modern revival of daily prayer apps and printed lay editions means the office is now prayed by more people than at any time since the age in which it was built.