A series of worship services performed in the course of each day and night in the Roman Catholic Church. After discussion of the Office’s early origins, this article describes the Divine Office as it is presented in manuscripts of the Middle Ages; for information on its structure and content after the reform of the breviary called for by the Council of Trent and completed in 1568 under Pius V, and that of Pius X (1911), see Righetti and Pascher. Vatican Council II called for a fundamental renewal of the Divine Office; the Latin text to implement this was published in 1972 under the title Liturgia horarum (see Liturgy of the Hours).
The origins of the Divine Office may be traced back to early Christian customs of praying at regular times of the day. These times included the early morning and late evening, and sometimes the third, sixth and ninth hours. Such prayer, though probably private in the earliest centuries, became public no later than the emancipation of Christianity under Constantine (313). The Divine Office already existed in a variety of forms and with differing customs by the end of the 4th century, and services may have retained a certain looseness of structure for as much as a hundred years after this.
Examination of the early history of these services enables a distinction to be made, especially with regard to the distribution of psalms throughout the liturgical day, between a ‘cathedral’ Office held in secular churches and a monastic Office celebrated by monks and nuns: the cathedral tradition prescribed particular psalms for each service, among them Psalm lxii for the morning and Psalm cxl for the evening, whereas the monastic Office required the recitation of large parts of the Psalter in numerical order. The later development of these two traditions was influenced by the rapid transplanting to urban centres of the characteristic psalmody of the desert monastic communities of Upper and Lower Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Urban monastic psalmody was increasingly organized into daily or weekly cycles, and was also adopted by the secular churches in a variety of hybrid Offices. A divided morning Office – a vigil service held shortly before cock-crow separated from a later morning service – was a characteristic of these hybrid Offices; the two services, predecessors of medieval Vigils (or Matins) and Lauds, derived, respectively, from the monastic and cathedral traditions. Prayer at the third, sixth and ninth hours, precursors of Terce, Sext and None, took an almost exclusively monastic form. The evening service, or Vespers as it came to be known, contained elements derived from both traditions.
Elements of the cathedral Office also found their way into the urban monastic Office, surviving there until well beyond the Middle Ages. An enduring characteristic of the early Eastern cathedral Office was the inclusion from an early date of certain fixed chants in the morning and evening services, for example, the canticle Benedicite and the Gloria in excelsis at Lauds. The medieval Byzantine Office preserved a particularly wide variety of such elements in its two main services, Orthros (Lauds) and Hesperinos (Vespers), until the 13th century. In Western Europe, on the other hand, monastic traditions predominated and determined much of the Office’s development until well into the Middle Ages. Many early writers on the Western Office prescribed the singing of hymns in several services. With the Rule of St Benedict (c535), composed for the monks of Monte Cassino, the Western monastic Office achieved a form that was to serve as a model for centuries afterwards. The cathedral Office always retained something of its specific identity, particularly in the form of Matins, but it also continued to absorb elements from the monastic tradition throughout the Middle Ages. The selection of Proper chants, particularly the antiphons and responsories sung with the psalms, was never as strictly established in the cathedral tradition as it was in the monastic and tended to vary, sometimes drastically, from place to place.
The Divine Office consists of eight services, each traditionally associated with a particular time of day: Matins, a long service, originally called Vigils, beginning after midnight (often about 3 a.m.); Lauds, at daybreak; Prime, at 6 a.m.; Terce, at 9 a.m.; Sext, at noon; None, at 3 p.m.; Vespers, at twilight; Compline, before retiring. Prime, Terce, Sext and None are often referred to together as the Little Hours. The services in the Divine Office are composed of psalms and canticles with antiphons, lessons followed by responsories, hymns, versicles with responses and prayers. The arrangement of these in the Office in the course of the day and year follows a fixed pattern, referred to as the cursus. There are two somewhat different cursus: the Roman cursus, followed in churches, which was not given a precise description until Amalarius of Metz (c830); and the monastic cursus, followed in monasteries, for which there is an outline in the Rule of St Benedict.
Of the material in the Divine Office, some is unchanging: for example, the canticle Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel is always chanted near the end of Lauds, and the Magnificat near the end of Vespers. Some of it changes through the course of the week according to a regular pattern: each week all of the psalms are chanted, with some assigned to each day. This arrangement is shown more or less explicitly in the liturgical psalter, breviary, antiphoner or ordinal of a particular church, monastery or religious order. The psalms in the weekly cycle are sung with antiphons; other sung texts that change from one day of the week to the next in a regular scheme include the Lauds canticles and their antiphons, the antiphons for the Benedictus at Lauds and the Magnificat at Vespers, the antiphons for the invitatory of Matins, and (in some later sources of the Roman cursus, and in the monastic cursus) the hymns for various services of the Divine Office. The whole of this may be referred to as the ‘Sunday and ferial Office’; an annual series of Matins lessons that covers the whole Bible (at least in principle) is combined with it.
From time to time a Proper Office is substituted for the Office of the feria, either of the Proper of the Time (the cycle which includes Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, with the Sundays that lead towards or away from these feasts), or of the Proper of the Saints (the latter alternative increased in importance during the Middle Ages). Although a Proper Office usually replaces the ferial Office of the day on which it falls, in early times one was sometimes added to the other: both the Ordo romanus XII (c800) and Amalarius of Metz described the performance of ferial Matins in addition to the Matins of the feast in the early hours of Christmas at Rome. Ordinarily, however, the ferial Office is replaced to some extent by material specifically selected or composed for the celebration of the feast. In consequence, parts of the book of Psalms are not chanted, and some ferial antiphons and hymns are not sung in some weeks.
The principal source of texts for the sung parts of the Divine Office is the Bible, from which the texts of antiphons and responsories are often adapted or centonized (put together by juxtaposing excerpts from scattered passages), when they are not taken verbatim. Another important source is the lives of the saints; on a particular saint’s day the texts for the antiphons and responsories for the Office are likely to come from the vita (the traditionally accepted account of the saint’s life), as are the lessons of Matins. Freely composed texts are found in hymns, in occasional antiphons and responsories, and in the relatively late category of the Versified Office.
J.-M. Hanssens, ed.: Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia (Vatican City, 1948–50)
R.-J. Hesbert, ed.: Corpus antiphonalium offici, i–iv (Rome, 1963–70)
La prière des églises de rite byzantin, iii: Dimanche: Office selon les huit tons – Oktoechos (Chevetogne, 1968)
J. Wilkinson, ed.: Egeria’s Travels (London, 1971)
La prière des églises de rite byzantin, i: La prière des heures: Horologion (Chevetogne, 1975)
M. Righetti: Manuale di storia liturgica, i (Milan, 1945, 3/1964); ii (1955, 3/1969)
J. Pascher: Das Stundengebet der römischen Kirche (Munich, 1954)
A. Hughes: Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: a Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto, 1982)
D. Hiley: Western Plainchant: a Handbook (Oxford, 1993)
In each of the encyclopedias, the article on the Divine Office provides the headings under which the individual services are discussed.
FasquelleE
MGG1 (‘Offizium’; W. Irtenkauf)
H. Leclercq: ‘Office divin’, Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. F. Cabrol and H. Leclerq (Paris, 1903–53)
F. Cabrol: ‘Office’, The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907–12)
S. da Romallo and P. Siffrin: ‘Uffizio divino’, Enciclopedia cattolica, xii (Rome, 1954)
P. Salmon: ‘Divine Office, Roman’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967)
C. Vogel: Introduction aux sources de l'histoire du culte chrétien au Moyen Age (1966/R; Eng. trans., rev. by W.G. Storey and N.K. Paucker as Medieval Liturgy: an Introduction to the Sources, Washington DC, 1986)
P. Bradshaw: Daily Prayer in the Early Church (London, 1981)
R. Taft: The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: the Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for Today (Collegeville, MN, 1986), 2/1993
T. Kohlhase and G.M. Paucker: Bibliographie Gregorianischer Choral, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, ix–x (1990), 411–484
W.J. Grisbrooke: ‘Cathedral and Monastic Offices’, The Study of Liturgy, ed. C. Jones and others (Oxford, 2/1992), 403–20
T. Kohlhase and G.M. Paucker: Bibliographie Gregorianischer Choral: Addenda I, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, xv–xvi (1993–4)
J.W. McKinnon: ‘Desert Monasticism and the Later Fourth-Century Psalmodic Movement’, ML, lxxv (1994), 505–21
See also the bibliographies in Revue bénedictine, and the journals Ephemerides liturgicae, Sacris erudiri, Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft, Etudes grégoriennes, Jb für Liturgik und Hymnologie
RUTH STEINER/KEITH FALCONER