![]() The organisation of which Psalms one chants for a given time of day and for a given liturgical season has a very deep meaning, about “sanctifying time,” and they are not chosen at whim either by the individual monk or the monastery. Benedict, is sung each week in its entirety. The main part, described to me by a Benedictine monk as the “meat of the sandwich,” is the content of the Book of Psalms, which, in the traditional manner of recitation laid out by the Rule of St. The Psalms themselves contain hints as to how they were used by Jews: “I will meditate on thee in the morning ” “I rose at midnight to give praise to thee ” “Evening and morning, and at noon I will speak and declare: and he shall hear my voice ” “Seven times a day I have given praise to thee.” Following the Jewish custom, the first Christians organised their lives around their daily prayer times and must have lived lives very much steeped in the knowledge of these praises, petitions and lamentations. The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that the term “Divine Office” dates at least as far back as the Council of Aix la Chapelle in AD 800, but that the daily recitation of the Psalms in an orderly way throughout the hours of the day comes to the Church from the Jews who were Christ’s first disciples. And without the Divine Office there would have been no monks. Without monks there would simply have been no European civilisation. Nearly all the institutions we take for granted law, medicine, natural sciences, agriculture, engineering, architecture, universities, hospitals, the systematic care for the poor, the sick, the elderly, education of children, even intangibles like the ordering of our societies according to a ranking from small towns to local governments, to nation states… all were built on this monastic foundation. Make no mistake, the Divine Office is at the heart of the monastic life and our civilisation was largely built by monks. Paul’s exhortation to “pray always” and it is the thing that Gregorian Chant is mostly for. In brief, it’s what monks do in response to St. The Divine Office is the other half of the Church’s public prayer life and we have been chanting some form of the Divine Office since there have been Christians. How could this apparently simple thing – the daily recitation or chanting of the Psalms at set intervals throughout the day, organised in such a way that you get through the whole book every week – have ended up creating a kind of new foundation for an entire civilisation, the one you are probably sitting in right now? But it is true the Divine Office helped the Church to “reboot” classical civilisation as a Christian society of many nations, united by one Faith and one liturgical practice. ![]() The longer answer opens a whole world of mystery. The two halves express the fullness of a kind of grand and multi-millennial, collective conversation – and means of communion – between God and His saints, taken up and continued generation after generation. It could be described as the “other half” of the Church’s universal liturgy, of which the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the first and to which it is intimately connected. The Divinum Officium, Divine Office, Opus Dei, Canonical Hours, Liturgy of the Hours… all terms more or less describing the same object, is simply the orderly, regular daily recitation of the Psalms, accompanied by hymns and selected passages of the Bible, all related to the liturgical year and interspersed with shorter intercessory prayers. There’s a short answer but it is perhaps deceptive in its simplicity.
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