On Cathedral and Monastic Offices
And the dangers of antiquity as an authorizing past for liturgical reform
Edit: I am very embarrassed! In my hurriedness to get this out, I confused Toni’s last name with his Twitter handle! He is, of course, the Rev’d Toni Alvarez! I am so, so sorry, Toni!!!
This is a first for my Substack: a piece done by request! A friend of mine, the Rev’d Toni Decali, asked me if I was going to write about the common scholarly move to distinguish between ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ types of early Christian daily liturgical prayer for the Substack and mentioned that he (very kindly!) would be interested in hearing my reflections on the topic. It is, indeed, a topic of interest to me, and so I very happily took on the project. What follows is a summary of the cathedral vs monastic office analysis and the way that this analysis then motivates a proposal for reforming contemporary daily office practices. I then ask what we should make of this analysis and its use as an authorizing past for contemporary liturgical reform. I’ll argue that this analysis is genuinely illuminating so long as we remember that it is a scholarly artifact rather than a typology which would have been used by early Christians. However, its use to support reform proposals is, I think, often unhelpful – and unhelpful in a way that sheds light on some common misuses of antiquity in proposals about the liturgy. To simply assume the authority of antiquity for contemporary liturgy has three problems that I sketch out: it requires a degree of confidence in the uniformity and knowability of earliest Christian worship that we ought not have, it short-circuits conversations about ascetics and theology that are vital when the churches uses its freedom to shape its forms of worship, and it plays into a common tendency to assume that getting the liturgy right will fix what ails the contemporary church.
It is a commonplace in the study of Christian daily liturgical prayer, since the pivotal work of Anton Baumstark in the 1950s, to describe two primary forms or styles of daily prayer over the course of Christian history: the “cathedral” and the “monastic” office. As typically understood, the “cathedral” office was a form of daily prayer gathering together laypeople, priests, and deacons under the presidency of the bishop. These offices typically included short, fixed psalm and perhaps Scripture readings appropriate to the time of day along with extensive intercessions, and were associated with ceremonial (such as the evening lamp-lighting). A good example of this sort of worship is, say, the daily services in Jerusalem and Antioch in the fourth century. The “monastic” office, then, was associated with – as the name suggests – monastic communities, and was a form of prayer adapted to the needs and lifestyle of monks, using not fixed psalm and Bible passages but eventually incorporating the praying of the entire Psalter and the reading of (in principle) the whole Bible, or at least the most important parts of it, in a proliferation of prayer offices throughout the day and night. Here we might think of the Rule of St Benedict.
Often the history of Christian daily prayer is then cast as a sort of declension narrative, in which the pristine cathedral offices of the fourth century patriarchal sees were gradually contaminated with elements proper to the monastic office to their detriment. Offices became longer and more complicated, focused less on praise of God and intercession for the world and more on individual edification through the prayerful reading of psalms and Scripture. And over the course of this process, laypeople came to be crowded out of Christian daily prayer, which in its length and complexity came to be the preserve essentially of a (monasticized) priesthood. We might see this development reach its zenith (or, better, nadir?) in the development of the breviary for use by individual priests. No longer is daily prayer the practice of the entire Christian community, gathering together under their ministers to give thanks to God and pray for the world in the morning and the evening in splendid liturgical ceremonies. Daily prayer is now the sort of thing that priests can do just as well by themselves, sitting at a table and praying out of the breviary. The monastic office has been ripped out of its appropriate context and made normative for Christian daily prayer as such, destroying the form of Christian prayer appropriate to the entire Christian community, the cathedral office.
This history, then, is often taken among Anglicans (and others) to have a normative thrust for contemporary liturgical revision in a very particular way: the task of the revision of the daily office is to restore the ‘cathedral office’, whether as a replacement of or alongside a more traditional Anglican morning and evening prayer service which is seen to be roughly monastic in form. We see this especially in the liturgical revisions done at the height of the Liturgical Movement’s influence. The lamplighting service that both the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church and the 1985 Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada introduced is a perfect example of an attempted restored ‘cathedral’ office. The introductory essay at the beginning of the daily office in the BAS is an elaboration of the scholarly account of the history of daily prayer I sketched out above, and suggests that an important part of the future of the daily office is the incorporation of ‘cathedral forms.’ Similar arguments are made in more scholarly veins, as in Professor Paul Bradshaw’s 1991 essay in The Identity of Anglican Worship.
What then should we make of this account of the history of Christian daily prayer, and the use of this account as the authorizing past for the advocacy for a particular shape for daily liturgical prayer today? I do not wish to suggest that the ‘monastic’ vs ‘cathedral’ typology has no value, nor that the ‘monasticization’ narrative is wholly unhelpful in making sense of the history of Christian worship. But, following Dean Andrew McGowan, my old seminary dean at Berkeley at Yale, I think it is worth remembering first of all that this typology is one of ideal types imposed by twentieth century scholars. That is, while doubtless 4th or Christians would have noticed differences in forms of daily prayer between, say, the cathedral in Antioch and Pachomius’ monastery in Egypt, they did not understand them as reflecting two different, discrete types of daily worship. Indeed, it seems probable that a ‘pure’ monastic or cathedral office never existed in actual Christian practice; actually-existing Christian daily worship pretty invariably combines elements that we might associate both ‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ offices as pure types. This does not mean that to analyze Christian daily worship in such categories is necessarily illegitimate! Responsibly done, it can indeed illuminate features of Christian liturgical practice, but – rather like with the Dixian fourfold shape of the Eucharist – the scholar must always remember that when engaging in such analysis she is imposing scholarly schema rather than operating with the categories of her subjects.
In part because there is no pristine, perfect ‘cathedral’ office to be recovered, it is also worth querying whether this history means that the ‘monasticization’ of the office must be entirely rejected. That is, should we simply assume that Christian antiquity is our best source for contemporary Christian daily prayer? It seems to me rather that we should not, and that the story of the reform of daily prayer, both in the 16th century and during the Liturgical Movement, shows some of the dangers of precisely this assumption.
One danger, of course, in attempting to base contemporary Christian worship on patristic models is that scholarship on early Christian worship changes! And neither the scholarly reconstructions used to reform daily prayer in the 16th nor the 20th centuries have aged particularly well. Thomas Cranmer, when reforming Christian daily prayer in the sixteenth century, argued that he was returning to the earliest Christian practice in making the daily Christian prayer of the entire community focused on the monthly recitation of the psalter and the weekly recitation of the Scriptures. But scholars now know that this was not, in fact, normative across early Christian communities! Similarly, the inclusion of the lamplighting ceremony as a ‘cathedral-style’ office in both the BAS and the 1979 BCP depended in large part upon the then-contemporary scholarly view that a document called the Apostolic Tradition (which includes such a ceremony) was the work of Hippolytus in the early 3rd century describing Christian worship in Rome in the late 2nd century. But contemporary scholarship has - to my mind, at least - rather decisively challenged the ascription of this text (in the form we have it, anyway) to Hippolytus. More broadly, scholarship on early Christian worship has increasingly emphasized the diversity of early Christian worship. To appeal to a unform patristic standard to reform contemporary Christian worship – as both Cranmer and the Liturgical Movement doyens did – is not seen as particularly responsible, at least at the moment.
Furthermore, this assumption of antiquity’s authority risks avoiding the conversations about theology and ascetics that need to undergird Christian worship. While indeed we owe fidelity to the Christian worship tradition, Anglicans have always held that individual churches have broad freedom to shape the worshipping life of their own churches in order to edify their members and form them in proper doctrine. It is thus not obviously the case that we need to return to 4th century cathedral services to have a form of daily prayer appropriate to all Christians, and embrace a model of prayer and praise over a model of daily prayer focusing on psalmody and Scripture. Simply because it is old does not mean it is authoritative. Now, we may indeed want to do so. I, after all, think there are good reasons to retain the use of 17th c. worship forms; I can hardly say that making the same move for a particular 4th c. liturgy is prima facie inappropriate. But such a case needs to be made on ascetical and theological grounds: why would the use of this particular form now best edify God’s people? And – to put my own cards on the table – I am not so sure that moving away from a form of daily prayer that emphasizes making one’s way through the Scriptures is a prudential move, given the lack of Biblical literacy among many Anglican laypeople and priests alike.
Finally, another danger in assuming the authority of antiquity in Christian liturgy, around the daily office or other areas of Christian practice, is that it can feed into a tendency common among Anglicans to assume that what we need to do to fix Christian practice is to get the liturgy right. That is, one might say that the problem over the history of the daily office is that the importation of complicated and lengthy monastic forms into the cathedral office rendered it increasingly inaccessible to laypeople. So, today if we want Christian daily common liturgical prayer to be practiced, we can accomplish this by returning to a cathedral model. Now, I am certainly not going to say that liturgical forms do not matter! And for that matter, it may well be true that models of daily liturgical prayer that emphasize intercession and praise and deemphasize Scripture may be more approachable for everyday Christians. But (as, to be clear, the more thoughtful advocates of the ‘cathedral’ model fully understand!) adopting a new liturgy will simply not, by itself, do much of anything. The lamplighting services, after all, have scarcely become weekly fare in Anglican churches – ironically, about the only place I know that practices it regularly is, in fact, a monastery, the Society of St John the Evangelist. Liturgical revision may be necessary, but there is no shortcut to the long work of discipling, forming, and teaching Christians.
Where does this all leave us? The great scholars of the liturgical movement who developed the categories of ‘monastic’ and ‘cathedral’ offices have done us a great service, and provided us with analytical tools that are very helpful when we seek to understand the Christian past. But when we absolutize their categories and use them to fund a particular scheme of liturgical reform, we run into trouble. As my old liturgy professor, Bryan Spinks, likes to say about the Eucharist, why should it be the case that the 4th century, and not the 10th or the 16th or any other century, is the norm for Christian liturgy? The story of the use of these categories to reform liturgy in the twentieth century can in fact help us understand some of the potential pitfalls in simply assuming the authority of antiquity for contemporary Christian liturgical practice.