I am a layman and have enjoyed praying some of the hours of the Divine Office. I was wondering when the church began to live this beautiful form of prayer. Can you help me?
In the early church, Christians, many of whom had been Jews, continued the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at certain hours of the day.
In the Psalms we find expressions like “in the morning I offer you my prayer”, “Evening, morning and at noon I will cry and lament”; “Seven times a day I praise you”.
The apostles themselves observed the Jewish custom of praying at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, and at midnight (cf. Acts 10:3, 9; 16:25; etc.). Hence the practice of seven fixed times for prayer was lived from the earliest times of the church.
We see this also in the third-century Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus, which instructed Christians to pray seven times a day: “on rising, at the lighting of the evening lamp, at bedtime, at midnight” and at “the third, sixth and ninth hours of the day, being hours associated with Christ’s Passion.”
This prayer in the early church consisted of basically the same elements as the Jewish prayers: the recital or chanting of psalms and the reading of the Old Testament, to which were soon added readings of the Gospels, Acts, epistles, and canticles.
Around the end of the first century, the Didache recommended saying the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, a practice which was later incorporated into the canonical hours of the Divine Office.
By the second and third centuries, St Clement of Alexandria and Origen wrote of the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, and of the prayers at terce (9am), sext (noon), and none (3pm).
The prayers could be prayed individually or in groups. In the third century, the Desert Fathers began to live out St Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) by praying at these fixed times.
In the fourth century, the characteristics of the canonical hours took more or less their present form. In addition to the monks in monasteries, secular clergy and lay people also prayed at fixed hours, but their prayers were generally much shorter.
In the East, the development of the Divine Services took place first around Jerusalem and later Constantinople.
In particular, Theodore the Studite (ca 758 – ca 826 AD) combined a number of influences from the Byzantine court ritual with monastic practices common in Asia Minor, and he added a number of hymns composed by himself and his brother Joseph.
In the West, the Rule of St Benedict modelled its guidelines for the Divine Office on the practice of the basilicas in Rome.
As the rituals became more elaborate, praying the Divine Office began to require several different books, including a psalter for the psalms, a Bible for the Scripture readings and a hymnal for singing.
To solve this problem a book was developed called the Breviary, which gave the format of the daily office and the texts to be used.
The spread of the Breviary eventually reached Rome, where Pope Innocent III extended its use to the Roman Curia. The Franciscans sought a one-volume Breviary for their friars to use during their travels, so they adopted the Breviarium Curiae, which gradually spread throughout Europe.
Pope Nicholas III (1277-1280) adopted this Breviary for use in Rome. By the 14th century, the Breviary contained the entire text of the canonical hours.
The Council of Trent, in its final session in 1563, entrusted the reform of the Breviary to the Pope, and so in 1568 Pope Pius V promulgated the revised Roman Breviary with his Apostolic Constitution Quod a nobis, ordering the abolition of all other Breviaries except those in use for at least 200 years. Among the Breviaries excepted were those of the Benedictines, Carmelites, Carthusians and Dominicans.
Following the Second Vatican Council, another revised version was introduced with the title Liturgy of the Hours.
The hour of Prime was abolished, Matins was changed to the Office of Readings to be used at any time of day, the psalms were distributed over a period of four weeks instead of one, and the Latin hymns were restored to their earlier form.
