Aldean B.

Hendrickson

“Pray without ceasing”

The Loss of Daily Prayer in the Western Church
Aldean B. Hendrickson1

From its inception, the Christian community fostered and developed a strong tradition of
fervent prayer.2 As the Church grew in membership and prominence, the shape of that prayer
was bound to grow and change as well. In the more public Church that emerged under the pro-
tection of Constantine, this “constant” prayer developed into a set form of communal prayer, the
daily liturgical action of the Christian community.3
This formal public prayer, clearly a popular and established part of the life of Christians
(laity and clergy alike) in the fourth century, later became intertwined with a superficially analo-
gous style of prayer from the monastic tradition. Eventually this hybridization was so total that
the character of such prayer as the daily praise of the community was obscured and extinguished,
and the very fact that such prayer had been a popular communal celebration was forgotten.
In this paper I will briefly sketch out the idea of daily prayer in the first three centuries of
the Church as a foundation for the developments of the fourth century. We will discuss how the
public celebration of morning and evening prayer looked in the fourth century, and how very dif-
ferent it was from the monastic praying of the Psalter of the same era. This will lead us to how
the latter came to infect and ultimately devour the former, and conclude with some reflections on
how this affected — and continues to affect — the life of the Church.

Daily Prayer in the First Three Christian Centuries

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his disciples “a parable about the necessity for them to
pray always without becoming weary.”4 A few chapters later in the same Gospel, Jesus exhorts
his followers: “Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribula-
tions… and stand before the Son of Man.”5 Paul echoes this advocacy in his epistles.6
There is every evidence that the followers of Christ through the first centuries of the

1 Currently a student in Theology at Université Saint-Paul/Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Mr.
Hendrickson holds a B.A. (2000) in English from the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he
was a Don Leyden scholar.
2 Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for To-

day. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1986), 11.

3 Taft, 31.
4 Luke 18:1 (all scripture quoted is NAB).
5 Luke 21:36
6 E.g. Eph 6:18; Col 4:2.

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Church conceived of themselves, from the very first, as a community of prayer.7 The New Tes-
tament, especially the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, are teeming with references to prayer —
and exhortations for Christians to follow suit. The Pauline admonition to “Rejoice always. Pray
without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Je-
sus,”8 was taken deeply to heart by the Christian communities.
Though the evidence from the first three centuries after Christ is fragmentary at best, it has
been intensely studied and there are many indications that daily prayer, multiple times per day,
was an important part of the Christian life in those years. What the exact nature of these prayer
times was, or what shape they might have taken, remains a matter of scholarly debate.9 Also un-
certain is to what extent, if any, these daily prayers were related to daily prayer times in the con-
temporary Jewish tradition.10
Liturgical historians struggle to discern the fine line between what individual Christians did
by way of prayer and what they did as a community. For Taft, this distinction is a vain pursuit.
“Was this ‘liturgical prayer’ or ‘private prayer’ or something in between? The very question is
anachronistic in this early period. Christians prayed. Whether they did it alone or in company
depended not on the nature of the prayer, but on who happened to be around when the hour of
prayer arrived.”11 But Bradshaw points out that the paucity of evidence of liturgical formality
does not rule out continuity between the prayer-life of pre-Constantinian Christians and that of
the fourth-century Church.12
From the scraps that we can glean from the writings of these years, it emerges as a common
theme for Christians to pray three times per day, possibly with another time for prayer during the
night. Again, scholarly opinions differ as to what this translated to in praxis: was their prayer
performed at rising in the morning, midday, and at sundown? Or were moments for prayer taken
at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, where at least one patristic writer observes there were already

7 See the description at Acts 2:46-47; also Acts 12:5, 12. Taft gives a seemingly-exhaustive catalogue of NT verses
pointing to the prayer of the early Church (4-5).
8 1 Thes 5:16-18
9 Paul Bradshaw has a nice summary of the divergent interpretations of the evidence from this era in “The First

Three Centuries,” in The Study of Liturgy, Revised Edition, ed. Cheslyn Jones et al, (London: SPCK, 1992), 399-
403.
10 Robert Taft opens his book with a pithy bracketing out of this perennially-contentious question. “Jews pray at set

times. So do Christians. The first Jewish-Christian converts may even have recited the same prayers at the same
times as their Jewish contemporaries. Morning and evening prayer seem to have been the most constant and impor-
tant hours of Jewish prayer. This will become true for Christians as well. And of course, Old Testament themes and
types, and even texts, have formed part of the stuff of Christian prayer from the beginning. Beyond such generalities
lie obscurity and speculation” (Taft, 3).
11 Taft, 29 (emphasis mine).
12 Bradshaw, in Jones, 400.

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natural breaks in the rhythm of the day.13 In some cases there may have been as many as five set
prayer times (morning, the three hours during the day, and at sunset), plus time for prayer during
the night. “There is, of course, no way of knowing how many early Christians actually did man-
age to maintain this extensive daily schedule, but it should be remembered that the initiatory
practices of the Church at this period demanded a high level of commitment from those seeking
admission to the faith....”14 The call to prayer was an evangelical precept for all believers, one
that was, from the evidence we have, taken very seriously. 15
But the early Church Fathers seem to agree on one thing: if prayer is to be ceaseless, then
there must be set times for prayer.16 By the time the Christian community was able to emerge
into the full light of public life following the Edict of Milan in 313, these patterns of prayer were
an established aspect of Christian life.

Daily, Public, Liturgical Prayer in the Fourth Century and Beyond

By the middle of the 4th century, the documentary evidence shows the daily horarium is
everywhere, “an established cycle of daily, common, public services.”17 It is difficult to trace the
developments that must have led to this universal liturgical form, but scholars agree that there
was at least some continuity with what had been already going on in a more restrained fashion
throughout the first three Christian centuries. What occurs following the Peace of Constantine in
312, according to Taft, “is evolution, not revolution: it does not overturn what went before but
builds on it.”18 From the fervent life of daily prayer that had sustained the Christian faith for
three centuries of endemic persecution, the newly accepted Church was able to craft a public li-
turgical structure that suited the needs of the people even as the scale of the Christian community
grew dramatically.
Our earliest textual witness to what we have come to know as the ‘cathedral’ office is
Eusebius (c. 263-339), bishop of Caesarea in Palestine. (The distinction, first advanced by the
pioneering German liturgiologist Anton Baumstark19 , between the popular public celebration of
Psalm-based praise (the ‘cathedral’ tradition) and the the formal ‘monastic’ recitation of the Psal-

13 Tertullian, On Fasting, X: “...these three hours, as being more marked in things human — (hours) which divide
the day, which distinguish businesses, which reecho in the public ear — have likewise ever been of special solem-
nity in divine prayers[.]” Translated by S. Thelwell in Vol. IV of The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Roberts and Donaldson,
eds. (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885), 108.
14 Bradshaw, in Jones, 401.
15 See Taft, 35.
16 See Aimé Georges Martimort, in The Liturgy and Time. Volume IV of The Church at Prayer: An Introduction to

the Liturgy, New Edition (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1986), 165.

17 Taft, 32.
18 Taft, 31-2.
19 Anton Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1958), 111-2.

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ter by ordered religious communities has, with certain later refinements, decisively shaped all
subsequent research of this topic.) 20 Eusebius writes:
For it is surely no small sign of God’s power that throughout the whole world in the churches
of God at the morning rising of the sun and at the evening hours, hymns, praises, and truly
divine delights are offered to God. God’s delights are indeed the hymns sent up everywhere
on earth in his Church at the times of morning and evening.21

Eusebius goes on to make specific mention of Ps 140:2: “Let my prayer be like incense be-
fore you.” Taft draws attention to this reference: it is this psalm that emerges as the standard core
of cathedral evening prayer throughout the Church at that time.22 Epiphanius, who became
bishop of Salamis (in Cyprus) in the year 367, speaks of morning and evening hymns & psalms
in a treatise he composed c. 374-377. 23
That these daily gatherings for prayer were of deep importance to Christians can be
glimpsed from some of the patristic references to them. Taft notes the recurring allusion to the
cathedral office in the hagiographical deathbed scenes of saints in both East and West.24
Augustine attests to his mother Monica’s devotion to the communal celebration of morning and
evening prayer in his Confessions, describing her as “twice a day at morning and at evening
coming to your Church with unfailing regularity … wanting to hear you in your words and to
speak to you in her prayers.”25
There is not space here to attempt even a brief summary of the varieties of nuanced local
expression that this daily cycle of prayer took throughout the East and West in the fourth-century
Church.26 The days of liturgical standardization were far in the future yet, and diversity flour-
ished from church to church. The fifth-century church historian Socrates writes this of ritual life
in the first century following the council at Nicea: “It would be difficult, if not impossible, to
give a complete catalogue of all the various customs and ceremonial observances in use through-
out every city and country…”27 But let us look in haste, first at the daily prayer of the cathedral

20 See Taft, xii. Mateos (1967) adds a third category, the ‘urban-monastic’ office, and Bradshaw (1990) breaks it
down even further, disputing the identification of the Christian prayer of the first three centuries with the developed
fourth century cathedral office. Grisbrooke (1992) offers a yet different four-part division of the historical office,
based on the cathedral-monastical dichotomy and the varying degrees of hybridization between the two.
21 Eusebius of Caesarea, Commentary on Ps 64 (PG 23, 630), as quoted in Taft, 33. The text upon which Eusebius is

commenting here is Ps 65:9b: “east and west [i.e. morning and evening] you make resound with joy.”
22 Taft, 33.
23 Taft, 41.
24 Taft 146; see also 36-38.
25 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book V, (17), trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),

83.
26 Taft gives an impressively compact overview of the galaxy of references and allusions, 31-56 (for the East) and

141-64 (for the West).

27 Socrates. The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, Book V, Chapter XXII, (London: Henry G. Bohm, 1853 ), 292.

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or parochial communities, and then at the prayer of the monastic communities.

The Character of the Cathedral Office

The Office of the secular churches was a popular service characterized by symbol and cere-
mony (light, incense, processions, etc.), by chant (responsories, antiphons, hymns), by diver-
sity of ministries (bishop, presbyter, deacon, reader, psalmist, etc.), and by psalmody that was
limited and select rather than current and complete. … the cathedral services were offices of
praise and intercession, not a Liturgy of the Word.28

The cathedral office — the daily morning and evening prayer celebrated in the local, or ca-
thedral, church — was a communal prayer of praise and intercession, a gathering of earnest wor-
ship. The psalms, canticles and hymns reflected this character, and were also chosen to reflect
the time of day. Most churches used Ps 63 as the main psalm of the morning synaxis: “I will
bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands, calling on your name. I will bless you as long
as I live; I will lift up my hands, calling on your name.”29 In the evening Ps 141 was widely used:
“Let my prayer be incense before you; my uplifted hands my evening sacrifice.”30
Both gatherings shared a theme of light. In the morning references to the rising sun and ref-
erences to Christ rising from the darkness of death to the light of new life. In the evening gather-
ing, the lighting of lamps — surely a practical measure following sunset, but invested with relig-
ious significance in this context of worship — was accompanied by a congregational hymn to the
light; a common hymn attested to in this context is the Phôs hilarion, a hymn that Basil the Great
(d. 379) already described as “ancient.”31
Rising as this liturgy did from what was seen as the primary duty of every Christian to pray
constantly, these gatherings were the spine of each local church’s corporate worship. John Chry-
sostom calls attention to these prayer gatherings as an essential exercise of the shared priesthood
of all baptized Christians, where daily “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving thanks
be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and
peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.”32 In other words, for the social order of the world in
which they lived.

28 Taft, 32.
29 Ps 63:5-6 (Ps 62 in the Septuagint/Vulgate numbering).
30 Ps 141:2.
31 O Joyous light of the holy glory of the immortal Father, heavenly, holy, blessed Jesus Christ!

As we come to the setting of the sun and behold the evening light,
We praise you Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God!
It is fitting at all times that you be praised with auspicious voices, O Son of God, giver of life.
That is why the whole world glorifies you! (As translated in Taft, 38.)
32 John Chrysostom, Homily 6 on 1 Tim, 1, in Vol. 12 of Pusey et al., A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic

Church (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1843), 47.

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The Character of the Monastic Office

From the very beginning of the monastic movement, the men and women drawn to that life
were doing something very different from what the Christians in the towns, cities, and country-
side were doing. To the monastic mind, prayer was not just something, or even the main thing —
it was everything, and the various rules they lived by had as their core purpose to allow these
professional pray-ers to do just that: pray. “If in the first early Christian view every undertaking
could become a prayer, a ministry, a creating of and bearing witness to the Kingdom, in monasti-
cism prayer itself now became the sole undertaking, replacing all other tasks.” 33
This is a fundamentally different raison d’être than the prayer synaxes that were going on
in cathedral churches all across the Christian world. There is perhaps no clearer demonstration of
this than the radically different use of the Psalter that emerged in the monastic setting. As W.J.
Grisbrooke puts it, the monastic methods of psalm-based prayer “were not, strictly speaking,
forms of worship — that is, forms for the expression of praise and prayer — at all. They were
envisaged primarily as instruments to inculcate in the monk the discipline of continuous medita-
tive prayer: in other words, they were not forms of corporate worship, but aids to private medita-
tive prayer to be practised in common.”34
The daily schedule of prayer in monastic communities was also more extensive and com-
prehensive than was expected of Christians living ‘in the world’. The number of psalms recited
at each prayer hour varied widely: if some is good, more is always better. At least that seems to
be a perennial human impulse; twelve became a common pensum (‘burden’) of psalms for each
hour. As the centuries passed, the monastic orders also added additional hours to their daily cur-
sus (the cycle of daily prayer times). In the twelfth century monks in Spain celebrated as many as
twenty-four hours of the office daily.35

The Monasticization of the Cathedral Office

With the popularity of the monastic life, it was a natural development that such communi-
ties would be formed, not only in the desert, but in the cities as well. We will focus our view on
the West, where the model that emerged in the Roman situation had considerable normative in-
fluence on later developments in the Church’s worship.
From the fifth century the daily liturgical prayer in the great basilicas of Rome was led by
communities of monks attached to them for that purpose. Here, though public and ostensibly
communal, the monastic hours were celebrated; the full Psalter was probably recited every

33 Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (London: Faith Press, 1966), 107.
34 W. Jardine Grisbrooke, "The Formative Period—Cathedral and Monastic Office," in Jones (see note 8), 405.
35 Martimort, 176.

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week.36 Though the worshipping community of the basilica would have gathered for the tradi-
tional morning and evening synaxes as elsewhere, the level of popular participation would have
had to have grown very low; without access to printed texts it is unlikely whole congregations
could have recited or chanted the entire Psalter from memory along with the monks. Outside of
Rome the morning and evening hours continued to exist as a popular communal daily worship. 37
The Benedictine order played a very important rôle in the shaping of liturgical practice
throughout northwestern Europe. Benedict himself had grown up in Rome, and the liturgical
practices there played a large part in shaping his ideas of ritual and worship when he crafted his
Rule.38 His order became emblematic of the spread of the Roman liturgical practice: Augustine
of Canterbury brought it to Britain, Boniface to Northern Gaul and Germany. In the Benedic-
tines’ extensive missionary efforts they brought with them a fairly standard liturgical form of
both the Mass and the daily office, a standard form that was taken from the current practice of
the churches in Rome. This process was aided by the civil patronage — and active urging — of
reform-minded rulers like Pepin and Charlemagne, who saw uniformity of worship as a key part
in the ordered governance of their growing empire.39
The Roman practice that spread with the help of the Benedictines was very much a monas-
tic pattern, which came to be normative for all clergy not only in monasteries but also in parish
life. The growing struggle of secular clerics to perform (for it increasingly became so) the exten-
sive daily cursus or cycle of psalm-filled hours pushed them toward a more monastic style of
recitation, which ultimately had no place in it for the lay congregation.
What we have in the development of the public celebration of the Office in this period,
then, “is the problem of the supersession of an office that was predominately laudatory and inter-
cessory and ‘popular’ by one that was predominately meditative and ‘monastic’ (and ultimately
‘clerical’)....”40
Even Pierre Salmon, writing as he does with a clear conviction that the history of the Lit-
urgy of the Hours is little more than the history of the breviary as a book, admits (rather grudg-
ingly, it seems to this writer) that the formal celebration of lauds and vespers “had been con-
ceived in terms of a ‘parish’ attendance.”41 Yet the total monasticization of the daily office has
an air of inevitability about it. “In the disturbed conditions of the early Middle Ages it was only

36 J.D. Crichton, "The Office in the West: The Early Middle Ages," in Jones (see note 8), 421.
37 Ibid., 422.
38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 424-5.

40 Grisbrooke, in Jones, 407-8.

41 Pierre Salmon, The Breviary Through the Centuries, trans. Sr. David Mary (S.N.J.M. Collegeville: Liturgical

Press, 1962), 38.

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 Aldean B. Hendrickson

monasteries and similar communities that could sustain the daily prayer of the Church. This task
they performed nobly, and through the ages they kept alive the notion that common prayer is an
essential function of the Church.”42 Unfortunately that prayerful function of the Church, as
Church, became fused to a notion that such prayer was the work of professionals.

The Church’s Need for Communal Prayer

Even though the people still came to the celebration of the morning and evening offices,
the celebrations became increasingly inaccessible to them. Like the Mass, the offices continued
to be celebrated in Latin even as the populace no longer spoke the language. As the psalmody
became vastly more extensive, it was no longer feasible for the laity to know the words or the
melodies to sing along. And with the development of more and more solemn chanting, the office
became the sole province of professionals: monks, canons, clerics and holders of benefices.43
Church architecture kept pace, gradually isolating the chanting clergy in choir behind an ornate
rood-screen, far up an ever-lengthening nave.44
Yet, all these alienating accretions notwithstanding, the people to a large extent persisted in
attending the parish or cathedral chanting of the offices;45 they retained, as Martimort puts it, “a
more or less confused desire for the prayer of the hours and tried to share in it.”46 In attempts to
fill the void between desire and availability, a vast sweep of pious devotions grew up all across
Europe, very many of them retaining widespread currency well into the twentieth century.
From at least the sixteenth century there were numerous efforts to reform and reshape the
prayer cycle we now know as the Liturgy of the Hours. As regards the daily cycle of prayer
which ordained priests and professed religious are canonically obliged to perform, considerable
progress was made in the twentieth century in this undertaking. Unfortunately, “in all this reform
the notion that the office was the prayer of the Church, and that the laity were part of the Church,
was completely overlooked”47 Even those responsible for the reforms following the Second
Vatican Council, well-intentioned as they were in restoring greater clarity and simplicity to the
breviary, still suffered from the institutional amnesia that had made the whole Church forget that,
buried and hidden under the monastic style of prayer that all clergy knew, lay the gasping soul of
the popular prayer of the early Church.

42 Crichton, "The Office in the West: The Roman Rite from the Sixteenth Century," in Jones (see note 8), 439.
43 Martimort, 181.
44 See Martimort, 180.
45 Even though relegated to the rôle of silent observers. William Storey observes of this that “Christian people have

always been able to learn to pray with their bodies and hearts even when conditions were not ideal.” (“The Liturgy
of the Hours: Cathedral versus Monastery,” in Christians at Prayer, ed. John Gallen, S.J. (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 74.
46 Martimort, 181.
47 Crichton, in Jones, 435.

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