The night from six o'clock in the evening to six o'clock in the morning was divided into four watches or vigils of three hours each, the first, the second, the third, and the fourth vigil. The word "Vigils", at first applied to the Night Office, comes from a Latin source, namely the Vigiliae or nocturnal watches or guards of the soldiers. In the early church, during the night before every feast, a vigil was kept. By the second and third centuries, such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian wrote of the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, and of the prayers at the third, sixth and ninth hours.įrom the time of the early Church, the practice of seven fixed prayer times, being attached to Psalm 119:164, have been taught in Apostolic Tradition, Hippolytus instructed Christians to pray seven times a day "on rising, at the lighting of the evening lamp, at bedtime, at midnight" and "the third, sixth and ninth hours of the day, being hours associated with Christ's Passion." By 60 AD, the Didache, recommends disciples to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day this practice found its way into the canonical hours as well. In Act 10: 9, the decision to include Gentiles among the community of believers, arose from a vision Peter had while praying about noontime.Įarly Christians prayed the Psalms ( Acts 4:23–30), which have remained the principal part of the canonical hours. Psalm 119:164 states: "Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws" (of this, Symeon of Thessalonica writes that "the times of prayer and the services are seven in number, like the number of gifts of the Spirit, since the holy prayers are from the Spirit"). The practice of daily prayers grew from the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at set times of the day known as zmanim: for example, in the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Peter and John the Evangelist visit the Temple in Jerusalem for the afternoon prayers. The miraculous healing of the crippled beggar described in Acts of the Apostles 3:1, took place as Peter and John went to the Temple for the three o'clock hour of prayer. After the people returned to Judea, the prayer services were incorporated into Temple worship as well. This "sacrifice of praise" began to be substituted for the sacrifices of animals. Eventually, these sacrifices moved from the Tabernacle to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.ĭuring the Babylonian captivity, when the Temple was no longer in use, synagogues carried on the practice, and the services (at fixed hours of the day) of Torah readings, psalms, and hymns began to evolve. In the Old Testament, God commanded the Israelite priests to offer sacrifices of animals in the morning and afternoon ( Exodus 29:38–39). The canonical hours stemmed from Jewish prayer. Development Judaism and the early church The usage in Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Assyrian Church of the East, and their Eastern Catholic and Eastern Lutheran counterparts all differ from each other and from other rites. Despite numerous small differences in practice according to local custom, the overall order is the same among Byzantine Rite monasteries, although parish and cathedral customs vary rather more so by locale. In the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches, the canonical hours may be referred to as the divine services, and the book of hours is called the horologion ( Greek: Ὡρολόγιον). In Lutheranism and Anglicanism, they are often known as the daily office or divine office, to distinguish them from the other "offices" of the Church (e.g. The current official version of the hours in the Roman Rite is called the Liturgy of the Hours ( Latin: liturgia horarum) or divine office. In the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, canonical hours are also called officium, since it refers to the official prayer of the Church, which is known variously as the officium divinum ("divine service" or "divine duty"), and the opus Dei ("work of God"). A book of hours, chiefly a breviary, normally contains a version of, or selection from, such prayers. In the practice of Christianity, canonical hours mark the divisions of the day in terms of fixed times of prayer at regular intervals. Opening versicle Domine labia mea aperies et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam from a book of hours, ca. For the specific manifestation of the canonical hours in the public prayer of the Roman rite of the Catholic Church, see Liturgy of the Hours.
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