The Shepherd, January 2005
“THE HOUSE OF GOD AND THE CHURCH SERVICES”, 3
§ 99. The Time When the Various Parts of the All-Night Vigil Appeared or Their Historical Provenance. Just as with the Divine Liturgy, we can derive theological understanding from questioning the historical provenance of the parts of the Vigil. However, we must bear in mind that as the Vigil is more changeable than the Liturgy, and has compositions from more church writers and is, in fact, a more complicated service, it is comparatively more difficult and more complicated to outline the historical provenance of its parts than it is for the Liturgy. Scholars are unwilling to explain the historical provenance of the Vigil before resolving some greater, more general and more important questions, questions touching upon the provenance and distribution of first Vespers and Mattins services themselves, and secondly the periods when the most important parts of these and other services were composed, for instance the antiphons, the canon, the entrances, the liti, the blessing of the loaves, the kathismata, the polyeleos and the First Hour, etc.. Besides all this, we must pay attention to how the appearance of the Vigil as a service, the history of its development, and its general character are linked to the history of the Liturgy.
Right back in ancient times, in the first days of Christianity, there existed the custom of holding prolonged, night-long services (Acts 12:12, 7; 16:25). In the period of the persecutions, the Christians also prayed at night, when initially the general services for Christians were the Eucharist or Liturgy, joined to the Agape. These brotherly meals, which were held in conjunction with the Eucharist, were for the first Christians the most inspiring and prayerfully-uplifting moments within the day’s series of particular prayers; beginning in the evening, they often continued all night in prayer. Thus the Liturgy was in ancient times not only the premier communal service, but also the service which most nearly approximated to the designation of an “all-Night” keeping awake in prayer. But these services were not held every day; for the greater part they were conducted only on Sundays. Furthermore, in the life of the very earliest Christian community the custom had taken root which gave rise to the component parts of the Vigil, Vespers and Mattins, with their distinctive meanings. The custom was to dedicate the various parts of the day, and thereafter the night, to prayer; thus morning prayer, evening prayers, that at the setting of the sun, night-time, and at the dawn chorus. These prayer services said at home contained the Lord’s Prayer and readings from the psalms which were appropriate to the time of day. Thus, for instance, at evening prayer psalm 140, which contains the words, “Let my prayer be set forth as incense before Thee, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice; hearken unto me, O Lord,” was generally used. Psalm 62, “O God, my God, unto Thee I rise early at dawn,” was used at the hour of dawn. These psalms were kept in subsequent times and have come down to us as part of the services of Vespers and Mattins, where they form part of the order. The presence of these appointed psalms in the services from time immemorial is witnessed by various records. Thus the initial basis of Vespers and Mattins consisted in the psalms. The reading of the HolyScriptures in the first century was not so widespread, on account of there being an insufficiency of books for home use. While Vespers and Mattins were thus far private affairs and existed only in embryo form, the All-Night Liturgy flourished, containing within it a fully-fledged kernel comprising the Holy Scriptures, preaching, secret prayers and the chanting of hymns. However, at the end of the first century, there was a definite break in the development of the Liturgy. The governing Roman authorities, being hostile towards Christianity, forbade the secret gatherings of the Christian communities. As a consequence of this, in many places in the Graeco-Roman world, the night-time Eucharist service was re-timed, instead of being with the evening or night-time prayers, it was with the morning ones or even the midday ones. This laid the foundation for the morning celebration of the communal service, the composition and prayerful rites of which were from the very start identical to the Eucharistic gatherings. But it was not easy for the Christian spirit to completely abandon the evening celebration, which was poetic in its composition and deeply edifying. Therefore in those places, which were far from the hostile and often cruel oversight of the Roman authorities, and equally at those times when the persecutions of the Christians died down, the Christians found opportunities to build proper churches and evening services were revitalised again, although they enriched with new compositions of prayers. From the historical records that have been preserved, we have a basis to affirm that in the second century on feastdays the Christians held two services, one very early in the morning, and the other in the day-time or evening. The composition of the Liturgy in the second century influenced the composition of the Vigil and was influenced by other considerations. The gradual separation of the celebration of the Eucharist from the Agape, and the strengthening of the pious custom of receiving the Eucharist earlier before tasting any other food working with the Church’s recognition of the need then to fortify the believers during their evening and morning prayers led to the custom of blessing simple bread and wine for them. From this we have the rite of the blessing of the loaves in our present day Vigil service. But an even earlier period of Christian history, the age of the martyrs, gave rise to another part of the All-Night Vigil, one closely connected to the blessing of bread - namely the liti or supplication. Originally this was known as the litany and it entailed making a solemn procession from one place of prayer to another. Originally these processions had accompanied the transfer of holy relics and other memorials of the martyrs, or they had been made as a pilgrimage to the place of a martyrdom. Having marked the places where the martyrs suffered by prayerful pilgrimages or simply pious journeys, the Christians also felt the need to mark the sacred places connected by various events in the earthly life of Jesus Christ by prayerful observance and here in the course of time they built churches (for example at the cave which was the Lord’s tomb, at Golgotha, at the place of the finding of the Lord’s Cross, on the Mount of Olives, in Bethlehem, etc). So, solemn processions to visit these churches became an indispensable part of the church-life in Jerusalem. In the end, the prayerful living through of that period of martyrdom and the memory of the martyrs gave impetus to the introduction of yet another special part of the Vigil: the reading of the lives of the saints. These readings arose as a natural result of the commemorations of the struggles of the holy martyrs, which were held dear not only by those near the places of their sufferings but by others as well, who lived in more distant places. Commemorative records of the martyrs began to be read during the Divine services during Vespers and Mattins, although already in the third century readings only from the Holy Scriptures were permitted during the Liturgy.
… to be continued in the next issue
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