How the New Morning Office Began

But you must know that this morning office, which is now very widely kept in Western countries, was appointed as a canonical office in our own time, and in our own monastery too: the place where our Lord Jesus Christ was born of a virgin and deigned to grow through infancy as a man, and where by his grace he supported our own infancy in religion, still tender and, as it were, fed with milk. [a]

Until that time, we find, when this morning office was finished together with the daily vigils, our elders assigned the remaining hours to bodily rest. This is the office that in the monasteries of Gaul is generally celebrated a short while after the Psalms and prayers of the night office. But some rather carelessly abused this allowance and stretched their time of sleep too long, since no service required them to leave their cells or rise from their beds until the third hour. Besides losing their work, they were drowsy from too much sleep in the daytime, when they ought to have been applying themselves to their duties, especially on those days when keeping watch from evening till near morning brought on an unusually heavy weariness.

So a complaint was brought to the elders by some of the brothers who were ardent in spirit and in no small measure troubled by this carelessness. After long discussion and careful thought the elders decided this. Until sunrise, when the brothers could without harm be ready to read or to take up manual labor, time for rest should be given to their weary bodies. After that they should all be called to keep this service and rise from their beds. By reciting three Psalms and prayers, following the order fixed long ago for the third and sixth hours as a sign of the confession of the Trinity, they should at one and the same time, by a uniform arrangement, put an end to their sleep and make a start on their work.

This form may seem to have arisen by accident and to have been appointed within recent memory for the reason given above. Yet it plainly makes up, by the letter, the number that the blessed David points to, though it can also be taken spiritually: “Seven times a day I praise you because of your righteous judgments.” For by adding this service we certainly hold these spiritual assemblies seven times a day, and are shown to sing praises to God seven times in the day. Finally, although this same form, starting from the East, has spread to these parts with great benefit, yet in some long-established monasteries of the East, which will not tolerate the slightest breach of the old rules of the fathers, it seems never to have been brought in.