Chapter X: The Divine Office and Mental Prayer

GOD created man to have fellowship with Him, and to contract a bond of love and intimacy which will be completed and perfected in heaven. Meanwhile is it not the principal concern of the present life to bring about within ourselves, by our own efforts aided by grace, the conditions of that perfect union, and to endeavour, as we can do, to live already as we shall live in eternity.

But can we do this? Yes, without any doubt. The sin of our first parent did not break completely the sweet intimacy of the earthly paradise. God did not cease to communicate Himself to men, and they might still treat with His divine Majesty. The promise of a Redeemer immediately followed the fall, and man was thus reinstated in several of his supernatural privileges in virtue of the foreseen merits of his Saviour. But since the accomplishment of the mysteries of redemption we must own that this intimacy with God has taken far larger proportions. Servants have become friends and brethren; and to the spirit of bondage and fear which reigned in the old law has succeeded the spirit of adoption whereby we cry: "Father, Father."¹

Prayer, which sums up the relations of the soul with God in its state as wayfarer (viator), is consequently a subject well worth the attention of all who know for what end they were created. Therefore it will be useful briefly to set forth the general forms of prayer, were it only to show the perfect unity of the divine plan, in the many and various ways that may lead the spirit to union with God.

The soul of man may, under two forms of prayer, treat with its Lord—Liturgical prayer regulated by the Church, and individual prayer. In itself there can be no doubt that the first form far surpasses the second in dignity, authority, comprehensiveness and power. A little explanation will suffice to make this evident.

The official and social homage rendered by the Church militant to God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost—that whole group of spoken formulas, of chants and ceremonies which is, as it were, the necessary accompaniment of the eternal Sacrifice—constitutes the most noble portion of divine worship, which is the essential tribute of adoration, thanksgiving, praise and impetration.

Even amid the figures of the old law, the importance of that prayer, the words of which were for the most part inspired by God, the general forms of which were fixed by the Church, was not overlooked; and it would be almost impossible to bring forward the many passages of Scripture in which the Holy Spirit asserts God’s rights in regard of this. Moses attaches blessings from on high to the fidelity of the people in observing not only the commandments of God but even the smallest details of His worship: “Keep the precepts of the Lord thy God, and the testimonies and ceremonies which He hath commanded thee. . . . that it may be well with thee: and going in thou mayest possess the goodly land, concerning which the Lord swore to thy fathers.”² The Book of Ecclesiasticus, when praising men of renown, mentions in particular their solicitude for the worship rendered to the true God.³ Finally Esther, when seeking to draw down the divine mercy, lays great stress on this decisive argument: "They design," she says, "to change thy promises and destroy thy inheritance, and shut the mouths of them that praise thee, and extinguish the glory of thy temple and altar."⁴ Our Lord, during the whole of His life on earth, showed by His example the importance of public and social prayer. His frequent visits to Jerusalem had no other end than this; and the exactness with which He fulfilled every, even the least detail of the Mosaic Law shows clearly what place the prayer of the Church should hold in our esteem and practice. The early Christians in their turn gave abundant evidence that our divine Lord came not to abolish the rites of the Synagogue, but to fulfil what was figurative in them, and to bring to His Father adorers in spirit and in truth. The Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles tell us what was the custom of the early Christians and what place social prayer held among them. Later on the fathers handed down the tradition of the importance of liturgical prayer and gave us in their writings the very forms which it took at different periods. Holy Church also proves well enough what is the mind of the Holy Spirit who rules and animates her, by obliging all her clergy to the recitation of the Divine Office.

Finally, the holy Gospel gives us some severe words of our Lord regarding the Jews, and in so doing it teaches us how greatly God has at heart the purity of the official homage which He expects from His creatures. Quoting the Prophet Isaias, our Saviour says: "This people honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and commandments of men.”⁵ Now on the lips of our Divine Master this reproach has a special tone of gravity; it is addressed to souls tainted with Pharisaism, to those who make everything consist in mere external worship which gives unto God—and that with great show—what is least in man.

Our Lord complained of this mere material and therefore deceitful worship, wherein the lips only utter words while the mind and the heart are not in accord with them. This kind of lying is the more odious as it is addressed to Him before whom “all things are naked and open.” Hence, it called for the watchful care of our Saviour, who came to restore all things for His Father’s glory. In vain will the Pharisees offer a counterfeit worship with servile exactness and the perfection of external form; they cannot deceive the divine Majesty: “Is this house then, in which My name hath been called upon, in your eyes become a den of robbers? I, I am He: I have seen it, saith the Lord.”⁶ Therefore our Lord, who came to fulfil all justice, takes up the words of His prophet when He casts the buyers and sellers out of the temple, saying to them: “It is written: My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.”⁷

This house of prayer is principally the soul, which is vowed by her state to the worship of God; she cannot fully satisfy her obligation without uniting in one and the same act both vocal and mental prayer. St. Benedict expresses this perfectly in these few words: "That our mind concord with our voice."⁸ These words are in reality a summary of the whole teaching of the ancient fathers on mental prayer. With this in mind, we can read the chapters of St. Benedict's Rule "On the discipline of Psalmody" and "Of the reverence of Prayer," where the holy patriarch insists, above all, on the interior dispositions which should accompany this sacred psalmody, and shows clearly what attentive preparation our fathers thought it necessary to make that they might worthily perform the "Work of God." Their whole life was devoted to it; their whole observance was centred in it.

For a considerable length of time in fact the two kinds of prayer of which we are speaking were conjoined, and it will be useful to refer here to the liturgical customs which prevailed before St. Benedict's time that we may better understand the language of the ancient fathers. It appears evident that in the early Church the public prayer was interrupted at certain times, especially after the psalms, to give free scope to prayer without any set form; the soul spoke intimately to God, and God sometimes by inspiration revealed Himself to the soul. The ridiculous apings of Protestant sects in these latter times must not prejudice us against admitting what is historically true of the first ages of the Church.

It is also to this kind of extemporaneous prayer, so in keeping with the ancient style when the first Christians who were favoured with supernatural gifts lent themselves with docility to God's working in them, that certain passages of the first Epistle to the Corinthians refer. They are difficult to understand in our present way of acting. This is what the Apostle says: "So you also, forasmuch as you are zealous of spirits, seek to abound unto the edifying of the Church. And therefore he that speaketh by a tongue, let him pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is without fruit. What is it then?

I will pray with the spirit; I will pray also with the understanding. I will sing with the spirit; I will sing also with the understanding. Else if thou shalt bless with the spirit, how shall he that holdeth the place of the unlearned say "Amen" to thy blessing? Because he knoweth not what thou sayest. For thou indeed givest thanks well, but the others are not edified."⁹

We see from this passage that the faithful who had received the gift of tongues, of prophecy, of interpreting the Scriptures, were allowed at times to speak in the Church, and to communicate to the assembly of Christians the lights they had received; but they were themselves to be judged by those who had the gift of discernment of spirits. Among all these gifts St. Paul frankly owns his preference for that of prophecy; but he numbers them all as follows: "How is it then, brethren? when you come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a revelation, hath a tongue, hath an interpretation: let all things be done to edification."¹⁰ He wishes that all be done with order, wisdom, decorum, without any confusion, and for this he gives admirable lessons of prudence. In view of this he points out in particular that the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, and that there is in the use of these supernatural gifts neither overpowering pressure nor loss of liberty: the Holy Spirit is never immoderate. In the same place the Apostle forbids women to raise their voice in the Church, either because they have no place in the regular hierarchy of the Church or perhaps also because the weaker sex is more exposed to mistake dreams of the imagination for true inspirations, and by so doing more easily to fall a victim to delusion.

Why not stop for a moment here to point out the word Benedictio, which St. Paul uses when speaking of this semi-liturgical extemporization, to which the people answered "Amen"? According to documents recently discovered it is certain that it is what we now call the Collect, which the Church has definitely fixed, and thus taken away the occasion of those abuses which would inevitably have arisen if liberty had been left to the spirit of each. It is easy to see in all the ancient writers that when certain moments were given to personal extemporization in the midst of the liturgical service, this prayer had necessarily to be short; otherwise there would have been danger of vanity, empty discourse and the assumption of airs of importance; and these were the abuses against which the masters were anxious to guard.

Let us hear St. Augustine in his letter to Proba: "Wherefore it is neither wrong nor unprofitable to spend much time in praying if there be leisure for this without hindering other good and necessary works to which duty calls us, although even in the doing of these, as I have said, we ought, by cherishing holy desire, to pray without ceasing. For to spend a long time in prayer is not, as some think, the same thing as to pray with much speaking. Multiplied words are one thing, long-continued warmth of desire is another. For even of the Lord Himself it is written that He continued all night in prayer, and that His prayer was more prolonged when He was in an agony; and in this an example is given to us by Him, who is in time an intercessor such as we need, and who is with the Father eternally the hearer of prayer.

"The brethren in Egypt are reported to have very frequent prayers, but these are very brief and, as it were, sudden and ejaculatory, lest the wakeful and aroused attention, indispensable in prayer, should by protracted exercises either vanish or lose its keenness. And in this they themselves show plainly enough, that just as this attention is not to be continued unto weariness, so if it is well sustained there is no need suddenly to interrupt it. Far be it from us either to use much speaking in prayer or to refrain from prolonged prayer, if fervent attention of the soul continues. To use much speaking in prayer, is to employ a superfluity of words in asking a necessary thing; but to prolong prayer is to have the heart throbbing with continued pious emotion towards Him to Whom we pray. For in most cases prayer consists more in groaning than in speaking, in tears rather than in words. But He setteth our tears in His sight, and our groaning is not hidden from Him who made all things by the Word, and who does not need human words."¹¹

It is thus that St. Augustine wards off intemperance of speech in prayer. Cassian in his turn gives rules of discretion with reference to the prayers that follow the Psalmody:

"When the solitaries meet together to celebrate the Offices, all keep profound silence, and in that multitude of brethren, he alone is heard who rises to recite the Psalms; it seems as though there was no one at all in the church. At the end of the prayer especially there is no sighing, no noise; no talking troubles the assembly, nor drowns the voice of the priest who recites the prayer."

Thus from this quotation we see that there is mention of three distinct parts: the Psalmody, the Prayer and the conclusion made by the priest. Cassian next proceeds to give some reasons why this free kind of prayer should end briefly saying:

"Those, on the contrary, who pray in a noisy manner and show little fervour are accounted guilty of a double fault. They make prayer a profanation by offering it to God negligently, and moreover by their noise they trouble their neighbours, who otherwise would perhaps pray with more recollection. Therefore our Fathers recommend a prompt end of prayer, lest by prolonging it we should be unable to keep up attention. We must make haste in order to secure our fervour from the snares of the devil. . . . For this reason, the masters of the spiritual life thought it better to make short prayers and repeat them more frequently. By multiplying these prayers we attach ourselves more intimately to God, and by making them short we the better avoid the darts which the devil hurls against us more particularly at that time."¹²

Hence St. Benedict, laying down this teaching still more precisely, says in his Rule: "And therefore prayer should be short and pure, save perchance one be led to lengthen it from the affection of an inspiration of divine grace. But in the monastery let the prayer be very short, and as soon as the superior has given the signal, let all rise together."¹³

With his usual discretion the holy patriarch cuts short all the abuses which might find their way into prayer made in common. But he had not the slightest idea of asserting that what we nowadays call mental prayer might be curtailed to a few moments; for in his mind this attention of the soul to God is the very law of our existence. In the great schools of the contemplative life it was thought that man should be unceasingly occupied with divine things, in order to be thoroughly affected by them.

Now private or mental prayer, though lower in dignity, has this advantage over social prayer, that it can be uninterrupted; it can be offered to God at all times and in all places, in sickness and in health, by day and by night. There can however be no advantage in making a jealous parallel between these two forms of Catholic prayer, or in making them stand alone in a kind of rivalry; we fail to see how they can either harm or exclude each other. Happy they who unite both in one common love! Let each keep its respective place in the practice and esteem of the children of the Church. In the king's palace, the pomp of court ceremonial is indispensable to enhance the royal dignity; but it does not forbid the outpourings of tender love and friendship. Thus our great King and Lord of lords has a right to the splendid service of a royal court, but at the same time He wishes to find tender devotedness in the hearts of His subjects, love in His bride, filial piety in His children, and fraternal affection in those whom He honours with the name, friends. He would read in the heart of the very last of His courtiers not a servile fear inducing Him to perform with mere external exactitude His duties in the palace, but a love which exalts those duties and causes them to be fulfilled with the most delicate care. We are well aware that in private sources the soul may find food for mental prayer; but it is no less true that the Divine Office will ever be the principal and richest food of contemplation. And how could it be otherwise if on this subject we believe the words of the Apostle: "For we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit Himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings."¹⁴

How can it be that a soul prepared and formed by the Holy Spirit should not know better than any other how to converse with God in the intimacy of her heart returning as she does to her solitude laden like a bee with honey from so many flowers? How can she be ignorant of the right language in which to address the Divine Majesty, when she enters into the secret chamber of her heart, all replenished with the Divine Word. What is contemplation in its highest form but the opening out of the beautiful affirmations which the prayer of the Church puts upon our lips? When a soul borrows her expressions from human language, she will never find any words that more exactly convey the truths she has contemplated than the forms of liturgical prayer, lending themselves, as they do, with equal ease to the lispings of the soul beginning to seek God and to the enraptured outpourings of the soul that has found Him. It is needless therefore to make contrasts between liturgical prayer regulated by the Church, and mental prayer as it takes its free and varied course; the former cannot be perfect without the latter, and the latter gains its strength from the former and leans securely upon it. The Church does not cripple the soul nor weaken her tendency to God. She fixes and regulates the forms of official prayer, and then leaves souls at liberty in their personal intimacy with God; she excludes nothing here below that can prepare the way for divine union, and hesitates not to find even in physical beauty a precious help for raising us to the one true source of all beauty. Not indeed that the spirit of prayer can ever resemble the vague and purely æsthetic emotions which sometimes seize upon the soul in presence of the beauties of the Liturgy; even unbelievers may have impressions such as these, but we simply mean to say that the Church makes use of all the natural forces which she finds in the soul in order to elevate it to God.

"Whence," asks Dom Gueranger, "did the holy Doctors of the early ages and the venerable Patriarchs of the desert acquire their spiritual knowledge and tender devotion, of which they have left us such treasures in their writings and their works? It was from those long hours of psalmody, during which truth, simple yet manifold, unceasingly passed before the eyes of their soul, filling that soul with streams of light and love.” According to the ancient practice what they called meditation and attentive reading of the Scriptures followed the prayers said in the oratory, and every one will admit that this looks very like what we nowadays call mental prayer. A few examples will show this more clearly. Cassian says: “The solitaries join private vigils to those imposed by the Office, and they apply to them with even greater care, in order to preserve the purity they have acquired by prayer and to gain by their meditations in the night that strength and vigilance which ought to be their safeguard during the day.”¹⁵ “They also join manual labour to their vigils that idleness may not make them a prey to sleep, and they do not interrupt it any more than their meditation. They exercise equally the faculties of the soul and of the body in order to unite the efforts of the exterior man to those of the interior man.”¹⁶ This meditation, which fills up the intervals between the Divine Office, is preserved by St. Benedict as a precious tradition: “As to the time that remains after the vigils,” he says, “let it be spent in the study of the Psalms and Lessons, by such of the brethren as may have need thereof.”¹⁷ Of course this does not mean a dry exercise of the memory, but a work of the mind and heart, a work in which the soul, fed upon the holy Scriptures and supernatural truths, becomes more fit to celebrate the work of God. Thus light is thrown upon the Rule of St. Benedict by the constant custom of the ancient Fathers, who all devoted to meditation the time that followed the vigils.

Plainly, therefore, mental prayer, as we understand it nowadays, is the indispensable preparation for worthily celebrating the Divine Office and for rendering to God the homage of perfect praise. In it the soul takes her attitude, as it were, prepares and drills herself to fulfil perfectly the four great ends of the Sacrifice of Praise; in it again, she tunes her instrument, so to say, that when the hour comes it may vibrate in perfect harmony to the glory of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. For in order rightly to celebrate the Divine Office, it is not enough to have a general intention to apply our minds to it, we must also bring actual attention to the great work, and this the soul cannot either gain or preserve unless she has made progress in the spirit of prayer and lost the habit of dissipation. It is in this way that the exercise of mental prayer fixes and steadies the soul for the time of the Divine Office.

What we here assert is not a mere opinion. The preparatory prayer which the Church appoints to be said before the Divine Office, shows clearly what dispositions she expects to find in the hearts of those whom she deputes to sing the divine praises, when they stand before God: "Ut digne, attente, ac devote hoc officium recitare valeam—That I may worthily, attentively and devoutly recite this Office." And we are taught in the same prayer to beseech our Lord to cleanse our heart not only from vain and wicked thoughts—vanis perversis—but also from thoughts foreign to the purpose—alienis cogitationibus; to enlighten our understanding, intellectual illumiua, to kindle our affections, affectum influmvia, by which words we ask directly for the grace of contemplation. The Church, therefore, counts upon her children bringing to the Divine Office the dispositions requisite for contemplation, that they may offer to God a living homage and not a mere external worship.

Thus, by a double current, which consists in praying mentally the better to celebrate the Divine Office, and seeking in the Divine Office the food of mental prayer, the soul gently, quietly and almost without effort arrives at true contemplation. Practically these two forms of prayer can never either stand against each other or be separated in those who are vowed by their state to the contemplative life.

It is by the use of these several means, combined together and supporting one another, that the soul raises herself day by day to God. This progress was well known to the ancients: "When by the charms of harmony," says Saint Denis, "the song of the sacred truths has prepared the powers of our soul for the immediate celebration of the Sacred Mysteries, and when it has subdued them so to say, borne along by this music, down to the cadence of an absorbing divine transport, and has put us in unison with God, with our brethren and with ourselves, then what the holy Chants expressed in brief, and shadowed forth by figures, the reading of the holy Scriptures will worthily develop in descriptions and narratives more ample and more clear. Then we behold all things tending to one perfect unity under the influence of one only Spirit."¹⁸

Footnotes

1. Abba, Pater (Rom. viii, 15). ↩

2. Custodi præcepta Domini Dei tui, ac testimonia et ceremonias quas præcepit tibi . . . ut bene sit tibi, et ingressus possideas terram optimam, de qua juravit Dominus patribus tuis (Deut., vi, 17, 18). ↩

3. Eccli, xliv. ↩

4. Volunt tua mutare promissa et delere hæreditatem tuam, et claudere ora laudantium te, atque exstinguere gloriam templi et altaris tui (Esth., xiv, 9). ↩

5. Poqulus hic labiis me honorat, cor autem eorum longe est a me. Sine causa autem colunt me docentes doctrinas et mandata hominum (Mattii. xv, 8). ↩

6. Numquid ergo spelunca latronum facta est domus ista, in qua invocatum est nomen meum in oculis vestris? Ego, ego sum; ego vidi, dicit Dominus (Jerem. vii, 11). ↩

7. Scriptum est: Domus mea domus orationis vocabitur; vos autem fecistis illam speluncam latronum (Matth. xxi, 13). ↩

8. Mens nostra concordet voci nostræ (S. Reg., cap. xix). ↩

9. Sic et vos, quoniam æmulatores estis spirituum, ad ædificationem Ecclesiæ quærite ut abundetis. Et ideo qui loquitur lingua, oret ut interpretetur. Nam si orem lingua, spiritus meus orat, mens autem mea sine fructu est. Quid ergo est? Orabo spiritu, orabo et mente: psallam spiritu, psallam et mente. Cæterum si benedixeris spiritu, qui supplet locum idiotæ, quomodo dicet, Amen, super tuam benedictionem, quoniam quid dicas nescit? Nam tu quidem bene gratias agis, sed alter non ædificatur (1 Cor., xiv, 12-17). ↩

10. Quid ergo est, fratres? Cum convenitis, unusquisque vestrum psalmum habet, doctrinam habet, apocalypsim habet, linguam habet, interpretationem habet: omnia ad ædificationem fiant (1 Cor., xiv, 26). ↩

11. Epist. cxxx. ↩

12. Cassian, Instit., lib. ii, cap. x. ↩

13. Et ideo brevis debet esse et pura oratio; nisi forte ex affectu inspirationis divinæ gratiæ protendatur. In conventu tamen omnino brevietur oratio, et facto signo a Priore, omnes pariter surgant (S. Reg., cap. xx). ↩

14. Nam quid oremus, sicut oportet, nescimus: sed ipse Spiritus postulat pro nobis gemitibus inenarrabilibus (Rom. viii, 26). ↩

15. Cassian, Instil, lib. ii, cap. xiii. ↩

16. Ibid., xiv. ↩

17. Quod vero restat post vigilias, a fratribus qui Psalterii vel lectionum aliquid indigent meditationi inserviatur (S. Reg., cap. viii). ↩

18. Hier., Eccl., cap. iii, 5. ↩