(In this article I consider narrowly the place of the Psalter in the daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. I do not consider here other important matters concerning the Psalter, including notably the translation thereof and its liturgical uses outside the Offices. All rights reserved by the author.)
In the Anglican liturgical tradition, embodied in the classical editions of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), the reading or singing of the Psalter is a very prominent element of the daily Offices of Morning Prayer (or Mattins) and Evening Prayer (or Evensong). Precisely how prominent an element psalm-reading is, whether considered in and of itself or considered as a proportion of the whole of the Offices, varies with the edition of the BCP. The prominence of the Psalter also depends on the prominence of the daily Offices in the overall liturgical life of a parish. Evensong, with its regular budget of psalms, was a popular service in the Church of England in a way it almost never was in the United States. Likewise, the disappearance of ‘Morning Prayer parishes’ during the 20th and early 21st centuries lessened the prominence of the psalms for many lay Anglicans. In any case, in the Continuing Church ‘the importance of the psalms’ mainly means ‘the importance of the psalms for those who say the daily Office’.
The origins of the Prayer Book Offices lie in the medieval Western Church and its extensive and complex daily Offices, which were read by the clergy and by members of religious orders. The typical medieval sequence of Offices consisted of Mattins and Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. The medieval Offices (and the subsequent Roman Catholic Offices which remained largely intact until Vatican II) theoretically read through the 150 psalms every week. In practice this systematic reading of the whole Psalter weekly was often interrupted by major feasts, which occurred frequently. Nonetheless, even if not every psalm was read every week, something close to the full length of the whole Psalter – with its 2,461 verses – was read.
The Prayer Book tradition simplifies the Offices by combining elements from most of them into two Offices. In part this simplification is achieved by reducing the prominence of the Psalter and then by introducing extensive, systematic reading of the rest of the Old Testament (and Apocrypha) and the New Testament. Some of the extra time needed for significant Old and New Testament lessons was taken from a reduction of psalm-reading. Instead of a theoretical, even if actually rare, reading of the whole Psalter each week, the Prayer Book scheme regularly and systematically reads the whole Psalter each month.
The classic Prayer Book division of the Psalter for public reading can be seen easily in the printing of the Psalter in all traditional editions of the BCP. The BCP Psalter is divided into 60 units, one unit each for the thirty mornings of the typical month and one for the thirty evenings of the typical month. With 2,461 verses in the Psalter, divided by 60 units in the typical month, the average reading of psalms at each Office contains 41 verses. Since the Psalter is read systematically in course, the number of verses read at any given Office differs. The longest number of verses in any Office during a month is read at Evensong on the 15th day, when Psalm 78 with its 73 verses is read through. Balancing such longer-than-average Psalter readings are, for example, the 2nd evening of each month when the assigned Psalms 12-14 have only 23 verses and the 23rd evening when Psalms 114 and 115 have only 26 verses. The longest psalm, Psalm 119 with its 176 verses, is read over five Offices (from Evensong on the 24th evening through Evensong on the 26th evening), with 32 verses read at the three Evensongs and 40 verses read at the two Mattins. The average Office, however, has, to repeat, 41 verses from the Psalter.[i]
In the typical Prayer Book Office, the Psalter reading is longer than either the Old Testament or New Testament lesson but is shorter than the two lessons taken together. The fundamental medieval principle, that the Psalter is the core or most important single element of the Offices, therefore, remains a feature of the Prayer Book Office. But the continual reading of Scripture in the context of prayer – which was the most fundamental goal of the 16th century Anglican reform of the Office – is even more clearly achieved. The Anglican Office presents the Bible systematically in the context of common prayer, with the Psalter at the heart of that prayer. The prominence of the Psalter in classical Anglican worship unites it with the worship of Israel, of the ancient Church, of the medieval Church, and indeed of most Christian bodies prior to the last century. But I think the Prayer Book Office uses the Psalter in a uniquely successful fashion: it centers the Office in the Psalter while adding systematic reading of Scripture in lectio continua.
Unfortunately, the achievement of this combination was obscured by revisions of the BCP beginning in the 20th century.
The 1928 American Prayer Book revision, with its revised lectionary dating from the 1940s, permits a severe reduction in the psalms read as well as a major shortening of the Old and New Testament lessons. The reading of the Psalter in the traditional monthly course is still permitted in the 1928 book, but an alternative scheme of daily selections from the psalms reduces the verses read roughly by half. The Psalter in effect is reduced, when this alternative scheme is followed, to a kind of third Scriptural lesson: Psalms, Old Testament, and New Testament. In this alternative pattern the Psalter is no longer the core of the Office in any sense. Moreover, this lectionary simply drops ‘hard’ passages from the psalms, such as Psalm 109.[ii] As a result, in the alternative lectionary, the Psalter is never read in its entirety, much less read monthly. In this liturgical change one sees at work already in the early 20th century among North American Anglicans the theological modernism that would destroy the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in the United States during the 1970s.
The 1979 prayer book of the Episcopal Church retained the 1928 option of reading the Psalter in a monthly cycle or in a substantially reduced form.
It is difficult to summarize developments concerning Psalter use in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) because in liturgical matters chaos reigns in ACNA. Various parishes and clergy use: the 1928 book, other classical BPC editions, the 1979 Episcopalian book, an ACNA prayer book from 2019, and the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours. Some ACNA parishes and dioceses are so non-liturgical as to have virtually no Office at all. It seems unlikely that this extreme diversity will resolve itself. Insofar as ACNA has a norm, it presumably is the 2019 ACNA prayer book. The 2019 book permits both the traditional monthly psalm cycle and a sixty-day cycle.
- Mark Haverland.
[i] The 1928 American BCP makes one alteration in the monthly reading of the Psalter. Psalm 141 in the English Prayer Book editions is read on the morning of the 29th day, while in the American book it is read on the evening of the 29th day. The result is that in the English book at Morning Prayer Psalms 139, 140, and 141, containing 48 verses, are read, while at Evensong Psalms 142 and 143, containing 21 verses are read. The American book roughly equalizes the two Offices with 37 verses read in the morning and 32 in the evening.
[ii] The Canadian BCP takes this tendency a step farther by bowdlerizing the text: the hard passages, again such as the bulk of Psalm 109, are simply excised from its printing of the Psalter.
Anglican Catholic Liturgy and Theology 