Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as

Priestly Temple Service

BENEDICT MARIA ANDERSEN OSB

They shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in the midst of them.
Thine eyes shall see the shekinah of the king of the ages in his beauty.
The Logos was made flesh and pitched his tent among us: and we beheld
his glory.1

psallite sapienter, cum tremore, in conspectu angelorum

The title of this year’s Fota Liturgical conference, Psallite Sapienter, taken
from the Vulgate text of Psalm 46,2 is one dear to the sons and daughters of
Saint Benedict, since the Patriarch makes it a centerpiece of one of the most
luminous passages of his Rule, chapter 19, entitled De disciplina psallendi.
‘We believe,’ writes Saint Benedict,

that the Divine Presence is everywhere, and that the eyes of the Lord
behold the good and the bad, in all places; but we believe this especially
and without any doubt, when we assist at the Work of God. Let us
therefore always be mindful of what the Prophet saith: ‘Serve ye the
Lord in fear’; and again, ‘Sing ye his praises with understanding’ (Psallite
sapienter); and, ‘In the sight of the Angels will I sing praise unto thee.’
Therefore, let us consider in what manner and with what reverence it
behoveth us to be in the sight of God and of the Angels, and so let us
sing in choir, that mind and voice may accord together.3

Monks, when taking part in the Divine Office, the Opus Dei, should sing the
psalms ut mens nostra concordet voci nostræ – lest what is pronounced with
the mouth becomes a mere puff of breath, rather than spiritual food for the

1 Exod 25:8; Isaiah 33:17 (after the Chaldee Paraphrase); and John 1:14 (literally rendered).
2 The Septuagint/Vulgate numbering of the Psalms is used throughout this paper. Likewise, proper
names from Scripture follow the Douay Rheims tradition.
3 Translation slightly adapted from The Rule of Our Most Holy Father Saint Benedict, Patriarch of Monks,
from the Old English Edition of 1638 (London: R. Washbourne, 1875), p. 113.

13
14 Benedict Maria Andersen

mind and heart. This requires three fundamental dispositions – godly fear,
wisdom, and awareness of the unseen world – illustrated respectively by three
short excerpts from the Psalter, namely Psalms 2, 46, and 137. The common
thread running through these three psalms is a cultic one: the liturgical
service of God in his Temple. Each envisions the eschatological submission
of the nations to the God of Israel in the context of Temple worship: Psalm
2 with its image of the Anointed King, begotten by his Father, reigning over
the nations from Mount Sion, that is, from the Temple; Psalm 46, a song of
the Temple musicians known as the Sons of Core (Korah), concerning God’s
ascension to his throne; and finally Psalm 137 with its allusion to the presence
of angels.
The whole passage almost certainly bears an Augustinian stamp,4 but at a
much more basic level, chapter 19 of the Rule is deeply Hebraic. The reference
to the angelic ministry – both as ‘watchers’5 of mankind, and as our invisible
counterparts in the adoration of God – is a dead giveaway. The imagery is
essentially that of Isaiah in the heavenly throne room ‘in the year King Ozias
died’ (Isa 6), and of John the Theologian, ‘in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’
(Apoc 1:10), beholding the vast heavenly liturgy of angels and men taking
place before the throne-altar of God and the Lamb. This is not to say that
Saint Benedict was consciously doing what is now called ‘Temple theology.’6 In
writing his ‘little rule for beginners’ (ch. 73), he is simply expressing the mind
of the Church, the traditional understanding of Christian worship from the
earliest days, passed down from generation to generation in the same spirit of
reverent submission with which Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians: ‘For I
have received of the Lord (parelabon apo tou Kyriou) that which I also handed
down unto you (ho kai paredoka hymin).’7

4 See Jonathan D. Teubner, Prayer after Augustine: A study in the development of the Latin tradition (Oxford
University Press, 2018), pp 182–184.
5 Iyrin in Aramaic; in Greek egregoroi.
6 Temple Theology, exemplified in the works of Margaret Barker (a Cambridge-trained theologian and
sometime President of the Society for Old Testament Study), explores the ways in which the worldview
of the Temple (particularly the First Temple) came to influence, via Jewish apocalyptic literature, the
formation of the Christian Church. It is an hypothesis, a way of reading all of the available evidence,
such as the canonical Old and New Testaments, apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts, the Qumran
texts, patristic writings, liturgical texts, Christian iconography, and church architecture.
7 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations in English are from the Douay-Rheims-Challoner
Edition (American edition of 1899). This choice is due to a desire to follow as close as possible the
Vulgate (as the Latin Church’s traditional Bible) at the same time as the Septuagint (as the theological
‘gold standard’ of the ancient Christian tradition).
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 15

‘according to the pattern’

For Saint Benedict, as for the whole tradition before and after him, Christian
Liturgy is ‘Temple-shaped.’ Benedictine liturgical tradition adapted the words
of Sirach (Ecclus 47) to portray the holy Abbot of Cassino as a new David,
organiser of countless monastic choirs, who, through the Psalter and the
plough, would conquer Europe for Christ: ‘With his whole heart he praised
the Lord, and loved the God that made him … and he set singers before
the altar, and by their voices he made sweet melody. And to the festivals he
added beauty, and set in order the solemn times even unto the end of his
life.’8 When speaking of the origins of the eightfold Divine Office (Rule,
ch. 16), it is enough for the Patriarch simply to point to the divine pattern
revealed through Psalm 118: David, and Jesus his descendant, sang: Septies
in die laudem dixi tibi (v 164) and Media nocte surgebam ad confitendum tibi
(v 62). This is the model – Nocturns (Mattins or Vigils), Lauds, Prime, Terce,
Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline – and we obey.9
Several centuries after Saint Benedict, William Durand (commonly called
Durandus), Bishop of Mende in southern France (†1296), in his influential
treatise Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, has much more to say about the
Office than Saint Benedict, and the fundamental attitude is the same:

We read in Exodus that the Lord said to Moses: ‘See that thou make
all things according to the pattern shown to thee on the mountain’
(Ex 25:40). This is why it is fitting for us to fashion ourselves after
that celestial Jerusalem that the Lord commanded us to praise – and
which, just as the Apostle says to the Galatians, is ‘above us’ and is
our Mother (cf. Gal 4:26) – and especially, when we are praising God,
according to this text: ‘Upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed
watchmen, who day and night shall never cease to praise thy name’

8 The Lesson (for the Epistle) from the Mass of the Octave of the Solemnity of Saint Benedict (18 July);
trans. from The Saint Andrew Daily Missal (Saint Paul, MN: E.H. Lohman Co., 1945), ‘Supplement for
the Order of Saint Benedict,’ p. 33.
9 Saint Benedict’s reverence for ‘the pattern’ can also be seen in his deference to the liturgical tradition of
the Roman Church (sicut psallit ecclesia Romana, ch. 13), as well as that of the Church of Milan when
prescribing for each hour the use of the Ambrosianum, or Office hymn (then unknown in the Roman
Office). The ‘pattern’ of New Covenant worship is not as minutely defined as that of the Old, and
that is by necessity, since the one liturgy celebrated by the Great High Priest in the heavenly Temple
is ‘incarnated,’ as it were, in each culture which has been touched by the Gospel (without, of course,
losing contact with the Church’s Hebraic and Greco-Roman roots).
16 Benedict Maria Andersen

(cf.  Isa 62:6). And in the Apocalypse, it says that the [four living]
creatures ‘rested neither day nor night, saying: Holy, Holy, Holy’ (Apoc
4:8). Nevertheless, the Church militant cannot fully imitate the Church
triumphant because, just as we read in the Book of Wisdom: ‘The
corruptible body is a weight on the soul’ (Wis 9:15). For we are unable,
with the shackles of our infirmity, to persevere continually in the divine
praises at each of the twelve hours of the day, because man, by necessity
sometimes has to give attention to the needs of the body – according to
what is in Genesis: ‘In the sweat of thy brow, thou shalt eat thy bread’
(Gen 3:19) – therefore, we do what we can in praising God at certain
hours of the day.10

Durandus later relates a story (originally from the fifth-century historian

Socrates of Constantinople) in which ‘Blessed Ignatius, the third bishop
of Antioch after Blessed Peter, was on a certain mountain and heard choirs
of angels singing antiphons.’ From Ignatius, relates Durandus, the Greek
Church received first the custom of joining antiphons to psalms as though
they were ‘in a choral dance (quasi in chorea),’ and from the Greeks the
custom passed to the Latins.11 Pious legend, perhaps, but it illustrates once
again the Church’s traditional belief that her liturgy, like her saints, ‘is born
[not] of the will of man, but of God’ (John 1:13).
There exists, according to this belief, a definite pattern set forth by the
Spirit, which is reflected in the various classical liturgical traditions and
through which we can join, even now, in the liturgy of heaven: Sicut in cælo,
et in terra. The angelic choirs praise him endlessly, but alas, we are not angels;
we have this priceless treasure ‘in earthen vessels’ (II Cor 4:7). By God’s
mercy and condescension to our frailty, we are able to have a kind of ‘virtual’
share in the ceaseless song of the angels by observing specific hours of prayer,
symbolic (according to Durandus) of all the hours of the day, as well as of an
entire human lifespan from infancy to death: ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul,
in my life I will praise the Lord: I will sing to my God as long as I have my
being’ (Ps 145).12

10 William Durand, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum V, 1, 1. Translation (slightly adapted) from Timothy
M. Thibodeau, Rationale V: Commentary on the Divine Office (Corpus Christianorum in translation, 23)
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp 63–64.
11 Rationale V, 2, 36. Thibodeau, p. 92.
12 Ibid, p. 65.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 17

‘always in the temple’?

The Divine Office, always in close cooperation with the Eucharistic Liturgy,
is the means by which the Church remains, to use Saint Luke’s phrase from
the end of his Gospel, like the Apostles semper in Templo, ‘continually in
the temple, praising and blessing God’ (24:53). These words deserve a close
reading. In context, they come at the end of Luke’s first of two accounts of
the Lord’s Ascension (the other being found in the first chapter of the Acts of
the Apostles). The full account in the Gospel (24:50–53) reads:

And he led them out as far as Bethania: and lifting up his hands, he
blessed them. And it came to pass, whilst he blessed them, he departed
from them, and was carried up to heaven. And they adoring went back
into Jerusalem with great joy. And they were always in the temple, praising
and blessing God.

It is not immediately clear how Luke wants the listener/reader to take this
statement. What does it mean that the Eleven were ‘in the Temple’, and that
‘always’ or ‘continually’? The most obvious approach would be to interpret
it more or less literally: Luke is referring to the great Temple of Herod then
standing in Jerusalem. A close reading of the Gospel and Acts, however, reveals
fundamental problems with this literalistic approach.13 Another explanation
must be found to explain the centrality of Temple themes in Luke’s Gospel.
This interest is even more remarkable if one holds to the tradition that Luke
is the only Gentile Evangelist.
Beginning with Saint Irenaeus (†c.202), Luke’s Gospel has been
traditionally regarded as the liturgical and priestly Gospel. Irenaeus, the first
to make the connection between the four Evangelists and the four living
13 This interpretation would seem to be corroborated by Acts 3:1, where we read that Peter and John went
up to the Temple at the ninth hour, the hour of prayer, or more exactly, the time of the evening sacrifice.
However, no prayer or ritual participation takes place, as by chance they find a lame man begging at
one of the gates, whom they heal, leading to an eloquent sermon by Peter and trouble with the Jewish
authorities. One might presume that, had they not encountered the lame man, they would have entered
the Temple to be present at the evening sacrifice, but there is no way to be sure of this. Chapter 5 has the
Apostles in Solomon’s Porch, but the only activities mentioned are preaching and performing miracles.
They do this on more than one occasion, despite the punishments meted out by the authorities. The last
time we meet with an Apostle in the Temple is the account, in chapter 21, of Paul’s (rather disastrous!)
attempt to pacify the Jerusalem Christians by undergoing a Temple purification rite. Paul’s words in I
Cor 9:20–22 would seem to explain his action: ‘And I became to the Jews, a Jew, that I might gain the
Jews: to them that are under the law, as if I were under the law – whereas myself was not under the
law – that I might gain them that were under the law.’
18 Benedict Maria Andersen

creatures of Ezechiel’s vision (Eze 1), assigned to Luke the creature with the
likeness of a calf, which is the animal of sacrifice. Luke’s Gospel, he wrote,
is ‘of a priestly character, [commencing] with Zacharias the priest offering
sacrifice to God. For now was the fatted calf [Christ] being prepared which
was to be sacrificed for the recovery of the younger son [the Gentiles].’14
Centuries later, Saint Bede the Venerable, pointed out that the Evangelist has
enveloped his Gospel in the literary device now known as inclusio:

Luke has undertaken to explain more fully than the rest the priesthood
of Christ; and his Gospel, which he commenced with the ministry of
the temple in the priesthood of Zacharias, he has finished with the
devotion in the temple. And he has placed the Apostles there, about to
be the ministers of a new priesthood, not in the blood of sacrifices, but
in the praises of God and in blessing.15

This is not an exercise in medieval anachronism, but the fruit of a careful

reading of the verse in light of Luke’s narrative as a whole.

luke the iconographer

It is with good reason that pious tradition assigns to Luke the role of the
Church’s first iconographer. Not only does he provide the most complete
verbal icon of the Mother of God (hence the beautiful piety that ascribes
to him the painting of various ancient Marian icons), but he also provides
us, both in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, with a kind of multi-
paneled ‘icon’ of the beginnings of the Church. In Luke’s ‘icon’ of the
Ascension, the bodily dispositions of the Risen Lord and the Eleven function
almost like a code: these are the gestures of Temple worship. Christ the
Great High Priest is imparting his last blessing, with uplifted hands, before
his entrance into the heavenly Holy of Holies, exactly as Aaron did at the
beginning of his high priestly ministry in Leviticus 9. Luke the iconographer
has transposed the image of Aaron, clad in the sacred vestments, fresh from

14 Adversus Hæreses 3.11.8, translation of F.R. Montgomery Hitchcock, The Treatise of Irenæus of Lugdunum
Against the Heresies, vol. 1 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1916), p. 294.
15 Bede, In Lucæ Evang. Expositio, 6, XXIII (PL 92:634); quoted in Bl J.H. Newman’s English edition of
Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Catena Aurea on Saint Luke, vol. III, part II (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843),
p. 794.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 19

the bloody sacrifice, with Christ, who rose again in the glorious apparel of his
humanity, reddened in the wine of his passion (cf. Isa 62:1–3).16
The great Dominican mystagogue, Jean Corbon, writes of the Ascension as
precisely that mystery that creates a ‘new space for the liturgy of the last times,’
of which the physical church or temple is the ‘transparent symbol.’17 Building
on Corbon’s insight, Laurence Paul Hemming refers to the Ascension as the
culmination of a forty day long Paschal ‘pedagogy on the eschaton.’18 ‘[A]n
important exchange takes place,’ writes Hemming:

the physical, bodily presence of the Lord is withdrawn from the

world: but this is not a taking away, it is a transformation in how we
are to understand Jesus’ own being-located … The whole symbolic,
and this means sacramental, order of the Church (as the fulfilment
of the meaning of the Jerusalem Temple) becomes possible on
this day, or rather, every sacramental sign, every ritual gesture and
prayer, the Church herself as an order of sacred signification, comes
to be understood in its possibility on this day. This is the day of the
replacement of the one Temple with the possibility of many temples,
and so of many sites of sanctification, many churches.19

This explains, argues Hemming, the mysterious Noli me tangere of the Risen
Christ to Mary Magdalene (John 20:17–18): the words ‘Do not touch me, for
I have not yet ascended to my Father’ suggest ‘that it will be possible to touch
the Lord once he has ascended,’ through the mysteries and tangible signs he
has entrusted to his Church until the end of the age.20 This is what it means
for the Church to be semper in Templo.

16 One can easily imagine Christ, like Aaron, pronouncing over his disciples the threefold priestly blessing
recorded in Num 6:24–26: ‘The Lord bless you and keep you: The Lord make his face to shine upon
you, and be gracious to you: The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.’ The
Eleven receive the divine blessing with an act of proskynesis or full bodily prostration, a feature of Near
Eastern court ceremonial expressing belief in the divine status of the king. Other examples of proskynesis
include the resurrection appearance of Mt 28:9, and in the story of the penitent woman anointing
and kissing the Lord’s feet (kyneo means ‘to kiss’) (Luke 7:36–50). Cognates of proskynesis appear, not
surprisingly, most often in the Apocalypse (22 times).
17 Jean Corbon, The Wellspring of Worship (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 61.
18 Laurence Paul Hemming, Worship as a Revelation: The Past, Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy
(London: Burns & Oates, 2008), p. 100.
19 Ibid., pp 101–2.
20 Ibid, p. 55.
20 Benedict Maria Andersen

The cultic aspects of Luke’s narrative blend harmoniously with his other
great preoccupation: the discipline of private prayer, of which the Lord is
himself the great exemplar. Three parables which are unique to Luke – the
Unjust Judge, the Friend at Midnight, and the Pharisee and the Publican –
all have to do with persevering, ceaseless prayer.21 Furthermore, the Lord, not
content merely to talk about prayer, shows his disciples physically what it
means ‘to pray always, and not to faint’ (Luke 18:1); we frequently find him
praying to his Father, often in private, especially before or during pivotal
moments in his own life and the life of the Church.22 And finally, Luke alone
among the Evangelists records the Lord’s ‘evening prayer,’ as some have called
it,23 drawn from Psalm 30: Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum,
sent up to the Father with the same priestly gesture of outstretched hands,
though this time nailed fast to the wood of the Cross.
In Acts (the second part of Luke’s history) the image of the praying
Christ becomes the model for the praying Church, or rather, the presence
of the praying Christ in this world becomes inseparable from the praying
Church. Luke paints us another icon, which, in fact, in time becomes an
actual Byzantine icon: the Apostolic Church, assembled in the Cenacle,
keeping solemn vigil until the promise of the Spirit descends from on high.
Many of these icons rightly include Mary in the midst, as a symbol of the
Ecclesia Orans: this seems more than appropriate given the Marian character
of Luke’s Gospel.24 What Luke means by saying Erant semper in Templo, he
immediately begins to develop in the first two chapters of Acts. It means three
things: perseverence in orthodox teaching, partaking in the one Eucharist,

21 The Parables of the Unjust Judge (18:1–8) and the Friend at Midnight (11:5–8) show how prayer should
be ceaseless, relentless, even forceful, a taking of God’s kingdom by violence (Luke 16:16). The Parable
of the Pharisee and the Publican (18:9–14) exemplifies a prayer that is short, simple, humble, repetitive,
engaging both body and soul: in other words, truly liturgical.
22 Namely, his baptism (3:21), his election of the Twelve (6:12), the designation of Simon as the ‘Rock’
(9:18), the Transfiguration (both before and during, 9:28–29), the bestowal of the Pater noster (11:1), and
in Gethsemane before his arrest (22:40–46).
23 Ks. Ryszard Zawadzki, ‘The Prayer of Jesus on the Cross,’ Verbum Vitæ 22 (2012), pp 93–110.
24 The Marian aspect reveals hidden depths when viewed through a Temple lens. The Virgin’s fiat to the
mysterious designs of God parallels the priestly, psalmic (liturgical) dialogue of the Son with the Father
at the moment of his Incarnation: ‘Sacrifice and oblation thou wouldest not: but a body thou hast fitted
to me. … In the head of the book it is written of me: that I should do thy will, O God’ (Ps 39 [LXX] via
Heb 10). Now Solomon receives an answer to his question at the dedication of the Temple: ‘Is it then to
be thought that God should indeed dwell upon earth? for if heaven, and the heaven of heavens cannot
contain thee, how much less this house which I have built?’ (III Kings 8:27). The womb of the Virgin
becomes, as the Greeks sing, platytera ton ouranon, ‘more spacious than the heaven,’ or, as the Latins sing
in the Litany of Loreto, Domus aurea and Fœderis arca (‘House of gold’ and ‘Ark of the covenant’).
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 21

and participation in something which Luke calls ‘the prayers,’ in Greek tais
proseuchais (Acts 2:42). That this is a formal discipline of prayer is made clear
by Luke’s inclusion of the definite article, tais. Ronald Knox’s translation here
– ‘the fixed times of prayer’ – is a bit bold, but it does make clear that this
worship is structured and well-defined.

‘the temple of his body’

Almost midway through Luke’s Gospel, there is a not-so-subtle shift. Luke

has so far painted a very sympathetic portrait of the Jerusalem Temple. At
the end of chapter 13, however, that portrait begins to darken. The very
place where the one true God dwells among his people – the axis mundi,
the beating heart of creation – is declared by Christ to be empty, forsaken,
and doomed (Luke 13:35); his violent cleansing of it plays a crucial role in his
condemnation and death. Given the Temple’s cosmic significance, it is no
wonder that the Lord’s prediction of the Temple’s destruction is framed in
terms of a cosmic cataclysm (Luke 21:25–26). His horrible prediction comes
to fulfilment in the year 70, exactly as he said, in the lifetime of his disciples
(Luke 21:5, 32). Hence the words of Saint Melito of Sardis (†c.180):

Nothing, beloved, is spoken or made without an analogy and a sketch

… This is what occurs in the case of a first draft; it is not a finished
work but exists so that, through the model, that which is to be can be
seen. When the thing comes about of which the sketch was a type, that
which was to be, of which the type bore the likeness, then the type is
destroyed, it has become useless, it yields up the image to what is truly
real. What was once valuable becomes worthless, when what is of true
value appears. … The temple below was of value, now it is worthless
because of the heavenly Christ.25

It is in light of Luke’s narrative shift in ch. 13 that one must read his
statement (24:53) of the Apostles’ continuous offering of praise ‘in the
Temple.’ The body of the earthly Temple has given way to the ‘Temple of
his (Christ’s) Body’ (John 21:1), born of the Virgin, crucified, buried, risen,

25 Peri Pascha 35–37, 44; translation by Alistair Stewart-Sykes, in On Pascha, with the fragments of Melito
and other material related to the Quartodecimans (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001),
p. 48.
22 Benedict Maria Andersen

and taken up to the Father’s right hand, yet ever present in this world, until
the end of the age, in his Body the Church. This is the background of Paul’s
astonishing statement, that it is through the Church that God’s ‘manifold
wisdom,’ the ‘mystery hidden from eternity [in him] who created all things,’
has been revealed: not just to humanity but also ‘to the principalities and
powers in heavenly places’ (Eph 3:9–10).
The Church as Temple is revealed as the true centre piece of God’s saving
oikonomia: ‘Thou hast redeemed us to God, in thy blood, out of every tribe,
and tongue, and people, and nation: and hast made us to our God a kingdom
and priests, and we shall reign on the earth’ (Apoc 5:10; cf. I Pet 2:9). What
Luke has given us, in a few words, is the Church’s primitive ecclesiology: she
is the Qahal or Ekklesia of the end times, the liturgical, sacerdotal community
taken from all nations, as foretold by the Prophet Isaias (66:18–21):

I come that I may gather them together with all nations and tongues:
and they shall come and shall see my glory. And I will set a sign among
them, and I will send of them that shall be saved, to the Gentiles into
the sea, into Africa, and Lydia them that draw the bow: into Italy, and
Greece, to the islands afar off, to them that have not heard of me, and
have not seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory to the Gentiles:
and they shall bring all your brethren out of all nations for a gift to
the Lord, upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters, and on mules,
and in coaches, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, saith the Lord, as if
the children of Israel should bring an offering in a clean vessel into the
house of the Lord. And I will take of them to be priests, and Levites,
saith the Lord.26

If indeed Luke was a Gentile (which seems likely),27 presumably it was

through his father-in-God, Paul, that he came to understand the complex
symbol that was the Jewish Temple. In other words, he was ‘initiated,’ in some
way, into the world of Jewish apocalypticism viewed through the lens of the
Passion and Resurrection of Christ.28 Rabbinic tradition after ad 70 preserved
26 See also Isa 43:21, 61:6, 12 and Mal 3:17.
27 When Paul mentions Luke in Col 4, it is not among a list of associates of Paul who are ‘of the
circumcision.’
28 Apocalypticism throughout this paper refers not to the ‘end times’ but to a semitic genre of writing
(appearing around 200 BC) in which a prophet or seer is granted a vision of the unseen world through
the pulling aside of the veil of the visible world, in other words, revelation of the spiritual realities
which lie behind the sensate, material world. The individual, accompanied by an otherworldly guide,
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 23

a saying attributed to the High Priest Simeon the Righteous (likely Simon
I, who served c.280 bc) that ‘[b]y three things is the world sustained: by the
Law, by the Temple Service, and by deeds of loving kindness.’29 Luke might
have known this precise saying from Paul, or something similar. He would
have also known that Paul’s expectation of a cosmic renewal through Christ
was framed in the conceptual language of the Temple: ‘for God indeed was
in Christ, reconciling the world to himself ’ (II Cor 5:19; see also Col 1:12–27,
Rom 8:18–23, Apoc 21). Luke would have understood that Jesus of Nazareth
– enthroned at the Father’s right hand in his crucified and glorified flesh –
now fulfills the role that the Temple played within creation, or rather that
the Temple was a model of Christ. It is no wonder, then, that Luke begins
his ‘Good News’ at the altar of incense, the last ‘station,’ as it were, before
one reached the great veil setting apart the Holy of Holies, into which the
High Priest entered on the Day of Atonement as part of an elaborate series of
sacrificial acts.

retracing the steps of creation

Margaret Barker offers an explanation of the Temple’s cosmic role by

suggesting that its various parts represented the six days of creation recorded
in Genesis 1 – though, counter-intuitively, it is not so that the Genesis
account that is then later replicated in the Temple, but rather the plan of the
Temple was first revealed to Moses, and Genesis 1 reproduces it as a narrative.
Barker, based upon a number of sources, proposes that

[in] the six days when Moses was on Sinai, before the Lord called to
him (Exod 24:16), he saw the six days of creation, and was then told to
replicate these when he built the tabernacle. A few ancient sources say
that Moses saw the heavenly temple; but most assume that he saw the
process of creation, and that the tabernacle represented this.30
is taken into the heavenly realm/temple and is granted initiation into its mysteries, that is, into the
heavenly priesthood. The mortal is in some sense ‘deified’ and takes on the identity/appearance of an
angelic concelebrant in the eternal liturgy. Having beheld the Glory of God and other ineffable things,
he returns to the earthly realm, invested with divine authority as God’s messenger. Christianity both
embraces this genre and transforms it at the same time.
29 From Pirke Aboth, or ‘Sayings of the Fathers,’ in the Mishnah, 1.2. Translation from Margaret Barker,
The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London: T&T Clark, 2003), p. 83.
30 Margaret Barker, ‘Creation Theology’ (a talk delivered at Wakefield, Yorkshire, 2004), taken from Barker’s
official website <http://www.margaretbarker.com/Papers/CreationTheology.pdf> (retrieved 25 Aug 2018).
24 Benedict Maria Andersen

The High Priest, proceeding through the various sections of the Temple
towards the Holy of Holies, symbolically retraced the steps of creation. Day
six, the day of the creation of Adam, is represented by the human priest
himself. Day five, the creation of land animals, is represented by the altar
of sacrifice, whereon cattle were slaughtered and burnt. Day four, on which
the lights of heaven were made, was represented by the seven-branched
candlestick. The table whereon the Shewbread and the wine libation were
offered corresponded to day three, when the Lord brought forth the fruits of
the earth.
Day two, represented by the great veil, is of crucial importance in
understanding what the Temple represented. The description in Genesis of
the separation of waters above and water below the firmament was its way
of expressing the separation of the realm of time and matter from the realm
of God and the angelic hosts. We know that the veil was woven from four
materials: white linen, and wool in three colours, blue, scarlet, and purple.
The linen, from flax, represented earth; purple, since it was extracted from
mollusks, symbolised water; blue represented the sky; and scarlet stood in
for fire. The vestments of the High Priest were woven of the same materials.
Christianity was to adopt the symbolism of the veil as a representation of
the Incarnation, that is, the invisible, uncreated One putting on the visible
garment of human flesh, which was made from the earth. The rending of the
veil of the Temple is the rending of the veil of Christ’s flesh upon the Cross.
Day One, beyond the veil, was the realm of the God who ‘dwells in
light inaccessible’ (I Tim 6:16). It should not, as Barker insists, be called
‘the first day’ as if in a series, as part and parcel of chronological time. It
is instead ‘Day One,’ the state outside of time, the realm of God and of
the bodiless powers who, though created themselves, were closely associated
with the divine unity. This is the meaning of the golden throne in the shape
of two cherubim, upon which the divine shekinah, the presence of the Lord
of Hosts, rested. The Temple retraced the work of creation because it was
intended as a divine corrective for the chaos that sin had introduced into
creation. The sin of Adam and Eve was not merely personal but cosmic:
the falling away of man spelt doom for irrational creation, because it was
through him that creation partook in the divine, invisible reality which
gave shape, form, and existence to all things. It was through the rites and
ceremonies of the Temple, divinely appointed, that the fabric of creation,
rent asunder by sin, could be repaired.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 25

The Levitical ministry of music was a crucial part of this reparation.

The fullest and most positive accounts of Temple music occur in I and II
Paralipomenon (or Chronicles). ‘Even before the Temple was built,’ Barker
writes, ‘David established musicians to serve before the ark, to invoke, to
praise and to thank the Lord … . Their music was to invoke the divine presence.’31
There was an original cosmic harmony, an angelic song which predated the
foundations of the earth – ‘when the morning stars praised me together, and
all the sons of God made a joyful melody’ (Job 38:7) – a harmony to which
man, as the representative of the material creation, was meant to join his
voice. He rejected his calling, and thus introduced into the cosmos a horrible
dissonance. However, man, through the Temple and through the liturgy of
the Church, can resume his part in the Canticum Novum,32 and through
him, so too can everything that God has placed in subjection under his feet
(cf. Ps 8). ‘Through heaven and earth and sea,’ said Saint Leontius of Crete
(556–634),

through wood and stone, through all creation visible and invisible, I
offer veneration to the Creator and Master and Maker of all things. For
the creation does not venerate the Maker directly and by itself, but it is
through me that the heavens declare the glory of God, through me the
moon worships God, through me the stars glorify him, through me the
waters and showers of rain, the dews and all creation, venerate God and
give him glory.33

the ‘already but not yet’

Over the course of the centuries, the Church remained faithful to this vision,
even when the exact details of the original Temple context had been obscured
or forgotten altogether. The fact was almost too obvious to be pointed out:
the mysteries of the Christian dispensation, expressed in the liturgical and
sacramental forms passed down from the Apostles, had their roots in the
worship of the Mosaic Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon. The Church’s
31 ‘Margaret Barker on Temple Music,’ taken from T&T Clark’s Theology & Biblical Studies blog, 4 June
2009 <http://tandtclark.typepad.com/ttc/2009/06/margaret-barker-on-temple-music.html> (retrieved
25 Aug. 2018). Emphasis original.
32 See Pss 95, 97, 143, 149; Isa 42:10; Apoc 5:9, 14:2–3.
33 Third apologetic sermon on the holy icons (PG 93:1604ab). Translation in Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox
Way (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981), p. 70.
26 Benedict Maria Andersen

Head and Bridegroom was the Great Melchizedech, High Priest, begotten
of his Father before the dawn of creation, as the Church of Rome sang in
Psalm 109 Sunday by Sunday, and on the most important feasts. He was the
Agnus Dei, ‘the Pure Victim, the Holy Victim, the Spotless Victim,’ offered
‘on behalf of all and for all’34 upon the altar of the Cross. She was his Body
and his true Temple upon earth, and her churches were also temples, almost
always built with the same proportions as the Tabernacle and Temple. The
iconography of their temples often presented the figures and events of the
Old Testament almost as contemporaries, always pointing the way to Christ
and to the mystery enacted upon the altar. When bishops were consecrated,
they became high priests; the presbyters, their deputies, were like the seventy
men appointed by Moses; the deacons were Levites. The Church’s choirs,
monastic or otherwise, were the choirs of angels.
The old Temple was the typos (the stamped impression) of the antitypos,
the Church (the original stamp); but the Church is in turn the typos of the
antitypos of the Kingdom as it will be when Christ will be ‘all in all’ (I Cor
15:28), when ‘this body of corruption will have put on incorruption’ (v 54).
This is the ‘already but not yet’ character of the liturgy. The liturgy of the
Apocalypse (in the words of Paul Evdokimov) ‘gives form and structure to the
earthly liturgy; the heavenly celebration confers on the earthly its character
of being an icon of the celestial liturgy.’35 There will be a time when there
will be ‘no Temple’ (Apoc 21:22), when the Sacraments of the New Law, even
the Eucharist, will pass away, as Saint Thomas Aquinas explains (following
Dionysius’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy): ‘the state of the New Law is between the
state of the Old Law, whose figures are fulfilled in the New, and the state of
glory, in which all truth will be openly and perfectly revealed.’36 Saint Bede
uses Temple/Church symbolism to explain the state of the Church between
the Ascension and the Parousia:

This division of the Lord’s house is a clear figure of a mystery and,

thanks to the explanation of the Apostle (Heb 9:1–9), is clearer than
daylight because the first house [the Holy Place] into which ‘the priests’
continually ‘go performing their ritual duties’ is the present Church,
34 Quotations, respectively, of the Roman Canon and the Anaphoræ of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy.
35 Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood Publications,
1990), p. 38
36 Summa Theologiæ, III, q. 61, art. 4, ad. 1. Translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province
(New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), p. 2349.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 27

where, intent upon works of piety, we daily offer sacrifices of praise to

the Lord, but the inner house [the Holy of Holies], which was built
at the rear of the temple, is the promised life in heaven, which indeed
precedes this life of our exile, which is celebrated there in the presence
of the supreme king as a perpetual solemnity of the blessed, both angels
and humankind.37

paradise lost

It is only in the context of the Reformation that we find the first

widespread rejection of the Temple as the ideal model of Christian worship.
Protestantism, especially of the Reformed/Calvinistic variety, with its desire
for simple, primitive worship, and emphasis on biblical literalism, then put
forward a different model: the synagogue, with its focus upon the study and
teaching of the Torah. ‘Romish’ ceremonies were sometimes condemned
precisely on the basis of their similarity to those of the Temple. Thus John
Foxe, in his ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Acts and Monuments of the Church, 1563),
portrays medieval Catholicism as having fallen back into Jewish superstition,
‘in so much, that there could be no great difference almost perceived between
Christianity and Jewishness, save only the name of Christ.’38 The Scottish
Presbyterian author James Oswald Dykes (1835–1901), in his study of the early
Church (1874), contrasts the Hellenized synagogue Judaism of the diaspora
with the Palestinian Judaism of the Temple in terms almost too chauvinistic
to believed:

Cut off from the Temple ritual on Mount Zion, [the Hellenized Jews]
carried with them neither priest nor sacrifice … The local, temporary,
external parts of Mosaism, its cumbrous dress of liturgy and washings and
victims, had to be left behind. … [By their] simple unsacerdotal worship

37 De Templo Salomonis, lib. 1, ch. 9. (PL 91:758b). English text from Bede: On the Temple (Translated Texts
for Historians, Volume 21), trans. with notes by Seán Connolly (Liverpool University Press, 1995), p. 37.
38 The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: A New and Complete Edition, Volume 2, Stephen Reed Cattley, ed.
(London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837), p. 793. Foxe later adduces as proof of this unacceptable
Judaising a statement by Pope Boniface VIII (reigned, 1294–1303), that ‘my institution began in the
Old Testament, in that my priesthood was prefigured by Aaron; and other bishops under me were
prefigured by the sons of Aaron, that were under him.’ Foxe cleverly prefaces this section of his screed as
‘The Image of the Antichrist, exalting himself in the Temple of God, above all that is named God’ (cf.
II Thess. 2:4). Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, Volume 4, p. 145.
28 Benedict Maria Andersen

they really were both prepared themselves and helped to prepare the
Greek world for the preaching of a more spiritual faith. … [T] horough
Hebrews in their monotheism, but with less Hebrew bigotry or
traditionalism than their Palestine countrymen … [these] were the men
to whom we chiefly owe it, under God, that the Church of Jesus grew
out of all risk of continuing a Judæan sect, and became the religion of
civilized mankind.39

About the same time (1889), in a very different ecclesiastical context, Msgr
Louis Duchesne (who very narrowly escaped the ecclesiastical fate of his pupil
Alfred Loisy40), states with an air of nearly infallible certainty, that the Temple

did not in any way influence the Christian Liturgy, and the connection
which the commentators of the Middle Ages delighted to point out
between the ritual of the Pentateuch and that of the Church cannot be
taken seriously. Everything that has been said on this point is a matter of
mere imagination, and has no basis in tradition.41

‘No basis in tradition’ is a rather bold, unequivocal statement; it is also

demonstrably false. If the presence of Temple themes on practically every
page of the New Testament is not enough (and verse by verse in books such
as Hebrews and the Apocalypse), patristic literature from the earliest post-
apostolic period onward shows how these themes continued to exercise a
great influence over the Church’s faith and practice. Clement of Rome, in
his Epistle to the Corinthians (likely the second oldest extant post-apostolic
writing, c.96), could not make the point more clearly that the various orders
in the Church (including the laity) correspond to the Temple priesthood, and
are organized in a harmonious order as in the Temple:

39 From Jerusalem to Antioch: Sketches of the Primitive Church (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1874),
pp 210–211. Emphasis added.
40 Alfred Firmin Loisy (1857-1940), a French priest and biblical scholar, is often considered, along with
George Tyrrell, as the father of theological modernism in the Catholic Church. He was excommunicated
in 1908 for his teaching that (as Sheridan Gilley put it) Jesus was “a limited first century Jew who,
by great good fortune, had inadvertently founded the Catholic Church” (‘The Years of Equipoise,
1892–1942’, in V.A. McClelland and M. Hodgetts (ed.), From within the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of
Catholicism in England and Wales [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1999], p. 37).
41 Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution; A Study of the Latin Liturgy up to the Time of Charlemagne,
trans. M.L. McClure (5th ed.: London: SPCK, 1931), p. 46. Emphasis added.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 29

Now the offerings and ministrations He commanded to be performed

with care, and not to be done rashly or in disorder, but at fixed times
and seasons. And where and by whom He would have them performed,
He Himself fixed by His supreme will: that all things being done with
piety according to His good pleasure might be acceptable to His will.
They therefore that make their offerings at the appointed seasons are
acceptable and blessed: for while they follow the institutions of the
Master they cannot go wrong. For unto the high priest [the bishop]
his proper services have been assigned, and to the priests their proper
office is appointed, and upon the levites their proper ministrations are
laid. The layman is bound by the layman’s ordinances. Let each of you,
brethren, in his own order give thanks unto God, maintaining a good
conscience and not transgressing the appointed rule of his service, but
acting with all seemliness.42

Given the Church’s traditional adherence to the principle of lex orandi,

lex credendi, the most powerful testimony to her ‘Temple theology’ is in the
traditional rites (Eastern and Western) for the dedication of a church.43 If
one wants to know what the Roman Church, for instance, believes about
the Church as the continuation/fulfillment of the Jewish Temple he will find
the answer in the traditional Pontifical, Breviary, and Missal.44 It is here we
find the ‘Temple idea’ at work on its various symbolic levels. Since the liturgy
itself is the best interpreter of the liturgy, and the liturgy is the expression
par excellence of holy Tradition, surely we cannot dismiss these texts as being
merely the products of overheated, credulous pre-modern minds!45

42 Ch. 41. Translation in J.B. Lightfoot and J.R. Harmer, The Apostolic Fathers (London: Macmillan and
Co., 1907), pp 74–75.
43 Cipriano Vaggagini OSB, a member of the ‘Consilium’ which produced the reformed post-conciliar
Roman liturgical books, lamented that ‘the current Liturgy of the Hours is insensitive to this rich
liturgical heritage’ and expressed hope that ‘it will be remedied in the next “reform”.’ (!) (Theological
Dimensions of the Liturgy, trans. Leonard J. Doyle and W.A. Jurgens [Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical
Press, 1976], p. 498). Of course, Vaggagini had not yet seen the 1977 Ordo dedicationis ecclesiæ et altaris.
It represents a radical theological break wherein, essentially, the physical church is not actually hallowed,
and the community, as the real temple, in essence, constructs and blesses itself by coming together to
celebrate the Eucharist.
44 See also the traditional formulæ for the blessing of vestments, altar linens, chalice and paten, the
baptism of a bell, and, of course, the rites of ordination.
45 In 2010 Oxford University Press published a fascinating book by a young American scholar, Michael G.
Legaspi, about the early days of German higher criticism. The title of the book striking: The Death of
Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies. One could well write a sequel entitled The Death of Liturgy and
the Rise of Liturgical Studies.
30 Benedict Maria Andersen

The belief, still fairly common,46 that the synagogue provided the template
of early Christian liturgy47 is now largely discredited, having been put down
in large part by Paul Bradshaw.48 He has shown that we simply do not know
nearly enough about the complex, diverse reality of synagogue life in the
first century to be able to say for sure how specific forms and elements may
have been picked up by Christianity; there is even the possibility that the
synagogue borrowed from the Church! Nor are we sure whether or not there
was, at the time of Christ and the earliest Christians, a ‘synagogue liturgy’
to speak of; we know nothing for certain other than scripture reading and
preaching. It may well be that the synagogue liturgy, as it appeared later,
developed in part in reaction to Christianity. The discovery of the richly
decorated synagogue and church at Dura Europos, as well as the magisterial
work of the late John Wilkinson, entitled From Synagogue to Church: The
Traditional Design, further complicates matters for the ‘synagogue thesis’ as it
shows that both synagogues and churches were built to be tiny copies of the
Temple. Both Christians and Jews believed in a heavenly Temple, and built
their houses of worship accordingly.49

46 It is a commonplace of catechetical literature, for instance, that the early Jewish Christians would go
to the synagogue for the reading of the Scriptures and to their homes for the ‘breaking of the bread’,
and that after A.D. 70 and the ‘expulsion from the synagogue’, the Christians combined the synagogue
service with the Eucharist. Sometimes the description of the Christian assembly given by Justin Martyr
in his First Apology is given as proof, though Justin himself makes no such connection, and would
be extremely unlikely to do so, given his attitude towards the synagogue expressed elsewhere (e.g.
‘as the rulers of your synagogues teach you to do after your prayers’, Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 137).
Justin would almost certainly have wanted to provide a purposely vague and innocuous description for
two reasons: (1) to counter pagan hysteria about a secretive new Oriental sect which may or may not
engage in aberrant sex, ritual murder, cannibalism, and sedition, and (2) because of the disciplina arcani.
47 The classic expressions of this viewpoint in English are W.O.E. Oesterley’s The Jewish Background of the
Christian Liturgy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925) and C.W. Dugmore’s The Influence of the Synagogue
Upon the Divine Office (London: Humphrey Milford, 1944).
48 It is also to Bradshaw principally that we owe the debunking of many of the claims made by 20th
century liturgists concerning what might be most accurately decribed as the Pseudo-Apostolic Pseudo-
Tradition of Pseudo-Hippolytus. See Bradshaw, “Hippolytus Revisited: The Identity of the So-Called
‘Apostolic Tradition”’, Liturgy, 16:1, 6–11 (2000).
49 Admittedly, all of this begs the question as to why early Christian writings, in general, speak in so
little detail about the precise ways in which early Christian practice continued, or recalled, Temple
practice. Space does not permit any discussion of this important question, but readers will profit from
Margaret Barker’s essay ‘The Secret Tradition’, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian
Liturgy (London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp 1–33.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 31

‘sicut incensum in conspectu tuo’

The Temple roots of the Divine Office are well attested in the patristic
tradition, especially Lauds and Vespers, which the Church regards as ‘the two
hinges on which the daily Office turns’.50 Eusebius of Cæsarea, writing in
the time of Constantine, and thus at the time of the Church’s triumphant
emergence from the shadows, speaks of an already well-established and
universal custom of morning and evening worship.51 Tertullian (†c.220)
states in no uncertain terms that morning and evening devotions are legitimæ
orationes which are obligatory (debentur) for Christians because commanded
by God in the Old Law (that is, for Temple worship).52 The reference is to
the morning and evening sacrifices described in Exodus 29:38–42 (two lambs,
morning and evening, at the altar which stood outside of the Holy Place
in the Court of the Priests) and Exodus 30:39–41 (two offerings of incense,
morning and evening, in the Holy Place, near the veil).
Saint John Chrysostom (†407), referring to these divine prescriptions,
wrote that ‘God had ordered this to be done, signifying through it that it is
necessary to be zealous in praising him both at the beginning and the end
of the day’.53 The Apostolic Constitutions (Syrian, c.380) prescribe the use of
Psalm 62 in the morning, and Psalm 140 in the evening.54 The traditional
Roman and Benedictine Offices still feature Psalm 62 at Lauds on Sundays
and greater feasts, and at Vespers Psalm 140 is (vestigially) present in the form
of versicle which regularly occurs just before the incensation of the altar:
Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea / Sicut incensum in conspectu tuo. Juan Mateos
S.J. suggested55 that in the Roman Rite the oblatio incensi at Vespers and
(in former times regularly) at Lauds is connected to the intercession of the
saints (as in Apoc 5:8 and 8:3–4), particularly those ones who symbolise the
transition from the Old Covenant to the New: hence Our Lady’s Magnificat,

50 Laudes, ut preces matutinæ, et Vesperæ, ut preces vespertinæ, ex venerabili universæ Ecclesiæ traditione duplex
cardo Officii cotidiani, Horæ præcipuæ habendæ sunt et ita celebrandæ (Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 89a).
51 Eusebius of Cæsarea, Commentary on Ps. 64 (PG 23.649b); translation from Juan Mateos, ‘The
Morning and Evening Office’, Worship 42:1 (Jan. 1968).
52 De Oratione 25:1–3 (PL 1:1193). He seems to have in mind a round of private prayers that can also be
prayed corporately.
53 Commentary on Ps. 140 (PG 55.430), trans. in Juan Mateos, ‘The Morning and Evening Office’,
Worship 42:1 (Jan. 1968).
54 Apostolic Constitutions, II:59.
55 Juan Mateos, ‘The Morning and Evening Office’, Worship 42:1 (Jan. 1968), pp 43, 46.
32 Benedict Maria Andersen

and the Benedictus of Zacharias, father of the Forerunner (both from the
Gospel of Luke, no less!).56

apocalypse now?

This paper was originally intended as a review of the history of the Divine
Office; the finished product is far from that. What is sorely needed is not a
rehash of the usual historical account (which can be easily had in reference
books or online): what is needed is – apologies to Dr Kant – a ‘prolegomenon’
to any future liturgical history. Before one can speak of what the Office is, he
or she must come to grips with the complex problem of Christian origins;
and that, in large part, has to do with the way in which the earliest Christian
communities absorbed and interpreted the Jewish apocalyptic worldview.
Any account of liturgical origins that has little time for the conceptual world
of the Temple has already ‘gone astray’, as the Psalmist said, ‘from the womb’
(cf. Ps 57). Rather, one must start where where John, or Paul, or Peter, or
indeed, the Messiah himself, would have started: with a deeply Hebraic vision
of God’s creation, and the Holy of Holies as its beating heart. The Christian
religion is ‘Temple-shaped’: its memory is, as it were, ‘hard-coded’ into the
structure of the faith itself, ever present in the living memory of the Church.
The rhetorical question which Saint Paul put to the Church at Corinth
resonates throughout the ages: ‘Know you not, that you are the temple of
God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? But if any man violate the
temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which
you are’ (I Cor 3:16–17).
When Ernst Käsemann wrote his famous comment that ‘apocalyptic[ism]
was the mother of Christian theology’57, he was (not unlike Caiaphas in
Jn 11:49–53) uttering an unwitting prophecy. What Käsemann meant by
‘apocalypticism’ is very different from the way that most scholars understand
it today. For Käsemann, ‘apocalyptic’ is shorthand for the ‘imminent
expectation of the parousia’.58 When this hope, promised by Jesus, did not
materialise, the Christian community began to settle down in this world ‘for

56 Incense is also connected to the notion of saintly intercession through the story of Moses and Aaron
offering incense as an atonement for the sins of the people (Num. 16:46–48).
57 ‘The Beginnings of Christian Theology’, in New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W.J. Montague
(London: SCM, 1969), p. 102.
58 ‘On the Subject of Primitive Christian Apocalyptic,’’ New Testament Questions of Today, p. 109, n. 1.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 33

the long haul’ and eventually became the hierarchical, liturgical, sacramental
‘Great Church’. Käsemann was right about the centrality of the ‘apocalyptic’
in the New Testament, but almost entirely mistaken about the nature
and content of the early Christian community’s ‘apocalypticism’. ‘Early
catholicism’, far from being the rejection of the ‘apocalyptic’, turns out to be
its legitimate successor. Jewish apocalypticism is the daughter of the Temple,
and liturgical/sacramental/catholic Christianity is its granddaughter. It is at
home in the world of stone temples, altars, priests, water, bread, wine, oil,
fire, and incense. It is precisely through these things – being semper in Templo
– that the Church maintains her apocalyptic orientation and ultimately resists
(sometimes very narrowly!) capitulation to the spirit of the world.
Biblical scholarship is coming more and more to recognise Temple-inspired
Jewish apocalypticism as the key for understanding the New Testament.
Liturgical scholarship, on the other hand, once so closely allied with biblical
scholarship, shows little evidence of interest in following where the same
field is going today. Perhaps this is not surprising, since most liturgical
scholars today remain more or less committed to the reformist mindset of
the 1960’s and 1970’s. Perhaps they sense in a Temple-inspired approach –
with its unabashed sacerdotalism (sometimes mistaken as clericalism), robust
sacramentalism, and atmosphere of the mysterious and suprarational – potent
fuel for a liturgical counter-revolution. When one begins to see as normative
for Christianity the genuinely Jewish apocalypticism of the Gospel of John,
the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Book of the Apocalypse, so many of the
wornout tropes of modern liturgical studies (ritual complexity, mysticisation,
and clerical elitism) begin to reveal themselves as what, deep down, they are:
essentially modern, Darwinian and even Marxist in inspiration.59
Many despised traditional practices – shared with the Christian East – such
as sotto voce recitation of priestly prayers, increasing architectural separation
between sanctuary and nave, or the rise of allegorical interpretation, begin to
make sense as part of the gradual unfolding, under the guidance of the Spirit
of Truth, of that very first burst of praise and blessing from the lips of the first
Christian priests, made possible precisely by the disappearance of the great
High Priest beyond the veil of the visible creation. The liturgy of the Church

59 This is not to say that liturgical ‘traditionalists’ cannot be ideological. Any Christianity in which the
liturgy – the meeting place of God and man, heaven and earth – is simply a piece of furniture in one’s
ideological house (of whatever point on the left-right spectrum) is tantamount to ‘having a form of
godliness but denying the power thereof ’ (II Tim. 3:5, AV).
34 Benedict Maria Andersen

is the fruit of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection, actualised by the Ascension
and Pentecost: a humble sapling that, through the gentle, patient cultivation
of Divine Providence, grows into a mighty tree with many branches, which
we call the great liturgical traditions of Christendom.

‘let grace come and this world pass away’ 60

Scholars will continue to debate these matters, as they must; theories and
hypotheses will be adopted, attacked, defended, altered, abandoned, or
revived. Such discourse has been and will continue to be an important part of
the ‘new liturgical movement’ first proposed by Cardinal Ratzinger in 1997–
1998, which received such an impetus under the pontificate of the same man
as Pope Benedict XVI, and which remains alive in the teaching of men such
as Robert Cardinal Sarah, or Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, present with
us today. The future Pope spoke of the need for such a movement in terms
of a recovery of Catholic liturgical life from the ‘enormous harm’ done by
a hasty, academically-driven reform which set up ‘a new construction over
against what had grown historically’, making the sacred liturgy itself ‘appear
no longer [to be] a living development but the product of erudite work and
juridical authority.’

For then the impression had to emerge that liturgy is something ‘made’,
not something given in advance but something lying within our own
power of decision. […] When liturgy is self-made, however, then it can
no longer give us what its proper gift should be: the encounter with
the mystery that is not our own product but rather our origin and the
source of our life.61

This ‘gift’ from above that is the liturgy is none other than the mystery of
the pattern shown to Moses on Sinai: ‘They shall make me a sanctuary, and I
will dwell in the midst of them: according to all the likeness of the tabernacle
which I will shew thee, and of all the vessels for the service thereof: and thus
you shall make it’ (Exod 25:9). God, writes Ratzinger,

60 Didache 10:1–7.
61 Milestones: Memoirs, 1927–1977 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), pp 147–148.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 35

through the mediation of Moses, makes a covenant with [Israel], a

covenant concretised in a minutely regulated form of worship. …
Israel learns how to worship God in the way he himself desires. Cult,
liturgy in the proper sense, is part of this worship, but so too is life
according to the will of God; such a life is an indispensable part of true
worship. ‘The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the
vision of God’, says St. Irenaeus (cf. Adv. Haer. 4, 20, 7), getting to the
heart of what happens when man meets God on the mountain in the
wilderness. Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living
righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real
life when it receives its form from looking toward God. Cult exists in
order to communicate this vision and to give life in such a way that
glory is given to God.62

The alternative to the grateful reception of the gift is what Ratzinger called
‘the self-generated cult’ of the golden calf, which brings only ‘frustration and a
feeling of emptiness.’63 Liturgy of any sort (‘new’ or ‘old’) that cannot meet the
need of every human being (however fleetingly or obscurely) for theophany, a
glimpse of the Kingdom, of ‘the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory’ (Luke 21:27), is not liturgy equipped to convince,
persuade, enchant our world. Laurence Paul Hemming describes just such an
experience, in the context of a solemn celebration of the Divine Office:

The eternal song of praise, and the renewal of the earth in which we are
called to join in Templo, surely requires a magnificence and awe-giving
splendour? Who, having heard it sung in dead of night in a shivering
cold choir could fail to be moved in that heaven-borne direction by the
historic chant of so many of the great Invitatoria of the Antiphonary,
ushering in, in shade and text and tone of exaltation, the sanctifying
work (and so letting-appear the given grace) of each God-granted
new day? Last time I was in Moscow, one freezing February Saturday
evening, I went to pontifical vespers at Sergiyev Posad (Zagorsk).
The church was twilight-dim and packed to the gills, the three-sided
iconostasis aglow with light and chant until the doors burst open and

62 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000),
pp 17–18.
63 Ibid, p. 23.
36 Benedict Maria Andersen

the Patriarch and thirteen of his bishops poured out and processed
through the throng, blessing us. I understand the eastern office-cycle
very little, and yet the symbolism left no doubt – of heaven befalling
earth and setting the two in proper proportion, one to the other. Many
texts, especially in the renaissance and baroque poetic traditions speak
of the marriage of earth and heaven as if it were a singular event. Of
course, all genuine marriages are ongoing, condition-giving relations:
they unfold their manner of being not once, but continually. This was
that marriage, performed, illuminated, set before us so that we were let
in to its visibility and gathered up into its reality.64

This same vision, the Kingdom breaking into this world, will be offered
us in a few short hours in the form of the Solemn Pontifical Vespers at
the Throne, presided over by His Eminence Cardinal Burke, under whose
presidency we will offer our sacrificium vespertinum, ‘the fruit of lips that
acknowledge his name’ (Heb 13:15). Provided that we approach with the fear
of God and faith, and have the eyes to see and ears to hear65, we may catch
a glimpse, not of a man dressed as if he stepped out of the Renaissance, but
the great High Priest, God amongst his people, Emmanuel (Isa 7:14, Mt 1:23):
‘And presently the Lord, whom you seek, and the angel of the testament,
whom you desire, shall come to his temple. Behold he cometh, saith the Lord
of hosts’ (Mal 3:1). We may, even just for a moment, recognise in this entrance
not something merely utilitarian, or else a vestige of post-Constantinian
triumphalism, but the Verbum supernum prodiens of whom David sang,
dancing before the Ark: ‘They have seen, O God, thy processions: how thou
goest, my King and my God, in sanctuary’ (Ps 67).
We may see surrounding him, not just clerics and servers, but the heavenly
escort of ‘the King of kings and Lord of lords, Christ our God, [coming]
forward to be sacrificed … the bands of angels [going before] with every
power and dominion, the many-eyed cherubim, and the six-winged seraphim,

64 From private correspondence, 25 June 2018.

65 Saint Maximus the Confessor, in his Mystagogy (ch. 24), teaches that the grace of the Spirit ‘at the time
of the holy synaxis … transforms and changes each person who is found there and in fact remolds him
in proportion to what is more divine in him and leads him to what is revealed through the mysteries
which are being celebrated, even if he does not himself feel this because he is still among those who are
children in Christ.’ The entrance into the assembly signifies ‘rejection of unbelief, the increase of faith,
the lessening of vice, the bestowal of virtue, the disappearance of ignorance, and the development of
knowledge’, thus leading the soul over time to an ever clearer perception of what the mysteries signify.
Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 206.
Et erant semper in templo: The Divine Office as Priestly Temple Service 37

covering their faces, and crying aloud the hymn, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.’66
We may even see in the cappa magna (that much despised garment!67) not a
cover for the ‘hinder parts’ of a horse, but the glorious train that Isaias saw
filling the temple (Isa 6:1). When he is stripped of it, our mind’s eye may see
a rough image of the One who divested himself of his glory and gave himself
over to the shameful death of the Cross:

He endured the nails, the spitting, Hic acetum, fel, arundo,

Vinegar, and spear, and reed; Sputa, clavi, lancea;
From that Holy Body broken Mite corpus perforatur;
Blood and water forth proceed: Sanguis, unda profluit,
Earth, and stars, and sky, and ocean, Terra pontus astra mundus
By that flood from stain are freed.68 Quo lavantur flumine.

Only then, after the stripping away of his outward finery, does he don the
vestments of our glorified, deified flesh to enter into the presence of the Father
in the heavenly sanctuary, a spectacle which even the angelic intelligences
cannot fully fathom:

Yea, Angels tremble when they see Tremunt videntes angeli

How chang’d is our humanity, Versam vicem mortalium;
That Flesh hath purg’d what flesh hath stain’d Culpat caro, purgat caro
And God, the Flesh of God, hath reign’d.69 Regnat Deus Dei caro.

We may hear, in the chant of the choir, an echo, however faint, of that
Canticum Novum, the universal song of heaven and earth, which the Son of
God came to earth to intone:70 the same Song, which day by day, hour by

66 From the ancient eucharistic hymn Sigesato pasa sarx broteia, Divine Liturgy of Saint James. Translation
by William Macdonald from Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Vol. XXIV: Early Liturgies and Other
Documents, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1883), p. 19.
67 See Damian Thompson. ‘Why the Cappa Magna Makes People See Red.’ CatholicHerald.co.uk, 29
June 2017, http://catholicherald.co.uk/issues/june-30th-2017/people-get-ruffled-by-the-cappa-magna/
(retrieved 3 Sept. 2018).
68 J.M. Neale’s rendering of Venantius Fortunatus’ hymn Pange lingua gloriosi, from Mediæval Hymns and
Sequences (London: Joseph Masters, 1867), p. 3.
69 Neale’s rendering of the Ascension hymn Æterne Rex altissime, from Neale and Thomas Helmore, The
Hymnal Noted: Parts I and II (London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1851), hymn 31/p. 69.
70 The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council expressed their hope for a renewal of the Divine Office
in ‘Temple-speak’: ‘Christ Jesus, high priest of the new and eternal covenant, taking human nature,
introduced into this earthly exile that hymn which is sung throughout all ages in the halls of heaven. He
38 Benedict Maria Andersen

hour, sustains us in our hope and prepares us for the glorious ‘revelation of
the sons of God’ (Rom 8:21), wherein ‘death shall be no more, nor mourning,
nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed
away’ (Apoc 21:3).

Behold the might of the new song! It has made men out of stones, men
out of beasts. Those, moreover, that were as dead, not being partakers
of the true life, have come to life again, simply by becoming listeners
to this song. It also composed the universe into melodious order, and
tuned the discord of the elements to harmonious arrangement, so that
the whole world might become harmony. … And He Himself also,
surely, who is the supramundane Wisdom, the celestial Word, is the all-
harmonious, melodious, holy instrument of God. What, then, does this
instrument – the Word of God, the Lord, the New Song – desire? To
open the eyes of the blind, and unstop the ears of the deaf, and to lead
the lame or the erring to righteousness, to exhibit God to the foolish,
to put a stop to corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient
children to their father.71

Special thanks are due to Dr Margaret Barker and Professor Laurence Paul
Hemming for their helpful suggestions and encouragement in writing this paper.

joins the entire community of mankind to Himself, associating it with His own singing of this canticle
of divine praise’. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (4 Dec. 1963), §83.
71 Exhortation to the Heathen, ch. 1. Translated by William Wilson, The Writings of Clement of Alexandria
(vol. 1), in The Ante-Nicene Christian Library, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson,
volume IV (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1867) pp 21–22.