The Liturgical Cycle and Consecrated Time in Christian Culture #

Fr. Alexander Pankratov, Priest of the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church (RPSC)

Church services hold a very great significance in Christianity: they are a communal, conciliar communication of believers with God, carried out according to special prayer books and rules that have developed over centuries of history. However, the foundations that determined the order of performing divine services were laid at the very dawn of Christianity—by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself and the apostles—and certain features of the church service, such as the time of its performance, go back to Old Testament times.

Thus, already King David sang in the Psalter: “Seven times a day do I praise thee because of thy righteous judgments” (Ps. 118:164). David prayed seven times a day: in the middle of the night: “At midnight I arose to give thanks unto thee” (Ps. 118:62); at the end of the night and beginning of the morning: “O God, my God, unto thee will I rise early” (Ps. 62:2); and also: “In the morning shalt thou hear my voice; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up” (Ps. 5:4); at midday: “Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and he shall hear my voice” (Ps. 54:18); and in the evening, when going to sleep: “I will wash my couch every night; I will water my bed with my tears” (Ps. 6:7).

References to calling upon God at these specific times of day by Christ Himself and the apostles are frequently found in the books of the New Testament. The subsequent development of spiritual life in the Christian Church, as well as the liturgical creativity of the holy fathers—who composed all the ecclesiastical rites and statutes—led, by approximately the 8th century after the Birth of Christ, to the formation of a clearly defined structure of Orthodox worship, known as the daily liturgical cycle.

Let us recall that the foundation of every church’s architectural plan, as we have learned, is the cross in combination with the circle of the dome and the semicircles of the altar apse. The circle is a symbol of eternity, as it has neither beginning nor end, just as Christ says in Revelation: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.” But the circle is not a motionless figure—it has the capacity to rotate, to move, and this is the principle of the wheel. In this way, the liturgical cycle is a kind of wheel, making continuous motion through time, directed from earth toward heaven.

We have now mentioned time, whereas in speaking of the church building we had only addressed space. Here the two are brought together: the church sanctifies space through the grace given to it at its construction and consecration, while the services performed within the church sanctify time itself—every hour of the day.

We already mentioned the seven praises of King David, which were also observed by Christ and the apostles. Accordingly, the Orthodox liturgical cycle also includes seven services. The first of them is Vespers, because the liturgical day begins in the evening of the preceding calendar day. Thus, if according to the calendar the Feast of the Nativity of Christ falls on December 25 (Old Style), then the festal Vespers will be served on the eve—on the 24th. This custom likewise goes back to Old Testament times, but in Christianity it has a special spiritual meaning. As St. Symeon of Thessalonica says:

“For this reason, we begin to sing the praise of the saints in the evening—because they, having lived through the day of this life in the light of God’s grace and having completed that day, now abide with their souls in unapproachable light, while their bodies remain under the power of death, awaiting the last and never-ending day, when, having received their bodies again at the sound of the trumpet and risen with us, they will appear with us there also in the flesh.”

After Vespers comes the second service, called Compline (Pavechernitsa), which is performed after Vespers. According to St. Symeon of Thessalonica, it is “a thanksgiving for the approaching night, for rest from labors, and a reminder of death, which follows us at every step; likewise, it is a thanksgiving for the beginning of the night, for it too is a gift of God and one of His creations—for our sake and for the sake of the rest of creation—and a prayer that we may pass through the night without temptation from hostile demons.”

In the middle of the night, Midnight Office (Polunoschnitsa) is performed. In monasteries, the monks were summoned to it by striking a semantron—a wooden or metal board. This was done, as St. Symeon notes, “as an image of the last trumpet, which shall announce the Second Coming of Christ, which, according to Church tradition, is to occur at midnight. Therefore, the midnight prayer was established, so that Christ, when He comes, may find His followers watching and praying, and not asleep in sloth.” According to St. Symeon, the Midnight Office is also performed “because of the silence and peace of mind during divine praise, for the glory of the Lord’s Resurrection, since He rose (from the tomb) ‘very early on the first day of the week.’” And Christians likewise rise to pray from sleep, which is a likeness and shadow of death.

Following the Midnight Office is Morning Office (Utrenya)—“because of the coming of the day and in thanksgiving to Him who produced the light, scattered the darkness of delusion, and sent us the light of piety.” Matins is immediately followed by the First Hour —“for the beginning of the day,” and as thanksgiving to God “for all creatures being illumined by the light.”

The daytime liturgical cycle begins with the Third Hour, which is celebrated because the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles at the third hour on the day of Pentecost, and also because the first quarter of the day (morning) has passed. After another three hours comes the Sixth Hour—“because another quarter of the day has passed in the four-part world, each quarter being three hours and forming exactly half of the day” [i.e., 12 o’clock, or noon in modern reckoning]. At this sixth hour, Christ was crucified, suffering for the whole human race (St. Symeon).

Three more hours later, the Ninth Hour is served, in thanksgiving to God that another three hours have passed, and for the approaching end of the day. But especially it is served “because at this hour the Savior died in the flesh upon the Cross, offering the perfect sacrifice on our behalf.”

Three hours after that—essentially at the twelfth hour—Vespers is again performed, as mentioned above. It is worth concluding here with the words of St. Symeon of Thessalonica about Vespers, which in essence apply to all liturgical services:

“We give thanks [to God] for our life, for food, thoughts, words, and deeds; and we ask for a peaceful night, without sin and free from temptations—a night which prefigures the end of our life, for death comes to us like night.”

Among the church services listed, it is not by accident that the most important one—the Divine Liturgy—has not yet been named, for it does not have a fixed time attachment. In ancient times, the Liturgy was celebrated either after the Sixth or the Ninth Hour. The Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts during Great Lent, and the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great on the eves of great feasts of Christ, were served together with Vespers—that is, at the close of the day. Thus, if we compare the liturgical cycle to a wheel, with each service being a segment of that wheel, then the Liturgy is the axle—the center of the circle—which can be connected to any of its parts.

Regarding the unique place of the Liturgy, St. Symeon of Thessalonica says:

“This most divine and most sacred of services is not counted among the seven praises, but is a distinct service, an institution of the One Jesus, and the work of priests… It is something preeminent, the supreme work of God, and it is performed not by anyone else, but only by God’s priests.”

Indeed, according to the Church Ustav (Rule), all of the services listed above may be performed in the absence of a priest by laypeople—of course, omitting the particular priestly prayers and actions. But the celebration of the Divine Liturgy is the exclusive right of the priest, who by virtue of his special ordination (cheirotonia) possesses the gift of invoking upon the bread and wine on the altar the grace of the Holy Spirit, which mystically transubstantiates them into the true Body and true Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The seven principal church services each have different significance, duration, and structure. Some of them—Midnight Office, Little Compline, and the First Hour—were in ancient times performed in the narthex of the church, with the main sanctuary doors closed. This practice emphasized the difference in the importance of the services: the narthex (the outer part of the church) symbolizes the earth, while the church itself symbolizes heaven. Thus, the less significant and shorter services were performed “on earth before heaven,” while the more significant and lengthier ones (Vespers, Morning Office, the Hours—except for the First Hour—and the Divine Liturgy) were conducted in the main sanctuary, as if in the invisible spiritual heavens. Memorial services such as lityas and panikhidas also took place in the narthex, as these included prayers for the souls of the departed, whose bodies remain in the earth until the General Resurrection.

It is also important to note that according to Church rules, those present during services in the narthex were typically people who, for specific reasons, could not enter the main part of the church. These included catechumens—those who had not yet been baptized—and penitents, Christians temporarily excommunicated from communion and participation in the sacred mysteries due to various sins. Thus, the narthex had considerable significance in antiquity: separate services were held there, and it often contained a large number of people. Accordingly, when we look at the floor plans of Byzantine and pre-Mongol Russian churches, we see that the narthexes were built quite large, sometimes occupying nearly half the church’s total area.

Over the centuries, however, changes took place in ancient Russian church architecture: narthexes were either reduced to minimal size (in large cathedrals), becoming mere entrance vestibules or porches—and sometimes disappeared altogether—or (in parish churches, especially in the 17th century) were expanded into full “trapeza halls” (refectories), sometimes with additional side chapels. In either case, the original meaning of the narthex as the threshold of “heaven above” was gradually lost. This change reflects broader shifts in church life over the course of Russian history. In the early years after the Baptism of Rus’, there were still many unbaptized adults, for whom large narthexes were necessary. But as Christianity became more deeply rooted in the people’s way of life—especially with the spread of infant baptism—the practical need for the narthex diminished. Most people were now baptized from infancy, meaning they were already part of the faithful, and the rite of catechumens disappeared.

At the same time, those excommunicated for grievous sins, or non-Orthodox seekers desiring to learn about the Orthodox faith, would typically stand inside the church near the doors, not proceeding forward toward the altar—or, in certain cases, they still stood outside the main sanctuary, either in a small narthex or on the outer porch or papert (a gallery surrounding many ancient churches).

As for memorial services, due to the large number of worshippers present on days of remembrance for the departed, it became customary to serve them not in the narthex, but in the center of the church, or slightly west of the church’s geometric midpoint.

Regarding the daily cycle services that were formerly held in the narthex, these came to be performed directly inside the church, in the kliroses (choir areas) near the iconostasis. This change coincided with the shifting of service times, which in antiquity were rigorously tied to specific hours of the day. For example, Compline began to be performed immediately after Vespers, without dispersing the congregation. In general, performing entire services in the small narthexes of post-Mongol Russian churches proved impractical.

Further changes also affected the timing of the Hours: they came to be served one after another in succession, without intervals, forming a kind of “preface” to the main church service—the Divine Liturgy. This was largely due to Russia’s geographical situation. Unlike Palestine or Byzantium, it lies in latitudes where sunrise and sunset times vary greatly throughout the year. Consequently, it is quite difficult to tie the beginning of a service to a specific hour of the day. Thus, the following pattern of the daily cycle became customary in ancient Rus’:

1. Vespers and Compline;

2. Midnight Office, Morning Office, and the First Hour;

3. the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours, followed by the Liturgy (always after the Ninth Hour).

The order of services described here does not apply to the great feast days, of which there are twelve that commemorate important events from Sacred History—mostly from the earthly life of Christ and the God-bearer (Mother of God). These are called the Twelve Great Feasts.

In addition to these twelve, other feasts are ranked with them in importance: two feasts in honor of St. John the Baptist, two in honor of St. John the Theologian (the Apostle), the day commemorating the Holy Chiefs of the Apostles Peter and Paul, and the feast of the saint in whose honor a church is dedicated (known as the altar feast or patronal feast). On these days (as well as on every Sunday of the year), the Church Typikon prescribes the celebration of the All-Night Vigil—that is, prayer extending through the entire night. In such cases, on the eve of the feast, there is first a Little Vespers, then a Great Vespers, followed by Morning Office and the First Hour, while on the feast day itself, the Hours and Divine Liturgy are served.

On feast days, Compline and Midnight Office, according to the Church Typikon, were either omitted or (in monasteries) performed privately in one’s cell. Later, when the Vigil service ceased to last the entire night and was shortened to approximately half the night (this happened around the 17th century), Compline and Midnight Office began to be performed in church during the vigil itself—Compline after Little Vespers, and Midnight Office before Great Vespers. At present, in most churches—both Old Rite and Patriarchal—the prevailing custom is to serve Matins or the entire All-Night Vigil in the evening. This practice arose at the beginning of the 20th century and became especially widespread from the 1920s onward—thus, it is quite a late development.

The daily liturgical cycle is only the first link in the Orthodox system of “sanctified time,” which has been formed over centuries of spiritual life. Every day in the church calendar commemorates a saint or an event from Sacred History. The individual days form weeks, and the spiritual center and focal point of each week is Sunday—the Lord’s Day—dedicated to God according to His commandment.⁴ Weeks form into months, within which special significance is given to the days of the great feasts, most of which have fixed dates in the church calendar. A feast is usually preceded by one or more days of forefeast—a time of spiritual preparation—and followed by a period called the afterfeast, which may last a week or less. This is a continuation of the festal celebration, which concludes with the leave-taking (otdaniye) of the feast—a kind of formal “farewell,” when the festal service is repeated in abbreviated form, and for the last time that year, the festal hymns and prayers are heard.

The central place in the liturgical year is held by the Feast of the Resurrection of Christ—Holy Pascha. It does not have a fixed calendar date, because, according to the 7th canon of the Holy Apostles and other church regulations, “it must be celebrated on the first Sunday after the vernal equinox and the full moon, and in no case may it coincide with the Jewish Passover.” As a result, this feast falls on different dates in the spring months—there are altogether 35 possible dates on which Bright Pascha can occur.

Several periods of the liturgical year that vary in length are tied to the date of Pascha: Great Lent, which begins forty days plus one week before Pascha; the Feast of the Ascension (on the 40th day after Pascha); the Feast of the Holy Trinity or Pentecost (on the 50th day after Pascha); and the Sunday of All Saints (the Sunday following Pentecost). During this moveable portion of the year, special liturgical books called Triodia are used: the Lenten Triodion, whose services begin four weeks before the start of Great Lent and end on Friday of the sixth week of Lent; and the Flowery Triodion, which begins on Lazarus Saturday (the day before Palm Sunday) and ends on the ninth Sunday after Pascha—the Sunday of All Saints.

This moveable Triodion cycle, lacking fixed dates, overlays itself each year upon the immoveable calendar of saints’ days (menaion)—the fixed-date commemorations of saints and sacred events. The result is that each church year takes on a unique appearance. The Church Typikon specifies the order of services for all such combinations. Years themselves form a broader cycle known as the Great Indiction, which repeats every 532 years. This “cycle of world harmony” is tied to the variation of Pascha’s calendar dates, to the lunar cycle (which returns to its original sequence every 19 years), and to the repetition of weekdays aligning with the same calendar dates (every 28 years, weekdays fall on the same calendar days in both common and leap years). This cycle was used to calculate the date of Pascha—not only to determine when it would be celebrated in future years, but also to find out what day it fell on in the past.

There are even longer cycles in Orthodox time reckoning than the Great Indiction—such as the so-called Cycle of Indictions (a cycle of 1,980 years) and others—but a detailed examination of those lies beyond the scope of our present discussion.

It is fundamentally important to emphasize that at the foundation of ancient liturgical practice, timekeeping, architecture, and other forms of art lies the union of two symbolic figures: the circle, as the symbol of eternity, the universe, and of God Himself—Beginningless and Endless—and the cross, which is the symbol of the redemptive suffering of the Son of God, the sign of sanctification and ordering, the subjection of all being to a certain order, or, in the language of the Church, to a Rite, a Typikon, immovably established by the Holy Spirit through the holy fathers for all time.

All of ancient Christian culture can be envisioned as a complex movement of circles under the shadow of the Cross, where smaller circles revolve while moving along larger ones, forming various combinations—many in number, yet all precisely defined. Moreover, this movement has two directions:

1. an ideal one—from earth toward heaven—with the unchanging goal of spiritually elevating the human person who participates in it, and

2. a concrete-historical one—depending on the moment in history when one or another circle “revolves.”

These moments may correspond to times of spiritual ascent or decline, which naturally affect the artistic quality of the various phenomena of spiritual life and culture. Thus, for example, the icon of the Holy Trinity painted by St. Andrei Rublev is immeasurably greater in both spiritual and artistic depth than the icon with the same subject (and the same purpose—to adorn the church, especially on the Feast of the Holy Trinity) by Simon Ushakov, because the two were created in different historical periods. The first appeared during a period of spiritual flourishing and the blossoming of Russian monasticism under St. Sergius of Radonezh, in the 14th century. The second was created during the era of Patriarch Nikon’s reforms in the second half of the 17th century, when the entire structure of the spiritual life that had given the world St. Sergius and St. Andrei with his marvelous icons was being systematically dismantled, and the adherents of ancient piety suffered cruel persecutions and executions.

Similar examples can be found in other spheres of ecclesiastical life and art. In secular literature since the 17th century, the replacement of the greater by the lesser, the lowering of the spiritual level of culture, has been described as a natural and inevitable phenomenon. Secularization—the transformation of the spiritual and heavenly into the bodily and earthly—is simply called a change of artistic styles. Everything appears differently from the Christian point of view. In the Orthodox understanding, the entire history of our era is a movement “from Christ toward the end.” The spiritual center of our present time lies not in the foreseeable future, which contains only the approaching last times and the coming Antichrist, but rather in the already accomplished past—in the events of the earthly life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, in which the true meaning of time and of human life was revealed to the world. Christianity thus proclaims a kind of reverse spiritual perspective, akin to the reverse perspective found in iconography.

In other words, the inner meaning of Christian worship and Orthodox artistic culture lies in the continual renewal and reliving of the sacred events of the New Testament through the Church’s services and the various arts connected with them. At the center of this, without doubt, stands the mystical commemoration of the Gospel event of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ and the apostles, which is enacted in the Divine Liturgy.

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