Nocturns

In the liturgy of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, nocturns refer to the sections into which the canonical hour of matins was divided from the fourth or fifth century until after the Second Vatican Council.

[1][2] A nocturn consisted of psalms accompanied by antiphons and followed by readings, which were taken either from Scripture or from the Church Fathers or similar writings.

The Latin adjective nocturnus corresponds to English "nocturnal" and is attached to many different nouns, such as nocturnae horae (the hours of the night), nocturna tempora (nocturnal times), which are not necessarily connected with religion and are unrelated to the subject of this article.

In Oriental Orthodox Christianity and Oriental Protestant Christianity, the office is prayed at 12 am, being known as Lilio in the Syriac and Indian traditions; it is prayed facing the eastward direction of prayer by all members in these denominations, both clergy and laity, being one of the seven fixed prayer times.

For those elders who handed down the tradition to us taught us that in this hour every creature hushes for a brief moment to praise the Lord.

[20] Saint Benedict wrote about it as beginning at about 2 in the morning ("the eighth hour of the night") and ending in winter well before dawn (leaving an interval in which the monks were to devote themselves to study or meditation) but having to be curtailed in summer in order to celebrate lauds at daybreak.

In the writings of John Cassian (c. 360–435) is found the earliest mention of dividing the vigil service into three parts, thus breaking the monotony of the long night prayer.

The Peregrinatio ad loca sancta of about 380 still gave no evidence of any division of the office of vigils whether on Sundays or on weekdays.

[19] Saint Benedict of Nursia (480 – c. 543 or 547) gives a detailed description of the division of vigils into two parts (for which he does not use the name "nocturns") on ordinary days, and three on Sundays and feast-days.

[21] Leonard J. Doyle's English version of the Rule of St Benedict translates horis nocturnis in chapter 42 as "the hours of the night", but elsewhere uses "the Night Office" to represent the entirety of each phrase in the Rule consisting of one of the nouns vigiliae, laus, hora, qualified by nocturnus; to render an isolated nocturnus in chapters 15 and 17; and to translate vigiliae wherever it appears unaccompanied by nocturnus.

In the shorter summer months the three readings of the first nocturn were replaced by an Old Testament passage recited by heart.

[24] Within the Carolingian Empire (800–888), a form of the liturgy of the hours, described by Amalarius, was imposed that can be called the "Roman-Benedictine Office".

[30] This tendency of viewing the Liturgy of the Hours as edification and spiritual nourishment of individual clergy rather than a form of worship had been strengthened by the publication in 1535, and the widespread printing of the drastically modified breviary of Cardinal Francisco de Quiñones, which restored generally the weekly recitation of the whole psalter and the reading of the major part of the Bible in a year, but which provoked a reaction that led to the determination of the Council of Trent to restore a somewhat purified form of the previously existing form of the Liturgy of the Hours.

This revision was not in fact carried out until after the Second Vatican Council, but concrete work on it had already begun under Pope Pius XII.

[41] With his apostolic constitution Laudis canticum of 1 November 1970, Pope Paul VI announced his revision of the Latin-Church Liturgy of the Hours, involving among other things distribution of the psalms over a period of four weeks instead of the previous arrangement whereby they were said within a single week.

In line with the decision of the Second Vatican Council that matins, while retaining its character of nocturnal praise should become a prayer for any hour of the day, that canonical hour was renamed the Office of Readings and to it were assigned two substantial readings, one from Scripture, the second from the Fathers of the Church or other writers, and only three psalms or portions of psalms.

This contrasted strongly with the arrangement to which the Rule of Saint Benedict gave witness: twelve complete psalms, to which on Sundays three canticles were added.