wrote, “all the doors of the church are opened and all the monks and nuns come down, and not only they,
but also those lay people, men and women, who wish to keep vigil at so early an hour. From that time
until it is light, hymns are sung and psalms responded to, and likewise antiphons; and with every hymn
there is a prayer.”
The important points to note are two: it is a night service (or office) that is being described, and it is
primarily a monastic gathering, even though the laity has been admitted. The origins of Christian
psalmody, hence the earliest intimations of Gregorian chant, lie not in the very public worship of the
Jewish temple, but in the secluded vigils of the early Christian ascetics.^1
MONASTIC PSALMODY
Christian monasticism arose in the fourth century in reaction to the church’s worldly success following its
establishment as the official religion of the late Roman empire. Whereas earlier the Christians were
persecuted in Rome for their pacificism and their contempt for temporal authority, now, as the custodian
of an imperial state religion, the Christian church itself took on the attributes of an imperium. Its clergy
was organized into a steep hierarchy. That clerical hierarchy, in turn, put forth an elaborate theology and
an enforceable canon law, and modified the church’s teachings so as to support the needs of the temporal
state that supported it, needs that included the condoning of legal executions and military violence. The
state Christian church could no longer afford the pure pacificism it had espoused when it was a
persecuted minority. Indeed, it now became itself a persecutor of heretics.
In the face of this increasingly pompous and official ecclesiastical presence in the world, an
increasing number of Christian enthusiasts advocated flight from the city, retreating into a solitary and
simple life more consonant, in their view, with the original teachings of Christ. Some, like the Egyptian
hermit St. Anthony the Abbot (ca. 250–350), established colonies of anchorites devoted to solitary prayer
and mortification of the flesh. Others, like St. Basil (ca.330–379), the Bishop of Caesarea, the Roman
capital of Palestine (now Kayseri in central Turkey), conceived of monastic life not in eremitic terms but
in terms of koinobios—ascetic communal living devoted to pious, meditative fellowship and productive
work.