Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round

What you'll notice

It's Saturday, a little before dark, and there are a dozen cars in the lot. Inside, the lights are low and the Royal Doors in the middle of the icon screen stand open. The priest comes out with the censer and walks the whole church, every icon and every corner and the handful of people standing around, while a psalm is read about cedars and wild goats and a moon that knows its seasons. Then the doors close, and the priest stands in front of them with his head uncovered, praying under his breath.

A while later the singers start something you may half recognize: "Lord, I have cried unto thee, hear me." The incense comes around again. Then a small procession: the doors open, the priest walks out with the censer and back in through the middle, and the people sing a hymn to the light just as the windows go dark. No sermon, no Communion line. Before long you're back in the parking lot, and you've prayed the way Christians have prayed at sunset for about as long as there have been Christians.

What it's called

This is Vespers (the evening service), from the Latin for "evening"; Greek Hesperinos, Slavonic Vechernya. On Saturday evenings and the eves of great feasts it's Great Vespers (the full form, with the procession); on ordinary evenings the books allow a plainer one.¹ Joined to Matins, Great Vespers becomes the All-Night Vigil (Vespers and Matins served as one service; Greek Agrypnia, Slavonic Vsenoshchnoe bdenie). It's called all-night because it once lasted all night, and in some Eastern monasteries it still does.²

The short services that mark the rest of the day are the Hours (the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth, counted the old way from sunrise). Compline (the prayer before sleep; Greek Apodeipnon, "after supper") closes the evening, and the Midnight Office sits in the dark after it. The fixed parts of all of these live in the Horologion (the Book of Hours).³ The Sunday morning service, Matins, has its own stop in Part Two.

What's actually happening

Great Vespers runs in a clear order, here as Hapgood's 1906 book prints it in its Russian form.

1. The creation. After the opening blessing and "O come, let us worship," the reader takes Psalm 104 (103 in the Septuagint) while the priest censes the whole church with the doors open. Then the doors close, and he reads the Prayers of Light quietly in front of them.⁴ Hapgood's appendix reads the scene as Adam outside the shut gates of Paradise.⁵
2. The litany and the Psalter. The Great Litany, then verses from Psalm 1, "Blessed is the man," with alleluias.⁶
3. "Lord, I have cried." Psalms 141, 142, 130 and 117 (140, 141, 129 and 116 in the Septuagint), with the hymns of the day sung between the last verses while the whole church is censed. One verse names the hour: "Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as incense, and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice."⁷
4. The entrance and the light. A hymn to the Theotokos, the procession with the censer, the priest's blessing ("Blessed is the Entrance of thy Holy Ones"), and then the hymn Saint Basil already called ancient, "O gladsome radiance of the holy glory of the Father immortal."⁸
5. The verse of the day. The prokeimenon (a psalm verse sung before the readings) changes with the evening; on Saturday night it's "The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel," from Psalm 93 (92 in the Septuagint). On feasts, three Old Testament readings follow.⁹
6. The end of the day. More litanies, the prayer "Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this night without sin," verses with more hymns, the Song of Simeon ("Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," Luke 2:29–32), the Trisagion and the Lord's Prayer, the hymn of the day, and the dismissal.¹⁰

On the eve of a great feast a litiya (a procession to the back of the church with fervent petitions) can follow the entrance, ending with the blessing of five loaves, wheat, wine and oil; Other Services You'll Meet has it.¹¹

At the Vigil, the dismissal never comes. The reader goes straight into the Six Psalms, and Matins follows without a break.¹² On a feast the priest anoints the faithful with the oil blessed at Vespers, and the blessed bread is handed out.¹³ Slavic-practice parishes, Russian and Serbian and much of the OCA, often serve the Vigil every Saturday night; Greek-practice parishes, including most Antiochian and Romanian ones in America, usually serve Vespers on Saturday and Matins on Sunday morning (Matins Is Already Happening has the Sunday side).

The Hours are short: three psalms, a few hymns, a prayer. Hapgood sets the First Hour at about seven in the morning, the Third at nine (when the Spirit came at Pentecost), the Sixth at noon (the Crucifixion), and the Ninth at three in the afternoon (Christ's death).¹⁴ Many parishes read them on Sunday morning while the clergy prepare the gifts.¹⁵ Christmas and Holy Friday have the Royal Hours, all four read together with Scripture lessons, and at Pascha the Hours are sung as hymns alone.¹⁶

Compline comes in a short form and a long one. Great Compline is the Lenten one, where the two sides of the choir trade a refrain from Isaiah 8, "God is with us: understand, ye nations, and submit yourselves."¹⁷ On the first four evenings of Lent it carries the Great Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete.¹⁸ On the eves of Christmas and Theophany, Great Compline takes Vespers' place at the Vigil.¹⁹ The Midnight Office is mostly kept in monasteries; Hapgood left it out of her book, and you're most likely to hear it on Pascha night, timed to end at midnight.²⁰

Why it matters

The evening comes first because Scripture counts that way: "So the evening and the morning were the first day" (Genesis 1:5). Hapgood's book says the Church reckons its day "after the pattern of the Jewish Church, from sunset."²¹ The liturgical day starts at sundown, so the feast starts the night before.²² That's why Saturday night's Vespers already sings Sunday: at the Saturday Vigil the Resurrection "is more particularly commemorated and exalted."²³

Then there's the light. The Prayers of Light thank God for ordinary light, the kind that comes through a window, and ask for light in the soul.²⁴ The hymn at the lamp-lighting answers them. When you sing it you're doing what Saint Basil saw his people do in the 370s: they didn't want to receive "the gift of the light at eventide in silence," so they gave thanks when the lamps came in.²⁵

And the day gets prayed whole. "Evening and morning and at noon I will pray, and cry aloud, And He shall hear my voice" (Psalm 55:17 (54:18 in the Septuagint)). While the singers are on "Lord, I have cried," the priest prays almost the same words in secret: "In the evening, and in the morning, and at noonday we praise thee."²⁶ The Hours tie the clock to the Gospel: Pentecost at nine, the Cross at noon.

Where it came from

Jews prayed at fixed hours (Psalm 55:17 (54:18 in the Septuagint); Daniel 6:10 (6:11 in the Septuagint)), and the first Christians kept doing it; Peter and John went up to the Temple "at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour" (Acts 3:1). The Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-century church order, tell Christians to "assemble yourselves together every day, morning and evening," saying Psalm 63 (62 in the Septuagint) in the morning and Psalm 141 (140 in the Septuagint) in the evening, the same evening psalm you still hear.²⁷ The same book describes the bishop gathering the church at the lighting of the lamps.²⁸

"O gladsome radiance" is old enough that its author is lost. Saint Basil couldn't name him: "Who was the author of these words of thanksgiving at the lighting of the lamps, we are not able to say. The people, however, utter the ancient form." He quotes the line they sang, "We praise Father, Son, and God's Holy Spirit," which matches the hymn's "we hymn thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God."²⁹ Hapgood's rubric credits the hymn to Sophronius, a later Patriarch of Jerusalem.³⁰ The sources disagree; Basil's is the older witness.

By the fourth century, Jerusalem and Constantinople had an elaborate morning and evening prayer for the whole city, and the monasteries had a longer one of their own. What we have now is the monastic skeleton with the cathedral hymns stitched in. Mavropoulos treats Vespers and Matins together as the Church's evening and morning.³¹ Even the bread blessed at the litiya, Hapgood's appendix explains, began as food for people who meant to stay till morning.³² Hapgood herself printed Vespers "almost in a skeleton state," because it changes so much with the seasons that no single text could hold it.³³

What you do

If you're Orthodox: go on Saturday night when you can. Some people make Vespers or the Vigil part of getting ready for Sunday's Communion, and Saturday night has Resurrection hymns that Sunday morning doesn't repeat. If your parish serves only Sunday Liturgy, the Horologion's evening prayers can be read at home (Prayer at Home has more).

If you're visiting: Vespers is the best first service there is. It's short, it's quiet, nobody is going up for Communion, and nobody expects you to know anything. Stand toward the back, sit during the psalms if there are seats, and give a small bow when the censer comes your way. If, at a Vigil, the faithful go up to kiss the icon and be anointed, you can stay where you are.

Field Note: the feast starts the night before. If a great feast falls on a Tuesday, its Vespers or Vigil is on Monday evening. Plan on the evening before.

Go deeper

• Hapgood, Service Book, the All-Night Vigil Service (Great Vespers and Matins), pp. 1–37, and the Hours, pp. 38–57.
• Saint Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 29.73 (NPNF2 8).
• Apostolic Constitutions II.59 and VIII.35 (ANF 7).
• Go to a Saturday-night Vigil or Great Vespers and stay for "O gladsome radiance."

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