Celtic Rite - Office and Liturgy

Office and Liturgy

Evidence as to the nature and origin of the Celtic office is found in the Rule of St. Columbanus, which gives directions as to the number of psalms to be recited at each hour, in the Turin fragment and the Antiphonary of Bangor, which gives the text of canticles, hymns, collects, and antiphons, in the 8th century tract in Cott. MS. Nero A. II., which gives what was held in the 8th century to be the origin of the "Cursus Scottorum" (Cursus psalmorum and Synaxis are terms used for the Divine Office in the Rule of St. Columbanus) and in allusions in the Catalogus Sanctorum Hiberniae, which differentiates between the Cursus Gallorum, which it derives imaginatively from Ephesus and St. John, through St. Polycarp and St. Irenaeus, and this Cursus Scottorum which, according to this writer, probably an Irish monk in France, originated with St. Mark at Alexandria. With St. Mark it came to Italy. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Basil, and the hermits St. Anthony, St. Paul, St. Macarius, St. John, and St. Malchus used it. St. Cassian, St. Honoratus, and St. Porcarius of Lérins, St. Caesarius of Arles, St. Germanus, and St. Lupus also used it, and St. Germanus taught it to St. Patrick, who brought it to Ireland. There Wandilochus Senex and Gomorillus (Comgall) used it and St. Wandilochus and Columbanus brought it to Luxeuil. The part of the story from St. Germanus onwards may possibly be founded in fact. The other part is not so probable as it does not follow that what St. Columbanus carried to Gaul was the same as that which St. Patrick had brought from Gaul in an earlier age.