The Rolling Octaves of Christmas
The twelve day march of Our Lord and his Companions toward the Epiphany
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V Kalendas Ianuarii (28 December) Anno Incarnationis MMXXIII
The Feast of the Holy Innocents
The passage of days from the great Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord until the Vigil of his Epiphany on 5 January is the march of Our Lord and his Companions through the trials of this world towards the ultimate manifestation of the next. To pray the ancient Office during this time is a very special experience.
We begin on 24 December with First Vespers of Christmas and each succeeding evening until the 27th another member joins this sacred band each marching towards its own proper Octave day. The first on the evening of the 25th is the protomartyr Saint Stephen, the second on the 26th is Saint John the Evangelist and Beloved Disciple, and the third and final on the 27th of December are the Holy Innocents: that troop of infants whose brutal death sated the hand of Herod’s lunatic rage and allowed the Christ child to escape into Egypt.
The structure of the Divine Office mandates that each of these Feasts be commemorated1 at Vespers and Laudes on each of the following days until they reach their own Octave a week after the original Feast. Thus a commemoration is added each day until the complement reaches its full number on the Feast of the Holy Innocents and all four march together through the Feasts of Saints Thomas Beckett and Sylvester until they reach their crescendo at the Octave of Christmas on 1 January. From then on one Commemoration each day falls away until second Vespers of the Octave of the Holy Innocents on 4 January when the last of the Companions arrives at journey’s end.
These commemorations create a wonderful rolling effect of motion that permeates the entire time between Christmas and the Epiphany. For the first four evenings each night a new companion on the march is added and then for the following five nights the number remains stable until the conclusion of the Octave of Christmas on New Years Day when on each succeeding night another companion completes his march and little by little the troop retires to await the complete public manifestation of the Incarnate Word that will take place on the Epiphany.
It is hard to know exactly how old this succession of Octaves is. The Feasts themselves of Stephen, John, and the Holy Innocents seem already to have been firmly established in the West by the middle part of the first millennium2 but when precisely the Octaves were attached is hard to guess. Even if one doesn’t find a specific mention of an Octave in a Sacramentary that does not always necessarily mean that an Octave was not celebrated - especially if its prayers at the time the book was produced were an exact repetition of the prayers of the original Feast Day since it would likely have seemed an incredible waste of time and effort and space in a hand copied book to rewrite the exact same words all over again.
But as the centuries wore on, and maybe even at the beginning when they were first celebrated, it became clear that these particular Feasts represented the comites Christi, the Companions of Christ, both the particular persons in whose name the Feasts are celebrated and all those who came after and followed their path. That bloody martyrdom of Stephen all the martyrs who were yet to come, those who struggle every minute of every day in this fallen world living lives of innocence that do not end bloodily as represented by Saint John, and finally the combination of a life of innocence and a bloody end that can be seen in the Holy Innocents.3 These are the ones who have taken up whatever Cross they have been given and marched along to follow the Lamb wherever He went.
Author’s note: If you have been praying the 1962 Breviary under the impression that it represents some version of the Divine Office that is largely uncontaminated by the liturgical disasters of recent times then you may be wondering what precisely I have been talking about. So just for the record: the beautiful ancient custom of the Feasts of Saint Stephen, Saint John, and the Holy Innocents each having their own proper Octaves was first greatly diminished4 by Pius X’s 1911 alterations to the Breviary and finally abandoned during the reign of Pius XII.
This commemoration is recited after the Oratio of the principal Feast at Vespers and at Laudes of that day and consists of the antiphon recited at the appropriate Gospel canticle either the Benedictus or Magnificat that was recited on the Feast Day, the accompanying versicle, and the proper Oratio which is identical to the Collect prayer of the Mass of the Feast.
There is a sermon of Saint Augustine’s delivered on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Sermo 10 de Sanctis) during the early fifth century that was read in the Divine Office for several centuries up through 1962. From time to time doubt gets cast on some of these homilies from the academic world, or at least it did when people in the academic world could still read Latin, and I frankly don’t know where this one stands in their eyes. But the Church never had any problem with its authenticity so neither do I. In any case there are prayers for all of these Feasts already found in the sixth century Veronese or Leonine Sacramentary.
As a side note: a whole industry was developed with the rise of Protestantism that accused many precious things that the Catholic Church had handed down to us from the ancient world of being so called ‘medieval forgeries’. Unfortunately, all of this was imbibed wholesale in many Catholic circles and became a leading factor in fomenting all of the liturgical disasters that we have suffered through since the 19th century. Yet strangely enough in 2023 one can still hear some of these claims being repeated unquestioningly by more than a few so called ‘traditionalist’ liturgical writers.
Were there inaccuracies? It is impossible to say at this point because precious little real evidence ever gets offered to back up these claims and they acquire their force simply through constant repetition by the right (or wrong) people. But what we can see is the evil fruit they have borne: and by their fruits you shall know them.
That this Feast is ultimately about more than just the babes who were murdered by Herod in Bethlehem can be seen in various antiphons and chapter readings of the Office such as Vidi supra montem… which seems to be some sort of non-Vulgate and possibly quite ancient Latin rendering of Apocalypse 14:1.
Following Divino Afflatu an extraordinarily confusing and complicated set of rubrics concerning octaves came into force. The upshot being in this case that there was no longer any mention made of these Feasts during the days intervening between each Feast and its Octave, and on the Octave day itself only a simple commemoration was made. Thus the sense of motion through this period that had earlier existed was entirely lost. And later on, in 1955, Pius XII simply eliminated them altogether.