The Psychology and Anthropology of Compline

The Principles of Hierarchy, Mimesis, and Local Custom

The practices and religious culture at Wyoming Catholic College where I attended and used to work have been shifting in more of a Byzantine Catholic direction due to the less frequent offering of the Latin Mass. But one element of the traditional Latin rite that has remained strong amidst students themselves are the traditional Latin liturgical hours that are part of the liturgical life more generally, both from the Divine Office of the Roman Breviary and the related but different parallel practice of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Regular attendance at Compline, the last office of the day, has over doubled over the past two years in the school’s chapel, with some nights seeing over a quarter of the college’s students coming, an incredible rate by almost any measure for a voluntary and unofficial, student-led custom mostly advertised by word of mouth and often even objected to by those who wish a more charismatic or revised (English Liturgy of the Hours post-Vatican II) to be the custom instead. While interesting in general to me as a topic for future study of the effects following from its form and purpose in greater detail, the practice of Compline at Wyoming Catholic College in general is also a lens into human group behavior. Here to follow are some of the observations, surprises, and tensions that can be learned about human psychology and anthropology (or perhaps just that of young traditional Catholics) from two years of watching, praying, and on some nights, helping lead Compline. These, I believe, have something interesting to say more generally about what motivates and bears upon our actions in communal situations.

What I’ve observed can be summarized along three principles: (1) hierarchy, (2) mimesis, and (3) inertia of local custom.

Hierarchy

To the first point, although Compline and any of the liturgical hours can be prayed alone, they are designed for prayer in common. In a monastery or as long ago would have been parish custom, a priest or bishop would preside or lector, and the rubrics in the booklets used for the prayer give details on exactly how this is to be done. But in the absence of a priest as at the college, the assignment of the roles of celebrant and lector/cantor is not left to chance, nor to a written, agreed-upon hierarchy. No one has ever officially been in charge of leading Compline at the college, but someone always does, according to an unwritten, but strict ranking based mostly upon ability, but also outgoingness, and frequency of attendance. It’s an ordering where whomever is highest on the list and present at the time the prayer starts will be the celebrant and second-placed person present will serve as the lector/cantor. I’ve written a satire article about this, but as to the ranking in that article, the serious names on it at least, it’s entirely accurate. And you could ask anyone who’s attended for more than two weeks, and they could give the exact ordering, even though they were never told it and no one ever planned it, and if a lower ranking person was about to lead, and someone higher ranking comes in later, but not too late, he will wordlessly defer to the higher. A rigid hierarchy of deference to the twin characteristics of ability and commitment (frequency of attendance) developing wordlessly implies that hierarchy is natural and desired nor artificial and forced by force. Everyone wants the order to prevail and the best and most committed to lead, and by some sort of social consensus it happens. No one, even those at the top of the social hierarchy of Compline, could become the official head, even if they wanted to as this hierarchy’s strength comes from the continual deference of all others, a cooperative mutualism. This might seem far from the hierarchies of politics or business, but the suggestion I hold from the example of George Washington selected as president de facto more by mutual consent than by formalized process as well as the similar way in which tribal chieftains were selected in more primitive societies suggest that hierarchies need not always be established by force and unnatural. Sometimes, if they align with nature, they just naturally are selected, all having some sort of implicit respect and acknowledgment towards them that can rise above selfish inclinations.

Mimesis

Following this, and related, because it is partially the cause of the last, is the mimesis or imitation conformity and compulsion, and the way in which it is a strong, but often only partially consciously perceived motivator for human action. I’ve noticed this with regard to Compline in several ways. Choosing to come to Compline in the first place is probably often a mimetic act for many of the students who come, one performed less for its own sake than for the social approval of or desire for conformity towards others of high social status who are also coming or whom we wish to be like. Admit it. Sometimes it is for me. Often we pray, do charitable deeds, or even just avoid sin for such Pharisaical, lower reasons. It doesn’t mean our desires or actions performed on such a basis are necessarily bad, just that they ought only to be the beginning of a transformation of the heart, not just an end in themselves soon to be replaced by imitation of another passing fad. 

Similarly, one quirk of the college’s Roman chapel, the fact that the pews butt up against a wall on one side means that many people are “trapped” with others in between them and the aisle, brings about another occasion for mimesis and introduces much tension when the prayer is finished. No one wants to be seen to be the first to want to leave after Compline (and a similar thing also happens at Mass). A tension divides the heart, however, as someone’s desire to leave is balanced against the desire to stay kneeling and praying for the sake of the social standing of appearances. And you often cannot predict which of these will succeed in each moment.

Similarly, how each attendee performs certain small details of the prayer is also subjected to this mimetic pressure. Exact posture when performing a bow, the exact moment to rise at the end of each Psalm or to sit at the end of the Gloria Patri, etc. are set by what others are doing, and in particular those with a higher social status. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously aims to conform, and to conform most of all to someone of higher status, someone known as “holy” or “proficient” in the prayer. Movements occur like waves, as I’ve seen in somewhat more hilarious detail at the EF/Latin Mass at the college, where most don’t know the exact moments to rise, sit, or kneel, and a change in posture usually spreads like a wave through the attendees rather than occurring all at once at its official or proper time. In this, it is also evident that perfect knowledge of every detail seems not to be wholly present in most attendees. Most depend on mimesis in order to know what to do and what to say. Having others around you, it seems, can provide support or extension to your memory, almost as if collective action allows you to tap into a collective memory that stretches past your individual memory. Many Compline attendees, for example, can quickly pray without a booklet for most of the prayer as long as there are enough others around. But when attendance is low or you are praying by yourself, as I have noticed myself, one’s memory is far duller, and the support of a booklet is more necessary. Perhaps poor memory is fragmentary memory, and the lesson here is that the support of others praying with you gives you a virtually more complete memory by allowing you to rest on mimesis to fill in the gaps in your own memory.

Inertia of Local Custom

This mimetic process also reinforces and fixes into place divergences from or expansions on the official rubrics for the celebration of Compline. These differences or details, the longer they are reinforced, are soon perceived as necessary to proper celebration and are remembered and perfectly perpetuated in practice even though they were never written down and are never audibly discussed. At Wyoming Catholic College these include the merger of the position of lector within the celebration of Compline with that of the cantors, where the lector stands at the beginning of Compline, praying the St. Michael prayer (in English) at the end, as well as a semi-formal (including bows in both directions) ceremony of the lector collecting the Compline booklets at the end. None of these are official custom per the rubrics of the Divine Office, and all developed locally, but reinforcement has made them a natural part of the collective mimetic memory of the celebration of Compline at Wyoming Catholic College. 

One who begins attending Compline here, even if they have prayed the Divine Office elsewhere, is subsumed in their actions into conformity with the small details of the collective action, and once part of it, will pass it along to other new attendees. A hilariously similar thing happened at the Byzantine Chaplaincy of the college in its early years, when, on a snowy day, older attendees took their soaked and soggy shoes off to dry during Divine Liturgy. Many people were coming to Liturgy for the first time that day and they all assumed that it was Byzantine practice to be shoeless during Liturgy. Every subsequent time they came, they took their shoes off because they assumed it was the custom, and the practice of these people set a false precedent for future new attendees. The lesson here is that if you know better or know a different way to do something, the practice of a group has an inertia that will soon mimetically subsume almost all outliers. Similarly, the improper singing of one note of one of the tones of the “Te Lucis” hymn has stuck so firmly that even with almost everyone knowing about the error, it had simply persisted too long to be quickly eliminated. It became part of the local custom and would take far more effort to change than for it to persist.

One seeming counter-example that actually proves this rule of group inertia was the disruption posed a month ago by the introduction of hymnal racks in each pew. Someone then spread all the Compline booklets amongst the pews, in contradiction to their usual past storage location at the rear of the chapel. This briefly upended many particular customs of practice including a previously rigid clustering of all attendees in the front three rows of pews of the chapel. This perturbation of practice seemed destined to stick briefly, but eventually, enough people were bothered that words were spoken about “the right place to put the books” and the old patterns of seating were restored as soon as the associated placement of the booklets was changed back.

Conclusions

Our actions in group settings, at least by these examples from Compline seem to be mostly determined by those of the group. While those of high status can set precedents and affect details, the inertia of a group has a higher staying power, due to mimetic effects that seem to be extremely strong to the behavior of all persons in a group, than the intention of any one individual. Group settings, and prayer in particular, have a strong effect of binding the individual, first in outward conformity, and then over time in customary habit, to that of the group. One could see this as a negative Pharisaical problem for prayer, and I do think there are potential pitfalls and downsides, whereby the prayer is merely external or merely for show. In other group settings, like the rise of totalitarian states or purity spirals, the rise of “natural” hierarchies of those of high social status, compulsions to conformity, and inertia of custom are often negatives. But in group prayer, I believe, the fact that these conditions occur is part of the point and key to its success. One is, if one is open to it, drawn into prayer and outside of oneself over time, from merely external conformity up towards internally motivated intentionality. Perhaps being “trapped” inside a pew next to someone who is praying for a long time afterward might force you, stuck kneeling next to them, to begin praying long yourself. And your attendance and your internal motivation can eventually serve as the same launching-off point for others to make the same ascent.

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Note:

We pray Compline 8:30 PM Monday-Saturday in the Immaculate Conception Oratory, and at 7:30 PM on Sunday nights.