The practice of counted prayers in early monasticism as a form of unceasing synaxis

Introduction. The texts of early Egyptian monasticism contain information about the practice of counted prayers. In some cases, these counted prayers are presented as a form of incessant prayer. However, it is difficult to understand today what is meant in the Lausiac History by fifty, one hundred, three hundred, or seven hundred prayers. In the scientific literature, three respected scholars of the early monastic tradition - Adalbert Voguet, Gabriel Bunge, and Armand Veilleux - have formed the position that those counted prayers weren’t psalms and signify prayer moments or pauses during monastic manual labor. In our work we will present a critique of this position. Methods and analysis. On the basis of terminological and typological analysis of the prayer practice of Egyptian monks, we will give arguments that the counted prayers should be understood as exactly the psalms that were said in combination with prayers and that the counted prayers were the form of monastic synaxis performed separately from other activities.