Gloria in Excelsis Deo

← Encyclopedia

The Gloria in Excelsis Deo — “Glory to God in the highest” — is one of the oldest hymns of the Christian church, sung near the opening of the Mass and known as the Greater Doxology, to distinguish it from the shorter Gloria Patri. Its first line is taken from scripture: the words the Gospel of Luke gives to the host of angels above the shepherds at the birth of Jesus, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace.” Everything after that opening is the work of the early church, which extended the angels’ cry into a sustained song of praise addressed in turn to God the Father, to Christ the Lamb, and to the Holy Spirit.

The hymn is Greek before it is Latin. It appears, in fuller form, among the morning prayers of the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions, and it survives in the Byzantine liturgy as part of the daily office of Orthros rather than the eucharist. In the West it migrated into the Mass itself. Early on its use was restricted — sung, the medieval rubrics held, by bishops freely but by ordinary priests only at Easter — before it settled into its familiar place on Sundays and feast days, omitted in the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent. Because it is neither a psalm nor a passage of scripture but a freely composed text, liturgical scholars class it among the psalmi idiotici, the “private psalms” of the patristic age, of which very few were admitted to the canonical worship of the church.

What the words do is move from height to nearness. They open with the unreachable — glory in the highest — and then turn to petition the Lamb who “takest away the sins of the world,” so that the same hymn holds the transcendent God and the suffering, approachable Christ within a few lines of each other. That structure is much of why it has drawn composers for more than a thousand years, from plainchant settings through the polyphonic Mass ordinaries of the Renaissance to the large concert settings of Bach and beyond, where the single liturgical text becomes a frame for an entire movement.

Its theology is broadly held across the divided Western churches. The Roman Catholic Mass, the Lutheran and Anglican services that grew out of it, and a range of other liturgical traditions all retain some form of the hymn, which makes it one of the more durable points of continuity across the Reformation divide. The early church received it as the angels’ own song carried into human worship; later use kept that sense, treating the congregation, when it sings the Gloria, as briefly joining a praise older than itself.

→ Related: Gloria Patri · Dies Irae