Gloria in Excelsis Deo

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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: a song the heavenly host raises above the shepherds at the birth of Jesus, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. The verse is the angels’ announcement of the Nativity, and the church took it out of the narrative and handed it back as worship. 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 cry the shepherds overheard becomes a Trinitarian doxology the congregation sings in its own voice — the same words climbing from the field at Bethlehem into the liturgy of the altar.

A borrowed first line, extended into a doxology

The opening sentence belongs to the Nativity. In the Gospel of Luke the angel brings the shepherds news of a savior, and “suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God.” Their song is two clauses long: glory above, peace below. From that seed the hymn grows downward into a long chain of acclamation and petition. After the angelic line it turns directly to the Father — We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory — heaping up verbs of praise without asking for anything, then names him Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty. Only then does it turn to the Son, and the register changes. The Lamb “who takest away the sins of the world” is asked to have mercy, to receive the prayer, to hear; the verbs become pleas. A closing acclamation gathers the three Persons — thou only art holy, thou only art the Lord, thou only art the most high, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Ghost, in the glory of God the Father. The whole arc moves from height to nearness: it opens on the unreachable glory of the heights and ends at the throat of the suffering, approachable Christ, so that the same hymn holds the transcendent God and the petitioned Lamb within a few lines of one another. This is what distinguishes it from the Gloria Patri, the Lesser Doxology — two lines that name the Trinity and seal a psalm, a formula rather than a composition. The Greater Doxology is a free hymn that argues a theology as it sings: each Person addressed, each in his own grammar, the equal glory of the three asserted not by definition but by the act of praising them together.

Greek before Latin

The hymn is Greek before it is Latin, and older in the East than in the West. It can hardly be later than the third century, and by the middle of the fourth it had spread, in a variety of versions, across the Christian world. Its earliest substantial witness places it not at the eucharist at all but among the morning prayers: it appears, in fuller form, at the head of a proseuche eothine, a morning prayer, in the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions (VII, xlvii), the great Syrian compilation of church order. Its complete Greek text survives appended to the Codex Alexandrinus, the fifth-century biblical manuscript that gathers a set of canticles after the Psalter — the Gloria filed there among the songs of scripture, though it is not one. In the Christian East it stayed where it began. The Byzantine office of Orthros, the dawn service, keeps the Greater Doxology to this day as a morning hymn, in a longer form than the West received, closing with the Trisagion — “Holy God, holy Mighty, holy Immortal” — and worded so as to leave no trace of subordinating the Son to the Father, the wording sharpened in the fourth-century controversies over the relation of the Persons. So the hymn has two liturgical homes, divided by the break between the churches: in the East a song of the morning office, in the West a song of the Mass.

Migration into the Western Mass

The move West, and the move from morning prayer into the eucharist, is traced by tradition through a handful of names. The Latin version is credited to Hilary of Poitiers (d. 366), a Western father of the church who is thought to have learned the hymn during his exile in the East around 360 and carried a Latin rendering home with him. The Liber Pontificalis, the catalog of the popes, distributes the credit for its place in the Mass across two very distant figures: it remembers Pope Telesphorus (a second-century bishop of Rome) ordering the hymn to be sung, and Pope Symmachus (498-514) ordering that it be said on Sundays and on the feasts of martyrs. The early evidence shows it entering the Mass first at Christmas — the feast to which, by its opening line, it most properly belongs — and then spreading to Sundays and the great feasts.

Its use was sharply rationed, and the rationing reveals how the hymn was valued. The first Roman Ordo directs that when the Kyrie is finished, “the pontiff, turning toward the people, begins Gloria in excelsis, if it be the occasion for it” — si tempus fuerit — and notes that an ordinary priest may sing it only at Easter. A bishop could intone the Greater Doxology freely; a parish priest, only once a year, on the morning of the Resurrection. The hymn was a thing of high solemnity, attached at first to the great festal days and to the office of the bishop, and only over centuries did it become the common Sunday property of every celebrant. Where it settled — after the Kyrie and before the collect, near the head of the Mass — it remains; and where it is withheld, it is withheld on purpose. The Gloria is omitted in Advent and Lent, the two penitential seasons of the liturgical calendar, so that its return at Christmas and at Easter lands as a release: a hymn that goes silent for weeks at a time, so that its angelic opening arrives, when it arrives, as the proper sound of a feast.

The “private psalms”

Because it is neither a psalm of the Psalter nor any other passage of scripture but a freely composed text, liturgical scholars class the Gloria among the psalmi idiotici — the “private psalms,” hymns written by individual hands rather than received, like the Psalms of David, from the canon. The fourth-century church grew wary of such compositions. The Synod of Laodicea, gathered in Asia Minor around 363-364, ruled in its fifty-ninth canon that no private psalms and no uncanonical books be read in church, only the canonical writings of the Old and New Testaments. The measure swept most of the non-scriptural hymns out of the liturgy at the very moment they were multiplying — the same anxiety that hedged the boundaries of the Psalms themselves against extra-canonical praise poetry such as the Psalms of Solomon. A handful of the psalmi idiotici survived the cull and lodged permanently in worship; the Gloria is the most prominent of them, and the Te Deum the other. What kept it in was its first line. A hymn that opened with words spoken by angels inside scripture was hard to file among the merely private compositions, even though everything past its first clause was the church’s own work — and so the Greater Doxology passed through a sieve that caught almost everything else of its kind.

A thousand years of music

Held at the head of the Mass and reserved to the feasts, the Gloria became one of the great fixed texts of Western music. As the second item of the Mass Ordinary — the unchanging texts of the rite, set in sequence as Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei — it drew composers for more than a thousand years. It exists first as plainchant, a body of Gregorian Gloria melodies graded by solemnity, the most florid kept for the highest feasts. From the late medieval period it passed into polyphony, and every composer who set a complete Mass Ordinary set the Gloria: the long text, with its accumulation of short acclamations, gave polyphony a wide field to work, and the structural turn from the praise of the Father to the petition of the Lamb gave the music a built-in change of mood. In its largest form it left the liturgy outright. The Gloria of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B minor unfolds across nine movements — a number read as three times the three of the Trinity — opening with a dancing five-voice chorus in D major as the trumpets and drums enter for the first time, then dropping at once into Et in terra pax, a slow pastorale that paints the shepherds of the Nativity field before rising into a fugue on the peace promised to men. There the single liturgical sentence becomes the frame for an entire concert structure, far too long to be sung at any Mass.

A point of continuity across the Reformation

The theology of the Gloria is broadly held across the divided Western churches, and the hymn became one of the more durable seams running through the Reformation fracture. Martin Luther’s reform kept the Greater Doxology in the German Mass; the cantor Nikolaus Decius (c. 1485-1541) cast it as a German chorale, Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr — “To God alone on high be glory” — printed by the 1520s and set to a melody adapted from the plainchant Et in terra of an Easter Mass, so that congregations sang the angels’ hymn in their own tongue to a tune the Latin rite had already taught them. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer likewise retained the hymn in its Communion service, moving it in 1552 from the opening to the very end of the rite, where it became the congregation’s parting song. Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican worship thus all carry some form of the same text, set in different places and sung in different tongues, which makes the Gloria one of the few hymns a worshipper from any of the three Western confessions would recognize across the divide.

The early church received the hymn as the angels’ own song carried into human worship, and later use kept that sense. To sing the Greater Doxology is to take up, in the first person plural, words first heard secondhand by shepherds in a field outside Bethlehem; the congregation, when it sings the Gloria, is briefly joining a praise older than itself.

Sources and scholarship

The standard modern treatment of the Gloria within the structure of the Mass is Josef Andreas Jungmann’s Missarum Sollemnia (1948), translated as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (1951), which sets the hymn in its place after the Kyrie and reconstructs its passage from morning office to eucharist. The older but still cited account is the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) article Gloria in Excelsis Deo, which collects the patristic witnesses, the Liber Pontificalis attributions to Telesphorus and Symmachus, and the tradition crediting the Latin to Hilary of Poitiers. The decisive disciplinary text for the psalmi idiotici is the fifty-ninth canon of the Council of Laodicea (c. 363-364), barring private psalms and uncanonical books from public reading. For the hymn’s Reformation afterlife, the German chorale Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr of Nikolaus Decius preserves the medieval Et in terra melody beneath a vernacular text. The earliest complete Greek text travels in the canticle appendix of the Codex Alexandrinus; the fuller morning-prayer form survives in the seventh book of the Apostolic Constitutions, and the longer Eastern form endures in the Byzantine Orthros.

→ Related: Gloria Patri · Dies Irae · Kyrie · Liturgy · Psalms · Psalms Of Solomon · Christianity · Jesus Christ · Church Of The Nativity · Martin Luther