Gloria Patri

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The Gloria Patri, known in English as the “Glory Be,” is the short doxology of Christian worship: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” Two lines only, and among the most often spoken sentences in the history of the Latin and Greek churches — recited at the close of psalms in the Liturgy of the Hours, threaded through the Rosary, set as a refrain across the liturgical day, and returned to so constantly that a worshipper formed in the Western office will have said it tens of thousands of times in a lifetime. It is called the Lesser Doxology to mark it off from the longer Gloria in Excelsis Deo, the festive angelic hymn of the Mass; the two share a name and a function — ascription of glory — but not a text, a length, or a place. The Lesser is the workaday one, the formula a psalm is handed off to, said standing, said again.

Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity (c. 1411), depicting the three Persons the doxology names — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. — Andrei Rublev, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two halves, two ages

The prayer is a seam. Its two clauses did not arrive together, and the join between them is the join between two very different moments in the history of Christian praise. The first half names the three: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Its shape echoes the baptismal command at the close of the Gospel of Matthew, to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit — a triadic naming as old as the church’s washing of converts, and one that the doxology lifts out of the baptismal rite and sets loose into daily prayer. To ascribe glory to the three by name is to confess, in the act of praising, the God into whom one was baptized.

The second half — “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end” — is later, and Western, and grammatically a small puzzle. In its Latin form, Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, the verb erat is singular and the subject left implicit. As the clause is now heard, the subject is the glory: as the glory was at the beginning, so it is now and always. But the older reading, traced by liturgical scholars including the entry on the doxology in the Catholic Encyclopedia, takes the implicit subject to be the Son — as he was in the beginning — an echo of the opening of John’s Gospel, in principio erat Verbum, in the beginning was the Word. On that reading the addition is not a remark about the permanence of praise at all but a second, quiet assertion of the eternity of the Son: he who is glorified was there from the start. The two readings sit inside one untranslated sentence, and the prayer carries both without choosing.

The fourth century and the weight of a conjunction

The first half looks artless, but its exact wording was fought over, and the fight is the reason the formula reads as it does. The earliest Christian doxologies are not parallel. They give glory to the Father through (διά) the Son and in (ἐν) the Holy Spirit, or to the Father with (μετά, σύν) the Son — prepositions that arrange the three in a descending order of mediation, the Father glorified by way of the Son, the Son by way of the Spirit. A doxology of just this shape closes Clement of Alexandria’s homily on the rich man’s salvation at the end of the second century. The phrasing was not heretical; it was simply the grammar of praise as the early church had received it, and it read the three Persons as a sequence.

That sequence became dangerous in the fourth century, when the relation of the Son to the Father was the open wound of the whole church. To those holding the positions associated with Arius — that the Son was a creature, made, not co-eternal with the Father — a doxology that glorified the Father through the Son was a doxology that could be sung as their own: it ranked, and ranking was the point. The defenders of the Nicene confession, Athanasius foremost among them, answered partly in the doxology itself. Set the three side by side, joined by a flat and — Father and Son and Holy Spirit — and the coordinate phrasing makes its own argument: three given the one same glory, in parallel, with no preposition left to rank them. The conjunction does the dogmatic work of the homoousion in miniature, and does it where everyone, learned or not, would say it daily.

The sharpest contemporary record of the quarrel is Basil of Caesarea’s treatise On the Holy Spirit, written in 374. Basil had pronounced glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit — the coordinate form — and was attacked for innovating, for abandoning the traditional through the Son in the Spirit. His reply is careful and decisive: the prepositions do not fix degrees of being; with and through can each be used rightly; and the true question hidden under the grammar is whether the Spirit is God at all. The argument over a word like and was never really about diction. It was the divinity of the third Person, carried in the smallest available vessel. When the coordinate doxology won, it won because the theology behind it had won, and it then went on confessing that theology in every choir stall in the Latin West.

Basil of Caesarea, whose treatise On the Holy Spirit (374) defended the coordinate form of the doxology; icon from the Trinity Cathedral iconostasis, Sergiev Posad, 1420s. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Western addition and the Eastern silence

The second clause has a date attached to it, or nearly. The Second Council of Vaison, in Gaul in 529, legislated the words Sicut erat in principio into the Gallican churches, declaring that they were already in use at Rome, in the East, and in Africa, and were said there as a protest against the Arians who would not grant the Son an eternal glory. The council was right about the West and wrong about the East: the addition was never used in any Eastern rite, and the Greeks in time complained of its use among the Latins. From roughly the seventh century the full Roman form — both halves, the coordinate naming and the threefold tense — became all but universal across the West, the shape an English speaker still hears in the Book of Common Prayer, where it is appointed after the psalms at Morning and Evening Prayer.

The East kept the shorter prayer. The Greek Doxa Patri runs: glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, and now and ever and unto the ages of ages — kai nyn kai aei kai eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn — Amen. The coordinate naming is identical; the Trinitarian point is the same. What is missing is the look backward. The Latin sets the glory in three tenses, past, present, and endless future; the Greek opens only forward, now and ever and unto the ages. The difference is small to say and large to dwell in. The Western form turns the eye to a beginning — whether the beginning of the glory or the beginning of the Word — and folds the whole of time between two markers. The Eastern form simply pours forward, unbounded at the front, a present and a future with no closing horizon. Two churches, one confession, two postures toward time, and the seam where the second half was sewn on still showing.

What the formula does

Its theology is the more striking for how little it argues. The Lesser Doxology proves nothing; it ascribes. Set after a psalm, it does a particular and consequential work: it reads the Trinity back into the words of Israel. The Hebrew poem, addressed to the one God of the covenant, is closed by the worshipper with the threefold Christian name, and so received as already, secretly, speaking of the God the church confesses — the same God, now named in full. The handing-off is the act. The psalm is prayed, and then it is given, explicitly, to Father and Son and Spirit. In the liturgy of the hours this happens at the end of every psalm and canticle through the day, so that the office is a long alternation of Israel’s voice and the church’s signature; in the Rosary the Glory Be closes each decade, a small Trinitarian punctuation between the counted Hail Marys.

A leaf from a 14th-century Tuscan antiphonary, the chant book in which psalms and their doxology were sung; square notation on four-line staves. — Cleveland Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

There is a family resemblance here to the brief returning formulas of other traditions of prayer — the recurring subḥān Allāh, glory be to God, that threads through Muslim devotion in Islam is the readiest comparison — and the likeness is at once close and shallow: a short praise said often, by rote, until it lies below the level of attention — and it ends at the form. The Christian doxology glorifies three named Persons; that naming is the content of the prayer and the freight of two centuries of controversy, and it is not a general gesture of praise that happens to be Trinitarian. The specificity is the prayer.

This is why so plain a sentence has been weighed so finely. A formula said tens of thousands of times is not learned the way a creed is learned, by assent to its clauses; it is learned the way a path is learned, by walking it. The fourth-century combatants understood this exactly. They did not fight over the Nicene settlement only in councils and treatises; they fought for it in the doxology, because what the faithful say at the end of every psalm is what the faithful will come to believe, below argument, by the sheer pressure of repetition. The Gloria Patri is the homoousion made portable and worn smooth — a whole Trinitarian theology compressed into a sentence short enough to say while standing, and said so constantly that the doctrine is no longer held in the mind but kept in the mouth, returned with every psalm to the three it names.

→ Related: Gloria In Excelsis Deo · Dies Irae · Gospel Of St Matthew · Athanasius · Liturgy Of The Hours · Rosary · Psalms · Holy Spirit · Jesus Christ · Baptism · Liturgy · Book Of Common Prayer · Islam