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 Divine Office, threaded through the Rosary, and set as a refrain across the liturgical day. It is called the Lesser Doxology to distinguish it from the longer Gloria in Excelsis Deo of the Mass.

The prayer has two halves, and they did not arrive together. The first names the three Persons of the Trinity, and its shape echoes the baptismal command of Matthew’s Gospel to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” That triadic naming was old; what was contested, in the fourth-century disputes over the relation of the Son to the Father, was its exact wording. Some forms gave glory to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, language that could be read as ranking the three; the form that won out joined them with a flat “and,” each given the same glory, and this co-ordinate phrasing became a quiet statement of their equality. The second half — “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be” — was a Western addition, fixing the eternity of that glory in time’s three tenses.

In practice the formula does a particular liturgical work. Appended to a psalm, it turns an ancient Hebrew poem into Christian prayer, reading the Trinity back into the words of Israel; the worshipper closes each psalm by handing it, so to speak, to the God the church confesses. The Eastern churches preserve their own Greek form, Doxa Patri, with the same function and a slightly different close. Across traditions the doxology marks an ending — of a psalm, a prayer, an hour — and the marking is itself the point: a small, repeated act of referring everything back to its source.

What practitioners have heard in it is less a proposition to be examined than a posture to be assumed. The prayer asserts nothing it argues for; it ascribes, and the ascribing is the devotion. Theologians have nonetheless treated its wording with care, precisely because so settled and so constant a phrase carries doctrine by repetition rather than by demonstration — a creed worn smooth by use. The resemblance to other traditions’ brief returning formulas, the Islamic subḥān Allāh among them, is worth noting and easy to overstate: each belongs to its own theology of who is being glorified, and means that before it means anything shared. What the Gloria Patri keeps doing, line after line and hour after hour, is end things by pointing past them.

→ Related: Gloria In Excelsis Deo · Dies Irae