Kyrie Eleison

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Kyrie eleison is the Greek petition “Lord, have mercy,” a short cry for mercy that survives, untranslated, at the opening of the Latin Mass. Two words long in Greek — Kýrie eléēson — it is one of the very few Greek phrases the Roman liturgy never converted to Latin, and so it stands in the Roman rite as a small island of an older tongue inside a service otherwise spoken in Latin. A congregation that has not used Greek for its worship in fifteen centuries still begins by saying two Greek words, and saying them as if they were its own.

A petition older than its place

The petition is older than its place in the Mass. It is assembled out of a plea that runs through the Greek scriptures. In the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible — the Psalms repeat the cry eleēson me, kyrie, “have mercy on me, Lord,” at the turning point of one prayer after another, the appeal of someone who has run out of every resource but the mercy of God (so in Psalms 6, 9, 31, 86, 123 of the Hebrew numbering). The New Testament carries the same cry into narrative. The blind and the desperate use it to stop Jesus on the road: two blind men outside Jericho, the Canaanite woman pleading for her daughter, and blind Bartimaeus calling Son of David, have mercy on me loudly enough to be hushed by the crowd and answered anyway (Matthew 15 and 20, Mark 10). Ten lepers shout a near-identical line from a safe distance (Luke 17). In every case the words are spoken from below — by people with no standing, no claim, nothing to offer but the asking. That posture, more than any single verse, is what the liturgical Kyrie inherits. The cry was already the speech of the helpless before it was the speech of the assembly.

It had a long life in the East before the West settled it into fixed form, and the shape it took there was not the compact acclamation of the later Mass but a litany. In the Eastern liturgies the cry functions as a response, and it still does: in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy the great litanies — the deacon’s chains of petitions sung near the beginning and again before the offering — keep the cry exactly where Egeria found it, the people answering each bidding in turn. A deacon names the things to pray for — the church, the bishop, the sick, travelers, the dead, the city, the harvest — one petition after another, and the people answer Kyrie eleison to each, the same plea returned to the deacon until the petitions are exhausted. That responsive, list-like form is the cry’s native home, and it is the form in which it seems first to have spread. The earliest clear witness is an eyewitness one. The pilgrim Egeria — a woman from the Latin West, sometimes called Aetheria, who traveled to the Holy Land around 381 to 384 and wrote home a long, plainspoken account of what she saw — describes the evening service at the Anastasis in Jerusalem, the church over the empty tomb. At the lighting of the lamps the psalms and antiphons are sung; then a deacon reads out the commemorations, names of the living and the dead one by one, and as he pronounces each name a crowd of small boys answers, in her words rendering it into Latin, miserere Domine — Lord, have mercy. She is hearing Kyrie eleison sung as a response, in a city that prayed in Greek, decades before the West had any settled use for it.

How it came West

From the Antiochene and Jerusalem liturgies the cry traveled to Rome, and it arrived as something borrowed rather than something native. This is the point at which the Kyrie is most often misunderstood. The church of Rome did indeed pray in Greek in its first centuries, before Latin displaced it in the third; but the liturgical Kyrie is not a fossil left from that era. It is a later Eastern import, taken up in the West when the West was already Latin, and kept in Greek precisely because it came in Greek. The first firm Western evidence is legislative. The third canon of the Second Council of Vaison, held in 529 in the province of Arles in Gaul, directs that since the sweet and devout custom of saying Kyrie eleison with great fervor and compunction had been taken up at the Apostolic See, through all the East, and across Italy, the Gallican churches should adopt it too — at the morning office, at Mass, and at Vespers. The wording is revealing in two directions: it shows the practice already established at Rome and spreading, and it shows it new enough in Gaul to need a council to introduce it.

At Rome the litany then contracted. Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604, defended the Roman usage in a letter and noted what made it peculiar: alongside Kyrie eleison, Rome had begun to alternate Christe eleison, “Christ, have mercy,” which the Greeks did not do. The strung-out petitions that the cry once answered gradually fell silent, and what remained was the response by itself — the answer kept after the questions had dropped away. By the high Middle Ages the form had hardened into a fixed acclamation near the start of the Mass, after the entrance and before the Gloria: conventionally a ninefold pattern, Kyrie eleison three times, Christe eleison three times, and Kyrie eleison three times again.

That the words stayed Greek through all of this is the feature that makes the Kyrie unusual. A liturgy that had translated the whole of its prayer into Latin — the readings, the canon, the chants — left these two words standing in the language they came in. Several Greek survivals dot the Roman books, the Trisagion of the Good Friday reproaches among them, but the Kyrie is the one the ordinary worshiper meets every week. The conservatism is liturgical rather than learned: a form received in a fixed shape tends to be kept in that shape, and the cry came in Greek, sung, already weathered by use, and was simply not unpicked. The faithful went on saying a sentence most of them could not parse, on the strength of what it did rather than what its grammar said — which is itself a kind of testimony to how the Kyrie was held, as an act before it was a statement.

The threefold gloss

Medieval interpreters read meaning into that arithmetic. The three groups of three were heard as addressed to the three persons of the Trinity — Kyrie to the Father, Christe to the Son, Kyrie again to the Spirit — so that the whole became a compact act of worship of the triune God. The reading is old and durable, and it shaped how the Kyrie was sung and felt. But it is a gloss laid over the text rather than its origin. The threefold repetition came out of the litany, where any petition might be answered several times over, and out of the rhetorical habit of saying a plea more than once to mean it; the Trinitarian count was fitted to a shape that already existed for other reasons. The medieval interpreters were not decoding a cipher built into the words. They were finding a use for a number the form happened to give them — a way of reading addressed to the theology of the triune God rather than recovered from the prayer’s own history. Liturgical historians, Joseph Jungmann among them in his great study of the Roman Mass, draw the line carefully: the gloss is real and devout and centuries old, and it is not how the Kyrie came to be threefold.

The Kyrie sung

The same nine-line shape made the Kyrie one of the chief sites of liturgical music. When the texts that recur at every Mass — Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei — were gathered into the cycle that composers set as a unit, the Kyrie stood first: the opening movement, the first thing met in a sung Mass. Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, from the fourteenth century and the earliest complete polyphonic setting of the Ordinary by one composer, opens with it; so do the Masses of Palestrina, of Byrd, of the long line that follows them. The text invites elaboration almost by its poverty. A handful of Greek syllables, repeated nine times in a near-symmetrical frame, gives a composer a structure already built — the two outer Kyrie sections often set to related music around a contrasting Christe, an ABA shape handed over by the words themselves — and almost no words to get through, so that the music can dwell. The result is some of the most extended writing in the repertory: long melismatic chant runs, then dense polyphony, spinning many minutes of sound out of an acclamation a child could learn in a breath. Across the polyphonic centuries the Kyrie carried music far longer than the words, and the imbalance is the point — the cry asks for one thing, and the setting holds on the asking.

What it asks, and how often

What the petition asks is plain, and it does not change across these settings: that the Lord show mercy. The Greek noun behind the verb, eleos, is wider than the English “mercy” alone — it covers pity, compassion, the steadfast loving- kindness the Hebrew Bible calls ḥesed, the unowed favor of one who could withhold it and does not. To call eleēson is to ask for that whole field at once, and to ask it of Kyrie, the Lord, the address the early church used both for the God of Israel and for the risen Jesus, so that the cry rides the same word toward both without forcing a choice between them. Christian practice has held this not as a single request answered once but as a standing posture before God, returned to at every celebration — the reason the cry is repeated rather than spoken once and left. It is penitential without being a confession of particular sins. Unlike the rite of confession, it names no offense and asks no specific pardon; it names the need for mercy as a condition rather than an occasion, the constant ground beneath the particular failings. To say Kyrie eleison is not to admit having done a thing but to admit standing in want of mercy at all, which is taken to be always true and so always said. The repetition is not insistence in the sense of nagging an unwilling God; in the logic of the rite it is the form the condition takes when it is voiced — a state of need does not finish, and so its utterance does not finish either.

In this it stands close to a cousin in the Christian East, the Jesus Prayer of the hesychast tradition — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner — which takes the same plea for mercy and turns it inward, into a formula repeated in solitude and breath rather than answered aloud in assembly. The two are not the same prayer, but they are the same word doing different work: the Kyrie the public, sung, corporate form, the Jesus Prayer the private, continual, contemplative one, both built on the appeal the blind men made on the road. Within the Mass the Kyrie also has a later companion in the Agnus Dei, “Lamb of God, have mercy on us,” sung near the breaking of the bread: mercy asked at the threshold of the rite and mercy asked again at its center, the sacrament framed at both ends by the same petition.

Sources and scholarship {#research}

The early history of the Kyrie rests on a small set of much-examined witnesses. The eyewitness account is the Itinerarium Egeriae, the pilgrim Egeria’s late-fourth-century travel diary, whose chapter on the Jerusalem evening office preserves the cry in living use as a litany response; a public-domain English rendering is M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe’s The Pilgrimage of Etheria (online text). The decisive legislative witness is the third canon of the Second Council of Vaison (529), which records the cry’s spread into Gaul and its prior establishment at Rome and through the East. The standard modern synthesis is Joseph A. Jungmann’s Missarum Sollemnia (1948), translated as The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development (New York: Benziger, 1951), which traces the contraction of the litany to the bare acclamation and is careful to date the Trinitarian reading as a later overlay. The older but still cited reference treatment is Adrian Fortescue’s article Kyrie Eleison in the Catholic Encyclopedia (vol. 8, 1913), which assembles the patristic and conciliar evidence and stresses that the Roman Kyrie is a borrowing from the East rather than a survival of Rome’s own Greek age (full text). The Septuagint and Gospel background — the recurring eleēson me, kyrie of the Psalms and the mercy-cries of the Gospels — can be read in the Greek text of the relevant passages, the prayer’s biblical raw material gathered into the liturgy over centuries.

A congregation that has long since stopped speaking Greek still opens its central rite with a Greek sentence, kept because it was always kept — the phrase outlasting the language that made it ordinary. The cry goes on being said in the words in which it was first received.

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