Trisagion Hymn

The hymn is short enough to learn in a minute: Holy God! Holy Mighty! Holy Immortal! Have mercy on us. It is sung three times — the name comes from the Greek tris (thrice) and hagios (holy) — with "Glory to the Father…" and a final repetition. In those ten English words the Church joins two things that belong together: the thrice-holy praise the prophet Isaiah heard the seraphim singing around God's throne (Isaiah 6:3), and the plea of creatures who know they need mercy. Heaven's song, sung by people who know they are dust.

The Church addresses the Trisagion to the Holy Trinity: God, Mighty, and Immortal are names of the one God in three Persons. St. John of Damascus liked to hear the three titles resting on the three Persons in turn — God on the Father, Mighty on the Son, Immortal on the Holy Spirit — while insisting that every title belongs fully to all three. The Trisagion should not be confused with the Liturgy's other thrice-holy hymn, the Sanctus sung later inside the Eucharistic prayer; they share Isaiah's vision but are distinct hymns with distinct histories.

The hymn's origin is told by a beloved tradition. In the reign of the emperor Theodosius II — the tradition places it around the year 447, in the days of St. Proclus, Archbishop of Constantinople of Constantinople — earthquakes shook the capital, and the people went out in procession, praying. A boy, the story goes, was caught up into the air, heard the angels singing "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal," and came down to tell of it; the people added "have mercy on us," and the earth grew still. The Church commemorates this each year on September 25, but tells it as tradition, not as documented history.

What history can document is nearly as striking: the bishops of the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon (451) acclaimed the Trisagion in their sessions — the hymn's earliest surviving attestation — so it was already common coin by the mid-fifth century. Soon afterward it became a battlefield. Peter the Fuller, patriarch of Antioch in the 470s–480s, added the phrase "who was crucified for us," understanding the hymn as addressed to Christ; churches that address it to the whole Trinity heard the addition as ascribing the Cross to the Father and the Spirit, and rejected it — the Council in Trullo (692) forbade the interpolation outright. The Oriental Orthodox churches sing the addition to this day, understanding the hymn Christologically; the Byzantine Orthodox sing it unaltered, to the Trinity. Each use is coherent on its own terms — the dispute was over what the words were taken to mean.

At the Divine Liturgy the Trisagion is sung solemnly just before the Scripture readings, at the close of the Little Entrance: while the people sing, the clergy pass to the "high place" behind the altar table, from which the celebrant turns and blesses the congregation — in a hierarchical Liturgy this is one of the great moments of the bishop's blessing, given with the two candlesticks. A handful of days displace it. On the great baptismal feasts — Pascha and Bright Week, Pentecost, the Nativity, Theophany, Lazarus Saturday, and Holy Saturday — the Church sings instead the baptismal hymn drawn from Galatians 3:27, that as many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ; on the commemorations of the Cross — the Exaltation (September 14), the Procession of the Cross (August 1), and the third Sunday of Great Lent — it yields to the hymn in which the Church bows before the Cross and glorifies the Resurrection.

Beyond the Liturgy the Trisagion is everywhere. It opens the Trisagion Prayers, the fixed cluster of short prayers that begins nearly every Orthodox service and home prayer rule, and it is among the first prayers an Orthodox child learns by heart. It also accompanies the faithful out of this life: it is sung at the funeral and the memorial service, and traditionally chanted as the body is carried to the grave. From earthquakes to gravesides, it is the prayer the Church reaches for when only the essential will do: the holiness of God, and our need of mercy.