Gloria in Excelsis Deo

A night in the fields of Bethlehem

Luke tells the scene right after the birth. Shepherds are spending the night outdoors, keeping watch over their flocks. An angel appears to them, the glory of the Lord shines around them, and he announces “good news of great joy that will be for all the people”: a Savior has been born, and they will find him lying in a manger.

Then, Luke writes, “suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host with the angel, praising God.” That’s the choir that sings. One angel brings the news, the angels sing, and the shepherds get up and go to see. You can read the whole passage, verse by verse, in the Gospel accounts of the Nativity.

The text, in four versions

Luke wrote in Greek. Saint Jerome translated the Gospels into Latin in the late 300s; that translation is called the Vulgate. The Latin Mass kept a slightly different wording, the one everyone knows.

Word for word: gloria, glory; in excelsis, in the heights, that is, in heaven; Deo, to God. The second half answers the first: glory above, peace below.

Glory on high, peace on earth

The sentence is perfectly balanced. On one side, heaven gives glory to God. On the other, the earth receives peace. In between is the Child in the manger, and peace comes through him. For Christians, it’s Christmas in one line: God coming very close to us. The Church calls it the Incarnation.

The peace the angels speak of isn’t only the absence of war. In the Bible, the word (shalom in Hebrew, eirēnē in Greek) also means a life made whole, at peace with God and with others. That’s probably why the phrase has spread beyond churches: “peace on earth” has become a Christmas wish for everyone, believers or not.

“Good will toward men” or “people of good will”?

Many Americans know the line as “on earth peace, good will toward men,” from the King James Bible and from carols like It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. At Mass, Catholics say “peace to people of good will,” the word-for-word rendering of the Latin bonae voluntatis. And the New American Bible reads “peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

All three come from the same Greek word, eudokia, which means goodwill, favor, good pleasure. The question is whose goodwill it is: ours, or God’s. The King James follows manuscripts that read it as a blessing given to all (“good will toward men”); most modern translations follow the oldest manuscripts, where peace is given to those God favors. In that reading, the goodwill is first of all God’s: peace is given because God loves us.

Each wording brings out a different side of the same verse. If “good will toward men” is the one you grew up with, it still says something true.

From the angels’ song to the Gloria at Mass

The first Christians extended the angels’ song into a long prayer of praise, born in Greek in the Eastern Churches. It’s called the angelic hymn, or the Great Doxology. It’s the Gloria at Mass: it begins with the angels’ words, then continues with its own, “We praise you, we bless you, we adore you.”

According to a tradition recorded in the Liber pontificalis, an ancient chronicle of the popes, it was Pope Telesphorus, in the 2nd century, who had it sung at the Christmas Mass. Pope Symmachus (498–514) is then said to have extended it to Sundays and the feasts of martyrs. These attributions are late, but they make one thing clear: the Gloria is first of all a Christmas song.

And it still is. The Gloria isn’t sung on the Sundays of Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, and it comes back at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. For many people, that’s one of the loveliest moments of the night: the first Gloria in a month. For the full Christmas season calendar, see when to put up the nativity.

Angels We Have Heard on High

It’s the carol that made these three Latin words famous. Its refrain stretches the word Gloria into a long run of notes before in excelsis Deo, like a choir that doesn’t want to stop. It began as a French carol, Les Anges dans nos campagnes, presented as a traditional carol from Languedoc and first printed in Paris in 1842, in a collection by Father Louis Lambillotte. The English version, Angels We Have Heard on High, was adapted in 1862 and has been an American Christmas classic ever since.

The Gloria in your nativity scene

• The angel with the banner. Many nativity sets include an angel holding a banner reading Gloria in excelsis Deo. Hang it above the stable, or set it on the roof, near the star.
• A homemade banner. A strip of kraft paper or tracing paper, both ends cut in a V, the words written with a gold paint pen. Glue it to an angel’s hands, or stretch it between two small dowels above the stable.
• Shepherds facing the stable. They’re the ones who heard the song. Place them on the path, a little apart, as if they’d just gotten up. More placement ideas on the how to set up a nativity scene page.
• Sing the refrain. On Christmas Eve, when you lay the Child in the manger, many families sing the refrain of Angels We Have Heard on High. The other gestures of that night are on the praying before the nativity page.
• To color. The angel is one of our printable coloring pages, along with the shepherds and their sheep.

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