Trisagion (Hymn)

Held here as a hymn, the Trisagion, Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us, is sung near the beginning of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy and throughout Eastern Christian worship. Its threefold address to God as holy, mighty and immortal is distinct from the Sanctus of the eucharistic prayer, and the Eastern tradition preserves an account of its origin in a hymn revealed during an earthquake at Constantinople, when a child was said to have been caught up and heard the angels singing it. A single addition to the hymn, the phrase confessing that the holy and immortal one was crucified, became a serious point of controversy in the fifth and sixth centuries, entangled with disputes over the union of the divine and human in Christ, since to say that God was crucified touched directly on how the natures of Christ were understood. Sung repeatedly and with reverence, the Trisagion is among the most cherished hymns of the Orthodox liturgy and is used also in the Western church, notably in the Good Friday reproaches.

The added phrase who was crucified for us, associated with the Miaphysite patriarch Peter the Fuller of Antioch in the fifth century, was rejected by those who held to the Council of Chalcedon as implying that the divine nature itself had suffered, and disputes over whether to sing the hymn with or without the addition became a visible marker of the deep christological split between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches that persists to this day. In the Byzantine rite the hymn is sung with a slow processional character, underscoring its place as one of the most theologically weighted moments of the liturgy.

In the fifth century, Peter the Fuller, patriarch of Antioch, added the clause who was crucified for us to the Trisagion as customarily sung in his see, a change that ignited one of the more consequential liturgical controversies of the period because of what it seemed to imply theologically: opponents read the addition as asserting that the Trinity as a whole, rather than Christ specifically in his human nature, had suffered crucifixion, a position associated with the theological error called theopaschism. Defenders of the addition argued it was addressed to Christ alone within the Trisagion's threefold praise and carried no such implication, but the dispute became entangled with the wider fifth and sixth century controversies over Chalcedonian Christology, and communities that retained Peter's addition became identified, rightly or wrongly, with anti Chalcedonian theological positions.

The unmodified, older form of the Trisagion, without the added clause, remained and remains standard in Byzantine Chalcedonian Orthodox and Eastern Catholic liturgy, sung in the elaborate multi part choral settings characteristic of Byzantine chant near the start of the Divine Liturgy, while the added clause survives today specifically within the Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Coptic, Syriac and Armenian traditions, whose continued use of Peter's addition several centuries later remains one of the clearest living liturgical markers distinguishing Oriental Orthodox practice from Eastern Orthodox Chalcedonian practice on a single, specific point of wording.