On the Te Deum
I’m in the midst of teaching a Sunday School class on the Canticles, and we’ve begun with the Te Deum Laudamus. I’m inclined to joke that it’s a bit like beginning a tour of classical music with Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which would entail nothing but a descent into lesser forms of music. But since some of the other canticles are the inspired words of God and the Te Deum is a fourth century hymn, the analogy isn’t quite apt. Still, there are few more potent distillations of the grounds and contents of Christian worship. Cranmer was right to make it a part of daily worship for Anglicans.
The hymn* proceeds through an interesting progression of names and verbs in the opening lines: we praise God, confess Him as Lord, and the whole earth worships Him as Father everlasting. There is a double movement at work here: as we move closer to the center of the Christian confession of God as Father, we also expand the horizon of worship to include not simply the Church but the whole earth.
Yet the confession of praise that the Church makes below is one which participates in the praise being offered above: the angels, the heavens, the powers, the Cherubim and Seraphim proclaim with an unceasing voice ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, the heavens and earth are full of Thy glory.’ The heavens are nothing if not populated: the holiness of God’s inner life is so perfect and profound that it takes a vast range of creatures who behold it to proclaim it properly. That the ‘heavens and earth’ are full of God’s glory extends Isaiah 6’s description, folding into the immediacy of the worship surrounding the throne the earth’s worship of God the Father everlasting that we have just finished naming above.
The praise of God’s holiness within the Te Deum is indirect: it is the testimony of the creatures who stand immediately before the throne of God that the Church repeats. But the repetition becomes a re-enactment, and the indirect confession of God’s holiness becomes our own. But before we return below, we name those members of the Church who have preceded us: the Prophets, Apostles, and white-robed Martyrs all stand in praise around the throne as well. Through naming them, they become ours — and we, theirs. They matter for us because they precede us, because we are their debtors and heirs, and their praise of God in His Holiness obligates us to the same.
Yet what they see face to face, we yet see in a mirror darkly. “The holy church throughout the world doth acknowledge Thee…” Here many of the themes come together, and the Church is located in its peculiar position ‘on the way.’ The Church covers the whole earth, the very earth that worships God as the Father everlasting and that is filled with God’s glory. Yet while the Angels in heaven and the Church Triumphant behold God in His perfection, the Church confesses: it participates within the heavenly worship, but only in a way that is as of yet incomplete and unfulfilled.
Nor is the Church’s own confession empty. The triple-proclamation of the holiness of God that formed the center of the opening section of the Te Deum is here matched by the triple-confession of the three persons of the Godhead, in what is the exact center of the Te Deum as originally written. The mystery of God’s holiness that causes the Seraphim to cover their faces and feet in heaven is matched by the mystery of the Church’s confession of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That was as far as we got in the first class, and we’ll return to the subsequent sections in future weeks. Consider this, though, something of a sales pitch: a morning that begins with the Te Deum is a morning in which we are moved to the center of God’s throne, and our own desires and lives located properly as a momentary fragment of a grand chorus of creatures who now live to the praise of God’s glory.
*I call it a hymn here, but it’s really exalted prose.
