The great Eastern Orthodox hymn: The Thrice Holy. The thrice-fold invitation of God. The Trisagion prayer.

Agios o Theos (O Holy God), 
Agios ischyros (Holy, Strong), 
Agios athanatos, eleison imas (Holy, Immortal, have mercy on us)

“Agios o Theos is the first word. Agios means holy. And Theos, of course, is God, from which we get theology and all those words, okay? And notice it’s O, holy God. The O is stuck in the middle because it’s Greek and not English, but it’s an explanation. This poem is in second person, this prayer, you know? And then agios ischyros, the term basically means strong.  You know, if you’ve ever seen the translation, like in Annie Dillon’s book, Holy the Firm, that’s what it’s calling it. Agios ischyros is holy the firm, okay?  The last one is Agios athanatos, that means literally undying one. And so these are the thrice-fold invitation of God. And then eleison, one of the few words to survive from the Greek into the Latin mass, eleison, have mercy. And imas is on us, it’s a plural. So it’s a beautiful prayer poem.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff -Teilhard, 1:12 10 – Tuesday Evening Q&A.

“Gurdjieff is really tying up all kinds of knots in his teaching in the Trinity and the Trisagion. Because what he’s done, if you’ve noticed, he’s put together this kind of massive overlay. You have the three persons of the Trinity, three-centered awareness, three parts of the body, and the law of three. And when you consider what’s implicit in this, in this overlay, and if you say that here in head, you’ve got the head, the physical head. You’ve got affirming, the first, the pushing force in the law of three. You’ve got the intellectual center. And you’ve got Agios o Theos.

“All of them sort of perched simultaneously on that point. So we come down to the back, the spinal column now. You’ve got wholly the denying, the second force of the law of three. You’ve got the, in a deep way, he’s putting the seat of the moving center and the seat of the gravity, the seat of gravity of the human being in the back, in the spinal column. So you’ve got wholly denying. You’ve got, and then Christ. So again, a body part, a part of the person of the Trinity, the three-centered awareness, moving center awareness, wholly denying. Jesus Christ, all overlapping. Agios ischyros.

“And then the solar plexus, a part of the body, the seat of the emotional or feeling center. The third person of the Trinity, Agios athanatos. So this basically gives us like a grand central station in our body. And of course, what we get from the law of three, particularly when you make this overlay through the Trinity, between three-centered awareness and the law of three, written in your body, is this amazing sort of capacity to demonstrate that the Trinity is not just a kind of theological idea that got invented by a bunch of bald, bored, old Greeks in the 4th century. It’s an archetypal, cosmogonic principle.

“The Trinity cannot be locked up in itself. Because if it does exemplify, which I think is overwhelming, the three strands of the law of three, affirming, denying, and reconciling. It can, will, and must create a new arising. It brings worlds into existence. It doesn’t stay locked up within its own divine monastery. It leaps the walls and brings new forms in.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 38:50 04 Sunday pm Teaching.

“What Gurdjieff is basically saying is that this formula that we know as the Trisagion, which is not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s Holy, O Holy God, O Holy and Mighty, O Holy Undying One, is the fundamental vestigial, pre-personalized, pre-anthropologized vision of the Trinity as it emerges as the undivided unity. So if you get primordial quivers through your body when you sing, Agios o Theos. Agios ischyros Agios athanatos. Eleison imas. And if you feel the antiquity of that and wonder why that chant with those funny words in it is still around in the liturgy, I think it represents the purest shot back to the maximum esoteric understanding that Gurdjieff says of why the Trinity actually emblemizes the capacity of the One to express itself in three so that creation can exist at all. Because one cannot create.

“You get that? As you begin to understand the Law of Three, you see why that’s so. One has to begin by creating the conditions within the oneness through which particularity and action within a field of undividedness is possible. And later on, the persons of Jesus, God, and the Father and the Holy Spirit would come to be identified with this as a way of personalizing as doorways and portals so that we could, in our personal human nature, take these principles and begin to relate to them.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff -Teilhard, 1:02:30 12 – Wednesday Afternoon Teaching.

“[Gurdjieff] developed a very, very tender relationship for the idea of the mercy of God as something that flows to us, as tender comfort and connection. Some of his most tender passages in his work, where you find the real heart of Gurdjieff’s devotion, are all, in my opinion, built around the terms that have to do with mercy, the mercy of God, and the sorrow of our common father. And so to be able to sing this hymn in a Byzantine setting in the original Greek is a way of putting into your databank some of the stimuli that are actually working in his mind to put on the brain and to see where the tremendous heartiness comes.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 2:00 10 – Tuesday Evening Q&A.

Listen to the Trisagion Prayer:

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Logion 50
Yeshua says...
Suppose you are asked,
"Where have you come from?"
say, "We have come from the Light at its source,
from the place where it came forth
and was manifest as Image and Icon.
If you are asked, "Are you that Light?"
say, "We are its children,
and chosen by the Source, the Living Father."
If you are questioned,
"But what is the sign of the Source within you?"
say, "It is movement and it is rest."

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Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.