Adoration and Praise

The first duty of man toward God is to adore him. Before asking, before even giving thanks, the creature must recognize its Creator and bow before him. Adoration and praise are the two great acts by which man renders to God what is due to him: adoration, which recognizes God as God and prostrates itself; praise, which celebrates his greatness and sings his works. These two acts are at the heart of the religious life, for they answer to what God is and to what man is before him. But they are often confused, and it is important to distinguish them in order to understand what the Church teaches of the worship due to God.

What adoration is

To adore is to recognize God as God: the infinite Creator, source of all that exists, on whom all depends and to whom all is due. Adoration is the act by which the creature, measuring the abyss that separates it from God, lowers itself before him and recognizes him as its Lord. It is first the recognition of a truth, more than a feeling: God is all, I am nothing without him, and I owe him everything. From this recognition is born the gesture of adoration, inward and often outward, such as prostration or kneeling, by which the body itself expresses the submission of the soul. The psalm unites this gesture and what it signifies: “Come, let us bow down and adore, let us bend the knee before the Lord, our Creator.” Psalms 95:6. Adoration recognizes in God the Creator, and in man the creature; it puts each in its place, in the truth of what it is.

This is why adoration is the first act of the virtue of religion, the one that renders to God the honour due to him. It is the foundation of the whole spiritual life, for all the rest, prayer, obedience, offering, flows from it. To adore is to let God be God in one’s life, and to stand before him in the truth.

What praise is

Praise is the act by which one tells the greatness and the goodness of God, one celebrates his perfections and his works. Where adoration lowers itself, praise rises: it proclaims who God is, magnifies what he has done, and sings his glory. It springs from admiration and joy, like an overflowing of the heart that has recognized God and wants to say it. The book of Psalms is full of it, and it ends on a call to praise God in every way: “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.” Psalms 150:6.

What distinguishes praise is that it is disinterested. One can pray to God to obtain, thank him for what one has received, implore him in distress; praise asks for nothing and does not even give thanks for a particular benefit: it praises God for himself, for what he is. It is the purest act of worship, for it turns toward God without return upon oneself, solely because he is worthy to be praised. Heaven itself resounds with this praise, where the creatures celebrate God for his glory alone: “You are worthy, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honour and power, for it is you who created all things.” Revelation 4:11. Adoration and praise thus go together: one recognizes God and bows, the other celebrates him and sings; together, they form the worship that man owes to his Creator.

To God alone

One point is capital: adoration is due to God alone. Because it recognizes in its object the infinite Creator, one cannot offer it to any creature, however high, without committing an idolatry. Christ himself recalled it in repelling the temptation: “You shall adore the Lord, your God, and you shall serve him alone.” Matthew 4:10. To adore a creature, a man, an image, a power, would be to render to it what belongs to God alone. This is so true that, in the Apocalypse, an angel refuses to be adored and at once refers the adoration back to God: “Take care not to do it! Adore God.” Revelation 22:9.

This truth sheds light on a distinction often misunderstood. The Church honours the saints and, still more, the Virgin Mary; but it does not adore them. The tradition has fixed precise words to express it. The worship of adoration, reserved to God alone, is called latria. The honour rendered to the saints, who are creatures loved by God and whom we take as models and intercessors, is called veneration, or dulia; it recognizes in them not gods, but friends of God. And the veneration rendered to the Virgin Mary, by reason of her unique place as Mother of God, is higher than that of the other saints: it is called hyperdulia. But between veneration, even the highest, and adoration, the difference is of nature and not of degree: one honours the saints because they reflect God, one adores God alone because he is God. To confuse the two would be to betray the first commandment; to distinguish them is to keep for God what is his alone, while honouring those whom he has filled with grace.

Adoration in spirit and in truth

It remains to know how God wills to be adored. Under the old covenant, worship passed through rites, sacrifices, a single Temple. Christ announces a new worship, which now holds to the truth of the heart rather than to a place: “The hour is coming, and is already come, when the true adorers will adore the Father in spirit and in truth; it is such adorers that the Father seeks.” John 4:23. To adore in spirit is to adore from the depth of the soul, and not with the lips alone; to adore in truth is to adore the true God as he is, without reducing him to our ideas or our interests. The adoration God asks therefore holds first to the heart, more than to gestures: it wants a man wholly turned toward him.

This does not suppress the outward acts of worship, but founds them. The liturgy, the sacraments, the singing of psalms, the kneeling, have value only when carried by inward adoration; without it, they would be only an empty décor. But animated by it, they become the right expression of what the soul recognizes: that God is God, and that he is worthy of all adoration and all praise. The summit of this worship, for the Church, is the Eucharist, where adoration finds its centre, for Christ makes himself present there and man can adore him no longer from afar, but in his very presence.