Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983)

“Man,” writes Schmemann, “is a hungry being.” Were man to invent his own ideal state of being, it is doubtful he would conceive of perfection in hunger. And yet, man is dependent upon sustenance from the very beginning. Man suffers no lack in the Garden only because man is fed by God in the Garden. Ideal human existence is not, therefore, merely the possession of life in its fullness. It is the enjoyment of life in its fullness as gift and communion with God. It is in this sense that show more all of creation is sacramental, as we receive more than just creation in creation. We receive God himself. Sacrament is a gift of creation “shot through with the presence of God.”

Eucharist is participation in the true sacramental nature of creation. Fallen men are now accustomed to dealing with the world only as it appears on the surface, devoid of any transcendent quality. To be eucharistic, however, is to receive the world as sacrament and bless God in return. This is “the state of perfect man,” returning blessing with blessing in loving communion with God. This is the vocation of man, unifying the world in the act of blessing God. Man is a priest, called to the mission of eucharist. The world becomes what it truly is through this priestly offering of eucharist, as God’s world is only comprehensible as sacrament.

The problem is that the world is broken. Man took creation while rejecting God. Jesus Christ came as the “perfect expression of life,” and the world killed him (thereby killing its own life). The natural world has consigned itself to death, and it therefore cannot experience eucharistic communion with God’s sacramental gift of life. However, this death is the context into which the proclamation of the Gospel sounds forth. With great joy, Christianity asserts that God in Christ will again fully restore the world to the fullness of sacramental life. Moreover, the Gospel is the good news that God has already endowed his people with the life of this world to come in the Church. In Christ, the future breaks into the present.

In the Church, Eucharist is the “sacrament of joy” by which the redeemed journey into the dimension of the world to come – the dimension of the Kingdom – to feast on the presence of Christ, who is our life. It is in this sense that “Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy its Lord,” as it is here that man is restored again to the Garden. It is here that man returns blessing for blessing in loving communion with God, receiving life as it truly is – sacramentally. It is only here that man finds the ability to participate in eucharistic life, as he participates in the body and blood of the only perfect man.

As many Christians do, I struggled for a long time with Eucharist. I simply did not know what God expected me to be thinking as I received the bread and the cup, and I typically settled into some form of guilt. Christ died on a cross for me, and it was my sin that nailed him there. The bread and cup were stark reminders of my homicidal heart, and communion was a time for me to consider whether I was living worthy of the sacrifice Jesus had made for me. There is, of course, a vein of truth in the guilt and examination that takes place in the shadow of the cross. However, this conceptual framework dominated my thinking so heavily that I was unable to picture Eucharist as a feast of joy until much later in life.

The joy of Eucharist is greatly muted when it is made a symbol of realities long in the past, only promised in the future, or far off in a yet unseen world. It is hard to conceive of such a detached ritual as “real,” and joy always relates to that which we experience as “real life.” However, Eucharist is not a participation in some far-off world; it is a participation in this world. “It is this world… it is this life… that were given to man to be a sacrament… given as communion.” Therefore, “the Church… is the expectation… not of any ‘other world,’ but of the fulfillment of all things and all life in Christ.” In Eucharist, the Church proclaims the truth with great joy that God’s world is still God’s world. His presence does not await us elsewhere; his presence is here. In Eucharist, the Church receives the peculiar joy of feasting at a table prepared by God in the presence of her enemies (Ps 23:5). The Christian’s enemies are all too apparent as he enters worship with his sins and burdens close at hand. And yet, he finds himself transported to a banquet table that is not a rescue from his life; rather, it is the completion of it. He does not leave his life behind or trade it in for another in order to commune with God. With surprising joy, he finds God revealed in his own life.

What joy it is to be visited by God as we are, where we are! It is here that “man is again king of creation. The world is again his life, and not his death… He is restored to the joy and power of true human nature.” Created for sacramental life, man is restored to joy at Christ’s Table. He is restored to joy because he is restored to the presence of God in his own life.

Eucharist is indeed a journey into the dimension of the world to come. It is a heavenly feast of joy. And yet, this heavenly gathering always concludes with a sending. Having feasted in Christ, “I am sent back into the world in joy and peace… having been a witness of divine Love.” Ultimately, the Church herself is a sacrament. She is a gift of God through which man is given the possibility “to see in and through this world the ‘world to come,’ to see and to ‘live’ it in Christ.” The Church leads creation to live life the way life was intended to be lived – as eucharist. In this way, Eucharist is mission. It is the recovery of true human life. It is the vocation of man as priest, unifying the world in the act of blessing God. show less

Time and linguistic shift have shifted the effectiveness of this book - ironically, in a sense, as Orthodoxy has rightly stood out against the caprice of time (see 89), but writing styles, unlike theology and liturgical practice, are not under the imprimatur of ecclesiology. Nevertheless, Schmemann, that great theologian of Orthodoxy, takes us deep into the meaning of Orthodox Lent, and therefore Orthodoxy's attractive spirituality; for that we should be thankful (even if I admit I am too show more lazy to swim the Bosphorous!). show less

The title to this review provides a single quote by Father Alexander Schmemann: "Secularism must indeed be acknowledged as a 'Christian' phenomenon" [111]. Provocative and insightful, Schmemann recognizes how ancient distortions arise concerning tenets and practices of the Christian faith. Dual emphases on living the Liturgy and discussing distortions of the communal liturgical life of the Church provide foci for his inquiry.

The quote also discloses the author's humble demeanor, for he show more admits that Christians have distorted what they believed and how they worshiped. His solution resists liturgical reforms that abandon an ancient mystical union between God and the human race. Just the same, his solution resists liturgical conservationists who maintain sterile liturgical climates inside ethnic ghettos. In fact, to those who propose fulfilling human needs by promoting secularized liturgical practices among post-modern Christians, Schmemann exposes human needs that, he claims, secular proponents deny.

Consider, for example, one of the author's crafty points. By acknowledging that secularism is a "negation of worship" [118], Schmemann identifies an irrational denial by secular liturgists of a human need to adore. Schmemann admits that a reader would have expected him to define a "negation of worship" as denying divine transcendence. Instead, he identifies a phenomenon of Christian anthropology that helps human beings meet their need to adore [in addition to 20, NB: 21,57, passim].

In the main, this book sets out to clarify distortions of an experiential faith that secularism presents. However, unlike many contemporary opponents of secularism, whose approach is deductive and systematic as illustrated in their method of inquiry concerning moral depravity, Schmemann simply describes what should be a vibrant liturgical life of the Church. However, secularists do not bear all the guilt for sapping life from liturgy, according to Schmemann. Not only have secularists distorted a vibrant liturgical life, but also many moralists among Christians have removed life from the liturgical community by trying to deduce liturgical experience from prescriptive formulae.

His sustained interest in meeting human needs throughout the book leads me to agree with Schmemann that he has not written a "...treatise of systematic theology" [20]. Rather, he acts more like a phenomenologist, by naming experiences in worship that he shares with others.

Anyone familiar with the writings of early-to-mid 20th-century phenomenologists such as William Kristensen, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand--viz. their descriptions of intuitive spiritual phenomena in everyday experience apart from adherence to a history of philosophy--will recognize sympathy in Schmemann's treatment of 'homo adorans' in Appendix 1 [118-19]. In particular, Schmemann discusses 'homo adorans' as a relational characteristic of all human beings, an idea which few secularists would oppose.

Without global opposition among secularists, surely this book's enterprise will appeal to at least those whose method for inquiry is descriptive and contextual like Schmemann's. Moreover, the author's interests in liturgy are constructed "for" readers and "for" the world. Indeed, the title for the book depicts a universal blend of practical service and contemplative support within the Church: "For the life of the world."

Almost a half century has passed since 1963 when Schmemann's book was first published. Later reprinted and translated into several languages, the book occupied an integral place in earlier discussions of secularism, even as it occupies to this day. Of particular note is the fact that the book appeared only two years after Gabriel Vahanian's 'The Death of God.'

Numerous theologians and philosophers of the early 1960's had advanced an experiential approach to divine immanence, and had disavowed themselves of transcendental language in worship concerning God. For example, talk about the death of God had become a topic of even small-town churches by the time that 'Time' magazine released a front cover headline, "God is Dead," in 1966. Therefore, Schmemann demonstrated astute timing when he created a "study guide" for a 1963 student Christian conference to address what he called "the Christian 'world-view' " [7]. The study guide was published as the book's first edition.

In addition to scattered textual revisions of the first edition, Schmemann added two appendices to the 1973 second edition. The author notes that he wrote the Appendices "...in a somewhat different 'key' " [8]. The appendices are "Worship in a Secular Age" [117-34], and "Sacrament and Symbol" [135-51]. There is no index of key terms and names, and editors of the Publisher (SVSP) should consider introducing an index in a third edition if one were planned to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first edition.

What I like most about this book is Schmemann's honest acknowledgment of paradoxes in what Orthodox Christians pray aloud in the Divine Liturgy, services of the Church, and theology. The title of this review introduces a paradox of how secularism had its start as a 'Christian' phenomenon. I will close with a second example of paradox. "...In baptism, man 'wants' the newness of life as forgiveness, and he is given it. And yet sin is still in us..." [78]. show less

Argument/Thesis: Schmemann seeks to show that as originally intended, the world and in fact all material is sacramental for humanity. This is true because matter is itself a means by which we are able to commune with the Triune God as we receive the gift and return it to the Father. Humanity must rightly stand “in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God—and by filling the world with this Eucharist, he show more transforms his life…into life in God, into communion with him” . He seeks to establish this point in order to show that both secularism and the “almost Manichean rejection of the world, for an escape into a discarnate and dualistic spirituality” (which he terms ‘religion’) are not Orthodox positions and thus neither are good starting points for mission.
The original sin then was to make the world an end in itself rather than a means to communion with God. When Adam ate of the tree, he made that food the end of his pursuits rather than rightly using food as a springboard toward a relationship with God. Thus, it is the creation of a dichotomy between the material and the spiritual that makes possible two separate ends: materialism and religion. Both of these are false ends according to Schmemann since it is precisely the separation of material from spiritual that allows one to think about the world without thinking about God and vice versa. It is this separation that leads to idolatry. The stated purpose of the book "is to remind its readers that in Christ, life--life in all its totality--was returned to man, given again as sacrament and communion, made Eucharist. " Christ came to restore the sacramental life as it was intended from the beginning. All of mission then must be centered on this Eucharistic center. In establishing this, it is Schmemann’s hope to show that mission begins and ends with the Kingdom of God, which must necessarily destroy the distinction between the spiritual and material. This in turn requires that those who participate in this Eucharistic Kingdom must do so by living between both secularism and religion by participating in the unified whole of the Kingdom as it was meant to be—ecstatic, kenotic love of God and humanity.
Evaluation of Sources: Fr. Schmemann is a well known, widely respected writer coming out of the Orthodox tradition. His books however are not limited to merely the Orthodox, but have been utilized widely in both scholarly and practical applications. This particular book is not intended to be research based, but rather it is more pastoral. In his stated intentions, Schmemann says that the impetus for writing was “to outline—to students preparing themselves for a discussion of Christian mission—the Christian “world view”, i.e., the approach to the world and to man’s life in it that stems from the liturgical experience of the Orthodox Church. ” Thus, we would expect that much of his writing would draw from his lengthy experience of performing the liturgy and reflecting upon its meaning. Therefore, we are not surprised to see very few external references to ‘authorities’ in their field. Rather the focus is clearly upon an exegesis of his own tradition. However, the implications for this study extend well beyond the figurative boundaries of the Orthodox Church. Indeed, this study is important for any Christian in terms of understanding Creation, Fall, Redemption and Sacrament. I find this study to be very helpful indeed.
Tracing the main idea: From beginning to end, Schmemann exegetes a view of sacrament that integrates both the material and the spiritual as necessary parts of a seamless whole. This unification of supposed parts has major implications for mission. Indeed, it is the rightful sacramental participation of the church as the body of Christ in the world, offering the world and ourselves back to the Father in the Spirit that is both salvation and mission. This is the way in which we transform our world, by ceasing to use the world as an end in itself and instead returning the gift of the world given to us back to the Father. This understanding of mission posits that the world itself, having been created as good and very good, needs to be redeemed through Christ and not merely the individual self. As has been said before, this holistic understanding limits the secular and religious view of the world in favor of a unified sacramental whole. Indeed, he claims that Christianity is not itself a religion, but the death of all religion since Christianity seeks to recognize the reorientation of all of life toward God through Christ and in so doing transforms the world. But, when Christianity mutates into religion, secularism recognizes it as dead and rejects it in a movement to oppose all religion (rightfully so?). Yet, sacramental Christianity, the recognition of God’s kingdom reigning on earth as it is in heaven (even if ever so faintly through the body of Christ at present) to accomplish God’s purposes, is both life and mission. This Eucharistic existence is “indeed the preface to the world to come, the door into the Kingdom: and this we confess and proclaim when, speaking of the Kingdom which is to come, we affirm that God has already endowed us with it. This future has been given to us in the past that it may constitute the very present, the life itself, now, of the Church. ”
This, then, is the impetus for mission—that people are drowning in both religion and secularism respectively. The religious are awaiting another reality outside of this one, and in so doing, miss Christ here. The secularists in reaction to this religion cannot dismiss the reality before them and thus believe all of this is an end in itself. Both of these beliefs are heresy and cause despair and death. “But the Christian is precisely the one who knows that the true reality of the world…is in Christ” . Thus our mission is to announce the Kingdom of God and invite persons to participate in the life giving reality of it. For “…as long…as we make our life an end in itself, no meaning and no goal can stand, for they are dissolved in death. It is only when we give up…the self-sufficiency of our life…that the ‘newness of life’…is given to us. The world then truly becomes the sacrament of Christ’s presence, the growth of the Kingdom and of life eternal. ”
My Evaluation: This is one of the better books I have read in a while. Schmemann makes a compelling argument for understanding all of life as sacramental and for doing away with the categories of secularism and religion in favor of a more unified view of reality. This book has tremendous implications for mission as well. If God’s redemptive activity is not about saving a disincarnate soul from some future spiritual death, but about saving the whole incarnate world beginning now, then our aim in mission needs to be much more holistic. Indeed, the original sin is to disconnect the material from the spiritual and to treat it as an end in itself rather than a means to an end in God. Thus, if we do not reunite these two seemingly disparate parts we really do not participate in God’s mission at all. God is about redeeming the whole world through one man—Jesus Christ. The Gospel of the Kingdom recognizes that the incarnation is the supreme moment of identification for God with the world where God becomes a bunch of borrowed earth and matter and yet does not cease to be God. Thus our mission must pattern after God’s own. We must cease proclaiming a rest after death for a discarnate soul and start proclaiming eternal life that begins to manifest right now through the body of Christ and never ceases. This Gospel is not about escape from the world, but rather about radical incarnate transformation of the world through full, sacramental participation in it.
“A Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, finds Christ and rejoices in Him. And this joy transforms all his human plans and programs, decisions and actions, making all his mission the sacrament of the world’s return to Him who is the life of the world. ” show less