For the Life of the World - Classics Series, Vol. 1

by Fr. Alexander Schmemann

such was its misunderstanding during the long centuries of the total identification of the Church with “religion” (a misunderstanding from which all sacraments suffered, and the whole doctrine of sacraments) that the sacrament of oil became in fact the sacrament of death, one of the “last rites” opening to man a more or less safe passage into eternity. There is a danger that today, with the growing interest in healing among Christians, it will be understood as a sacrament of health, a useful “complement” to secular medicine. And both views are wrong, because both miss precisely the sacramental nature of this act.

A sacrament therefore is not a “miracle” by which God breaks, so to speak, the “laws of nature,” but the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the world and life, man and nature, the Truth which is Christ.

In Christ everything in this world, and this means health and disease, joy and suffering, has become an ascension to and entrance into this new life, its expectation and anticipation.

in Christ suffering is not “removed”; it is transformed into victory. The defeat itself becomes victory, a way, an entrance into the Kingdom, and this is the only true healing.

suffering can be defeat, the way of complete surrender to darkness, despair, and solitude. It can be dying in the very real sense of the word. And yet it can be also the ultimate victory of Man and of Life in him. The Church does not come to restore health in this man, simply to replace medicine when medicine has exhausted its own possibilities. The Church comes to take this man into the Love, the Light, and the Life of Christ. It comes not merely to “comfort” him in his sufferings, not to “help” him, but to make him a martyr, a witness to Christ in his very sufferings.

Christ says, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”11 Through his own suffering, not only has all suffering acquired a meaning, but it has been given the power to become itself the sign, the sacrament, the proclamation, the “coming” of that victory; the defeat of man, his very dying, has become a way of Life.

The whole life of the Church is in a way the sacrament of our death, because all of it is the proclamation of the Lord’s death, the confession of his resurrection.

To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that he is Life itself and, therefore, my life.

faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ himself as the Life and the Light of life.

if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the “content” of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess him as the Life of my life.

The great joy that the disciples felt when they saw the risen Lord, that “burning of heart”21 that they experienced on the way to Emmaus were not because the mysteries of an “other world” were revealed to them, but because they saw the Lord. And he sent them to preach and to proclaim not the resurrection of the dead—not a doctrine of death—but repentance and remission of sins, the new life, the Kingdom. They announced what they knew, that in Christ the new life has already begun, that he is Life Eternal, the Fulfillment, the Resurrection and the Joy of the world.

In him death itself has become an act of life, for he has filled it with himself, with his love and light. In him “all things are yours; whether . . . the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.”

the Church is mission and that to be mission is its very essence, its very life.

today we must honestly face a double failure: the failure to achieve any substantial “victory” over the other great world religions, and the failure to overcome in any significant way the prevailing and the growing secularism of our culture.

As for secularism, nothing shows better our inability to cope with it than the confusion and division it provokes among Christians themselves: the total and violent rejection of secularism in all varieties of Christian “fundamentalism” clashes with its almost enthusiastic acceptance by the numerous Christian interpreters of the “modern world” and “modern man.”

Not only “liberal” and “nondenominational,” but also the most conservative Christians are ready to give up the old idea of mission as the preaching of the one, true universal religion, opposed as such to all other religions, and replace it by a common front of all religions against the enemy: secularism.

the basic religion that is being preached and accepted as the only means of overcoming secularism is in reality a surrender to secularism.

even if a man changes religion, it is usually because he finds the one he accepts as offering him “more help”—not more truth.

if this is religion, its decline will continue, whether it takes the form of a direct abandonment of religion or that of the understanding of religion as an appendix to a world which long ago ceased to refer itself and all its activity to God.

It is to be feared that certain “mystical” aspects of Orthodoxy owe their growing popularity in the West precisely to their easy—although wrong—identification with Oriental mysticism.

the spiritual preoccupations of those esoteric groups are, in the last analysis, not very different from those of the most emphatically Christ-centered preachers of personal salvation and “assurance of life eternal.”

It is indeed one of the grave errors of religious anti-secularism that it does not see that secularism is made up of verites chretiennes devenues folles, of Christian truths that “went mad,”2 and that in simply rejecting secularism, it in fact rejects with it certain fundamentally Christian aspirations and hopes.

This truth is that secularism—precisely because of its Christian “origin,” because of the indelible Christian seal on it—is a tragedy and a sin. It is tragedy because having tasted a good wine, man preferred and still prefers to return to plain water; having seen the true light, he has chosen the light of his own logic.

The “modern man” has “come of age” as a deadly serious adult, conscious of his sufferings and alienations but not of joy, of sex but not of love, of science but not of “mystery.” Since he knows there is no “heaven,” he cannot understand the prayer to our Father who is in heaven, and the affirmation that heaven and earth are full of his glory.4 But the tragedy is also a sin, because secularism is a lie about the world. “To live in the world as if there were no God”!—but honesty to the gospel,5 to the whole Christian tradition, to the experience of every saint and every word of Christian liturgy demands exactly the opposite: to live in the world seeing everything in it as a revelation of God, a sign of his presence, the joy of his coming, the call to communion with him, the hope for fulfillment in him.

To accept secularism as the truth about the world is, therefore, to change the original Christian faith so deeply and so radically, that the question must be asked: do we really speak of the same Christ?

The Church is the sacrament of the Kingdom—not because she possesses divinely instituted acts called “sacraments,” but because first of all she is the possibility given to man to see in and through this world the “world to come,” to see and to “live” it in Christ.

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.

Secularism, I submit, is above all a negation of worship. I stress:—not of God’s existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore of some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both “posits” his humanity and fulfills it. It is the rejection as ontologically and epistemologically “decisive,” of the words which “always, everywhere, and for all”3 were the true “epiphany” of man’s relation to God, to the world and to himself: “It is meet and right to hymn thee, to bless thee, to praise thee, to give thanks to thee, and to worship thee in every place of thy dominion. . . .”

such indeed is the direction taken today by the great majority of liturgical reformers. What they seek is worship whose forms and content would “reflect” the needs and aspirations of the secular man, or even better, of secularism itself.

The term “sacramental” means here that the basic and primordial intuition which not only expresses itself in worship, but of which the entire worship is indeed the “phenomenon”—both effect and experience—is that the world, be it in its totality as cosmos, or in its life and becoming as time and history, is an epiphany of God, a means of his revelation, presence, and power.

worship is truly an essential act, and man an essentially worshipping being, for it is only in worship that man has the source and the possibility of that knowledge which is communion, and of that communion which fulfills itself as true knowledge: knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world—communion with God and therefore communion with all that exists.

We need water and oil, bread and wine in order to be in communion with God and to know him.

Thus the term “sacramental” means that for the world to be a means of worship and a means of grace is not accidental, but the revelation of its meaning, the restoration of its essence, the fulfillment of its destiny.

Being the epiphany of God, worship is thus the epiphany of the world; being communion with God, it is the only true communion with the world; being knowledge of God, it is the ultimate fulfillment of all human knowledge.

if Christian worship, being the fulfillment and the end of all worship, is at the same time a beginning, a radically new worship, it is not because of any ontological impossibility for the world to be the sacrament of Christ. No, it is because the world rejected Christ by killing him, and by doing so rejected its own destiny and fulfillment. Therefore, if the basis of all Christian worship is the incarnation, its true content is always the cross and the resurrection. Through these events the new life in Christ, the incarnate Lord, is “hid with Christ in God,”8 and made into a life “not of this world.”9 The world which rejected Christ must itself die in man if it is to become again a means of communion, a means of participation in the life which shone forth from the grave, in the Kingdom which is not “of this world,” and which in terms of this world is still to come.

secularism is by no means identical to atheism. A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.

All this changes nothing in his fundamental rejection of “epiphany”: the primordial intuition that everything in this world and the world itself not only have elsewhere the cause and principle of their existence, but are themselves the manifestation and presence of that elsewhere, and that this is indeed the life of their life, so that disconnected from that “epiphany” all is only darkness, absurdity, and death.

The “acme” of religious secularism in the West—Masonry—is made up almost entirely of highly elaborated ceremonies saturated with “symbolism.”

whatever the degree of his secularism or even atheism, man remains essentially a “worshiping being,” forever nostalgic for rites and rituals no matter how empty and artificial is the ersatz offered to him.

by proving the inability of secularism to create genuine worship, this phenomenon reveals secularism’s ultimate and tragic incompatibility with the essential Christian world view.

the secularist is constitutionally unable to see in symbols anything but “audio-visual aids” for communicating ideas.

he does not realize this because in his rejection of the world’s and man’s sacramentality he is reduced to viewing symbols as indeed mere illustrations of ideas and concepts, which they emphatically are not.

To anyone who has had, be it only once, the true experience of worship, all this is revealed immediately as the ersatz it is.

Heresy, however, is always the distortion, the exaggeration, and therefore the mutilation of something true, the affirmation of one “choice” (hairesis means choice in Greek), one element at the expense of the others, the breaking up of the catholicity of Truth.

heresy is also always a question addressed to the Church, and which requires, in order to be answered, an effort of Christian thought and conscience. To condemn a heresy is relatively easy. What is much more difficult is to detect the question it implies, and to give this question an adequate answer.

if secularism is, as I am convinced, the great heresy of our own time, it requires from the Church not mere anathemas, and certainly not compromises, but above all an effort of understanding so it may ultimately be overcome by truth.

uniqueness of secularism, its difference from the great heresies of the patristic age, is that the latter were provoked by the encounter of Christianity with Hellenism, whereas the former is the result of a “breakdown” within Christianity itself, of its own deep metamorphosis.

The Lateran Council which condemned him—and here is for me the crux of the matter—simply reversed the formula. It proclaimed that since Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not “mystical.” What is truly decisive here is precisely the disconnection and the opposition of the two terms verum and mystice [“real” (lit. “true”) and “mystical”—Ed.], the acceptance, on both sides, that they are mutually exclusive.

This was, in fact, the collapse of the fundamental Christian mystērion, the antinomical “holding together” of the reality of the symbol,17 and of the symbolism of reality. It was the collapse of the fundamental Christian understanding of creation in terms of its ontological sacramentality.

Here is the real cause of secularism, which is ultimately nothing else but the affirmation of the world’s autonomy, of its self-sufficiency in terms of reason, knowledge, and action. The downfall of Christian symbolism led to the dichotomy of the “natural” and the “supernatural” as the only framework of Christian thought and experience. And whether the “natural” and the “supernatural” are somehow related to one another by analogia entis, as in Latin theology, or whether this analogy is totally rejected, as in Barthianism, ultimately makes no difference.20 In both views the world ceases to be the “natural” sacrament of God, and the supernatural sacrament to have any “continuity” with the world.