For the Life of the World

by Alexander Schmemann

In the biblical story of creation man is presented, first of all, as a hungry being, and the whole world as his food. Second only to the direction to propagate and have dominion over the earth, according to the author of the first chapter of Genesis, is God’s instruction to men to eat of the earth:

And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life.

what life do we speak, what life do we preach, proclaim and announce when, as Christians, we confess that Christ died for the life of the world?

There are those among us for whom life, when discussed in religious terms, means religious life.

thus mission consists here in converting people to this “spiritual” life, in making them “religious.”

The “spiritualists” are counterbalanced by the activists.

But the fundamental belief in Christianity as being first of all action has remained intact, and in fact has acquired a new strength.

The Christian mission, therefore, is to catch up with the life that has gone astray.

The question may seem a naive one, but one cannot really act without knowing the meaning not only of action, but of the life itself in the name of which one acts.

What is the content of life eternal?

Unless we know, the same dichotomy between religion and life, which we have observed in the spiritual solution, remains.

“Spiritual” versus “material,” “sacred” versus “profane,” “supernatural” versus “natural”—such were for centuries the only accepted, the only understandable moulds and categories of religious thought and experience.

nowhere in the Bible do we find the dichotomies which for us are the self-evident framework of all approaches to religion.

it is given as communion with God.

He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation:

“O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

All desire is finally a desire for Him.

But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him.

To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God.

So the only natural (and not “supernatural”) reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and—in this act of gratitude and adoration—to know, name and possess the world.

The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest.

To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that “something more” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it.

The fruit of that one tree, whatever else it may signify, was unlike every other fruit in the Garden: it was not offered as a gift to man.

It seems natural not to be eucharistic.

The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.

Man was to be the priest of a eucharist, offering the world to God, and in this offering he was to receive the gift of life. But in the fallen world man does not have the priestly power to do this.

He forgets that the world, its air or its food cannot by themselves bring life, but only as they are received and accepted for God’s sake, in God and as bearers of the divine gift of life.

For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death.

Man lost the eucharistic life, he lost the life of life itself, the power to transform it into Life.

In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping.

the “original” sin is not primarily that man has “disobeyed” God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God.

But it is the Christian gospel that God did not leave man in his exile,

In this scene of radical un-fulfillment God acted decisively: into the darkness where man was groping toward Paradise, He sent light.

the same light that had been shining unextinguished in the world’s darkness all along, seen now in full brightness.

As Christians we believe that He, who is the truth about both God and man, gives foretastes of His incarnation in all more fragmentary truths.

he runs in fact straight into the arms of Christ.

Christianity, however, is in a profound sense the end of all religion.

She asked him a question about cult, and in reply Jesus changed the whole perspective of the matter.

But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.

The old religion had its thousand sacred places and temples: for the Christians all this was past and gone.

The fact that Christ comes and is present was far more significant than the places where He had been.

It 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.

Our purpose is to show that there exists and always existed a different perspective, a different approach to sacrament, and that this approach may be of crucial importance precisely for the whole burning issue of mission, of our witness to Christ in the world. For the basic question is: of what are we witnesses? What have we seen and touched with our hands? Of what have we partaken and been made communicants? Where do we call men? What can we offer them?

The Orthodox may have failed much too often to see the real implications of their “sacramentalism,” but its fundamental meaning is certainly not that of escaping into a timeless “spirituality” far from the dull world of “action.”

The fragmentary life of the world was gathered into His life; He was the heart beat of the world and the world killed Him.

But when Christ, the true life of the world, was rejected, it was the beginning of the end.

As Pascal said: “Christ is in agony until the end of the world.”

Christianity often appears, however, to preach that if men will try hard enough to live Christian lives, the cruc...

If we think seriously about the real meaning, the real scope of these words, we know that as Christians and insofar as we are Christians we are, first of all, witnesses of that end: end of all natural joy; end of all satisfaction of man with the world and with himself; end, indeed, of life itself as a reasonable and reasonably organized “pursuit of happiness.”

from its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy,