For the Life of the World

by Alexander Schmemann

Eucharist (thanksgiving) is the state of perfect man.

But this perfect man who stands before God is Christ.

In and through this Eucharist the whole creation becomes what it always was to be and yet failed to be.

For faith is not the fruit of intellectual search, or of Pascal’s “betting.”

It is the only possible response to the divine invitation to live and to receive abundant life.

It is here that we find the main “defect” of Christian theology; the theology of the Eucharist ceased to be eucharistic and thus took away the eucharistic spirit from the whole understanding of sacrament, from the very life of the Church.

For without this beginning the rest could not take place. The Eucharist of Christ and Christ the Eucharist is the “breakthrough” that brings us to the table in the Kingdom, raises us to heaven, and makes us partakers of the divine food.

thus the Preface fulfills itself in the Sanctus—the “Holy, Holy, Holy” of the eternal doxology, which is the secret essence of all that exists: “Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.”

It is here—in the heavenly dimension of the Church, with “thousands of Archangels and myriads of Angels, with the Cherubim and Seraphim … who soar aloft, borne on their pinions …”—that we can finally “express ourself,”

This is the ultimate purpose of all that exists, the end, the goal and the fulfillment, because this is the beginning, the principle of Creation.

we inescapably discover that the content of all this thanksgiving and remembrance is Christ.

And the Sanctus, therefore, brings us so simply, so logically to that one man, one night, one event in which this world found once for all its judgment and its salvation.

In which, rather, He did give Himself For the life of the world, Took bread in His holy and pure and sinless hands And when He had given thanks, and blessed it, and sanctified it, He gave it to His holy disciples,

in it all thanksgiving, all remembrance, all offering—that is, the whole life of man and of the world—were fulfilled.

What we have offered—our food, our life, ourselves, and the whole world—we offered in Christ and as Christ because He Himself has assumed our life and is our life. And now all this is given back to us as the gift of new life, and therefore—necessarily—as food.

Something is lacking because the theologian thinks of the sacrament and forgets the liturgy.

the main point has been that the whole liturgy is sacramental, that is, one transforming act and one ascending movement.

It is our same world, already perfected in Christ, but not yet in us. It is our same world, redeemed and restored, in which Christ “fills all things with Himself.”

His life was totally, absolutely eucharistic—all of it was transformed into communion with God and all of it ascended into heaven.

Only in the Kingdom can we confess with St. Basil that “this bread is in very truth the precious body of our Lord, this wine the precious blood of Christ.”

It is the Holy Spirit who manifests the bread as the body and the wine as the blood of Christ.

He always takes us beyond. To be in the Spirit means to be in heaven, for the Kingdom of God is “joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” And thus in the Eucharist it is He who seals and confirms our ascension into heaven, who transforms the Church into the body of Christ and—therefore—manifests the elements of our offering as communion in the Holy Spirit. This is the consecration.

there remains one last, absolutely essential act: the intercession.

And thus it is the very joy of the Kingdom that makes us remember the world and pray for it.

It is when, “having put aside all earthly care,” we seem to have left this world, that we, in fact, recover it in all its reality.

For in and through communion not only do we become one body and one spirit, but we are restored to that solidarity and love which the world has lost.

No one has been “worthy” to receive communion, no one has been prepared for it. At this point all merits, all righteousness, all devotions disappear and dissolve. Life comes again to us as Gift, a free and divine gift.

And now the time has come for us to return into the world.

Eucharist was the end of the journey, the end of time. And now it is again the beginning, and things that were impossible are again revealed to us as possible.

And God has made us competent, as Paul Claudel has said, competent to be His witnesses,

this is why the mission of the Church begins in the liturgy of ascension, for it alone makes poss...

Through time on the one hand we experience life as a possibility, growth, fulfillment, as a movement toward a future. Through time, on the other hand, all future is dissolved in death and annihilation.

It is rather to describe very briefly the experience of time which Christians have had from the very beginning and which is still given to them in the Church.

it may be, the joy of that gift makes both the problem and the solution unnecessary, irrelevant.

Not only the average layman, even the theologian seems to say: the world of Christian “symbolism” is no longer our world,

Are these “symbols” merely “symbolic”?

And religion—as we know already—has thus come to mean a world of pure spirituality, a concentration of attention on matters pertaining to the “soul.”

They left time meaningless indeed, although full of Christian “symbols.” And today they themselves do not know what to do with these symbols.

It is because of us, Christians, that the world in which we live has literally no time.

There is no time because Christianity, on the one hand, made it impossible for man to live in the old natural time, broke beyond repair the cycle of the eternal return.

There is no time, on the other hand, because having announced all this, Christianity abandoned time, invited Christians simply to leave it and to think of eternity as of an eternal rest

All this, “inspiring” and “uplifting” as it may be, has no meaning for the real time in which the real man must live,

did He, in other words, enter time only that we may “symbolize” it in fine celebrations which, although connected with the days and the hours, have no power to give time a real meaning,

In the Jewish religious experience Sabbath, the seventh day, has a tremendous importance: it is the participation by man in, and his affirmation of, the goodness of God’s creation.

It is the active participation in the “Sabbath delight,” in the sacredness and fullness of divine peace as the fruit of all work, as the crowning of all time.

In the late Jewish apocalyptic writings there emerges the idea of a new day which is both the eighth—because it is beyond the frustrations and limitations of “seven,” the time of this world—and the first, because with it begins the new time, that of the Kingdom. It is from this idea that grew the Christian Sunday.

It was thus the beginning of a new life and of a new time. It was truly the eighth and the first day and it became the day of the Church.

If Christianity were a purely “spiritual” and eschatological faith there would have been no need for a “fixed day,” because mysticism has no interest in time.

And if Christianity were but a new “religion,” it would have established its calendar,

For, on the one hand, Sunday remained one of the days (for more than three centuries it was not even a day of rest), the first of the week, fully belonging to this world. Yet on the other hand, on that day, through the eucharistic ascension, the Day of the Lord was revealed and manifested in all its glory and transforming power as the end of this world, as the beginning of the world to come.