For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy

Schmemann's slim volume (the main body is only 100 pages) is a profound and unusual meditation on the sacraments as worldview. He begins by pointing out that “Man must eat in order to live” (11). But unlike the animals, man is called to bless God for his food, and therefore acts as priest for the whole created order: “he stands 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” (15). The Eucharist in Orthodoxy arise out of this sacramental understanding of the world.

Schmemann complains that all too often “theologians applied to the Eucharist a set of abstract questions in order to squeeze it into their own intellectual framework” (34) instead of following along the Eucharistic liturgy itself, which he proceeds to do, step by step. The opening movements of the Preface are “our ascension in Christ, our entrance in Him unto the ‘world to come'” (41)—an idea quite amenable to Calvin's view of the Supper, as is Schmemann's remark that in the epiclesis “it is the Holy Spirit who manifests the bread as the body and the wine as the blood of Christ” (43).

In baptism, meanwhile, for theologians “validity was the preoccupation, and not fullness, meaning, joy” (67). But there is a stern side, for in the excorisms “the first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it” (71). This is an aspect of baptism that could profitably be incorporated into the Protestant experience of baptism. In chrismation, “the very fulfillment of baptism” (75), we see that “the only true temple of God is man and through man the world” (76).

The most intriguing part of the book was the chapter on the sacrament of marriage, entitled “The Mystery of Love”. If marriage is a revelation of Christ and the church, then it is not private but sacramental (82). In wonderful symbolism recalling Genesis the priest puts crowns on the bridal pair, an announcement that “each family is indeed a kingdom” (89).

Towards the end of his book, Schmemann observes that a sacrament is not so much a miracle as “the manifestation of the ultimate Truth about the world and life, man and nature, the Truth which is Christ” (102).