The Move to America and the Deanship

In 1951 Schmemann crossed to New York to join the faculty of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, then a small and precarious school; from 1962 until his death in 1983 he was its dean, and under him it became the most internationally influential Orthodox theological institution in the English-speaking world. This file traces the crossing, the deanship, the partnership with John Meyendorff, and the death of 13 December 1983.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

The Crossing of 1951

In June 1951 Schmemann left Paris with Juliana and their children and joined the faculty of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич”; hub essay, Fr. Alexander Schmemann). The seminary, founded on 3 October 1938, belonged to the Metropolia — the self-governing Russian Orthodox body in North America that would become the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) in 1970 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “Our History,” svots.edu; see The Orthodox Church in America).

He was invited by Fr. Georges Florovsky, who had come to St. Vladimir’s in 1948 and become its dean, and who was determined to turn a modest seminary into a serious academic institution. Meyendorff states it plainly: “In 1951, Schmemann joined St Vladimir’s Seminary faculty after Fr Georgi Florovsky became dean” (Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1984], text at schmemann.org/memoriam; see Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival, on Florovsky’s American years and deanship). The invitation closes the circle of his formation: the man whose neo-patristic summons had set his direction now brought him to America.

The move was a considerable gamble. Schmemann left the greatest center of Orthodox theology in the world — St. Sergius, where he held a faculty position — for a small school in a country whose Orthodoxy was, at that date, overwhelmingly an immigrant affair conducted in Slavonic, Greek, and Arabic, divided among jurisdictions, and largely invisible to American intellectual life. He did so because he had come to believe what he would spend thirty years arguing: that Orthodoxy in America was not a diaspora keeping vigil over a lost homeland but a Church with a future in a new land, and that its future required theology done in English and addressed to the actual conditions of American life (Schmemann, Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1979; see An American Orthodoxy and the Recognition Dispute).

He taught as Professor of Liturgical Theology from 1951 until his death in 1983, together with church history — his Paris subject — and held adjunct appointments at Columbia University, New York University, Union Theological Seminary, and General Theological Seminary (St. Vladimir’s Seminary press release of 13 December 1983, at schmemann.org/memoriam; “Rev. Alexander Schmemann, Dean of Orthodox Seminary,” The New York Times, 14 December 1983, p. B5). He also served as an Orthodox observer at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) (OrthodoxWiki, “Alexander Schmemann”; New York Times obituary, 14 December 1983).

Dean, 1962–1983

Schmemann became dean of St. Vladimir’s in 1962 and held the office until his death in 1983 — twenty-one years. The date is not arbitrary: it is tied to the seminary’s move, and Meyendorff frames it exactly so — when the seminary relocated to Crestwood in 1962, Schmemann assumed the post of dean, which he held until his death (Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” SVTQ 28, no. 1 [1984]; OrthodoxWiki, “Alexander Schmemann”; The Orthodox Church in America, giving the deanship as 1962–1983).

What he did with the office is the institutional half of his legacy, and it is easy to underrate because it is not theology. He found a small seminary and left an internationally consequential one. The record, taken from the seminary’s own history, is precise (St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “Our History,” svots.edu):

Milestone Date
Seminary founded 3 October 1938
Provisional Charter, New York Board of Regents 18 June 1948
Absolute Charter (degree-granting authority), Board of Regents April 1953
Move to the Crestwood campus, Yonkers 1962 — Schmemann becomes dean
Associate membership, Association of Theological Schools June 1966
Authority to grant the BD (later MDiv) March 1967
Authority to grant the ThM 1970
Full ATS accreditation 1973

[Corrected: Schmemann is often credited with securing the seminary's degree-granting charter. The **Absolute Charter was granted in April 1953**, nine years before his deanship, and belongs to the Florovsky era (St. Vladimir's Seminary, "Our History," svots.edu). What Schmemann personally presided over is the Crestwood move of 1962, associate ATS membership in 1966, the MDiv and ThM authorizations of 1967 and 1970, and **full accreditation in 1973** — a substantial record in its own right that does not need inflating.]

Beyond the accreditations, he built a faculty of international standing and, through St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, made the seminary the principal English-language publisher of Orthodox theology in the world. The Popular Patristics Series and the press’s translations of the Fathers and of modern Orthodox theologians are, in a real sense, part of Schmemann’s work: they are the infrastructure by which the neo-patristic recovery reached readers who had no Greek, no Russian, and no seminary.

The seminary’s theological character in those years was set by a partnership. Fr. John Meyendorff (1926–1992) — the Byzantinist and Palamas scholar, Schmemann’s colleague, fellow negotiator in the autocephaly, and, after 1984, his successor as dean — supplied the patristic and historical depth beside Schmemann’s liturgical and pastoral emphasis (see John Meyendorff; The Orthodox Church in America, on the succession of deans). Together they articulated a vision of Orthodox theological education in which academic rigor and liturgical life were not two departments but one thing: the seminary served the daily cycle of services, and the theology was done from within that worship. The model has been widely imitated, and it is the practical embodiment of Schmemann’s central thesis (see Liturgy as Theology).

He was made archpriest (protoierey) in 1953 and elevated to protopresbyter in 1970 — the year of the OCA’s autocephaly (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич”; drevo-info.ru). The New York Times obituary described the dignity accurately as “protopresbyter, the highest accolade that can be bestowed on a married Eastern Orthodox priest” (The New York Times, 14 December 1983, p. B5). That is the title this collection uses, and the reason it does not use “St.” (see the collection README).

He held five honorary doctorates — from Butler University, the General Theological Seminary, Lafayette College, Iona College, and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology (St. Vladimir’s Seminary press release of 13 December 1983, at schmemann.org/memoriam; St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann,” svots.edu) — and was among the first Orthodox theologians to be heard as a matter of course in American ecumenical and academic settings (Sobornost obituary, 1984, at schmemann.org/memoriam).

The Wider Labor

Three other undertakings of these years belong to the same single project and are treated in their own files.

  • The Radio Liberty broadcasts, weekly in Russian for some thirty years, by which he became one of the best-known Christian voices inside the Soviet Union (see Radio Liberty and Solzhenitsyn).
  • The OCA’s autocephaly of 1970, in which he was a principal negotiator and the chief theological advocate (see The Road to Autocephaly).
  • The books, from For the Life of the World (1963) to The Eucharist (posthumous, 1988), which carried his argument far beyond the seminary (see The Schmemann Corpus).

He was also, throughout, a pastor: he served, preached, heard confessions, and taught — and his own repeated insistence in The Journals is that the administrative and academic work was worth doing only because it served the Liturgy and the people who came to it (Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann, SVS Press, 2000; see The Journals).

The Last Year

Schmemann was diagnosed with cancer in the autumn of 1982. Fr. Paul Lazor’s memoir records that he was unwell after returning from Canada in the summer of 1982, was hospitalized in late September or early October, and that “his condition was diagnosed as cancer”; Fr. Thomas Hopko likewise dates the diagnosis to the fall of 1982 (Paul Lazor, memorial reflection, 2007, at schmemann.org/memoriam). [Disputed: a precise date of 21 September 1982 appears in Richard John Neuhaus, "Alexander Schmemann: A Man in Full," *First Things*, 1 January 2001, derived from his reading of the *Journals*; it is second-hand, and "autumn 1982" is the safely documented form.]

[Corrected: the illness is often described flatly as "lung cancer." The single primary attestation of its nature is his widow's: he learned "in a totally unexpected and unforeseeable manner, that he had cancer in his lungs and in his brain, already in a rather advanced stage" (Juliana Schmemann, "Marriage to a Priest," *Le Messager Orthodoxe* 133 [January 1986], 121–123, text at schmemann.org/memoriam). No contemporary source of 1983–84 names a cancer type at all — not the *New York Times*, the Associated Press, the Gannett obituary, the St. Vladimir's press release, or the whole memorial issue of *SVTQ* 28, no. 1. The disease was metastatic; "lung cancer" alone understates it.]

The Journals record the last stretch with unusual directness and without either dramatization or piety. The final entry is dated 1 June 1983, and it ends: “What happiness it has all been!” (Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann, SVS Press, 2000, final entry). He continued to work, and the great book of his maturity — The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, written in Russian and published only after his death — belongs to these last years (see The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom).

The Thanksgiving Liturgy, 24 November 1983

On Thanksgiving Day, 24 November 1983, Schmemann celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the seminary chapel for the last time.

The strongest attestation is an eyewitness one, printed within weeks. John Meyendorff, preaching at the first memorial service and published in the memorial issue of St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, wrote:

“Fr Alexander celebrated his last Divine Liturgy here with us on Thanksgiving Day on November 24. Those of us who prayed with him in this Chapel on that day remember how, at the end of the Liturgy, he called on all of us to give thanks to God — for the Liturgy which we had just celebrated, for the joy and communion which was given to us in the holy Church, for our common ministry at St Vladimir’s Seminary, for our family joys, for the children around us, and even for the noise they occasionally make in church.”

(John Meyendorff, “Thanksgiving,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1984], 43–44, text at schmemann.org/memoriam)

This matters more than any later retelling: Meyendorff was present, wrote from memory before the text was printed, and his summary tracks the published prayer’s petitions point for point — independent corroboration of the text’s content.

The prayer itself was first published in The Orthodox Church, the OCA newspaper, vol. 20, no. 2 (February 1984), p. 1 (citation carried by the family and archival site, schmemann.org, “Final words,” and by St. Vladimir’s Seminary, svots.edu). It carries as its epigraph the sentence for which Schmemann is now most widely quoted — “Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy” — followed by nine petitions:

“Thank You, O Lord, for having accepted this Eucharist, which we offered to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which filled our hearts with the joy, peace and righteousness of the Holy Spirit.”

and closing:

“Great are You, O Lord, and marvelous are Your deeds, and no word is sufficient to celebrate Your miracles. Lord, it is good to be here! Amen!”

(Schmemann, “Thank You, O Lord!”, 24 November 1983; text at oca.org/reflections/fr-alexander-schmemann/thank-you-o-lord and schmemann.org/byhim/thankyoulord.html)

The circulating text is authentic and complete: four independent postings (schmemann.org, oca.org, and two parish sites) carry an identical structure — epigraph, nine “Thank You, O Lord” petitions in fixed order, and the closing — with no interpolation.

Two details of the usual telling need care.

[Disputed: the manner of delivery. The account that Schmemann "took from his pocket a short written sermon, in the form of a prayer, which he proceeded to read," noting that "Father never wrote his liturgical homilies, but delivered them extemporaneously," is the earliest narrative and comes from the unsigned editorial headnote in *The Orthodox Church* 20, no. 2 (February 1984), p. 1 — semi-official, published about ten weeks after the event, and carrying no named witness. Meyendorff, the one named eyewitness in print, mentions neither the pocket nor the written text. The detail is likely true and is repeated by every subsequent account, but it should be attributed to that headnote rather than to eyewitness testimony.]

[Apocryphal: the impression, common in present-day retellings, that Schmemann was too weak to speak and that another read the prayer for him. **No source says this.** Russian accounts explicitly describe the homily as *произнесённую* — spoken, delivered — on 24 November 1983 (pravmir.ru, "Последняя проповедь протопресвитера Александра Шмемана"), and no English source suggests otherwise. The impression probably arises from the present-day practice, noted by Fr. Paul Lazor, of the prayer being *read aloud annually* in the seminary chapel at the Thanksgiving Liturgy.]

[Corrected: the prayer is sometimes cited to *The Liturgy of Death*, *Celebration of Faith*, or *O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?*, and sometimes to the *SVTQ* memorial issue of 1984. This guide found no evidence for any of these; it is **not** in *SVTQ* 28, no. 1. The correct first publication is *The Orthodox Church* 20, no. 2 (February 1984), p. 1.]

These were the last words he spoke from the ambo, and the fittingness has been remarked ever since without needing embroidery: a man who had spent his life teaching that eucharistia means thanksgiving, and that the Church’s whole existence is the offering of thanks, ended his priestly ministry by reading a list of thanksgivings at the end of a Eucharist celebrated on the American feast of Thanksgiving (see Liturgy as Theology).

Death and Burial

Fr. Thomas Hopko’s chronology of the last days records that Schmemann received Communion and Holy Unction in hospital on 8 December, responding “Amen! Amen! Amen!”; that he communed for the last time on 11 December, after which “he said simply, ‘Thank you’”; and that on 12 December he sat listening to the office of the Separation of Soul and Body (Hopko, memorial account, at schmemann.org/memoriam).

He died on Tuesday 13 December 1983, at home in Crestwood, Yonkers, New York, aged sixty-two — on the feast of St. Herman of Alaska, the first saint glorified in North America, whose canonization in 1970 Schmemann himself had celebrated in print in the year of the autocephaly (“Rev. Alexander Schmemann, Dean of Orthodox Seminary,” The New York Times, 14 December 1983, p. B5: “died of cancer yesterday at his home in Crestwood, N.Y. He was 62 years old”; Associated Press and Gannett obituaries, 14 December 1983, at schmemann.org/memoriam; on the 1970 glorification, see Orthodoxy: The Tomos of Autocephaly).

His body was brought to the seminary’s Chapel of the Three Hierarchs that evening. A memorial service followed on 14 December, Metropolitan Theodosius presiding and Meyendorff preaching; the funeral on 15 December was served by Metropolitan Theodosius with twelve bishops and more than a hundred priests, with the principal homily by Metropolitan Philip; a Liturgy followed on 16 December with Hopko preaching. He was buried at the cemetery of St. Tikhon’s Monastery, South Canaan, Pennsylvania, where Juliana was buried beside him in 2017 (funeral report, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1984], at schmemann.org/memoriam).

See Also

References

  • Meyendorff, John. “A Life Worth Living.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984). Text at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The invitation by Florovsky; the deanship from 1962 with the Crestwood move.)
  • Meyendorff, John. “Thanksgiving.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984): 43–44. Text at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The eyewitness account of the last Liturgy of 24 November 1983 and of the thanksgiving Schmemann called for at its end.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. “Thank You, O Lord!” Thanksgiving Day prayer-homily, 24 November 1983, St. Vladimir’s Seminary chapel. First published in The Orthodox Church (Orthodox Church in America) 20, no. 2 (February 1984): 1. Texts at schmemann.org/byhim/thankyoulord.html and oca.org/reflections/fr-alexander-schmemann/thank-you-o-lord. (The epigraph, the nine petitions, and the closing; the unsigned editorial headnote on the manner of delivery.)
  • “Our History.” St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu. (The founding of 3 October 1938; the Provisional Charter of 1948; the Absolute Charter of April 1953; the Crestwood move of 1962; ATS associate membership 1966; the MDiv 1967 and ThM 1970; full accreditation 1973.)
  • “Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann.” St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu; and St. Vladimir’s Seminary press release of 13 December 1983, at schmemann.org/memoriam. (Professor of Liturgical Theology 1951–1983; the five honorary doctorates.)
  • “Rev. Alexander Schmemann, Dean of Orthodox Seminary.” The New York Times, 14 December 1983, p. B5. Text at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The death; the title of protopresbyter; the adjunct appointments; the surviving family.)
  • Associated Press and Gannett obituaries of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, 14 December 1983, at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The death; “had been suffering from cancer for more than a year.”)
  • Schmemann, Juliana. “Marriage to a Priest.” Le Messager Orthodoxe 133 (January 1986): 121–123. Text at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The nature of the illness: cancer in the lungs and the brain, already advanced.)
  • Lazor, Paul. Memorial reflection, 2007, at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The onset of the illness in summer 1982 and the diagnosis; the annual reading of the Thanksgiving prayer in the seminary chapel.)
  • Hopko, Thomas. Memorial account of Schmemann’s last days, at schmemann.org/memoriam. (Communion and Unction on 8 December; the last Communion on 11 December and “Thank you”; 12 December.)
  • Funeral report. St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984), at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The services of 13–16 December 1983 and the burial at St. Tikhon’s Monastery, South Canaan, PA.)
  • Sobornost obituary of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, 1984, at schmemann.org/memoriam.
  • Neuhaus, Richard John. “Alexander Schmemann: A Man in Full.” First Things, 1 January 2001. (The precise diagnosis date, reported second-hand from the Journals.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983. Translated by Juliana Schmemann. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The final entry of 1 June 1983.)
  • “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич.” Russian Wikipedia; drevo-info.ru; OrthodoxWiki, “Alexander Schmemann.” (Arrival in June 1951; archpriest 1953 and protopresbyter 1970; the Vatican II observership. Used to locate the underlying sources, not as terminal citation.)