The Book and Its Origin

For the Life of the World was not conceived as a book. It began as material commissioned in February 1963 for the 19th Quadrennial Ecumenical Student Conference at Athens, Ohio, whose theme gave it its title, and was published that year by the National Student Christian Federation; the standard text is the revised and expanded second edition of 1973. It became the most widely read Orthodox book in the English language. This file treats its origin, its shape, and the reasons for its reach.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Commissioned, Not Composed

The most influential Orthodox book written in English in the twentieth century was written to order, for a Protestant student conference, by a Russian émigré priest who was not yet widely known outside his own seminary.

In a letter dated 21 February 1963, C. Alton Robertson, director of the Commission on World Mission of the National Student Christian Federation, invited Fr. Alexander Schmemann to be the principal speaker at the 19th Quadrennial Ecumenical Student Conference, to be held at Athens, Ohio (William C. Mills, “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World,” Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 54, nos. 3–4, on the invitation letter, its date, and its author). The Quadrennial was the latest in a long series of four-yearly student missionary conferences descending from the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions — a mainline Protestant institution with a century of history behind it (Mills, “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World,” on the Quadrennial’s lineage).

The conference theme for 1963 was “For the Life of the World” (John 6:51), and it was framed around mission: the relation of Church and world, of worship and life. The theme was the conference’s, not Schmemann’s; he took the assigned title and wrote into it. The text was published in New York by the National Student Christian Federation in 1963 (Mills, “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World,” on the conference theme, the publication, and the publisher).

Two features of this origin explain much about the book.

First, the audience was not Orthodox. Schmemann was writing for American Protestant students concerned with mission and the modern world, most of whom had never been inside an Orthodox church. He could presuppose nothing — no Slavonic, no Typikon, no familiarity with the Byzantine rite — and so he had to state the Orthodox vision of the world and the sacraments from the ground up, in ordinary English, without technical vocabulary. The book’s celebrated accessibility is a consequence of the commission.

Second, the assigned subject was mission. Schmemann’s answer to a question about mission was to talk about the Eucharist — and this is the book’s central and characteristic move. He did not treat worship and mission as two topics to be related; he argued that the Church’s mission is the eucharistic offering of the world back to God, and that a Christianity which locates its relevance somewhere other than at the altar has already lost the argument (Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd rev. and exp. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973, chs. 1–2; see The World as Sacrament).

The Editions

The publishing history is straightforward but often garbled, and the collection states it plainly.

1963 — first published by the National Student Christian Federation, New York, out of the Athens, Ohio, Quadrennial (Mills, “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World”).
1973 — the second, revised and expanded edition, published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press with the subtitle Sacraments and Orthodoxy. This is the standard text: a new preface, seven chapters, and two appendices — “Worship in a Secular Age” and “Sacrament and Symbol” (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press edition of 1973, contents; the two appendices are the standard supplement to the 1973 text).

The 1973 appendices matter. “Worship in a Secular Age” is the sharpest short statement of Schmemann’s critique of secularism and is treated separately in this collection (see Worship in a Secular Age); “Sacrament and Symbol” is his most compact account of symbolic realism against illustrative allegory, and it is the theoretical underpinning of his objection to the allegorical reading of the Liturgy (see The Ordo and the Byzantine Synthesis). A reader who takes up only the seven chapters gets the vision; a reader who takes the appendices as well gets the argument.

The repository’s own citations follow this history: the book is cited as 1963 where the first edition is meant and as 1973 where the standard revised text is meant, and both forms appear across the collections (see, e.g., The Divine Liturgy: What the Divine Liturgy Is; Orthodoxy: Liturgy as Theology).

The Shape of the Book

The seven chapters move outward from a single center.

“The Life of the World” — the sacramental vision of creation: the world as gift and communion, the human being as homo adorans, the priest of creation; the fall as the loss of the eucharistic relation to the world (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1; see The World as Sacrament).
“The Eucharist” — the Liturgy as the ascent of the Church into the Kingdom and the restoration of the world’s true meaning.
“The Time of Mission” — the sanctification of time; Sunday as the “eighth day”; the liturgical year as the revelation of the meaning of all time rather than the setting apart of some of it.
“Of Water and the Spirit” — baptism as real death and resurrection, not a rite of admission (developed at length in the 1974 book of that name; see Of Water and the Spirit and Frequent Communion).
“The Mystery of Love” — marriage as a sacrament of the Kingdom rather than a blessing on natural affection.
“Trampling Down Death by Death” — the Christian confrontation with death; the refusal both of denial and of despair.
“And Ye Are Witnesses of These Things” — the sending: the Church, having entered the Kingdom, returned to the world as its witness.

The structure enacts the thesis. The book begins with creation, passes through the Eucharist, and ends with mission — the same movement Schmemann finds in the Liturgy itself, which gathers the world, offers it, receives it back transfigured, and sends the assembly out (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, chs. 1–2 and 7; see Liturgy as Theology).

Why It Traveled

For the Life of the World is, by common consent, the most widely read Orthodox book in English. Its reach is worth explaining rather than merely asserting, because it was not the product of promotion.

It is short and jargon-free. Written for students in a week’s conference, it is under two hundred pages and contains almost no technical apparatus. A reader with no theological training can finish it in an evening and understand it.

It answers a question people are actually asking. The book’s real subject is the meaning of ordinary material life — food, marriage, work, time, death — and its claim is that these are not the neutral background against which religion happens but the very matter of communion with God. That claim lands with equal force on a secular reader who has never considered it and on a religious reader who has been taught to think of the spiritual life as an escape from matter.

It is not polemical. Schmemann is writing to non-Orthodox readers about the Orthodox vision without arguing against them, and the effect is unusual: the book presents Orthodoxy positively rather than comparatively, and readers of other confessions have consistently found it possible to receive.

It became a convert text. In the American convert movement of the later twentieth century, For the Life of the World functioned as an entry point for a great many people — the book handed to the inquirer, the one that made the sacramental vision intelligible before any question of jurisdiction or rite arose (see Orthodoxy: The Convert Movement, on the mid-century intellectual converts drawn through St. Vladimir’s and Schmemann’s writing).

It has been received beyond Orthodoxy. Its influence on Western liturgical and sacramental theology, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, is substantial, and it is regularly assigned outside Orthodox institutions. The most conspicuous mark of that reception is that in 2020 the Ecumenical Patriarchate published its social-ethos document under the title For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church — taking Schmemann’s title, thirty-seven years after his death, for the Church’s own statement on its engagement with the world (David Bentley Hart and John Chryssavgis, eds., For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2020; official text at goarch.org; see Orthodoxy: Social Ethics).

[Disputed: the number of languages into which *For the Life of the World* has been translated. It is very widely translated and is routinely described as the most widely read Orthodox book in English, but this guide has not located an authoritative count of translations and therefore gives none. Readers wanting a figure should consult St. Vladimir's Seminary Press directly rather than the round numbers that circulate.]

References

Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973. (Seven chapters and the two appendices “Worship in a Secular Age” and “Sacrament and Symbol.” First published New York: National Student Christian Federation, 1963.)
Mills, William C. “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World.” Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 54, nos. 3–4. (The invitation letter of 21 February 1963 from C. Alton Robertson of the Commission on World Mission of the National Student Christian Federation; the 19th Quadrennial Ecumenical Student Conference at Athens, Ohio; the conference theme; the 1963 publication. Also in We Give Our Thanks Unto Thee: Essays in Memory of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, ch. 10.)
Hart, David Bentley, and John Chryssavgis, eds. For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2020. Official text at goarch.org. (The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s social-ethos document, taking Schmemann’s title.)
Scripture: John 6:51 (“the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world”), the source of the title.