The World as Sacrament

The argument of For the Life of the World: the world is created as a sacrament — the matter of communion with God — and the human being as homo adorans, the priest of creation who receives the world as gift and offers it back in thanksgiving. The fall is the loss of that eucharistic relation; the Eucharist is its restoration; and the Liturgy is the ascent in which the Church carries the world into the Kingdom. This file expounds that argument.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Beginning with Food

Schmemann begins the book not with God, not with the Church, and not with religion, but with eating. “Man is what he eats” — the materialist slogan of Feuerbach, which Schmemann takes up and turns — because the Bible begins there too: the first thing God says about the human being after creating him concerns food, and the first human act that changes everything is an act of eating (Genesis 1:29; 2:16–17; 3:6) (Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, 2nd rev. ed., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973, ch. 1).

The move is characteristic and it is the whole book in miniature. Schmemann refuses at the outset the division of reality into a “spiritual” region where religion operates and a “material” region where it does not. Human life is bodily; it is sustained by taking the world into oneself; and the question of God is therefore posed, from the first page of Scripture, at the level of the dinner table (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1).

The World as Gift

The world, on Schmemann’s reading of Genesis, is given. It is not a self-explaining datum, not raw material, and not a neutral system of objects; it is a gift, and a gift carries the presence of the giver. To receive the world as gift is to know God in it — not to infer God from it, but to encounter him through it, because the world is God’s own address to his creature (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1).

This is what Schmemann means by calling the world a sacrament. Not that the world is divine, and not that it possesses a magical quality: but that it is the means of communion with God, matter through which God gives himself. In his own words:

“The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.”

(Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, p. 15; the quotation as verified and cited in the repository at Orthodoxy: Environmental Ethics)

Note the ordering. The sacraments of the Church are not, on this account, isolated islands of the sacred inserted into a profane world. They are the restoration of what the world was always meant to be. The Church does not sacralize a few things; she reveals the true meaning of everything (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, chs. 1–2; see The Holy Mysteries: Sacramental Theology).

Homo Adorans

The correlative claim concerns the human being, and it is the one for which the book is best remembered.

Schmemann’s name for the human person is homo adorans — the worshipping being. Prior to being homo sapiens or homo faber, the one who knows or the one who makes, the human being is the one who blesses God for the world and offers the world back to God. That offering is what makes him a priest: not by ordination, but by creation. He stands at the center of the world as the one creature capable of receiving it consciously as gift, of naming it, of giving thanks for it, and of returning it to the Giver — and in that return the world becomes what it was made to be, communion with God (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1; and see Orthodoxy: Environmental Ethics, on Schmemann’s homo adorans and the priest of creation).

The idea was taken up and developed by Metropolitan John Zizioulas into the formula for which he is best known — the human being as “priest of creation,” distinguished sharply from the modern image of the “steward” or “manager,” since stewardship can remain utilitarian while priesthood is doxological. Zizioulas drew explicitly on Schmemann’s homo adorans, and the line of descent from one to the other is direct (Zizioulas, “Priest of Creation,” in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce Foltz, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013; see Orthodoxy: Environmental Ethics; John Zizioulas). Through this line Schmemann’s first chapter became one of the foundations of contemporary Orthodox ecological theology — a development he did not live to see.

The Fall as the Loss of the Eucharist

If the human vocation is the eucharistic offering of the world, then the fall must be defined in the same terms — and Schmemann’s definition is his sharpest departure from the manuals.

Sin, on his account, is not first the breaking of a rule. The original sin is the reception of the world as an end in itself: taking the gift without the Giver, eating without blessing, treating the world as self-explanatory and self-sufficient. Adam’s fault was not disobedience considered as a legal infraction but the cessation of thanksgiving — he ceased to be a priest and became a consumer (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1).

Two consequences follow, and both are load-bearing for everything else Schmemann wrote.

First, the fall is a cosmic catastrophe and not merely a moral one. When the human being stopped offering the world, the world lost its meaning as communion and became opaque — matter that no longer speaks of God. Death enters as the natural end of a life cut off from the source of life (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, chs. 1 and 6; see Orthodoxy: Soteriology).

Second — and this is the hinge to his critique of the modern world — secularism is the fall in its contemporary form. Secularism, in Schmemann’s definition, is not atheism; it is precisely the reception of the world as an end in itself, “the negation of worship.” A secularist may believe in God; what he does not do is offer the world. This is why Schmemann treats secularism as a theological rather than a sociological problem, and why he regarded a “religion” that had accepted its allotted compartment within a secular world as having already conceded the essential point (Schmemann, “Worship in a Secular Age,” appendix to For the Life of the World, 1973; see Worship in a Secular Age).

The Eucharist as Restoration and Ascent

Christ, the new Adam, does what Adam failed to do: he offers the world and himself to the Father in perfect thanksgiving, and in his death and resurrection the eucharistic relation between creation and God is restored (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2; see Orthodoxy: Soteriology). The Eucharist is the Church’s participation in that offering — which is why the Church’s central act consists in taking bread and wine, the most ordinary food, and offering it.

Here Schmemann introduces the correction that most changes how the Liturgy is read. The Eucharist, he insists, is not primarily a descent — God coming down into the elements while the congregation waits — but an ascent: the Church is lifted up, in Christ and by the Spirit, into the Kingdom, and it is there, at the table of Christ in his Kingdom, that she receives the gifts back as his Body and Blood (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2; The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Kachur, SVS Press, 1988, chs. 2 and 6; see The Divine Liturgy: The Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance).

The whole Liturgy is then legible as a single movement in four beats — gathering, offering, ascent, return:

The assembly gathers, and by gathering becomes the Church (see The Divine Liturgy: What the Divine Liturgy Is).
It offers — bread and wine, the world in miniature, together with the lives of those who bring them: “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all.”
It ascends: “Lift up your hearts” — “We lift them up unto the Lord” — and the anaphora is the prayer of a Church already standing before the throne (see The Divine Liturgy: The Eucharistic Prayer).
It returns, sent back into the world — “Let us depart in peace” — carrying what it has received.

(Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 2; The Eucharist, 1988, throughout; see Liturgy as Theology.)

The Sacraments and the Rest of the Book

The later chapters apply the same pattern to the other mysteries and to the shape of Christian life.

Baptism is not a rite of admission but a real death and resurrection with Christ, the making of a new creature — the argument expanded in 1974 into Of Water and the Spirit (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 4; see Of Water and the Spirit and Frequent Communion; The Holy Mysteries: The Theology of Baptism).

Time is sanctified not by dividing it into sacred and profane portions but by the revelation of its meaning: Sunday is the “eighth day,” the day of the Kingdom breaking into the week, and the liturgical year discloses the significance of all time rather than sacralizing a few dates (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 3; see Orthodoxy: The Church Calendar).

Marriage is a sacrament of the Kingdom — the crowning of two persons into a new unity that is an image of the Church — and not a religious blessing laid over a natural arrangement (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 5; see The Holy Mysteries: The Mystery of Crowning).

Death is confronted directly in the sixth chapter, and Schmemann refuses both available consolations: the denial that treats death as a natural transition and the despair that treats it as the end. Death is the enemy, and it has been defeated — “trampling down death by death” — and Christian hope is neither denial nor stoicism but Pascha (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 6; see Orthodox Eschatology: The Paschal Frame).

And the last chapter returns to the commission that produced the book: mission. Having entered the Kingdom, the Church is sent; the Liturgy issues in witness; and the world for whose life Christ gave his flesh (John 6:51) is the world the Church exists to offer (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 7; Church, World, Mission, SVS Press, 1979).

What the Argument Is Not

Two misreadings are common enough to be worth naming, since both are made by admirers.

It is not pantheism or a sacralized nature-mysticism. The world is not divine and is not to be worshipped; it is given, and it becomes communion only when it is offered — which requires a personal God distinct from the world and a creature who freely returns the gift (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, ch. 1).

And it is not an optimism about the world as it stands. Schmemann’s world is fallen, opaque, and under the dominion of death; the sacramental vision is a claim about what creation is for and what the Eucharist restores, not a denial that it is broken. The book’s serenity is paschal, not sunny — it has passed through the sixth chapter on death (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 1973, chs. 1 and 6).

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. (The world as sacrament and gift; homo adorans; the fall as the loss of thanksgiving; the Eucharist as ascent; baptism, time, marriage, death, and mission. The quotation “The world was created as the ‘matter’… man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament” at p. 15.)
Schmemann, Alexander. “Worship in a Secular Age.” Appendix to For the Life of the World, 1973 edition. (Secularism as the negation of worship.)
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Translated by Paul Kachur. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. (The ascent and the sacrament of offering.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979.
Zizioulas, John D. “Priest of Creation.” In Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration, edited by John Chryssavgis and Bruce Foltz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. (The development of Schmemann’s homo adorans.)
Scripture: Genesis 1:29; 2:16–17; 3:6; John 6:51.