The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom

Written in Russian in his last years and published only after his death — Evkharistiia: Tainstvo Tsarstva (Paris, 1984), English translation by Paul Kachur (SVS Press, 1988) — The Eucharist is Schmemann’s mature and most personal theological work: a walk through the Divine Liturgy read as a single ascent into the Kingdom, structured as a sequence of “sacraments” within the one sacrament. This file expounds it, and sets out the eucharistic ecclesiology he received from Afanasiev and modified.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Book

Schmemann wrote The Eucharist in Russian, his first language and the language of his Radio Liberty talks, and did not live to see it published. It appeared as Evkharistiia: Tainstvo Tsarstva from YMCA-Press, Paris, in 1984, the year after his death, and in English as The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, translated by Paul Kachur, from St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1988 (hub essay, Fr. Alexander Schmemann; the repository’s standard citation across collections, e.g. The Divine Liturgy: What the Divine Liturgy Is).

Its character differs from both of his better-known books. Where Introduction to Liturgical Theology is a scholarly argument with a historical apparatus, and For the Life of the World is a short popular exposition written for outsiders, The Eucharist is a mature commentary written from inside — the work of a priest who had served the Liturgy for nearly forty years and was writing about it, in his own language, under sentence of death. It is warmer, more personal, and more direct than either, and it is the book his readers most often name as the one that changed how they stand in church.

The Structure: A Sequence of Sacraments

The book’s organizing device is announced in its chapter titles. Schmemann walks through the Liturgy in order, and names each movement a “sacrament” — not to multiply the mysteries, but to insist that the whole Liturgy is one sacramental action whose parts are not preliminaries to a consecratory moment but constituent movements of a single ascent (Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Kachur, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988, throughout).

The sequence runs:

The Sacrament of the Assembly. The Liturgy begins before a word is said, in the gathering. The Church’s first and constitutive name is ekklesia, “assembly”; the coming-together of the faithful is not the precondition of the sacrament but its first act (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1). This is the ecclesiological foundation of the whole book: there is no Eucharist without the assembly, and the assembly is not an audience but the celebrant, with the presiding priest among them and not over against them (see The Divine Liturgy: What the Divine Liturgy Is).
The Sacrament of the Kingdom. “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” — the unique opening of the Liturgy, which no other Orthodox service shares — announces the destination. The Liturgy is a journey, and this is its declared end (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 2; see The Divine Liturgy: The Enarxis and the Little Entrance).
The Sacrament of Entrance. The Little Entrance as the Church’s ascent, the movement of the assembly toward the altar and the Kingdom.
The Sacrament of the Word. The reading of Scripture in the Liturgy is not instruction inserted into worship but a sacramental act: the Word is not merely heard but received, and the Church is constituted by it as much as by the Bread (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, on the sacrament of the word; see The Divine Liturgy: The Readings and the Homily).
The Sacrament of the Faithful. The ancient dismissal of the catechumens marks what the assembly is: the baptized, those who may stand before God as sons and offer (see The Divine Liturgy: The Readings and the Homily, on the dismissal and the disciplina arcani).
The Sacrament of Offering. The Great Entrance and the bringing of the gifts — here Schmemann makes his sharpest correction of the received allegory (below).
The Sacrament of Unity. “Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess” — the kiss of peace and the Creed, the Church made one in love and faith before she dares to offer (see The Divine Liturgy: The Creed and the Kiss of Peace).
The Sacrament of the Anaphora. The great prayer: “Let us lift up our hearts” — “We lift them up unto the Lord.” The anaphora is the prayer of a Church that has arrived, standing before the throne (see The Divine Liturgy: The Eucharistic Prayer).
The Sacrament of Thanksgiving, of Remembrance, of the Holy Spirit — the constituent movements of the anaphora itself: eucharistia, anamnesis, epiclesis.
The Sacrament of Communion. The end for which the whole action exists: the reception of the Body and Blood, and the return (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, chs. 9–14; see The Divine Liturgy: The Reception and Thanksgiving).

The cumulative effect of the scheme is the argument. If each movement is a sacrament, then the Liturgy has no “unimportant” parts, no preliminaries to be endured while waiting for the consecration; and the question “at what moment does it happen?” — the question that has dominated Western sacramental controversy and, Schmemann held, infected Orthodox thinking too — is the wrong question. What “happens” is the whole ascent (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 1 and chs. 11–12; on the epiclesis question and the Orthodox reserve about isolating a consecratory moment, see The Divine Liturgy: The Epiclesis and the Consecration).

The Great Entrance: A Test Case

The clearest instance of Schmemann’s method is his treatment of the Great Entrance, and it is worth setting out because it shows both his force and what makes him contested.

The mature Byzantine mystagogy reads the procession of the gifts as an image of Christ’s burial: the gifts borne to the altar as the body borne to the tomb, the aer as the shroud — a reading found in St. Germanus of Constantinople and elaborated afterward (Germanus, On the Divine Liturgy, trans. Paul Meyendorff, SVS Press, 1984, §§37–41). Schmemann rejected this as a misplaced and enfeebling symbolism. The Great Entrance, he argued, is not a mournful reenactment of a past burial but a royal procession — the King of all entering, “upborne by the ranks of angels” as the Cherubikon says — and, still more, the Church’s offering: the bringing to God of bread and wine that stand for the whole creation and for the self-oblation of the assembly, that God may receive them and give them back as the Body and Blood of Christ (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 6, “The Sacrament of Offering”; the correction is registered in the repository’s liturgical compendium at The Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance).

The repository’s own treatment of this passage states the balance the collection maintains here: the two readings need not simply cancel each other, since the tradition holds many layers; but Schmemann’s correction keeps the Great Entrance oriented forward, toward the Kingdom and the offering, rather than backward toward a dramatization of the past (see The Cherubic Hymn and the Great Entrance). It is also precisely the sort of move for which his traditionalist critics have faulted him — the setting aside of a received patristic interpretation on the authority of a reconstructed earlier meaning (see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique).

Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Received and Modified

The theological substructure of the book is eucharistic ecclesiology, and the debt is to Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev, Schmemann’s teacher at St. Sergius.

Afanasiev’s thesis, stated compactly: the Church is fully realized in the local eucharistic assembly gathered around its bishop; wherever the Eucharist is celebrated there is not a part or branch of the Church but the whole Church; and ecclesiology must therefore be built “from below,” from the eucharistic community, rather than “from above,” from a universal institution. He set this “eucharistic ecclesiology” against the “universal ecclesiology” whose emergence he traced to St. Cyprian of Carthage (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit [Tserkov Dukha Sviatogo], Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971, posthumous; English trans. Vitaly Permiakov, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007; Afanasiev, “The Church Which Presides in Love,” in The Primacy of Peter, ed. John Meyendorff, SVS Press; see Orthodoxy: Ecclesiology). The full exposition of Afanasiev’s position, its canonical arguments, and its own critics belongs to the sibling collection, and this guide defers to it rather than duplicating it (see Nicholas Afanasiev).

What Schmemann did with it is his own, and three modifications are worth naming.

1. He turned it from canon law toward liturgical theology. Afanasiev’s question was largely structural: who is the Church, where is she, what follows for primacy and order. Schmemann took the same principle and asked what the Liturgy is and what happens in it. The result is that eucharistic ecclesiology, in his hands, becomes an account of worship rather than chiefly an account of church polity.

2. He gave it an eschatological center. Afanasiev’s local assembly is the Church because the Eucharist is celebrated there. Schmemann adds: and the Eucharist is the Church’s passage into the Kingdom, so that the assembly is the Church not merely as a local realization of the Body but as the eschatological gathering of the age to come, present now. The word in his subtitle — Sacrament of the Kingdom — carries the modification (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, ch. 2; see Orthodox Eschatology: Inaugurated Eschatology and the Kingdom).

3. He drew the pastoral conclusions Afanasiev left implicit. If the Eucharist constitutes the Church and the assembly is the celebrant, then the assembly must actually commune; a Liturgy at which the faithful do not receive is a contradiction in terms. This is the ground of Schmemann’s campaign for frequent communion, which is treated with its critics in the companion file (see Of Water and the Spirit and Frequent Communion).

A third figure belongs in the frame. Metropolitan John Zizioulas, in Being as Communion (1985), developed eucharistic ecclesiology in another direction again, grounding it in a relational ontology of personhood and criticizing Afanasiev for over-weighting the local church at the expense of the communion among the churches (Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985, esp. chs. 4–5; see Orthodoxy: Ecclesiology; John Zizioulas). Schmemann, Afanasiev, and Zizioulas are thus three distinct positions and not one school, and this collection does not merge them.

Sacrifice, Thanksgiving, Communion

One further emphasis of the book deserves note because it addresses an old East–West quarrel without entering it.

Western theology has often divided the Eucharist’s aspects — sacrifice, presence, communion — and made them the subject of separate controversies. Schmemann held them together and refused the division. The Eucharist is thanksgiving, for the word means nothing else; it is sacrifice, but the one sacrifice of Christ, into which the Church enters rather than repeating it — “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all,” while the priest confesses that Christ is “the offerer and the offered, the receiver and the distributed”; and it is communion, the reception that is the point of the whole. These are three faces of one act (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1988, chs. 9–11; see The Divine Liturgy: The Eucharistic Prayer; The Holy Mysteries: The Mystery of the Body and Blood).

The same reserve governs his handling of the how. Schmemann shows no interest in specifying a mechanism of the change or in adjudicating the moment of consecration; the Orthodox preference for metabole, “change,” over the scholastic “transubstantiation,” and the location of the mystery in the whole prayer rather than in an isolated formula, are entirely congenial to him (see The Divine Liturgy: The Epiclesis and the Consecration; The Holy Mysteries: The Mystery of the Body and Blood). What he insists on is that the gifts are the Body and Blood, and that they are given to be eaten.

The Book’s Standing

The Eucharist is generally taken as the fullest and most balanced statement of Schmemann’s theology, and the one in which the polemical edge of Introduction to Liturgical Theology has softened into exposition. It is the book the repository’s own liturgical compendium leans on most heavily for the theology of the rite (see The Divine Liturgy, which names Schmemann’s The Eucharist and For the Life of the World among its governing sources).

It is also the book in which the reader can most clearly hear what the Journals record privately: a man who believed, without qualification and to the end, that the hour spent at the Liturgy on Sunday morning is the truest hour of human life (Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, SVS Press, 2000; see The Journals).

References

Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Translated by Paul Kachur. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988. Russian original: Evkharistiia: Tainstvo Tsarstva. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1984 (posthumous).
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. 2nd rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983. Translated by Juliana Schmemann. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit [Tserkov Dukha Sviatogo]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1971 (posthumous); English translation by Vitaly Permiakov, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. And “The Church Which Presides in Love,” in The Primacy of Peter, edited by John Meyendorff, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Germanus of Constantinople. On the Divine Liturgy. Translated by Paul Meyendorff. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (The burial symbolism of the Great Entrance that Schmemann contested.)