The Journals

Schmemann kept a private journal from 1973 until five months before his death. Published in English in 2000 in his widow’s translation, it is a major and unsettling source: delighted, contemplative, and startlingly harsh about Orthodox church life, the clergy, the academy, and himself. This file describes the book, its editorial character, and the genuinely divided reception it has had — read by some as saintly self-knowledge and by others as evidence of alienation.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Book

Schmemann kept the journal in Russian from 1973 until 1 June 1983, five months before his death. It was published in English as The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, translated and edited by his widow Juliana Schmemann, by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 2000; the Russian Дневники followed, and the complete Russian text is now freely available (Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000; Russian Дневники, full text at azbyka.ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_Shmeman/dnevniki/).

Two editorial facts matter for anyone using it.

[Disputed: the English edition is **abridged**, and the Russian *Дневники* is fuller. Material of biographical importance — including the account of the cadet corps and of General Rimsky-Korsakov's death that underlies this collection's first file — is present in the Russian and absent from the English (see [Reval, Paris, and the Cadet Corps](../01-life-and-formation/reval-paris-and-the-cadet-corps.md)). Scholars should work from the Russian; readers relying on the English should know they are reading a selection made by the author's widow, not the whole diary. This guide has not been able to establish the principles on which the abridgement was made.]

[Disputed: page references to the SVS Press edition circulate in the secondary literature but have not been independently verified by this guide. Where page numbers are given below, they are reproduced from the reviewer who supplies them and are attributed accordingly.]

The final entry is dated 1 June 1983, and it ends: “What happiness it has all been!” (Schmemann, The Journals, 2000, final entry). Given what the preceding year had been — the diagnosis in the autumn of 1982 of cancer in the lungs and the brain, already advanced — the sentence is not a pious flourish but a verdict rendered under sentence of death (see The Move to America and the Deanship).

What Is in It

The journal is not a spiritual diary in the devotional sense and contains almost no record of prayer states. It is the mind of an intelligent, cultivated, overworked man set down daily: reading (French literature above all), weather and light, travel, conversations, the ordinary happiness of family life, the seminary’s endless administration, and — recurrently — the Liturgy, of which he writes throughout with an undiminished joy.

What has made it famous is the candor. Schmemann wrote for no one, and it shows. He is severe about:

  • Church life and its politics — the pettiness of ecclesiastical business, the vanity of hierarchs, the substitution of administration for the Gospel;
  • Clericalism — the temptations of the clerical state, its self-importance and its costumes;
  • The academic theology of his own guild, including at times his own institution;
  • Religiosity — a certain kind of intense, self-regarding piety, which he found more often oppressive than holy;
  • Converts and enthusiasts of a particular temper, in whom he detected an appetite for religion rather than for God;
  • and himself, constantly: his laziness, his vanity, his love of praise, his flight into reading and talk.

The severity extends to individuals, and it does not spare the admired. Of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose broadcasts he had defended on air and whose friendship he valued, he wrote that he found in him “narrow-mindedness, suspicion, fanaticism,” and, in the entry of 12 May 1975, that “his treasure is Russia and only Russia; mine is the Church” (Schmemann, Дневники, entry of 12 May 1975, azbyka.ru; The Journals, 2000, p. 80, as quoted in L. Joseph Letendre, “Lucid Love,” Touchstone 14, no. 10, December 2001; see Radio Liberty and Solzhenitsyn). On the movement for the ordination of women he was equally blunt, dismissing what he took to be its motivation as “a low-level egalitarianism, cowardice before the contemporary world. Nothing deep or genuine” (The Journals, 2000, p. 127, as quoted in Letendre, “Lucid Love,” 2001; on the question itself, see Orthodoxy: Women in Orthodoxy).

[Apocryphal: a line about zealots pursuing "non-existent, imagined deserts" is frequently attributed to the *Journals*. It could not be located in either the Russian or the English text by the research conducted for this collection. It is reported here as unverified and is not quoted as Schmemann's.]

Set against all this is the other half of the book, which is why it is not a bitter book: the sustained delight in creation, in ordinary life, in the Liturgy, and the recurring conviction — stated without irony — that the hour spent at the Eucharist on Sunday morning is the truest hour of human life. The two registers are not in different sections; they are on the same page, often in the same paragraph.

Why It Matters Theologically

The journal is not an appendix to the theology. It is, on a defensible reading, the theology’s autobiography.

The books argue that the Church’s whole existence is thanksgiving, that the world is a sacrament, and that secularism is the refusal to offer it. The journal shows what those claims looked like in a life: a man who found God in a February afternoon and in a novel and in his wife’s company, and who was correspondingly impatient with a religion that located holiness only in religious things. The critique of “religiosity” in the diary is the critique of the “sacred/profane” division in the essays, written in the first person (see Worship in a Secular Age; The World as Sacrament).

It also supplies something his published work conspicuously lacks: evidence that he applied his own critique to himself. The charge most often brought against him is that he criticized the piety of the faithful from a professor’s chair (see The “Western Captivity” and Liturgical Piety). The journal shows him turning the same instrument on the academy, on the seminary, and above all on his own vanity, with a severity he never applied in print to anyone else.

The Divided Reception (§4.2)

The Journals have been read in two incompatible ways, and this collection presents both without adjudicating.

Read as self-knowledge

On this reading the book is a rare and valuable document of Christian honesty: the record of a man who refused to pretend, who knew his own faults better than his critics did, and whose impatience with religiosity was the impatience of someone who had actually met God and could tell the difference. The harsh judgments are the private thinking of a tired man, written for no reader and never intended for publication — and to weigh them as though they were published verdicts is to misread the genre. What the book finally communicates is joy: “What happiness it has all been!”

The most substantial English review in this key is L. Joseph Letendre’s “Lucid Love” (Touchstone 14, no. 10, December 2001), which reads the book as spiritual reflection rather than ecclesiastical exposé while quoting its hardest lines without flinching (Letendre, “Lucid Love,” Touchstone 14, no. 10, December 2001). In Russia the book has been defended in the same terms by, among others, Archpriest Alexy Gostev and Igumen Pyotr (Meshcherinov) — the latter endorsing Schmemann’s sharpest criticisms and extending them (symposium on the Дневники, pravmir.ru, “О дневниках отца Александра Шмемана”).

Read as alienation

On the other reading, the book reveals a man estranged from the Church he served. His contempt is not for abuses but for the actual texture of Orthodox life — its monasticism, its ascetic tradition, its popular devotion, its clergy, its converts. A theologian who found so much of the Church’s living practice oppressive was, on this view, not a prophet within it but a stranger to it, and the Journals are the evidence.

The fullest traditionalist statement of this reading is Archpriest Andrew Phillips’s «Дневники отца Александра Шмемана и единство Русской Церкви в рассеянии» (Русская народная линия, 21 May 2011), which argues that in Schmemann “a whole side, even a whole half, of Orthodox church life was absent,” and concludes that “Fr. Alexander’s mind was never fully churched” (Andrew Phillips, «Дневники отца Александра Шмемана и единство Русской Церкви в рассеянии», Русская народная линия, 21 May 2011, ruskline.ru). A Russian reading in a related key is Pavel Protsenko’s «Муки нелюбви: парадоксы “Дневников” о. Александра Шмемана» — “The Torments of Unlove” — in Знамя 2006, no. 12. [Disputed: the title and place of publication of Protsenko's article are verified (*Знамя* 2006, no. 12, magazines.gorky.media), but the text could not be retrieved by the research conducted for this collection. Its title signals the "bitterness" reading, but this guide does not characterize its argument, not having read it.]

[Disputed: how the *Journals* should be weighed. (a) The "self-knowledge" reading holds that they are the private, unpublished thinking of a man of unusual honesty, that their harshness is directed as much at himself as at others, and that their governing note is joy — the book ending "What happiness it has all been!" (Letendre, "Lucid Love," *Touchstone*, December 2001; the Russian defenders at pravmir.ru). (b) The "alienation" reading holds that they disclose a settled estrangement from monasticism, asceticism, popular piety, and much of the Church's actual life, and that this estrangement is the key to the theology rather than an incidental mood (Andrew Phillips, ruskline.ru, 21 May 2011, "his mind was never fully churched"; and, in a more systematic anti-modernist register, Roman Vershillo, «Отец Александр Шмеман: характеристика мировоззрения», Антимодернизм.ру, 15 July 2013). A third consideration cuts across both: the English edition is an abridgement made by his widow, so that judgments formed on it are judgments on a selection. The collection reports the readings and does not adjudicate.]

A Note on Reading Private Papers

One methodological point is worth making, because it bears on how much weight the Journals can carry either way.

A private diary is not a considered publication, and it is not a confession. It records what a man thought on a particular afternoon, often in irritation, frequently without the qualifications he would have added in print. To treat its sharpest sentences as Schmemann’s settled theological positions is a category error — and so, equally, is dismissing them as mere moods when they recur for a decade. The honest course is the one this collection takes: to report what the book contains, to note that it was not written for publication, to name the readings it has received, and to leave the weighing to the reader.

It is worth adding that the Journals have made Schmemann more read, not less. They are, for many, the book by which he is known — a theologian whose most widely circulated work is his private diary, published seventeen years after his death by his widow.

See Also

References

  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983. Translated and edited by Juliana Schmemann. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The English edition; abridged.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. Дневники, 1973–1983. Full Russian text at azbyka.ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_Shmeman/dnevniki/. (The fuller text, containing material absent from the English edition.)
  • Letendre, L. Joseph. “Lucid Love.” Touchstone 14, no. 10 (December 2001). (Review reading the Journals as spiritual reflection; source of the page references at pp. 80 and 127.)
  • Phillips, Andrew (Archpriest). «Дневники отца Александра Шмемана и единство Русской Церкви в рассеянии». Русская народная линия, 21 May 2011, ruskline.ru. (The fullest traditionalist reading; “his mind was never fully churched.”)
  • Vershillo, Roman. «Отец Александр Шмеман: характеристика мировоззрения». Антимодернизм.ру, 15 July 2013, antimodern.ru. (The systematic anti-modernist indictment.)
  • Protsenko, Pavel. «Муки нелюбви: парадоксы “Дневников” о. Александра Шмемана». Знамя 2006, no. 12, magazines.gorky.media. (Title and venue verified; text not consulted.)
  • “О дневниках отца Александра Шмемана.” Symposium, pravmir.ru. (Russian defenders, including Archpriest Alexy Gostev and Igumen Pyotr (Meshcherinov).)