Influence and a Sober Assessment

Robert Taft called it “the Schmemann phenomenon”: an influence out of all proportion to the size of the output, and to the strictly scholarly standing of the man who produced it. This file measures that influence — in parish practice, in theological education, in the English-speaking Church, and inside the Soviet Union — then sets against it the case that the vision is now in eclipse, and closes with an assessment that tries to be neither an obituary nor a brief.

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

The Schmemann Phenomenon

The phrase is Taft’s, and he used it to name something he found genuinely puzzling. Schmemann was not the strongest scholar of his own faculty, and Taft said so plainly in a late interview: “Of course Fr Meyendorff was a much stronger scholar than Schmemann, who was gifted in a somewhat different way… I’ve called it ‘the Schmemann phenomenon’” (Robert F. Taft, S.J., interview with Deacon Andrei Psarev, 14 December 2012, ROCOR Studies). Yet it is Schmemann, not Meyendorff, whose books are still in print in a dozen languages and whose name is invoked in parish councils.

Taft’s own explanation, given in his 2009 memorial lecture at St. Vladimir’s, was that Schmemann accomplished a synthesis nobody else had managed. Liturgy, theology, ecclesiology, and ordinary Christian living had come apart; unlike all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Fr. Alexander was the one who “finally succeeded in putting Humpty-Dumpty together again” (Robert F. Taft, S.J., “The Liturgical Enterprise Twenty-Five Years After Alexander Schmemann [1921–1983]: The Man and His Heritage,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 [2009]: 139–177, at p. 174). His verdict at the end of that essay is the one most often quoted in Schmemann’s favor, and it comes from a scholar who had just conceded that some of Schmemann’s factual claims were “dead wrong”: “Alexander Schmemann was right on target in his vision of what liturgy is in the life of the Church” (Taft, SVTQ 53 [2009]: 176; see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique).

That is the phenomenon precisely: a body of work whose historical particulars are contestable and whose central vision has convinced even its critics.

The Scale of the Influence

Four measures, each documentable.

1. Parish practice. The most concrete legacy is a change in what Orthodox Christians in North America actually do on Sunday morning. Nicholas Denysenko identifies three linked changes that mark the reception of Schmemann’s eucharistic revival — itself built on Kern and Afanasiev: the encouragement of frequent, ideally weekly, reception of communion; the priest’s audible recitation of the liturgical prayers, the anaphora above all; and, as the necessary consequence of the first, a revised theology of worthiness in which rigorous fasting and obligatory confession ceased to be prerequisites for every communion (Nicholas Denysenko, “Reviving the Liturgical Enterprise of Alexander Schmemann,” The Wheel 16 [Winter 2019]: 52–56, at 52–53; the primary document is Schmemann’s “Confession and Communion: Report to the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America,” 17 February 1972). Denysenko adds the judgment that the greatest of Schmemann’s tributes is not academic at all but consists in “the generations of clergy committed to the eucharistic revival whom he formed as a teacher” (The Wheel 16 [2019]: 53). See Of Water and the Spirit and Frequent Communion.

2. Theological education. “Liturgical theology” is now a standard category — an examinable subject in Orthodox seminaries and a live field in Roman Catholic and Protestant faculties, where Schmemann’s influence runs through David Fagerberg, Aidan Kavanagh, and Gordon Lathrop among others (Fagerberg, Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology?, Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004; and “The Cost of Understanding Schmemann in the West,” SVTQ 53, nos. 2–3 [2009]: 179–207). St. Vladimir’s itself, its Theological Quarterly, its annual summer institute, and above all its press — the preeminent English-language publisher of Orthodox theology — bear his stamp (Michael Plekon, “The Liturgy of Life: Alexander Schmemann,” Religions 7, no. 11 [2016]: 127, p. 3).

3. The English-speaking Church. For the Life of the World was written for non-Orthodox students and has been translated into more than ten languages; it remains the book by which Orthodoxy is most often first met in English (William C. Mills, “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World: A Retrospective,” Logos 54, nos. 3–4 [2013]: 199–228, at p. 201 n. 4). No Orthodox book of the twentieth century has been read by more people who were not Orthodox.

4. Inside the Soviet Union. For thirty years he broadcast weekly into Russia over Radio Liberty, introduced only as “Father Alexander.” That was, in sheer numbers, the largest audience he ever had, and for many listeners the only sustained Christian teaching available to them (see Radio Liberty and Solzhenitsyn). He is remembered in Russia at least as much as a voice as an author.

To which must be added the ecclesial act: the 1970 autocephaly, which he negotiated and defended, and which remains both the OCA’s charter and the standing objection to it (see The Road to Autocephaly).

The Case That the Vision Is in Eclipse

Against all of that stands a judgment made by one of the closest and most sympathetic observers of Schmemann’s afterlife.

Fr. Michael Plekon — who has done more than anyone to keep the Paris school in English print — wrote in 2016 that Schmemann “met with often bitter resistance and rejection in his own lifetime, from the hierarchy, clergy and laity of his church,” and that since his death “his work has been either politely ignored or contradicted, often diplomatically, without express reference to his name. While his name is still officially honored, his vision is very much in eclipse” (Plekon, “The Liturgy of Life,” Religions 7, no. 11 [2016]: 127, p. 3).

Plekon’s specifics are worth reproducing, because they are checkable rather than atmospheric. Frequent communion has held. Much else has not: the effort to return baptism to a communal celebration within the Liturgy; the argument for saying the presbyteral prayers aloud; his criticisms of the funeral rite, where he thought the resurrection nearly absent from texts dominated by terror and grief. These, Plekon writes, “are not practiced or even discussed as they now are cast as innovations” — a striking reversal for a theologian whose whole claim was to be recovering the tradition rather than adding to it. He notes, further, the rise of exactly what Schmemann warned against in his last years — sectarianism, clericalism, and what Plekon calls a pseudo-traditionalism among clergy and laity alike — and observes that the deaths of Schmemann and Meyendorff “left a vacuum in the intellectual and spiritual leadership of the Orthodox churches in America” that has not been filled (Plekon, Religions 7 [2016]: 127, pp. 3–4).

Denysenko’s essay, written three years later and from a friendlier position on the practical questions, nonetheless takes the same premise: that the enterprise needs reviving, which is a word one does not use of a program in good health.

[Disputed: whether Schmemann's vision is ascendant or in eclipse. (a) The ascendancy case rests on parish practice — frequent communion is now normal in the OCA and widely spread beyond it — on the establishment of liturgical theology as a discipline, and on the continuing sales of *For the Life of the World*. (b) The eclipse case is Plekon's (*Religions* 7 [2016]: 127, p. 3): outside frequent communion, his specific proposals are unpracticed and now recast as innovations, and the "pseudo-traditionalism" he opposed has grown stronger. Both are judgments about a living situation and neither is settled; this guide reports them and does not choose.]

A Sober Assessment

What follows is offered as a judgment, not a finding, and it is deliberately provisional: Schmemann died in 1983, the argument about him is still running, and assessments written this close to the events have a poor record.

What appears to hold. The central thesis — that the Church’s worship is her primary theology, that she knows what she believes first by praying it, and that the Eucharist is not one activity of the Church among others but the act in which she becomes herself — has survived the criticism substantially intact and has been accepted by many who reject his history. So has the diagnosis of secularism as the negation of worship rather than the absence of religion; written against a theological fashion of the early 1970s that has entirely passed, it reads better now than when it was published. And so has the pastoral core: that the faithful should communicate, and know what they are doing when they do.

What has not held, or has not yet. The historical reconstruction of Introduction to Liturgical Theology is no longer usable as it stands, and no one now writes Byzantine liturgical history on its terms (see The Liturgiological and Traditionalist Critique). His treatment of the Byzantine mystagogical commentators is a real loss in his work and not merely a difference of emphasis, as Taft argued. Sister Vassa Larin’s structural objection — that an ecclesiology of realized eschatological joy struggles to accommodate a repenting and struggling Church — has not been answered at the level at which she made it. And the local, English-speaking, non-ethnic American Orthodox Church for which the autocephaly was engineered has not come into being: the jurisdictions still overlap, and the recognition dispute is where it was in 1970.

What is genuinely uncertain. Whether the theology can survive detachment from the history that carried it. Schmemann’s argument is not a set of propositions plus illustrations; it is a narrative in which a recovered origin judges a later declension. Take the narrative away and something remains — a vision, in Taft’s word — but it is not obvious that it remains an argument. That is the question his best critics press and his defenders have not yet fully met.

One thing not in doubt. He made the Liturgy interesting to people who had stopped noticing it, and he made Orthodoxy intelligible to a world that had never heard of it, in a prose of unusual clarity and without condescension in either direction. Whatever the verdict on the Ordo, that was a real work, and it was done.

See Also

References

  • Denysenko, Nicholas. “Reviving the Liturgical Enterprise of Alexander Schmemann.” The Wheel 16 (Winter 2019): 52–56.
  • Fagerberg, David W. Theologia Prima: What Is Liturgical Theology? Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004. And “The Cost of Understanding Schmemann in the West.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 179–207.
  • Larin, Vassa (Sister). “Fr. Alexander Schmemann and Monasticism.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 301ff.
  • Mills, William C. “Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World: A Retrospective.” Logos 54, nos. 3–4 (2013): 199–228.
  • Plekon, Michael. “The Liturgy of Life: Alexander Schmemann.” Religions 7, no. 11 (2016): 127. (Source of the “very much in eclipse” judgment, p. 3.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. “Confession and Communion: Report to the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America.” 17 February 1972.
  • Taft, Robert F., S.J. “The Liturgical Enterprise Twenty-Five Years After Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983): The Man and His Heritage.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 53, nos. 2–3 (2009): 139–177. (Source of the “Humpty-Dumpty” image, p. 174, and of “right on target,” p. 176.)
  • Taft, Robert F., S.J. Interview with Deacon Andrei Psarev, 14 December 2012. ROCOR Studies. (Source of “the Schmemann phenomenon.”)