Schmemann on the inversion of Christian love

Already for centuries, and apparently with a pure conscience, not only individual Christians but also whole churches have affirmed that in reality Christian love must be directed toward one’s own—that to love essentially and self-evidently means to love neighbors and family, one’s own people, one’s own country—all those persons and things that we would usually love anyway, without Christ and the gospel. We no longer notice that in Orthodoxy, for example, religiously colored and justified nationalism long ago became a genuine heresy, crippling church consciousness, hopelessly dividing the Orthodox East and making all of our profuse tatlk about the ecumenical truth of Orthodoxy a hypocritical lie. We have forgotten the other, no less strange and frightening words that the gospel contains about this merely “natural love”: “He who loves father or mother…son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Mt 10:37), and “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers…he cannot be my disciple (Lk 14:26). If coming to Christ signifies the fulfilment of his commandment, then, obviously, Christian love not only is not a simple increase, “crowning” and religious sanction of natural love, but is radically distinguished from it and even contraposed to it. It is really a new love, of which our fallen nature and fallen world are incapable and which is therefore impossible in it.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (New York: St. Vladimir’s Press, 2003), 135-136.

 

How Christianity can make life meaningless

Life must not be a preparation for death, but victory over death, so that, in Christ, death becomes the triumph of life…. When it considers life only as a preparation for death, Christianity makes life meaningless, and reduces death to “the other world,” which does not exist, because God has created only one world, one life.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Journals, Entry for September 16, 1974

“All of theology is here.”

Pascha. Holy Week. Essentially bright days such as are needed. And truly that is all that is needed. I am convinced that if people would really hear Holy Week, Pascha, the Resurrection, Pentecost, the Dormition, there would be no need for theology. All of theology is here. All that is needed for one’s spirit, heart, mind and soul. How could people spend centuries discussing justification and redemption? It is all in these services. Not only is it revealed, it simply flows in one’s heart and mind.

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, Entry dated May 1, 1973

I’m resolved to do my best to “receive” for the first time the services of Holy Week of our Church, and I hope that you all are able to do the same from your respective traditions. I’m absolutely convinced of Fr. Schmemann’s words: All theology is here.

Schmemann on the heresy of religious nationalism

No one, I think, will deny that one of the fruits of Byzantine theocracy, which for a long time obscured the life of the Orthodox East, was the growth of those religious nationalisms which little by little identified the Church, her structure and organization, with the nation, making her the religious expression of national existence. This national existence, however natural and therefore legitimate it may be, is by its very essence a “partial” existence—the existence as a “part” of humanity which, though not necessarily inimical to its other “parts,” is nonethless opposed to them as “one’s own” to the “alien”. The early church knew herself to be the tertium genus, in which there is neither Greek nor Jew. This means that it proclaimed and conveyed a Life which, without rejecting the “partial” and natural life, could transform it into “wholeness” or catholicity. Hence it must be clear that religious nationalism is essentially a heresy about the Church, for it reduces grace and the new life to “nature” and makes the latter a formal principle of the Church’s structure. This does not mean that there can be no Christian people or any Christian vocation of a nation; it means only that a Christian nation (i.e. a nation which has acknowledged its Christian vocation) does not become the Church. Because the nature of the Church is the Body of Christ, she belongs to the Kingdom of the age to come and cannot identify herself with anything in “this world…”

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” in The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 169.

This is no doubt the most beautiful formulation of the problem I’ve yet to come across—and for this same reason, the one that strikes in me the greatest sadness. May the Lord have mercy on us all.

“Boredom is the kingdom of the Devil”

“The curse of labor.” But many people, if not the majority, are wallowing in furious activity because they are afraid of remaining face-to-face with life, with themselves, with death. They are bored, and boredom is the kingdom of the Devil. Bored and afraid, they deafen themselves with action, with ideas and ideologies. The key to our culture is an optimistic activity with traces of fear and boredom. Without God, all is possible, but this “all” is endlessly frightening and boring. It seems to me that the first duty of the Church is to refuse any part in the logic and the keys of this world. One cannot enlighten the world without first wholly rejecting it. What is needed in contemporary Christianity is courage and spiritual freedom….

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, Entry for October 19, 1973.