For the Life of the World
This past Friday I mentioned here that perhaps my favorite book of all time is For the Life of the World, by Fr. Alexander Schmemann. It is a book about the sacraments, but even more so about the implications of having the sacramental world view that both Catholic and Orthodox Christians share in common. Though this book approaches the sacraments from the standpoint of Eastern Christianity, it has certainly helped this Western Christian to see them with new eyes and has deepened my understanding of the Christian life. With this in mind, I have decided to spend some time reflecting on the thoughts that Fr. Schmemann presents in his book and to share them here. I am not the first to reflect upon this book and will certainly not be the last, but I hope that by spending some time with this book to encourage a greater dialogue about the sacraments here at this blog.
I will be taking a very slow approach to the book, examining small sections at a time and do not plan to focus the next few months exclusively on the book, as I enjoy the variety of subjects that have been part of this blog from the beginning. My hope is that this will allow readers and myself the opportunity to digest Fr. Schmemann’s words and enter into a more full dialogue.
Fr. Schmemann begins his book by quoting one of the great atheist philosophers, Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to use the statement, “man is what he eats,” in order to prove there was nothing beyond our material world. Contrary to Feuerbach’s belief, Schmemann reminds his reader that this idea is a very Biblical one:
He (man) is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at its end and fullfillment: “…that you eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom.”
Fr. Schmemann goes on to present the question of what it means that Christ gave Himself for the life of the world. He points out that there are two general patterns to this answer among Christians. One group of Christians believe that this life is limited to religious life, in other words a world that is separate and opposed to the secular world. Those who take this viewpoint believe the purpose of Christianity is to invite as many people as possible to enter into the “spiritual” life and as a result it is only in the activities of church, prayer and piety that any real meaning exists. On the other side of the coin are those that believe Christ came “for the better life of the world”. These are those who could be described as activists, those who believe that through our actions as Christians we can restore the world to what was lost in the fall. They place less importance upon worship and much more on what has sometimes been called the “Social Gospel”.
Fr. Schmemann responds to these two interpretations of the life offered to us by God with the statement,
Whether we “spiritualize” our life or “secularize” our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only-begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.
My observations of the modern Catholic Church are that we have in many places fallen into looking at our faith in the same inadequate categories described by Fr. Schmemann. We have too often accepted this so called divorce of the spiritual and the secular, needlessly separating the two. One of the first places I encountered the struggle to bring the two together was in the Catholic Worker movement inspired by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Catholic Worker communities insist upon engaging in both worship and work, in prayer and action.
What has been your experience of seeing these categories either united or divorced within the Christian community?
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