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For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
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Average Rating:  out of 24 Reviews
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Price: $15.00
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Sale: $12.60
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Manufacturer: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780913836088
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Alexander Schmemann
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Publisher: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press
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Edition: 2nd Expanded edition
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Dewey Decimal Number: 264.019
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Publication Date: 1997-03
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Reading Level: 151
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Description: I am Catholic. I began reading Orthodox theology about five years ago, after experiencing the Orthodox liturgy in the most dramatic and sublime manner possible: at Pascha vigil. It simply blew me away. In thirty years of weekly mass attendance I had never seen anything remotely approaching what I encountered that night.
That unknown beauty both crushed and liberated me. It revolutionized my worldview.
I began reading everything I could on ecclesiology, Church history, liturgy, and Orthodox apologetics. For Orthodox thinkers I dug into Lossky, Fr. Meyendorff, Elder Ephraim, Archbishop Kalistos Ware, the Philokalia, Pere Clement, St. Gregory Palamas, the Desert Fathers, the Cappadocian Fathers, St. John Climacus, Solzenhitzen, so on & forth. It was all utterly amazing. I had had no idea.
This book though, is a standout even amongst such rarified company. Schmemann is simply stunning. From the first page he piles insight atop insight. I've given my copy of the book away, so I haven't got it in front of me. Still, from memory I can tell you that he takes and reveals to you blatantly obvious truths about the sacramental life that have been right in front of our noses all along. That all of creation is in fact Eucharistic, rent with power of the Resurrection. You will never approach the chalice with the same mind again, once you've read it.
Orthodox theology and spirituality is most often like this: limpid & fierce, uncompromising. Very bracing, in a culture as decadent and corrupt in it's thinking as ours.
Shamefully, only the very best in contemporary Catholicism - both in terms of liturgy and theology - can touch or exceed the Orthodox average.
That said, the tragedy of historical Orthodoxy is that has been unable to make an apologetic case for itself in the so called West. Ground as they were for so long under the heel of all those Arabs, Turks, Tartars and communists. Maybe those persecutions preserved the "East" from modernity, and are the reason the flame burns so clean, particularly in the Russian, Arab & OCA parishes I've visited? God scourges those he favors, after all.
The yoke is mostly cast off, though. This seems to me to be an Orthodox moment. Can they get their act together, throw the bushel basket off their lamp, and engage the world? If the Orthodox are the Catholic Church of the Creed, as virtually every Orthodox I've talked to has insisted, I demand nothing less. (Heh. Demand! Quelle cheek, huh?) Heretics are swarming the West. So where's our Tome of Leo? Where is it? Is there a bishop to equal Athanasius in the East? Or are the Orthodox going to succumb to secularism, now that they've slipped the Communist & Saracen yokes? Will rationalism, relativism, sloth, lust and avarice do them in too? Will suburbia demand organs and pews, shorter liturgies, prefab iconography, the abrogation of feasts & fasts, & the rest? Or will Slavic ferocity save them?
No matter, all irrelevant, it seems. Orthodoxy isn't even really on the cultural radar screen. The Orthodox take on Church history is just incomprehensible here, mostly because people have never heard any of it before. The categories and data are for the most part utterly foreign. Is this excusable?
Or is it simply as it was in Noah's time, foreordained that no one should care about the Ark? But didn't Noah warn the people, anyway?
Or are the Orthodox anointed with the Sign of Jonah? And is the West Nineveh?
Or are they - God forbid - simply petulant xenophobic schismatics with nothing relevant to share?
In any case, this book - as well as everything else I've read by Schmemann and other Orthodox authors - needs to become part of our common discourse.
The time is ripe. The harvest is now. We all need to be Orthodox. Just as we need to be Catholic. Not all Roman, but Orthodox Catholics.
Which isn't necessarily to say that there isn't a Petrine charism or primacy of power in the Church, as per Isaiah 22:15-25.. Nor is it to say that ultra-montagne papists don't have a hard historical lesson or fifty to learn along the lines of the Donation of Constantine affair.
Let there be polemics! Catholic Answers & Co. all need more of a challenge than shooting poor 'fundamentalist' fish in a barrel. Please! Help them! Their apologetics are sooo boring. Spot them 1 Tim. 3:15. The rest of their apologetic directed at the prots is sheer redundancy. Let's get down to nuts and bolts and excavate the meaning of that verse. It all boils down to that.
The significance of the primacy is already planted firmly on the table. John Paul did that. Benedict is now throwing up huge signals, too. No one I heard remarked on the most interesting thing about his oh so terribly scandalous Regensburg speech. That quotation was not arbitrary. A pope does not accidentally quote Orthodox (Imperial!) sources.
I just know that all can be resolved and forgiven, if we only submit to each other in love and (re)adhere to our tradition. If the Arians were vanquished, why not our schism? As Paul re-embraced Peter? Forget Vatican III. Why not Nicea III?
I'm sure the Turks will accommodate us ..
The Harvest awaits. The gates of hell shall not prevail.
SS. Cyril & Methodius, SS Benedict & Anthony, SS Augustine & Athanasius,
Pray for us.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: What is Sacramental Christianity? |
Date: 2008-10-22 |
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Details: I've read Alexander Schmemann's For The Life of the World twice now; his Journal as well, put together by his wife nearly two decades after he died. There's just something special about reading the accounting of one man's view of authentic Christianity when it comes through the eyes of one who has lived inside a sacramental worldview his entire life. This is the first book I give friends who ask, "What do you mean by "sacramental Christianity?".
How can you not love the heart and mind of a priest who writes with such dear antipathy for religiosity, for a sometimes puffed up and detached clergy, or the occasional cold hearted ethnocentric laity we all encounter or embody from time to time. And all this from a man who always seems eager to judge himself first, never laying off his true love for the historic Church. He seems always able to see the goodness and hope of true Church community while working amidst the often disappointing churchiness so many of us find off putting.
He understood. He remains one of the finest men of the cloth in recent memory, a simple family man and mentor of priests (Dean, St. Vlad's) a married Orthodox clergyman in love with life through every leaf and flower and sunrise and lit home visible through an urban subway while passing by.
Schmemann writes of the mystery of love, as one who made love to a woman. He writes of the Eucharist and the Divine Liturgy as one way too connected to the earthiness of the planet to have absentmindedly levitated behind the iconostasis as did our dear St. John Maximovich. He writes so well about worship and time and death and mission as one who arose with contentment most mornings no doubt and yet without the saccharine sweet view of a "let's hurry up and get to heaven" inch deep Christianity we too often see in America.
This man had depth of soul well reflected in the way he saw walking with God. It was always all about life for Fr. Alexander. Life given as a gift to and for the world.
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Review Summary: Excellent overview and insights of sacraments and orthodoxy |
Date: 2008-08-31 |
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Details: Schmemann delivers an overview examining the sacraments of the church from an Orthodox perspective. He begins with the sacraments of the Orthodox Church to lead readers into the understanding that for the Christian all of life is sacramental and filled with Christ. This is the best insight from this book...that in Christ Heaven has come to be present in believers and in the world. Sacraments are not a separate, distinct event in the Christian life but are indicative of the fullness of the Christians entire life and being that are filled with Christ's Spirit.
The Life of the world is Christ's life present in the world through his Spirit dwelling in believers and moving through all things. By his death and resurrection, Jesus has reconsecrated the world for God. For the Christian, there is no such thing as the secular versus the sacred. Christ dwelling in us makes all we do and are sacred through his death and life.
Schmemann discusses the Eucharist and Baptism in depth while also discussing the sacramental view of time and mission. He elaborates on marriage and love, death and the witness of Christ in the world.
This book will help all Christians, not just Orthodox ones, better comprehend the meaning and power of sacraments and to live a sacramental life in Christ.
I was disappointed with the Appendices that were previously published articles that I did not think added to the book's message or theme. |
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Review Summary: True Orthodox Christianity |
Date: 2008-05-03 |
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Details: A Must read for anyone willing to find the true Christianity. Reveals and explains the Orthodox Church the true and holy one settled by Christ and continued by the apostles and having no modern changes of faith or trends. The same true and holy faith as in the first centuries worshiped by the apostles. |
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Review Summary: If you could only buy one book about Christianity...... |
Date: 2007-06-01 |
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Details: This is my favorite book on Christianity. Less than 150 pages - yet it is rich in meaning and application. I have bought several copies of this book as a gift for others who might be interested in the meaning of Communion and the purpose of Worship. My original copy of this book has almost every word underlined. Fr. Schmemann's writing style is warm and very insightful. A truly great book - I'd say one of the classics of Christianity, like C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity," it should be in every Christian's library and read at least once a year!! |
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Review Summary: Profound Sacramental Theology. A Must Read. |
Date: 2006-10-27 |
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Details: I am Catholic. I began reading Orthodox theology about five years ago, after experiencing the Orthodox liturgy in the most dramatic and sublime manner possible: at Pascha vigil. It simply blew me away. In thirty years of weekly mass attendance I had never seen anything remotely approaching what I encountered that night.
That unknown beauty both crushed and liberated me. It revolutionized my worldview.
I began reading everything I could on ecclesiology, Church history, liturgy, and Orthodox apologetics. For Orthodox thinkers I dug into Lossky, Fr. Meyendorff, Elder Ephraim, Archbishop Kalistos Ware, the Philokalia, Pere Clement, St. Gregory Palamas, the Desert Fathers, the Cappadocian Fathers, St. John Climacus, Solzenhitzen, so on & forth. It was all utterly amazing. I had had no idea.
This book though, is a standout even amongst such rarified company. Schmemann is simply stunning. From the first page he piles insight atop insight. I've given my copy of the book away, so I haven't got it in front of me. Still, from memory I can tell you that he takes and reveals to you blatantly obvious truths about the sacramental life that have been right in front of our noses all along. That all of creation is in fact Eucharistic, rent with power of the Resurrection. You will never approach the chalice with the same mind again, once you've read it.
Orthodox theology and spirituality is most often like this: limpid & fierce, uncompromising. Very bracing, in a culture as decadent and corrupt in it's thinking as ours.
Shamefully, only the very best in contemporary Catholicism - both in terms of liturgy and theology - can touch or exceed the Orthodox average.
That said, the tragedy of historical Orthodoxy is that has been unable to make an apologetic case for itself in the so called West. Ground as they were for so long under the heel of all those Arabs, Turks, Tartars and communists. Maybe those persecutions preserved the "East" from modernity, and are the reason the flame burns so clean, particularly in the Russian, Arab & OCA parishes I've visited? God scourges those he favors, after all.
The yoke is mostly cast off, though. This seems to me to be an Orthodox moment. Can they get their act together, throw the bushel basket off their lamp, and engage the world? If the Orthodox are the Catholic Church of the Creed, as virtually every Orthodox I've talked to has insisted, I demand nothing less. (Heh. Demand! Quelle cheek, huh?) Heretics are swarming the West. So where's our Tome of Leo? Where is it? Is there a bishop to equal Athanasius in the East? Or are the Orthodox going to succumb to secularism, now that they've slipped the Communist & Saracen yokes? Will rationalism, relativism, sloth, lust and avarice do them in too? Will suburbia demand organs and pews, shorter liturgies, prefab iconography, the abrogation of feasts & fasts, & the rest? Or will Slavic ferocity save them?
No matter, all irrelevant, it seems. Orthodoxy isn't even really on the cultural radar screen. The Orthodox take on Church history is just incomprehensible here, mostly because people have never heard any of it before. The categories and data are for the most part utterly foreign. Is this excusable?
Or is it simply as it was in Noah's time, foreordained that no one should care about the Ark? But didn't Noah warn the people, anyway?
Or are the Orthodox anointed with the Sign of Jonah? And is the West Nineveh?
Or are they - God forbid - simply petulant xenophobic schismatics with nothing relevant to share?
In any case, this book - as well as everything else I've read by Schmemann and other Orthodox authors - needs to become part of our common discourse.
The time is ripe. The harvest is now. We all need to be Orthodox. Just as we need to be Catholic. Not all Roman, but Orthodox Catholics.
Which isn't necessarily to say that there isn't a Petrine charism or primacy of power in the Church, as per Isaiah 22:15-25.. Nor is it to say that ultra-montagne papists don't have a hard historical lesson or fifty to learn along the lines of the Donation of Constantine affair.
Let there be polemics! Catholic Answers & Co. all need more of a challenge than shooting poor 'fundamentalist' fish in a barrel. Please! Help them! Their apologetics are sooo boring. Spot them 1 Tim. 3:15. The rest of their apologetic directed at the prots is sheer redundancy. Let's get down to nuts and bolts and excavate the meaning of that verse. It all boils down to that.
The significance of the primacy is already planted firmly on the table. John Paul did that. Benedict is now throwing up huge signals, too. No one I heard remarked on the most interesting thing about his oh so terribly scandalous Regensburg speech. That quotation was not arbitrary. A pope does not accidentally quote Orthodox (Imperial!) sources.
I just know that all can be resolved and forgiven, if we only submit to each other in love and (re)adhere to our tradition. If the Arians were vanquished, why not our schism? As Paul re-embraced Peter? Forget Vatican III. Why not Nicea III?
I'm sure the Turks will accommodate us ..
The Harvest awaits. The gates of hell shall not prevail.
SS. Cyril & Methodius, SS Benedict & Anthony, SS Augustine & Athanasius,
Pray for us.
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