When Schmemann thinks about liturgy, he’s thinking about the world in its course of transfiguration. This indeed is how he defines Church: The Church is not a religious establishment but the presence in the world of a saved world. Leitourgia is the Church’s work on behalf of the world. In the Liturgy the world presents itself to be blessed, and God lifts the world to its spiritual fulfillment. The world is liturgy in potency and the Liturgy is the world in act. And the cost of understanding Schmemann is the cost of holding this antinomy in its proper tension. What Christianity offers to the world is joy, but salt that has lost its saltiness is good for nothing but to be trampled underfoot. Why? [he writes] What has Christianity lost so that the world nurtured by Christianity has recoiled from it and started to pass judgment over the Christian faith? Christianity has lost joy. Not natural joy, not joy-optimism, not joy from an earthly happiness, but the divine joy, about which Christ told us that “no one will take your joy from you” (John 16). This must be joy on God’s terms, not ours, so Christianity must not sell its birthright for a bowl full of temporary relevance. Adapting eschatological joy to the passing moods of the ages, either in our theology or our liturgies, will not gain credibility for Christianity. It is a false strategy to commit to the unending task of rewriting the content for each new context. Schmemann says that: Capitulating theology to the categories and concepts of this world results in a constant need of adaptation of verification, not of this world by the good news of Christianity, but of the good news itself and its content by this world and its mutations.And these mutations, he says, produce panic, and the panic, he says, leads to two orientations: either a dissolution of faith into worldly terms, or a spiritual escapism satisfied with cult.The first choice is realized by reinterpreting faith; the second choice is realized by reducing the whole Christian tradition to, say, rubrics. It seems that the Lion of Judah will not be retrained by our philosophies nor restrained by our ritual catnip. Instead, Schmemann writes: What is revealed surpasses and therefore tears life apart. The gift of joy which nobody will take from you. Genuine Christianity is bound to disturb the heart with this tearing. That is the force of eschatology, though one does not feel it in these smooth ceremonies where everything is neat, right, but without eschatological otherworldliness. The joy Schmemann describes comes with a price of liturgical asceticism that pries open closed hearts. And for the West to understand Schmemann’s idea, theology will have to receive its vision from liturgical epiphany and thus be able to look at all its subject matter with the eyes of the dove. History will be seen again against the horizon of eternity, matter will be seen again sacramentally, and each imago dei will be seen in process to deified likeness to God. All theology will become eucharistic, though the Eucharist will not be the only thing that theology studies. And once that happens, the theology can be as clear and organized and precise and scholarly as you like.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 14:57:51 +0000
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