Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983)

A Baltic noble family scattered by the revolution

Alexander Dmitrievich Schmemann was born on 13 September 1921 in Reval, then the capital of newly independent Estonia, into a family of the Russian nobility of Saint Petersburg that had fled the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution^[1][2]. His grandfather, of Lutheran Baltic-German origin, had converted to Orthodoxy and pursued a career as a senator of the Russian Empire; his father, Dmitri, an officer of the Imperial Guards, had fought in the ranks of the anti-Bolshevik armies before exile^[3]. Alexander had a twin brother, Andrei^[4].

Still a child, the family settled in Paris, where one of the largest communities of White Russian emigration in Europe was regrouping. Young Alexander received a dual education there, in Russian-language schools and then in a French lycée^[5] — a bilingualism and dual culture that durably marked his style, at once rooted in the Slavic liturgical tradition and perfectly at home in the French intellectual culture of the mid-20th century.

The University of Paris and the Saint Sergius Institute (1940-1945)

From 1940 to 1945, in the midst of the Occupation, Schmemann studied history at the University of Paris, where he wrote a dissertation on theocracy and the Eastern Roman Empire^[6] — a foretaste of his lifelong interest in the relations between the Church and temporal power, which he would later develop in The Orthodox Church, Yesterday and Today. At the same time, he began the five-year course at the Saint Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, founded in 1925 by the Russian emigration and become, in the interwar years, the principal centre of theological renewal for Orthodoxy outside Russia^[7].

It was at Saint Sergius that he studied under Father Sergei Bulgakov^[8], the great controversial figure of Russian "sophiology", and that he was formed through contact with the eucharistic ecclesiology of Nicolas Afanassiev and the historical theology of Georges Florovsky^[9] — two decisive influences that would structure all his later thought on the Church as a community gathered by and for the Eucharist. A lesser-known fact, stressed by several of his Catholic readers: it was also at this time that he discovered and discussed the works of the great figures of the French Catholic liturgical movement, in particular Jean Daniélou and above all Louis Bouyer^[10][11] — an intellectual debt he would explicitly acknowledge in his doctoral thesis, but mention more rarely in his widely circulated works, which would later fuel a legitimate Catholic criticism (see below).

He married Juliana Ossorguine (1923-2017) as early as 1943, herself also a daughter of the Russian emigration, who would become his companion for nearly forty years and the posthumous editor of his Journals^[12], and completed his studies at Saint Sergius in 1945^[13]. The couple would have three children, including Serge Schmemann, who would become Moscow correspondent for the New York Times^[14].

The ordination of 22 October 1946

On 22 October 1946, Alexander Schmemann is ordained priest by Metropolitan Vladimir (Tikhonicky), exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for the Russian parishes of Western Europe^[15]. He then teaches Church history at Saint Sergius until 1951^[16], training himself in parallel in the concrete pastoral ministry of an émigré parish — an experience that would nourish all his later reflection on the gap between learned theology and the real liturgical life of the Christian people.

Georges Florovsky's call and departure for America (1951)

In 1951, at the invitation of his former teacher Georges Florovsky, then dean of the young Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary in New York — founded in 1938 — Schmemann emigrates with his family to the United States to teach Church history there^[17][18]. He completes his training with a doctorate obtained at a distance from Saint Sergius, defended in 1959, devoted to liturgical theology^[19]: reworked, this thesis will become his Introduction to Liturgical Theology (1961), the first major theoretical milestone of his work.

Schmemann concurrently holds visiting professorships at Columbia University, New York University, Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary^[20][21] — a sign, already, of an influence reaching well beyond the borders of his own ecclesial jurisdiction and touching the entire Protestant and ecumenical academic world of New York.

The deanship of Saint Vladimir's Seminary (1962-1983)

In 1962, the year the seminary moves to its present campus at Crestwood, New York State, Schmemann becomes its dean^[22][23], a function he will keep until his death, twenty-one years later. Under his leadership, Saint Vladimir's becomes the principal centre of English-language Orthodox theological formation, training several generations of clergy and theologians — among them his own son-in-law, the future protopresbyter Thomas Hopko, who marries his daughter Anne in 1963 and will himself succeed him as dean of the seminary at the turn of the 1990s^[24].

"For the Life of the World" (1963): a small book with an immense destiny

In December 1963, Schmemann writes, as a mere discussion aid for the quadrennial Conference of the National Student Christian Federation in Athens, Ohio, a short essay that will become his most widely read work: For the Life of the World^[25]. Republished as early as 1965 by the Catholic publisher Herder and Herder under the title Sacraments and Orthodoxy, then in England under the title World As Sacrament, translated into French, Italian and Greek, the essay meets with an unexpected circulation as far as behind the Iron Curtain: it circulates anonymously in Russian translation through samizdat in the Soviet Union itself^[26]. The Catholic Trappist monk Thomas Merton, in the review Monastic Studies, hails on its publication "a powerful, articulate, and, indeed, creative essay in sacramental theology"^[27].

The heart of the work lies in a reformulation of the very definition of man. Taking up the classical categories of homo sapiens (the man who thinks) and homo faber (the man who makes), Schmemann affirms that the most fundamental definition of the human being lies elsewhere:

"'Homo sapiens,' 'homo faber'... yes, but first of all, 'homo adorans.' The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God." — Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, ch. 1, St Vladimir's Seminary Press ed., 1973, p. 16^[28]

For Schmemann, the whole world was created as the "matter" of a cosmic eucharist of which man is the natural priest: to name things, according to the Genesis account, is already to bless them and offer them back to God in return for the blessing received^[29]. This intuition — that the material world is not an obstacle to the sacred but its natural place of manifestation — echoes, almost word for word, the Catholic theology of creation as gift and of the common priestly vocation of the baptized (CCC § 1268), while formulating it in a resolutely liturgical rather than dogmatic vocabulary.

Secularism as the "heresy of worship"

It is in the appendix "Worship in a Secular Age" of the same work that Schmemann formulates his most famous and most debated thesis: secularism is not first a doctrine about the existence of God, but a negation of worship:

"Secularism, I submit, is above all a negation of worship [...]. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both 'posits' his humanity and fulfills it." — Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, appendix "Worship in a Secular Age", p. 118-119^[30]

This definition targets not first declared atheism, but a far more widespread and, according to Schmemann, far more insidious attitude: one that reduces Christianity either to a purely intellectual category ("the future of belief") or to a purely socio-ethical category ("the Christian service of the world"), in both cases evacuating the act of worship as the organizing centre of Christian existence^[31]. It is a critique which, for a Catholic reader, resonates with the Magisterium's constant warning against reducing the faith either to a system of ideas or to a mere social morality, without ever denying their rightful place.

The Eucharist as a "journey" toward the Kingdom

In the second chapter of For the Life of the World, devoted to the Eucharist, Schmemann develops his conception of the liturgy as an eschatological journey:

"The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom." — Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, ch. 2, p. 25-26^[32]

The idea is simple to grasp in principle, even if it has considerable theological implications: the Mass — or, in Orthodox vocabulary, the Divine Liturgy — is not first a rite that symbolically represents past events (the Last Supper, the Passion), but a genuine passage of the assembly, here and now, into the already-present reality of the Kingdom of God inaugurated by Christ's Resurrection. This theology of the liturgy's eschatological anticipation overlaps, for the most part, with the teaching of Vatican II's Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium on the earthly liturgy as participation in the "heavenly liturgy" (SC § 8), even if Schmemann formulates it with a particular insistence on the dimension of the "already" rather than that of the "not yet".

Great Lent and the theology of liturgical time

In 1969, Schmemann publishes Great Lent: Journey to Pascha, revised and expanded in 1974^[33], which applies the same method to the liturgical season of Orthodox Lent: far from a mere ascetic exercise in privations, Lent is presented there as a pedagogical journey — a progressive, week-by-week reappropriation of the meaning of baptism and of the Resurrection. Written in a deliberately accessible, non-technical style, the work in turn becomes a classic of spiritual literature translated into many languages, including for Catholic readers eager to live the Latin Lent with comparable liturgical depth^[34].

"The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom": the testamentary work

Schmemann completes, a few weeks before his death, the manuscript of what will be his most systematic work, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, published posthumously in English in 1988 (St Vladimir's Seminary Press), translated into French under the same title (Paris, YMCA-Press)^[35]. In it he takes up and deepens, with the rigour of a final theological reckoning, the central thesis of his entire work: theology is not constructed about the liturgy, but from it — a principle his Catholic disciples will sum up with the formula borrowed from the ancient patristic adage lex orandi, lex credendi^[36].

"Sunday talks" forbidden in Soviet Russia

For some thirty years, from 1953 until his death in 1983, Schmemann records each week a brief homily in Russian, broadcast by Radio Liberty from Munich to the Soviet Union^[37][38]. According to the counts of Biola University's biographical database, he is said to have delivered nearly three thousand of them^[39] — a figure that gives the measure of the constancy of this clandestine preaching commitment, at a time when open religious practice exposed Soviet believers to grave sanctions, and when the regime was actively seeking to jam the station's frequencies^[40].

Solzhenitsyn, a faithful listener

Among the most assiduous listeners of these Sunday talks is the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, still imprisoned and then deported in the Soviet Union when he discovers them^[41][42]. Once exiled to the West in 1974, Solzhenitsyn will seek to meet Schmemann, and the two men will become friends — the writer publicly acknowledging the spiritual debt he owed to those brief meditations received, in the clandestinity of radio listening, as rare nourishment in a country where public religious expression was stifled^[43].

"What builds a wall": Schmemann facing Catholic ecclesiology under debate

From 1962 to 1965, Schmemann attends the Second Vatican Council as a non-Catholic observer, alongside other delegates sent by the Moscow Patriarchate and by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia^[44][45]. His presence in Rome is not that of a mere spectator: he reports, in the American religious press, on his observations of the debates underway within the Catholic Church. In November 1963, speaking before an Orthodox assembly, he delivers a judgement at once grateful and lucid on the limits of the rapprochement then hoped for:

"What builds a wall between the Roman Church and Eastern Orthodoxy is the doctrine of papal infallibility." — Alexander Schmemann, remarks reported by The New York Times, 16 November 1963^[46]

He acknowledges that "the actions of the council thus far are good for the Roman Church itself", while judging that they remain "far from ecumenity" as sought by the Orthodox, and confides that he had, during this Roman stay, "the occasion to thank God" that he was himself Orthodox^[47]. He further notes, not without irony, that in the conciliar schema devoted to the definition of the episcopate, the word "pope" recurred four or five times in seventeen lines^[48] — a sign, in his eyes, of an ecclesiology still structurally centred on Roman primacy, precisely the point on which dialogue with the East founders.

An avowed ambivalence toward the conciliar West

Schmemann's judgement on Vatican II remains, throughout his life, marked by this ambivalence: genuine admiration for the liturgical and biblical renewal he observes in the best Catholic theologians of his time, but constant reserve toward what he perceives as an ecclesiology still too marked, in his view, by scholastic juridism and rationalism — the classic diagnosis of the Orthodox critique of the West, of which we shall see further on, with the Catholic theologian Andrew Kaethler, that it is not itself exempt from simplification.

The Constantinople meeting (1966) and the patriarchal refusal

From the mid-1960s on, Schmemann takes an active part in the negotiations aimed at endowing the Russian Metropolia of America — heir to the historic Orthodox mission in Alaska and then on the continent — with a fully autonomous canonical status, known as autocephaly^[49]. In 1966, a delegation travels to Constantinople to explore this path with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, without obtaining support: according to the available reconstructions of this episode, the Patriarchate then refers the American delegation back to the Russian Church itself, judging that the question falls above all under its jurisdiction of origin^[50]. The Ecumenical Patriarchate will later maintain, in its official response to the autocephaly, that only an instance representing all the local autocephalous Churches — or even an Ecumenical Council — would have competence to decide such a question^[51].

The autocephaly granted by Moscow (April 1970)

In April 1970, it is finally the Moscow Patriarchate that grants autocephaly to what becomes the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), at the end of negotiations in which Schmemann was, according to the OCA's own sources, "a leading participant and promoter"^[52]. As clergy vice-chairman he presides over the first All-American Council of October 1970 which ratifies this new status and adopts the name Orthodox Church in America, and he most likely drafts its inaugural message calling for the organic unity of all Orthodox on the continent^[53]. The following year, in 1971, he publishes in the St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly an essay that has become a classic of modern Orthodox ecclesiology, A Meaningful Storm: Some Reflections on Autocephaly, Tradition, and Ecclesiology, which theologically defends its principle^[54].

Reading the table: more than half a century after the Muscovite tomos of April 1970, the OCA's autocephaly remains a textbook case of the fragmentation of Orthodox authority on a major canonical question — none of these five Churches has broken communion with the OCA, but none has formally validated its status either^[55].

This controversy, which persists today in certain Orthodox circles, illustrates by itself one of the structural difficulties of Orthodox ecclesiology that Schmemann knew better than anyone from having lived it from within: unlike the Catholic Church, where the pope holds a recognized universal authority to decide such questions (cf. Lumen Gentium § 23), Orthodoxy possesses no instance capable of imposing a binding decision on all the autocephalous Churches — an observation also found, in comparable form, in the contemporary case of Bartholomew I of Constantinople facing the Ukrainian crisis.

What a Catholic can acknowledge: liturgy, ressourcement, sacramental ontology

Schmemann's contribution to 20th-century liturgical theology is acknowledged, including by leading Catholic theologians. The Catholic liturgist David W. Fagerberg, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and author of an entire monograph on his thought, goes so far as to make his own Schmemann's central claim that "the liturgy is the ontological condition of theology"^[56] — a thesis that nourished, through Fagerberg, a whole current of contemporary Catholic liturgical theology, alongside the Benedictine Aidan Kavanagh and the Jesuit Robert Taft^[57].

The Catholic theologian Andrew T. J. Kaethler, academic dean and professor of theology at Catholic Pacific College and author of a monograph comparing Schmemann and Joseph Ratzinger, sums up his debt to him thus:

"For Schmemann, there is no theology outside of the liturgy." — Andrew T. J. Kaethler, interview for Five Books for Catholics^[58]

Kaethler stresses in particular the aptness of Schmemann's criticism of a certain Western sacramental theology too inclined, in his view, to define the eucharistic mystery — for instance through the scholastic category of transubstantiation — and then to consider the question closed, whereas the definition, properly understood, should on the contrary open onto an endless deepening of the mystery it circumscribes^[59]. On this precise point, Kaethler judges the observation "really positive and important for us Catholics"^[60] — and it overlaps, by implication, with Catholic teaching itself, for which the dogmatic formula never exhausts the mystery it protects (cf. CCC § 1328 on the inexhaustible richness of the eucharistic mystery).

The Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the review First Things, who had personally known Schmemann, kept the memory of a man of uncompromising spiritual demand toward himself: in his intimate Journal, published posthumously in 2000 under his wife Juliana's editorship, Schmemann confided notably:

"Only when I serve the Liturgy am I not deceitful." — Alexander Schmemann, Journal 1973-1983, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus, "Alexander Schmemann: A Man in Full", First Things^[61]

The limits of a severe judgement on Western theology

This acknowledgement does not prevent Kaethler, as an honest Catholic theologian, from clearly naming the limits of Schmemann's judgement on the Christian West. According to him, Schmemann "caricatures Western thought": except in his doctoral thesis, he acknowledges very little, if anything at all in his widely circulated works, of his debt to the Catholic theologians of the ressourcement — Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac and above all Louis Bouyer — who had nevertheless, before him and in the same terms, denounced the "manualist" drift of late scholastic theology and themselves called for a return to liturgical thought and to the Fathers of the Church^[62]:

"He caricatures Western thought [...]. He repeatedly claims that Western theology has been prisoner to a juridical mentality and rationalism [...]. He gives the worst-case scenario of Catholicism, or one very specific read of Catholicism." — Andrew T. J. Kaethler, interview for Five Books for Catholics^[63]

Kaethler also notes that Schmemann "misreads" certain Western theologians, Saint Thomas Aquinas in particular^[64] — a reproach that echoes the classic criticism addressed by several contemporary Thomists to the thesis, popularized notably by the Orthodox theologian Jean-Claude Larchet, of a Western "rationalism" structurally foreign to Eastern apophatic theology: the Summa Theologiae itself opens with the explicit acknowledgement of the limits of natural reason before the mystery of God (Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 1), and the Thomist concept of analogical participation in divine being is not, contrary to what Orthodox polemic often suggests, a rationalist reduction of divine transcendence.

Roman primacy, the unbridgeable dividing line

On the ecclesiological substance, Kaethler recalls with precision what Schmemann, as a faithful son of the Russian Orthodox Church, never accepted and could never have accepted without ceasing to be Orthodox: that the Bishop of Rome is "the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity, both of the bishops and of the multitude of the faithful"^[65] — a definition Vatican II takes up, applying it to the pope, from the Church's constant teaching on Petrine primacy, already formulated with the force of dogmatic definition by the First Vatican Council in the constitution Pastor Aeternus (1870)^[66]. This is exactly the point Schmemann himself designated, as early as 1963, as the "wall" separating Rome and Orthodoxy^[67] — and it is this same unresolved point that structurally distinguishes his local eucharistic ecclesiology (each bishop, surrounded by his people gathered for the Eucharist, fully manifests the Church) from the Catholic ecclesiology of the universal primacy of Peter's successor. The same dividing line is found, formulated in very similar terms, in the case of Kallistos Ware and his endorsement of the Chieti text (2016) on synodality and primacy during the first millennium.

The complement of Joseph Ratzinger

For Kaethler, who devoted several years of doctoral research to putting Schmemann in dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger, the eschatological theology of the future Benedict XVI precisely completes what Schmemann's liturgical theology largely leaves unexplored: the Catholic doctrine of the immortality of the soul, of purgatory and of the life after death, in a relational ontology which, unlike Schmemann, holds together the eschatological transcendence of the Kingdom and the proper, not merely instrumental, goodness of temporal creation^[68]. Where Schmemann sometimes tends to present the sacraments as a passage out of this world toward the Kingdom rather than as the manifestation of Christ truly descending into this world, Ratzinger, according to Kaethler, offers a precious theological counterweight that avoids casting a suspicion of devaluation upon temporality and creation^[69].

"He did not notice history": the critique of identitarian withdrawal

Kept during the last ten years of his life and published posthumously in 2000 by his wife Juliana, the Journal 1973-1983 reveals a Schmemann freer and more incisive than in his writings published during his lifetime. In it he exercises, according to several of his commentators, the severest self-criticism any 20th-century Orthodox theologian ever levelled at his own Church: his target is not Western Christianity, but what he himself calls "Orthodoxism" — an almost idolatrous attachment to Byzantine or Russian aesthetics and folklore, lived as an end in itself rather than as a means in the service of Christ^[70]. He thus confides, about this nostalgic Byzantinism of the emigration:

"I realize how spiritually tired I am of all this 'Orthodoxism,' of all the fuss with Byzantium, Russia [...] it all literally obscures Christ, pushes Him into the background." — Alexander Schmemann, Journal 1973-1983, quoted by David W. Fagerberg, Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame^[71]

In the same pages he condemns what he calls "liturgism" — the reduction of Christianity to a ceremonial folded in on itself, cut off from its mission to transform the world once the believer has left the church^[72]. This very harsh diagnosis, applied by a seminary dean to his own tradition, is unanimously hailed, including by his Catholic readers, as a sign of rare theological integrity — the capacity, precisely, to address to his own Church the reproaches he does not hesitate, as we have seen, to formulate toward the West either.

Death on 13 December 1983

Diagnosed with cancer, Schmemann keeps teaching and writing until the last months of his life, completing the manuscript of The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom shortly before his death^[73]. He dies at his home in Crestwood, in the night of 13 December 1983, at the age of 62^[74][75]. Bearing the title of protopresbyter — the highest honorary distinction granted to a married priest in the Orthodox Church^[76] — he leaves behind his wife Juliana, his son Serge, his daughters Anne Hopko and Mary Tkachuk, and nine grandchildren^[77]. The funeral takes place at Saint Vladimir's Seminary on 14, 15 and 16 December 1983^[78].

His death elicits tributes from across American Orthodoxy, but also from the Catholic and ecumenical circles of New York where he had been known and respected for more than three decades^[79]. An American television channel, CBS, devotes a documentary to him in 1984, The Spirit of St Vladimir's^[80], testifying to the influence the small seminary he had led for more than twenty years had attained, well beyond strictly Orthodox circles.

A theological school: Meyendorff, Hopko, Fagerberg

At Saint Vladimir's, Schmemann works alongside Father John Meyendorff, a specialist in Byzantine theology, who will succeed him as dean^[81]. His son-in-law, Father Thomas Hopko, married to his daughter Anne since 1963, will in turn become a major figure of American Orthodox theology and dean emeritus of the same seminary. Internationally, his thought continues to irrigate both Orthodox theology and Catholic liturgical theology: Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, trained at the same time as him in the articulation between Orthodoxy and the Western world, counted Schmemann and Meyendorff among the figures of Saint Vladimir's Institute with whom his own Oxford doctoral students were in close contact^[82].

A Catholic reception still alive

Today, For the Life of the World still figures on most reading lists recommended to Catholic students of liturgical theology, alongside the great names of the ressourcement of which Schmemann was, without always fully acknowledging it, one of the indirect heirs^[83]. This reception does not erase the ecclesiological questions left open — Roman primacy, pontifical infallibility, authority to settle canonical conflicts between sister Churches — but it confirms, more than half a century after its publication, the aptness of Thomas Merton's initial diagnosis: a "creative essay in sacramental theology" whose strength remains, today as in 1963, to remind every Christian, Catholics included, that faith cannot be thought rightly without first being prayed and celebrated.

Alexander Schmemann's figure is illuminated by the history of the separation between East and West and by the other great contemporary architects of dialogue between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

• On another great 20th-century Orthodox theologian engaged in dialogue with Rome: Kallistos Ware (1934-2022).
• On the theology of uncreated light and hesychasm, another great debate of Orthodox theology: Gregory Palamas.
• On the founding rupture between Rome and Constantinople: The Great Schism of the East and The Fall of Constantinople.
• On the complete Catholic answer to Orthodox objections, notably on Roman primacy and pontifical infallibility: Answers to Orthodox objections and What does the Church say about the Orthodox?.
• On another Russian Orthodox pastor of the same century, known for his spiritual ministry rather than his academic work: John of Kronstadt (1829-1908).