Porter C. Taylor
The Eucharist is by far the most complete examination of the whole Divine Liturgy in Alexander Schmemann’s substantial corpus.1 If Introduction to Liturgical Theology is to be seen as simply the definition of terms and outlining of liturgical-theological methodology,2 and if For the Life of the World is a practical theological outworking of liturgical mission and ministry,3 then The Eucharist is the embodiment of the liturgical coefficient and liturgical theology proper.4 The Eucharist represents the doing of liturgical theology instead of theological discussion (Introduction) or application (FTLOW). To this text we must turn to see Schmemann’s liturgical theology on display and to assess the cosmic scope of the Eucharist.
Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom
As the title suggests, the entire book is structured around the explication and elucidation of the Eucharist because, for Schmemann, everything begins and ends with the Eucharist: “Any liturgical theology not having the Eucharist as the foundation of its whole structure is basically defective.”5 His examination of the Eucharist follows the logical progression as outlined in his methodology: the rite is seen as a whole, each element is examined in chronological order, and particular attention is given to the location of each element and its inherent and inherited meaning based on its relation to other elements.
Schmemann’s understanding of a sacrament is noteworthy at this point because every chapter in The Eucharist is titled after the sacrament of one thing or another: “For a ‘sacrament,’ as we have seen, implies necessarily the idea of transformation, refers to the ultimate event of Christ’s death and resurrection, and is always a sacrament of the Kingdom.”6 This sentence undergirds all of Schmemann’s sacramental thought and writing. Sacraments imply transformation, refer to the Paschal Mystery, and have the Kingdom as telos. Ultimately, Schmemann will argue for a three-fold understanding of the Eucharist: eschatological, ecclesiological, and cosmical. He expounds on this in detail:
From the very beginning, this unique function was precisely to “make the Church what she is”: the witness and the participant of the saving event of Christ, of the new life in the Holy Spirit, of the presence in “this world” of the Kingdom to come. . . . What is important for us at this point is the relationship between this cosmical and eschatological nature of the Church and her λειτουργία. For it is precisely in and through her liturgy—this being the latter’s specific and unique “function”—that the Church is informed of her cosmical and eschatological vocation, receives the power to fulfill it and thus truly becomes “what she is”: the sacrament, in Christ, of the new creation; the sacrament, in Christ, of the Kingdom.7
Schmemann’s thesis of the Eucharist is summed up in this quote. He will spend the entirety of The Eucharist outlining each liturgical element and its logical progression from synaxis to dismissal in an attempt to argue that the Eucharist actualizes the Church as that which she already is, invites her into the saving event of Jesus, and calls her to a vocation of embodying the already established but not yet fully realized Kingdom.
The call to worship is made by the Holy Spirit, and the answer is the synaxis of the ecclesia. It is assumed, perhaps, that the urge or intention to attend church is a decision made by the individual. This first step is essential: God’s word goes forth into his creation, and it does not return empty. God moves, and his people respond. Here, we also see a difference between synaxis and ecclesia: the synaxis becomes the ecclesia once gathered in the name of the triune God. Not every gathering is the Church and not every local expression of the Church is gathered. She already is the Church, but in gathering she becomes it once more; the faithful join together and become something collectively greater than they are individually. Ecclesiology rests upon the regular gathering of God’s people for word and worship, prayer and praise, feast and fast. Jean-Jacques von Allmen shares this sentiment when he suggests that it is in “worship . . . where the life of the Church comes into being.”8
However, God’s people do not simply gather for fellowship or something arbitrary. The business of gathering as ecclesia is singularly focused: worship of the triune God. The church participates in this worship through her words, her cries, her pauses, her offerings, and through the plethora of “Amens” she offers throughout the liturgy. Throughout the ordo, the church is an active participant in the Divine Liturgy.9 Every prayer—save those prayed silently or privately by the priest—concludes with a collective, “Amen.” The amen prayed by the people is far more than a stylistic flourish; it carries great meaning. To say “Amen” is to say, “Yes, this is so, and let it be so.”10 It is the affirmation and proclamation of the people bearing witness to God’s divine action. It is the testimony of the Church to God’s presence in their midst and his faithfulness to his covenant. From the opening acclamation of the Kingdom until dismissal, and certainly with the Eucharistic prayer proper in between, the gathered faithful are constantly affirming “Amen.” Yes Lord, may it be so. The Amen does not simply close the prayer: it seals the prayer. Indeed, the participation and proclamation of the people is always a hope-filled response to the divine work. Remember that Schmemann saw the participation of the Church in the liturgy as her participation in the “saving act of God”—that is, the Church does not initiate salvation, nor does she initiate worship: she always responds.
Throughout the liturgy, the Church bears witness to the saving acts of God as recorded in Scripture and therefore becomes an agent of proclamation, a sacrament of the Kingdom as she represents Christ in the world. She hears her very vocation expressed through liturgical word and action: confession, proclamation, offering, thanksgiving, body broken and blood poured, distribution of gifts, and an invitation to come to the feast. Liturgy, by this reasoning, forms ecclesia through synaxis, and then arms and equips her with the necessary tools and training for Kingdom living.
Her vocation is revealed through liturgical action, and she is similarly dismissed in order to act it out. There is a profound eschatological dimension to the celebration of the Eucharist. Just as every Eucharist is a remembrance of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension; just as it is a dangerous memory of Passover and Last Supper; just as it is the enactment of sacrifice in the present now, so, too, is the Eucharist the declaration of hope for future fulfillment. The Kingdom of God, in its glorious splendor and fullness, fully realized and fully present, is the hope of Eucharistic joy and celebration. Without such hope, there would be no point in celebrating the Eucharist, at least not in any sense beyond a memorial of past actions. “The event which is ‘actualized’ in the Eucharist is an event of the past when viewed within the categories of time, but by virtue of its eschatological, determining, completing significance, it is also an event which is taking place eternally.”11 The power of the Eucharist, the reason that we celebrate zealously on a weekly basis, is that it is the culmination of past grace and future joy in one present act, it is the convergence of past, present, and future in one otherworldly, Kairos-type moment before the throne of the King of kings and Lord of lords.
Traditional liturgies commence worship with a two-fold blessing: blessed be God and blessed be his Kingdom. From the outset, the object and subject of worship is made plain: God and his kingdom. Why do we bless the kingdom? “It means that we acknowledge and confess it to be our highest and ultimate value, the object of our desire, our love, and our hope. It means that we proclaim it to be the goal of the sacrament—of pilgrimage, ascension, entrance.”12 The link between the Kingdom of God and the Eucharist is the primary focus of Schmemann’s book because the Kingdom of God, for Schmemann, is also the goal of the Christian life: “But God has saved the world. He saved it in that he again revealed its goal: the kingdom of God; its life: to be the path to the kingdom; its meaning: to be in communion with God, and, in him, with all creation.”13 This communion with God and all of creation begins to reveal the cosmical dimension of the Eucharist because, as a sacrament of the Kingdom, we are citizens of God’s kingdom now realized on earth, humans called to a specific vocation.
The cosmical dimension of the Eucharist has to do with the vocation offered by God to Adam and Eve in the Garden and now restored through Christ and understood in the liturgy. In his discussion of “The Sacrament of Thanksgiving,” Schmemann asserts:
“Thus, each time [the thanksgiving] is raised up the salvation of the world is complete. All is fulfilled, all is granted. Man again stands where God placed him, restored to his vocation: to offer to God a ‘reasonable service,’ to know God, thank and to worship him ‘in spirit and in truth,’ and through this knowledge and thanksgiving to transform the world itself into communion in the life that ‘was in the beginning with God’ (John 1:2), with God the Father, as was manifested to us.”14
The vocation is restored: to praise God, direct the praise of creation back to Creator, and invite others to join in communion. Adam and Eve were created as the first priests and rulers over creation, and while the Fall may have drastically altered our ability to commune with God, the vocation is still the same. The Eucharist as the sacrament of the Kingdom and sacrament of sacraments is the place where God’s stewards, priests, and rulers gather together and direct the praise15 of creation back to Creator.
The most cosmical act, the purest, most right action of a human being is this: thanksgiving to God. The Eucharist is nothing more and nothing less than giving thanks to our Creator with the understanding that this is “meet and right.” The Eucharist proper begins with the sursum corda and then with the declaration that it is “meet and right” to give God thanks and praise. This is what it means to be human! This is what homo adorans and homo liturgicus looks like. Schmemann elaborates:
After the darkness of sin, the fall and death, a man once again offers to God the pure, sinless, free, and perfect thanksgiving. A man is returned to that place that God had prepared for him when he created the world. He stands at the heights, before the throne of God; he stands in heaven, before the face of God himself, and freely, in the fullness of love and knowledge, uniting in himself the whole world, all creation, he offers thanksgiving; and in him, the whole world affirms and acknowledges this thanksgiving to be “meet and right.”16
Schmemann is talking about the priestly actions of Jesus, and it is through the priesthood of Christ, through our participation in his life, death, resurrection, and glorious ascension, that the Church is able to make our thanksgiving before the throne of Almighty God.
Everything in this section has been tied directly to one word, laced throughout Schmemann’s work: vocation. It is the church’s (ecclesiology) eschatological and cosmical vocation that is expressed fully through her liturgy. Schmemann clearly states through The Eucharist that the church receives her call and is informed of her vocation through the liturgy; she becomes the Body of Christ and a sacrament of the Kingdom.
The Cosmic Scope of the Eucharist
Every eighth day, the faithful followers of Jesus gather together for worship, prayer, reading, exhortation, and ritual. The Eucharist begins with the synaxis or the assembled people. The people do not assemble of or on their own accord; rather, they do so in response to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and the grace of the triune God. God always moves first.17
The Church is gathered from the corners of the neighborhood, city, region, state, country, and world. While a single parish may only represent a small geographical area, the whole of God’s Church is in worship on Sunday, joining voices in prayer, praise, lament, and thanksgiving. Worship begins as the procession of Cross, preacher, celebrant, and other ministers goes forth from nave to chancel. The voices of the faithful are joined up in song, and, with their voices, they bring the entirety of their lives. The space that they inhabit during worship may be part of a liturgical time and space beyond the confines of this world, but they remain precisely who they are. Their relationships, fears, worries, anxieties, joys, triumphs, and more are present in worship with them.
Since the earliest years after Jesus’ death, as outlined by both the Didache and Justin Martyr’s Apology, the ecclesia has gathered for the reading of the Apostles’ writings and exhortation(s). Hebrews tells us that the word of God is living and active (Heb 4:12), and the prophet Isaiah records that God’s word goes forth from his mouth and does not return empty (Isa 55:11). Scripture has been part of the Christian cult since even before the split with synagogue worship in the mid-first century,18 and it was part of the Jewish cult long before that. Long has Israel read aloud the words of Torah and of YHWH in her worship. To read Scripture is to participate in something greater, in something larger, in something most real.
God is present and moving as his Word is being read and then proclaimed kerygmatically. Scripture shapes, forms, molds, convicts, strengthens, enlightens, and much more. Or rather, the Holy Spirit does all of this through the Word of God just as the word poured forth from God’s mouth and the Spirit hovered over the deep in Genesis 1.
In our journey toward the Altar, everything is first and foremost an action of God before it is ever a responsive-action of the church. The Word proclaimed and the story retold may be locally explicated and appropriated—such is the joy and work of liturgical preaching—but it is the story of the God who created the cosmos and loves his creation; it is the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. The story is one of love, pain, loss, joy, hope, and triumph. It is the universal story, the one true story which undergirds the entirety of our existence, and the people of God are invited to join in! This is not a story to be read and forgotten or to be seen and left as unaffected; it is the story of which we are part, into which we are called, and by which we proclaim God’s love.
The sermon or homily is the preacher’s reflection upon the passage(s) and upon God’s activity in the world; the Holy Spirit leads and guides as the preacher prays, “Lord open my [our] lips, that my mouth shall proclaim your praise.” Through the reading of God’s word and the explication of it by the preacher, the story of God is re-told, and the people of God are invited to participate, to join a story already in motion, and to take part in the saving acts of God. The salvation narrative becomes tangibly present in the liturgy as God’s people dangerously remember and proclaim all that he has done. This memory and proclamation is both personal and corporate; it is local, global, and cosmical because it tells of God’s redeeming acts for the whole of creation and beckons the church to participate in his ongoing work.
Prayers are offered for the church, the world, and those around us. The prayers prayed and the offering offered are the church’s opportunity to present before her Creator all that he has created and to ask that he may bless it all. Schmemann discusses this when he writes:
But already, from the very beginning, in these “common supplications” made “with one accord,” in their joyous and triumphal antiphons, which proclaim and glorify the kingdom of God, we signify that the “assembly as the Church” is above all the joy of the regenerated and renewed creation, the gathering of the world, in contrast to its fall into sin and death.19
This is why Eucharist is “for the life of the world” in Schmemann’s thought; for just as Christ willingly handed himself over to suffering and death, so too does the Church offer herself willingly for the life of the world. This is the very role of the priest—both the Priest and the priesthood of all believers: to direct the praise and worship of creation to the Creator. In our prayers for the world and those around us, we bring every relationship, every possession, and every interaction before the Throne and ask that they be blessed and sanctified.
The anaphora is the culmination of the move from Word to Altar. Schmemann described the movement of the Eucharist as a journey of ascent and return.20 The ascent begins with the synaxis and reaches its climax with the lifting up of gifts and hearts (Sursum corda, up hearts!) and the participation of the ecclesia in the foretaste of the eschatological banquet. Here, the ecclesia ascends to the heavenly Throne Room and joins in the heavenly chorus with the thrice-holy hymn, joining voices with “the angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven who forever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory”21 of the Holy Name. The people receive the Body and Blood of Jesus from Jesus, the great High Priest, as he presides over the Eucharist through the priest in persona Christi. Christ is ever-present, always active in the celebration. The people give thanks for their meal and, after being blessed, are dismissed to go out into the world as the Eucharistic people, sharing the love and news of God with all whom they meet. The Eucharist is seemingly incomplete if the ecclesia remains ascended. It is like Peter’s words and Jesus’ rebuke on Mt. Tabor: it is good for us to be here, but we cannot remain on the summit. One day, when God is all in all, we will see God clearly, and we will be ascended and glorified. Until that time, however, our ascent must always be met with a return: we must return to our homes, lives, neighbors, work, family, and everything else God has given us. Why? Because in returning, we are able to invite others, indeed all of creation, to join us in the praise and worship of Almighty God.
The climax of the ordo is also the climax of the Church’s worship. The Eucharist is the pinnacle of the liturgy of time, of the lex orandi, of every action here on earth. In the Eucharist, we find the Church united as a whole, across both time and space, through prayers, the reading of Scripture, the exhortation, the sharing of peace, the offering of gifts, the offering of the elements, and the distribution of the consecrated Bread and Wine, Body and Blood. In the Eucharist, we encounter the Church as she was always meant to be, as she one day will be before her Lord and Savior. The realization and fulfillment of the Church’s nature is not something the Church does to herself. It is rather the response of the people of God to God.
The Eucharist, therefore, should not and cannot be relegated to simplistic political, economic, or social readings. It is the giving of the thanks of the gathered church on behalf of the world and the whole of creation. It is the joining of the church militant with the church triumphant in the Throne Room of the triune God as the “voices of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord.’” It is the participation of the Church in the mission of God. It is the offering of self and gifts for the benefit of all around. In short, it is the embodiment of the cosmic vocation given by God to humanity in the Garden: steward creation and direct her praise to the Creator. Anything short of such a vision falls short of God’s intentions for his creation.
This article is adapted from Porter C. Taylor’s chapter, “The Cosmic Scope of the Eucharist” in his edited volume We Give Our Thanks Unto Thee: Essays in Honor of Fr. Alexander Schmemann (Pickwick, 2019).
The Rev. Porter C. Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen where he is writing his dissertation on liturgical theology. He is the contributing editor of We Give Our Thanks Unto Thee: Essays in Honor of Father Alexander Schmemann (Pickwick, 2019) and co-editor of The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Liturgical Theology (2021). He is an Anglican priest and serves at Church of the Apostles, Kansas City as Theologian in Residence. Porter lives in Kansas with his wife and their three sons.
Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus
- Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom, trans. Paul Kachur (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1987).[↩]
- Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (Crestwoord, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1966).[↩]
- Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1973).[↩]
- Schmemann provides a working definition for the “liturgical coefficient” in Introduction, 19: “Worship simply cannot be equated with texts or with forms of worship. It is a whole, within which everything, the words of prayer, lections, chanting, ceremonies, the relationship of all these things in a ‘sequence’ or ‘order’ and, finally, what can be defined as the ‘liturgical coefficient’ of each of these elements (i.e., that significance which, apart from its own immediate content, each acquires as a result of its place in the general sequence or order of worship), only all this together defines the meaning of the whole and is therefore the proper subject of study and theological evaluation.” Emphasis added.[↩]
- Schmemann, Introduction, 24.[↩]
- Schmemann, FTLOW, 81.[↩]
- Schmemann, FTLOW, 136–37.[↩]
- “It is in the sphere of worship, the sphere par excellence, where the life of the Church comes into being, that the fact of the Church first emerges. It is there that it gives proof of itself, there where it is focused, and where we are led when we truly seek it, and it is from that point that it goes out into the world to exercise its mission.” Jean-Jacques von Allmen, Worship: Its Theology and Practice, trans. Harold Knight and W. Fletcher Fleet (London: Lutterworth Press, 1965), 43–44. The connection and similarities between Schmemann and von Allmen require further exploration.[↩]
- Even the titular “Divine Liturgy” bears further witness to the belief that God is present and active in the worship of his Church. The Church participates in the heavenly and eternal liturgy through his worship.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 48.[↩]
- Schmemann, Introduction, 72.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 47.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 61.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 181.[↩]
- “Praise,” in this instance, is an all-encompassing term, providing an umbrella for praise, petition, lament, confession, and more, because all presuppose that God is worthy of worship and all are forms of doxology.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 170.[↩]
- This should be a sufficient rebuttal to Aune’s claim that Schmemann and Co. are concerned with a bottom-up approach to liturgical theology versus his own top-down agenda. Schmemann, Kavanagh, Fagerberg, and Lathrop are all clear that God moves and acts first and the participatory acts of the gathered Church are but a response! This is a false dichotomy.[↩]
- We see Jesus reading a passage from Isaiah in the synagogue in Luke 4—it was customary for Israel’s Scriptures to be read aloud publicly as part of worship.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 53.[↩]
- Schmemann, Eucharist, 199.[↩]
- Episcopal Church, Book of Common Prayer, s.v. “Eucharistic Prayer A.”[↩]