Paying Attention To The Sky

From 1946-51, Fr Schmemann taught church history at St. Sergius in Paris. He was invited to join the faculty of Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, then in New York City, where he taught from 1951 onwards. When the seminary moved to its present campus in Crestwood, New York in 1962, Fr Schmemann assumed the post of dean, which he would hold until his death. He also served as adjunct professor at Columbia University, New York University, Union Theological Seminary and General Theological Seminary in New York. Much of his focus at St Vladimir’s was on liturgical theology, which emphasizes the liturgical tradition of the Church as a major sign and expression of the Christian faith. Fr Schmemann was accorded the title of protopresbyter, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a married Orthodox priest. He held honorary degrees from Butler University, General Theological Seminary, Lafayette College, Iona College, and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He was an Orthodox observer for the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church from 1962 to 1965. He was active in the establishment of the Orthodox Church in America and in its being granted autocephaly by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970. His sermons were broadcast in Russian on Radio Liberty for 30 years. He gained a broad following of listeners across the Soviet Union, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who became his friend after emigrating to the West.

The Last Enemy
The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26) — these are the words of the apostle Paul, writing at the dawn of Christianity following the relentless persecution and death of Christ, in a time of a general, passionate hatred of Christians.

Previously I said that the question about death and, more precisely, the confusion about death, lies at the very heart of human understanding, and in the final analysis, the relation of man to life, that which we call his worldview, is ultimately determined by his relationship to death. I also said that there are essentially two positions, both clearly unsatisfying, neither of which gives us a real answer.

On the one hand we have a form of a rejection of life in the name of death: I quoted the words of the Greek philosopher Plato. “The life of a righteous man,” said he, “is an eternal dying.” Here, as in many religions, one finds the irrevocable victory of death, which violates the purpose of life. For if it is inevitable that we must die, then it is best to transfer all our hopes and aspirations to that other, mystical world.

But I call this answer unsatisfactory because it is precisely about this other world that man has no knowledge. And how can we have as the object of our love that about which we know nothing? This is the source of man’s reaction against various “funereal,” “death-centered” religions, the rejection of pathetic and sorrow-filled world-views.

But while rejecting them in the name of this life, in the name of this world, man still is not liberated from the oppressive sense of the awareness of death. On the contrary, having lost the perspective of eternity, he becomes even more fragile, even more ephemeral on this earth. As Pasternak wrote:

We shall stroll through the dwellings
With flashlights in hand,
We also shall search,
And we also shall die.

All of civilization seems to be permeated with a passionate obsession to stifle this fear of death and the sense of the meaninglessness of life that oozes out of it like a slow-dripping poison. What is this intense conflict with religion, if nothing other than a mindless attempt to root out of human consciousness the memory and concern with death and consequently the question: why do I live in this brief and fragile life?

And so we have two answers, neither of which in the final analysis gives us anything. And it is this dilemma that leads us to ask: but what does Christianity say to us about death? Even if we know nothing about Christianity, we cannot help but recall that its attitude toward death is radically different — it can’t be reduced to one of the two approaches cited above.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” So, it is as if we suddenly find ourselves in a different dimension: death is an enemy that must be destroyed. We find ourselves so removed from Plato and his efforts to force us not only to become used to the idea of death but actually to love this thought and to transform our whole life into an “exercise about death”

Christ weeps at the grave of his dead friend Lazarus — what a powerful witness! He does not say, “Well, now he is in heaven, everything is well; he is separated from this difficult and tormented life.” Christ does not say all those things we do in our pathetic and uncomforting attempts to console. In fact he says nothing — he weeps. And then, according to the Gospels, he raises his friend, that is, he restores him into that life from which we are supposedly to find liberation toward a higher good.

Furthermore, is it not a fact that Easter stands at the center of Christianity, with its joyful proclamation that death has been overthrown? “Trampling down death by death!” Did not Christianity enter into and rule the world during many centuries with this unheard-of proclamation: “death is conquered in victory”? Is not Christianity first of all faith in the resurrection of Christ from the dead, in the assertion that the dead shall arise and those in the graves shall rejoice”?  

Yes, indeed this is all true, yet within Christianity itself and among individual Christians we now find the weakening of this victorious, new, and, from the viewpoint of this world, foolish faith. And Christians have themselves begun to slowly return to Plato, not with his opposition of life and death as two enemies, but in the opposition of two worlds: “this world” and the other world, in which supposedly rejoice all the immortal souls of people who have died.  

But Christ never spoke about the immortality of souls — he spoke about the resurrection of the dead! And how can we fail to see that between these two approaches there is an immense abyss? For, surely, if the question is strictly about the immortality of souls, then we need not concern ourselves with death as such, and what need have we of all these words about victory over death, about its destruction, and about resurrection?  

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” And so, let us ask ourselves: in what sense is death the last enemy? Whose enemy is death? And how did this enemy become the ruler of the world and the master of life? We may recall the lines from Vladimir Soloviev’s poem: “Death and Time have dominion on earth / you must refrain from calling them lords …” But how can we not recognize the lordship of all that has become nor mal, the rule of life, with which man has long ago come to terms, against which he has ceased to protest and about which he has ceased even to be concerned in his philosophy, the enemy with which he seeks to find a compromise both in his religion and his culture?  

Indeed, the Christian teaching about death is no longer heard, and Christians themselves can no longer deal with it, for in essence Christianity is not concerned about coming to terms with death, but rather with the victory over it. And when this subject is discussed with the attitude of the foolish Russian philosopher Fedorov, then immediately it is blindly accepted as the voice of wisdom, the voice of compromise, the voice of inevitability. But if such is the case, then I repeat, the whole Christian faith is meaningless, for the apostle Paul said: “If Christ has not been raised then … your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). So it is to this theme — the Christian understanding of death — that we will return in our next conversation.

The Origin of Death
In my last conversation I referred to the Gospel account in which Christ weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus. We need to pause and consider the meaning of these tears, for in this very moment there occurs a unique transformation within religion in relation to the long-standing religious approach to death.

I already spoke about the meaning of this transformation. Up to this moment the purpose of religion, as well as the purpose of philosophy, consisted in enabling man to come to terms with death, and if possible even to make death desirable: death as the liberation from the oppressiveness of the body; death as the liberation from suffering; death as freedom from this changing, busy, evil world; death as the beginning of eternity. Here, in fact, is the sum total of religious and philosophical teaching before Christ and outside of Christianity — in primitive religions, in Greek philosophy, in Buddhism, and so forth.

But Christ weeps at the grave of his friend, and in so doing he reveals his own struggle with death, his refusal to acknowledge it and to come to terms with it. Suddenly, death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

In order to feel the whole depth and revolutionary force of this change we must begin at the beginning, at the source of this new and unprecedented approach to death. We find it as a brief statement in Holy Scripture: “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living” (Wisdom 1:13). This means that in the world, in creation, there is a power that does not have its origin in God, which he did not desire, which he did not create, which opposes him and is independent of him.

God created life. Always and everywhere God is himself called the Life and the giver of life. In that eternally new and eternally childlike story in the Bible, God delights in his world, in its resplendent light and in its joy of life.

To be more precise, and to bring this story revealed in the Bible to its conclusion, one can put it this way: death is the denial of God, and if death is natural, if it is the ultimate truth about life and about the world, if it is the highest and immutable law about all of creation, then there is no God, then this whole story about creation, about joy, and about the light of life is a total lie.

Therefore, the most important and most profound question of the Christian faith must be, How and from where did death arise, and why has it become stronger than life? Why has it become so powerful that the world itself has become a kind of cosmic cemetery, a place where a collection of people condemned to death live either in fear or terror, or in their efforts to forget about death find themselves rushing around one great big burial plot?

To this question Christianity answers with equal force, brevity, and conviction. Here is the text: “and through sin death has come into the world” (Romans 5:12). In other words, for Christianity, death first of all is revealed as part of the moral order, as a spiritual catastrophe. In some final and indescribable sense man desired death, or perhaps one might say, he did not desire that life that was given to him by God freely, with love and joy.

Surely it is an indisputable fact that life consists in total interdependence. In the words of Holy Scripture man does not have life in himself. He always receives it from outside, from others, and always depends on the other — for air, for food, for light, for warmth, for water. It is precisely this dependency that materialism emphasizes with such force. And it is justified in doing so, for indeed man is inextricably, naturally, biologically, physiologically dependent on the world.

But whereas materialism sees in this fact the final truth about the world and about humanity (for it regards this determinism as a self-evident rule of nature), Christianity sees here the Fall and the perversion of the world and of humanity. This is what it calls the original sin.

The world is a perpetual revelation of God about himself to humanity; it is only a means of communion, of this constant, free, and joyful encounter with the only content of life — with the Life of life itself — with God.

“You have created us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts cannot rest, until they find their rest in You!”

But the tragedy — and herein lies the heart of the Christian teaching about sin — is that man did not desire this life with God and for God. He desired life for himself, and in himself he found the purpose, the goal, and the content of life. And in this free choice of himself, and not of God, in his preference for himself over God, without realizing it, man became inextricably a slave of the world, a slave of his own dependence on the world. He eats in order to live, but with his food he communes with what is mortal, for food does not have life in itself.

Feuerbach said, “Man is what he eats.” Yes indeed, but what he eats has just died; he eats in order to live, but instead he began living in order to eat, and in this senseless and vicious circle lies the horrible determinism of human life.

Thus, death is the fruit of a life that is poisoned and perpetually disintegrating, a disintegration to which man has freely subjected himself. Not having life in himself, he has subjected himself to the world of death.

“God did not create death.” It is man who introduced death into the world, freely desiring life only for himself and in himself, cutting himself off from the source, the goal, and content of life — from God. And this is why death — as disintegration, as separation, as temporality, transitoriness — has become the supreme law of life, revealing the illusory nature of everything on earth.

In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited this world, gave it up decidedly to death. Only if we fully return to the Christian understanding about death, as the root of man’s own perversion of the understanding of the very content of life, can we hear once more, as new, the Christian proclamation about the destruction of death in the resurrection.