This week marked the birthday (Sept. 13) of the late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann.
To mark the occasion, we offer the following introductory guide to his theology.
3. Schmemann.org
This tribute website makes available a fine collection of Schmemann’s shorter pieces. The whole collection is worth browsing, but here is one of the more stellar pieces:
Theology and Eucharist
1.
The actual state of Orthodox theology must be characterized by two words: confusion and awakening. By confusion, I mean an obvious lack of unity among Orthodox theologians: unity of theological language, unity of method, consensus as to the nature of questions and the mode of their solution. Our theology develops in a plurality of theological “keys” and within several mutually exclusive intellectual frameworks. This confusion, however, is also the sign of an awakening, of a new search for a genuinely Orthodox theological perspective.
This situation is by no means accidental, for the fate of Orthodox theology has been a tragic one. On the one hand, since the collapse of Byzantium and the interruption of the creative patristic tradition, our theology endured a long “Western captivity” which deeply obscured and even deformed the Orthodox theological mind, while, on the other hand, the same post-patristic period was that of a radical transformation of the status and function of theology in the life of the Church. From being the concern — and the function — of the whole Church, it became that of the “school” alone and was thus deprived of the living interest and attention without which no creative effort is possible. Today the situation is changing. Conflicts and divisions within the Church, the new “ecumenical” encounter with the Christian West, and, above all, the pressing challenge of the modern world, have placed theology in a new focus, restored to it an importance it has not had for many centuries. Hence both the confusion and the awakening, the unavoidable clash between ideas, the pluralism of approaches, the acuteness of the methodological problem, the new questioning of sources and authorities. Freed from official “conformity” which was imposed on it by extra-theological factors, Orthodox theology has not yet found a real unity. But it must find it. However understandable and even useful, the actual theological pluralism cannot last forever. It is asynthesis, i.e., an integration of all the more or less “private” theologies into one consistent whole that we must seek. For Orthodox theology is by its very nature a Catholic expression of the Church’s faith and the Church neither knows nor needs any other theology.
Read the full essay….
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