Alexander Schmemann Quotes

#1. Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.

Alexander Schmemann

#2. The Eucharist is the sacrament of cosmic remembrance: it is indeed a restoration of love as the very life of the world.

Alexander Schmemann

#3. It seems to me that any ideology is bad because it is inevitably reductive and identifies other ideologies as evil, and itself with truth, whereas both truth and goodness are always transcendent.

Alexander Schmemann

#4. The "modern man" has "come of age" as a deadly serious adult, conscious of his sufferings and alienations but not of joy, of sex but not of love, of science but not of "mystery.

Alexander Schmemann

#5. At this stage we shall say only this: the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord. And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness to it in the world, is indeed the very calling of the Church, its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it "becomes what it is." In

Alexander Schmemann

#6. Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.

Alexander Schmemann

#7. We are approaching again the Great Lent - the time of repentance, the time of our reconciliation with God. Repentance is the beginning and also the condition of a truly Christian life.

Alexander Schmemann

#8. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is the communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

Alexander Schmemann

#9. Homo sapiens," "homo faber" ... yes, but, first of all, "homo adorans.

Alexander Schmemann

#10. If the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always the act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.

Alexander Schmemann

#11. The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.

Alexander Schmemann

#12. Simone W eil has said that though a person may run as fast as he can away from Christ, if it is toward what he considers true, he runs in fact straight into the arms of Christ. Much

Alexander Schmemann

#13. We should have understood long ago that there is, in this world, religion without God, religion as a center of all idols that possess fallen man, religion that is the justification for these idols.

Alexander Schmemann

#14. Love is the essence of the holiness of the Church.

Alexander Schmemann

#15. Christian mission is not to preach Christ, but to be Christians in life. There

Alexander Schmemann

#16. In the process of replacing the old religions, Christianity became a religion.

Alexander Schmemann

#17. Academic theology is false.

Alexander Schmemann

#18. We know that real life is "eucharist," a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and the value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled.

Alexander Schmemann

#19. Every evil screams only one message: 'I am good.'

Alexander Schmemann