In Genesis, Man was created “hungry”: he incorporates the world into himself by eating it, and is given the world as food. But food is dead (hence why we put it in refrigerators, like we do corpses), so it—the world—cannot give life. Man was also created at the center of heaven and earth, where he receives from God and returns back thanksgiving or praise. That is, Man is a priest, transforming the world he was given into communion with God through thanksgiving. (“Eucharist” means “thanksgiving” in Greek.) The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was not blessed by God, so communing with it is communing with yourself only. So the original sin was not disobedience so much as it was trying to find life only within the world.

There are two types of knowledge: objective knowledge that can be verified (“facts”) and subjective knowledge that must be experienced to be known (the taste of mango, what is the Schmemann family). The modern world only accepts objective knowledge as truth, but a sacrament is a means of knowing spiritual truth, since the sacrament is the means by which we participate in the truth. The Patristic Fathers understood the sacraments in this fashion, that the symbol is intrinsically related to the reality and is the means of participating in the reality. Around the early medieval era, the Western Church began to see the symbol as separate from the reality, and ultimately decided that symbol and reality are separate. This led to the symbol and reality having an extrinsic, formal relationship, where the symbol actually causes the reality. (Hence the concern about what constitutes a valid sacrament, which is not a question for the Fathers, since the symbol does not cause the reality, but enables our participation in the reality.)

As the Western Church separated the symbol from the real, it sowed the seeds that have now (Schmemann wrote this in 1963) have blossomed into secularism. The Orthodox Church kept the liturgy fairly unchanged, but accepted the Western theology (in Russia, theology was taught in Latin until the 1940s!), so while the terminology continued to be the same as the patristic terminology, the words came to mean something completely different. In fact, what the Church did was very similar to the original sin in the garden: instead of the material world containing symbols that enable us to participate in and communicate with God, we sought meaning in the symbol itself. Secularism is lack of worship (so secularists believe in God, but their distinguishing characteristic is that they think the meaning is found in the world, not in knowing God in receiving and thanksgiving), but it was Christians themselves that created secularism. It was Christians who first started looking for knowledge about the world rather than of the world (in a participatory sense). It was Christians who first made holy into an adjective with guaranteed divine properties.

The reason that Schmemann sees for this process is that people want religion. The meaning of this word varies widely between authors; Schmemann appears to use it to mean a sacred/secular divide, which seems to enable the divine to be safely bottled. Jesus was very harsh toward religion in this sense, condemning the religious leaders of his day, and was ultimately killed by religion. Jesus ultimately killed religion, demonstrating its powerlessness by revealing what Life actually looked like. But it is a lot easier to have a symbol that reliably produces the result given the appropriate conditions (what is necessary for the sacrament to be “valid”) than to figure out what it means and he we can possibly live at the intersection of heaven and earth, receiving the world as a gift, giving it back to God in thanksgiving, and somehow in that process communing with God and receiving life. But by reviving religion, Christians created secularism.

Schmemann originally wrote this as a summary for people being trained as Orthodox missionaries, hence the question raised by the title: Christ is the life of the world (John 6:51), but how is he the life? The answer is in the sacraments, or rather, a sacramental worldview. Schmemann focuses on the sacraments of the Church, but he does also occasionally suggest that the sacramental worldview goes beyond just the Sacraments. The Church is itself a sacrament, which reveals the new Kingdom and also enables us to participate in the new Kingdom now. In fact, the whole world is a sacrament, revealing Jesus and enabling us to communing with him through receiving the world and blessing him back via thanksgiving.

The Eucharist (the whole service, not just Communion) enables us to participate in the journey of Christ. We start off as individuals, and as we travel to the church we become one body. When we enter the church we leave the world. The procession ascends with Christ into heaven (up the steps to the altar) where we partake of Christ and are united with him. Then at the end we return to the world, where we (ideally) act as little Christs and little pieces of the Kingdom.

The cycles of Church calendar—the yearly cycle of Jesus’ life and of the feasts of the saints, and the daily cycle of the Office—make a sacrament of time. Philosophy and religion have been trying to find a meaning for time, because time appears to have no meaning, because it ends in death. The ancients attempted to find meaning with time as circular, but Christianity ended that (as it also ended sacrifices, since how can an animal sacrifice be meaningful once you heard about Jesus’ sacrifice of himself). Time became linear, since God began it and is moving us towards a purpose. Since Christ entered time, the Church calendar of his life reveals him and enables us to participate in his life. Feasts of the Church year and of saints were not something now, since pagans had feasts celebrating the year, so the Church feasts are not something totally new, but rather imbuing things people were already doing with new meaning. The Office, offered on behalf of the community, reveals the cycle of Fall (vespers) and anticipating the Light to come (matins, just before sunrise).

In the Baptism service, the waters of baptism are first blessed. This shows two symbols of the water. The first is that the water symbolizes the material world (the cosmos), which was originally a gift to us, and through the blessing returned to be a blessing as at the beginning. The second, of course, is that the water symbolizes death, and we participate in Christ’s death, and receive new life from God. The Baptism service has much more symbolism, and eventually developed into the Easter service.

Marriage illuminates the function of humanity. In the service the couple is crowned, because each couple is a king and queen of their domain, thus acting like the original Adam and Eve. They also act like a little church, so they are a sacrament of the Kingdom, too. In fact, they are a martyr, which means “witness” of the Kingdom. Marriage involves death to yourself in order that two may be united into one, and the entrance into the Kingdom requires death.

Ordination is related to Marriage, and together they reveal the functions of men and women. Through the Virgin Mary we see a new Eve. Mary demonstrates femininity; virgin does not refer to no sex but rather the fulfillment of love. The feminine accepts the proposal and responds in love. In this sense, Creation is feminine, because God proposes and Creation accepts and responds in love. Now, love is not blindly accepting (which would not be love), but does so out of knowledge and choice: we see that Mary asks the angel how it is possible for her to give birth without sex, but she accepts the proposal and responds in love. The fullness of love produces children, and so motherhood is the fulfillment of femininity. The masculine is the act as priest: “Man was created priest of the world, the one who offers the world to God in a sacrifice of love and praise and who, through this eternal eucharist, bestows the divine love on the world.” (112) Through ordination the priest receives this love, hence its relation to love.

The Sacrament of Healing/Anointing turned into the “Sacrament of Death”, Last Rites, whereby a person is mechanically assured of smooth entrance into the next world. However, as a sacrament it points to life: since it is through death that we receive new life, the sacrament reveals and enables to participate in this new life. The modern world sees health as normative and does everything it can to restore that, ignoring death even when it is inevitable. The Christian cannot agree, for once the world had rejected Christ, there was no possibility that it could have any life, even if it had been given to us as a means to life. However, neither is death normative, for Christ is Life and he overthrew death, and so the sacrament points to him.

So how is the Church the life of the world? By offering a sacramental worldview, and thereby, the means of knowing Christ, the world, and the Kingdom by participation. “A Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, finds Christ and rejoices in him. And this joy transforms all his human plans and programs, decisions and actions, making all his mission the sacrament of the world’s return to him who is the life of the world.” (139, emphasis in original)

For the Life of the World is the canonical book on a sacramental worldview. Unfortunately, since it was written for Orthodox missionaries, who presumably were already familiar with the sacramental worldview, Schmemann never explains the worldview directly, but only obliquely in the context of other discussions. The book makes sense in its original context, as it Orthodoxy clergy will find a rich discussion of how the Sacraments bring the Life of Christ to the world. As Schmemann observed in his introduction to the second version, it found “a wider audience” than he expected, presumably people like me who want to know what a sacramental worldview is. Unfortunately, his solution seems to be merely tacking on two appendices: a brief outline of how we ended up losing a sacramental worldview (even while retaining it in name), and an examination of how a secular worldview is not a sacramental worldview. I found the appendices most helpful, but even so, they did not address the question directly. Apparently instructing people who are not familiar with a sacramental worldview was not what Schmemann wanted to do, but he did give enough information to figure it out, even if that leaves one wondering, well, how exactly do being a priest receiving the world and communing with God through eucharist/thanksgiving.

Like Martin Thornton (Anglican priest who wrote about spiritual direction), Schmemann has a number of insightful comments that are somewhat tangential to his point. One that grew on me is a quotation from a book by Léon Bloy: “There is but one sadness, that of not being a saint.”, which I will simply let grow on you. He also gives incisive critiques on secularism, although in 2026 that seems to not be as relevant as in 1963, since the mainline churches that embraced secularism are dying. Then there are things that really do not fit well in a summary, but which still want to be shared. “[I]t is the very nature of symbol that it reveals and communicates the ‘other’ as precisely the ‘other', the visibility of the invisible as invisible, the knowledge of the unknowable as unknowable, the presence of the future as future. The symbol is the means of knowledge of that which cannot be known otherwise, for knowledge here depends on participation” (167). “All .. sensible creatures are signs of sacred things”, which is Aquinas, and which Schmemann agrees with, but with a much richer understanding of “signs”. Then, his condemnation that we made holy into “a mere adjective, a definition sufficient to guarantee the divine authority and origin of anything.” (175)

Schmemann blames the Western Church for the decomposition of sacrament, but after reading St. John of Damascus, The Fount of Knowledge, I think the East was heading that direction, too. The first section summarizes Aristotle’s definition of terms, and it divides up everything into extremely fine details, including a definition of “definition” (a definition properly contains all the things necessary to distinguish the category from other categories and nothing extra). Divinding things up is inherent to the analytical project. It is easy to see why the discovery of Aristotle in the West produced such excitement, and why Scholasticism emerged, but the sacred/secular process was already happening in the East, by the time of John (the mid 700s). In the book On the Orthodox Faith, Book 1 Chapter 12, he says “Immaterial things are more noble than material, the pure more than the sordid, the sacred more so than the profane, and they approach Him more closely because they participate in Him more.” To be fair, the footnote observes that this section of the chapter only occurs in later manuscripts (dates not give), but also notes that the Byzantines have always considered it genuinely written by John. Later on, in Book 2 Chapter 9, he says “Water is a most admorable element, for it cleanses from filth, not only the bodily kind but the spiritual as well, provided the grace of the Spirit is added to it.” This sounds very much like the blessing of the water adds the Spirit and now it becomes a Sacrament that washes away sin, rather than the water being a symbol by which we participately-know the spiritual reality. The Scholastics may have really pushed it all the way, but it seems like the process was already well along by John’s day. Given the inherent nature of Aristotle, as well as human proclivity for religion and certaintly, I suspect this process is inevitable.

This book touches on some small points in two other books that may be relevant. First, Porcu in Journey to Reality, says that the function of a priest is to safely handle the divine, which being rather infinite, is unsafe to handle directly, just as electricity in its raw form is unsafe, so what have licensed electricians. Porcu has a lot of degrees, and is in charge of catechizing Orthodox converts at his church, but I think Schmemann would say that his view of the priesthood is religious, not sacramental. Second, and rather more minor, is that Schmemann comments that the Office is offered on behalf of the community, which is very similar to what Martin Thornton says in Pastoral Theology. Unfortunately, a failing of Schmemann is that he is frequently ambiguous: does “the community” mean the people who are part of the church, or everyone in the neighborhood around the church. If the latter, then he agrees with Thornton, who thinks that the Office is offered on behalf of the parish as an administrative district, including non-Christians. If the former, then he agrees with Thornton on the vicarious nature of the Office, but may not agree with Thornton’s larger Remnant theology. However, since the vicariousness was what I had trouble with Thornton, it is interesting that that is what Schmemann agrees with Thornton about.

Schmemann also mentions that humanity’s role is to join heaven and earth, receiving the world as a gift and returning thanks, thus communing with God. This is very similar to N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, who says that the humanity joins heaven and earth as God’s image in his temple (the earth), and that as priests, we receive from God and make God known to Creation, and receive Creation’s praise and bring that to God. John Walton’s book The Lost World of Genesis, while more focused on arguing for a literary rather than fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis 1, nonetheless also talks about the earth being God’s temple. It is hard to know where these authors got their sources, although I imagine that Walton, as a Wheaton College professor, came to it through Middle-eastern cultural patterns and applying those to Genesis 1, while Wright probably pulled from many sources, including the Fathers and New Testament readings. I find it unlikely that Wright read Schmemann, since he offers no sacramental perspective of the world, and instead emphasizes humanity as God’s image (which, if we were doing what we were created to do, we would be a sacrament to the rest of Creation, although Wright does not not make that connection, either). Schmemann presumably is pulling almost entirely from the Fathers. So we see three people saying similar things but arriving at that conclusion from very different paths.

Schmemann is a little hard to read. He likes parallel lists, but he includes a lot of different categories in the lists, so the reader needs to spend time to understand what is actually common. The result is rich, but hard to understand and hard to remember. His logical outline is reasonably transparent, but he wanders around a bit, and he assumes quite a bit of theological knowledge. I found this book difficult to summarize, although that is because my purpose (understanding what is a sacramental worldview) and his (demonstrating how the Sacraments bring participatory understanding and Life) are different. Also, there is more risk than usual that the summary has introduced errors into what he was saying, since I do not feel that I have grasped it entirely, and I may have misunderstood some things which seem minor to me but which result in embellishing or corrupting something important. I advise readers who found the summary helpful to read through the notes, as they are closer to Schmemann’s text.

For the Life of the World is probably very useful in its current form for its intended audience of Orthodox missionionaries. Presumably clergy would not be far from that audience, and even Orthodoxy laity (which Schmemann would disagree with that category) would easily benefit. Us non-Orthodox  probably struggle more. I would advise non-liturgical Protestants to read attend an Anglican or Orthodox (but not Catholic) service for a month or two, and to read Journey to Reality before reading this. Catholics should be advised that he thinks the Catholic view of sacraments is rubbish. In this he is not too different from the Reformers, but he takes the opposite approach that Protestants did: instead of throwing them out, he returns them to their original meaning. Unfortunately, this is not really the book us non-Orthodox need, even though it apparently is the only one that we have, given that it is both the primary and a ubiquitous recommendation. At least the book can be twisted to our purpose, aided by the appendices, which I would recommend reading first.


Review: 8
I am unclear how to evaluate this book, since I am not the target audience, and he was not wanting to write a book for me. The content is excellent, but hard to turn to my use, and somewhat incomplete for that purpose. The writing is unnecessarily unclear (perhaps this is one of the glaring failures that he claims the book has in his introduction), but it is understandable, although taking notes and summarizing may be necessary.
▶ Notes

Copyright © 2026 by Geoffrey Prewett