From Sacramentality of the Church to the Sacramentality of the World:

An Exploration of Alexander Schmemann's and Louis-Marie Chauvet's Theology

Ivana Noble

In this paper I am going to explore the relationship between the church and the world in the sacramental theology of Alexander Schmemann and Louis-Marie Chauvet. My interest focuses on the question of how their notions of sacramenality influence an on-going conversion towards participation in God and unity among Christians.

Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) was a Russian Orthodox theologian who lived most of his life in emigration, first in Paris, and then from 1951 till his death in New York, where he was, for more than 20 years, dean of St Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary.[1] Louis-Marie Chauvet (*1942)[2] is a Roman Catholic theologian, professor of sacramental theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Both can be viewed as revival figures for sacramental theology, criticising lapsed practices and those theologies which had separated sacraments from their liturgical celebration and which reduced sacramentality to a supernatural - other-worldly - reality. For both, the relation between the church and the world is given by God. For both, the notion of sacramentality is central to that relationship. But how? What are its sources and aims? And which priorities in a Christian life does it emphasize? In order to address these questions, I will have to start with a brief examination of the relational and symbolic knowledge of God they operate with, then I will move to their notions of sacrament and sacramentality, and finally with that background knowledge I will analyse how exactly the church and the world are interwoven in their understanding of sacramentality, and what implications this has for their speaking of conversion. Although I find both approaches attractive, I will also offer a critique of their ideas. How do we appropriate Schmemann's beautiful holistic vision without absolutising liturgy, restricting tradition and ending up with political or ecclesial conservatism? How do we learn from Chauvet's emphasis on the corporality of faith without absolutising the church institution and eliminating the space for individual dissent in limit situations? In the conclusion I ask what both approaches contribute, where they may benefit from each other, and where they need to be helped from elswhere, in order to foster conversion towards God and thus also towards deeper ecclesial and creaturely unity, which is not individual-destructive.

1. Schmemann's holistic vision

Schmemann's sacramental theology grows from the synthesis of the Greek Fathers. It affirms that God is completely different from all our images, that we creatures are incapable of grasping God in his essence, but that at the same time it is truly possible to communicate with God and to participate in the communion of the Holy Trinity.[3] To understand this, we have to examine Schmemann's notion of theological knowledge, which holds together not only this "existential synthesis" of the apophatic and the cataphatic ways, but also knowledge of God and theosis,[4] knowledge of God and the celebration of our participation in God. Liturgy is for him a vital source of theology. He shows that in liturgy we experience the unity of God's plan with the creation, which is prior to and overcomes the fall, the power of sin and death. The church celebrating liturgy is led to become a sign of conversion for the world, an image of the world's destiny. Schmemann's holistic vision holds together the world, the church and the kingdom. Our question will be, in which sense is this vision "sacramental", and what are its implications for the unity of the church?

1.1. The roots and nature of theological knowledge

Although Schmemann lived most of his life in the West,[5] he means by "knowledge" something else than post-enlightenment western philosophy or theology. He emphasizes that our knowledge of God starts with the intuition of the divine mystery. This first intuitive knowledge, then, can be expressed only by means of symbols. They allow the revelation of the divine other precisely as the "other", they can speak of "the visibility of the invisible as invisible, the knowledge of the unknowable as unknowable, the presence of the future as future."[6] In other words, it belongs to their nature not to reduce, not to try and substitute relational knowledge for explanation, for something smaller, more similar to us creatures and to our creaturely structure of thinking. Schmemann stands in line here with other Orthodox theologians, like Lossky, Meyndorff or Zizoulas,[7] as he opposes the reduction of knowledge to its discursive part and the isolation of knowledge from mystery. He states that "theology is not only related to the "mysterion" but has in it its source the condition of its very possibility. Theology as proper words and knowledge about God is the result of the knowledge of God - and in Him of all reality."[8]

Thus, according to Schmemann, theological knowledge grows in relationship with God, but it also includes knowledge of the world and of ourselves. But it is not clear here, whether for the knowledge of the "whole of reality", the relationship to God is sufficient, or whether it leads us to recognize the need of knowing the world also in relation to the sum of accessible human knowledge, and to know ourselves in relation to all the dimensions of our being. Schmemann is vulnerable to the critique that his views give space to claims that holy people are by reason of their relationship with God experts in politics, medicine or psychology.

His holistic vision becomes rooted in liturgy. Symbols which make theological knowledge possible are taken from there. In the context of the liturgical celebration they reveal the levels of the mystery of God, which in our first intuition remained hidden. The one who does not participate in liturgy cannot do theology, because only in liturgy does the mystery become epiphany. [9] In liturgy all our existence is included into the "all embracing vision of life".[10] Liturgy does not create a new reality, it celebrates what theology has known as reality. Conversion and the mission of the church in the world, then, grow from the mutual relationship between knowing and celebrating.[11] Schmemann complains that the second aspect has been largely lost among contemporary Christians, and this has contributed tothe one-sidedness of theological knowledge:

"Feast means joy. Yet, if there is something that we - the serious adult and frustrated Christians of the twentieth century - look at with suspicion, it is certainly joy. How can one be joyful when so many people suffer? When so many things need to be done? How can one indulge in festivals and celebrations when people expect from us ‘serious' answers to their problems? Consciously or subconsciously Christians have accepted the whole ethos of our joyless and business-minded culture."[12]

The joy which one experiences in liturgy is not a satisfaction with the world as it is, while ignoring the pain and sufferring in it. It is a joy from experiencing that God has come to this world, and that God fulfills what he promisses. This joy is eschatological. Its loss also takes away the eschatological hope, which Christians are to bring to the world. The one-sidedness caused by alienation from the dynamics between knowledge and celebration impacts on the move from an experience of God's presence in the world to being confronted with God's absence.

1.2. Created and instituted sacramentality

Schmemann's holistic vision of theological knowledge is sacramental: it counts with the symbolic unity between the world and Christ, which we celebrate in the sacraments, and which reveals God's plans for creation. It rests on a strong understanding of the symbol and the symbolic. Losing the depth of the understanding of symbol leads, according to Schmemann, to a fragmentation of reality, and the secularisation of theology. He emphasizes that symbolic reality does not start with our categorising, it is not an extra layer added to "what is here" by our understanding. Instead Schmemann states:

"And the world is symbolical - ‘signum rei sacrae' - in virtue of its being created by God; to be ‘symbolical' belongs thus to its ontology, the symbol being not only the way to perceive and understand reality, a means of cognition, but also a means of participation. It is then the ‘natural' symbolism of the world - one can almost say its "sacramentality" - that makes the sacrament possible and constitutes the key to its understanding and apprehension. If the Christian sacrament is unique, it is not in the sense of being a miraculous exception to the natural order of things created by God and ‘proclaiming His glory.' Its absolute newness is not in its ontology as sacrament but in the specific ‘res' which it ‘symbolizes,' i.e., reveals, manifests and communicates - which is Christ and His Kingdom. But even this absolute newness is to be understood in terms not of total discontinuity but in those of fulfilment. The ‘mysterion' of Christ reveals and fulfills the ultimate meaning and destiny of the world itself."[13]

The world is the first symbol, and Schmemann would go as far as saying that we could speak of it even in terms of the first sacrament,[14] because it makes all other sacraments possible. God takes the elements of the world to reveal his mystery - and thus also to reveal that it is possible to encounter God in the world. Schmemann speaks of the continuity between the world and Christ, which is given by the world being created through Logos, and by the eschatological fulfilment, when all things will be gathered in Christ.[15] It is the continuity of God's will for the creation, which is the participation in the divine life. This continuity is, however, marked by the discontinuity caused by sin. Although Schmemann does not use the fall as an interpretative key for understanding the world, he does not minimize its presence.[16] In the continuity between the world and Christ given by creation we also recognize the discontinuity given by sin:

"‘This world', by rejecting and condemning Christ, has condemned itself; No one, therefore, can enter the Kingdom without in a real sense dying to the world, i.e. rejecting it in its self-sufficiency, without putting all faith, hope and love in the ‘age to come', in the ‘day without evening' which will dawn at the end of time."[17]

We live in a tension between participation in the divine life - and alienation from God. This tension is so strong that it breaks all possibilities of going on in a "natural life" without conversion, of being satisfied with the world as it is, without striving and eagerly expecting the kingdom of God. Now, could we also say that to live in our churches as they are, without desiring unity with God and with each other, without allowing the kingdom to break through to them too, is also opting for self-sufficiency and alienation? I come back to this question in the conclusion.

Schemmann articulates the relation between the world, the church and the kingdom in the following way. The church is rooted in the world. It bears all the positives and the negatives of this rootedness. Its history is bound up with the history of the world. Schemamnn recognizes that Orthodox theology traditionally places the beginning of the church in paradise and interprets its life as a manifestation of the Kingdom of God.[18] He holds together the cosmic and eschatological dimensions of the church, whence the tension between participation in divine life and alienation also enters in. The church like the world is a symbolic, sacramental place, it is a passage to the new creation. "The church, as visible society and organisation, belongs to this world", says Schmemann. She is vulnerable and struggles with the same problems as the rest of the world, yet "she is ‘instituted' to ... stand for the world," and to "assume ... all the natural forms of human existence in the world ... in order to reveal and manifest the true meaning of creation as fulfilment in Christ, to announce to the world its end and the inauguration of the Kingdom."[19]

The world is created as sacramental, the church is instituted as sacramental. Schmemann distinguishes here the natural sacramentality of the world given by creation from the instituted sacramentality of the church. He speaks of the church as the "sacrament of the Kingdom" by means of which she "always becomes what she is, always fulfills herself as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, as the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit, as the new life of the new creation." Schmemann adds, "The basic act of this fulfilment, and therefore the true ‘form' of the Church, is the Eucharist: the sacrament in which the Church performs the passage, the passover, from this world into the Kingdom, offers in Christ the whole creation to God, seeing it as ‘heaven and earth full of His glory', and partakes of Christ's immortal life at His table in His Kingdom."[20]

This addition is perhaps most striking when we take it into the situation of a divided church, which is incapable of sharing the Eucharist. How, then, can she become what she is: one, holy and apostolic? Schmemann uses a beautiful cosmic symbolism, which includes every stone of the earth in this celebration, but gives only a partial answer to why it is in practice satisfactory for some to bring other Christians into the Eucharistic celebration more or less like the stones, but not as fellow participants. [21] Schmemann conditions sacramentality of the church - and also the overcoming of her divisions - on the preservation of the full and unaltered faith and traditions "once delivered unto the saints".[22] In 1963, when he wrote his "Ecclesiological notes", he was convinced that the Orthodox Church managed this best of all Christian churches. This position is step by step complemented by a critique of, especially, the Russian Orthodox Church.[23] His last work, The Eucharist, finished a month before his death in 1983, in returning to the theme of the Orthodox Church and the Orthodox crisis, says that a way forward has to be sought in dialogue with others, because we have many problems in common. Yet even here, in spite of all the criticism, Schmemann repeats that the Orthodox Church has carried the tradition more faithfully and continuously than any other church.[24] John Meyndorff points out that, however much Schmemann's work may be relevant to the ecumenical discussion, he himself moved, after a brief period of cooperation, out of the ecumenical movement, and participated in more conservative Christian circles.[25]

Schmemann's desire to hold on to the "unaltered" tradition is admirable, but also vulnerable. It lacks a good hermeneutics of tradition, which would help him to work better with the dynamic and pluralistic nature of the tradition.[26] Thus he becomes preoccupied with guarding the past, so that the ability to glimpse a new horizon, or new possibilities to deal with new problems in new ways is minimised, if not absent. This is true not only in the area of liturgy, where Schmemann criticizes all attempts to make it more accessible to present day people,[27] but also in the social and political expressions of Christian faith. This is perhaps most visible in Schmemann's relation to Liberation theology, which he, even in his last work, criticizes for building not on faith but on "ideology and utopian escapism", for replacing a "Christian vision of the world" with issues related to economics, politics and psychology.[28] Yet this position seems to be in contrast with Schmemann's sacramental understanding of the world, with the possibilities it opens for bonds between service to God and service to God's creatures. It seems that Schmemann's dynamic cosmological-eschatological view of sacramentality needs to be complemented by an equally dynamic notion of tradition.

Yet Schmemann's critique of Western "adaptation" of the tradition and its negative fruits also should not be overlooked, because, in spite of the weaknesses of his own position, he uncovers with precision why our theology first "secularised" the world, and then realised the absence of God.

1.3. Real and unreal presence

The first target of Schmemann's critique is the Western teaching on the "real presence" of Christ in the sacrament. Although it attempts to emphasize important truths, namely that God really can be encountered, that God really gives himself to us, it also rests on doubt as it holds: God really can be encountered, God really gives himself to us, but only somewhere and only under certain conditions. This teaching also implies some kind of presence which is "not real" Reality is ontologically divided between the higher and the lower.[29] This problem started when sacraments were taken out of the context of liturgical celebration. Medieval treatises De sacramentis started to define the sacrament on the base of its essence, and thus distinguished it from the "non-sacrament". The signum belonging to its essence, then, received an ontologically different status.[30] Schmemann sees this as a betrayal of the older tradition and its symbolic understanding of all reality as one, because all reality was created and participated in the divine mystery.[31] This, then, has fatal consequences, for symbol is dispensable, and symbolic reality is seen as opposed to the "real" reality, at most as a creation of human mind, if not as an obstacle to the "real".[32]

Schmemann lists three reasons, why the usage of symbol was weakened in the West: (i) symbol was identified with means of knowledge; (ii) knowledge was reduced to discursive knowledge; (iii) the "symbolical" mediation of sacramental reality was substituted by a "realistic" mediation. To this last point Schmemann says that as the sacrament was defined as verum, i.e. real, a difference arose between the "reality" of the sacrament and "symbol", which was seen as unable to express the reality of the sacrament adequately. The Council of Lateran of 1059 condemned the teaching of Berenger of Tours because he held that the body and blood of Christ in the eucharist are not real but rather symbolical. This condemnation resulted, according to Schmemann, in the Council Fathers, instead of criticizing Berenger for not having a good theology of symbol, stating that the presence of Christ in the eucharist is real because it is not symbolical. Thus they perverted the more original notion that held that the presence is real precisely because it is symbolical.[33]

The weakenning or redefining of symbol[34] gave way to a different type of theological knowledge, which, according to Schmemann: (i) abandoned participation and headed towards atomisation; (ii) emphasized the fall and the discontinuity between Christ and creation; (iii) accepted the fundamental opposition of matter and spirit, profane and sacred, natural and supernatural, all of which led to a gradual secularisation of theology.[35] Western scholasticism, which prevailed in theology for centuries, brought a new focus, an analysis of causal relations and a conviction that what is real can be also conceptually grasped and legally controlled.[36] Schmemann laments the fact that, in the history of theology, this shift was often praised as progress towards scientific theology and the growth of a more precise theological method.[37]

Causality[38] SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, str. 139-140.[39] combined with the previously mentioned three features of the new type of theological knowledge gave rise to a new absolute starting point, and a new system deduced from it.[40] The concept of "supernatural being", which became a dominant feature of this system, weakened the ontological status of everything else. This led to division and alienation of being, to the loss of life-giving links between the church, the world and the kingdom, to the loss of a holistic vision and to the subsequent atomisation and secularisation of theology.[41] Schmemann remarks that when patristic theology held all the levels of Christian existence together, they shed light on each other, and kept the inner unity of theology.[42]

Thus Schmemann's critique comes back to its initial point, that we will be unable to grasp what the sacramentality of the church means, if we fail to renew its roots in the sacramentality of the world, and its fulfilment in the Kingdom of God. This renewal can have fascinating implications for an understanding of Christian unity as well as for responses to problematic ethical issues, such as taking action in situations of political or economical injustice or even in issues like the sacramental status of gay relationships. I will try to sketch these possibilities in the conclusion, while recognizing that Schmemann would have very little sympathy with them. Schmemann proposes that for this renewal we need to return to the frame of mind of the Church Fathers of the second and the third century, and there is an unspoken question as to whether the non-Orthodox would not anyway find that more difficult. When we examine Louis-Marie Chauvet's position, we will see an alternative - Western - approach to this renewal, trying to see the possibilities coming from within the tradition of scholastic theology and combining them with insights from philosophy of the 20th century.

2. Sacramentality in Chauvet

The Roman Catholic theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet examines sacramentality in its celebrative, liturgical and ecclesial contexts.[43] There is no primordial sacramentality given to the world by creation - which then would be fulfilled by Christ, the Church and her sacraments of the Kingdom. Chauvet starts from the opposite end. Sacraments represent the language of the church expressing what she believes and celebrates. As in Schmemann, liturgy is for Chauvet "a theological locus of first importance", because it "shows us, not by mode of reasoning but by mode of symbolic action" how Christian existence is born and rooted, namely, "that no one becomes a Christian except by being taken into the common ‘womb' of the church", and that it is not "a question of Christians uniting to form the church, but of the church forming Christians."[44] Sacraments in his understanding are more explicitly than in Schmemann linked to the Scriptures and to ethics,[45] and examined in terms of the structures of our being and understanding. [46] From here Chauvet draws the sacramental dimension of our communication with God and with each other.

Chauvet finds inspiration in a Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, and his rehabilitation of the symbol starts with criticisms of causality, a concept preferred by the scholastics for explaining the relation between God and the world, which strengthened the idea of knowledge at the expense of excluding the symbolic "non-knowledge".[47] Schmemann's critique of the weakened status of other than supranatural reality finds a partial analogy in Chauvet's understanding of symbol and sacrament. Yet Chauvet pays attention to different things, instead of opposing the "second rate" reality attributed to the world, like Schmemann, Chauvet examines the dialectics between the real presence and real absence in the sacrament. He brings a critique of instrumental and subjectivist sacramentality, which according to him deform the relation between God and the world. He attempts to overcome Western Catholic - Protestant polarities: faith - belonging; grace - acting; Scripture-sacrament; Christ- church.[48] Our questions will be what exactly his alternative to Schmemann's holistic vision is, and what potential for conversion towards church unity it has?

2.1. Critique of instrumental and subjectivist sacramentality

Chauvet's position is a response to what he sees as two defective models of sacramentality. The first one can be called instrumental - it sees sacraments as "instruments" of sanctification for believers, or "objectivist" - it stresses the ex opere operato dimension. The second model is a reaction to the first one - subjectivity replaces objectivity. Chauvet sees the first as more Catholic, and the second as more Protestant, but he is aware that followers of both are found across the churches.[49] He demonstrates that both these models end up in individualism and instrumentalism, even if of a different kind. Michael Kirwan sums it up like this: if we start with an "instrument" or a "channel" of grace, "the celebrating community ...fades into the background" - and we end up with as much individualism as the second model; if we start from the "subjective" human response which confuses "authenticity with human sincerity, and runs the risk of elitism, rigorism, or anti-institutional hostility towards the Church" - we end up with as much instrumentalism as the first model.[50] In both cases sacraments are isolated from their celebrative, liturgical, and ecclesial contexts.

Vatican II represents for Chauvet a change towards recognising these dimensions. Its return to the biblical and patristic sources helped to recover the centrality of the paschal mystery, it stressed Christ as the source-sacrament of God's encounter with humanity, it rediscovered the vital role of the Spirit and the anamnetic-epicletic character of the sacraments, it theologically rehabilitated the local celebrating church, the community of believers, as the foundation of all seven sacraments.[51] Thus it corrected the objectivist model, which pushed "vertical theocentrism to its limits, deprived the rite of its properly human significance and opened the way for an anthropological recapture of the rite closed to its theological understanding."[52]

The correction offered by the Vatican II, however, left its opposing interpretations "unreconciled", and thus the Scholastic and Tridentine current considering sacraments as "means", and the newer current, treating sacraments as "expressive signs" continue to be in opposition to each other.[53] Besides that, the anthropological reaction to the "vertical theocentrism" remained more vulnerable to the second defective model, the subjectivist, not because it left the church out of the picture, but either because it wanted to "reintroduce the lived human experience into the sacraments" and did not have appropriate tools for doing so, or because it dismissed the efficacy of sacraments as "magic" and reduced communication with God to ethics. As a way forward Chauvet proposes a symbolic mediation, which would be able to think of sacraments both as "revealers" and "operators" at the same time.[54] To do that, he needs to clear the foreground first, by means of a more general critique of metaphysics, which then will open up a space for his symbolic theology.

Chauvet is dissatisfied with Western metaphysics, in its various forms, because it has an underlying desire to explain being in its totality. This Chauvet identifies as onto-theology, and he sees it as the biggest obstacle to the recovery of the symbolic understanding, which is by definition never fully graspable by concepts.[55] Symbolic understanding presupposes what Heidegger calls revelation of being, which we have to understand precisely as revelation and not as something which we can own as "stock in trade".[56] Being is not an entity - a "beingness", rather it is a non-thing; it ‘never ceases to hide within a difference which constitutes it'.[57] Chauvet repeats with Heidegger that we are thrown into Being.[58] From Emmanuel Levinas Chauvet takes a critique of the obsession with "identity", and a turn of attention, where the the Other is constitutive for the subject and gives it its lost identity.[59]

This critique of metaphysics provides Chauvet with new tools for sacramental theology. His initial points are remarkably similar to those of Schmemann, even if they are inspired by different sources. Sacramental theology, according to Chauvet, runs two risks, one of becoming narrow legalism, the other of being abstract speculation: ‘Like every branch of theology, it must negotiate constantly between conceptual knowledge (without which it would no longer be theology, and therefore constructed discourse - "science" as the scholastics call it) and symbolic non-knowledge (without which it would no longer be respecting the mystery of God)...it must not forget to derive the concept from its living source: the symbols deployed by liturgical action.'[60] Chauvet asks why the symbolic aspect, which is so necessary for sacramental theology, has been so often ignored:

‘The initial question of the present study may be formulated as follows: How did it come about that, when attempting to comprehend theologically the sacramental relation with God expressed most fully under the term "grace," the Scholastics (and here we will consider only Thomas Aquinas) singled out for privileged consideration the category of "cause"?'[61]

In other words, why was their approach dominated by conceptual knowledge, the need to explain how God is related to his creation and vice versa, at the expense of symbolic non-knowledge? Chauvet takes insights from philosophy of language as well as from Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalyses, and relates them to the symbolic communication of grace, which aims at restoring faith and its basic attitudes of gratitude and generosity, which lie at the heart of sacramental theology.[62] In the symbolic order held by Chauvet, grace is an irreducible gift, outside of our value system. Grace comes first, it is "always preceding and necessitated by nothing", it is not justified, it is not reducible to any "value", whether conceptual, physical or moral. A way to grace is also a way towards Heideggerian Being, which is spoken of in terms of a fundamental openness, "an attitude of listening and welcome toward something ungraspable by which we are already grasped; ...a gracious attitude of ‘letting be' and ‘allowing oneself to be spoken' which requires to renounce all ambition for mastery."[63]

Chauvet is aware that the metaphysical conceptualisation of grace is one of the forms of controlling it. The communication of grace - needed for restoring faith - has to restore symbolic language, which allows the subject to be open to others, or even more strongly, which helps the subject to realize that it has its being in relation to others, that these relations are constitutive of it.[64]

2.2. Corporality of faith

Chauvet agrees with Schmemann that symbol is the key to sacrament, yet his understanding of symbol differs. For Schmemann the world is symbolic - and therefore sacramental - because it is created by God, and thus to be symbolic belongs to its ontology,[65] Chauvet speaks about the "arch-sacramentalityof the faith", which is symbolic - and therefore sacramental - in its constitution, and which is corporal and as such enables a subject to participate in it.[66] As was said earlier, it is not the faith of an individual Christian which comes first, but the faith of the church which forms Christians.[67] The "arch-sacramentality" and what we may call "arch-symbolicity" is born here. Before we examine more closely the nature and implications of the corporality of faith, let us pause and look at what else Chauvet says about the symbol.

First, he is vulnerable to the criticism that the Western approach distinguished between symbol and reality. He says that symbol represents the real, but it does it not "really" but "symbolically", in other words, it does not carry in itself the material reality (not even the material "value") of what it symbolizes.[68] "What characterizes the symbol is not the material value in quantity or quality but its relation with the whole to which it belongs."[69] Symbol: cannot be isolated from it without being destroyed.

In this Chauvet deviates from the Scholastics. He even says that "it is impossible to transpose a symbolic element from one cultural or religious system into another or from one context (liturgical for example) into another without causing it to produce effects completely different from those it had in its original system or its initial context."[70] This raises difficult ecumenical questions. For example, could the Roman Catholic Church really lift the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer out of its original (Greek and Orthodox) context and expect it to work in the Western Catholic context? Or can Protestants really have ikons in their churches and expect people to understand their meaning? These questions come even before a more complicated one, whether, and under which circumstances we can share the eucharist with each other. Is a deep sharing of our symbols at all possible? Because there would never be all the elements of the original context present? But we could equally ask, whether we can celebrate today liturgy which was composed in the fourth century - because we no longer live in that context? Or should we try to restore that context to be able to share in the symbol, which Schmemann seems to propose?

Yet Chauvet's position does not lack the desire for communication and it is not exclusivist. In his work the net of relations, in which symbol crystallised over time is carried in the symbol, and belongs to the process of "identification" or "recognition" of the symbol. He states: "Such is without a doubt one of the major functions of the symbol: it allows all persons to situate themselves as subjects in their relation with other subjects or with the world of these other subjects ... or with their own worlds."[71] But the recognition or identification of the symbol is possible "only inasmuch as the subjects are under the agency of the Other" binding subjects among themselves, subjecting them to a common "symbolic order" and allowing them to form a community. "Symbol is a mediator of identity only by being a creator of community".[72]

Not all reality is symbolic. Chauvet, like Tillich, distinguishes between sign and symbol,[73] and yet, "the symbol ...is in some way the original language of human beings".[74] Sign is needed for a scientific discourse, for, as sign does not participate in the reality it represents, it can aim at being as "objective" as possible. Sign transmits information. Sign is needed everywhere where we need to know something. Yet sign is even in those areas complemented by the metaphorical or poetic presence of symbol, that is not "objective" in terms of disengaged, but participates in the reality it represents. Chauvet states that symbol is primary, sign is secondary, that "language is in its essence primarily "poetic" or symbolic", and that it is this symbolic or poetic language, the possibility to speak it, that makes humans human.[75] Symbol is corporal - it creates a community. Symbolic language (including both knowledge and non-knowledge) enables us to express "the ‘corporality' of the faith"[76] and makes it possible. Language constitutes "a place", where we come into being.

Now, what does Chauvet say about the corporality or the "arch-sacramentalityof the faith"?[77] It is symbolic, participatory, it enables the subject to recognize its identity within the wider whole, within the community, the church. Chauvet speaks of "the triple body which makes us into believers": first, the social body, the church with its network, interpretation of history, life and the universe; second, the traditional body, which within the church supports the whole of ritual, through references to the words and deeds of Christ attested by the apostolic witness of the Scriptures; third, the cosmic body of a universe received as a gift of the Creator, from which symbolic elements of water, bread and wine, oil ... are recognized as a "sacramental" mediation of God's acting in the Spirit.[78]

It is interesting that "the cosmic body" comes here in the end. It is not the continuity between the world and Christ to which we are invited, as we find in Schmemann,[79] the sacramental world as a condition for other sacraments, but rather a community, a body of interrelated subjects, which receives and recognizes the world as a gift, and takes "symbolic elements" of it to be transformed by the Spirit and to mediate God's actions sacramentally. Although the sacramental symbol carries in itself the whole of the world, Chauvet says, it does not carry it "really", but "symbolically". It carries it in its language, in its structure of meaning, in its power to mediate new identity. We are symbolic beings, but as such, we appropriate the world, rather than participating in it. The primary materiality for the symbolic beings is their community, for Christians the church, the celebrating assembly, which has given them identity. In this way faith is material, but not in the sense of being rooted in the world which would be symbolic as as a whole.

In Chauvet we find a weaker participation in the world, but stronger participation in the church, "the church precedes the individual"[80] Chauvet is, like Schmemann, engaged in sacramental renewal, yet his position is formed against the background of the Catholic- Protestant dispute, and looks for ways of overcoming the controversy and expressing his Catholic view in a non-confrontational manner with the help of insights from contemporary philosophy and anthropology. His stress on the corporality of faith is Catholic in the widest meaning of the word: it invites participation in the body of the church, and stresses that there is no such thing as an individual faith. Having stated that, he opens some traditionally more Protestant themes and appropriates them for Catholicism, as was stated earlier. Sola fide is shifted from an individual to the corporal faith; sola gratia is interpreted in terms of an irreducible gift challenging our value systems; sola scriptura is widened and the Scripture is placed into the context of the celebrating community; Solus Christus is taken through the critique of temptations of immediacy - and translated as mediated through the church, and opens space for what Chauvet calls respecting God's difference.[81] The theme of the immediate presence of Christ, whether in the world or in the sacrament, needs, according to Chauvet, perhaps the most attention, because it can provide us with false solutions and make obstacles to being grateful and generous, which are the two key components of being Christians.

2.3. Real presence and real absence

Chauvet emphasizes the "materiality" of faith in contrast to what he calls ‘a nostalgia for an ideal and immediate presence to oneself, to others, and to God.'[82] Faith, to be Christian faith, must leave a seal, a character, on one's body, the character testifying to a belonging to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, in the body of the Church, by means of participating in her tradition receiving and offering the universe as a gift. In this light he interprets the story of the disciples going to Emmaus.[83] Here he starts with a key question: ‘How does one pass from non-faith to faith?'[84] In order to arrive at an answer Chauvet analyses the structure of the turn-around, the transformation, that gradually takes place in the disciples in that story:

"In the first section of the story (vv.13-17, up until their first stopping on the road), the two disciples have in effect abandoned their mission; in turning away from Jerusalem, they are also in effect turning their backs on their previous experience with Jesus. They talk between themselves, each a sort of mirror-image of the other, tossing back and forth the same expression of a definite postmortem on the failed mission of theirs. Consequently, their eyes are "kept from recognising him"; their spirits, like their eyes, are shut. For that matter, everything is shut. They have allowed themselves to be sealed up together with the dead body of Jesus in the constricted place of his death, the sepulcher, whose mouth has been blocked with a huge stone. Their past is dead; in any case, it has no future.'[85]

Chauvet points to a transition from a dualistic to a triangular relation, when, instead of speaking to each other in a closed circle, they open themselves to a stranger. He enters into a conversation with them, and lets them name their situation, lets them tell their story. He first appeals to their memory, then makes a link with the Scriptures: ‘remember... slow of heart, all that the prophets have declared ...everything ...must be fulfilled',[86] and offers a rereading of all the Scriptures.[87] Chauvet says, ‘Instead of holding forth with self-assured pronouncements on God, one must begin by listening to a word as the word of God. The reference to the Scriptures as a third agency plays a role that is of capital importance here. In allowing Jesus to open the Scriptures for them, the two disciples begin to enter into an understanding of the "real", different from what they previously thought evident.'[88] They urge the stranger to stay, and in his breaking bread, when his word becomes flesh, their eyes begin to open, they recognise the stranger in his radical strangeness. But their eyes open to an emptiness, he vanished from their sight. But it is emptiness full of presence. The disciples recognize the Risen Lord, they receive it as a gift of the good news and return it as a gift in terms of Christian witness. Chauvet emphasizes that one is not possible without the other. Then Chauvet states: ‘In the last analysis, faith can exist only if it expresses itself in a life of witness.'[89]

Chauvet seems to identify immediate presence with the real presence. Therefore he speaks of the symbolic presence, not as unreal presence, but as presence which carries in itself and reveals its opposing quality - real absence. Christ is not here, he has disappeared from our eyes to help us find him in our hearts, in our community. Yet Chauvet does not want to idealize the church. She is the "topos", the place where the sacramental is present - revealing the opposing qualities of the presence and absence of God: "Those who reject the Church in order to find Christ by themselves misunderstand [Christ has departed]... But those who live too comfortably in the Church also misunderstand it: they are then in danger of forgetting that the Church is not Christ and that if, in faith, it is recognized as the privileged place of his presence, it is also, in this same faith, the most radical mediation of his absence. ...The Church radicalizes the vacancy of the place of God."[90] The blank space of God, then, Chauvet calls the ‘anti-name of God, the Spirit, ...which, while fully of God's very self, works to subvert in us every idolatrous attempt at manipulating God (whether at the conceptual, ethical or ritual level...)'.[91]

Still, the church is where we are given a share in faith, where we learn gratitude and generosity. For Chauvet a Christian life and a Christian identity is unthinkable without the church. His strong concept of the church and weaker concept of the world would run a risk of locking God for Christians to the church and not being able to see God operating outside. But it is not the position Chauvet shares. We as Christians are engaged in the church, whether Roman Catholic or other. We are not disengaged and thus cannot imagine the world from a neutral point of view, from a different point of view than that of the witnesses of the Lord. In this position we have to search for openness. Chauvet finds such an openness, when he sketches his theology of "the pastoral interview".[92] While in Symbol and Sacrament Chauvet stresses our epicletic bond with the Spirit, in Sacraments he adds that the Spirit also blows where it wishes. He does not go back to holding the immediate presence of God, but states:

"it is important to constantly remember that the reign of God is wider than the church as institution and that the Holy Spirit is bound neither by sacraments nor - still less- by the discipline devised for their preparation, as indispensable as it may be. All this puts pastoral ministers on the spot concerning their own conversion. For in this domain, as in all other sectors of the mission, what counts above all is an inner attitude, a spiritual potential: that through which the Holy Spirit enables pastoral ministers to discern and welcome that part of the reign that comes to them and can come to them through persons who may be relatively distant from the ecclesial institution. The Spirit's subtlety is not on the side of rigorism; it is rather on this practical sixth sense, so precious in pastoral care, a sense to which the medieval theologians assigned the first place among the cardinal virtues and which they named ‘prudence'."[93]

3. Conclusion

The initial questions of this paper were how Schmemann's and Chauvet's notions of sacramentality can strengthen a conversion, which would be personal as well as communal, and which would see the unity of the churches as a part of the journey towards the unity with God? What is the potential of their sacramental theology to strengthen these areas? After having examined their theological positions, I will return to these questions, first evaluating their approaches and looking for areas where they can benefit from each other, and which would be worth of further investigation.

For both Schmemann and Chauvet conversion is first communal, before it can become personal, and both emphasize its non-individualistic nature.

Schmemann emphasizes that the church celebrating liturgy is a sign of conversion for the world, she is an image of the world's destiny. This celebration revitalizes the image of God in ourselves. Our personal knowledge of God and our participation in God, the two poles of theosis,[94] are rooted in it. Conversion has a relational character. Therefore, Schmemann, together with other Orthodox theologians, can claim that our knowledge of God and participation in God unite us with God, that both of these aspects of theosis are personal but not individualistic. The process of becoming united with God involves also uniting with each other. Or should we also say that if we want to be united with God, we have to be united with each other? Schmemann leaves this implication open.

For Chauvet, conversion is primarily communal because its possibility is rooted in the celebrating church, which gives life to Christians.[95] The first gift one receives there - or as Chauvet says, the arch-sacrament, the source of all sacraments[96] - is the gift of faith. It is possible for him to speak of the arch-sacramentality of faith, because faith is corporal - it has a body, the church. Chauvet speaks of this body in a triple way, as a social, traditional and cosmic body.[97]

The first gift, as Chauvet puts it, the arch-sacrament of faith, makes conversion also something sacramental. This we find both in Chauvet and Schmemann, although for different reasons. They have in common that liturgy and personal piety do not stand in opposition, but the latter is flowing out of the former.

Schmemann says that in liturgy all our existence is included into the "all embracing vision of life".[98] And in this vision we are brought to recognize the goodness of God in creation, in incarnation and in sanctification, the goodness of God, whose intention for us is to participate in divine life. Schmemann speaks of the arch-sacramentality of the world - for in creating the world through Logos God has started communicating to us this intention.[99] The sacramentality of conversion follows directly from this, as in conversion we return to and are embraced by God's intention. In Schmemann's holistic vision the world, the church and the Kingdom do not stand against each other, but find their salvific relation. This gives rise and meaning to conversion. Schmemann yet again emphasizes that conversion, as well as a mission of the church in the world, grows from the mutual relationship between knowing and celebrating.[100]

What is interesting is that Schmemann operates both with the sacramentality of the world, given by creation, and with the sacramentality of the church, instituted by Christ and fulfilled by the Holy Spirit. He does not use the fall as the key for understanding the world, or sin for understanding conversion. He starts with the goodness of God being present in creation, and in each person, and emphasizes the continuity of the goodness of God operating in the world, announcing the end of its turning away from God, of the discontinuity given by sin.[101] The church is the place of conversion in the first place, as the church celebrates the transformation of this world into the Kingdom. She is a passage into the Kingdom. Thus we cannot live in our churches without desiring unity with God and with each other, without allowing the Kingdom to break through to them. In the liturgical celebration every church renounces self-sufficiency - it is a celebration of relationship, and self-sufficiency would be seen as an alienation from this relationship; it would be against Schmemann's participatory theology.

Eucharist is the primary symbol of this relationship. In the eucharist, the whole of creation is in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, offered to God, and partakes of Christ's immortal life at His table in His Kingdom."[102] Yet this partaking has in practice different modes, and is affected by the division of the church. In Schmemann's theology no one is completely outside of the eucharistic celebration, outside of the church, for the whole of creation is included. Needless to say this inclusion is something different from being able to receive communion. And if liturgy uniting us with God and with each other is so important, then not being able to share communion together is a big problem. The situation which permits that is sinful, and we, not only at the individual level, but also at the communal level, we as churches, need conversion.

Schmemann is convinced that the condition for intercommunio is the preservation of the full and unaltered faith and traditions, and here comes an ecumenically problematic point, as it is in the Orthodox Church.[103] Although he frequently calls his own church to conversion, other churches seem for him to be further away from this condition. Then, there is another issue. We celebrate and recognize conversion. It seems that it is not something we can initiate. Our cooperation with God's grace is seen by Schmemann more in terms of living out what has been revealed to us in liturgy. So to speak about striving for church unity, or doing something about it, linking conversion more to human reality may seem strange to Schmemann's theology.[104] The unity is here since the beginning of the world, according to Schmemann. "How things are with God", and "how they are celebrated in liturgy" is such a strong precedent, that it overshadows at times the sensitivity to how our fellow brothers and sisters experience them here and now, how they are affected by them here and now. And in this I agree with Bruce Morrill's criticisms that Schmemann's theologia gloriae, however good it is, needs complementing with more of a theologia crucis than it has, that his "theology from above" needs to be complemented by a "theology from below", which will help it to be truly incarnational, as is his own desire.[105]

For Chauvet, conversion is sacramental because it is an act of faith. He links it to liturgy, but he recognizes more explicitly than Schmemann other sources of conversion apart from liturgy, such as the Scriptures or ethics.[106] Conversion is sacramental, because it is rooted in our communication with God and with each other, because, as such,it touches the structures of our being and understanding.[107] Similarly to Schmemann, Chauvet emphasizes that being and understanding are interwoven. Conversion is not a matter of explaining the world in its totality, but seeing the world with the eyes of faith and living a life as God's witnesses. Symbols of faith, including the symbol of conversion, create a community, where conversion comes into being.[108] Chauvet then expands this community, and at the ultimate horizon it carries within itself all kosmos, all creation. Yet Chauvet makes the problematic distinction between the symbolic and the real, which Schmemann rejects. Chauvet employs more the language of appropriation than that of participation. This weakens our bonds with the world as it was created, but strengthens our active work in the world.

Chauvet's theology develops the dialectics between the real presence and real absence of God in the world and in the church. His notion of sacramentality allows talk of the privileged place of God's presence, but also of the most radical demonstration of the recognition that none of the things which testify to God are God. The church is not only the place of God, it also " radicalizes the vacancy of the place of God".[109] Both recognitions belong to conversion, to having the eyes of faith. The empty place of God is filled by the Spirit, and it calls to conversion, it "subverts in us every idolatrous attempt at manipulating God",[110] it teaches us gratitude and generosity.

These can be for us the keys to Christian unity. They are accompanied by a recognition that the reign of God is wider than any of our churches, and call us to rediscover the inner attitude of openness to the Spirit, openness rooted in our "body" - in the places we inhabit - and in faith. We must recognize that openness to the Spirit is one movement with the openness to the other, and that our need of the Spirit is also bound with the need of the other. Here Chauvet's theology, in particular Chauvet's pastoral interview[111], can bring new life and movement to issues concerning which church has most faithfully kept the full and unaltered tradition, where Schmemann's response is less then satisfactory.

Schmemann's strong point lies in his cosmology, in his inclusion of all creation into the celabration of our participation in divine life. His participatory theology, however, needs a stronger emphasis on history, and a better evaluation of human struggles for making this world and the church a better place to live in. This can be achieved by a more consistent application of his own principles. To expand his understanding of tradition,[112] and to offer a better relation between liturgy and other sources of Christian conversion, he needs an inspiration from elsewhere, and Chauvet's approach may be of service here.

Chauvet's strong point lies in his dialectics between the presence and the absence of God, which for conversion and for a Christian life renew the place of the Spirit, as well as the recognition of the fact that we are the witnesses of God, that we are the church, the body, that now stands in the empty place of God. His theology can be expanded, when it comes to the relation of the world to the Spirit, and it can benefit from the yet more radical reading of symbol in Schmemann, which does not presuppose the split between symbolic and "real" reality.

Both theologians are important when we deal with the corporal and sacramental dimensions of conversion, and yet application of their theology to practical issues concerning the lack of church unity, and often the lack of desire for it, still needs to be done.

BRINKMAN, Martien, HILBERATH, Jochen, NOBLE, Tim and Ivana, Charting Churches in Changing Europe: Charta Oecumenica and the Process of Ecumenical Encounter. Rodopi, Amsterdam - New York, 2006, 222p; ">From Sacramentality of the Church to the Sacramentality of the World: An Exploration of the Theology of Alexander Schmemann and Louis-Marie Chauvet", pp. 165-200.

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[1]Alexander Schmemann was born in Estonia in a family of Russian emigrés. They moved in his early childhood to France, where he studied, was ordained and started teaching theology at St Sergius Orthodos Seminary. There he was strongly influenced by the so-called "eucharistic ecclesiology" of Nicholas Afanassieff. In 1951 he moved to New York to St Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary, where he served as dean till his death. In his time St Vladimir's became the centre of a liturgical and eucharistic revival, which Schmemann saw as analogous to the Roman Catholic "return to sources" and "liturgical movement" as he encountered them in France. Jean Daniélou and Louise Bouyer had a lasting influence on him. Schmemann took an active part in establishing the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, yet at the same time he collaborated with "Radio Liberty", brodcasting religious programmes to Russia. Apart from theology Schmemann was interested in contemporary Russian and French literature and philosophy, and knew them well. Among his main works are: Introduction to Liturgical Theology, The World as Sacrament, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom of God..

[2]Louis Marie Chauvet was born in France. He was ordained as a priest in the Diocese of Lucon and since 1973 he has been teaching at the Institut Catholique. He has published: Symbol and Sacrament: A sacramental reinterpretation of Christian Existence, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Bod. In French also: Du symbolique au symbole: essay sur les sacrements, Les sacrements. He has coedited and contributed to the following titles: Liturgy and the Body (with Francois Kabasele Lumbala), Le Sacrement de mariage entre hier et demain, Le Sacrement du pardon entre hier et demain (with Paul De Clerck), Le guide du baptisme, Pour accompagner la pri re des personnes malades (with Jean-Marie Humeau), Illness & Healing (with Miklos Tomka).

[3]Schmemann's theology is influenced by the insights of Maximos the Confessor, yet also from the Cappadocians; so in places it resembles Gregory of Nyssa's controversy with radical Arianism. See GREGORY OF NYSSA, Contra Eunomium libri I et II. Ed. W. Jager, GNO II, Leiden, 1960; I. NOBLE, "TheApophatic Way in Gregory of Nyssa", in P.POKORNÝ and J. ROSKOVEC, Eds., Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2002, pp. 323-339.

[4]A. SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. St. Vladimir's Theological Press, New York, 1998, str. 140.

[5]See J. MEYNDORFF, "A Life Worth Living", in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann. Ed. T. Fisch, St. Vladimir's Theology Press, Crestwood, 1992, pp. 143-154.

[6] SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 141.

[7]See e.g. V. LOSSKY, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. James Clarke & Co., London, 1957; J. MEYNDORFF, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. Fordham University Press, New York, 1979; J.D. ZIZOULAS, Being as Communion:Studies in Personhood and the Church. St Vladimir's Theology Press, Crestwood, 1997.

[8]SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 141.

[9] Schmemann stresses that the believers need to learn to understand this revelation in which they participate. Viz SCHMEMANN, Liturgy and Life, pp. 13-14; The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. St Vladimir's Theology Press, Crestwood, 1987, p. 34.

[10]See A. SCHMEMANN, "Liturgy and Theology", in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann. Ed. T. Fisch, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1990, pp. 51-52.

[11]Schmemann interprets the relation between theology and liturgy on the base of the Latin connection between lex orandi and lex credendi. See A. SCHMEMANN, Liturgy and Life: Christian Development through Liturgical Experience. Department of Religious Education, Orthodox Church in America, New York, 1993, p. 22; see also B.T. MORRILL, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory: Political and Liturgical Theology in Dialogue. The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 2000, pp. 83, 90.

[12]SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 53.

[13] SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, pp. 139-140.

[14]This is a recurring theme in Schmemann, one of his works is even called The world as sacrament.

[15]See J 1: 1-5; Eph 1:10.

[16]Schmemann says that Christianity unites three fundamental truths: (i) the world is good; (ii) the world is fallen; (iii) the world is redeemed. See A. SCHMEMANN, "Between Utopia and Escape" (lecture from 1981), http://www.schmemann.org/byhim/betweenutopiaandescape.html, p. 7.

[17]A. SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, 1 (1967), pp. 35-39, note 2.

[18]See e.g. P. EVDOKIMOV, "La culture et l'eschatologie", Semeur 50 (1947), p. 363; L'Art de l'icôn. Théologie de la beauté, Desclée de Brouver, Paris, 1970, p. 54; P.C. PHAN, Culture and Eschatology: The Iconographical Vision of Paul Evdokimov. Peter Lang, Berne, 1985, p. 59; compare SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", note 2.

[19]SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", note 3.

[20]SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", note 3.

[21]And yet in For the Life of the World Schmemann writes: "The symbol of the world is fulfilled in Christ", people partake in it through conversion and faith, they share it, they "eat it" and are healed, are fed and live for ever in heavenly joy. (p. 149). And in The World as Sacrament he adds: "Man must eat in order to live; He must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at its end and fulfilment: ... ‘that you eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom'" (p.10).

[22]SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", note 8.

[23]See e.g. SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, from 1973, where he sharply criticises the Russian Orthodox Church for alienating itself from its own tradition, for embracing Western scholastic forms of thought and separating theology from spirituality and liturgy . He points out that official Orthodox theological manuals from the 16th century are as far from the tradition of the Fathers as the Western ones, and that in Russia up to the 1840s theology was even taught in Latin (pp. 135-136).

[24]See MORRILL, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory, p. 76.

[25]See MEYNDORFF, "Life Worth Living", p. 10.

[26] For Schmemann the concept of tradition is reserved primarily for the Church Fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. These are contemporary in every time, he says, they are not to be adapted, but we are to adapt to be able to enter into their experience. See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 146.

[27]See e.g. SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 147.

[28]See SCHMEMANN, The Eucharist, p. 9-10.

[29]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 138-139.

[30]Compare T. AQUINAS, Summa theologica IIIA, questions 60-65.

[31]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 138-139.

[32]Compare to Tillich's effort to renew symbolical understanding in theology, e.g. P. TILLICH, Dynamics of Faith. Harper & Torchbooks, New York, 1958, p. 41, which in spite of its return to a participation theory, would still operate with the mediation between the symbolical and the real. This is overcome by Ricoeur, for whom all language is symbolical and who recognizes a semantic as well as non-semantic quality in the symbol. See P. RICOEUR, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth, 1976, pp. 45-46.

[33]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 143; compare to DS 690.

[34]Compare to Luther's notion, which similarly opposes the real to the symbolic (spiritual), opting against Zwingli for the real and binding the real presence of Christ in the sacrament to the reality of his words in the Scripture, even if not weakening its link to the rest of creation. See M. LUTHER, Sermon von dem Sakrament des Leibes und Blutes Christi wider die Schwarmgeifter (1526), in Dr. Martin Luthers Werke, Vol. 19, Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, Weimar, 1897, pp. 474-523; J.F. WHITE, The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith, Abingon Press, Nashville, 1999,76-80; P. FILIPI, Hostina chudých: Kapitoly o Večeři Páně. [Feast of the Poor: Essays on the Lord's Supper], Kalich, Praha, 1991, pp. 70-71, 78-82. Calvin opts for the symbolic presence, but his view of symbol, influenced by Zwingli, is spiritualised. In the Institutions of Christian Religion he defines sacrament as"externum esse symbolum, quo benevolentiae erga nos suae promissiones conscientiis nostris Dominus oimbecillitatem", J. CALVIN, Institutiae Christianae Religionis (1559),, in Corpus reformatorum, sv. XXX, C.A. Schwetschkeet Filium, Brunsvigae, 1864, IV.xiv.1. Symbol here is a pedagogical concept, something external, which does not have a real being, unless it is given from outside: by the Holy Spirit at the celebration of the Lord's supper, and by the faith and state of grace of the believer. For the non-believer and those who are evil the symbol does not become anything real. See J. CALVIN, Petit tracité de la saincte cene de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ, in Corpus reformatorum, sv. XXXIII, C.A. Schwetschkeet Filium, Brunsvigae, 1886, pp. 426-459; Catechismus sive christianae religionis institutio communibus renatae in evangelio geneviensis ecclesiae suffragiis recepta (1538), in Corpus reformatorum, sv. XXXIII, pp. 312-362, esp. "De sacramentis" (p. 358), "De baptismo" (p. 359) a "De sancta coena" (p. 359); see also WHITE, pp. 78-80.

[35]Schmemann says that Feuerbach's reduction of religion to anthropology, which inspired Marx, grows from "the same fundamental opposition of the spiritual to the material, ...for centuries the only accepted, the only undersandable moulds and categories of religious thought and experience. And Feuerbach, for all his nihilism, was in fact a natural heir to Christian ‘idealism' and ‘spiritualism'." A. SCHMEMANN, The World as Sacrament. Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966, p. 14. Compare to L. FEUERBACH, Podstata křesťanství. Státní nakladatelství politické literatury, Praha, 1954, pp. 73,83.

[36]See A. SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, 1 (1967), pp. 35-39, esp. note1.

[37]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, str. 137.

[38] Schmemann doesn't completely deny the role of causality in theological argumentation, but he weakens it. According to him, causality, the link between a cause and effect, is in theology inseparable from the symbolism in which this link is roored. Theological speech of revelation, of transfiguration, of new creation in Christ, can, then, work with several layers of these statements at the same time. "New creation" is not a creation of something "new", but it reveals "continuity" between creation and Christ, continuity granted by Logos, by the life and light, which Christ is. What is new is symbolised, i.e. revealed, in the mystery of Christ and his kingdom, which "reveals and fulfills the ultimate meaning and destiny of the world itself."

[39] Causality employed by theology is subjected to the task of communicating the divine mystery and divine closeness at the same time, and thus it should not be reduced to identity thinking so typical for Western theology. see SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, pp. 139-140, 143-144.

[40]Till Vatican II it can be observed that the words of institution were seen as the absolutely new starting point. See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 144.

[41]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p 115.

[42]"It was the source of theology - knowledge about God in His relation to the world, the Church, and the Kingdom - because it was knowledge of God and, in Him, of all reality." SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, str. 144.

[43]See also I. DOLEJŠOVÁ (NOBLE), "The Symbolic Nature of Christian Existence according to Ricoeur and Chauvet", Communio Viatorum 1 (2001), pp. 39-59.

[44]See L.-M. CHAUVET, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body. Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 2001, pp. 33-34.

[45]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 29-31.

[46]"If we widen the perspective, we see that the relation between Scriptures, Sacrament, and Ethics is superimposed on a probably fundamental anthropological structure which we have named ‘knowledge,' ‘gratitude,' and ‘action.' For the human subject cannot live as subject without at once thinking the world...,singing the world..., and acting in the world." CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p.31. "Thinking the world" consists of "the logic of theoretical reason at work especially in philosophy and science", "singing the world", is, then, "the aesthetic value of poetry, music, the feast, whether religious or not", and finally, "acting in the world" is seen in terms of "ethics ...constituting the essential human mode of action", which is given in contrast with "technique", seen in spite of its indispensability as an inadequate candidate for this constitutive role. See ibid.

[47]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 7.

[48]Prokop Brož offered a different way of grouping the polarities at the discussion on Theology and Church at the meeting of the Protestant and the Catholic Theological Faculties in Prague on April 30th 2004. He spoke of: "sola fide- intellectus; sola gratia - natura; sola scriptura - traditio; sola Christus - ecclesia." I have altered the scheme according to Chauvet's areas of interest.

[49]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, 410-413; 416-424. As a prime example of objectivist sacramentality Chauvet uses the Catechism for Use in the Dioceses of France (1947),and as an example of subjectivist sacramentality he cites Karl Barth.

[50]See M. KIRWAN, "The Word of God and the Idea of Sacrament: A Catholic Theological Perspective", manuscript, pp.4-5.

[51]See e.g. Gaudium et Spes 22, Lumen Gentium 5, 16.

[52]Chauvet quotes here A. VERGOTE, Interprétation du language religieux, Seuil, Paris, 1974, p. 201, in CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 412.

[53]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 415-416.

[54]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp. 416, 418-420.

[55]He is aware that the metaphysical tradition of the West cannot be reduced to one approach. So he speaks about a variety of diverse forms of the philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks, which is named "metaphysics". At most we can speak of a "family resemblance" of the unconscious logic underlying these approaches, namely that they aim at explaining the totality of being, which Chauvet identifies as onto-theology. He accepts that the best of these approaches were aware of their own conceptual limits, and did not think that we can describe being "as it is". Chauvet shows examples of this awareness of the limints, as he mentions Plotinus's notion of oion ("such as"), the quasi ("such as") of the Latin thinkers, or Thomas's esse ("being"), which also plays a critical role. See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 8.

[56] Chauvet recalls Marin Heidegger's critique of metaphysics as the ‘ongoing confusion between the entity and Being' M. HEIDEGGER, Le retour au fondement de la métaphysique, Q.1, 29 , in CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 47. See also Heidegger, Le retour, Q.1, 24 -25.

[57]See M. HEIDEGGER, Contribution to the Question about Being. 1955, in CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 49.

[58] For Heidegger to overcome metaphysics is finally to make metaphysics possible. Chauvet prefers to move into speaking about symbolic theology.

[59]Chauvet sees a double-sidedness in Levinas's approach, even if he partially accepts its emphasis on alterity, in a similar way as Derrida summarizes it: ‘None have struggled more vigorously than E. Levinas to liberate themselves from the Greek logos and to challenge the Greek tradition from the view point of the Jewish; that is to challenge Being (impersonal, anonymous, violent reducer of otherness to the totality of the same) with the Other (pure eruption and rupture bursting through the "Face," the unifying pretensions and the ultimately totalitarian essence of the Greek logos).' J. DERRIDA, "Violence et métaphysique," in L'écriture et la différence. Seuil, Paris, 1967:196; in Chauvet, 1995:46)

[60]See Chauvet, L.-M.‘The Liturgy in its Symbolic Space', Liturgy and the Body, Concilium 1995/3, ed. L.-M. Chauvet and F.K. Lumbala, SCM, London; Orbis Books Maryknoll, 29-39: 36-37.

[61] CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p.7; in his later book Chauvet also gives answer to this question: "...the sacramental mystery is simultaneously a revealer and an agent of Christian identity. ...Furthemore, the symbol, like grace, is outside the value system. For these two reasons, the symbolic rout seems to us to supply an approach much more akin to the sacraments than that of instrumentality employed by the Scholastics of the twelfth century, and still dominant in our day. This appears so plainly evident to us that one has to wonder how it is possible that the theologians in the past did not explore this avenue. The answer is clear enough: if they did not do it, it was certainly not for lack of philosophical and theological acumen. When one remembers the awesome intellectual work accomplished in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, in logic as well as in grammar, in physics as well as in metaphysics, there is only one possible answer: because they were part of a cultural age other than ours, the thinkers of those centuries could not ask certain questions that we ask today." The Sacraments, p. 95.

[62]"[T]he communication of grace is to be understood, not according to the "metaphysical" scheme of cause and effect, but according to the symbolic scheme of communication through language, communication supremely effective because it is through language that the subject comes forth in its relations to other subjects within a common "world" of meaning. It is precisely a new relation of places between subjects, a relationship of filial and brotherly and sisterly alliance, that the sacramental "expression" aims at instituting or restoring in faith." CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp. 139-140.

[63]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 446.

[64]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp.139-140.

[65]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 139-140.

[66]Chauvet links the corporality of faith to the Trinity - as corporality in God: "And theology that integrates fully, and in principle, the sacramentality of faith requires a consent to corporality, a consent so complete that it tries to think about God according to corporality." See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp.154-155.

[67]CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 33-34.

[68] See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 72; Chauvet uses the following examples: one does not need a vast pool to symbolize the submersion into death with Christ in baptism, one does not need a large stone from the Berlin wall to symbolize Communist dictatorship.

[69] CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 71.

[70] CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 71; Chauvet uses the example of a gesture, which can be an effective symbol in an African liturgy, but not in a Western one; or a posture, that may be meaningful for celebrating liturgy with children, but would not work with adults.

[71]CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p.73.

[72]CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p.74. Chauvet mentions the following features of the community: "language, tradition, ancestors, law, God (for the believers), Jesus or Muhammad (for Christians and Muslims), ideology (Marxist for instance), and so on"; yet he does not as whether all of them are a result of "being under the agency of the Other", or whether there is just one Other, or several different ones.

[73]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 74-78; compare to P. TILLICH, Dynamics of Faith, Harper & Row, New York, 1958; "The Religious Symbol/ Symbol and Knowledge", "Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality" in Main Works IV, Berlin, New York, 1987.

[74]CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p.77; here Chauvet moves from Tillich's understanding to that of Ricoeur, to which Chauvet refers in footnotes, see P. RICOEUR, "Parole et symbole", Revue des Sciences Religieuses (1975), pp. 142-161.

[75]CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 78; here he refers to J. LACAN, Ecrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966, p. 276. A similar statement can be found in B. Lonergan, who speaks of humans in terms of "zoon symbolikon", symbolic animals. See B. LONERGAN, "First Lecture: Religious Experience", in A Third Collection, Paulist, Mahwah, 1985, p. 115.

[76]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 152.

[77]Chauvet links the corporality of faith to the Trinity - as corporality in God: "And theology that integrates fully, and in principle, the sacramentality of faith requires a consent to corporality, a consent so complete that it tries to think about God according to corporality." See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp.154-155.

[78]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 152.

[79]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, pp. 139-140.

[80] CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 31.

[81]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 39-40.

[82]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 154. In this Chauvet is a true son of Aquinas, who argued for a mediated presence of God against Bonaventure's immediate presence. However, unlike Aquinas, Chauvet disregards the other position, without exploring its possibilities.

[83]Cf. Lk 24: 13-35; Chauvet returns to this text also in his later book, and sees it as a key text for understanding the structure of Christian identity. In The Sacraments he complements it with the baptism of the Ethiopian (Acts 8: 26-40), and the first account of Saul's conversion (Acts 9, 1-20); see pp. 20-28.

[84]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 161.

[85]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 167.

[86]Lk 24: 6.25-27.

[87]See Lk 24: 44-45.

[88]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 168.

[89]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 164.

[90]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp. 177.178. He also points out that the Church's mediation of Christ is a mediation of God's kenosis. See ibid, p. 509.

[91]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 517.

[92]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 192-200.

[93]CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 200.

[94]SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, 1998, p. 140.

[95]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 33-34.

[96]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp.154-155.

[97] See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 52.

[98]See SCHMEMANN, "Liturgy and Theology", pp. 51-52.

[99]See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 139-140.

[100]See SCHMEMANN, Liturgy and Life, 1993, p. 22.

[101] See SCHMEMANN, "Between Utopia and Escape", p. 7.

[102]SCHMEMANN, "Ecclesiological notes", note 3.

[103]See MORRILL, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory, p. 76.

[104]This is also why he does not have much time for liberation theology or even movements trying to appropriate liturgy for contemporary people. They are seen by him as betrayals of theology. See e.g. SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 147, The Eucharist, pp. 9-10.

[105]See MORRILL, Anamnesis as Dangerous Memory, p. 129.

[106]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 29-31.

[107]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, p. 31.

[108]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 152.

[109]See CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, pp. 177.178, 509.

[110]CHAUVET, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 517.

[111]See CHAUVET, The Sacraments, pp. 192-200.

[112]Schmemann in practice often reduces tradition to the writings of the Church fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, of which he says that they are up-to-date in any time, that it is not up to us to expand or appropriate them, but rather to step into their experience. See SCHMEMANN, For the Life of the World, p. 146.