Schmemann Alexander, Eucharist, The Kingdom’s Mystery, Translated by Joseph Roilidis, Akritas, Athens, pp. 328.
A classic by now, but always timely, this book by Fr. Alexander Schmemann, titled: Eucharist, is not, as the author suggests, a scientific liturgical study, nor a strict memorandum of the Divine Liturgy. It is more the fruit of a thirty-year course of Fr. Alexander as priest and teacher, with a continuous posing of questions about the future of the Church and the position of Eucharist within it. For this reason, though first translated in Greek many years ago, it continues to inspire and attract the interest of readers who deal with such issues.
The interest on the position of Eucharist in the life of the Church, but also on liturgical studies in general, has considerably increased the last decades in our country. No doubt, Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s work and its wide propagation in Greece contributed to this. Eucharist has been conceived not simply as the centre of devotional life, but also as the heart of the Church itself.
Re-baptism in such theological self-consciousness came to replace decades of moralism and legalism in our ecclesiastical life and juxtapose the living Eucharistic experience with talk of duty and rationalism. A new air of Orthodox theological self-consciousness seemed to blow in our domestic theological affairs and with its regenerating breath set on the theological table a plethora of issues about our liturgical theology, Eucharistic ecclesiology and authentic devotional intentness on the eschatological message of the Resurrection. Liturgical conferences, relevant doctoral dissertations, studies on the liturgical renaissance have been in bloom.
More than forty years later, perhaps, as the book’s translator points out, the same liturgiological concern is needed, this time about the hyperbole of analysis and the scientific overload, which has possibly covered up the primary, vital and saving message of our ecclesiastical worship and mainly of the Divine Eucharist.
Although the author unreservedly characterizes the “crisis” in the Church as crisis of the Eucharist, still, he does not consider the reformations and modernizations a panacea solution, but rather calls for a return to the vision and experience that Eucharist infused in the life of the Church from the beginning. Fr. Alexander attempts with his book to serve the rebirth in this vision. By means of a step by step theological analysis of the Eucharist, Fr. Schmemann, more a theologian and less a historian of worship, initiates, in an eloquent and comprehensible way, his readers into the “supper” of the Kingdom.