Secular West

Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early Church, between the ‘now’ and the ‘to come,’ between the ‘old’ and the ‘new,’ with an orderly, stable, and essentially extra-temporal distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural,’ between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’; and then, in order to assure God’s total transcendence, it viewed grace itself not as God’s very presence but as a created ‘medium.’”

As a result, “Eschatology . . . became exclusively ‘futuristic,’ the Kingdom of God a reality only ‘to come’ but not to be experienced now as the new life in the Holy Spirit, as real anticipation of the new creation. Within this new theological framework, ‘this world’ ceased to be experienced as passage , as ‘end’ to be transfigured into ‘beginning,’ as the reality where the Kingdom of God is ‘at hand.’ It acquired a stability, almost a self-sufficiency, a meaning of its own, guaranteed to be sure by God ( causa prima , analogia entis [Schmemann the Barthian!]), yet at the same time an autonomous object of knowledge and understanding. For all its ‘other-worldliness,’ the Latin medieval synthesis was based on the alienation of Christian thought from its eschatological source, or to put it more bluntly on its own ‘secularization.’” Before secularization in the narrow sense, “the ‘world’ in the West was secularized by Christian thought itself.”

Schmemann’s focus is on medieval Christianity, and his analysis holds best there. Eschatology was recovered by the Reformation, but over the centuries the Reformation became “re-Westernized,” and today the secularizing nature/grace scheme is seen as the essence of Protestantism.