Secularization, Schmemann continues, causes a reduction of the Church on two levels; the reduction of the person and the reduction of the parish. These reductions diminish the Church by separating it from its meaning and fulfillment, making it dependent on the proximity of this world.
The reduction of the personal character of man is a reduction “of his life and his religion to history and sociology”, Schmemann articulates in an article published in 1965. The historical reduction makes truth relative in the eyes of the world; what was once true may not be true today. The sociological reduction has claims that man is determined by his sociological context. Together these two reductions makes man unable to present himself as a person before God, but salvation in orthodox tradition, according to Schmemann, is entrusted to a person and not merely to man. To reduce the person to mere man is to enslave the person to the “impersonal” nature, where man becomes an object to himself.
In the Christian teaching man is always a person and thus not only a “microcosm” reflecting the whole world, but also a unique bearer of its destiny and a potential “king of creation.” The whole world is given—in a unique way—to each person and thus in each person it is “saved” or “perishes.” Thus in every Saint the world is saved and it is fully saved in the one totally fulfilled Person: Jesus Christ.
“The parish constitutes the main battlefield of the war between Orthodoxy and the growing secularization of the American Orthodox”, Schmemann argues in the same article. The second reduction, that of the parish, is therefore the more striking of the two. From being a natural community gathered for service it has, according to Schmemann, become an organization to fulfill the needs of its members. Instead of being a communion of holy people, gathered in the name of the Lord, its main purpose has become to uphold the ancient culture of the old “nation”, often with an ethnocentric focus. The final outcome of this double reduction, stemming from secularization, is the surrender of the Church, for the needs of the people, making it a “philosophy of life”. This meant a loss of the Church’s independence, not to an Empire but to a far more expansive threat: the objectification of the Church where the Church becomes an object in itself.
In his book For the Life of the World (1963), reprinted in an extended version in 1973, Schmemann visualizes the solution by making an analogy: when we enter into the Life of Christ, into His Resurrection, we add another dimension. This does not mean that we abandon the other dimensions, but they are fulfilled in this new dimension. If you look at color images, two dimensionally, they are lacking life and depth. The same goes for life without the dimension that Christ offers us in His Resurrection. The solution then is not to abandon this world. On the contrary, this world is already fulfilled in Christ, but not in us. We need to enter into this dimension of fulfillment in order to be fully Church and fully Man. The solution therefore emerges as a responsibility, first on a personal level and then as a community in order to be subjects.
According to Schmemann, secularization poses a threat to the Church not because it challenges religion, rather it is in itself a religion, with its intrinsic answers of life and death. It is a religion for those who are tired of the world being explained in the categories of another world, of which we know nothing. The secularized religion is compelled to withdraw from any relation to “otherness” or the “other” world. The only world we know is the one we live in. Secularization is the very “explanation” of death with the terminology this cessation of life gives us.
