Alexander Schmemann

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Every evil screams only one message: 'I am good.'
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Christian
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Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Men
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Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence...To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: People
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The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Real
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It seems to me that any ideology is bad because it is inevitably reductive and identifies other ideologies as evil, and itself with truth, whereas both truth and goodness are always transcendent.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Evil
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How torturous is the "churchly" language one must speak in church - the tone, style, habit. It is all artificial; there is a total absence of a simple human language. With what a sigh of relief one leaves this world of cassocks, and kissing and church gossip. As soon as one leaves, one sees: wet bare branches, fog which floats over fields, trees, homes. Sky. Early dusk. And it all tells an incredibly simple truth.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Home
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If the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always the act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Church
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For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is the communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Thinking
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Love is the essence of the holiness of the Church.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Love Is
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Academic theology is false.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Academic
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Principles are what people have instead of God.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: People
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We should have understood long ago that there is, in this world, religion without God, religion as a center of all idols that possess fallen man, religion that is the justification for these idols.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Men
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In the process of replacing the old religions, Christianity became a religion.
- Alexander Schmemann
Collection: Christianity