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Vegetable garden on the windowsill

Orthodox worship. Prot. A. Schmemann. From the new book "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture"

The title of the new book by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann may cause at least bewilderment. “Liturgy of death and modern culture"- this is incomprehensible and very risky. But I would like to warn the reader against wanting to get into a title debate without opening the book.

The "religion of the dead" remains a significant part of our culture, even if we don't pay attention to it. In the 21st century, like two and five thousand years ago, the "religion of the dead" penetrates into all traditions and rituals associated with death and commemoration of the dead.

This statement is true for the most different countries but the connection with the "religion of the dead" manifests itself in different ways. Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann talks about America in the 1970s. But also modern Russia not an exception. The brightest, but far from the only example- the mausoleum with Lenin's body, which, almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the communist regime, remains on Red Square, and it is unlikely that Lenin's body will be buried in the foreseeable future.

The mummy in the center of Moscow remains the most important symbol of the Soviet past, materially connects everyone living today with this past. This connection turns out to be so significant that the decision on burial becomes not just political, but religious-political, and none of Russian presidents until he dared to accept it.

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann - Liturgy of Death

M .: GRANAT, 2013.- 176 p.

Translated from English by E. Yu. Dorman

ISBN 978-5-906456-02-1

Alexander Schmemann - Liturgy of Death - Contents

Foreword

From the sub

LECTURE I Development of Christian funeral rites

Death as " practical problem»A few introductory notes
Challenges of modern culture Secularism
"Conspiracy of Silence" (denial of death)
"Humanizing" death (tamed death)
Death as a "neurosis"
Christian roots of "secular death" "Christian truths gone crazy"
Memento mori
"Christian revolution" Ancient "cult of the dead"
Victory over death
Early Christian origins of the liturgy of death

LECTURE II Funeral: rites and customs

Introduction
Pre-Constantine Christian Funeral Continuity of Forms / Discreteness of Meaning
Radically A New Look to death
Preserved "early elements" in the modern burial rite Prayer "God of spirits and all flesh ..."
Kontakion "With the saints ..."
"Form" of the original burial: parallels with Holy Saturday Burial as a procession: from the place of death to the place of rest
Service in the church Psalm singing. The Word of God. Reading of the Apostle. Gospel

LECTURE III Prayers for the dead

The second "layer" of the burial (hymnography)
Changing attitudes towards death
Loss of the "eschatological vision"
Commemoration of the departed
Prayers for the dead

LECTURE IV The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture

Action plan General considerations Culture. Faith. Hope. Liturgical tradition
Action Plan Striving for catholicity. The need for education
Renewal and reunification of the funeral "layers": "Lamentation", "Great Saturday" and "Remembrance"
On the secularization of death The origins of secularization Rejection of eschatology
Bringing back a life of meaning

Alexander Schmemann - Liturgy of Death - "Conspiracy of Silence" - denial of death

Death is a fact, inevitable and, on the whole, unpleasant (I think there is no need to explain the latter). As such (and here I am trying to summarize the secular argumentation) it should be handled in the most effective way, business style, that is, so as to minimize its "unattractiveness" for all participants in the event, starting with the dying "patient" (as he is called today; man is the "patient" of death), and the anxiety that death can cause to life and living. Therefore, for the treatment of death, our society has created a complex, but well-established mechanism, whose invariable efficiency is provided by the same invariably [impeccable] assistance from medical and funeral industry workers, clergymen and - the last of the conspirators in the account, but not in value - the family itself.

This mechanism is programmed to provide clients with multiple services in a specific order. This makes death as easy, painless, and inconspicuous as possible. To achieve such a result, they first lie to the patient about his true state, and when this becomes impossible, then he is immersed in a narcotic sleep. Then this mechanism makes it easier hard time after death. This is done by the owners funeral home, experts in death, and their role is extremely diverse. Very politely and unobtrusively, they do everything that the family has done in the past.

They prepare the body for burial, they wear black mourning suits, which allows us to keep our ... pink trousers! They tactfully but firmly lead the family in the most important points burial, they fill up the grave. They make sure that their skilled, skillful and dignified actions take away the sting of death, turning the funeral into an event, although (I must admit it) sad, but in no way disrupting the flow of life.

Compared with the two most important "death specialists" - the doctor and the funeral director - the third component of the "funeral mechanism" - the priest (and the Church in general) - seems to be in a secondary and in fact subordinate position. The development of events that led to the fact that the French scientist Philippe Aries (I consider him the best specialist in the field of death history) called "medicalization of death", which means transferring death to a hospital and treating it as a shameful, almost indecent disease, which is better kept secret, this "medicalization" at first radically belittled the role of the priest in the whole process of dying, then is in that which precedes death.

From a medical point of view (and more often than we can imagine, and from a family point of view) the presence of a priest is discouraged if he can disturb the patient by informing him of the news of his imminent death. But if he agrees (which is happening today more and more often) “to participate in the game”, “to become part of the team,” which is precisely trying to “destroy death” as significant event[...], hiding it from the dying person himself, then he is received with open arms.

The second stage (the treatment of the body, or, as the Church says, with the "remains of the deceased"), the Church gave up completely to culture. She does not participate in the preparation for burial of the body, which is secretly transferred to the funeral home workroom and brought to the church already as (excuse this expression) "finished product", personifying our aseptic, hygienic, "decent" way of life and death.

The Church does not take part in the invention and choice of the coffin, and, as far as I know, she never once expressed a protest against this terrible, bright and catchy object, the purpose of which is probably to make death, if not desired, then by at least comfortable, solid, peaceful and generally harmless. And here in front of this strange tastelessly decorated product (which involuntarily makes us think about shop windows and mannequins in large department stores), a funeral service, a service, every word, every action of which exposes feelings, ideas, worldview, which, undoubtedly, most vividly express and present a modern funeral.

I will talk about this service itself, about the church funeral later. And I start not with our Orthodox “liturgy of death”, but with the culture within which we celebrate it, because I want to prove a position that is essential and decisive for me.

Our culture is the first in long history of humanity, which ignores death, in which, in other words, death does not serve as a reference point, a reference point for life or any aspects of life. A modern person can believe, as all modern people seem to believe, "in some kind of posthumous existence" (I took this from a survey public opinion: "Some posthumous existence"), but he does not live this life, constantly having this "existence" in mind. For this life, death has no meaning. It, to use the economic term, is absolute complete destruction. And therefore, the task of what I have called the "funeral mechanism" is precisely to make this death as painless, calm and invisible as possible for us who remain to live on.

12/11/2014 - doc file by scribe

Recognized and processed text of a scanned book in Word-2003 format (* .doc). The work was carried out with the aim of preparing a book for reading in an e-reader "ah.

The preface by S. Chapnin is omitted, the preface “From the translator” by E. Dorman is left.

Fixed several noticed typos in the original text (corrected words are highlighted in yellow).

Several notes have been added (in cases where, in my opinion, there are semantic or factual inaccuracies in the text; highlighted in yellow).

“The first thing we must do in the Church and in education is to rediscover death itself. This sounds naive, because we are all dying and we simply “cannot but know” about her. But meaning death has been perverted, and therefore it is extremely important to open and cleanse it. It is necessary to reveal the Christian meaning of death as opposed to the secular and humanistic view of it, to reveal the meaning of death as not created by God as not(in the very deep sense words) "natural event" as events in the highest degree "not natural "and therefore tragic. The knowledge that death is a" punishment for sins ": where is it in modern burial? In humanism, death is treated as a very unpleasant, but" morally neutral "phenomenon. But we must see that in this world death, on the one hand, is an omnipotent sovereign, but on the other, she is an impostor! The death of every person is illegal, every time someone dies is an insult to God! God did not create death. And so we come to the conclusion that death is tragedy, for she is separation not only from those who love me or whom I love, but separation from God Himself. And this means that the Christian understanding of death (and in this it is fundamentally different from the humanistic one) is tragic. In today's conversation, we can call many things "tragic", even a toothache, but I mean "tragedy" in the ancient Greek sense of the word, as tragodia... Tragedy is a clash, a conflict that goes far beyond the realm unpleasant sensations our life. Therefore, first of all, we must rediscover for ourselves death as a tragedy.

The second statement that we must proclaim anew in our education, in our preaching, in our doctrine, in our theology, is, of course, about death as victory... Death never ceases to be a tragedy, but it is also a victory. I have already said a lot about the fact that Christ destroyed death. But, you see, in terms of Christianity, this means that each one death must be destroyed. For example, my death has not yet been destroyed, because I have not died yet. My death may still be the denial of Christ, it may not be a tragedy, but the final sin. Thus, death should be seen as a victory to be won all the time. That is why the Church is in our world, she does not say: "Sit down and do not worry about anything, all problems were solved two thousand years ago." Each time - the same struggle, the same "descent" and "ascent", each time we see the uniqueness of each life, the uniqueness of each death. It would be truly awful if a person, after listening to the theology of Great Saturday, entered the room where the child had just died and said to his parents: "Just think! Christ is risen!"

In fact, we all the time forget about the existence of the Christian dimension in all that concerns suffering. The sacrament of suffering is one of the greatest sacraments of the Christian faith. Christ does not abolish suffering as suffering, He fills it with a new meaning, He triumphantly declares: "If you suffer, then you suffer with Me, because I suffered with you." He does not say: "You are not suffering, this, you know, is all an illusion." This is very difficult to understand. Death as victory - where does it take place? I would answer this - on many levels: in the consciousness, in the souls of those who suffer, but also in death liturgy, which is the pinnacle of this victory. ""

Our in all respects multi- and poly-world full of value systems. Every state, ethnic group, every generation, every religion, party, community, every person has a system of values. I repeat, there are many of them, they stick out and rise, they form huge colonies of stalagmites, rows and chains, palisades and walls. Yes, according to the word of the saint, these partitions do not reach the sky - but in our earthly existence they separate us almost completely. However, there is a stone that lies at the base of every Babylonian pillar, the attitude towards it in one or another system of values determines the entire system, a stone that every person born into the world tries to move from its place - and no one succeeds: death.

The attitude towards death determines the attitude towards life. The lifestyles of people, one of whom believes death to be the inevitable end of everything and dreams of only delaying this end for as long as possible with the help of medical technology, and the other - only by a transition to eternal life, are different, like the running styles of a sprinter and a marathon runner. The lifestyle of the sprinters' society, conventionally called the "consumer society", is the style of today's Russia: death in its various forms, from savoring terrorist attacks and catastrophes to reporting from the life of hospices, has become only a media topic for discussions on Facebook, death in the form of a dismemberment TV screen does not require empathy, but just a glass of popcorn, death seems to surprise no one - but at the same time, the modern Russian prefers not to ask critical issue“How I will die” and the death of their loved ones pushes, hides from themselves, gives it over to the funeral industry (which, alas, often becomes a part of which nowadays, and the Orthodox parish practice of commemorating the dead ...). With the depletion of the depth of a person's relationship to death, his life also diminishes.

In this context, I see the event that took place in October this year - the publication of the book "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture" in the Moscow publishing house "Granat", completely timely, or, as the Christians say, providential. Thirty years have passed since the death of its author, a prominent pastor of the Russian diaspora, apologist, theologian of the Orthodox Church, Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983), but his books continue to be in demand in Russia by the reader not only churchly, but also secular - "The Historical Path of Orthodoxy" , “The Eucharist. The Sacrament of the Kingdom ”,“ Holy to the Saints ”,“ By Water and Spirit ”, the“ Diaries ”published posthumously and other works by Fr. Alexander is imbued with that special spirit of tragic but joyful Christianity, which is built around the great event of the resurrection of Christ, His victory over hell and death. Schmemann's theological thought attracts with its utmost honesty, lack of confessional inertia and a high prophetic degree, and his language, the language of Shmelev, Zaitsev, Bunin, is an example of wonderful Russian literature, which Schmemann himself knew and loved well.

The local council of the free Russian Church gave two escapes: the emigre survived and brought intellectual fruit, while the Russian one perished and manifested the feat of holiness.

The Liturgy of Death is a small book, but extremely capacious in content. She was born out of a series of lectures given by Fr. Alexander Schmemann in 1979 at St. Vladimir's Seminary in the USA, read in English, recorded on a tape recorder by one of the students and subsequently transcribed. The topic of these lectures was an important subject of thought for Fr. Alexandra - as the translator Elena Dorman notes, he was going to write a book about the Christian attitude towards death, its reflection (and distortion) in the liturgical practice of the Church and the view of the death of a secular society, but did not have time. And all the more remarkable is the current release of the translation of these preserved lectures, because it carefully preserved the living voice of the pastor, his figurative, often passionate speech, the main - Easter - message of all his liturgical thought.

In four chapters - four lectures: "The Development of Christian Funeral Rites", "Funeral: Rites and Customs", "Prayers for the Dead", "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture" - Schmemann shows how over the centuries the spirit of parousia gradually disappeared from the church consciousness how the pagan fear of death and the dreary obsession with the “beyond the grave”, penetrating the liturgical practice of commemorating the dead, supplanted the main essence of the Good News - the joy of the risen Christ and the confidence of Christians following the Risen One in their own resurrection. They ousted it - but could not completely replace it, the Easter meaning is alive in the Church, although it is obscured by distortions (the author methodically analyzes specific examples Orthodox funeral services and prayers, how and why it happened), and Christians are faced with the creative task of eliminating these darkness. However - and here the author's speech becomes comparable with the speech of the Israeli prophets and the great Russian satirists of the 19th century - these darkness served as the reason for the crushing of the attitude towards death outside the church fence. As Sergei Chapnin notes in the foreword to the book, “speaking about secularist society, Father Alexander defines it through his attitude to death - this is, first of all,“ a worldview, life experience, a way to see and, most importantly, live life as if she has nothing to do with death””. The loss of the vertical of being, the devaluation of the meaning of life, the dehumanization of a person who has deheed the Divine - Schmemann gives in his lectures examples from American reality in the 70s of the XX century, but they are also relevant for us, Russians of the XXI century. Bitter words about. Alexandra: “When you go to confession, try, starting now, to spend less time on your" impure thoughts "- they just flooded confession! - and to confess like this: “I confess to You, my Lord and my God, that I also contributed to the fact that this world has turned into a hell of consumerism and apostasy” ”are most applicable to those who today in Russia call themselves“ believers "...

As you know, the earth is full of rumors, the book "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture" was eagerly awaited long before its publication, and a fair part of the circulation immediately went from hand to hand. In my opinion, it is good sign- no matter how confessionally thinking and caring people in Russia position themselves, no matter with what criticism they approach church realities and events, they listen attentively to the word of the Orthodox Church. And the word about. Alexander Schmemann is precisely the word that is expected from the Church. The word about struggle and victory - but not over our neighbors, as is often declared from certain tribunes and pulpits, but about victory over the main enemy of humanity - death, the victory of Christ, which you and I are called to share.

Ksenia Luchenko

The book of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, The Liturgy of Death, first published 30 years after the author's death, was twice denied the stamp of the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church. This means that church censors do not recommend selling it in temple bookstores. Temples that still sell it, and there are several of them in Moscow, risk getting into trouble if a check comes up.

On the same days, when Schmemann's book was not approved by the Publishing Council, the text of Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, chairman of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations, was published on the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate, in which he urges "to overcome the" Parisian captivity "of Russian theology" and writes, that in the “Orthodox intellectual stratum, too many have completely surrendered themselves into the hands of the heirs of the diaspora theology, which in the second half of the 20th century tried to declare itself the mainstream and continues these attempts to this day. Yes, the Christian thinkers of the Diaspora did a great deal to preserve the faith among their flock. However, by definition, the diaspora is a rather marginal phenomenon in the context of the life of free Orthodox peoples. "

There is no collusion here: Archpriest Vsevolod does not influence the work of the Publishing Council. There is also no direct reference to Schmemann: the “marginal diaspora” is dozens of theologians who belonged to different ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Nevertheless, this coincidence speaks of a trend. On the desire to limit the significance of the works of Orthodox preachers in Europe and America to the applied preservation of the faith among emigrants (despite the fact that these preachers attracted to their communities the inhabitants of those countries in which they found themselves - the British, French, Americans). The desire to abandon their experience and thoughts as insignificant for those countries where Orthodoxy is declared the religion of the majority.

Schmemann looks at the modern attitude towards death, the dying and the deceased person through the prism of the full confidence in the resurrection of early Christian texts.

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann is one of the brightest heirs of the same “Parisian school” of Russian theology. He studied at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, where many passengers of the "philosophical ship" taught. Schmemann himself belongs to the second generation of émigrés, who were born outside of Russia and have never seen them.

In his text, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin contrasts the theologians-emigrants with the new martyrs - Orthodox priests and laity who remained in Russia and died in the first decades Soviet power, many of which are canonized. In fact, these are two sprouts from the same root. During the revolution, in 1917-1918, the Local Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church worked in the diocesan house in Likhov Lane in Moscow. It was the first church meeting free from government pressure in several centuries. Several bishops had already been shot, church property was already being requisitioned and churches were demolished, and several hundred people were arguing about Russification liturgical texts, the participation of priests in politics, the transition to Gregorian calendar, the attraction of women to church work, the reform of church government, a new translation of the Bible into Russian. Subsequently, about three hundred members of the Council passed through the camps or were shot, and several dozen ended up in exile, and among them are those who founded the St. Sergius Institute in Paris: Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), the last chief prosecutor of the Synod, historian Anton Kartashev. No development of theology and normal church life in the USSR it was impossible. The local council of the free Russian Church gave two escapes: the emigre survived and brought intellectual fruit, while the Russian one perished and manifested the feat of holiness.

The conciliators tried to decide how to arrange the life of the church community without relying on the state and without the restrictions imposed by the status of the official religion, how to learn again to be just the Church of Christ. Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann and other émigré priests (Archpriest John Meyendorff, Archpriest Georgy Florovsky) implemented this in America, where several Russian dioceses dating back to the 18th century united into the American Orthodox Church, which became legally independent in 1970. Schmemann left for America, where he began to teach at St. Vladimir's seminary and several American colleges, conducted religious programs on Radio Liberty, because life in his native Paris, among the Russian diaspora, had become cramped for him. As his widow Ulyana Shmeman (nee Osorgin) writes in her memoirs, Father Alexander suffered from the fact that among the Russian Parisian professors “the majority took for the truth only that which was previously in Russia and, in their opinion, should have remained the same and in the present and in the future. " Schmemann, on the other hand, was a man of the 20th century, acutely experiencing all his challenges, Russian by culture and European by fate.

Publishing house "Granat"

American Orthodoxy was distanced from Russia, did not depend on it politically and economically, while it was not fully incorporated into American society, accepting its members. American church (OCA -OrthodoxChurchinAmerica) was never thought of as a church of the diaspora: Romanians, Americans and Greeks entered and are included, services go to different languages... The Church of the Diaspora in full measure remained the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), the basis of self-identification of which was loyalty old Russia and the preservation of Russian piety.

Father Alexander Schmemann's theology is inseparable from this unique experience“Simply Orthodoxy,” when only the liturgy remains at the center of church life — living communion with God, around which the community of the faithful is gathered.

Schmemann was not only a church scientist and active apologist, but also one of the Russian writers of the 20th century, who, for some misunderstanding, was not included in the history of literature. His "Diaries", published in Russia in 2006, is a philosophical confessional prose, on the one hand, very characteristic of the era and environment, grounded by issues and events relevant for the 1970s, on the other, going back to the best examples of Christian literature. "Confessions" of Blessed Augustine, « Provitasua " Cardinal Newman and others. Schmemann, as the author of The Diaries, is a Christian left alone with modern world, without shock-absorbing ideology and ready-made schemes... He doubts, makes mistakes, experiences fear and disappointment, but he does not forget about God in anxiety.

A new book The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture differs from the previously published books of Father Alexander in that he did not write it himself. In the "Diaries" it is written only about the intention to collect a book with such a title, which Schmemann did not have time to realize before his death in December 1983. Preparing for the lecture cycle « LiturgyofDeath ", which he taught as an elective course in the late 70s, he only sketched theses and quotes. One of the students, Canadian Orthodox priest Robert Hutchen, dictated and transcribed the lectures. Only in 2008, the translator and editor of all the texts of Father Alexander, published in Russian, Elena Dorman learned that these records had survived. The published book is oral speech Schmemann, translated from English man, who for many years heard the author speak both languages, that is, translated as carefully as possible. In the Diaries there is evidence of Schmemann's work on these lectures: “Monday, September 9, 1974. Yesterday I began working on a new course: “ LiturgyofDeath "... And again I am amazed: as no one did this, no one noticed the monstrous degeneration of the religion of the resurrection into funeral self-gratification (with a tinge of sinister masochism; all these “cry and cry ...”). The fatal significance of Byzantium on the path of Orthodoxy! "

Saint John Chrysostom in the "Announcement", which is read in all Orthodox churches on Easter night, exclaims: “Death, where is your sting ?! Hell, where is your victory?<…>Christ is risen - and no one is dead in the grave! " This is the very essence of the Christian faith, which age-old layers have made less piercing and obvious, and which Father Alexander reminded his listeners, and now - his readers. In his book there is no emotionality inherent in Chrysostom. Schmemann is true to himself, calm and reasonable, even sad. He analyzes modern practices of attitudes towards death and burial - philosophical, medical, psychological and ritual, religious. He talks about how death becomes “aseptic”, how they hide it, try to “tame” it, but it still takes its toll. Father Alexander does not teach, does not impose faith in the resurrection and salvation through Christ. He himself goes with the reader the whole path of reasoning about death, about the fact that without death - terrible and inevitable - the fate of a person will not take place in its fullness. Schmemann looks at the modern attitude towards death, the dying and the deceased person through the prism of the full confidence in the resurrection of early Christian texts. This does not mean at all that Father Alexander proposes to artificially return to the state of man in the first centuries of our era. He only changes optics, tries to overcome the inertia of grief and existential despair, deeply understanding the inner structure modern people being one of them.

"She is alive!" - Father Alexander quotes in his book an inscription on the grave of a young girl in the Christian catacombs of Rome. “There are people who, many years after death, are perceived as alive,” Moscow priest Dmitry Ageev wrote on the Facebook wall 30 years after Schmemann's death. Probably, Father Alexander understood something about death, if he is still alive.

Lethargic sleep is medically a disease. The very word "lethargy" comes from the Greek lethe (oblivion) and argia (inaction). In a person who is in lethargic sleep, the life processes of the body slow down - metabolism decreases, breathing becomes superficial and imperceptible, reactions to external stimuli weaken or completely disappear.

Scientists have not established the exact causes of lethargic sleep, however, it was noticed that lethargy can occur after severe hysterical seizures, excitement, stress, with depletion of the body.

Lethargic sleep can be light or heavy. A patient with a severe "form" of lethargy may become similar to dead man... His skin becomes cold and pale, he does not react to light and pain, his breathing is so shallow that it may not be noticeable, and his pulse is practically not palpable. His physiological condition deteriorates - he loses weight, biological secretions stop.

Mild lethargy causes less radical changes in the body - the patient remains motionless, relaxed, but he maintains even breathing and partial perception of the world.

The end and beginning of lethargy is impossible to predict. However, like the duration of being in a dream: there have been cases when the patient slept for many years. For example, the famous academician Ivan Pavlov described a case when a certain sick Kachalkin was in a lethargic sleep for 20 years, from 1898 to 1918. His heart beat very rarely - 2/3 times a minute. In the Middle Ages, there were a lot of stories about how people who were in lethargic sleep were buried alive. These stories often had a real basis and frightened people, so much so that, for example, the writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol asked to bury him only when signs of decomposition appeared on his body. Moreover, during the exhumation of the writer's remains in 1931, it was discovered that his skull had been turned on its side. Experts explained the change in the position of the skull by the pressure of the rotted lid of the coffin.

At present, doctors have learned to distinguish lethargy from real death, but they have not yet been able to find a "remedy" for lethargic sleep.

What is the difference between lethargy and coma?

The distant properties of these two physical phenomena exists. Coma occurs as a result of physical stress, injury, damage. Nervous system at the same time is in a depressed state, and physical life artificially supported. As with lethargic sleep, the person does not respond to external stimuli. You can get out of a coma in the same way as with lethargy, on your own, but more often this happens with the help of therapy and treatment.

Burial alive - is it real?

First of all, let us determine that deliberate burial alive is a criminal offense and is regarded as murder with special cruelty (Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

However, one of the most common human phobias, taphophobia, is the fear of being buried alive unintentionally, by mistake. In fact, there is very little chance of being buried alive. Modern science there are known ways how to determine that a person has died for sure.

Firstly, if doctors have a suspicion of the possibility of lethargic sleep, they must remove an electrocardiogram or an electroencephalogram, where activity is recorded. human brain and cardiac activity. If a person is alive, such a procedure will give a result, even if the patient does not respond to external stimuli.

Further, medical examiners conduct a thorough examination of the patient's body, in search of signs of death. It can be as obvious damage to the organs of the body, incompatible with life (for example, head injury), and rigor mortis, cadaveric spots, signs of decay. In addition, a person lies in the morgue for 1-2 days, during which visible cadaveric signs should appear.

If in doubt, capillary bleeding is checked with a slight incision, and a chemical blood test is performed. In addition, doctors check the general picture of the patient's health - whether there were signs that could indicate that the patient fell into a lethargic sleep. For example, whether he had hysterical seizures, whether he lost weight, whether he complained of headaches and weakness, or a decrease in blood pressure.

Our multi- and poly-world is full of value systems in all respects. Every state, ethnic group, every generation, every religion, party, community, every person has a system of values. I repeat, there are many of them, they stick out and rise, they form huge colonies of stalagmites, rows and chains, palisades and walls. Yes, according to the word of the saint, these partitions do not reach the sky - but in our earthly existence they separate us almost completely. However, there is a stone that lies at the base of every Babylonian pillar, the attitude towards it in one or another system of values determines the entire system, a stone that every person born into the world tries to move from its place - and no one succeeds: death.

The attitude towards death determines the attitude towards life. The lifestyles of people, one of whom believes death to be the inevitable end of everything and dreams of only delaying this end for as long as possible with the help of medical technology, and the other - only by a transition to eternal life, are different, like the running styles of a sprinter and a marathon runner. The lifestyle of the sprinters' society, conventionally called the "consumer society", is the style of today's Russia: death in its various forms, from savoring terrorist attacks and catastrophes to reporting from the life of hospices, has become perhaps a media topic for discussions on Facebook, death in the form of a dismembered TV screen does not require empathy, but just a glass of popcorn, death seems to surprise no one - but at the same time, the modern Russian prefers not to ask the most important question "how will I die?" the funeral industry (of which nowadays, alas, the Orthodox parish practice of commemorating the dead too often becomes a part ...). With the depletion of the depth of a person's relationship to death, his life also diminishes.

The local council of the free Russian Church gave two escapes: the emigre survived and brought intellectual fruit, while the Russian one perished and manifested the feat of holiness.

In four chapters - four lectures: "The Development of Christian Funeral Rites", "Funeral: Rites and Customs", "Prayers for the Dead", "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture" - Schmemann shows how over the centuries the spirit of parousia gradually disappeared from the church consciousness how the pagan fear of death and the dreary obsession with the “beyond the grave”, penetrating the liturgical practice of commemorating the dead, supplanted the main essence of the Good News - the joy of the risen Christ and the confidence of Christians following the Risen One in their own resurrection. They displaced - but could not completely supplant, the Paschal meaning is alive in the Church, although it is obscured by distortions (the author methodically examines, using specific examples of Orthodox funeral services and prayers, how and why this happened), and Christians are faced with the creative task of eliminating these darkness. However - and here the author's speech becomes comparable with the speech of the Israeli prophets and the great Russian satirists of the 19th century - these darkness served as the reason for the crushing of the attitude towards death outside the church fence. As Sergei Chapnin notes in the foreword to the book, “speaking about secularist society, Father Alexander defines it through his attitude to death - this is, first of all,“ a worldview, life experience, a way to see and, most importantly, live life as if she has nothing to do with death””. The loss of the vertical of being, the devaluation of the meaning of life, the dehumanization of a person who has deheed the Divine - Schmemann gives in his lectures examples from American reality in the 70s of the XX century, but they are also relevant for us, Russians of the XXI century. Bitter words about. Alexandra: “When you go to confession, try, starting now, to spend less time on your" impure thoughts "- they just flooded confession! - and to confess like this: “I confess to You, my Lord and my God, that I also contributed to the fact that this world has turned into a hell of consumerism and apostasy” ”are most applicable to those who today in Russia call themselves“ believers "...

As you know, the earth is full of rumors, the book "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture" was eagerly awaited long before its publication, and a fair part of the circulation immediately went from hand to hand. In my opinion, this is a good sign - no matter how confessionally thinking and caring people in Russia position themselves, no matter with what criticism they approach church realities and events, they listen carefully to the word of the Orthodox Church. And the word about. Alexander Schmemann is precisely the word that is expected from the Church. The word about struggle and victory - but not over our neighbors, as is often declared from certain tribunes and pulpits, but about victory over the main enemy of humanity - death, the victory of Christ, which you and I are called to share.

Ksenia Luchenko

Schmemann looks at the modern attitude towards death, the dying and the deceased person through the prism of the full confidence in the resurrection of early Christian texts.

In his text, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin contrasts the theologians-emigrants with the new martyrs - Orthodox priests and laity who remained in Russia and died in the first decades of Soviet power, many of whom were canonized. In fact, these are two sprouts from the same root. During the revolution, in 1917-1918, the Local Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church worked in the diocesan house in Likhov Lane in Moscow. It was the first church meeting free from government pressure in several centuries. Several bishops had already been shot, already with might and main requisitioned church property and destroyed churches, and several hundred people argued about the Russification of liturgical texts, the participation of priests in politics, the transition to the Gregorian calendar, the attraction of women to church work, the reform of church government, a new translation of the Bible into Russian language. Subsequently, about three hundred members of the Council passed through the camps or were shot, and several dozen ended up in exile, and among them are those who founded the St. Sergius Institute in Paris: Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky), the last chief prosecutor of the Synod, historian Anton Kartashev. No development of theology and normal church life in the USSR was possible. The local council of the free Russian Church gave two escapes: the emigre survived and brought intellectual fruit, while the Russian one perished and manifested the feat of holiness.

The conciliators tried to decide how to arrange the life of the church community without relying on the state and without the restrictions imposed by the status of the official religion, how to learn again to be just the Church of Christ. Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann and other émigré priests (Archpriest John Meyendorff, Archpriest Georgy Florovsky) implemented this in America, where several Russian dioceses dating back to the 18th century united into the American Orthodox Church, which became legally independent in 1970. Schmemann left for America, where he began to teach at St. Vladimir's Seminary and several American colleges, conducted religious programs on Radio Liberty, because life in his native Paris, among the Russian diaspora, had become cramped for him. As his widow Ulyana Shmeman (nee Osorgin) writes in her memoirs, Father Alexander suffered from the fact that among the Russian Parisian professors “the majority took for the truth only that which was previously in Russia and, in their opinion, should have remained the same and in the present and in the future. " Schmemann, on the other hand, was a man of the 20th century, acutely experiencing all his challenges, Russian by culture and European by fate.

Publishing house "Granat"

American Orthodoxy was distanced from Russia, did not depend on it politically and economically, while it was not fully incorporated into American society, accepting its members. American church (OCA -OrthodoxChurchinAmerica) It was never thought of as a church of the diaspora: Romanians, Americans and Greeks entered and are there, services are held in different languages. The Church of the Diaspora in full measure remained the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), whose self-identification was based on loyalty to old Russia and the preservation of Russian piety.

The theology of Father Alexander Schmemann is inseparable from this unique experience of “simple Orthodoxy,” when only the liturgy remains at the center of church life - living communion with God, around which the community of the faithful is gathered.

Schmemann was not only a church scientist and active apologist, but also one of the Russian writers of the 20th century, who, for some misunderstanding, was not included in the history of literature. His "Diaries", published in Russia in 2006, is a philosophical confessional prose, on the one hand, very characteristic of the era and environment, grounded by issues and events relevant for the 1970s, on the other, going back to the best examples of Christian literature. "Confessions" of Blessed Augustine, « Provitasua " Cardinal Newman and others. Schmemann, as the author of The Diaries, is a Christian who is left alone with the modern world, without a shock-absorbing ideology and ready-made schemes. He doubts, makes mistakes, experiences fear and disappointment, but he does not forget about God in anxiety.

The new book "The Liturgy of Death and Contemporary Culture" differs from the previously published books of Father Alexander in that he did not write it himself. In the "Diaries" it is written only about the intention to collect a book with such a title, which Schmemann did not have time to realize before his death in December 1983. Preparing for the lecture cycle « LiturgyofDeath ", which he taught as an elective course in the late 70s, he only sketched theses and quotes. One of the students, Canadian Orthodox priest Robert Hutchen, recorded the lectures on a dictaphone and transcribed them. Only in 2008, the translator and editor of all the texts of Father Alexander, published in Russian, Elena Dorman learned that these records had survived. The published book is Schmemann's oral speech, translated from English by a man who for many years heard the author speak both languages, that is, translated as carefully as possible. In the Diaries there is evidence of Schmemann's work on these lectures: “Monday, September 9, 1974. Yesterday I began working on a new course: “ LiturgyofDeath "... And again I am amazed: as no one did this, no one noticed the monstrous degeneration of the religion of the resurrection into funeral self-gratification (with a tinge of sinister masochism; all these “cry and cry ...”). The fatal significance of Byzantium on the path of Orthodoxy! "

St. John Chrysostom, in the "Announcement", which is read in all Orthodox churches on Easter night, exclaims: "Death, where is your sting ?! Hell, where is your victory?<…>Christ is risen - and no one is dead in the grave! " This is the very essence of the Christian faith, which age-old layers have made less piercing and obvious, and which Father Alexander reminded his listeners, and now - his readers. In his book there is no emotionality inherent in Chrysostom. Schmemann is true to himself, calm and reasonable, even sad. He analyzes modern practices of attitudes towards death and burial - philosophical, medical, psychological and ritual, religious. He talks about how death becomes “aseptic”, how they hide it, try to “tame” it, but it still takes its toll. Father Alexander does not teach, does not impose faith in the resurrection and salvation through Christ. He himself goes with the reader the whole path of reasoning about death, about the fact that without death - terrible and inevitable - the fate of a person will not take place in its fullness. Schmemann looks at the modern attitude towards death, the dying and the deceased person through the prism of the full confidence in the resurrection of early Christian texts. This does not mean at all that Father Alexander proposes to artificially return to the state of man in the first centuries of our era. He only changes optics, tries to overcome the inertia of grief and existential despair, deeply understanding the inner structure of modern people, being one of them.