Alexander Schmemann. 2021. A Voice for Our Time: Radio Liberty Talks. Translated by Alexis Vinogradov and Nathan Williams. 2 vols. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Reading this collection of radio addresses by Orthodox priest and theologian Fr. Alexander Schmemann, one might at first think it mistitled. The fact that Radio Liberty would even be interested in a priest’s defense of religion and his musings on the light of his Russian Orthodox faith may seem bizarre. Radio Liberty sought to broadcast messages of democracy and liberty into the Soviet Union. Why not give airtime to a political theorist or economist? What could theology and religion possibly contribute to the cause of liberty in the Cold War?
Thus, these essays, originally given as radio talks in the 1960s, might seem to be a voice for another time, now far distant from us today. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Today Russia still threatens liberty in Europe, but it does so in the name of its historic Orthodox Christianity, and shamefully with the blessing of some of Moscow’s hierarchs.
The words of C. S. Lewis make the strongest argument for why this book belongs to us today, for our time. In his introduction to Saint Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, he wrote, “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” This collection aptly serves that end.
Soviet propaganda presumed religious faith and freedom were inseparable. Therefore, the USSR sought to expunge Russia’s religious heritage—and anyone who still affirmed it—from its national memory. School curriculum lauded the triumph of “science” in defeating the superstitions of religion, Russian Orthodox Christianity in particular. Low estimates number those of this church martyred by the Soviet Union at more than one million. Why would Radio Liberty broadcast the often-sermonic reflections of an Orthodox priest? Because, if only by cultural polarity, the West also still largely assumed that faith, freedom, and democracy were inseparable.
Schmemann never lived in Russia. He was born in Estonia, his family soon after moving to Paris, from which, his son Serge informs readers in his introduction, he moved to the United States when he was twenty-nine years old. Schmemann, in fact, was thoroughly American, even to the point of founding, with others, the Orthodox Church in America, which obtained autocephaly from Moscow in 1970. Yet despite this, one cannot escape how thoroughly Russian he was in these talks, too, constantly referencing luminaries of Russian culture—poets, novelists, scientists, philosophers, and theologians—all of whom bore witness to the lie of totalitarian atheism.
Schmemann defends faith, but he is no apologist; he does not try to prove his faith, preferring instead a perspective reminiscent of Blaise Pascal, writing, “The world is not divided into believers and unbelievers, but into believers who are constantly tested by unbelief, and unbelievers who are constantly tested by faith. No proofs have made the believer believe—by no means! This is why he seeks evidence of his faith: because it is constantly being eroded by unbelief” (1:21). Yet his talks provide a powerful counterpoint prohibited in Soviet Russia: faith also erodes unbelief.
Schmemann’s faith served as the foundation for a personalistic worldview: “Christ did not utter a single word about the social and political problems of his time. His call was wholly directed to the individual, to this or that person, to you yourself. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that historically Christianity brought about the most radical of all revolutions, for its teaching about the person transformed from within the psychology of government and society, to say nothing of all world culture” (1:85). More to the point of the cause of liberty in the Cold War, he insists, “[T]he only thing countering totalitarianism is the religious concept of man. No science, no technology has any knowledge of the personal, nor can it” (1:187). Thus, slowly over a series of what, in contemporary terms, read like well-written blog posts, Schmemann pointed his hearers, and points his readers today, to something more fundamental than the right combination of liberal policies or institutions: the essential root from which that “delicate fruit” of liberty, to use Lord Acton’s phrase, grew from Christian civilization, in the East as well as the West.
He points to a road unfortunately less traveled—but still, one must affirm, traveled—in the East, and a way as relevant for our time as the twentieth century. Those who truly desire freedom for Russia today need, like Schmemann, to first love it with its culture and history. Then, like him, they can point to examples like Saint Herman, metropolitan of Kazan, and Saint Philip of Moscow, who stood up to the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible and suffered martyrdom for the cause not only of faith but freedom (2:104–7). Russian opponents of liberty might accuse a political theorist or economist of spreading Western propaganda, but that straw man withers in the flame of Russia’s own saints and luminaries, not to mention the shining witness of Schmemann himself.
And now, when faith, though miraculously revived, is often twisted for political ends in Russia, we find it waning in the West, where a renewed call to the reality and importance of objective Truth remains as timeless as ever. Perhaps tragically, then, for the sake of our freedom as much as Russia’s, these broadcasts are indeed a voice for our time.
Dylan Pahman
Acton Institute
dpahman@acton.org