unity – a thought from father alexander schmemann

In order to understand the depths of this danger and its genuine horror, one must first of all sense the essence of what we have termed “unity from below,” in contradistinction to the “unity from above.”  It is that unity that, however much it is fallen, dead and “lying in evil,” lives to the same degree that “this world” lives and that, however much it obscures and distorts, is placed in it by God.  The devil could turn man, and in him, the world, away from God, he could poison and enfeeble life through sin, permeate it with mortality and death.  One thing he could not and cannot do: change the very essence of life as unity.  He could not and cannot because only God is the creator and giver of life.  Only from him is there life, the law of which, however much life is perverted by sin, remains the law of unity.  Everything that lives, in every pulse of life, lives through unity, awaits it and strives toward it.

The substitution, the victory of the “prince of this world,” however, lies in the fact that he has torn this unity away from God, its source, content and goal, and thus has made unity an end-in-itself or, in the language of faith, an idol.  Unity, which is from God, has ceased to be unity with God and in God, who alone fulfils it as genuine unity and genuine life.  Unity becomes its own content, its own “god.”

Here, on the one hand, because unity is from God, it continues to shine in “this” fallen world and to create its life: in family and friends, in the sense of belonging to a particular people and of responsibility for its fate, in love, compassion and charity, in art, its flights and transports to the eternal, heavenly and beautiful, in the highest quests of the mind, in the divine beauty of goodness and humility–in everything, in other words, that exists in man and in the world from the image and likeness of God, darkened but not destroyed.  And, on the other hand, to the degree that it ceases to be unity with God and in God and is transformed into an end-in-itself and an idol, it becomes not only “easily transformable,” unstable and easily shattered, but also the generator of every new division, evil, violence and hatred.  Itself being turned downward–to the earthly and natural, to things below–and regarding flesh and blood as its principle and source, this unity from below begins to divide in the same measure that it unifies.  Love for one’s own, unity among one’s own, revolves around enmity toward the “foreign,” what is not one’s own, and separation from it, so that unity itself proves to be above all a type of chauvinism, self-affirmation and self-defense against something or someone.  Everything in the world lives through unity, and everything in the world is divided by this unity and constantly divides itself into collisions and struggles of “unities” that have become idols.  And nowhere does the diabolical essence of this substitution become more apparent that in those utopias of unity that constitute the content and inner motivation of all contemporary ideologies without exception, both “left” and “right”–ideologies in which the diabolical lie sells itself as the ultimate dehumanization of man, as the offering of man as a sacrifice to the “unity” that has become a complete idol.  The Eucharist, Fr. Alexander Schmemann