A Thought from Father Alexander Schmemann

What the modern man does not understand, that to which he has become blind and deaf, is thus the fundamental Christian vision of death, in which the “biological” or physical death is not the whole death, not even its ultimate essence.  For in this Christian vision, death is above all a spiritual reality, of which one can partake while being alive, from which one can be free while lying in the grave.  Death here is man’s separation from life, and this means from God Who is the only Giver of life, Who Himself is Life.  Death is the opposite term, not of immortality–for just as he did not create himself, so also man has no power to annihilate himself, to return to that nihil from which he was called into existence by God, and in this sense he is immortal–but of the true life “which was the light of man” (John 1:2).  This true life man has the power to reject and thus to die so that his very “immortality” becomes eternal death.  And this life he has rejected.  This is the Original Sin, the initial cosmical catastrophe about which we know not “historically,” not rationally but by means of that “religious sense,” that mysterious inner certitude in man which no sin could ever destroy, which makes him always and everywhere seek salvation.

Thus the whole death is not the biological phenomenon of death but the spiritual reality whose “sting…is sin” (!Cor. 15:56)–the rejection by man of the only true life given to him by God.  “Sin entered the world and death by sin” (Rom. 5:12): there is no other life but God’s life; the one who rejects it dies because life without God is death.  This is the spiritual death, the one that fills the entire life with “dying” and, being separation from God, makes man’s life solitude and suffering, fear and illusion, enslavement to sin, and enmity, meaninglessness, lust and emptiness. It is this spiritual death that makes man’s physical death truly death, the ultimate fruit of his death-filled life, the horror of the biblical “sheol” where the very survival, the very “immortality” is but the “presence of the absence,” a total separation, total solitude, total darkness.  And as long as we do not recover this Christian vision and “feeling” of death, of death as the horrible and sinful law and content of our life (and not only of our “death”), of death as “reigning” in this world (Rom. 5:14), we will not be able to understand the significance of Christ’s Death for us and for the world.  For it is this spiritual death that Christ came to destroy and to abolish; it is from this spiritual death that He came to save us.  (from Of Water and the Spirit)