by Alexander Schmemann Mankind is hungry for God’s nourishment. The whole of creation was divinely intended to provide the human person with a divinely designed environment in which all things would come together in fulfilling man’s hunger. The world was intended to be man’s food, and his eating of it becomes a communion with the life of God. Thus, in a mystic sense, all of creation was to be a Eucharist which man would eat in order to commune with God. “It is divine love made food, made life for man.1 The human longing for some communion with the ‘nous’ or ‘deity’ underpins our human ritualization of meals. In every culture, there is some importance attached to the family meal that is greater than the need to ingest and digest for survival. The eating of food sacramentalizes the instinctual hunger for higher things, for a communion with things which are beyond the physical. Meals are still rites when they are true meals. The authors of Genesis caught that longing for God, that need for nourishment from the divine pantry, and they placed it at the center of the great story of Adam and his sojourning in the garden of Eden. They place eating in the Garden of God’s greatness, and the loss of that source of food in the very heart of their explanation of the Fall. Let us examine how images of hunger, eating and the importance of choosing good food are used to explain the Fall of Adam. The blessing of God by Adam Mankind is the Thanks-giver The Fruit that was not our food Adam decided that thanks for joy and satisfaction are no longer due to God, but to the world. Adam eats forbidden food and so loses his place as the cosmic priest. Instead of being the priest of the created world, blessing God for its beauty and magnificence, Adam becomes a slave to the world, making his bread by the sweat of his brow. The new master of man is Material world, no longer God. But worse than all this is the great debasing of the world by Adam. God made a world in which all things are holy, in which all things are lifted up by Adam as priestly sacrifice, in which all things are so God-infused that Adam has to bless and praise God for each one. What Adam had done is to make the world the enemy of God; he has set up material things as other objects of thanks to oppose God. It was God’s intention that Adam would sanctify and lift up all things to show their divine origin and purpose; instead, Adam has lifted up alternative sources of joy and fulfillment. Christ is the New Adam 2 Alexander Schmemann. For the life of the world. Originally published in 1963 by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 15 3 Alexander Schmemann. For the life of the world. Originally published in 1963 by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 17
When God makes the world, he first names all the planets and the moon. But when it comes to the naming of the food and the animals, it is Adam who gives each one its name. To name something is to bless God for it, to recognize that the food or the animal is part of God’s gift to us. “All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life. 2 We cannot live without food, and Adam’s blessing of God for the food is the human race’s acknowledgement of God’s making provision for our lives.
Man is the one who blesses God for his greatness and generosity. He receives from God, knows who the giver is, and then gives thanks by blessing God in return. This giving thanks is a type of Eucharist, a song of thanks and praise for gifts received. This primordial, pre-Lapsarian Eucharist continues as long as Adam stands where a priest must, awed in God’s shadow. The priest has to be in communion with God, knowing God as the object of life and thanks. When the priest is no longer awed by the awesomeness of the divine Giver, when the priest loses sight of God as the one from whom all good things come and to whom all praise is due, then the Eucharist ceases. The species of the cosmic Eucharist is no less than the cosmos itself, and Adam is the cosmic priest.
The Fall of Man in Genesis happens when Adam forgets that all his food must come from God. He goes out and he eats that which is not God-intended food. The blessing of the food represented Adam’s joyful acceptance of God’s providence for him; his eating of the forbidden fruit represents his decision that life is its own end and that he can be sated by something other than God. He eating of the fruit is the moment when humans decide that the great thirst is satisfied with material goods, money and sexual joy. The eating of the forbidden fruit is that moment when humans turn away from the divine feast as their food and forget that God is the author of their happiness. Schmemann writes that “For one who thinks that food in itself is the source if life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death.”3
The sins of the first Adam require that a New Adam come into the world. That New Adam, Christ is the new priest, who takes all the things of the cosmos, recapitulates them into the world made new in Himself and offers thanks for them to the Father. He is the second priest of the cosmos, making all things holy by his sacrifice of praise. His sacrifice is the Cross. In him the whole world is made holy and the dichotomy between material and spiritual worlds is removed.
1 Alexander Schmemann. For the life of the world. Originally published in 1963 by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 14