The World: an end in itself?

I have been re-reading a lot of Alexander Schmemann recently and I find him to complement Stăniloae very well, particularly in their mutual understanding of the world as the means by which humans maintain communion with God. The material therefore having a purpose not only of itself (for material needs), but also beyond itself (as a means of accessing the metaphysical). 

I quote a paragraph from Schmemann's popular work 'For the Life of the World' (p. 17)

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the "sacrament" of God's presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

The world is dead. Distressing as that sounds, it is not the end. The world is animated by life, the presence of God within the world, permeating through all by being glorified by His own creation. 

The Eucharist is where the world and the divine (the life), is met. To receive of the Eucharist is to receive of the living food, the food which does not perish. Rather than the human, being the hungry consumer, eating of the dead flesh in order to receive energy to survive, the reception of the body of Christ, mystically present in the Eucharist, infuses himself (the life of eternity) with the communicant. 

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. (John 6:35 KJV)

The world therefore is a medium by which we come to know and recognise God. It is the means by which God reveals Himself to us, and it is the means by which we are reconciled with God through the sacraments. Sacraments make use of worldly physical things in order to restore them to their ordained purpose, but also on account of our creaturely weakness to perceive the metaphysical 'realities' of the heavenly host etc., as being present.