  It is shown that an (anti-)self-dual homogeneous vacuum gluon field appears
in a natural way within the problem of calculation of the QCD partition
function in the form of Euclidean functional integral with periodic boundary
conditions. There is no violation of cluster property within this formulation,
nor are parity, color and rotational symmetries broken explicitly. The massless
limit of the product of the quark masses and condensates, $m_f \langle
\bar\psi_f \psi_f \rangle$, is calculated to all loop orders. This quantity
does not vanish and is proportional to the gluon condensate appearing due to
the nonzero strength of the vacuum gluon field. We conclude that the gluon
condensate can be considered as an order parameter both for confinement and
chiral symmetry breaking.
