The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once quipped: “In olden days people said, ‘What a shame things in the world don’t go in the way the priest preaches.’ But the time may be coming, not least with the help of philosophy, when we shall be able to say, ‘How fortunate that things in the world don’t go in the way the priest preaches, since at least there’s a little meaning to life, but none in his sermon.’”[1] By this Kierkegaard voiced his alarm that the preachers of his day would so imbibe a philosophy inimical to real Christian faith that their witness to the world would thereby be emptied of substantive, existential import. In Kierkegaard’s case, the particular philosophy that most seriously threatened true Christianity was “the System,” his term of derision for the German idealism of Georg F.W. Hegel.
Beginning in 1917 when the Bolsheviks first seized power, Russian Christians for three generations were forced to wage war with another “System,” a militant atheism imposed upon them in part by a leftist version of the same Hegelianism. But alas, in 1991 the USSR collapsed, leaving post-Soviet Russia in search of healing for a national soul ravaged by seventy years of iron-fisted communist rule. Because for a thousand years the Orthodox Church has been so intimately tied to Russia’s history, it is only natural for the Church at the dawn of the new millennium to play a significant role in the nation’s present hopes for renewal. The question that comes to mind, however, is whether the Orthodox Church of today can and will produce in adequate numbers the type of ministers who combine apologetic depth with cultural relevance by which to meet the most pressing religious needs of a land for so long deprived of any such freedom. In so striving, the Church could do no better than to emulate the example bequeathed to them by the late Father Alexander Men, “the man sent from God to be missionary to the wild tribe of the Soviet intelligentsia.”[2] Russian Orthodox lay theologian Vladimir Zelinsky claims that Fr. Men “established the greatest and, however one looked at it, the most active parish in Moscow – perhaps in all of Russia. . . . It was composed primarily of converts, those returning to the Church, or rather discovering the Church in that milieu where the very subject of God was rarely heard.”[3]
Similarly, historian James Billington considers Fr. Men, a man who “embodied and advocated a Russian Orthodox Christianity whose ecumenism would reach out not only to other Christians and to the unchurched, but also to the other, related prophetic monotheisms that needed to be honored within the Russian Federation,” to be one of “two especially admired martyrs of the 1990s [who] might conceivably point the way toward renewal within the Church as well as the broader society.”[4]Consequently, the aim of this essay will be to address this basic question: What specific personal and philosophical qualities enabled Fr. Alexander Men to establish such a dynamic parish and become for over twenty years perhaps the most sought after priest in Russia among both Christians and the unchurched, all the while in a culture that had for decades suffered the sustained attack of a militant, institutionalized atheism? While no essay of this length is likely to provide a fully satisfying answer to this question, a good place to at least start one’s query is with the legendary Optina, the monastery from which Fr. Men inherited his philosophy of openness to the world.
Since the birth of Christianity two thousand years ago, followers of Christ have always wrestled with the tension that inherently comes with being “in the world but not of it.” Christians who have sought to authentically live out their faith are intimately acquainted with what Fr. Men called “the dialectic in which we have to distinguish the two understandings of the world.”[5] The biblical essence of that dialectic can be captured with reference to the Apostle John’s evangel that “God so loved the world” alongside the same author’s injunction to “love not the world.”[6] Viewed superficially these two verses can seem to represent an irresolvable paradox. But even while theologically there is no contradiction here, nonetheless believers throughout the ages have wrestled with finding a practical and livable resolution. As one familiar metaphor puts it, how should the Christian tend to and live in the “garden of holiness,” without being either corrupted by or ignoring altogether the “wilderness of impurity”? How should one “go into all the world to make disciples,” but also “come out from among them and be separate”?[7] In the two thousand year history of the church, East or West, there have always been those who have sought refuge in one extreme or the other, either walling oneself up in the garden to escape the pollution of the world, or trafficking freely in the wilderness, fully embracing the spirit of the age.
The Puritan Roger Williams is one thinker familiar within the American religious experience who used this very garden/wilderness metaphor to illustrate his sometimes extreme view of separationism. Author Stephen Carter explains: “For Williams . . . the garden was the domain of the church, the gentle, fragile region where the people of God would congregate and try to build lives around the Divine Word. The wilderness was the world lying beyond the garden wall, uncivilized and potentially quite threatening to the garden. The wall separated the two, and the reason for the wall was not that the wilderness needed protection from the garden – the wall was there to protect the garden from the wilderness.”[8]Philip Hamburger in his book Separation of Church and State adds: “So severe was William’s division between the spiritual and the worldly that they seemed almost irrelevant to each other, leaving worldly activities – or at least those so specialized as to seem secular – unburdened by spiritual concerns.”[9]
The point of this passing mention of Roger Williams is not to unfairly criticize a straw man, but to contrast one particularly recognizable view of separatism, for which Williams is a notable representative, with another quite different one that while not entirely foreign to American religion, may be less familiar at least in its terminology. I speak here of Fr. Men’s idea of the “churching of the world.” Rather than the radical distinction between the sacred and profane as is common among the more severe separatists, Fr. Men’s view was practically a denial of the secular, at least as a realm existing on its own.[10] Sociology professor and Orthodox priest Michael Plekon elaborates: “Much of Father Men’s writing and work can be characterized as what theologians of the Russian renaissance called churching. This is the cosmic plan of salvation history, begun in the Old Covenant and fulfilled by Christ in the New through the Incarnation, the Fathers’ vision of all things being gathered and restored in Christ. By extension, it came to also mean the building up and renewal of authentic ecclesial consciousness and existence, either among those who knew nothing of the faith or among those for whom it had become reduced to a few ritualistic observances.”[11]
Nevertheless, Fr. Alexander understood quite well the struggle of being “in the world but not of it,” along with the ever-present temptation to fall into extremes in a vain attempt to fully resolve that tension. In Moscow in 1989, Fr. Men gave a lecture on this very topic in which to illustrate his main point he drew upon literary figures quite familiar to the Russian mind, the two monks from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamasov who practiced polar opposite views of monastic life, Ferapont and Zosima. Dostoevsky himself drew his inspiration for the character of Zosima from his own personal experience with the famous monastic community of Optyna Pustyn, or Optina for short. In the nineteenth century, Optina found itself at the forefront of a religious revival led by Seraphim of Sarov. In his work The Icon and the Axe James Billington writes concerning this renaissance: “The spiritual intensity generated by the new monastic communities which Seraphim set up began to attract a new kind of pilgrim – secularized intellectuals – back for visits if not pilgrimages. The famous Optyna Pustyn, to the south of Moscow, became a center of counseling and of spiritual retreats for many of Russia’s most famous nineteenth-century thinkers: [including] . . . Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solov’ev.”[12]Sergei Hackel, the late Vicar-General of the Russian Orthodox Church in the British Isles, explained that the basic spirit of Optina was that the fruit of spiritual guidance “was not to be cherished and secreted away. Rather did the great mid-nineteenth-century elders of Optino . . . make themselves available to a continuous stream of pilgrims and enquirers.”[13]
Fr. Men personally came under the influence of Optina through his early upbringing in the Catacomb church, the short-lived branch of Russian Orthodoxy that refused compromise with the state in the earliest years of Soviet rule. Fr. Seraphim Batyukov, a disciple of the startsy (elders) of Optina, for many years undertook the spiritual direction of Alexander’s extended family, heard young Alexander’s first confession, and before his death in 1942 passed on the responsibility for Alexander’s spiritual upbringing to the likeminded Fr. Ieraks and Fr. Piotr Shipkov.[14] That stewardship fell eventually to Mother Maria, the abbess of a small community of nuns in Zagorsk.[15] In a personal letter translated and republished in Hamant’s biography, Fr. Alexander gratefully acknowledged the enduring impact that Mother Maria had upon him: “She lived an ascetic and prayerful life . . . [yet] had a trait similar to the character of the startsy of Optina, a trait so dear to them: openness to people, to their problems, and to their searching; openness to the world. It is precisely this quality that drew the best representatives of Russian culture to Optina. . . . This idea of dialogue with the world has stuck with me all my life; it should never be interrupted.”[16]
To Fr. Men, Zosima represented “a kind of open variant, an open understanding of Orthodoxy and an open understanding of Christianity.”[17] In sharp contrast was Ferapont, “a famous ascetic, a powerful old man who walked around bare-foot, dressed in a rough belted overcoat, like a beggar.”[18] But while finding fault with a Ferapont-like Christianity, a faith completely walled-off from the outside world, Fr. Men nevertheless refused to altogether condemn the ascetic life, acknowledging that “it contains some of the richest experience of self-observation and the richest experience of inner practice, that is, of spiritual work designed to make the human personality grow.”[19] One who would develop a deep spirituality must out of sober necessity fortify his own soul from the influences of an often hostile world, a reality applicable not just to individuals but to whole Christian communities as well. But at the same time, and herein lies the great tension, one must take care to not pervert the good judgment of exercising a reasonable sense of spiritual self-defense into the unjustifiable conviction that one should therefore hide within an impenetrable fortress or quarantine oneself on some private reservation.
Hoping to reconcile Zosima and Ferapont, Fr. Men looked to the philosophies of Vladimir Solovyev (1853-1900) and Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948), two figures who loomed large in all of Fr. Men’s life and ministry. Solovyev and Berdyaev were influential to Russia as a whole inasmuch as they both, upon breaking ranks with the intelligentsia, consequently helped to spearhead a religious renaissance in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries, a genuinely Christian movement which sharply contrasted Russia’s increasing acceptance of atheism and Marxism. Nicolas Zernov explains that though the Russian intelligentsia had no uniform religious outlook, as a whole it “was particularly attracted to western atheism and materialism and regarded them as a sign of enlightenment.”[20] Beginning with Solovyev (and Dostoevsky) in the late nineteenth century, however, many among its ranks “revolted against the intelligentsia’s creed and began to preach another solution to the pressing Russian social and political problems. . . . [Those who parted with the intelligentsia] were read and admired, but their call to follow their example, be reconciled with the Church and seek in Christianity the answer to man’s search for truth fell on deaf ears.”[21] By the early twentieth century, Berdyaev too had recovered his Christian faith, whereupon in one of the most important works – an essay included in the famous Vekhi collection – he struck a devastating blow to the crude utilitarian epistemology of the intelligentsia, their peculiar view that truth was valuable only as it served the socialist cause.[22]
Solovyev, widely recognized as the greatest philosopher of the Russian Silver Age, was one of those intellectuals who frequented the Optina monastery. Fr. Men, as an heir of that same spiritual heritage, was especially drawn to Solovyev’s central idea, known by the rather awkward term “Godmanhood,” and described by Fr. Men as the joining of “higher things with lower, the divine with the human.”[23] Godmanhood, which to Fr. Men captured the very heart of Christianity, entails “the joining of the finite and temporal human spirit with the eternal Divinity.”[24] Furthermore, Godmanhood is a doctrine exclusive to Christianity and not to be found in any of the world’s other religions, insofar as it is rooted in Jesus Christ, the unique God-man, who “belongs simultaneously to two worlds, ours and the world beyond.”[25] But the spiritual significance of Godmanhood does not terminate with the doctrine of the Incarnation; this idea also essentially describes the fundamental role of the Church in the world: “Christianity is the religion of the union of God and man. We are participant’s in God’s acts.”[26] In sum, “For Solovyev, Christianity was not some abstract idea, but a life-giving impulse, transforming earthly existence.”[27] Berdyaev also expounded upon this idea in speaking of “the churching of the world,” a phrase that, as noted earlier, was fruitfully employed by Fr. Men who in turn defined it as a divinely-directed activity whereby the Church “participates in the whole movement of human society.”[28] Berdyaev, like Fr. Men, was critical of the Ferapont type of Christian to whom “the most important thing is simply inner self-perfection leading to salvation. Everything else is rejected.”[29] The tragic result of such an enclosed spirituality is that “creativity is left to the secular world . . . without the light inherent to the impulse of the Gospels.”[30] The undesirable outcome of a Christianity that never leaves the garden is that ultimately “humanity is demeaned.”[31] Borrowing heavily from Solovyev and Berdyaev, Fr. Men concluded that as it regards Zosima and Ferapont the “fullness of life lies in the synthesis of the two.”[32] Characteristically, he found something true and admirable in each understanding of Christianity. Michael Plekon writes that, according to Fr. Men, neither represents the full ideal, but rather Ferapont and Zosima “are necessary checks or better, complements to each other.”[33] Either one in isolation from the other can quickly mutate into an imbalanced and inauthentic version of Christianity.
Fr. Men at times illustrated this idea of the “churching of culture” in such a way that left him especially vulnerable to criticism by traditionalists in the Orthodox Church: “Absorbing elements of paganism into itself, Christianity in this way sanctified all that was wonderful in the legacy from India to the New World. . . . No matter where pagan concepts originated, they always had elements adaptable to Christianity, not in a spirit of compromise or expediency, but because of their innate worthiness. If some of our hymns contain echoes of the hymns of Osiris, that only makes me happy, knowing that we have received that eternal intuition of the resurrection which the ancient Egyptian experienced on the shores of his native river.”[34] But however disapprovingly this passage may at first glance present itself to the Christian mind, it is most certain that Fr. Men was in no way trying to sanction paganism. To be sure, he viewed paganism as a primitive form of religion paralyzed by a fear of the unseen forces of the world.[35] Rather than sanction paganism, he sought to sanctifyit, an important distinction to which his last recorded words testify: “Christianity is the sanctification of the world, the victory over evil, over darkness, over sin. But it is the victory of God. It began on the night of the resurrection, and it will continue as long as the world exists.”[36]
In reality, despite any negative reaction one might have when first encountering this view of “churching,” upon further reflection it should bring to mind a question already familiar within the history of Christian theology: What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? For many Western Christians, most prominently Augustine and Aquinas, the solution to the problem of how to deal with the philosophy of the pagans was simple: Christianize it. In rough terms, that meant for Augustine doing Christian theology more or less using concepts borrowed from Plato. For Aquinas it meant “baptizing Aristotle.” In either case, while some Christians have found nothing of value in Athens and thereby walled themselves up inside Jerusalem, others have taken the truths of Jerusalem outside the walls in order to “sanctify Athens.” In so doing, many Christian thinkers have found the conceptual framework of Athens to be quite helpful in formulating and clarifying the doctrines of Jerusalem. As historian and philosopher Etienne Gilson writes: “Coming after the Greeks, the Christian philosophers had asked themselves the question: How obtain from Greek metaphysics an answer to the problems raised by the Christian God?”[37] Gilson furthermore argues that “what is perhaps the key to the whole history of Christianity philosophy . . . is precisely the fact that, from the second century A.D. on, men have had to use a Greek philosophical technique in order to express ideas that had never entered the head of any Greek philosopher.”[38] This seems to be closely analogical or even identical to what Fr. Men was saying. One thing is clear regardless: he was in no way suggesting that Christianity should be subjugated to or equated with paganism. On the contrary, Fr. Men affirmed that “‘Christianity is not one among other religions – it is the crisis of all religions.’ It rises above all others because, as the apostle Paul said, ‘No one is saved by works of the law, but only through faith in Jesus Christ’ [Rom. 3:20-22].”[39] In summary, a Christian should not be like Ferapont, walling up oneself within the garden and ignoring the needs of the wilderness. Instead, the believer should strive to find in the world suitable soil in which to plant the fruit of the Spirit, even should that host soil be pagan philosophy or a non-Christian religion and thereby require some initial plowing. Put simply, out of a deep love for both Christ and the world, Fr. Men sought whatever common ground he could find in order to build bridges to those who had yet to come to faith in Christ, all in hopes of persuading them to cross over.
Fr. Men’s method of Christian apologetics, rooted as it was in the legacy of Optina, combined an uncompromising commitment to historic Christian doctrine with a profound sensitivity to the atheistic intellectual climate created by generations of Soviet propaganda. That is, his commitment to the Christian message was not without a deep understanding of the anti-Christian milieu into which that message was preached. He was not one to simply exhort listeners to blind faith, but one who offered reasons for why Christian faith is in fact reasonable to believe. He lived out the words of the Apostle Peter: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.”[40] As the early twentieth-century Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen once observed: “False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”[41] If ever a whole people were collectively under the assault of ideas which threatened by the sheer force of logic their faith to be a mere delusion, it was Russian Christians living under the thumb of a militant atheism. Only the Communist Party was not content to leave Christianity alone as a “harmless delusion,” but mercilessly sought to “relieve” the masses of their addiction to this primitive opiate. As Tatiana Chumachenko notes: “The peculiarity of the Soviet state was that its ecclesiastical policy was founded on the Marxist-Leninist concept that socialism and religion were incompatible. In this sense, the church in the USSR was doomed because it carried a religious worldview.”[42] As a result, the “priests” of the Communist Party sold themselves out to the task of baptizing the Russian people into the waters of metaphysical naturalism.
The creation and maintenance by the state of such an anti-religious social climate necessitated the rise of skilled churchmen who not only could preach the gospel, but also defend its metaphysical underpinnings. Fr. Men, writes Hamant, was one such capable apologist who dedicated himself to destroying “the barriers which hindered men from receiving the Word of God: barriers erected by culture, prejudice, preconceived ideas, and stereotypes set up in people’s minds by atheistic propaganda.”[43] Hamant laments: “The Soviet system was as destructive of souls as it had been in other domains. People sometimes speak of an anthropological catastrophe, a catastrophe that affected peoples minds and hearts as much as Chernobyl affected their bodies. The participation in deceit which the regime required of all its subjects as a test of absolute obedience, was experienced as a secret humiliation, a deep wound inflicted on each person. . . . And so, in order to repair the disaster, doctors of the human soul were necessary.”[44] Fr. Men was an especially competent “doctor of the human soul” who committed his life to curing the ill effects of a Soviet system that based its very legitimacy on the belief that there is no God, no absolute morality, no afterlife, and, of course, no such thing as religious knowledge.
Realistically, only to the degree that it could succeed in propagating the intellectual legitimacy of its militant atheism could the Soviet regime hope to advance the political legitimacy of its forced collectivism. It is a necessary condition for the survival of Marxist-Leninist doctrine that the state subvert the authority of God and establish itself as the only sovereign. To say it differently, deification of the state is impossible where the people still openly acknowledge a higher power, namely God. Fr. Men thus observed: “the Bolshevik system was conceived as a system of absolute authoritarian control. But total authoritarianism is only possible when no other form of authority exists. From the outset, therefore, the Bolsheviks sought to destroy those institutions which represented another, spiritual, authority.”[45] But the cult of the state, which reached its eventual zenith (or nadir) in the deification of Stalin, was made possible only because of the religious vacuum created, sadly enough, by false Christians and corrupt clergy.[46] In other words, while the failure of the Church was not in itself a sufficient condition for the ascendancy of atheism, it was nevertheless the necessary condition without which metaphysical materialism could never have flourished as it did. It was, so to speak, only upon the host of a decayed Christianity that the parasite of atheism could live. Because church and state are so closely united in Russian history, in order to gain political legitimacy, writes James Billington, the latter was forced to rely upon the former, even while plotting its destruction: “Although the new communist regime totally rejected past tradition, it had to use new versions of old symbols to gain popular legitimacy. . . . The first, most fundamental and most enduring element in the new legitimacy – a quasireligious cult of veneration for an allegedly infallible political leader – was thus established at the very beginning of the new political entity.”[47]
The record of the Communist Party’s relentless war against religion is now well publicized and need not be repeated here in detail, but only as much as is necessary to make sense of the cultural climate in Fr. Men ministered. Toward that aim, it is worth mentioning, as Nikita Struve points out, that while the means of anti-religious propaganda often varied, the subject-matter nevertheless was constant and always revolved around two main themes: (1) the incompatibility of science and religion, from which follows the characterization of Christianity as anti-historical and fanciful; and (2) the superiority of communist morality over religious.[48] Soviet propaganda, thus, took direct aim at two primary targets: the intellectual legitimacy of the Christian faith and the moral legitimacy of the Orthodox Church. In addressing the second point first, it should be noted that Fr. Men himself was critical of the moral authority of many of the Church’s leaders. He quite candidly agreed with the Communists in that already before the Revolution, the moral influence of the Church had been greatly compromised through, among other things, its willing submission to the tsarist government. Moreover, at the time of the 1917 Revolution, many of the clergy “went drinking with the civil authorities and sucked up to them and gave their blessing to all kinds of illegalities.”[49] Fr. Men thus held the conviction, scandalous as it may sound, that atheism itself was not the problem but was instead a gift from God Himself. Indeed, even worse things would have befallen the Church if not for the “wretched atheism and the whole anti-Christian movement. . . . I fear that then the Christian world would have indeed been suffocated by the atheists in the guise of Christians.”[50] Fr. Men, consequently, viewed atheism as God’s way of getting the church to recognize its own failures, whether moral or intellectual. Thus, atheism “is not at all a defeat for Christians. It is a great healing and strengthening force.”[51] And instead of deriving pleasure from the ability to logically refute atheism and then stopping there, “what we need much more is to do battle with false Christianity inside each of us, it is much more important because atheism appears as a result of our own unworthiness.”[52] In the earliest days of Soviet rule, Patriarch Tikhon courageously rebuked and withstood the Bolshevik party. But political expediency, indeed survival, eventually necessitated a softened, compromised tone from Tikhon and subsequent leaders of the Church. This partial complicity with Soviet oppression later provoked this sharp rebuke from Fr. Men: “When we believers celebrated the millennium of Christianity [1988], there was not a single word of repentance, not a single word about the tragedy of the Russian Church, only triumphalism and self-congratulation.”[53]
With commendable humility, therefore, Fr. Men acknowledged that the triumph of atheism in formerly Christian Russia was due largely to the failure of the Church to practice the “churching of the world,” the only means of effecting genuine spiritual recovery.[54] Russia became a land of overwhelming atheism because the church failed in its God-given role of preaching, witness, and presence.[55] By preaching, Fr. Men had in mind an idea we have already seen, the need to find a “common language with the people of our time, not identifying with them completely, yet not isolating ourselves from them behind an archaic wall.”[56] By witness, Fr. Men was concerned with the church determining its proper relationship to all of life’s problems, and committing itself to living out that relationship.[57] And by presence, Fr. Men intended that the witness of the church not be about ideology, “but of the living presence of God in us.”[58] But rather than become embroiled in politics and social problems, the Church must emulate Christ who “spoke about those things which concern all times.”[59] Just as Christ transcended a narrow sense of relevancy, “so we too, must be simultaneously connected to our time and not to fully belong to it. This question of ‘what you will do for modern society,’ is asked equally by the conformist or dissident, the active person or escapist. We will answer all the same way: If we witness to Christ and the Gospel, if we live in His Spirit, then in some measure we will participate in what He envisaged, and His aim was never to abandon this earth. . . . Through such an approach, each culture will be the beneficiary only of good.”[60] As Fr. Men saw it, Marx was right inasmuch as faith really is no more than an opiate to so many nominal Christians: “Yet, we are given faith not as an opiate, but as a life-force, the power of struggle and of hope; not as one more anesthetic. If we don’t prove to Marx that for us religion is not an opiate, we’ll be bad Christians.”[61]
The other, perhaps even more urgent goal of Soviet propaganda, was Agitprop’s sustained attempts to “prove” the incompatibility of science and religion, that is, to rob the Church of any intellectual credibility. Zernov explains that “according to official propaganda, Communism is concerned with the practical task of reorganizing society; but Leninism is primarily a philosophical system which . . . claims to have answered such questions as whether God exists, what the origin of the universe is, what happens to men after their death, where the source of their happiness lies, and how they can be liberated from misery and pain.”[62] For communist agitators, the only legitimate methodology for addressing such ultimate questions was the purely scientific one; all other methods are hopelessly permeated with superstition and myth. The natural enemy of Marxist-Leninism, therefore, is any religious belief that presumes to provide alternative answers to these same fundamental and universal questions about life. Lamentably, at the time of the Revolution, the Church was caught intellectually napping because of what Fr. Men called a “veto on any new thinking in the church, on Bible translations. All this meant that when the revolution came the church was mentally quite unprepared.”[63] At the hour of its crisis, the Church was derelict in its God-given duty to respond to the challenge of an antisupernaturalistic philosophy which threatened to undermine the very reason for its existence.
Atheism and materialism having taken hold for several decades by the time of his public ministry, Fr. Men, in Hamant’s words, was convinced that “in order to sustain the dialogue with Soviet society and to respond to the questions of atheists, Christians needed to be capable of responding to the challenge of science, which the official ideology proclaimed to be incompatible with religion.”[64] Fearing that the Church still had not yet learned its lesson, he worried that “the most difficult time for the Church will come when everything is permitted. Then we will be ashamed because we are not ready to bear witness, and unfortunately we are preparing ourselves very poorly for that moment.”[65] For his own part, however, Fr. Men was eminently qualified to carry on such a dialogue. One of the first of hundreds of public lectures that he gave after the Gorbachev “thaw” was at the cultural center of the Steel Institute in Moscow, an astounding fact when one considers that before that remarkable day no priest had given a public lecture at a state school since the 1920s.[66]
What made Fr. Men such an effective evangelist and apologist, as Zelinsky put it, “in that milieu where the very subject of God was rarely heard,”[67] was his seamless combination of knowledge in both theology and natural science with penetrating insights into the universal cry of the human heart for meaning and purpose, which no ideology however ruthlessly imposed has the power to extinguish. Concerning knowledge itself, as has been the majority view among Christians for two millennia Fr. Men viewed faith and reason as neither subordinate to nor mutually exclusive of one another, but rather complementary. That is, he was neither a fideist who denigrated reason, nor a rationalist who denigrated faith. That being the case, he was entirely unimpressed with the strong scientism uncritically embraced by and foisted upon the Russian people by the Soviet propagandists.[68] He gave no ground to those who excoriated Christian faith as inherently irrational and hopelessly unsalvageable by any right use of reason. At the same time, his credo was that the Christian should not “consider reason and science to be the enemies of faith. Knowledge enlightened by the spirit of faith deepens our understanding of the greatness of the creator.”[69] The resulting balance in his thought is both evident and refreshing: “Rational reasoning, operating with the data of experience and revelation, acts as a barrier protecting the idea of God from faulty thinking. But reason must clearly see the limits of its jurisdiction.”[70] In one of a series of talks that he gave on the Nicene Creed, Fr. Men argued that the “Spirit of God does not extinguish human reason, but on the contrary, illuminates it. If a person does not permit reason to function and thinks that it is possible to live only by irrational, intuitive impulse, he or she can get lost.”[71] Fr. Men was quick to note, however, that scientific reasoning no less than its theological counterpart “comes to a point where modeling and adequate verbal descriptions become impossible and then symbols come to the rescue.”[72] Thus, contrary to what the atheistic agitators would have one believe, the relationship between science and religion is never a simple dualism of “empirical knowledge” versus “blind faith.”
Michael Bordeaux records how “in the age of perestroika Fr. Alexander frequently addressed a whole roomful of atheists and ‘seekers’, holding them spellbound for up to three hours.”[73] This rare ability can be at least partially explained with reference to three factors. The first is that Fr. Men had an educational background in science, having studied biology at the Moscow Fur Institute, where he remained before being transferred upon that school’s closing to a school in Irkutsk, Siberia.[74] Fr. Men used to say that God had given us two books: the Bible and nature, and he studied both with equal passion because he believed, as Hamant puts it, that “they are two modes of the acquisition of knowledge, which not only should not ignore each other, but which mutually complete and enlighten each other on the path of Truth.”[75] While not officially part of the academic establishment, Fr. Men’s evident learnedness nevertheless gave him strong standing even before those that were. The second factor that allowed Fr. Men to hold an unchurched, scientifically-inclined audience of atheists captive for hours on end was that he learned to speak their language. In a 1996 interview with historian Wallace Daniel on the topic of religion and science in Russia, Boris Raushenbakh recalled the following: “In the late 1980s the Physics and Technological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences invited a senior official of the church to a discussion about religious issues. My colleagues did not take the meeting seriously, and behind the scenes they laughed at the church official because his style and language were completely inadequate for the audience. A meeting with Father Alexander produced the opposite effect; even now my colleagues recall that Father Alexander had the unusual capacity to relate both to the common people and to the educated, and the intelligentsia trusted him.”[76]
The third factor explores Fr. Men’s keen awareness of the spiritual hunger that lies in the heart of every man and woman, however much that yearning is papered over with denials cloaked in a pretense of raw scientific rationality. Gilson says it well: “Quite apart from any philosophical demonstration of the existence of God, there is such a thing as a spontaneous natural theology. A quasi-instinctive tendency, observable in most men, seems to invite them to wonder from time to time if, after all, there is not such an unseen being as the one we call God.”[77] For all the efforts expended by the Soviet government to stamp out any idea of transcendence from the minds of its subjects, the Party soon discovered the futility of trying to altogether eradicate religious consciousness. When posed by interviewer Mark Makarov with the supposition that because most people had so thoroughly absorbed the atheist education that it must therefore follow that everyone really knows that there was no God, Fr. Men responded without equivocation: “I think that, on the contrary, everyone knows precisely the opposite.”[78] Using a line of reasoning reminiscent of the so-called argument from desire popularized by C.S. Lewis, Fr. Men had this to say: “People thirst for water because it is a necessity – that’s an objective fact. They need food – that’s an objective fact – like many others, and there is nothing imaginary about them. If people always thirst to find a higher meaning in existence, and to revere it, and to orient their lives on it, then this means that this need is not merely something pathological, but the normal condition of the human race.”[79]
And despite all the resources brought to bear on finding an ultimate “cure,” this condition of the human heart prevailed even in Soviet Russia, as a brief historical note will help illustrate. After Stalin’s death in 1953, a short-lived period ensued known as “the Thaw” in which church-state relations became less acrimonious, and the state’s persecution of the church temporarily abated. The power struggle that followed Stalin’s death meant that church-state issues were for the time pushed to the back burner.[80] In 1956, for the first time since the Revolution in 1917, Bibles were printed in Russian.[81] But thanks in part to the directives of M.A. Suslov (1902-1982), the Party’s chief ideologist after Stalin’s death, a hard line against religion was once again pursued as soon as 1958. At the same time that he was denouncing Stalin’s brutalities, Khrushchev, who had emerged as the party leader by 1956, also announced a return to the true spirit of Leninism along with the ambition of achieving the “withering away of the state” within twenty years. This, as Chumachenko spells out, helps to explain Suslov’s re-intensified attack on religion: “It was impossible to build a communist future without ‘alterating the people’s consciousness’ and freeing that consciousness from ‘religious prejudices and superstitions.’”[82] Because Suslov’s anti-religious sentiment was echoed by Khrushchev, “the attack on the church organized by the Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda Department was guaranteed support at the very highest level.”[83] In addition to ramping up the official atheistic propaganda, the state’s renewed attacks against the church in the Khrushchev era directly affected the status of monasteries, damaged the financial well-being of what few churches were still open, and further curtailed admissions to theological educational institutions. These afflictions were felt personally by Fr. Men as well, as he was excluded from taking his final exams at Irkutsk owing to his religious convictions and contacts.[84]
In 1964, however, Khrushchev was removed from power, and in the years that followed, writes Hamant, “the religious feeling of the people changed very noticeably.”[85] The force-fed and empty promises of utopian paradise having rung hollow, many people began to search for answers elsewhere than in materialism and atheism. The revival of religious inquiry, however, took the form of a “growing interest in yoga, parapsychology, paranormal phenomena, UFOs, astrology, and the occult; in other words, everything that was a substitute for religion. In short, an increasingly noticeable spiritual hunger made itself felt.”[86] The Orthodox Church as a whole was poorly prepared to respond to this mass stirring of hearts. It was, however, during this very time period when Fr. Men settled into the parish of Novaya Derevnya where he would minister the gospel to seekers such as these until the day he was brutally struck down by an axe twenty years later. Even by 1970, Fr. Men already had a reputation and a following, having been sought out by many intellectuals who knew that he understood their spiritual longings. One such intellectual who regularly partook communion at Novaya Derevnya was Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the great poet Osip Mandelstam. Another frequent visitor, with whom Fr. Men had to meet in secret, was the dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.[87]
The widespread spiritual hunger of the 1970s and 1980s that manifested itself against the wishes and efforts of the communist dreamers brings us to a final point. One of the salient features of Fr. Men’s argument for why the Soviet propagandists were destined to ultimately fail involved a particular view of ecumenical dialogue for which he was roundly criticized by Church traditionalists. In a selection taken from his impressive six-volume work on the history of religion, Fr. Men observed an irony inherent in the agenda of the atheists: “Even the struggle against religion is an indirect acknowledgment of its significance,” and even more, the apparent motive behind that struggle reveals “an unconscious fear of religion.”[88] In the end, despite the most diligent efforts of such a massive state apparatus committed to the abolition of religion, there yet remains in the human heart “an unconscious attraction to those things which dogmatic materialism denies: to meaning, purpose, and to a rational origin of the universe. This mysterious attraction, which is inherent in human beings, cannot be eradicated by any doctrine.”[89] Even atheists as uncompromised as Friedrich Nietzsche always seem to fall back on “the shadow of God,” finding it necessary to “soften the grimness of the landscape” produced by their own irreligion.[90] Atheists themselves cannot live with the consequences of the metaphysical reality they fancifully imagine. In reality, atheism is not so much irreligion, but a substitute religion, along with “its own infallible authorities, its dogmas, scriptures, rituals and saints.”[91] In sum, “when the idea of God is expelled from consciousness, it comes back to people though in a perverted, hardly recognizable form. This proves that people have an ineradicable need to link their lives to something higher, something holy.”[92]
Plekon explains the connection this had to the intramural debate over ecumenism: “Across the Orthodox churches, there is a growing conflict between two perspectives and their adherents. Although some decry the use of such descriptions, it is not inaccurate to call one of these groups, as several in France have, integristes, traditionalists who oppose any development in liturgy or theology as “innovation” and who are against participation in ecumenical activity, particularly membership in the World Council of Churches.”[93] However, inasmuch as he quoted favorably and often from non-Orthodox theologians, Western philosophers, and even non-Christian sources, Fr. Men’s apologetic methodology and thus his refutation of atheism, incited the indignation of these integristes. Plekon remarks that “in his deep love for the Tradition of the Church, Father Men, much like his confreres, is driven by an equal love for the people who enact this tradition and make it living and for those who have yet to discover it. From faithfulness to Christianity comes a rich and fearless openness to the diversity of Christian churches, to other communities of faith, and to the culture of our complex modern world.”[94] As far as Fr. Men was concerned, the traditional Orthodox, other Christian denominations, other communities of faith, and even the culture at large all have a critical feature in common: a unanimous and resolute rejection, either explicit or implicit, of the basic tenets of atheistic dogma. Thus, while Fr. Men was fully committed to traditional Christian doctrine, even traditional Orthodox Christian doctrine, he looked for allies against atheism wherever they were to be found for the simple reason that for three generations, atheism was the enemy of all religious faith in Russia, Orthodox or otherwise. As Plekon’s says, he inherited from both Soloviev and Berdyaev a “respect for differences, even in his insistence that such differences cannot categorically be condemned since they may well lead to the truth.”[95] That means that Fr. Men was disposed to acknowledge truth wherever he found it, even if that was in a non-Orthodox Christian denomination, a Western or Westernized philosopher, or a non-Christian religion. As Hamant puts it, for Fr. Men “the strongest element of Christian spirituality is not negation, but its capacity to encompass, to transcend, to bring to fullness.”[96]
But even though Fr. Men, much to the chagrin of his ultra-conservative critics, could grant in a lecture he delivered the night before he was murdered that Buddhism is true inasmuch as it “is permeated with a passionate longing for deliverance from evil,” and Islam is true inasmuch as it “teaches the absolute devotion of man to God,” and even pantheism is true to the extent that it “declares that God is in everything,” he maintained without equivocation that Christianity alone was the answer to the hopes present in all other philosophies and religions.[97] He acknowledged, atheistic dogma notwithstanding, the inherent longing for transcendent reality present in every human heart. But while openly attesting to the evidence of that longing contributed even by non-Christian religions, he was uncompromising in that “the most profound Encounter with God can only be in Christ.”[98] In Christ alone, the full and personal expression of Godmanhood, does the complete union of God and man become possible. Thus, whereas Christianity has much in common with the general aspirations of other religious viewpoints, it ultimately demonstrates itself to be unique. And “nothing proves the uniqueness of Christianity, nothing except one thing alone, namely, Jesus Christ.” [99]
On the morning of September 9, 1990, Fr. Men was struck down to his death by an axe blow to the back of the head. No one was ever convicted of the crime. But just as Joseph could tell the brothers who sold him into slavery, “what you meant for evil, God meant for good,” so can it be said with Fr. Maxym Lysack that “Russia and the Orthodox church have lost a great shepherd but gained a great martyr.”[100] Fr. Men knew how to unite and he knew how to heal.
The embodiment of those qualities, joined with his open heart and apologetic depth, is why Fr. Men can still be thought of today as one whose heritage and example can help bring renewal both in the Church and to the broader society. Such was the character of his life and ministry that when contrasting Fr. Men with the stark realities of our age, one is tempted to join Kierkegaard in the solemn lament: “what a shame things in the world don’t go in the way the priest preaches.”
Billington, James H. Russia in Search of Itself. Washington, DC.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004.
________. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretative History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.
Bourdeaux, Michael. The Gospel’s Triumph Over Communism. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1991.
Carter, Stephen. God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Chumachenko. Tatiana A. Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years. Trans. and ed. Edward E. Roslof. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2002.
Gilson, Etienne. God and Philosophy. 2d. ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia, A Man for Our Times. Torrance, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1995.
Hamburger, Philip. Separation of Church and State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
McManners, John, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Men, Alexander. About Christ and the Church. Trans. Alexis Vinogradov. Torrance, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1996.
Moreland, J.P. Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul. Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1997.
Plekon, Michael. Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
________, ed. Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in our Time: Readings from the Eastern Church. Lanham: MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003.
Roberts, Elizabeth and Ann Shukman, eds. Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men. New York: Continuum, 1996.
Shatz, Marshall S. and Judith E. Zimmerman, eds. Vekhi: A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994.
Struve, Nikita. Christians in Contemporary Russia. Trans. Lancelot Sheppard and A. Manson. 2d rev. ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967.
Zernov, Nicolas. The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963.
Internet resources cited:
www.roca.org
www.encyclopedia.com
[1] Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 59.
[2] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men, ed. Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman (New York: Continuum, 1996), 11.
[3] Vladimir Zelinsky, “An Extraordinary Pastor – Fr. Alexander Men.” Available at http://www.roca.org/OA/103/103d.htm
[4] James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), 163-64.
[5] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 155.
[6] John 3:16 and 1 John 2:15. See also Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 154.
[7] Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 6:17.
[8] Stephen L. Carter, God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 75.
[9] Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 42.
[10] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 160.
[11] Michael Plekon, Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 251.
[12] James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 203.
[13] John McManners, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 533.
[14] Yves Hamant, Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia, A Man for Our Times (Torrance, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1995), 37.
[15] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 5, 197.
[16] Hamant, 40.
[17] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 152-53.
[18] Ibid., 153.
[19] Ibid., 154.
[20] Nicolas Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963), 5.
[21] Ibid., 18.
[22] Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman, eds., Vekhi: A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia, with a forward by Marc Raeff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), xiii, 1-16.
[23] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 157.
[24] Ibid., 191.
[25] Ibid., 187.
[26] Alexander Men, About Christ and the Church, trans. Alexis Vinogradov (Torrance, CA: Oakwood Publications, 1996), 36.
[27] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 94.
[28] Ibid., 160.
[29] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 157.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid. Traditionalists, for their part, showed little affinity for Berdyaev’s idea that man in this way was a co-creator with the divine. While separatism might demean humanity, the traditionalist asserted that Berdyaev demeaned God by denying His omnipotence. Interestingly, among Westerners Berdyaev’s ideas were well-received by the process theologian Charles Hartshorne. See The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2d ed., ed. Robert Audi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.
[32] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 162.
[33] Plekon, Living Icons, 236.
[34] Men, About Christ and the Church, 29-30.
[35] Ibid., 51-52.
[36] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 192.
[37] Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy, 2d ed., with a forward by Jaroslav Pelikan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 110.
[38] Ibid., 43.
[39] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 188-89.
[40] 1 Peter 3:15.
[41] Cited in J.P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1997), 63.
[42] Tatiana A. Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy From World War II to the Khrushchev Years, trans. and ed. Edward E. Roslof (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2002), 193.
[43] Hamant, 156.
[44] Ibid., 122-23.
[45] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 164.
[46] Ibid., 107, 133.
[47] Billington, Russia in Search of Itself, 28.
[48] Nikita Struve, Christians in Contemporary Russia, trans. Lancelot Sheppard and A. Manson, 2d rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), 282.
[49] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 107.
[50] Men, About Christ and the Church, 33.
[51] Ibid., 34.
[52] Ibid., 35.
[53] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 166-67.
[54] Men, About Christ and the Church, 36.
[55] Ibid., 64.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., 65.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Ibid., 39.
[62] Zernov, 310.
[63] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 107-08.
[64] Hamant, 156.
[65] Ibid., vii.
[66] Ibid., 189.
[67] Vladimir Zelinsky, “An Extraordinary Pastor – Fr. Alexander Men.”
[68] J.P. Moreland explains: “Scientism is the view that science is the only paradigm of truth and rationality. If something does not square with currently well-established scientific beliefs, if it is not within the domain of things appropriate for scientific investigation, or if it is not amenable to scientific methodology, then it is not true or rational. Everything outside of science is a matter of mere belief and subjective opinion, of which rational assessment is impossible. Science, exclusively and ideally, is our model of intellectual excellence.” Moreland, 144.
[69] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 73.
[70] Ibid., 47.
[71] Alexander Men, “Fifth Talk on the Creed.” In Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in our Time: Readings from the Eastern Church, ed. Michael Plekon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), 153.
[72] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 46.
[73] Michael Bourdeaux, The Gospel’s Triumph Over Communism (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1991), 6-7.
[74] Hamant, 53-54.
[75] Ibid., 49, 165.
[76] Available at http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-18055620.html
[77] Gilson, 115.
[78] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 33-34.
[79] Ibid., 34.
[80] Chumachenko, 136.
[81] Ibid., 139.
[82] Ibid., 149.
[83] Ibid. Agitation and Propaganda Department was known as “Agitprop” for short.
[84] Hamant 71. See also Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 10.
[85] Hamant, 91.
[86] Ibid., 94.
[87] Ibid., 129.
[88] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 55.
[89] Ibid., 56-57.
[90] Ibid., 55-56.
[91] Ibid., 58.
[92] Ibid., 59.
[93] Plekon, Living Icons, 235.
[94] Ibid., 237.
[95] Ibid., 254.
[96] Hamant, 162.
[97] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 179-80.
[98] Men, About Christ and the Church, 101.
[99] Christianity for the Twenty-First Century, 31.
[100] Genesis 50:20. See Hamant, x.