The Catacomb Community

After the death of Archimandrite Seraphim (Bityukov) in 1942, Men and his mother continued under the guidance of that priest’s disciples, and above all of the schemanun Maria (1879–1961), superior of an underground monastic community. Men left an explicit judgment on her, praising in particular her freedom from sanctimony and narrowness — a judgment that discloses, early, what he valued and what he would spend his life arguing against.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Community After 1942

Fr. Seraphim died on 19 February 1942 and was buried under the floor of the house where he had served (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Серафим (Битюков)”). The community around him did not dissolve. His disciples — clergy in hiding, monastics without a monastery, and lay people who had come to faith through him, several of them from the Moscow intelligentsia — continued to gather, to pray, and to instruct. Men and his mother remained within that circle throughout his childhood and adolescence (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович”; Wallace L. Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, ch. 1–2, drawing on the memoirs of Elena Semyonovna Men and Vera Vasilevskaya).

This is the crucial fact about Men’s formation and it is easily understated. He did not receive an underground baptism and then grow up as an ordinary Soviet child. He grew up inside an illegal church: house liturgies, hidden books, spiritual direction given in whispers, and the constant knowledge that any of the adults responsible for him could be arrested. Whatever one concludes about his later theology, no serious account of him can present him as a man who came to Christianity from the safe side of anything.

The Schemanun Maria

The Russian sources are specific about who mattered most. After Fr. Seraphim’s death, the greatest influence on the boy’s development was schemanun Maria (1879–1961), the superior of the underground monastic community — a woman who had taken the great schema, the highest monastic rank, in a country where monasteries had been abolished (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень,” summarizing Men’s own recollections and the family memoirs).

Men’s own words about her survive and are quoted in the Russian literature:

“An ascetic and a woman of prayer, she was entirely free of those traits of sanctimoniousness, of old-believerism, and of narrowness which are not infrequently met with among persons of her calling.”
— Alexander Men on the schemanun Maria (quoted in Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович,” from Men’s autobiographical recollections)

Three things are worth noticing in that sentence, because they run through everything he later wrote.

First, he assumes that asceticism and prayer are the substance. He does not praise her for being modern, or open, or educated. He praises her as a podvizhnitsa — one who undertakes the ascetic labor — and as a woman of prayer. Whatever else Men was, he was formed by a schema-nun and never doubted that the ascetic and liturgical center of Orthodoxy was the center.

Second, he immediately distinguishes that substance from its counterfeits. “Sanctimoniousness” (ханжество), “old-believerism” (староверство, used here not of the Old Believers as a body but as a name for a rigid literalism of custom), and “narrowness” (узость) — these are the three vices he names, and he names them as things “not infrequently met with among persons of her calling.” At perhaps his most reverent, he is still drawing a line between piety and its imitations.

Third, this is not a polemic he learned from Western liberal theology. It is a judgment made about, and evidently within, the catacomb church itself. His critics have often traced his openness to foreign and modernist sources (see The Charges and the Defence). Whatever the merits of that charge as applied to his mature theology, the disposition itself was in place before he had read any of the sources in question.

What This Formation Gave Him

A Church without infrastructure. Men learned Christianity in a setting with no buildings, no publications, no schools, no legal existence and no protection. The consequence was practical: when, thirty years later, he set about catechizing Moscow intellectuals, he did not wait for institutional permission or provision. He simply reconstituted what he had grown up in — small groups meeting in apartments, typescripts passed hand to hand, teaching done in private (see The Small Groups and the Baptisms). His method was not an innovation borrowed from the West; it was the catacomb church’s own method, applied to a new constituency.

A library rather than a curriculum. With no seminary open to him, Men read. The intellectual sources traceable in his mature work are the Russian religious renaissance — Vladimir Soloviev above all, to whom he dedicated his history of religion and from whom he took the theme of bogochelovechestvo, divine humanity; Sergius Bulgakov; Nikolai Berdyaev, from whom he took the term “personalism”; and Pavel Florensky, whose The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914) persuaded him that truth involves an intuitive knowledge exceeding empirical reasoning — together with Western authors such as William James, Rudolf Otto, and Karl Jaspers, whose “Axial Age” he adopted (Randall A. Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” Northwestern University Forum, 2026). This reading list is itself a fact about his formation, and a contested one: the neo-patristic current represented by Florovsky and Lossky regarded precisely this line of Russian religious philosophy as the problem rather than the resource (see Vladimir Lossky; Fr. Sergius Bulgakov).

An early start. By his own account and that of his biographers, Men began drafting the material that became his history of religion while still a student — that is, in the mid-1950s, before ordination (Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, ch. 2; Hamant, Alexander Men, ch. 2). The six volumes published in Brussels between 1970 and 1983 were the harvest of work begun in his early twenties.

A Caution About the Sources

The record of these years rests almost entirely on family and community memory: the memoirs of his mother and aunt, his own later recollections, and the testimony of people who loved him. There are no archives of an illegal church. This means that the shape of the formation is well attested — the community, the schemanun, the reading — while individual episodes are of the genre in which significance accretes in retrospect. This collection reports the shape and the documented names, and does not build arguments on anecdote.

It should also be said that the catacomb church is itself a contested subject within Russian Orthodoxy. The non-commemorating clergy who refused Metropolitan Sergius’s Declaration of 1927 are honored by some as confessors and regarded by others as having compounded the Church’s wounds with schism; the Moscow Patriarchate’s glorification of the New Martyrs in 2000 involved careful decisions about which figures from these currents could be included (see The New Martyrs of Russia). Men himself did not remain in the catacombs: he sought and received ordination in the Moscow Patriarchate in 1958–1960 and never left it. That decision — to be formed by the underground and to serve in the institution — is one of the few things about him that both his admirers and his critics tend to respect.

References

Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (The community after Fr. Seraphim’s death; the schemanun Maria, 1879–1961, superior of the underground monastic community, as the chief influence; Men’s quoted judgment on her.)
Russian Wikipedia, art. “Серафим (Битюков).” (Death 19 February 1942; the hidden community at Zagorsk.)
Daniel, Wallace L. Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. (The catacomb formation, from the memoirs of Elena Semyonovna Men and Vera Vasilevskaya.)
Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times). Trans. Steven Bigham. Oakwood Publications, 1995.
Poole, Randall A. “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought.” Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, 2026. (Men’s intellectual sources: Soloviev, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Florensky; James, Otto, Jaspers.)
Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Moscow, 1914; English trans. Boris Jakim, Princeton University Press, 1997. (The work Poole identifies as decisive for Men’s epistemology.)