In Search of the Way and the Pseudonymous Press

Between 1970 and 1983 the Brussels house Zhizn s Bogom published, under the pseudonym E. Svetlov, the six volumes of Men’s In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life — a history of humanity’s religious search from the origins of religion, through the religions of India, China, Greece and the ancient Near East, to the prophets of Israel and the threshold of the New Testament. Alongside them appeared biblical handbooks under further pseudonyms. None could be printed in the USSR; all returned in samizdat.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The Series

The full series, published in Brussels by “Zhizn s Bogom” (Life with God) under the pseudonym E. Svetlov, comprises six numbered volumes issued between 1970 and 1983, with Son of Man standing as its culmination (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович”; English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men,” which describes “History of Religion: In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life (volumes 1–6, Brussels 1970–1983); seventh volume Son of Man”). The volumes, in order, are:

Истоки религии — The Sources of Religion: the nature of faith, the human person in the universe, and the standing of religious knowledge over against scientific materialism.
Магизм и единобожие — Magism and Monotheism: archaic religion, magic, and the emergence of monotheistic faith.
У врат Молчания — At the Gates of Silence: the spiritual life of China and India.
Дионис, Логос, Судьба — Dionysus, Logos, Fate: Greek religion and philosophy.
Вестники Царства Божия — Heralds of the Kingdom of God: the prophets of Israel.
На пороге Нового Завета — On the Threshold of the New Testament: the intertestamental period and the world into which Christ came.

(Volume titles as listed in the Russian bibliographies of the series and in the Moscow editions issued from 1991; the Brussels publisher and the pseudonym per Russian Wikipedia and the Google Sites catalogue of “Zhizn s Bogom” publications.)

Moscow editions of the series began to appear in 1991–1992, after his death (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). The first volume has been published in English as The Sources of Religion (2017).

The Argument of the Series

The design is a single argument in six movements, and it is the most theologically consequential thing Men wrote.

Men holds that religion is not a primitive error superseded by science but a permanent structure of the human person, and he opens the series by arguing that case directly against Soviet materialism — hence a first volume about the natural sciences, the origins of consciousness, and the human situation in the cosmos. He then treats the great religious traditions of humanity not as a catalogue of falsehoods but as a search: real movements of the human spirit toward God, containing genuine intimations, and culminating — this is the point at which everything turns — in the revelation to Israel and the Incarnation.

The intellectual lineage is explicit. Men dedicated the history of religion to Vladimir Soloviev, whose conception of bogochelovechestvo (divine humanity, Godmanhood) supplied both an anthropology and a philosophy of history oriented toward universal deification; he took the term “personalism” from Berdyaev; he adopted Karl Jaspers’s “Axial Age” as a periodization; and he drew on William James and Rudolf Otto for the analysis of religious experience (Randall A. Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” Northwestern University Forum, 2026).

Two consequences follow, and they are the substance of the controversy about him.

The positive one, urged by his defenders: this is a framework in which a Soviet-educated reader can enter Christianity without being asked to despise everything he knows. Evolution is not an enemy; Greek philosophy is not a snare; the religions of India are not simply demonic. The reader is invited to see his own searching as part of a history that ends in Christ.

The critical one, urged by his opponents: a scheme in which all religions are stages of a single search can be read as making Christ a culmination rather than the unique and exclusive Incarnation of God, and can shade into syncretism. The conservative journal Blagodatny Ogon has published exactly this charge, citing Men’s statements that “seeds of divine truth are scattered through all religions” and his willingness to call the Bhagavad Gita a sacred text of high spiritual flight; the article’s author, Tatyana Petrova, a former follower, terms the result “theoretical super-ecumenism” (Благодатный огонь, “Куда способны увести наставления протоиерея Александра Меня”). [Disputed: Petrova’s quotations of Men are taken at second hand from a 1994 pamphlet by Mark Makarov collecting his lectures and interviews, not from the published books; the accuracy of that intermediate source is not independently established here.]

This collection does not adjudicate between those readings. It notes only that both are readings of the same architecture, and that the architecture is Soloviev’s before it is Men’s — which places the dispute inside a much older Russian argument about the Russian religious renaissance and its relation to patristic theology (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov; Vladimir Lossky).

The Pseudonyms and the Route Abroad

Men published under at least three pen-names: E. Svetlov (the principal one, used for the history of religion and Son of Man), A. Bogolyubov, and A. Pavlov (Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень”). Other titles issued in Brussels include Небо на земле (Heaven on Earth, 1969), Откуда явилось всё это? (Where Did This All Come From?, 1972), and Как читать Библию? (How to Read the Bible?, 1981) (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”).

The mechanics were straightforward and dangerous. Manuscripts were carried out of the USSR by sympathetic travellers and diplomats to the Brussels press, which printed them in Russian; copies were then smuggled back in, and inside the country they were retyped and passed hand to hand as samizdat. The state understood the operation precisely: the 1974 memorandum from KGB chairman Yuri Andropov to the Central Committee accused Men and a group of priests of producing works “illegally exported abroad” (English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men”; see Novaya Derevnya and the KGB).

Two things about the pseudonyms deserve comment.

They were a legal shield, not a disguise. Everyone who mattered — the KGB, his parishioners, his readers — knew who E. Svetlov was; Andropov names Men in 1974, four years into the series. The pseudonym gave the Church and the author a formal deniability that mattered administratively: so long as the author of record was a pen-name, a bishop could decline to act and a priest could decline to answer.

The publisher was Catholic-sponsored. Zhizn s Bogom was a Russian-language religious press in Brussels operating in the Catholic orbit — it printed Russian Orthodox liturgical and devotional literature for readers in the USSR as part of a broad Western Christian effort to supply the Soviet religious famine. This fact is at the root of the “pro-Catholic” charge in the Andropov memorandum, and it later fed the theological accusation that Men was, in Deacon Andrei Kuraev’s formulation, in effect an Eastern-rite Catholic (“Aleksandr Men: Current Criticism and Defense,” East–West Church and Ministry Report). Whether publishing with a Catholic-sponsored press when no other press existed says anything about a man’s ecclesiology is exactly the question at issue between his critics and his defenders (see The Charges and the Defence).

The Biblical Handbooks and the Dictionary

Alongside the history of religion Men produced a substantial body of biblical reference work: introductions to reading Scripture, an illustrated children’s catechism, and above all a Bibliological Dictionary (Библиологический словарь), an encyclopedia of biblical studies — authors, schools, methods, and terms — which he compiled over many years and which was published posthumously by the Alexander Men Foundation (Russian bibliographies of Men’s works; Direction journal profile, which lists a “Dictionary of Biblical Studies” and a children’s illustrated catechism among his works). [Disputed: the publication data of the Bibliological Dictionary — commonly given as three volumes, Moscow, 2002 — could not be verified against a library catalogue in the preparation of this file, and is reported here as it appears in the secondary literature.]

The dictionary is the least-read and in some ways the most telling of his works. A parish priest with no institutional support and no library privileges compiled, by hand, a reference encyclopedia of a scholarly discipline that his country had spent seventy years suppressing — because the readers he was catechizing would eventually need it. It is the clearest single index of what he thought he was doing.

References

Men, Alexander [as E. Svetlov]. В поисках Пути, Истины и Жизни [In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life], 6 vols. Brussels: “Zhizn s Bogom,” 1970–1983; Moscow editions from 1991. Vol. 1 in English as The Sources of Religion (2017).
Russian Wikipedia, art. “Мень, Александр Владимирович.” (The Brussels publication 1970–1983 under the pseudonyms E. Svetlov, A. Bogolyubov and A. Pavlov; Moscow editions 1991–92.)
English Wikipedia, art. “Alexander Men.” (Volumes 1–6, Brussels 1970–1983, with Son of Man as the seventh; Heaven on Earth 1969, Where Did This All Come From? 1972, How to Read the Bible? 1981; the 1974 Andropov memorandum on works “illegally exported abroad.”)
Catalogue of the publications of “Жизнь с Богом” (Brussels), compiled at sites.google.com/site/kniznyjmirekumenyold. (The publisher and its Russian-language list.)
Poole, Randall A. “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought.” Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, 2026. (Soloviev and bogochelovechestvo; Berdyaev and personalism; Jaspers’s Axial Age; James and Otto; the dedication of the history of religion to Soloviev.)
“Aleksandr Men: Current Criticism and Defense.” East–West Church and Ministry Report (eastwestreport.org/articles/ew07302.htm). (Kuraev’s argument that Men was in effect an Eastern-rite Catholic; Sigrist’s defence.)
Благодатный огонь [Blagodatny Ogon], “Куда способны увести наставления протоиерея Александра Меня,” by Tatyana Petrova (blagogon.ru/digest/105). (The charge of syncretism and “theoretical super-ecumenism,” citing Men on the Bhagavad Gita via a 1994 pamphlet by Mark Makarov.)
“An Evangelical in the Russian Orthodox Church: Fr. Alexander Men (1935–1990),” Direction 26, no. 1. (List of works including the dictionary of biblical studies and the children’s illustrated catechism.)