09 — Veneration and Assessment

Alexander Men is popularly revered on a considerable scale — his grave is visited, a church stands where he died, an annual conference bears his name, his books are everywhere — and he has not been glorified by any canonical Orthodox Church. This section states that fact plainly, explains what its absence does and does not mean, and offers a sober assessment of what he actually accomplished.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

The discipline here is the repository’s settled one for revered-but-unglorified figures, worked out in Fr. Pavel Florensky — What Non-Inclusion Does and Does Not Mean and in St. Maria of Paris — What the Church Received. It runs in two directions at once.

He may not be titled “St.” There is no glorification, no feast, no service, no troparion, and no authorization to venerate him liturgically. To style him a saint, or to call him a martyr in the Church’s technical sense, is to assert on the Church’s behalf something she has not said.

Non-glorification is not repudiation. A glorification is the Church’s recognition and reception of a holiness believed to be manifest; its absence is not a verdict that holiness was absent, and it is not a condemnation. No Orthodox Church has censured Men or his writings. The question is simply open, and in his case complicated by a fact peculiar to it: the manner of his death is an unsolved crime with no established motive, which removes from the outset the ordinary evidential ground on which a martyr’s glorification proceeds.

The two files below separate the ecclesial question from the historical judgment. The first treats veneration and the glorification question — including the “canonization” of Men by a body not in communion with the Orthodox Church, which is reported and labelled. The second offers an assessment of his work and his significance, provisionally, as the judgment of a moment still close to the events.

Section Contents

  • The Question of Glorification — the popular veneration, the institutional memory, the absence of glorification, and what that absence means
  • Legacy and Assessment — what he actually achieved, what he did not, and how he stands thirty-six years on

See Also