Legacy and Assessment

Thirty-six years after his death, Men’s legacy is real, measurable, and divided: a corpus that introduced a generation of Russians to Christianity, a network of Moscow parishes and institutions formed by his practice, a substantial scholarly literature, and a persistent body of Orthodox opinion that regards the whole of it as a wrong turning. This file offers an assessment — provisionally, as the judgment of a moment still close to the events.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate)

A Note on Provisionality

Men died in 1990, within living memory. Many of the people who knew him, were baptized by him, or attacked him are alive; the murder is unsolved and the relevant archives are closed; the Russian Church in which his memory is contested has changed substantially since 1990 and is still changing. Everything below is therefore offered as the judgment of a moment, not as a settled verdict — following the repository’s practice for recent figures.

What He Actually Did

Five achievements are documented and are not seriously disputed even by his critics, who dispute their value rather than their occurrence.

1. He wrote a usable corpus for a country with none. Between the mid-1950s and 1990, working as a village parish priest with no library, no editor and no legal publisher, Men produced a life of Christ, a six-volume history of religion, biblical handbooks, a children’s catechism, and an encyclopedia of biblical studies (see 04 — The Writings). Whatever the theological objections to particular pages, the fact of a completed, coherent, readable corpus produced under those conditions is remarkable.

2. He catechized and baptized on a large scale under a persecuting state. For twenty years he conducted an illegal ministry of adult catechesis, small-group formation and baptism, chiefly among the Moscow intelligentsia (see 05 — The Evangelist of the Intelligentsia). The counts are estimates; the order of magnitude is not contested.

3. He was the most audible Christian voice in Russia at the moment the country was permitted to hear one. From 11 May 1988 to 8 September 1990 — twenty-eight months — he lectured, broadcast and published to a mass audience. Michael Bourdeaux called him the late Soviet Church’s “unofficial patriarch”; Mikhail Epstein ranked him the most prominent Orthodox Christian thinker of the 1970s–80s (as summarized in Randall A. Poole, “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought,” Northwestern University Forum, 2026).

4. He built institutions that outlived him. The Russian Bible Society, the journal The World of the Bible, the Open Orthodox University that now bears his name, one of the first Sunday schools in the USSR, and a charitable group serving a children’s hospital — all founded or co-founded in 1990 (see 06 — The Glasnost Years).

5. He formed people who continued the work. Fr. Alexander Borisov, Fr. Georgy Chistyakov, Fr. Vladimir Lapshin and others carried a recognizable pastoral practice into Moscow parishes after 1990 (see The Named Disciples).

What He Did Not Do

An honest assessment also requires the negative column, and it is substantial.

He was not a systematic theologian and did not attempt to be one. There is no dogmatic treatise in the corpus, no sustained engagement with the Fathers of the order one finds in Lossky or Stăniloae, no contribution to a technical theological question that specialists cite. Men’s genre is apologetic, catechetical and historical. Comparisons that place him beside Florovsky, Lossky or Zizioulas as a theologian are comparisons across categories, and they do him no favors (see Vladimir Lossky; Fr. Georges Florovsky).

He did not answer his critics. He died at fifty-five, two years into his public life, and the sharpest criticism of him was published after his death. The result is a controversy in which one side cannot reply — which is unfair to Men, and which has also allowed his defenders to answer for him in terms he might not have chosen.

He did not revise. Much of the corpus was written for a readership and a situation that ceased to exist in 1991. Men was a rapid and practical writer who assumed he would keep revising — he had revised Son of Man for decades — and the texts we have are frozen at the point where his life stopped.

He did not resolve the questions his framework raises. The relation between the “search” of the religions and the uniqueness of the Incarnation is the central theoretical question his work poses, and he did not work it out at the level of rigor the question demands. His critics are entitled to say so; his defenders are entitled to say that a catechist under persecution was not obliged to.

The Divided Reception, Stated Once More

Two readings of the same life are current in Orthodoxy, and both are held by serious people.

The first. Men is the outstanding Russian Christian evangelist of the twentieth century: a priest who, under a totalitarian state and at length at the cost of his life, gave a de-Christianized nation a way back into the faith of its fathers, in language it could understand, and who was killed on the road to the Liturgy.

The second. Men is the source of a modernist current in Russian Orthodoxy — ecumenically indiscriminate, doctrinally loose, dependent on Western scholarship, and pastorally soft — whose books, however well-meant, should not be given to inquirers; Prof. Alexei Osipov and Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev, two of the most widely heard catechetical voices in the Russian Church, decline to recommend them (see The Charges and the Defence).

This collection has set both out at full strength and does not adjudicate. What can be said neutrally is that the division is not going away: it maps onto a much older and still unresolved argument within Russian Orthodoxy between the inheritance of the religious renaissance — Soloviev, Bulgakov, Florensky, Berdyaev — and the neo-patristic reaction against it (see Fr. Sergius Bulgakov; Fr. Pavel Florensky; Vladimir Lossky).

An Assessment

Offered as assessment, and as the judgment of a moment.

On the man. What is most durable about Men is probably not any of his theses but his practice: a priest who took seriously that people outside the Church have real questions, that those questions deserve real answers, and that the answering is a priest’s work and not a specialist’s hobby. He did that for thirty years in circumstances where it was illegal, without office, without payment, and without protection. Whatever one concludes about the books, that is a form of pastoral seriousness the tradition recognizes.

On the books. They are catechetical and apologetic works of high quality and real limitations, written in an emergency. They should be read as what they are: a priest’s attempt to make Christianity intelligible to people who had been told for two generations that it was a fraud. Read that way, their generosity is a virtue and their looseness a cost. Read as dogmatic theology — which is how both his warmest admirers and his sharpest critics tend to read them — they will disappoint or alarm.

On the controversy. The charges against Men are serious and are made by serious people, and this collection has stated them without softening. It is also true that the criticism has sometimes been conducted in a register — insinuation about his descent, guilt by association, characterization of his circle as a “syndicate” — that does the critics’ own case no good, and that the substantial theological questions deserve better than that (see Ecumenism, Scripture, and the Antisemitic Attacks).

On the death. It is the hardest thing to assess and the easiest to misuse. A priest was killed on the way to the Liturgy and nobody knows why. That fact has been made to serve every party’s narrative, and it supports none of them. The proper response to an unsolved murder is not interpretation but prayer for the dead and a refusal to pretend to knowledge — and, one may add, a continuing insistence that the case is not closed.

A Last Word from Him

The line most often quoted from Men is from the lecture he gave the evening before he died: that only short-sighted people imagine Christianity has already happened, that it has taken “only the first, I would say timid, steps in the history of the human race” (“Christianity,” 8 September 1990).

It is a characteristic sentence, and it is the sentence his critics like least. It is worth noting what it does not say. It does not say that the faith is still being assembled, or that the Fathers were provisional, or that dogma awaits revision. It says that the Church’s life in history is young. Whether that is a hopeful orthodoxy or a modernist evasion is precisely the question this collection has declined to settle — which is, in the end, the honest place to leave a man who has been neither glorified nor condemned.

References

Poole, Randall A. “Fr. Alexander Men and the Traditions of Russian Religious Thought.” Northwestern University Forum in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, 2026. (Bourdeaux’s “unofficial patriarch”; Epstein’s ranking; Men as the best representative of the traditions of Russian religious thought in the post-Stalinist period; the Solovievian framework.)
Daniel, Wallace L. Russia’s Uncommon Prophet: Father Aleksandr Men and His Times. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. (The principal English-language scholarly biography and assessment.)
Roberts, Elizabeth, and Ann Shukman, eds. Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Life and Work of Alexander Men. London: SCM Press, 1996. (Selected writings with assessment of his significance.)
Hamant, Yves. Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times). Trans. Steven Bigham. Oakwood Publications, 1995.
Plekon, Michael. Review of Daniel, Russia’s Uncommon Prophet, in Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe 36, no. 4. (Assessment from within the sympathetic scholarly literature.)
Kriger, Boris (Bruce). “The Theological and Ecclesiastical Controversy Surrounding Father Alexander Men: A Critical Analysis.” The Orthodox Faith (Medium). (Osipov and Kuraev declining to recommend Men’s books; the range of the criticism.)
Православная энциклопедия [Orthodox Encyclopedia], art. “Мень Александр Владимирович” (pravenc.ru/text/2562996.html).
Men, Alexander. “Христианство” [Christianity], lecture of 8 September 1990. (The closing quotation.)