The Two Alexanders in My Life:

Fr Men and Fr Schmemann

V. REV. MICHAEL MEERSON

Fr. Alexander Men and Fr. Alexander Schmemann never met. They lived and worked under totally different circumstances. The life of each was short by modern standards. Fr. Men was assassinated in 1990, at the age of 55, after a year of receiving letters that warned him to either stop his missionary activity or leave Russia if he wished to stay alive. Fr. Schmemann died of cancer in 1983, at the age of 62. Yet the influence of each continues to be felt throughout the Orthodox world today.

I was blessed to know both priests personally and be inspired by them. In the decades since they reposed, as I’ve reflected on my experiences with them, and have pored over their writings, I’ve realized there was a remarkable overlap in their apostolic work. Each of them in his own way became a living embodiment of the same theme: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). 

In theological terms, this concluding statement of the Letters to the Hebrews suggests that Jesus remains the same throughout the human history, for He has entered it from eternity—and with Him, and in Him, eternity has permeated time. It implies that the church, His body, is contemporaneous with every historical epoch. Both priests witnessed this belief in what has been called our “Post-Christian Era,” a time in which historical Christendom seems to be in retreat.

Fr. Men

In the environment of Fr. Men, this retreat was more than obvious; it seemed to be total, and the Orthodox church seemed to be irretrievably locked in the past. The Russian Orthodox empire had been replaced by a militant regime that renounced religion as such, and attempted to erect a new civilization, based on the modernist premises of atheistic humanism and scientism, and upon a totalitarian economic and political doctrine informed by those premises.

Fr. Men was born in Moscow, on January 22, 1935. He was baptized and raised in a small, underground community of believers who struggled to preserve the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, uncontaminated by any collaboration with Communist authorities. As a priest, however, his mission was not to preserve and restore the bygone Orthodox past. Instead, it was to see the Orthodox tradition reveal its true treasure - namely the presence in it of “Jesus Christ, who is the same, yesterday and today and forever.” Against the overwhelming background of Soviet ideological materialism, he evoked the worldwide expansion of human spirituality as found in religions of mankind.

As a theologian, Fr. Men is best known for a multivolume series, History of Religion, that frames the world’s spiritual traditions as a collective search for the Face of God—which, as he shows, is revealed in Christ. In these texts, Fr. Men deals with the nature of religion in general, arguing that it cannot be superseded by anything, because it addresses and expresses the very essence of the human nature. He later traces the historical development of religions throughout the world: in the primitive societies of Egypt and Sumer, and in ancient India, China, and Greece. The penultimate volume focuses on the Hebrew prophets; and the final volume describes the historical, cultural, and religious context of the first century, in which the Good News was proclaimed first to the Jews—and then, immediately, to the whole Hellenistic and Roman world at large. The first and the last book in this series, the one he started writing while still being a teenager, was The Son of Man. It became his most famous one.

Fr. Men is also remembered widely for his work as a minister. He earned the trust of thousands of believers in the communist Soviet Union. It wasn’t only because of his brilliant ideas, and their skillful exploration, that his ministry succeeded—nor was it all because of his great erudition and enormous productivity. Most of all, it was because of his pastoral gifts. I have not known another priest who could be so perfectly described by the words of St. Paul, the apostle: “I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).

Fr. Vladimir Zelinsky, an Orthodox priest and prolific Christian thinker and writer, who, as a religious dissident in the Soviet Union knew Fr. Men closely, superbly summed up Fr. Men’s ministerial gifts in a tribute in 2022. The martyred priest had the blessed gift to “take upon himself the cross of a stranger,” Fr. Zelinsky wrote. Fr. Men was able to share deeply in the pain of a parent who had lost a child, in the loneliness of a widow, and in the discomfort of a “well-read yet confused young intellectual.” “There are many pastor-teachers who know well how and what to teach,” Fr. Zelinsky went on, “and who know how to do it well, there are few elders who communicate the will of God, but at all, I think, there are even fewer those who are ready to provide their own personality as a breeding ground for the growth in Christ for another person.” 

People were drawn to Fr. Men as to a living embodiment of some tangible, yet unknown presence, for which they could find only one name: the divine presence. Each of his spiritual children became his friend, as I can personally testify. I was baptized as a child, but did not receive religious education, having been raised in the Soviet atheist system. I found my way out of atheism through intellectual means: through philosophical search, my acquaintances with dissidents, and reading forbidden literature; and yet it all failed to lead me to the Christian faith, and the Orthodox church. The latter merely repelled with its foreignness, incomprehensibility, and complete, as it seemed, lack of relevance.

Fr. Men changed all of this. At my first meeting with him, I instantaneously felt his kinship. Through him I was able to enter the church, feeling at home in it, because it was home for him. Ultimately, Fr. Men and I collaborated closely for almost seven years, first to publish his books underground—as samizdat—and later to promote and reproduce the works of Russian religious thinkers like Nikolay Berdiaev, Fr. Sergey Bulgakov, Fr. George Florovsky, as well as Fr. Alexander Schmemann, all of whom influenced Fr. Alexander Men and whose work he carried on behind the Iron Curtain.

Fr. Schmemann

After I escaped imprisonment in the Soviet Union for my underground publishing activity, I stayed briefly in France (1972-73), where I worked for a Russian Orthodox emigre press. In the end of 1973, I came to the United States. Fr. Alexander Schmemann, whom I had met in Paris at a conference of Orthodox youth, invited me to stay in his house. He was passionately interested in the religious revival and human right movement in the Soviet Union and found in me the one who represented the both trends and was able to witness about it and convey my experience in writing. Later his interest in Russian revival brought him in contact with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and he became Solzhenitsyn’s father-confessor and close friend.

In Fr. Schmemann’s house I had the familiar feeling that the Church was his home. After he took me to St. Vladimir’s seminary, I felt that the seminary and the church he represented—the Orthodox Church in America—could also become my home. During my years of studying under Fr. Alexander, and having him as my father-confessor, I realized he was endowed with the same Spirit as Fr. Men, despite their different cultural backgrounds. Both were broadminded, spiritually sober, bold, and independent in pursuing their missions.

Fr. Schmemann lived all his life in the West: first in Paris, where he ultimately became a professor of theology at St. Sergius Institute, and later in New York, where he taught at St. Vladimir’s. He saw his main task in bringing the Orthodox Church to conformance with this contemporaneity of Jesus’ everlasting presence in it, by revealing its relevance to modernity, and opening it up for strangers.

Fr. Alexander perceived the Eucharist as a forgotten treasure within the Church. He understood his mission as helping others rediscover it and to bring it back to the center of their experience with Orthodox worship. He made it a priority to achieve all-congregational regular communion throughout the whole OCA—which he saw as the only way for Orthodoxy in America to survive and grow. In the old world, he argued, the Orthodox church had been supported for centuries by national states and/or ethnic communities with their local traditions. In the American setting, Orthodox Christians lack state support; and no ethnic cultural tradition, he argued—be it Russian, Romanian, Albanian, or Greek—would be enough to bind church communities together for generations to come. What would hold it together and attract to it others, then? Solely Jesus Christ, “Who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

A message radiates from Schmemann’s books, articles, sermons, lectures: Christ is present in the Eucharist, and this presence is so powerful and vital that it makes the church ever young and fruitful. We, as Orthodox Christians, do not have to feel buried under the layers of our ancient, venerable tradition or our ethnic customs. With the Eucharist set in heart of the church life, everything finds itself in the proper place and perspective. We don’t need to run after today’s fads, struggling to conform to modernity, which keeps changing anyway. Christ always addresses “what is timeless and changeless in man himself.”

Along with regular communion, Fr. Alexander sought to revive another liturgical tradition: the loud and clear recitation of the so-called “secret prayers” of the Anaphora. The name comes from the association of these prayers with the sacraments; but over time, it had become customary for priests to mumble the prayers to themselves, behind the closed royal doors, effectively keeping them secret from the congregation. There was an idea that if they were spoken loudly, it might “desecrate them.” In fact, the entire content of the Liturgy as the believer’s preparation for the acceptance of God, in the form of the sacrament, is expressed in these prayers. Fr. Alexander began training seminarians to say them audibly, on behalf of all the faithful. He managed to educate several generations of ministers in this practice—although, sadly, since his death, this tradition has again fallen away, and to some extent the Orthodox Liturgy has returned to its usual clerical routine.

In his book Great Lent, Fr. Alexander shows how in our worship we relive the sacred history of salvation. Through the liturgical celebrations during the Great Lent, we reenact the biblical stories of Adam’s creation and fall, of the exile from paradise, of the Hebrews’ wandering through their exodus from slavery. It is the living liturgical participation in the events that saves us from regarding them as mere ancient tales with no application to our own life. We celebrate Adam’s expulsion from Paradise not as some pre-historical episode, but as a universal event of personal relevance to each of us. I, myself, am Adam (man), who am expelled for my own unfaithfulness; I am sitting “by the rivers of Babylon” and weeping, (Comp.137 (136) Psalm). The Holy Saturday Matins’ reading of Ezekiel’s prophecy about the dry bones of the House of Israel (37:1-14), proclaims general resurrection. Listening to this prophecy, in front of Jesus’ burial shroud, I, myself am thrilled with the anticipation of my own dead and dry bones which the power of God’s Spirit can restore to wholeness and revive.

Yet I lacked this vision and awareness before my study in his seminary. It was these years with Fr. Alexander that transformed the tedious and ill-understood Orthodox Liturgy into something meaningful, relevant, and indispensable.

Summing up my brief recollections about Fr. Men and Fr. Schmemann, I trust that I grew up as a Christian under the two great missionaries of Orthodoxy, one for Soviet society, the other for the Orthodox Church in the free world. I see the strength and success of their apostolate in their creative ability and fearlessness to discover in the Orthodox tradition the possibilities of renewal and growth hidden in it. Cutting through secondary things and centuries of outdated customs, they found and pointed at the direct access to Christ—who again and again, for every generation, opens in His church the sources of living water, being the same "yesterday, today and forever." They left us the legacy of this belief in their life work, personal example, and writings.

Simply addressing their memory may revive in us the same feeling of eternal, living tangible presence of Christ in the Church tradition to which they stayed faithful to the end. Despite their many tribulations, their suffering, and their untimely deaths, they both were of “good cheer,” and, it turned out, they won—because it was the One, whom they trusted and who acted through them, that said: “The world will make you suffer. But be brave! I have overcome the world” (Jn.16:33).