1. Two months before Aleksandr Menn was felled by an ax, he was asked in a radio interview broadcast across Russia, “Does one need to be a Christian, and if one does, then why?”
“I think there is only one answer, and it is as follows,” he said:
Man always seeks God. The normal state of man is, to some extent, to be connected with a higher power, even when the higher power in the human mind is distorted, and turned into something secular. Eras of Stalinism ... and all other isms seek some false god even if God is taken away. This turns to idol worship, but still the inner instinct of seeking God is there.
One can imagine Menn, in the austerity of the Moscow studio, drawing closer to the microphone as he continued, on the spot, his careful answer:
The question is totally different when it is put this way: Why Christianity? Is it because of the sacred scriptures? No, every religion has sacred scriptures, and sometimes with a very high quality of spiritual content.... Then why Christianity? Morality? Certainly. I am happy that in our society the high moral values of Christianity are accepted, but it would be totally erroneous to maintain that there are no moral values outside Christianity.... Then why Christianity? Should we embrace ... a position that God is revealed and therefore can be found in any kind of religion? No, because then the uniqueness and absolute character of Christianity will disappear. I think that nothing will prove the uniqueness of Christianity except one thing -- Jesus Christ Himself.
In the reflex of an Orthodox priest to the name of Jesus, Menn placed his right hand -- his fingers tapered like a concert pianist’s -- across the crucifix suspended over his chest, below his gray-streaked beard.
Many religious teachers, I’m sure, have a degree of truth in what they preach, but let’s listen to them: Buddha said that he could reach the state of absolute nothingness only after long and hard exercise. Can we believe him? We can. He is a good man. He reached what he worked hard for. Greek philosophers tell us how difficult it is for the mind to reach the idea of God and the truth. Mohammad says he felt miserable before God. He felt like nobody, but God simply revealed Himself to him. Mohammed was like a little fly before God. Can we believe him? Yes.
Among these religious teachers there is only one who says, “And I say to you,” as if he is speaking on behalf of God.
Menn’s fingers curl around his crucifix in a gesture that sets his Semitic features into sharp relief.
As the Gospel of John would say, “I and the Father are one.” Among the great teachers of world religions, nobody ever said anything like that. This is the only instance in history when God so fully revealed himself through a man -- Jesus Christ, the God-man.
It is a historical myth that Jesus simply preached morals. He could not be crucified for just doing that. Someone might say, “He called himself Messiah.” Yes, but ... [t]here were many false messiahs. Why was he so loved and hated? He said, “I am the door”-the door into eternity.
I believe that everything that is of value in Christianity is valuable only because it belongs to Christ. If it doesn’t belong to Christ, it belongs to the same degree to Islam or Buddhism. So every religion is an attempt to reach God. But Jesus Christ is the only answer.
The Moscow State Radio interviewer must have nearly tipped over in his chair. But Menn went on, quietly driving the point home: “On one hand He is the framework of history. On the other He is totally unique. Christianity is unique because Christ is unique.”
That was Menn’s answer, pared down, given under the constraints of an interview to which the KGB was listening, as he was aware. And he was not finished; that was only the opening. He spoke with the same alert eloquence for another half-hour. It was July 19, 1990, and the disassembly of the Soviet system was nearly complete, or so consumers of television and newsweeklies in the United States would have said.
But before glasnost and perestroika were bywords on the nightly news, Menn was known across the Soviet Union as a beacon of spiritual reform. In his humble church in a Moscow suburb, where intelligentsia flocked, even unlettered workers could understand Menn’s plain sermons and lecture presentations of the gospel. That gospel teaches how particular talents are given to believers; but the honed clarity that Menn exemplified does not drop from the stars.
2. Menn was born in Moscow in 1935. Both parents were Jews. His father, an engineer, was an official atheist and a nonpracticing Jew, but sympathetic to the Jewish community. In the early 1930s, during a period of anti-Christian purges, Menn’s mother, Elena, met Father Serafim Batukov, a priest in the underground church. As a child, Elena had been a seeker after truth, and as a young woman, she became active in the Russian Zionist movement. Now she happily received Father Serafim’s teachings.
Seven months after her first son, Alik, was born, Elena took him secretly to Father Serafim’s house in Zagorsk. There she and her infant were baptized. She joined Father Serafim’s community and moved to Zagorsk. Seven years later, as the elderly priest lay dying, he said to Elena, “Thanks to what you are enduring and to the serious way you are raising him, your Alik will someday be a great man.”
Young Menn received the nurture of Father Serafim until the priest died, and then turned to Boris Vasilev, a scientist and theologian who was also a member of Serafim’s church. At the age of 13, Menn knocked on the door of the Moscow Theological Seminary, located in Zagorsk, and asked to be admitted. He was turned down, but the dean of students was so impressed by the abilities of this prodigy-Menn had already begun to master Latin, Greek, and Hebrew as well as several modern European languages -- that he became Menn’s lifelong confidant.
Menn’s younger brother, Pavel, an Orthodox believer who later taught Hebrew in Moscow, says Menn felt called to the ministry when he was 12 years old. “He sought out religious literature wherever he could find it. I can still see him in a Moscow market, poring over books by great religious philosophers. ‘They inoculated me against the pestilence of Stalin,’ he once told me. ‘I trembled as I read.’”
At the age of 14, Menn began writing a life of Christ. Within the year, he finished a first draft -- a book that eventually became the first volume in a series on the history of world religions. Menn loved the natural world and hoped to know it better, so he studied biology-first in Moscow, then at Irkutsk, in Sibera. He later said that because of his training under Vasilev he never sensed any contradiction between faith and science.
His roommate at Irkutsk was Gleb Yakunin, a biology student and an atheist. Menn persuaded Yakunin to rejoin the Russian Orthodox Church, where he had been baptized. (Yakunin was later ordained a priest; he became an outspoken defender of human rights in the Soviet Union and, after the overthrow of communism, served as a deputy in the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament.) The year Menn was to receive his degree in biology, he was expelled from the institute as “a practicing church member.”
Since he had sensed his call earlier, he entered the seminary at Zagorsk. The call was confirmed, he felt, in 1948, when Israel became a nation. He believed that if Jesus was the Messiah of Israel, the people of Israel would someday acknowledge that. Once they did, and were gathered from diaspora with a national identity, he believed they would begin to study what he called their “Jewish legacy-the New Testament.” The need for Jewish preachers of the gospel at that time, he felt, would be momentous.
In 1958 he married, and that summer, on the feast of Pentecost, he was ordained a deacon. Two years later he was ordained a priest. He served parishes near Moscow, but only as an assistant because of the popularity of his ministry. Worship services, once attended only by elderly women, began to overflow with crowds attracted by his preaching. Menn baptized the songwriter Aleksandr Galich, the memoirist and cultural commentator Nadhezda Mandelstam (the widow of the great poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 in a Soviet labor camp), and the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who was later to spend nearly seven years in the gulag.
Menn was a spiritual adviser to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Nobel Prize- winning physicist Andrei Sakharov.Parishioners and friends, saved souls, described him as a man of joy, with unusual gifts of discernment; he seemed to sense spiritual needs intuitively, and he conveyed to others the love of Christ -- a light-hearted spiritual healer. In nearly every photograph he is smiling the broad, clear smile of one whose joy springs straight from the heart.
Menn read all he could, and his memory was encyclopedic. He wrote a six- volume history of religious and philosophical thought in Eastern and Western cultures before Christ-beginning with the volume he had first drafted when he was 14, his life of Christ. The series ended with the New Testament teachings of Christ being spread throughout the world. In its entirety, that work, according to his biographer, Yves Hamant, exceeds 4,000 pages. In addition to another massive encyclopedic work, a seven-volume dictionary of biblical studies, Menn wrote many other books and essays, including books on Orthodox worship and on how to read the Bible -- a necessity in tradition- fogged, officially atheist Russia.
The vibrancy of Jesus as revealed in the Gospels, Menn felt, had to reanimate the 1,000-year-old Orthodox church. And he was aware that its Russian branch had undergone compromises with the Soviet regime merely to exist. His books, circulated in samizdat, undid the Soviet claim that atheism was a science; they advanced Christianity as the true intellectual Way. These writings, Michael Meerson says, breathe out the appealing person of Christ. They brought about revival in the Orthodox church; thousands of young people were converted through Menn’s work.
Menn’s popularity aroused the IRE not only of government officials but also of clerics in the established church. They moved him from Moscow to the small parish of Novaya Derevnya.
Michael Meerson once visited Menn there, at the house where he lived for more than 20 years:
I found him working in his garden, watering plants. He was reading a book held in his left hand, reciting something to himself, while watering with his right hand. “What are you reciting, Father?” I asked him. “Dante’s Divine Comedy,” he replied. “I cannot live without it, I know it almost by heart, and reread it several times a year to keep it in my memory.” ... Conversation with him was an intellectual feast: his language was picturesque, full of puns, literary allusions, and quotations from memory of poetry, of the mystical literature of East and West, and of the Scriptures, which he knew brilliantly.
Certain members of the hierarchy of the Orthodox church hoped to suppress Menn -- denouncing him within the church, and even publicly, to the press and Soviet authorities. Those authorities, who had shadowed Menn for years, finally moved in. For six years, the KGB kept him under surveillance, and during 1985 and 1986 they subjected him to searches and seizures and harassment. During this time, Menn often had to meet with the KGB several times a week. They threatened him with deportation and prison, trying to force him to sign a public denunciation of his ministry.
He refused. He was somehow able to negotiate his own terms, finally stating only this: that in the past he hadn’t always behaved with proper caution and had made mistakes-a rudimentary confession for any sinner redeemed by Christ.
Menn was asked how he felt about being called in by the KGB so often, facing questions and threats. He said, “I’m a priest, I can talk to anybody. For me it’s not difficult.” When the recent change began in Russia, he said to a group of young professionals, “People see perestroika as a kind of panacea. ‘Ah! Here’s the solution for everything!’ But that’s not the way it works. We are living with the consequences of a colossal historical pathology [communism]. Our Church, our Russia, have been virtually destroyed, and the damage lives on, in people’s souls, in the work ethic, in the family, and in the conscience.”
But as the restrictions on religion lifted, Menn moved more freely and broadened his ministry. He visited schools and spoke to students, he gave public lectures -- often taking on 20 speaking engagements a month, besides Bible studies and prayer meetings and daily pastoral duties at his church. He put in regular appearances on radio and TV. He was instrumental in organizing an ecumenical institute in Moscow. Asked how he kept up, he said, “I volunteer; God provides the time.”
In the eyes of the Russian public, he took on the dimensions of a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov. And when Solzhenitsyn, then in exile in the United States, said that the single greatest hope for Russia was its underground church, he probably had Menn in mind. To American journalists, Solzhenitsyn’s statement simply confirmed the “reactionary” turn he had revealed in his Harvard address. Clearly, the old man was out of touch. As it turned out, Solzhenitsyn’s words were among the most prophetic spoken about modern Russia.
To his brother, Menn confessed that, after all the years of restrictions and imposed silence, he felt like “an arrow finally sprung from the bow.” But a darker shadow was dogging him now. Death threats arrived in the mail. They may have originated with the KGB, or a worse tyranny -- one of the heart. Menn had been speaking more about an ecumenicity not compartmentalized by denominations -- a faith of universal victory in Jesus Christ -- and zealots in the Orthodox church began to vilify him as a secret Catholic and crypto-Jew.
Those close to him believe that an ultra-conservative element of the KGB, or the church, or the two in concert, stirred members of the nationalistic group Pamyat to action against Menn.
It is an article of faith with Pamyat that being a Jew is a curse, and the group blames all of Russia’s troubles on the Jews. In some of the later lectures Menn was giving, there were disruptions, and one night a group started shouting, “Get out, you Yid! Don’t tell us about our Christian religion!”
In September 1990, Menn was invited to host a regular television show, broadcast from Moscow, on religion and culture. He was also asked to assume the position of rector at the Moscow Christian University. Threatening mail arrived, and it was blunt: accept either position, and you’re dead. Menn set these threats aside, or read them in public, trying to pass them off. But parishioners and friends started accompanying him home from public appearances, and somebody close to him suggested he should emigrate to the West.
“Why?” Menn asked. “If God hasn’t turned away from me, I have to stay and serve Him. And if He has turned away, where could I hide?”
[see #3973 for continuation...]
