Alexander Men: A Witness for Contemporary Russia (A Man for Our Times)
By Yves Hamant
Translated by Fr. Steven Bigham
Oakwood Publications
231 pp.; $14.95
Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men
Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman
Continuum
226 pp.; $19.95, paper
At 6:00 a.m. on September 9, 1990, a martyr was born. Fr. Alexander Men, a Jew by birth and probably the most powerful voice for Christ in Russia, had his skull laid open by an axe in the hand of a murderer. Did the kgb do it? Or one of the anti-Semites who wrote all those threatening letters? Or (probably) both in tandem? In Tengiz Abuladze’s 1986 film Repentance, which helped spark the religious revival in the dying Soviet Union, the closing scene had an old woman questioning what good is a road that doesn’t lead to a church. Men was assassinated while on his Sunday-morning way to catch a train to go to church to preach. The ultimate answer to what good this road was depends on how one views time and eternity. But there is no gainsaying the enormous loss to a Russia trying to get its post-Communist bearings–a classic case of what Solzhenitsyn calls “counterselection.”
Readers of Books & Culture know of Father Men from Larry Woiwode’s rendition [March/April 1996] and can know more of him from these two books: a passably written but miserably proofread biography, dotted with pictures of churches and priests, and the first translated fruits of a writer’s teeming mind. Hamant writes in the manner of hagiography, which need displease only cynics about saintliness. The women of Men’s family–grandmother, mother, aunt–shaped the spiritual life of their precocious boy, who absorbed Kant at 13, learned many languages both ancient and modern, and read very widely in the arts and sciences. Although he went on to write many books, none of which was published in Russia during his lifetime, and became friends with such worthies as Solzhenitsyn and Fr. Gleb Yakunin, Men always considered himself a preacher above all else. Amid a corrupt Russian Orthodox Church inclined toward passivity and ritualism, he manifested an evangelist’s missionary spirit and a teacher’s catechizing passion. His life and work were Christocentric; he spoke of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as freely as any evangelical Protestant. His influence continues through a Christian university in Moscow named after him, through the lives of his many spiritual children, and through his writings.
The 11 items gathered by Elizabeth Roberts and Ann Shukman–academic essays, public lectures, interviews–enrich our understanding of the situation of Christians at the end of the Soviet parenthesis of Russian history. But Men is no museum piece. With orthodox heart, ecumenical spirit, and model Christian mind, this polymath offers superior instruction for Western Christian thinkers, as well. Eschewing the exclusivity common among the Russian Orthodox and warning against excessive asceticism, he brings fresh rhetoric and a distinctive angle of vision to bear on familiar Big Questions such as how Christians should interact with the surrounding atheist culture, how Eastern and Western Christians can be both ecumenical and faithful, and how Christianity can respect yet transcend other world religions. He is especially sophisticated on Christian philosophy of history, interacting with the likes of Karl Jaspers and Arnold Toynbee while drawing steadily from Vladimir Solovyev and Nikolai Berdyaev, also Christopher Dawson–but indebted even more to the Church Fathers and most of all to the Bible.
If, as between the two powerful monks in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the spirit of the rigid, judgmental Father Ferapont seems preponderant among Russian Orthodox clergy in our time, Men legitimately lays self-conscious claim to the sweet and world-affirming spirit of Father Zosima. As we await translation of more of his works, we can say Amen to A. Men.
–Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
The Moral Intelligence of Children: How to Raise a Moral Child
By Robert Coles
Random House
218 pp.; $21
For many years, Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles has delighted his readers with inspiring observations on the nature of children–delight, because his reports have been cheerier than we might have assumed. Some of Coles’s young reporters have taught us more about race relations than a dozen passionate prophetic tomes could ever hope to accomplish.
Coles’s new book, The Moral Intelligence of Children, informed me less about the moral ability (or disability) of children than the responsibility of adults in their moral formation. In conversations with educators and parents, Coles learns that, in late twentieth-century America, adults habitually turn to the mental health system for “solutions” when confronted by the moral failure of children. A particularly sad story is that of a nine-year-old cheater who was supported by the teacher, much to the despair of her little classmate who reported her. Elaine had been observed to “fudge a little” in sports, “occasionally exaggerate things,” and–because she hated to lose, ever–she “told little white lies.” Under the cloak of euphemisms, the significant adults in her life turned to psychology and its own weasel words to solve a moral sickness in the family.
It is a curious commentary on our times that it takes a psychiatrist to recognize that these are spiritual sicknesses, not mental diseases. Alas, our culture has substituted social workers for grandmothers, and psychotherapists for priests. In the process we have passed the cost for our shift in paradigm along to the health-care system and now groan under a heavy burden that breaks our national back.
Why does the author rely on what some may regard as legalism? Here Coles is simply echoing biblical wisdom. The law is indeed a schoolmaster, and its lessons point to the need for more than what is naturally within. Children are not “naturally good”; they need godly instruction. I’m reminded of the daughter of a simple Dutch watchmaker who, when faced with Jews on the run from the Nazis, remembered her father’s words. Corrie ten Boom was 45 years old when she told her first lie, and then agonized as she weighed the competing demands of mercy, grace, and love. Our world needs more such morally proficient sons and daughters.
–Diane Komp
Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, Volume 1: 1926-1938
In The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson
Princeton University Press
836 pp.; $59.50.
Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor, is engaged in the titanic project of establishing a complete and reliable set of Auden’s works. The previous two volumes are devoted to Auden’s plays and opera libretti (most of which he wrote in collaboration with others). Two more volumes of prose will follow, and then the poems–which, because of Auden’s frequent revisions to already published poems, are a textual editor’s nightmare; one can see why Mendelson is saving them for last. This volume meets the high standards Mendelson set with the volumes of dramatic writings: the critical apparatus is full, detailed, one is tempted to say all-knowing; but unobtrusive. It is also a superbly produced book, with excellent paper and a fine flexible binding that makes it a delight to hold.
Readers interested in Auden’s intellectual development will find this volume fascinating, because throughout his life Auden tended to try out intellectual stances in his occasional prose. Especially in the 1930s, Auden’s poems were enormously difficult, at times even impenetrable. From the essays and reviews on poetry, one can garner a somewhat better understanding of what made Auden the poet tick at this time in his life; but much remains obscure. However, in the other occasional writings one can see more clearly Auden’s struggle to evaluate and make proper use of his greatest intellectual influences: Freud, D. H. Lawrence (his “think books,” as Auden called them, not his novels), English versions of Marxism. Christian theology seems to play a role nearly equal to that of the figures just mentioned; one of the potential surprises of this book for those who know that Auden re-entered the church in 1940 (for the first time since childhood) is how frequently Christianity comes up in the pieces collected here.
This is a useful collection, but Mendelson’s next installment, which will cover at least the years of World War II–when Auden was writing about and assimilating such figures as Charles Williams, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Kierkegaard–will be more important. Few of those writings are available between book covers, while many of the key pieces in this volume are already available in a collection titled The English Auden.
–Alan Jacobs
The Reformation in National Context
Edited by Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikulcs Teich
Cambridge University Press
236 pp.; $54.95
Calvinism in Europe, 1540-1620
Edited by Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis
Cambridge University Press
283 pp.; $59.95
These two outstanding collections provide further examples of the currently dominant approach to the Reformation. They feature detailed research in long-neglected sources such as local church archives, business accounts, diplomatic correspondence, and the records of local governments. Theology and grand contests over church order, which dominated Reformation research for the 400 years before about 1960, are present, but only at the margins.
It would be possible to look on this sort of history as contributing to the process of secularization. It is also possible, however, to look upon it as opening the possibility for understanding Incarnation. Especially when modern students of the Reformation write without animus against traditional religious faith (as is the case with most of the authors represented in these two books and most of the rest of “the new Reformation history”), the opportunity exists to see what religion meant for ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Even for those who remain mostly interested in theology, the results of this new history can be illuminating, for it brings faith out of the monastery or pulpit to the marketplaces, schoolrooms, courtrooms, and homes where most people lived–to, that is, the very places that the gospel was first proclaimed by Jesus himself.
Of special interest here is the skill with which several authors treat connections among religion, commerce, and government. The Calvinism book is especially germane in this regard, since those relationships eventually led, through several national channels, to the shaping of religious faith and practice throughout much of the United States and Canada. The most useful essays in the national context volume are those that describe reactions to Protestantism in often neglected parts of Europe like Bohemia, Hungary, or Poland, and those by editor Bob Scribner in weighing the varied mixture of political, urban, intellectual, cultural, and religious factors that help explain why Protestantism took root in some nations but not in others.
–Mark Noll
“We can understand, even applaud, normal human cravings for a secure place in some highly anthropomorphic heaven perceived as a structured and idealized version of man’s society on earth.” Indeed. And who are “we”? The writer, Lacey Baldwin Smith, a much-honored historian and professor emeritus at Northwestern University, doesn’t say; let us assume he means civilized, educated people–the kind who read the Times of a Sunday morning. Smith continues: “But peel back the carefully contrived veneer of sterotyped piety imposed by hagiographers, and we sense the existence of the dark abyss of psychosis: the agony, the courage, and the distorted logic of personalities that have long since passed spiritual hypochondria and are well on the road to madness.”
While Smith was writing Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World, Christians in China, the Sudan, and elsewhere were dying for their faith. Their stories, insofar as they are recoverable, offer little of interest to those who would probe “the dark abyss of psychosis.” They testify rather to the banality of evil and the tenacity of hope. And they point beyond themselves to the much larger number of Christians who, though not martyred, are suffering persecution at this moment.
Thanks in large part to the untiring efforts of the Hudson Institute’s Michael Horowitz, who has written that “the mounting persecution of Christians eerily parallels the persecution of Jews, my people, during much of Europe’s history,” the plight of these believers is at last beginning to receive sustained attention. Two new books–Their Blood Cries Out, by Paul Marshall with Lela Gilbert, and In the Lion’s Den, by Nina Shea–convey the scope of the problem with passion and a contagious sense of urgency. Every American Christian should read them.
Marshall, a widely published scholar who came to the subject via a philosophical interest in human rights, has produced the most comprehensive and coherent survey of the worldwide persecution of Christians, accompanied by extensive analysis of the apathetic American response to this crisis. Shea, a longtime human-rights activist and director of the Puebla Program division of Freedom House, covers much of the same ground in concise fashion, with a personal punch: her book includes many photos and brief profiles of victims of persecution.
Another book that belongs on the same shelf with these two is Susan Bergman’s Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith–a good antidote to Smith, whose last chapter is titled “The Twentieth-Century Martyr: An Endangered Species?” Bergman commissioned 19 poets, novelists, and essayists to tell the stories of modern martyrs. Not all of the subjects fit what I would call even a broad definition of martyrdom; I’m thinking, for example, of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the French philosopher Simone Weil: extraordinary writers of great moral courage, yes, but not martyrs. But these are exceptions. Archbishop Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Edith Stein: The lives and deaths of these exemplary figures and others, famous and obscure, are recounted without a trace of false piety, their stories framed by Bergman’s powerful introductory essay and a thoughtful afterword by the poet Dana Gioia. “‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed,'” Gioia reminds us, “but only the living can cultivate the fruit of their sacrifice.”
–JW
Diane Komp is professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine. Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 38
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