The Wellsprings of Religion by Alexander Men (review)

Alexander Men’s (1935–1990) profound life and ministry are familiar to many Russians even today, and his legacy as a missionary to his own people lives on in Russia’s religious consciousness. This is strikingly evident amongst certain members of the clergy, who even place photographs of Men alongside their household icons. Men’s remarkable life and work are less appreciated abroad. Alas-dair MacNaughton’s translation therefore marks a pivotal step in introducing Men’s ideas to the English-speaking world. The Wellsprings of Religion is the first of seven planned volumes from the author’s magnum opus: The History of Religion: In Search of the Way, the Truth, and the Life, first published abroad in 1970 and then distributed secretly in the Soviet Union. The series was finally officially published in Russia as Istoria Religii: V Poiskakh Puti, Istiny, i Zhizni (Moscow: Slovo, 1991). The thrust of Men’s first volume is apologetic, as he formulates for his Soviet contemporaries a defense of religious belief. Although the work is a product of its time and certainly makes outdated scientific assumptions, it contains relevant insights and introduces the reader to some of Russia’s greatest religious thinkers.

The Wellsprings of Religion is split into three parts: “The Nature of Faith,” “The Place of Humanity in the Universe,” and “Before the Face of the One Who Is.” The first part, the most substantial of the three, presents an overview of mystical experience and a justification for religious belief against Marxist materialism. The author’s remarkable erudition becomes evident here. Men was surely one of the most well-read religious writers of his time, steeped not only in his native religious thought (Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev) and literary traditions (Dostoyevsky, Lomonosov), but in the most influential twentieth-century works of Continental philosophy (Bergson, Husserl, and so on). However, Men’s copious use of references disrupts what should be the intuitive flow of his own argument. We lose the spirit of the author, as he is drowned in the flood of his citations, and in some places we are left with more of a literature review than a serious monograph.

Neverthless, Men offers valuable critiques of idealist and rationalist philosophies. He argues that “a theory of consciousness and reflection can never take away from the spontaneous living reality experienced personally” (62), and that human thought is never a “dead object for scrutiny” (68). For Men, pure rationalism is insufficient to grasp the “moving essence of reality” (67), but rationalism is also, more important, a denial of man’s spontaneous freedom. Rationalism presumes the blind adherence to syllogisms, which are necessarily coercive (77). Men, following in the footsteps of Florensky, thus makes the distinction between syllogistic rationalism (rassudok) and a superior “Great Reason” (razum), which is an ascent to the “sphere of paradox” (68). This forms the basis for faith as an “inexplicable confidence” (67). The influence of Fr. Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) is clear when Men associates this “Great Reason” with the Divine Wisdom (premudrost’) of the Old Testament, who is “constantly revealed in the whole process of cosmogenesis, in its organization, its drive to perfection, its order and its progress” (123).

As part of his critique of Marxism, Men also suggests (relying on Solov’ev) that although atheist materialism upholds the reality of the objective existence of matter, it cannot support this realism, since matter for materialists is known only through “the unreliable prism of perception and mediated experience” (106). Men thus argues that a “creative act of believing” is required even to uphold objective reality (106).

Parts 2 and 3 deal chiefly with Men’s anthropology and its relation to evolutionary biology. It is here that Men emphasizes the uniqueness of mankind; he points to the human race’s “general concept of shape and organized society” and reflects on the nature of the soul as man’s “sense of independence from the universe,” his “critical consciousness” (145). Although much of the biology used here is from the...