Like the stones of a mosaic

This article by Yves Hamant traces the spiritual formation of Father Alexander Men (1935-1990), a Russian Orthodox priest murdered in 1990, through a biographical study based on primary sources and direct testimonies. The author shows that Men was not a convert in adulthood, contrary to a common assumption, but had been baptized in childhood within the Soviet catacomb Church and formed by an unbroken spiritual tradition tracing back to the startsy of Optina. The main contribution of the article is to demonstrate how this early rootedness in living Orthodoxy enabled Men to play an irreplaceable role as a link between the pre-Soviet ecclesial tradition and the intellectual converts of the 1970s and 1980s, thereby explaining the nature of his missionary ministry as well as the resistance he encountered in certain neophyte circles.