Michel EVDOKIMOV. Two Martyrs in a Godless World. Dietrich Bonheoffer and Alexander Men. Hyde Park, New York: New City Press, 2021. Pp. 162. $24.95 pb. ISBN 978-1-56548-384-2. Reviewed by Anthony J. BLASI, San Antonio, TX

  Despite the title, this little book is not a double biography but a presentation of a religious stance. Published originally in French, the translation by Jeremy N. Ingpen reads smoothly. The author, Michel Evdokimov, is an Orthodox priest and theologian. For many years he was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Poitiers. He is the author of a short biography of Father Alexander Men and many books on Orthodox spirituality.

The book has four parts: an introduction, a section on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a section on Alexander Men (1935-1990), and an afterword consisting of an essay by Olivier Clément (1921-2009), an Orthodox theologian and ecumenist.

The introduction dwells on the paradox of Christianity: To be true to itself it needs to work against itself as a worldly power. God, to be genuinely embraced, needs to cease being God as people imagine God to be; and humans, to be genuinely embraced, need to cease being human as they imagine humans to be. For there is a necessary tension in the unity of genuine divinity and genuine humanity, a unity that is at the core of Christianity. So as Christianity needed once that Christendom be warded off—and the forces of secualrization made that possible—so now secular humanity needs spiritual and religious indifference to be warded off. The force of resistant theism makes the latter possible. The author reasons that God without an uncoerced humanity is but a sterile idea, and humanity without a voluntary theism is but animal. The dialectical nature of this stance pervades the remainder of the book.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of course, was a theologian and pastor of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s. He worked in the short-lived Finkenwalde seminary, where he prepared pastors for an underground chruch. His ministry featured a common life and, simultanaeously, a retreat from and engagement in the world. Boenhoefer became the counselor in the plot to assassinate Hitler, resolving the rule-based inhibitions that would lead the would-be assassins away from tyranicide. Engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, he was imprisoned, and he was executed just prior to the German surrender. In his famous prison letters, Boenhoefeer wrote of dispensing with the God of the gaps who would make the practice of the faith easy. He made it clear that God provided the social world providentially, a world that included non-Christians.

While Boenheffer was killed in an official procedure by the Nazis, an unknown assailant, presumbly a Communist in the Stalinist mode, killed Alexander Men with an ax apart from any official formality. The Soviets under Stalin has long persecuted religion. In 1937, 24,000 people, including almost all of the Moscow clergy, had been executed and buried in a mass grave outside Moscow. From that time, Men’s family affiliated with an underground "Catacomb Church." Trained as a biologist, Men was not allowed to graduate because of his church-going. He was self-taught in philosophy and completed a correspondence course in theology and was ordained a priest in 1960. As a pastor, he attracted an educated following; so under government pressure he was appointed to a rural parish, where he remained for the rest of his life. Intelletuals, often "atheists" in search of a spritiuality, went out to him in the countryside. When Russian society opened up in 1988, Men was speaking in schools and in the media about a Christianity that was open to society and science. He became a noted advocate of Christian unity. He noted that under the tsars, the Chruch had become nothing but a compulsory formality that persecuted monks and Old Believers. Official Soviet atheism, he observed, freed Christians from that compulsory formalism. He focused on knowing the Creator through creation, including history. "The diea of the aferlife should be considered, not as a consoling anxiety-relieving invention, but as an invitation to fulfill one’s vocation here on earth" (p. 112).

A brief postscript draws parallels betwene Bonhoeffer and Men. Then the afterword by Olivier Clément restates the basic thesis that secularity represents a freeing of faith from the dishonest control over the spirit by worldly powers, worldly sciences, and worldly art. Clément rejects fundamentalism, which he deems a quest for a restored Christendom, and rejects as well pseudo-sciences of the spirit, which he deems a technology for flight from the world.