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Martyr of Atheism and Tavrov: The Son of Man and second, critical works written
by representatives of the conservative establishment of the Russian Orthodox
Church that summarise Men’s ideas in order to demonstrate his ‘heresies’, such
as Kuraev: The Lost Missionary, Antiminsov: Fr. Alexander Men as a Commentator
of the Sacred Scriptures and Bufeev: About the Evolutionary theologies of Alexander
Men and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Among the few works that do not neatly fall
into these two categories, Ilyushenko in his book Father Alexander Men, gives
the most complete picture of Men’s world, his thoughts and publishes a good
selection of his letters. Unfortunately, the author’s determination to portray
Men as a saint leads to difficulties in the book’s use as a source for critical
assessment. In English, Shukman and Roberts have given us a varied collection
of translated excerpts – probably the most extensive collection in English – in
Christianity for the Twenty-First Century: The Prophetic Writings of Alexander Men.
Of particular interest to us in the present essay is a translation of Part 1
Chapter 4 of Men’s Origins of Religion, which discusses the problem of evil in its
philosophical aspects. Translations of other relevant sections of Men’s work
will be provided by the author of this present essay.

1. Intelectual Predecessors

In this section we shall first of all consider Teilhard de Chardin, and in
particular his influence on Men’s understanding of creation. We shall then move
on to consider the Russian thinkers Solovyov, Berdyaev and Bulgakov in
chronological order with respect to their major works, as these thinkers
influence Men in his attempts to resolve the problem of evil as set by a
Teilhardian understanding of creation.

A. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
In chapter 5 of Origins of Religion, Men claims in an addition that just as he had
written the first draft of that book, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work The
Phenomenon of Man was published in Russian. He writes that the ideas of
Teilhard correspond significantly with his own. This is controversial insofar as
conservative Orthodox commentators such as Bufeev have pejoratively claimed
that Teilhard ‘has nothing to do with Orthodoxy’. It should be noted, however,

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