THE PRICE OF TRUTH: FR. ALEXANDER MEN AND MEANING CHRISTIAN UNITY

Few figures in the modern history of the Christian East have stirred as much devotion and as much suspicion as Father Alexander Men. A priest who labored in the long shadow of a hostile state, he opened the doors of the Church to a generation raised without it, and he was struck down on the road to the altar by an assassin who was never found. To some he is a missionary saint; to others a dangerous innovator. This book refuses both caricatures. The Price of Truth takes the controversy surrounding Father Men as the doorway into a larger and more enduring question: what does Christian unity actually mean, and what may never be surrendered in its pursuit? Moving from the catacomb years of a persecuted Church to the heated parish disputes of our own day, it weighs the accusations leveled against Men with patience and historical honesty, and then turns to the deeper matters his legacy raises. What is true ecumenism, and how does it differ from the quiet dissolution of doctrine? Why does the Orthodox Church insist on a precision that can rival the exactness of the sciences? And why is the subtlest danger to the faith not the heretic outside the walls but the zealot within them, who mistakes his own bitterness for the defense of truth? Written with clarity and conviction, and addressed to believer and seeker alike, this is a meditation on the inseparable bond between truth and humility, and on the providence that has carried the Church through its darkest passages without abandoning it. KEYWORDS Alexander Men, Orthodoxy, ecumenism, Christian unity, apostolic succession, missionary theology, Russian religious thought