Russian scientist's journey to faith: science can answer many questions but cannot explain values, argues Russian mathematician Julius Schreider.

Ten-year-old Julius Schreider was lying in bed one evening in Mytishchi, a Moscow suburb, when the men from the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, later KGB) came to arrest his father. It was 9 April 1938, in the dying days of Stalin's Great Purge.

Anatoly Schreider was a metallurgist and bridge designer. As the purge intensified he had quit his leading position at the civil engineering plant in Bryansk and taken a humbler job in Moscow where he might attract less attention. It did not save him. After his arrest that night his family never saw him again. But today Julius Schreider believes that the move to Moscow saved his mother and himself from being arrested as well.

Born in 1927 in Dnepropetrovsk, Schreider believes that he has been lucky in life. `A friend told me that I always landed on my feet, like a cat,' he says. `I have shared the common difficulties of our people and suffered unpleasantness, but not martyrdom. I had many fortunate escapes. God must have wanted me to do something.'

Life became hard after his father's arrest. His mother lost occupancy of their modest flat and had to send Julius (Yuli in Russian) to stay with an aunt. It was a deliverance for them when, a few months later, the removal of secret police chief Yezhov brought a new turn and Maria Dinaburg (like many Russian wives she did not change her surname after marriage) was able to find work, and accommodation, at a sanatorium. Julius went back to live with her until the outbreak of war.

He was a gifted student and entered Moscow University in 1943, aged 15. He was already in higher studies when he reached the age for military service (hazardous even in peacetime) and was therefore exempt. In 1949 he completed a PhD in mathematics (on functional analysis) which was considered outstanding enough to be translated into English in 1952 by the American Mathematical Society.

He went on to work at a military research institute in Moscow. But this was soon cut short by the outbreak of Stalin's next persecution. The security organs remembered his father's arrest and had Schreider dismissed from his position in 1950.

Once again, good fortune intervened. Within a year, he was offered the chair of higher mathematics at Moscow's Steel Institute. The Rector, Ivan Kidin, had a brother in the Communist Party's Central Committee and was able to choose his staff with less interference from the secret police.

In 1958 Schreider married Tatyana Dmitrievna Wentzel, a mathematician like himself. (She still teaches at Moscow State University.) In 1959 he returned to military research which brought with it the luxury of a separate room in a shared Moscow apartment. For two years he worked on missile guidance systems, visiting the testing site at Sary-Shagan II (now renamed Priozyorsk) on Lake Balkhash  in Kazakhstan. Then, unable to find other work in the mathematics field, he joined the Institute of Scientific Information where he remained for 28 years.

It was his research into computers that initially led the `born atheist' and Communist Party member to investigate religion. The question of the difference between human and artificial intelligence led him to realize that science could answer many questions but not the decisive question of values. `Science has no way of explaining values, so it cannot be the foundation,' he now says. For Marxism, which claimed to be scientific, such a thought was heresy. Soviet philosophy seldom discussed values, focussing rather on goals.

A turning point came on an academic visit to Hungary in 1967. Schreider went on an excursion to the town of Nagybirzony, where he saw the old Roman church and met the priest, Father Adalbert Szappanyos, a well-known scholar of art who had restored the church. In Budapest two days earlier, Schreider had bought an old rosary as a cultural souvenir, and he now asked the priest to bless it, in a sense to `complete' his souvenir. Father Adalbert put on his stole, told Schreider to kneel, blessed the rosary and laid his hand on the kneeling man. At that instant, Schreider felt something change within him.

From then on, he felt a growing urge to enter the Catholic Church. On 7 October 1970, he took the opportunity of an official visit to Estonia to be secretly baptized by Father Michael Krumpan in Tallin's only Catholic church, the Church of St Peter and St Paul.

There had been other influences, including meetings with Nadezhda Mandelshtam, an Orthodox Christian and widow of the great poet Osip Mandelshtam who vanished in Stalin's prisons. In 1969 Schreider published an article in Novy Mir entitled `Science--source of knowledge and superstition' which provoked a minor furore and rebuttals from the Soviet scientific establishment.

The increasingly philosophical direction of his research resulted in a doctorate in 1981, with a dissertation on `Systematic approaches to science'. It served Schreider as a basis for more research into the philosophy of religion. Hidden in dry academic terminology, a profound spiritual journey was quietly proceeding.

1984 was a bad year on the oppression index, and for Schreider it brought another crisis. His membership of the Catholic Church was betrayed to the state authorities. He was interrogated by the KGB, expelled from the Party, demoted within his institute and not allowed to publish (`professional death for a scholar') for two years.

Once again, good fortune meant that these relatively mild sufferings (in the Soviet context) did not last long. Gorbachev's accession to power in March 1985 soon brought the policy of perestroika and a new dawn of academic and religious freedom. In 1989, Schreider joined the Laboratory of Consciousness Problems, part of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His work in the company of other creative scholars there, on the analysis of human attitudes and changing states of mind, has given him much satisfaction.

So what was the task that God had wanted for him? What is the role of an original thinker who, like other former secret dissidents, now finds himself able to air his deepest thoughts publicly? How does it relate to the crisis his country is passing through now following the collapse of the Soviet system? `I know we have great difficulties in Russia,' he said recently on Australian national radio, `but now at least they are normal difficulties. And people can really talk now about moral and religious questions.'

In the Soviet years, many people yielded to state pressures to go against their deepest beliefs, sometimes at great cost to others as well as themselves. The most important thing today, Schreider feels, is openness about one's own past mistakes. He has made a point himself of talking honestly with colleagues about an incident when for pragmatic reasons he allowed his name to appear under a film review that did not reflect his real opinion.

Russia's huge move from totalitarian state towards a functioning democracy includes learning the unfamiliar art of political compromise. Here the study of ethics and morality--Schreider's prime concern today--is of central importance. In fact, as he explains, the key to the art of compromise is absolute morality. `A person with absolute values aims not for victory over others but for compromise. Intolerance of evil leads you to compromise with people. Compromise with evil makes you intolerant towards people. We were trained in a culture of cruelty (towards an enemy). But our people are now able to accept compromise. Most do not approve of the war in Chechnya.'

Today, Schreider is Professor of Ethics at Moscow's Catholic Theological College of St Thomas Aquinas, as well as at the Orthodox St Andrew's College. His work forms part of a slow but steady growth of ecumenicism in Russia--an important phenomenon in a society where paranoia and xenophobia have been endemic. The Russian Bible Society, of which he is a board member, is one of the main institutions where Russian Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants work together. His articles, dealing with human and ethical issues, appear frequently and his Lectures on ethics were published as a book in 1994.

Four years ago he was elected to the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and is head of its theology division. Theology and natural sciences? A surprising juxtaposition--yet Schreider himself illustrates how the two go naturally together. His reflections on ethics and spirituality often contain scientific or mathematical allusions.

Another `democratic' task on his mind is the long neglected one of popularizing Christian teachings, as writers like CS Lewis have done. In fact, many of Lewis's works are now appearing in Russian translation.

At the beginning of last year Schreider's mother, Maria Lazarevna, died, having been baptized a Catholic one month earlier. The baptism, says Schreider, gave his mother a new peace of heart. Meanwhile the Schreiders, whose two children are working at Australian universities, have become grandparents for the third time. Life is still challenging, and still fortunate.