Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn, one of the most important men of the 20th century died a few days ago on August 3, 2008. Robert Kraynak, of First Things, has written a piece in his honor, Solzhenitsyn and the Battle for the Human Soul. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer and historian who helped bring down the totalitarian Soviet regime. He is perhaps best known for authoring the Gulag Archipelago in which the horrors of Soviet concentratin camps are exposed. Here’s an excerpt from Kraynak’s piece:
Solzhenitsyn uses the distinction of two realms in order to lower people’s expectations about the role of the state (Caesar’s realm) in people’s lives and to allow the higher, spiritual realm of God and the soul to flourish in conditions of political freedom. Under conditions of limited state power and responsible freedom, a vibrant Christian culture can develop—promoting faith, family, art, private property, and love of nature–without being destroyed by secular political ideologies. Thus, Solzhenitsyn opposes both totalitarianism and theocracy because they undermine responsible political freedom allied with a vibrant Christian culture. In The Mortal Danger, he clearly states: “I have been repeatedly charged with being an advocate of a theocratic state . . . this is a flagrant misrepresentation. . . . The day-to-day activity of governing in no sense belongs in the sphere of religion. What I do believe is that the state should not persecute religion and that religion should make an appropriate contribution to the spiritual life of the nation.”
Tom Gilson, of Thinking Christian, also has an excellent piece on Solzhenitsyn he wrote for the Center for a Just Society called Solzhenitsyn: Calling Evil What It Is. He talks about the speech Sozhenitsyn delivered at Harvard in the late seventies upon receiving an honorary doctorate from that institutions. Instead of spending a great deal of time talking about the atrocities of the godless Soviet government, he focused his keen insights on western culture. Among Gilson’s fine observations are the following:
[Quoting Solzhenitsyn's Speech] “The mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. … [It] could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him … with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”
If that was unsettling to his mostly secular audience, he was not finished yet: “There is a disaster … which has been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious human consciousness…. Is man above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him?”
Here was a message straight from the Gulag experience. In prison, Solzhenitsyn had discovered the Superior Spirit, Jesus Christ, and committed his life to Him. His eye was trained and his spirit steeled to see and pronounce the truth. He had honed his prophetic voice in his homeland; he had won great honor in the West…
He had spoken of evil as if it was real; he had spoken of courage and responsibility as if they were real and they mattered. He had spoken of spiritual brokenness; and he had called for a spiritually-centered solution as if that, too, was real.
These are not popular truths. Solzhenitsyn knew them more deeply than most of us ever will. He paid an unfathomable price for this education. We who have not paid such a price owe it to ourselves to give closer heed to the lessons he has left behind.