Reflection on a Giant of the Age

I remember Joem telling me that the instructors for UA&P's Modern Literature subject were supposed to have the 19th century Russian literary giants as the standard when selecting which pieces of literature to feed the young minds. That meant the literature had to be in the near vicinity of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Makes me wonder why I got frickin' Harry Potter for mod lit... I wuz robbed!) The funny thing about those two men was how little they were understood by those they wrote for.

In the 20th century, another similar fate befell another Russian giant. He was called a traitor in the USSR, and a cranky monarchist anti-Semite in the US. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had their number. He knew, just as Dostoevsky knew, what darkness lay in the hearts of men. And because of that, he knew precisely the greatest weaknesses harbored by the competing ideologies of his time. I'll let him speak for himself.

"More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God."
 
                       - A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983

A simple analysis from Russian elderly: men have forgotten God. In its simplicity, it cuts through the Gordian knot of rationalizations we have put up as a culture to justify our decadence. At the end of the day, we the enlightened have forgotten God, and that is why, for all our material prosperity, we are much less happier than the Russian peasant who celebrated ecstatically over a good harvest or a new life born. We have shed more blood in the 20th century than in all the religious wars we have decried in the past combined. Yeah, yeah, we had better weapons. Heck, we made them.

At the end of the day, the generations of the 20th century, including my own, will have much to answer for.

Solzhenitsyn knew that his analysis was not just true for Russia. It was true even for the West. It was universal. (Why can't our over-hyped local intelligentsia come up with anything like that?)

"The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West's own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.

Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the "pursuit of happiness, "a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make daily concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States, reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world, or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?

Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain "equality"--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.

This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God."

                       - A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983

This may well be written for the Philippines. Daily, we are beginning to make our little concessions. Soon, we may have a new reproductive rights bill that throws condoms at every johnson without a conscience, and soon we will wonder why there is no sexual conscience at all. We decry the corruption of our leaders, just before we give a little grease money for someone to make our sins go away. Our media lords sings their own self-righteous praises as they sensationally condemn everyone else, and wonder why so many people want to shoot them. Our "art" is already a showcase of the debased. Much of it is devoid of love. "Serbis", that disgusting abortion of a movie we used to represent ourselves to the rest of the world at Cannes, is not a bug in our local "art" scene; it's a feature. Like the rest of the West, we are conceding our souls, and to the delight of our mortal Enemy, we are getting naught but rot in the process.

But all is not lost...

" But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells--they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.

It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity."

                       - A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983

God tends to be very resilient. "How many divisions does the Pope have?" I wonder if, when Stalin asked that question, he had considered those divisions he would only meet once he's shuffled off his mortal coil. They can shout down the children of God (I think "theocracy" is the avant-garde accusation these days, by mis-educated people who only have cartoon notions of actual theocracy.), but they only beat their heads against an unshaken wall. Heh, if your spiritual ancestors were fed to lions for the entertainment of pagans, what can they really do to you? And these morons cannot even afford tanks.

However, it is not enough to rest in smug satisfaction about one's own sanctity. There is still the Great Commission.

"To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.

Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone."

                       - A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983

Amen.

We have lost a prophet of our age, and we won't begin to feel the sting until the night comes. Hopefully, it isn't too late.

Rest well, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. For you, the war is over. It's our turn now.