Week Twelve
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address
The West (European and American civilization) needs to recover what philosopher Remi Brague calls its Romanness, its willingness to learn, its genius of drawing on the spiritual energies of both Athens and Jerusalem. The fate of modernity, the fate of the West, hinges on our ability “to experience the ancient as new and as something renewed by its transplantation in new soil, a transplantation that makes the old a principle of new developments.” We need a kind of postmodern Renaissance, a new convergence of East and West.
“All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.”
Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in the North Caucasus region of southern European Russia. His mother was of Ukrainian descent; his father died before he was born. He served in the Red Army as commander of an artillery battery during World War II. As part of the Soviet advance into East Prussia, he witnessed atrocities committed by fellow-soldiers against German civilians, including mass rape. He kept the memory of these victims in his poem Prussian Nights. He was arrested in February 1945, three weeks after the offensive began, for protesting these crimes, as well as for subtly criticizing Stalin in private letters, and sentenced to serve eight years in the labor camps of the Soviet Gulag. When that term ended, he was sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan. During this time, he gave up Marxism and converted to Christianity. After Khrushchev delivered his speech in 1956 criticizing Stalin and exposing some of his crimes, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. After Khrushchev’s removal in 1964, the regime again grew hostile to Solzhenitsyn, who had won acclaim as a writer (awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970). Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported in 1974, eventually settling in Vermont. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, his Russian citizenship was restored, and he returned to Russia in 1994, where he died in 2008.
The Davenant Institute on the key to Martin Luther’s theology, and view of eternal life.
Solzhenitsyn exposed the brutalities of totalitarian communism in The Gulag Archipelago, published in 1973, which made it incredible for Western apologists of communism to continue maintaining the essential innocuousness of the system. In that book, Solzhenitsyn writes, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” The great temptation is to secure emancipation through the scapegoating of others, when the Socratic imperative still prevails: we must know ourselves, and know the good and evil of which we are all capable.