Paul Tuns, Review:
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn edited by Ignat Solzhenitsyn (Notre Dame University Press, $38, 195 pages)
The novelist and essayist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn is best-known as a Soviet dissident who spent time in communist concentration camps known as the gulag, of which he became their most famous chronicler. He is one of the few genuine heroes among artists, standing courageously against the Soviet tyranny, refusing to surrender his humanity or conscience. (He might say they are the same thing.) For a quarter century, Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, unwelcome in his beloved Russia. And as an exile in the “free” democracies of western Europe and the United States, Solzhenitsyn became a trenchant critic of the materialism of the West. Like a cross parent, he firmly but lovingly scolded the West for abandoning its (Christian) heritage. Many of these criticisms came in speeches he delivered, none as famous as his 1978 commencement address at Harvard, but nearly all as poignant in his diagnosis of what ailed western democratic capitalist society.
In We Have Ceased to See the Purpose, Notre Dame’s Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, as part of its Solzhenitsyn Series, has produced, under the editorial eye of Solzhenitsyn’s middle son, Ignat, an elegant volume containing ten essential speeches, from his Nobel Address in 1972 through the Harvard Commencement to the Templeton Lecture in 1983, and finally, shortly after returning to his homeland, “The Depletion of Culture,” delivered to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1997.
Ignat Solzhenitsyn notes in his excellent introduction that his father was hesitant to accept “external engagements” that took him away from his work of writing, and thus spoke publicly infrequently. The speeches collected in this volume are all responses to specific invitations or awards; thus, Ignat comments, the ideas articulated in them are not “born of a premeditated intention to issue public pronouncement” about this or that topic of the day. That hesitancy, he notes, “forms part of the speeches’ strength.” That is not to say, the invitation to address the public was unwelcome. Solzhenitsyn had things to say about “humanity’s predicaments,” rather than current affairs, and the West was not as welcoming in its reception of the dissident’s comments.
In his Nobel address, Solzhenitsyn discussed the purpose of art and the role of the artist. True art, Solzhenitsyn says, must not and cannot be divorced from Truth – with a capital T. The search, presentation, and contemplation of truth is — or should be – a “unifying force for mankind” (in Ignat’s words). It is in that Nobel Memorial Lecture that Solzhenitsyn famously urges mankind to “live not by lies.” Totalitarian violence and lies are naturally intertwined, but lies are a form of violence themselves against truth, beauty, and good. In “If One Doesn’t Wish to be Blind,” Solzhenitsyn says that not living by lies is not merely achieved by refusing to tell lies, but being on the alert for lies and refusing to accept them as truths.
In many of the speeches, Solzhenitsyn decries western weakness which he found predicated on a false understanding of freedom and dangerous dependence on excessive legalisms. This made western governments, intellectuals, and populations shortsighted, incapable of challenging totalitarian tyranny and mindless materialism.
In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn laments that fashionable ideas often crowd out unfashionable ideas (usually the wisdom of tradition), giving “rise to strong mass prejudices” that violate the interior freedom of individuals. “Your scholars are free in the legal sense,” he said, “but they’re hemmed in by the idols of prevailing fashion.”
The West has convinced itself that it is free, Solzhenitsyn repeatedly warned, because it cherishes a “soulless legalistic plane” – enumerated rights protected by constitutions — but the “human soul longs for something higher, warmer, and purer than what is offered by today’s mass Western lifestyle.” The danger, as Solzhenitsyn said in the Templeton Lecture, is “we’ve grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.”
Western man since late Enlightenment, Solzhenitsyn observed during his Harvard address, “has made man the measure of all things on Earth: imperfect man, who’s never been free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other vices.” Rather than feed our insatiable (earthly) appetites, man must look higher. In his Templeton Lecture, Solzhenitsyn insists “our life is intended for the pursuit not of material success, but of worthy spiritual growth,” as “our entire earthly life is but a transitional stage in the movement to something higher.”
Indeed, “the concept of freedom cannot be fully grasped” without a proper ordering of our desires, Solzhenitsyn says in “The Shallowing of Freedom” at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and he maintains “the life aim for each of us isn’t a boundless enjoyment of material goods but, rather, a departure from this Earth as better persons than we arrived.” That is, we are only free when we live as rational human beings, not mere animal existences. Freedom is required to carry out that task, but is not sufficient. At Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said “only by voluntary nurturing within ourselves serene self-limitation can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.”
At the conclusion of his Stanford address, Solzhenitsyn says “Genuine human freedom is a God-given inner freedom … the freedom to determine our own actions, but with moral responsibility for them.” The free individual, he says, “is not the one who hurries to cash in on his legal rights, but the one whose conscience constrains him even in the face of legal justification.”
Solzhenitsyn repeatedly returns to art – including literature – and states in “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” an address to the National Arts Club in New York City in 1993, that “relentless cult of novelty” hides “an unyielding and long-sustained attempt” to “uproot all moral precepts.” Art can uphold truth (and good and beauty), but not if art ceases “to hold dear the great cultural tradition of foregoing centuries with the spiritual foundations from which it grew.” Every person, but, for Solzhenitsyn, especially the artist, has a responsibility to be vessels through which truth is presented to the world.
Ignat observes in his introduction that his father seldom referred directly to God, although he was a believing Orthodox Christian. The son explains that his father did not want to alienate people receptive to his message but not his theology, so Solzhenitsyn would refer to the Supreme Spirit, Supreme Power, or other such euphemisms for God. Furthermore, Ignat says of Aleksander, “he felt it unseemly for a layman to pontificate about faith.” And yet, Solzhenitsyn had no compunction arguing that the West’s malady was essentially moral and why: “Men have forgotten God.” (First heard by a young, less religious Aleksander Solzhenitsyn during the atrocities committed by Stalin.)
Ignat Solzhenitsyn says that each speech “operates at the triple nexus of the past (historical understanding), the present (current affairs), and the future (possible paths out of humanity’s predicaments).” Indeed, despite the perceptive description of the de-moralizing of the West, Solzhenitsyn is quite hopeful, convinced that “one word of truth shall overweigh the whole world.”
Paul Tuns is the editor of The Interim.
