Romano Guardini: The End of the Modern World. Wilmington: ISI Books, 1998.

 

This volume consists of two books: The End of the Modern World, published in the original German in 1950, and Power and Responsibility, in which Guardini elaborates on his earlier work.

 

Guardini begins with the ancients. “Classical man had no desire to transcend his world.” He “lived within his cosmos.” Parmenides, Plato, and Plotinus distinguished nature from convention but “knew nothing of a being existing beyond the world.” Politically, this preference for the limited, the humanly scaled, registered in the classics’ preference for the small polis over the contemporary empires; Alexander was a Macedonian, not a Greek. And even the nation-state was outside their range, a fact Guardini ascribes to “political blindness,” although that may not quite be so. [1]

By contrast, “medieval man centered his faith in Revelation as it had been enshrined in Scripture,” which “affirmed the existence of a God Who holds His Being separate and beyond the world” as its sovereign. There was something, indeed Someone, far transcending the limits of nature, One who had indeed created nature from nothing. “Irreducibly personal,” the Christian God “can never be merged with any universe,” loving the world but not depending upon it, “need[ing] no world in order that He might be.” The world He created out of nothing “is found only in the Bible.” This being so, “man must turn toward the Lord as toward his final end,” not (or not crucially) to the fulfillment of his nature by right participation in the natural order. 

Although born in Italy, Guardini spent almost all of his life in Germany. He applauds “the influx of the German spirit” into Christianity, with its “restlessness” and “armed marches,” signs of a “mobile and nervous soul [that] worked itself into the Christian affirmation” and “produced that immense medieval drive which aimed at cracking the boundaries of the world.” 

But just as one suspects Guardini of offering a sort of Christian Hegelianism, he demurs. “Medieval anthropology, in both principle and application, is superior to its modern counterpart,” and “medieval life had a firmer yet richer hold on reality than is possible for modern man,” making “possible a fuller perfecting of human nature.” It is true that “medieval man neither wished to explore the mysteries of the world empirically nor did he want to illuminate them by a rational methodology,” but that enabled “a life and a sense of being integrally religious in nature,” one in which the division of God from nature and the analogous division between Church and Empire at once prevented ‘totalitarianism’ and elevated the souls of men, inviting them to live by a standard set above them, not by them. “Church and State were united only through the fact that both derived their power and their office from the high authority of God Himself”; “human life in the total sweep of its existence and in all its works must be founded upon and ordered by the transcendent sublimity of the Lord,” as seen in Dante’s Commedia, “perhaps the most powerful embodiment of this medieval sense of the unity of all things in being.” 

Intellectually, medieval man respected the authority of the Scripture and the Church in divine matters, the authority of the ancient philosophers in understanding nature. He did not inquire into nature by means of experimentation, Bacon’s method of ‘torturing nature to compel her to reveal her secrets.’ This, it might be noticed, did not preclude revision of previous insights; just as Aristotle respectfully disputed with Plato, Hugh of St. Victor respectfully disputed with Boethius and Cassiodorus. Indeed, disputation itself was a feature of medieval university education. Still, to relinquish authority altogether “always breeds its burlesque—force,” as seen in Machiavelli, “the first to express” a morality severed from the transcendent God “in the political realm,” followed by Hobbes, who “built his theory of the state upon the assertion that it should be absolute master and judge of human life.” At the same time (perhaps most clearly in the thought of Montaigne), “man began to find his own individuality an absorbing object for study, for introspection and psychological analysis.” The division between Church and Empire, both under God, was replaced by the division between State and Self, ‘under’ no one. While “medieval tensions were resolved as the soul achieved an ever new and greater transcendence,” modern anxiety “arises form man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a ‘real’ or a symbolic place in reality.” At best, modern man looked to nature as its standard, as seen “in the honnête homme of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the ‘natural’ man of Rousseau, in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, in the ‘natural’ beauty invoked by neoclassicism”—notably by Goethe. This resembled the classical view but only resembled it, since “the modern world affirmed neither nature nor classicism as the Middle Ages had done.” Medieval man saw in nature “the creation of God” and “a foreshadowing of Revelation.” Modern man saw nature as severed from Revelation, which he supposed “empty of meaning and hostile to life.” At the same time, and unlike the classics, moderns denied that nature had a telos. This left men free to undertake the project of dominating nature for their own purposes. What Machiavelli called the mastery of Fortune, what Bacon called the conquest of Nature, led to a “concept unique with modern man, the concept of ‘Culture,'” of human work as ‘creation.’ Culture “took its stance opposite God and His Revelation.” “Although the scientific picture of the world has become increasingly exact, man no longer finds a home in it.” Instead of looking ‘above,’ towards the transcendent God, modern man “sought for answers within his own soul.” This included even the remaining Christians: Calvin, Pascal. 

Guardini summarizes the modern world as consisting of “three ideals: a Nature subsisting in itself; an autonomous personality of the human subject; a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence,” with the “constant creation and perfection of this ‘culture’ constitut[ing] the final goal of history.” He adds, “This was all a mistake.” Modernity’s “technological mind” sees nature as “a mere ‘given,'” an “object of utility.” It begins to extend that sensibility to human “personality,” as well, with the “Mass Man…absorbed by technology and rational abstraction.” (Guardini is thinking of machine production; he was innocent of the cell phone.) In this culture, ‘leadership’ replaces statesmanship, the leader being “nothing but the complement of the many,” no authority but rather “another in essence with the many.” “It is taken increasingly for granted that man ought to be treated as an object,” losing what remains of his liberty “both for free decision and for open growth as a person.” In truth, however, “man is a person called by God,” a being “capable of answering for his own actions,” responsible to God and neighbor. “To assert and cherish the incommunicability of each and every man is not to advance self-interest or privilege; it is to pledge that loyalty, that fundamental duty, which is one with being a man.” 

This raises the Tocqueville problem, the problem of democracy, of social egalitarianism. “Does the leveling which flows from the dominance of the many cause the loss of personality or does it cause the loss of the person himself?” A genuine person orients himself toward the supreme Person, thereby being “robed with duties no other can assume.” Under democratic conditions, the human person “is destined to stand forth with a spiritual resoluteness never demanded of man before,” a challenge that “demands an inner freedom and strength of character, a strengthening of character which we can scarcely conceive.” This strength of character cannot stand alone, however. It requires “comradeship in the work of facing future danger and menace.” But Guardini doubts that this will suffice. The “not-human man” of modernity and the “not-natural nature” modernity conceives “promise to be the foundation upon which the world of the future will be erected,” a world in which man “will be free to further his lordship of creation, carrying it even to its last consequences.” But “a cultural order which does away with God cannot prevail—simply because God exists.”

To Guardini, and not only to Guardini, the “modern faith in progress” looks increasingly wan. As the wars and tyrannies of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated, evil is still possible. “We recognize with increasing clarity that the modern world deceived itself.” Human power has increased dramatically but increase in power does not denote human progress. “The modern world forgot the fact of ‘demons,”” having “blinded itself by its revolutionary faith in autonomy.” But, as so many modern revolutionaries and tyrants have shown, “demons may take possession of the faculties of man if he does not answer for them with his conscience,” as they “rule him through his apparently natural but really contradictory instincts, through his apparently logical but in truth easily influenced reason.” Insofar as human beings conquer nature, nature “becomes involved with, even partakes of, human freedom.” This enhances its “potential for evil as well as good.” “Could the events of the last decades have happened at the peak of a really true culture of Europe?” The question nearly answers itself. “What can guarantee man’s proper use of his power in the realm of freedom? Nothing.”

Modern man “has not developed thoughtfully that ethic which would be effective for controlling the use of power” and indeed lacks any “proper training ground…for such an ethic, either with the elite or among the masses.” For that, modern man will need a courage beyond even what he “needs to face either atom bombs or bacteriological warfare, because it must restrain the chaos rising out of the very works of man.” Personality “can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation, which related man to a living, personal God, which makes him a son of Gpd. which teaches the ordering of His Providence.” Humanism can preserve “an awareness of the individual as a rounded, dignified and creative human being” but without awareness “of the real person who is the absolute ground of each man, an absolute ground superior to every psychological or cultural advantage or achievement.” Without that awareness, moral principles and relations “begin to disappear.” “The last decades”—i.e., 1900 to 1950—have “suggested what life without Christ really is. The last decades were only the beginning.”

This is because modern ‘paganism’ differs radically from the ancient kind. It is no longer so innocent of the real nature of human beings. And it responds accordingly, as seen already in Machiavelli and his innumerable epigoni, who have increased the earthly sway of demonic powers. If so, for the remaining Christians “the Old Testament will take on a new significance” because it “reveals the Living God Who smashes the mythical bonds of the earth,” who “casts down the powers and the pagan rulers of life” while “show[ing] us the man of faith who is obedient to the acts of God according to the terms of the Covenant.” The stronger the powers of evil, the stronger the powers of freedom and faith will need to be. “Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world.” 

In The End of the Modern World, Guardini propounds a Personalism without the socialist optimism of Mounier. [1] The Essence of Power cautiously advances some ways in which Christians might counteract the worst effects of modernity. He begins by recalling the themes of the previous book. “What determines [the] sense of existence” of modernity “is power over nature.” The modern age has ended because “we no longer believe that increase of power is necessarily the same thing as increase of value.” The question now is how to curb power, how “to integrate power into life in such a way that man can employ power without forfeiting his humanity.” This will require man “to match the greatness of his power with the strength of his humanity.” This is possible, though far from sure, because power, “the ability to move reality,” requires energy and awareness, both of which require spirit, “that reality in man which renders him capable of extricating himself from the immediate context of nature in order to direct in freedom.” “Power awaits direction,” the free choice spirit makes possible. And choice implies responsibility; “there is no such thing as power that is not answered for,” even if “the person responsible rejects responsibility.” In rejecting responsibility (as Tocqueville sees), human beings get the impression that “there is no one at all who acts, only a dumb, intangible, invisible, indefinable something which derides questioning,” a “pseudo-mystery” that replaces the divine mystery—a Satanic mystery. [2] Guardini refuses to reduce Satan to a force, to ‘the demonic.’ Satan is a person, as much as God is.

There can be no evading the necessity of power. “Every act, every condition, indeed, even the simple fact of existing is directly or indirectly linked to the conscious exercise and enjoyment of power.” What men overlook, what Satan the deceiver wants them to overlook, is that human power derives from man’s creation in God’s image, with “a whiff of the spirit-breath of God.” It is that spirit which enables man to govern nature and himself. When modern men exercise power, however, they mask it “behind aspects of ‘utility,’ ‘welfare,’ ‘progress,’ and so forth,” thereby ruling “without developing a corresponding ethos of government.” On the contrary, “sovereignty is to be exercised with respect to the truth of things,” and the truth is that “power is not man’s right, autonomously,” but given “only as a loan, in fief.” “Man is lord by the grace of God” and he is “answerable for it to him who is Lord by essence.” This is how “sovereignty becomes obedience, service”—to neighbors (‘public service’) and to God. Man’s God-given right to rule, “in fief,” over the rest of God’s creation warrants no radical attempt at re-creating God’s work but rather his “acceptance of each thing’s being what it is—an “acceptance symbolized in the ‘name’ by which he tries to express its essential quality,” the task God assigns to Adam in Eden. That is how sovereignty can operate “as part of God’s creation,” not “to establish an independent world of man, but to complete the world of God as a free, human world in accordance with God’s will.”

Eden saw God test Man. God authorizes Man to rule over “all natural things,” which requires that he “know them.” But to remain lord of the earth, Man must remain “an image of God” and not his rival. This is Satan’s temptation or test. Satan baits Woman with the promise of becoming like God, and Man goes in with that. “To say God knows that man can become like him by doing the act he has forbidden is to imply that God is afraid, that he feels his divinity threatened by man, that his relation to man is that of a mythical divinity,” the insecure ‘gods’ of paganism. “Satan tempts man by distorting the genuine God-man relation, placing it in a mythical twilight which falsifies it.” But of course Man’s “disobedience brings, not knowledge that makes man a god, but the deadly experience of ‘nakedness'” in shame, naturalness seen as guilt because “man’s fundamental relation to existence is destroyed.” To restore it, first the divine Law brought by Moses and the salvific work of Jesus are both necessary. 

“No mere improvement of the condition of being,” salvation is “a new beginning”—not exactly a creation ‘from nothing’ (it “takes place within the reality of people and things”), but a renewal and redemption of the “old,” “fallen” man. While it is true that not only the ancient Greeks and Romans but “the sages of all great cultures” opposed the excesses of power with “moderation and justice,” such virtues are not salvation, as they do not “embrace existence as a whole,” existence including the personal and providential God. Indeed, as seen in the measure of classical architecture, “ancient man’s manner of interpreting nature, of reacting to it, utilizing and developing it” betokened “his rational, instinctive, and creative aspects” in just harmony with one another. But modern ‘paganism’ does more than that. Following the ‘lead’ of the Bible, man began to eschew comprehension of nature “with his senses” but to “disintegrate nature both experimentally and theoretically” in order not merely to regain some of the mastery over it that he lost when expelled from Eden but to imitate God’s power instead of following His spirit. To follow God’s spirit, however, man must become not only moderate and justice but humble. The Old Testament describes Moses as the preeminent man of anav, of humility before God, the one worthy of bringing His Commandments to the Israelites. But the ultimate Person of anav is God Himself. In Paul’s words, Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit formed of as a man”; “He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death even to the death of the cross.” His motive was not glory but agape, divine love, which animates the spirit that God breathed into Man in the first place. That is, the New Testament differs from the Old Testament because in the New Testament God humbles Himself, and by that act reveals His love for man, reveals Himself, his ‘nature,’ more completely than ever before. In Jesus, “what you see over and over again is supreme power converted into humility” because humility in love is nearer to the character of God as Person than His power is. He takes on “the lowliness of a slave,” even as He rules all of His creation, which was created to be loved.

“It is humanly impossible to judge Revelation. All we can do is to recognize it as a fact, and accept it, and judge the world and man from its standpoint.” We can nonetheless make sense of some of the things Jesus does. He never joins “any of the ruling groups,” any of the regimes on earth, selecting His disciples from ordinary men, none of them “personally extraordinary or particularly capable.” He obeys His Father, not in weakness but in strength. His prayer at Gethsemane ends with setting His face like adamant, toward Jerusalem and crucifixion. Human beings can imitate Him, in their own much limited way, when they choose to obey “a power that knows no outer bounds, only those self-imposed from within: the bounds of the Father’s will accepted freely and so completely accepted at every moment, in every situation, deep into the heart’s initial impulse, that will’s demands are effective.” In lordship “giving itself to slavery,” the Gospels attest to a “power so perfectly controlled that it is capable of renouncing itself utterly—in a loneliness as boundless as its dominion.” Monotheism, indeed. To disobey God is to risk “losing the measure of things and lapsing into the arbitrary exercise of authority”; “to forestall this danger, Christ sets up humility, the liberator which breaks asunder the spell of power” without denying its reality, its necessity. Christ’s experience “is not simply the isolated experience and victory of one individual…but rather an attitude in which all who will may share.” For their part, the ancients countered power’s tendency to corrupt “the lofty qualities of the soul” by moderation, the maintenance of “spiritual balance.” “Little by little, modernity has lost this knowledge.”

Guardini cautions against any Christian nostalgia for the Middle Ages, for pre-modernist Christendom, which incorporated classical with Christian virtue. No Romanticist kitsch about crusading knights in shining armor need intrude. More seriously, he acknowledges that any “direct application of the truths of Revelation to world problems also has its dark side”—religious persecution and religious warfare being two notable examples. “Christian truths are by no means self-evident,” as the Christians of Christendom sometimes supposed. One cannot only be as innocent as a dove; Jesus commends the wisdom, the prudence of the serpent, as well. The “correct interpretation” and “practical application” of Christian truths “presuppose a constant metanoia or conversion.” As for the modern world, it too suffers a sort of crisis of conscience, on its own less impressive terms, in which technique supplants what was supposed to have been the rule of reason. The techniques of the modern administrative state “tend to treat people much as the machine treats the raw materials fed into it.” “Organization does not create an ethic.” This leads Guardini to go a bit too far, claiming that the modern nations’ “political structure and methods of operation are largely interchangeable” from one country to the next. The remainder of his century would suggest otherwise, as the nations under the rule of Soviet Russia saw so clearly. Organization doesn’t create an ethic, but it does reinforce one ethic or another, and Pope John Paul II, a reader and admirer of Guardini, well understood that regime differences remained meaningful, even if bureaucracy had become common to all.

With Guardini, John Paul II understood the danger of replacing the course of events understood as providential with the course of events understood as what Guardini calls “a mere string of empirical processes,” the danger of replacing a state that exists by the grace of God with a state that exists by “grace of the people” yet operating on them as if its control of empirical processes in accordance with psychological and sociological ‘laws’ entitled administrators to rule. “The real drives behind” bureaucratic planning “are spiritual rather than practical,” culminating as they do “in an attitude which feels it to be its right and duty to impose its own goal upon mankind” for “the realization of its earthly ‘kingdom.'” That pope and his immediate successor also understood that bureaucracy in the hands of tyrants differs from bureaucracy in the hands of individuals still answerable, still responsible, to the people they rule, if not so much as they ought to be.

In considering actions that might begin to counteract modernity’s effects, Guardini returns to that upon which “everything depends, namely, “the personal responsibility of free men.” This may yet be recovered because “the feeling that is beginning to permeate our own age is that the world is something shaped, hence limited.” The seductive apparent—but only apparent—boundlessness of the modern project no longer quite convinces. “We have today an ever deeper realization that all existence rests on certain basic forms, and that the individual form is part of a whole, which in turn is affected by the individual.” Politically, “we are approaching a state in which the economic, social national conditions in one country have repercussions all over the world.” Regimes matter to other regimes; here, Guardini qualifies his claim that political structures have become “interchangeable,” worldwide. Machiavelli counted on the limitlessness of human ambition, but limits to ambition are tightening. “The future will depend on those who know and are ready to accept the all-decisive fact that man himself is responsible for the turn history will take and for whatever becomes of the world and of human existence,” that he has “power not only over nature, but also over his own powers,” knowing how to rule and also how to be ruled—Aristotle’s definition of politics, jettisoned by the moderns. As for the Christian element, “ultimately, one can command only from God, obey only in Him.”

Thus, Guardini has no recourse to historical or metaphysical necessity. He is no Hegelian, investing his hopes in “the Spirit of the Age.” Nor does he appeal to nature, to a First Cause that will work its way toward the good; “the evil in nature must be resisted, and this resistance is asceticism—not, to be sure, “a new version of Sparta” but a “realistic piety” which looks not only inward but outward. “History does not run on its own; it is run. It can also be run badly,” as it has been for some time. On the classical side, this means that “the concept of rule, like so many other vitally important ones, has been spoiled.” What it should mean is “a human, ethical-spiritual attitude that is, above all, deeply conscious of how the nascent world is conditioned and how every person, each in his or her place, may help to shape it.” Morally, this means that ruling “requires prudence” and the moderation that enables men to think prudently. Not the Absolute Spirit but spirituality is needed, initially by “try[ing] to rediscover something of what is called the contemplative attitude” in a world too inclined to thoughtless activity. “Before all else, man’s depths must be reawakened” by “step[ping] aside from the general hustle and bustle.” Open your “mind and heart wide to some word of piety or wisdom or ethical honor,” whether from Scripture or Plato, from Goethe or Jeremias Gotthelf.” [3] In so doing, “we must return to the essence of being,” asking such fundamental questions as the relation of a man’s work to his life, what standards are worthy of living by, and “what do health, sickness, death really signify?” Against Machiavelli’s valorization of grasping, he praises a certain asceticism, letting go of things, an open hand. “Man is not so constructed as to be complete in himself and, in addition, capable of entering into relations with God or not as he sees fit; his very essence consists in his relation to God,” on Whom “all other realities, including the human, are founded.” “When existence fails to give Him His due, existence sickens.” 

 

 

Notes

1. See “Personalism,” a review of Emmanuel Mounier: Personalism (1952) on this website under “Bible Notes.”
2. See Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America XXX
3. Jeremias Gotthelf was the pen name of Albert Bitzius, a nineteenth-century Swiss pastor and novelist whose best-known work, The Black Spider, depicts the malign effects of dealing with the Devil—Guardini’s theme here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emmanuel Mounier: Personalism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952.

 

“A philosophy but not a system,” Personalism refuses to trap human beings into any comprehensive determinism, whether natural, historical, or religious. “The existence of free and creative persons” is “its central affirmation,” but neither is it Nietzschean. Although versions of Personalism may include agnosticism, Mounier affirms Christian Personalism. Morally and politically, Christian Personalism beckons men to “the adventure of responsible liberty.” It posits a paradox that needs resolution: that “the personal is the mode of existence proper to man” but it “has ceaselessly to be attained.” It participates in “the human struggle to humanize humanity” against those who would dehumanize it, as the scientific manipulators of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World attempt to do. Personalism comports with the Bible’s personal God, not the ‘god of the philosophers,’ whether Aristotelian or Spinozist. It is not alien to some of the philosophers, however, as Socrates’ “‘Know thyself’ is the first great personalist revolution of which we know” and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics follows in the wake of that adjuration.

Still, “it is Christianity that, first of all, imports into these gropings a decisive notion of the person.” God “through love brings [persons] into existence,” creating the world ex nihilo and peopling it with individuals, each of whom has an “eternal destiny.” He unifies the world, makes it a cosmos, not “through the abstraction of an idea but by an infinite capacity for the individual multiplication of these separate acts of love.” This metaphysic so scandalized the world that Averroës attempted to return to generality, to abstraction, to depersonalization—to the notion of “one common soul for the whole human race.” But “the individual soul is not a crossroads where several participations in general realities meet (matter, ideas, etc.) but an indissoluble whole, in which the unity is prior to the multiplicity because it is rooted in the absolute,” by which Mounier means the God of the Bible and (emphatically) not Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. (Indeed, “Hegel remains the imposing and monstrous architect of all the imperialism of the impersonal idea,” an empire that demands that we “believe in complete subservience of the individual to the State.”)  No “abstract tyranny of a Destiny,” no Platonic or neo-Platonic “heaven of ideas,” no “Impersonal Though indifferent” to individuals and their “destinies”: the personal God “grant[s] man a freedom analogous to his own, by his readiness to be generous to the generous,” to be gracious.

God’s grace forces no one. Rather, “the profound purpose of human existence is not to assimilate itself to the abstract generality of Nature or of the Ideas, but to change  “the heart of its heart,” to convert, to undertake a ‘turning around’ of the soul, a “personal choice” made in “the inviolable domain which no one can judge and of which nobody knows, not even the angels, but God alone,” a transformation to which “man is freely called,” given that “liberty is constitutive of his existence as a creature.” Human liberty entails the freedom to sin, as well, the freedom of a man to “refuse his destiny”; otherwise, the choice wouldn’t be real. 

This inviolability, this “absoluteness of the person” does not isolate him from the world or from other persons. The Trinity itself, the very structure of God (as it were) suggests “an intimate dialogue between persons, and is of its very essence the negation of solitude.” Since “every human being is created in the image of God, every person is called to the formation of one immense Body, mystical and physical, in the charity of Christ.” That is the commonality underlying human individuality, the commonality that makes human beings persons, not atoms. Mystical and physical: Mounier rejects Christian neo-Platonism of the Middle Ages, which in his estimation “hampered full reaffirmation, by the Albertino-Thomist realism, of the dignity of matter and the unity of the human being” as a being created in God’s image and thereby as a person. Glimmers of Personalism, proto-personalism, may be seen in various ways in Occam, Luther, Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Rousseau in their several critiques of “scholastic decadence,” although Descartes also “bequeaths to us, in his Cogito, the germs of the idealism and metaphysical solipsism,” while Pascal and Kierkegaard succumb to a “lofty and solitary religion” that isolates them from human beings. As a result, “what one might call the Socratic revolution of the XIXth century, the fight against all those modern forces that tend to depersonalize man,” seen in Kierkegaard’ spirituality and Marx’s dialectical materialism—each a rebellion against Hegel but also a failure truly to overcome him—has led to a sharp duality between spirit and matter which Christian Personalism seeks to restore to the harmony God intends. [1]

Not dualism but “the indissoluble union of the soul and the body is the pivot of Christian thinking.” Christianity teaches that thought, soul, the divinely granted breath of life “fuse[s] with the body in existence.” When soul and body strive wrongly, in “the direction opposed to the supernatural vocation of man,” the “destiny” of man, Christianity calls that ‘the flesh’ (not to mention the world and the Devil). The flesh causes a “downward drag” of both body and soul, but when this unity, this person, “collaborate[s]” with the power of the Holy Spirit, it reaches out to “the substantial kingdom of God,” not “some ethereal realm of spirit.” That is, the Kingdom of God will see us not only in renewed souls but in new bodies. “The Christian who speaks of the body or of matter with contempt does so against his own most central tradition,” partaking not of the Gospel but of “the Greek contempt for the material,” transmitted us “under false Christian credentials.” Man is indeed incarnate, but he was so before the Fall, not only after it. His incarnation “is an abiding occasion of perversity,” not perversity per se. (While Marxism correctly regards material poverty as “an aberration,” one that needs correction of “the development of humanity,” that correction will not end all other kinds of aberration, “even upon the natural plane.” Marxism “is a kind of secularization of the central value that the Christian tradition claims for work.”) To exist subjectively and to exist bodily “are one and the same experience,” inasmuch as “I cannot think without being and I cannot be without my body.”

“If we are to render an account of humanity, we must grasp the living reality of man in his total activity.” Unlike other animals, man knows the cosmos and transforms it and, moreover, is capable of loving his neighbor and of loving cooperation with God, understanding both neighbor and God as persons. He can do this not only because he has a soul but because his body itself “takes me constantly outside of myself into the problems of the world and the struggles of mankind,” “pushes me out into space”; my body ages, thus “acquaint[ing] me with duration,” and, because it dies, “confront[ing] me with eternity.” “We bear the weight of [the body’s] bondage,” but we must never ignore that “it is also the basis of all consciousness and of all spiritual life, the omnipresent mediator of the life of the spirit.” This constrained liberty, this liberty limited by an incomplete bondage, perfects itself in struggle. “The right road for man is in this tragic optimism, where he finds his true destiny in a goal of greatness through unending struggle,” with no ‘end of history’ to be delivered by impersonal forces of nature or of history.

Mounier carefully distinguishes personalism from individualism, “the ideology and the prevailing structure of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries,” which conceives of “Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and undirected; turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoisms should not encroach upon one another, or to their betterment as a purely profitmaking association.” So defined, individualism “is the very antithesis of personalism, and its dearest enemy” because it denies that “the fundamental nature of the person is not originality nor self-knowledge nor individual affirmation.” Personalism affirms not “separation but communication” whereby the individual “make[s] himself available…and thereby more transparent both to himself and to others,” more gracious. Far from limiting the person, as ‘individualists’ suppose, other persons enable each person “to be and to grow.” Borrowing Martin Buber’s language, Mounier affirms that “the thou, which implies the we, is prior to the I—or at least accompanies it.” Failure of communication diminishes me. To avoid such failure, including the corruption of communication seen in lying, sophistry, and rhetorical domination, one must stand ready to go outside of oneself; to see others from their point of view; to share in their destinies, joys, and sorrows, to be liberal in the original sense of the word, generous (“an economics of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation”); and to be faithful in “devotion to the person” in “love and friendship.” “Love is the surest certainty that man knows; the one irrefutable, existential cogito (I love, therefore I am); therefore being is, and life has value (is worth the pain of living).” What “shakes me out of my self-assurance, my habits, my egocentric torpor” is what “most surely reveals me to myself.”

That is, love as agape dislocates as it rewards. Communication is difficult. Misunderstandings happen. Even when they don’t, “there is something in us that deeply opposes every movement toward reciprocity, the kind of fundamental ill-will that we have already mentioned.” Other persons aren’t easy to understand, given the “irreducible opacity about our very manner of existing.” Forming a community—whether a family, a nation, or a religious community—tempts us into “a new egocentricity of its own,” a collective selfishness and shutting-out. While the person “cannot be duplicated or repeated,” he also cannot fully realize his personhood without “the world of persons,” and that goes for communities, too. This means that “there must be some common factor,” some “abiding human nature,” a point that “contemporary thought” inclines to reject in favor of existentialism, historicism, conventionalism, or some other such claim. Contemporary thought “rejects the conception of ‘human nature’ as a prejudice that would limit” the possibilities of human achievement, typically claim that “every man is nothing but what he makes himself.” But personalism, whether Christian or agnostic, affirms “the unity of mankind, both in space and time.” It opposes “the totalitarians’ denigration of political adversaries” because “any man, however different, or even degraded, remains a man.” “This sense of humanity as one and indivisible is strictly implicit in the modern notion of equality,” although many egalitarians don’t recognize that. 

That includes egalitarian ‘idealists,’ who would abolish property. “Man must on no account play at being pure spirit,” however. He needs property, “a certain range of objects, with which [he] can form relations of intimacy somewhat like those that it seeks with other persons, relations of frequency and of long duration.” ‘To be’ and ‘to have’ are not mutually exclusive but “opposites between which our embodied existence is held in tension.” Embodied existence makes it impossible “to be without having”; it also requires a man “to give up [his] isolation, to ‘bear with’ something. The tension comes when he refuses to act generously with what he has, but to do so he must have things in the first place. “Moral idealism is not uncommonly the quest for an existence freed at last from any burden whatever: an aspiration opposed to nature which can end only in ruin, or in anti-humanity.” Rather, “concentrating in order to find oneself; then going forth to enrich and to find oneself again concentrating oneself anew through dispossession; such is the systole and the diastole of the personal life, an everlasting quest for a unity foretold and longed for but never realized.” And while “mystics of personality” forget that their persons are embodied “in the world,” “politicians of the person” incline to think of themselves beings in need of defensive walls against all others. Neither can be a hero, who risks himself in battle, or “a lover giving himself for love,” or a saint “inspired by love for his God.” They are too focused on their own interiority for any of that. 

A true person must ready himself for struggle. “To be a presence in the world is not easy! I am lost if I flee from it, I am also lost if I give myself up to it,” failing sometimes “to say no, to protest, to break away.” “Experience demonstrates that there is no value that is not born of conflict or established without struggle, from the political order to social justice, from sexual love to human unity, or, for Christians, to the Kingdom of God.” Mounier’s person strikes a balance, recognizing that “the machines, the masses, the ruling powers, administration, the universe itself and its forces present themselves to him increasingly as a general menace,” inviting him to succumb to “a kind of social paranoia,” while also recognizing that “love is a struggle,” life ” struggle against death,” spiritual life “a struggle against the inertia of matter and the sloth of the body”—a call for engagement in that very modern world. Christians call for the virtue of fortitude, whose “great aim” is to “overcome the fear of bodily evil,” the “fear of being hit,” still another manifestation of individualism or perhaps merely selfishness equally opposed to liberality and magnanimity. “In modern conditions of comfort and of indulgent care for the feelings, we have long cultivated, under the cover of philosophies of love and of peace, the most monstrous misunderstandings of these elementary truths,” which incline to deny not the wrong use of force but the use of any force at all. On the contrary, “rights themselves are an always precarious effort to rationalize force and incline it towards the rule of love.” Immoral violence must be confronted by violence, Mounier writes, a few years after the Second World War, an event which brought that point to one’s attention. “To try to eradicate aggressiveness altogether from education, or too early to swamp the virile energies of youth in idealistic hopes—this is less likely to realize any ideal than to spoil the fighters for it.” Education entails cultivation, and “to cultivate means to sacrifice”—to weed out, to prune. “Every organization, every technique, every doctrine which tends to deny or diminish this fundamental vocation of the person to exercise responsible choice, whatever advantages it may offer, is a poison more dangerous than despair”; “the most solemn declarations of Rights are speedily transgressed in a state that contains too few men of indomitable character to confirm them, or social structures too weak to guarantee their realization.”

This emphasis on the wholeness of human life, the integration of all its elements into the person, precludes any strict dualism. “As soon as one isolates freedom from the whole structure of the person, it tends toward some aberration.” And while it is true that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, “the indeterminism of modern physics,” refutes materialist determinism, “it does no more” than that. “If freedom were merely an irregularity in the working of the universe, who could prove that it was not reducible to a defect in our perception, or even to some systematic distortion in nature or in man?” Human freedom “is the freedom of a person, moreover of this person,” a naturally constituted and therefore limit being, “situated in the world and in the presence of definite values.” “To be free is, in the first place, to accept this position and base oneself upon it,” exercising choice and accepting the sacrifices choice requires, given our ‘givens’ of body, space, time. “He who is blind to his servitude is the only real slave, even if he is a happy one.” By “values” Mounier means not the arbitrary and/or conventional claims people make when they say that they, or ‘society,’ ‘places a value’ on some thing or some act. Real liberty means “liberation to choose the good,” to be a “responsible man.” Freedom is “the mode and manner in which the person is everything that it is”—its fully developed nature. In this, Christian personalism shows its affinities to Christian Aristotelianism.

And this is a Christian Aristotelianism. It is not mere vitalism, inasmuch as “the life-force never prompts us to anything other than itself,” tempting us to refuse “to accept suffering and death” because animated by “the passion for life at any price.” Not so: as the Personalist Gabriel Marcel writes, “I am more than my life,” more than my biological existence. That is the Christlike stance, but also the stance of the self-described ‘anti-Christ,’ Friedrich Nietzsche. The difference is that, like Christ, and unlike Nietzsche with his amor fati, Personalists “cannot willingly surrender the person to anything impersonal,” instead “deduc[ing] all values from the unique appeal of the one supreme Person.” To those who demand proof “of the transcendent,” Mounier replies, simply that “the transcendent, being inherent in the universe of freedom, is not susceptible of proof,” which requires firm predictability; its only verification “is manifested in the fullness of the personal life.” A person isn’t “tied to a given position like a horse hobbled to a post” but one who can “survey the universe from the angle of his own position, and indefinitely to lengthen to the bonds by which he is attached to it.” The “values” or principles by which he governs his conduct are independent of “the peculiarities of a given subject”—not ‘subjective’ in the sense moral subjectivists propound—but “they are subjective in the sense that they exist only in relation to subjects, that they have to be reborn through persons, yet without being bound to any one of them, mediating between all, drawing them out of their isolation and relating them to the universal”—ultimately, the supreme Person. It is true that “God remains silent; all that is of value in the world is steeped in silence.” What is ruinous is steeped in noise and distraction: “the modern techniques of degradation—financial trickery, bourgeois complaisance and political intimidation”—all “more deadly than weapons of war.” [2]

The Personalist theory of knowledge is rational without being rationalist, not an attempt to find a purely objective truth reducible to logical syllogisms. Spinoza, Adam Smith, and other modern philosophers aspire to a universality that “is not that of a world of persons,” either by attempting to “eliminate the spectator,” the one looking at the world, “in order to uphold the preeminence of the idea” or by positing “an ‘objective’ spectator, one who explains all things, understands all things, and admits everything.” Mounier calls this “the internal weakness in liberalism,” one that Nietzsche saw; “the knowing spirit is not a neutral mirror” but one “linked with a body and a history, called to a destiny, and involved in the situation by all its actions, including its acts of knowledge.”. But this is not to concur with Nietzsche’s attack on objectivity itself and his consequent valorization of the will-to-power. Science has its place, so long as one understands what it can and cannot do. “There is no valid reflection which does not give full weight to scientific knowledge,” but science cannot tell us anything about God, except the impersonal ‘god of the philosophers.’ A person who seeks truth must do what Plato’s Socrates (no mean logician) demands in his allegory of the cave: a conversion, a turning-around of the soul. To link oneself to transcendence and to communication with others requires “the recognition of objectivity,” the fact that there are other persons ‘out there,’ along with the impersonal objects of nature and art. Engagement is no solipsism. “A complete logic needs to formulated upon this basis”; Mounier refers his readers to his Treatise on Character for the beginnings of such a logic. Such a conversion is as necessary in morality as in epistemology. “The moral ‘cogito’ develops through suffering,” through engagement not only with one’s own faults but with other faulty persons. 

More generally, the whole field of action or engagement “presupposes freedom.” Action has four “dimensions”: poesis or making, behavior, “contemplative action,” and “collective action.” Making aims at “dominat[ing] and organiz[ing] external matter.” It requires ‘economy,’ that is, industriousness and efficiency. “But man has no satisfaction in fabrication and organization unless he finds in them his own dignity, the fraternity of his fellow-workers, and some fulfilment above that of utility.” That is, economy requires “the guidance of politics, which relates” its problems “to ethics.” “It is at the level of politics that an economy becomes personalized and its personnel institutionalized.” Behavior or ethical action thus requires a politics that treats human persons as persons, not as instruments. (In this, Mounier taps into not only Existentialist ‘authenticity’ but Kant’s refusal to treat human beings as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves, although as a Christian he insists that treating human beings only as ends in themselves is an attempt to bypass God.) “Contemplative action” means an action not of the mind alone but of the whole person, the Socratic and Christian conversion just mentioned, aiming at “perfection and universality, but by way of finite works and particular actions.” Far from denigrating theory in the attempt to exalt praxis, Mounier observes that “the highest mathematical speculations, the least directly useful…have found the most fruitful applications, and at the same time the most unforeseen.” The same is true of “the two centuries of theological controversy which established the full significance of the Incarnation of Christ,” speculations that “also founded the only fully activist and industrial civilizations.” Further, contemplation may more directly disrupt “existing practice” by action “of the type that we call prophetic,” by “affirm[ing] the absolute in all its trenchancy, by speech, writing or behavior, when its meaning has been blunted by compromises.” Finally, collective action affirming “the community of labor, a common destiny or spiritual community” must never “confuse engagement with regimentation,” as seen in fascism and communism, with their “systems and dogmatisms.” In all of its dimensions, action as personal engagement meets the scorn of fanatics, who despise its hesitation to act without thinking and of politicians who “reproach it as intractable because it never forgets claims that are absolute.” “But courage lies in acceptance of these inconvenient conditions.” 

Mounier criticizes modern education as “the worst possible preparation” for a culture of Personalism. “The universities distribute formal knowledge which predisposes men to ideological dogmatism or, by reaction, to sterile irony” and “spiritual educators” often “base moral edification upon scrupulousness and moral casuistry instead of the cultivation of decision,” of responsible choice in the real world. “The whole climate of education needs to be changed if we no longer want to see, on the plane of action, intellectuals who set an example of blindness and men of conscience who inculcate cowardice.”

“European nihilism,” impelled by the critiques of modern rationalism as seen in the way of life of “the bourgeois world” delivered by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, all deniers of Hegel’s claim to have constructed a philosophic system that marks the end of history because it marks “the end of philosophy,” of philosophizing, of the love of wisdom, the ever-renewed reasoned quest for the truth, “is spreading and organizing its forces in every field left vacant by the retreat of those substantial beliefs which kept our fathers in heart—the Christian faith, the culture of science, of reason and of duty.” Mounier identifies “the great question of the twentieth century” as whether the century “can avoid that dictation by the technocrats, either from the right or the left, which loses sight of man in the organizing of his activities.” Mounier knows what he doesn’t want: “the proletarian condition,” the “anarchic economy of property,” “state monopoly,” and paternalism. He wants “the priority of labor over capital,” abolition of “class distinctions founded upon the division of labor or of wealth,” and “an economy directed to the fulfilment of the totality of personal needs.” He is less sure of how to achieve these ends. Precisely as a Personalist, he must leave such things open to choices made in the future.

He does offer some preliminary reflections. “Politics is not an end in itself, overruling all other aims,” since “the State is meant for man, not man for the State.” Nevertheless, “if politics is not everything, it enters into everything.” Anarchists are mistaken to think that “power wielded by man over man” cannot be reconciled with “the interpersonal relation,” and this is the core of Mounier’s complaint about liberalism, as well; it is too antipolitical. “Anarchism and liberalism forget that since man’s personality is deeply rooted in the natural world it is impossible to exercise power over things without exercising some constraint over man.” But fascism and other forms of absolutism (he pointedly overlooks communism) ham-handedly reject “authority,” by which he means “the final destiny of the person, which power ought to respect and promote.” To do that, power must be used to protect the person “against abuses of power” with a constitution that limits the powers of the State including its police powers, institutes federalism, permits citizens to appeal decisions of the State, establishes an independence of the judiciary, and asserts the right of habeas corpus. Calls for “democracy” must define that term. Mounier defines it as “a form of government erected upon the spontaneity of the masses in order to ensure their participation as subjects in the objective structure of powers”—Aristotle calls that “ruling and being ruled in turn”—a form that prevents “the ‘mob-rule’ at one extreme”—the excesses of the French Revolution seldom drift far from the minds of French political writers—or “the irremovable one-party State at the other”—both “but different forms of irresponsible tyranny.” The “spontaneity of the masses” can be registered through representative government, itself informed by “political education,” typically undertaken by the political parties. With the parliamentary regime of the Fourth Republic now established, Mounier is predictably dissatisfied with the current parties. “Political democracy needs to be wholly reorganized in relation to an effectual economic democracy adapted to the contemporary systems of production.” And although “the Marxist criticism of formal democracy is on the whole unanswerable,” as a Christian Mounier also tacitly rejects real, existing Communism, with its “divinized” Leader and Party. In modern life, “all the regulative ideals that are set forth in the ‘phenomenology’ of religion come back again in novel cults and in generally debased forms, decidedly retrograde in comparison with those of Christianity, precisely because the personal universe and its requirements are eliminated.” 

Mounier hopes that someday “there will no longer be any need to direct attention” to the personal character of human beings and of God, a time when this “will have become the common and accepted knowledge of the situation of mankind.” The Christianity of the Bible prophesies that this will only occur with divine intervention at the end of days. Mounier’s ‘Left’ Catholicism inclines to forget that, although it nobly offers resources with which Christians might endure the interim.

 

Note

1. Leo Strauss regards this dualism as inherent in modern philosophy itself, seen first in Machiavelli’s invitation to the prince to master Fortuna, and in Bacon’s analogous invitation to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate.
2. It is noteworthy that Mounier’s journal, Esprit, became the voice of an anti-American, ‘Left’ Catholicism after World War II. That is, he clearly regarded liberalism as a more insidious threat to France and to humanity generally than Marxism, although that did not commit himself to adherence regimes of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ See Seth D. Armus: “The Eternal Enemy: Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and Franch Anti-Americanism.” (French Historical Studies, Volume 24, Number 2, Spring 2001, pp.271-304.)

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: We Have Ceased to See the People. Ignat Solzhenitsyn, editor. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

 

In each of these ten speeches, all but the last delivered while in exile from Russia, Solzhenitsyn “seek[s] not only to convince, educate, or grapple with his hosts,” as his son, the editor of this volume, writes, “but to reach across the Iron Curtain, and across the late Cold War decades, to buttress, censure, or inspire his own countrymen.” “It was this dual audience that the writer always bore in mind,” each in the grip of a version of one thing: modern ‘secularism,’ ‘humanism,’ ‘anthropocentrism.’ And it is indeed striking that these speeches, arranged in chronological order from the Nobel Lecture of 1972 to an address to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997, present a coherent, even step-by-step argument not only in opposition to modernity’s excesses, excesses originating in its core principles, but in defense of the traditions of piety, of humility before Being—traditions still followed, even if in attenuated form, by the peoples of the world, if not by the elites who rule them. By ceasing to see the people, by dismissing their beliefs, ‘ruling classes,’ incline—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unawares—to tyrannize over them in despotism ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’

Solzhenitsyn emphasizes his vocation as a literary artist, not as public figure, not as an intellectual, and most assuredly not as a prophet. He distinguishes artists who attempt to create “an autonomous spiritual world,” the l’art pour l’art aesthetes, weighed down by the attempt, from artists who believe that the only creator is God, for whom God bears the weight of creation, leaving the artist “even amid failure and at the lowest depths of existence—in poverty, in prison, in illness”—with “a sense of enduring harmony” that “cannot leave him.” This harmony derives from this artist’s sense that he alone isn’t in control of his own artistry, which cannot “be wholly accounted for by the artist’s worldview, by his conception, or by the work of his unworthy fingers.” The human capacity for art wasn’t created by the artist. “Back in the twilight preceding the dawn of mankind we received it from Hands that we did not manage to make out clearly. Neither did we think to ask: why this gift for us? how should we treat it?” 

Although Solzhenitsyn takes much of his literary style from ample Tolstoy, spiritually he much more resembles intense Dostoevsky. For a long time, Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world,” perplexed him. “Granted, it ennobled, it elevated—but whom did it ever save?” But beauty and “the nature of art itself” persuade in a way that philosophic systems do not, “prevail[ing] even over a resisting heart.” While philosophic systems may rest “on an error or on a lie” (Marxism being an excellent example), “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image.” Even when tyrants obliterate “the all-too-obvious, all-too-straight shoots of Truth and Goodness,” the “intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked for shoots of Beauty will force their way through and soar up to that very spot where Truth, Goodness, and Beauty once converged,” thereby fulfilling the task of all three. He is thinking of his own experience under Stalinist tyranny, when truths were censored, goodness punished, but he nonetheless began his own literary and spiritual journey. The linear force of tyranny can attack the linear results of reasoning, theoretical or practical, but art isn’t linear. It twists and turns, sometimes evading the censors and the police in its public display but before that, indispensably, in the soul of the artist.

It is true that many writers died in the Gulag. “An entire literary generation remained there,” and Solzhenitsyn shoulders the burden of trying not to speak for them, for their voices are irreplaceable, but to bring his listeners to understand something about the experience they shared. In the cold, the darkness, the exhaustion of the camps, “our field of vision…was filled with distinct physical objects and clear psychological impulses; and the unambiguous world that we imagined contained nothing to counterbalance this vision. These thoughts came not from books, nor were borrowed for appearance’s sake: they were forged in prison cells and around bonfires in the forest, in conversation with people now dead, tested by that life and springing from there.” Only when those few who survived found themselves outside the camps, back in ordinary life, did they see how “others tripped along to the tune of a carefree musical.” Jesus weeps but never laughs, Erasmus remarks; the spiritual concentration forced upon the zeks of the Gulag by a life stripped of distractions, superfluities, made them different from the others, deeper. They had experienced a compulsory asceticism, unintendedly experiencing the life of the desert monks. (One might add that the Russian Orthodox Church has always honored those monks, so the forced asceticism of the camps linked the zeks, perhaps unawares, to their country as well as to God.) “Man has from the beginning been so constituted that his view of the world (when not induced by persistent suggestion), his motivations and scale of values, his actions and his intentions, are all defined by his experience as an individual and as a member of a group.” This was more evident in earlier times, when human groups were small, unaware of almost all of the other humans on earth. In the world of poleis and tribes, “people were unfailingly guided by their life experience within their own circumscribed locality, their community, their society, and finally within their national territory.” Their convictions also were settled, for the same reason; they seldom encountered different “scale[s] of values.” 

Not so in modernity. We now know about one another, worldwide. “Humanity has become one, but it is not the stable unity of a former community or even that of a nation,” not a unity founded on “gradually acquired experience, not from one’s own eye…but rather—surmounting all barriers—a unity brought about by international radio and the press.” Information has outpaced the human capacity to assimilate it, to measure it on the moral scale that took so long to balance. “Of such different scales in the world there are, if not multitudes, then certainly several: the scale for close-by events and the scale for far-off ones; the scale used by old societies and that used by new ones.; the scale of the well-off and that of the unfortunate.” In the face of this confusing proliferation, we fall back, “prevent[ing] discomfort,” or salving it, by “wav[ing] off all alien scales as madness and error,” preferring to “judge the whole world according to our own homegrown scale,” which we attempt to rebalance. Human beings shouldn’t be blamed for this, as “man is simply built that way.” But under the conditions of modern unity without community, artificial if not artistic ‘communications,’ “such a mutual lack of understanding threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.” 

How, then, to “reconcile these scales of values,” and who can do that? “Who might impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys, and who might give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced?” That person is the artist, especially the literary artist who, by bringing his readers into his own experiences, can “overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others passes him by without profit.” That is because “art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another being’s life experience,” bringing it into his soul by the path of imagination, as Solzhenitsyn did for the zek experience in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and as he did for the experience of the Russian and Soviet revolutions in The Red Wheel. In those books, Solzhenitsyn’s experience, or at least some sense of it, can enter the souls of Americans, Germans, Chinese. In imaginatively experiencing Russian experience, it may even be that one people might learn from another, learn “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected,” since “the sole substitutes for an experience that we’ve not ourselves lived through are art and literature.” “This could save an entire nation from a redundant, or erroneous, or even destructive course”; it could do this from one generation to another, within a nation. Literature, “together with language, preserve the national soul” in this way.

Far from being a hindrance to human understanding, national literatures and the nations whose experiences they present constitute “the wealth of mankind”—Solzhenitsyn’s sly play on Adam Smith’s teaching on “the wealth of nations.” “Woe to the nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force,” which “seal[s] up the nation’s heart,” erases its memory, destroys its identity. And woe to mankind when that happens, impoverished not in the commerce Smith had in mind but in the spiritual dialogue among men and nations who know and feel in different ways because their ways of life, their experiences, have revealed to them dimensions of reality that other men and nations have not seen and felt.

Literature counterbalances the partly natural, partly perverse human inclination to draw back from foreigners, to suppose they have nothing to teach us. “A primeval rejection of all compromise is given the status of theoretical principle and regarded as the high virtue that accompanies doctrinal purity,” bringing “ceaseless civil wars” with their “millions of victims.” This rejection “drones into our souls that there exist no lasting, universal concepts of good and justice, that all such concepts are fluid and ever-changing—which is why you should always act in a way that benefits your party,” “the rest of society be damned.” And when force meets force, the world succumbs to “the brazen conviction that force can do anything, and righteousness—nothing.” The un-word, the anti-word, the anti-human, triumphs, as in Dostoevsky’s The Demons. Just as Satan is the enemy of God, of the Word, so is brute force the enemy of human words. To succumb to force is to succumb to fear. “The spirit of Munich dominates the twentieth century,” in which “a timorous civilized world,” a world that wants to be ruled by words, “faced with the onslaught of a suddenly revived and snarling barbarism, has found nothing with which to oppose it but concessions and smiles.” Lack of courage is “the malady of the will of affluent people,” people who worry that they have too much to lose if they stand up to tyrants and their armies. If a nation takes “material well-being as the principal goal of life on earth,” they will almost invariably “choose passivity and retreat, just so long as their accustomed life might be made to last a little longer.” But “courage and victory come to us only when we resolve to make sacrifices.” 

But writers must not retreat, precisely because they have “taken up the word,” even as soldiers take up weapons. By this, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t propose the use of words as weapons, as rhetoricians or ‘propagandists’ do. To take up the word means to tell your experience to others who have not had that experience. “I am encouraged by a vivid sense of world literature as one great heart that beats for the cares and woes for our world, even if manifested and perceived in its own way in each of its corners.” The beauty of words can save mankind by “making everything the concern of all,” as Solzhenitsyn himself has experienced, with “the hundreds of friends whom I’ve never met in person and whom perhaps I may never see,” those touched by “the concentrated experiences” of his country, who have never set foot there. If “one people might discover, accurately and concisely, the true history of another people, with the same degree of recognition and pain as comes from actual experience,” a “world vision” might develop, inasmuch as we focus “with the center of our eye on what is close at hand,” which we ineluctably do, living in our own bodies, while also “begin[ning] to use our peripheral vision to take in what occurs in the rest of the world.” With the natural, dual capacity of the human eye, the human mind and heart so honed we might “proceed to correlate and to adhere to commons standards.”

How can this fine vision counteract brute force? Because “violence does not and cannot exist by itself: it is invariably intertwined with the lie,” that is, the false word. True, at the outset “violence acts openly and even takes pride in itself,” as in a war or a revolution. “But as soon as it gains strength and becomes firmly established, it begins to sense the air around it growing thinner, and it can no longer exist without veiling itself in a mist of lie.” We warriors, we revolutionaries, have triumphed—but now what? Insofar as the physical force we have deployed has no purpose consonant with human nature, or with the Being within and under which human nature can thrive, it must make something up in order to seem to justify that force and the regime it has boosted ‘into power.’ The “ordinary, brave man” can “refuse to participate in the lie,” refuse to “support false actions,” in the manner of Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and thousands of refuseniks in Russia and in nations that have not the word “refusenik.” But Havel was more than an ordinary, brave man. “As for writers and artists, it is within their power to do more: to defeat the lie!” The Russian proverb is right: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

An example of Solzhenitsyn’s invocation of the common standards between the “two halves of the planet”—first of all the Communist East and the commercial republican West but perhaps behind that the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church—may be seen in his speech accepting the Golden Matrix prize from the Italian Catholic Press Union in 1974. “The true essence of the human condition today” can only be found if both sides “rise to a level well above political characterizations, formulas, and recipes” to see that “both systems are struck by malady, in fact a common malady, and thus neither of the systems, with their current worldview augurs a healthy outcome.” All of modern and civilized humanity “have been seated and fastened onto a single, rigidly interconnected carousel and taken a long orbital journey” from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, “bloody physical revolutions, democratic societies, socialist projects.” In this journey, men attempted to impose, forcibly, “the Kingdom of God” on earth. But before the Renaissance, “the Middle Ages failed.” Specifically, the Church (and especially the Roman Catholic Church, with the “excesses” of the Inquisition) attempted to force men “toward the Spiritual,” prompting them to rebel and rush “headlong and unbounded” toward “the Material,” toward “a long era of humanistic individualism” founded “on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all.” Solzhenitsyn is no ‘reactionary,’ longing for the premodern world, romantically valorizing medieval life. Modernity has “greatly enriched humanity’s experience.” He was trained as a scientist. The dilemma nonetheless remains. In the “material sphere,” modernity poisons air, water, and soil. In what modern men flatter themselves to call the spiritual sphere, “our blustering civilization,” bombarding us with superficial ideas, “false science,” and “affectation in art,” “has completely robbed us of a concentrated inner life”—of genuine spirituality—which “drag[s] our soul into a bazaar, whether of commerce or of party politics.” In the “social sphere,” we find ourselves either on “the brink of anarchy” or under “stable despotism,” with “feeble and powerless” democratic regimes in between. The same immoderation prevails in the social sphere as in the others: “communities large and small have no wish to self-limit in favor of the Whole.” Having refused to put “limits on our passions and our irresponsibility” because we have rejected the Whole and valorized ourselves and our desires, the human journey in modernity has orbited full circle. Having torn ourselves “from the hold of violence…into the hold of violence we have returned” in the East, and will return in the West, too, if the democratic regimes continue to weaken. “If there are to be salvific revolutions in our future, they must be moral ones”—revolutions by the consent of the governed. “We have yet to discover, discern, or bring to life” such a revolution. As he told an English audience in a 1976 radio address, “human nature is full of riddles and contradictions” and these are what engender art—that is, the search for nonlinear formulations, imaginative solutions, complex explanations.” 

Among these riddles and contradictions, from which Solzhenitsyn draws his own literary art, is the paradoxical contrast between nations “utterly pinned down by slavery” which “nevertheless muster the inner strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body,” and nations “who soar unhindered over the peaks for freedom” but then “suddenly lose their taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, fatefully adrift, being almost to crave slavery.” Oppression under tyranny, under regimes of the lie, concentrates men spiritually, while “societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargic mass blindness, into voluntary self-deception.” It was only his experience of living in the West that caused Solzhenitsyn to understand “to what extreme degree the West has already become a world of lost will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of danger,” a world which has lost its reason because it has lost the courage that enables reason to stand up to force. Having succumbed to the modern claim that “the only good in the world…was that which satisfied our feelings,” the (im)morality of humanist materialism, the west conquered the world, with Great Britain in the forefront, enslaving Africans and Asians “with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering of its own freedom at home.”

This began to end in August 1914, the starting point of Solzhenitsyn’s vast novel-epic, The Red Wheel. In the First World War, “Europe would ravage herself as never before,” more than in the wars of religion, and this resulted in the founding of the Soviet tyranny, “a fissure [that] bared itself on [Europe’s] edge.” Yet the fissure was in the same earth, Marxism-Leninism being “the perfectly consistent manifestation of teachings that for centuries roamed Europe with considerable success,” teachings Dostoevsky had understood. He “predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million lives.” And so it may have done, if you count mass murder along with wars civil and international and deaths caused by industrial pollution and slave labor. 

What was Great Britain’s response? Nothing more than “the incomparable pragmatic worldview,” the “refusal to take moral decisions”—still another consequence of the denial of “higher spiritual powers above us.” The pragmatist thinks, “Should anyone have to perish today, let it be someone else, anybody—but not I, not my precious self, nor those close to me.” Hence the quick withdrawal of Western forces allied with the anti-Communist armies that fought on against the Communists, after the revolution. Solzhenitsyn quotes British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George: “Forget about Russia. It’s our job to ensure the welfare of our own society.” More, many in Europe, “the progressive and influential society of Europe (and most vividly—in Britain)” applauded the Soviet “experiment” in socialism, by them regarded as a happy transition from the ‘capitalist’ excesses of modern liberalism. Ignoring the Ukrainian famine, ignoring the Gulag, “your rulers, your Members of Parliament, your public speakers, your journalist, your writers, your leading thinkers” finally turned from complacency to “conscious, calculated hypocrisy.” Solzhenitsyn readily concedes that “with Hitler, Britain wholeheartedly assumed a moral stance,” but its victory in doing so only underscores his point: “A moral stance can suddenly turn out to be more farsighted than any pragmatic calculation.” If so with Hitler, why not with Lenin, Stalin, and all their underlings and successors? The aftermath of the Second World War saw not a reversal but a continuation of pre-war irresolution and unreason. “The lofty philosophy of pragmatism laid down that, once again, you must not notice a great many things,” such as mass deportations, political mass murders, and the imperial subordination of the nations of Eastern and Central Europe. “At the Nuremberg trials” of Nazi war criminals, the British sat “amicably side by side with judges who were every bit the murderers the defendants were—never ruffling your British sense of justice.” Soon, you had lost your empire. “There sometimes arises a direct, tangible link between the evil we long ago caused unto others and the evil that suddenly smites ourselves,” a “link between sin and punishment” whereby “the generation of today will have to pay for their fathers and grandfathers, who strove to block their ears to the lamentations of the world and to close their eyes to the chasms of its depravity.” Much of this thanks to a fatuous sympathy for socialism, from George Bernard Shaw in the 1920s to the Labour Party of the 1970s. “Allow me to remind you that force labor is promulgated by all the prophets of socialism including in The Communist Manifesto, so one ought not to think of the Gulag Archipelago as an Asiatic distortion of a lofty idea—but, rather, as an inescapable law.” How else, except by force, can a government equalize “the basic elements of personality that display too much variability in education, aptitude, thought, and feeling” to make human beings amenable to any strict egalitarianism? “Socialism hypnotizes modern society and prevents it from seeing the mortal danger it is in.” 

What Solzhenitsyn and “the oppressed peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe” can offer the British and the West as a whole is simply but crucially “the experience of our suffering.” We men of the East offer this so that you will not pay “the monstrous price in death and bondage that we have paid.” As of 1976, “your society spurns our voices of warning,” making Solzhenitsyn think that “all experience is intransmissible,” that “everyone must experience everything for himself.” What use is literary art if no one bothers to read? Or, perhaps more accurately, if no one reads anything that contradicts “the ruinous tilt of the Late Enlightenment”? “Will we manage to shake off this burden and to make room for the Spirit breathed into us from birth—that Spirit which alone distinguishes us from the animal world?”

Solzhenitsyn did not hesitate to rebuke Americans along with the Britons, first at a gathering of the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, and then, most famously, at Harvard University in 1978—the one an association of American patriots, the other not so much. While “it is easiest to give in to rhetoric about the grim abysses of totalitarianism and to sing the praises of the shining strongholds of Western freedom,” he tells the patriots, “it’s far more difficult, but also more fruitful, to take a hard look at ourselves.” The regimes of liberty “have lost something of their inner strength and stability” because political liberty and personal freedom cannot be understood “without an evaluation of the objectives of our earthly existence.” Practical reasoning is one thing, pragmatism another; to achieve one’s aims, practical reasoning is indispensable, but an ideology of the practical can lead only to the pursuit of happiness redefined as the consummation of desires. To the contrary, “I hold the view that 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, better than our inborn inclinations alone would have made us; that is, a traversal, over the span of our life, of one path or another of spiritual improvement.” That is, freedom is a condition of “our undistorted development.” But “no less than external freedom, man needs unpolluted and uncrowded space for his soul, the opportunity to concentrate his spirit.” That condition of uncrowdedness, of “uncluttered space,” is exactly what “contemporary civilized freedom is reluctant to grant us.” The world of commercial advertisement, of pornography, of the tsunami of ‘news,’ of what André Malraux called “the arts of satiation,” produces “the shallowing of freedom”—an “unhinged freedom” that may well destroy itself or render itself vulnerable to tyrants. “Genuine freedom is a God-given inner freedom,” the “freedom to determine our own actions, but with moral responsibly for them”—freedom with honor, that “ancient and, by now, peculiar word.” 

At the Harvard Commencement, Solzhenitsyn summarizes and elaborates on his critique of the Western form of modernity. Recalling again the West’s imperial conquests, now much diminished, he points to “persisting blindness of superiority,” which has endured beyond the period of dominance, which “continues to support the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature towards the level of contemporary Western systems”—specifically, “Western multiparty democracy” and “the Western way of life.” By measuring “the essence of other worlds” by “a Western yardstick,” the West fails to comprehend those worlds in its ‘rush to judgment.’ This is especially true of the East-West, Communist-liberal divide; against the then-fashionable hope for “convergence” between the two regimes (happily combining political democracy with socialism, a synthesis Solzhenitsyn earlier showed to be impossible), “neither one can actually be transformed into the other without violence.” Further, the Western democracies now lack the civic courage needed to oppose Soviet oligarchy, a weakness Solzhenitsyn attributes to their founding principle, “that man exists on earth in order to be free and pursue happiness,” as seen in “the American Declaration of Independence.” The result has been the achievement of a “debased sense” of happiness, seen in Western license and material plenty. He warns the young graduates that the anxiety-ridden competition of these regimes “hardly swings open a pathway to a free development of the spirit.” Indeed, “even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is hardly advantageous to a living organism.” 

In addition to self-indulgence, the peoples of the West are also afflicted by legalism. True, the rule of law is a good thing; “a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed,” as the experience of ‘Soviet legality’ had taught him, harshly). “But a society with no scale but the legal one is also scarcely worthy of man.” To be ruled only by legal convention and not by conscience fosters “an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that deadens man’s noblest impulses.” One seldom hears or even thinks of “voluntary self-limitation” when we expect laws alone to govern us. The doctrine of ‘human rights,’ understood legalistically, weakens the sense of “human obligations.” It is in only in fulfilling our obligations to one another ‘from within’ that the West can develop the moral strength to “bear up under [the] trials” of “the menacing age that draws near.” The human right to freedom, whether legal or even natural, cannot defend itself against “the abyss of human decadence,” licentiousness. The “primary foundation” of this error “was laid by the humanistic and benevolent notion according to which man—the master of this world—bears no intrinsic evil within himself, and all the vices of life stem from faulty social systems”—an ideology derived from a simpliste version of Rousseau. 

For example (and here is where Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech obtained its bad reputation), freedom of the press easily veers toward press license. “What sort of responsibility do a journalist or a newspaper have to their readership or to history?” Are there any examples of journalistic repentance for “inaccurate information or wrong conclusions”? And because journalism aims at “instant, authoritative information,” hasty reportage resorts to “guesswork, rumors, and suppositions,” which then “settle into the public’s memory.” And even when journalists get the facts straight, do the people really have ‘the right to know’ everything? Do they have the right to know “secret matters pertaining even to the nation’s defense”? Do they have the right to know facts revealed by “shameless intrusions into the privacy of well-known people”? There is a superior “right of the people not to know,” “not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.” By peddling information indiscriminately, “the press has become the dominant power in Western countries, exceeding that of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.” But who elected the journalists? It is easy to see why journalists took offense at this, and even supposed it dangerous, forever more giving Solzhenitsyn ‘bad press.’ In so doing, they failed to connect this part of his speech with the part immediately preceding. He wasn’t calling for censorship, for an extension of legalism, but for voluntary self-limitation. And given the fact that the souls of journalists, no less than everyone else, bear a measure of “intrinsic evil,” their error should not have been unexpected.

Solzhenitsyn might be more justly criticized for claiming that “the fecund spiritual development already experienced” by Russians “through profound suffering” makes “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion” unenticing. It would have been better to say that the West’s spiritual exhaustion was unenticing in itself, but to admit that Russia’s own spiritual development, with the exception of certain rare souls such as Solzhenitsyn, remained awash in vodka, corruption, and libido dominandi. “The slackening of human character in the West” may have been “an indubitable fact” but “its strengthening in the East” was not. And while “the human soul longs for something higher, warmer, and purer than what is offered by today’s mass Western lifestyle, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting assault of advertising, by television stupor, and by intolerable music,” it is far from clear that servility under a decadent Communist Party (or under the oligarchies that would succeed it) can seriously be thought better.

Solzhenitsyn ascends to firmer ground in his critique of the American foreign policy of the 1970s, a blend of the pseudo-idealism of human rights campaigns with the pseudo realism of detente. He considers “the failure to understand the Vietnam War” as America’s “most serious blunder” of the period. Believing, or pretending, that the Communists in Vietnam and Cambodia fought for “self-determination,” the American antiwar movement has blinded itself to “the genocide and suffering” that afflicts Asians as a result of Communist tyranny in those country. Henry Kissinger (“your shortsighted politician,” a Harvard man) “signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation,” but the applause he garnered begs the question, “How can the West hope to stand firm in the future?” Looked at coldly but truly, “Western democracy has not won any major war by itself,” having availed itself of the forces of czarist Russia for much of the First World War and of those of Stalinist Russia for most of the Second World War. In so doing, in both instances it “raised up another enemy, one that would prove a more biter and powerful one,” namely, the Soviet Union. And in allying with China against Russia now, will its temporary ally not “turn around armed with American weapons” that may inflict “a Cambodia-style genocide” on the United States? That is, “the so-called world wars…were really about the internal self-destruction of the small progressive West”; “the next war—not necessarily an atomic one; I don’t believe it will be—may bury Western civilization for good.”

The weakness of will, of courage in the West may stem from the flaws of modern philosophy and ideology but this need not continue to be the case because it was not so in the American Founding. For Americans at that time, all individual rights were recognized on the premise that man is “god’s creature,” a person willingly shouldering his “religious responsibility.” At that time, “it would have seemed impossible, in America, that an individual be granted unbridled freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his cravings,” that Americans would seek and achieve “emancipation from the moral heritage of Christian centuries, with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” Yet that is what has happened, as “the legalistic egoism of the Western worldview” has hurled mankind into “a severe spiritual crisis and a political impasse.” In both “today’s West and today’s East,” “the logic of materialism’s development” has prevailed, “stamped out by the Party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West.” He adjures his young listeners instead to take up “perpetual, earnest duty, so that one’s entire journey may become, above all, an experience of moral ascent—to leave life a better human being than one started it,” struggling with themselves to find “a new level of life, where neither will our physical nature be consigned to perdition—as in the Middle Ages—nor will our spiritual nature, all the more crucially , be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.” “No one on Earth has any other way left but—upward.” 

If the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church led to the excesses of humanism, beginning in the Renaissance, what accounts for Russia’s catastrophe? Solzhenitsyn concurs with the explanation offered by elderly people when he was a child in the 1920s: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” At one time, “faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation,” but the 17th-century Schism of the Russian Church “gravely undermined” Orthodoxy. [1] In its weakness, the Church was vulnerable to Peter I’s (Solzhenitsyn silently declines to call him ‘Great’) “forcibly imposed” modernization program, which “suppressed religious spirit and national life in favor the economy, the state, and foreign wars”—Russia’s “first whiff of secularism,” opening “a broad avenue for Marxism,” later on. “By the time of the Revolution, faith had evaporated in Russian educated circles and had diminished among the uneducated.” As Dostoevsky had observed, revolution begins with atheism, although “the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism,” a doctrine in which “hatred of God is the principal driving force,” not economic or political ideology. To implement political centralization aiming at social and economic totalitarianism, all institutions standing between the ruling party with its state apparatus and the people with their churches must go, and in order to impose conformity to the new, tyrannical regime the moral limits of Christianity must be erased. Although the West still enjoys religious freedom, it too has been struck by “the tide of secularism”; in fact, the Enlightenment movement in Europe animated Czar Peter. “This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to incinerate religion from without” because it wins the consent of souls without sparking their resistance. Solzhenitsyn might have called this insidious appeal “playing upon the strings of freedom” and, as a writer, he concerns himself especially with spiritual warfare in literature and the arts generally. In turning to the arts, he does in fact call the most recent efforts “playing on the strings of emptiness.”

In that realm, “the necessary equilibrium between tradition and a search for the new” in art “has been repeatedly upset by a falsely understood avant-gardism.” In politics as in art, radical progressivism or historicism was promised to generate “the New Life.” In politics, “revolutions dismantle the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population while giving free rein to the worst.” And so it has been with literary ‘permanent revolution’: “It was even suggested that literature should start anew ‘on a blank sheet of paper.'” Solzhenitsyn remarks, sardonically, “some never ventured much beyond this stage”; the spectacle of the bohemian flaneur wasn’t limited to Paris. Avant-gardism “lower[ed] one’s standards of craftsmanship to the point of slovenliness and primitivity, at times combined with a meaning so obscure as to shade into unintelligibility.” In Russia, the partisans of this movement called themselves the “Futurists”; their work preceded the Russian and Soviet revolutions but was also ended by Lenin’s regime and the introduction of still another literary style, “so-called socialist realism,” which turned out to be more socialist than realist. Socialist realism fell “outside the bounds of art altogether,” as it “consisted of nothing more than servility” to Communist Party commands. By the early 1990s, after the Soviet dreams of future justice had been shown to have no future, young Russian writers, disillusioned by the lies, returned not to Orthodox religiosity or indeed to religiosity of any kind but to relativism, the denial of “absolute truth.” “In one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless.” ‘Postmodernism’ or “post-avant-gardism” has become the new ‘Futurism,’ both forms of nihilism. Postmodernism looks not, Nietzsche-like, to a more intensely lived life but to play, to the antics of Homo ludens. With play, “an author need have no accountability to anyone.” “There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative,” and the world is misconceived as a text, one that “any postmodernist is willing to compose” to keep himself and his audience entertained. This again manifests the moral emptiness of the century, with its “deep-seated hostility toward any spirituality” and “relentless cult of novelty.” 

Nihilism descends when “we have ceased to see the purpose” of human life. Somewhat oddly, Solzhenitsyn claims that John Locke held it “inconceivable to apply moral concepts to the state and its actions,” despite Locke’s clear insistence that states, and their actions, should guard natural rights to life, liberty, and property. What he may have in mind is Locke’s utilitarian tendency, its offshoot in Benthamism and its cultivation of technological progress over moral and spiritual elevation—Locke’s preference for the ‘low but solid ground’ that stays away from the religious controversies that gave rise to religious warfare in Western Europe and Russia, alike. [2] Solzhenitsyn answers that “if state, party, and social policy is not based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of,” that one must, as the Russian adage has it, “live by the truth,” which is not nearly exhausted by “material laws,” which by themselves “neither explain our life nor give it direction.” Modern men have become forgetful of “the human soul.” Having “allowed our wants to grow unchecked,” we “are now at a loss where to direct them.” ‘Interests’ are not purposes. “The paramount importance of self-limitation has only arisen in its pressing entirety before the humanity of the twentieth century,” with its dazzling material prosperity.

“It’s up to us to stop seeing [progress] as a stream of unlimited blessings and to view it, rather, as a gift sent to us for an exceedingly intricate trial of our free will.” The intricacy of that trial consists in the difficulty of making soul-sustaining choices among the seeming infinitude of things and actions modernity and its technological science offers, “seek[ing] or deepen[ing] ways of directing [the] might [of progress] towards the accomplishment of good.” Progress is nothing like the simple, linear (even if ‘dialectical’) thing historicists imagine. But if we “limit our wants,” adapt an attitude of “prudent self-limitation,” we will achieve genuine freedom. Man inclines to limit himself only if he considers himself not as the center of the universe but as a small part within it, flourishing only insofar as he adapts himself to what is greater than he—to “something Whole, something Supreme above us.” As the Russian philosopher Nikolai Lossky taught, “if a personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay.” [3]

Self-limitation, humility before the Whole, should govern not only the individual but states. The political refusal of self-limitation yields the rule of force, of taking. In an important footnote, Ignat Solzhenitsyn cites the policies of Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, which rightly “denounc[ed] the collapsing Communist regime founded by Lenin,” but then wrongly “rushed to assert their claims to the fullest extent of the historical dubious borders personally drawn by Lenin.” What had been “relatively meaningless internal borders within the USSR” became “newly consequential international borders” encompassing “millions of ethnic Russians”—encompassed, it might be added, because Lenin wanted a substantial population of Russians within Ukraine and Kazakhstan in order to buttress Russian control of the native populations. “Solzhenitsyn repeatedly said that he didn’t oppose independence for those countries per se, but that those capricious borders ought to be revisited in order to avoid calamities in the future.” That is, what Lenin deranged, a future Putin might seek to correct, disastrously, and (given the modern inclination to seize, to overreach) even to over-correct.

This is not to imply that individual and political morality are exactly the same, even if they are closely related. Politics is a matter of civilization—a ‘being civil,’ “a milieu, a way of life,” a regime. Individual refinement and elevation are a matter of culture, “the sum total of our intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and aesthetical achievements,” consisting of “the development, enrichment, and refinement of the non-material life.” Without culture, civilization hollows out, weakens, becomes legalistic and often collapsing into the uncivilized rule of force. Without civilization, a proper milieu, culture will be tyrannized. It may concentrate itself in certain spiritually strong individuals, who may (or may not) cause it to rekindle or at least survive, as when Blaise Pascal warned the subjects of the Machiavellian-absolutist Bourbons, “the ultimate essence of things is accessible only through religious perception.” In 1997, nearing the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn told his fellow Russians that “one thing we must certainly absorb from the West is an active yet stable civic life”—a degree of civilization. Such absorption should emphatically not extend to Western culture. “The only normal, natural path of development of any culture is a rational, balanced integration of its own organic principles.” “Our people’s survival or extinction will depend on those who persist through these dark times, by way of concentrated labor or its material support in shielding from ruin, in lifting up, in strengthening and developing the inner life of our minds and souls—the life that is culture.”

 

Notes

1. The Schism of the Russian Church began in 1653, when Patriarch Nikon introduced reforms of Church ritual intended to conform Russian Orthodox practice with that of Greek Orthodoxy. This offended local priests and their parishioners, who regarded the Russian rites as legitimate. Worse, the reforms included centralization of the Church, including increased control of Church lands by the Patriarch. This brought the upper level of the Russian aristocracy into the controversy, which eventuated in civil war between the centralizers and the ‘Old Believers.’
2. Lockean morality derives from that of Thomas Hobbes, who calls death “the King of Terrors.” Solzhenitsyn attributes the fear of violent death to materialism. “Nothing so bespeaks the present helplessness of our spirit, our intellectual disarray, as the loss of a clear, calm attitude towards death. The more human well-being increases, the hasher the chilling fear of death that cuts into the soul of modern man.” Having “lost the sense of himself as a limited point in the universe,” modern man begins “to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself. And then, of course the thought of death becomes unbearable: it is the extinguishment of the entire Universe at a stroke.”
3. Nikolai Lossky was the father of the theologian Vladimir Lossky. For a consideration of the latter’s work, see “Orthodox Christianity: Is Mysticism a Higher Form of Rationality?” and “Orthodox Christianity: Manifestations of God” on this website under “Bible Notes.” Although the elder Lossky taught theology, his personalist philosophy (he was a friendly colleague of Berdyaev at one point) had strong affinities with Origen’s doctrines.