| Subject: Bill Murchison |
| From: "Karen Lancaster" <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> |
| Date: 8/6/08, 12:55 |
| To: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> |
It was, of course, the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's indomitable courage in the face of the Soviet slave drivers that first earned him fame, and eventually almost every award in the gift of admiring Westerners. If his books inspired, so did he a gaunt, leafless tree in the forest, unbending in the gales that blew about him.
Malcolm Muggeridge, in the mid-1970s, called him "the greatest man now alive in the world." If competition for the distinction was thin, so much the worse for the national and cultural leaders who lacked the strength of the bearded Russian to whom liberation had come in the guise of slavery.
At last walls fell and prison doors sprang open; the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union became nominally free. Free to speak and make money; free to exploit and debase. After which Mr. Solzhenitsyn became to many Westerners a more puzzling figure than he ever had been a bit of a pouter, as some saw it; a moral scold, going on and on about the defects of modern culture, not to mention the need for spiritual revitalization.
It was at just this point, one could argue, Mr. Solzhenitsyn revealed everything that he was about: not just political liberty but renewal of the human spirit. As he saw it, outer freedom and inner worth nurtured each other in a relationship of miraculous beauty and intricacy.
It was no new thread, this relationship, in Mr. Solzhenitsyn's broad tapestry of freedom. The cries against oppression of the body, so familiar to readers of The Gulag Archipelago, had proceeded from consciousness of strength in the soul.
He had declared, in his Harvard commencement address of 1978, "Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism." The need of the day was a "spiritual blaze," "a new height of vision." No other way was left "but upward."
"Upward." The plain inference was "toward God." What did that have to do, please, with ICBMs, Berlin Walls, and the right to make a buck or a ruble hard, tangible matters such as everyone understood? Much of the world yawned and failed to make the moral connection Mr. Solzhenitsyn had made in the prison camps.
There the inner spirit mattered more than frozen fingers and empty bellies. By contrast, mere freedom had its limitations.
You could walk through life unhindered, doing whatever duty or opportunity always there was that choice indicated. It might turn out well enough. It might turn into barbed-wire barbarity, as in the sprawling land that had called itself Holy Russia until bloody gangs imposed a new and bloody vision.
The post-Soviet world, happy enough to be rid of the comrades and the threat of nuclear warfare, just wanted to get on with freedom. Mr. Solzhenitsyn's duty, as he saw it, became that of taking away the punch bowl (in the delightful phrase of a onetime American central banker) in order to check for deadly admixtures. One can see why his public image suffered. What we moderns want, we want now, and don't try stopping us, see?
Stopping, forcing, coercing was never on the agenda of a writer formed in the prison camps. It didn't work. Love and sacrifice and the ability to worship came from within, planted, watered by God the same God the Soviets had tried to eradicate, installing in his place the little tin gods of pleasure and self-interest. Mr. Solzhenitsyn knew from harsh experience the fraudulence of the latter. To the primacy of the real God, he spoke with unmatchable beauty and power.
William Murchison is author of the forthcoming "Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity" (Encounter Books).