Here’s some good news to brighten up your Monday: LarkNews.com, a Christian satire website in the mock-news tradition of The Onion, has posted new articles for the month of August.

My favorites among the latest headlines include “MySpace gives pastor ‘prophetic’ edge” and “Bush budget gets $100 million for spiritual warfare efforts.”

I know and have read little of Solzhenitsyn, but at some point in college I read his address at Harvard’s Class Day in 1978. To me he captured brilliantly Western society’s predominant form of legalism in which the law is obeyed only so far as one is compelled by the phrasing of positive law:

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. . . . Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

The apostle Paul calls the law a “guardian,” teaching us how to live the good life as God intends. Solzhenitsyn seemed to think that we have become morally malformed children who hear the nanny’s bidding, but try to get away with as much as they can while they do it. Thus “moral mediocrity” reigns alongside exact obedience of the law. Men need not be good; they need only be clever.

The remedy that Solzhenitsyn identifies for this legalism is a recovery of moral obligations–the sense that not only do we have negative freedoms from evils, but positive freedoms for good. Just as individuals have rights that their fellow citizens must protect, they have obligations to those citizens that they must fulfill. We have spent so much time emphasizing rights, Solzhenitsyn says, that we have neglected to teach obligations. From those to whom much has been given, much should be expected.

I think Solzhenitsyn would have agreed that we also need to recover a sense of law as not merely the positive commands of a government to be obeyed in letter, but as deeper guidelines for the order of the world that must be obeyed in spirit. In other words, we must recover of the natural law, a topic that Robert George and others have written about in our pages. For when laws are seen as habits to be inculcated and not an obstacle course to navigate, society will be better equipped to pursue true virtue and to flourish.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, rightly called “one of the great souls of the age,” passed away last night in Moscow. Best known for his piercing depictions of Soviet labor camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and the three-volume Gulag Archipelago (1973–1978), Solzhenitsyn exposed the pervasive horrors of Russian communism to the Western world. His ideas did not spring from the sterile, marble halls of the academy: After serving as a commander in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in Soviet work camps, followed by what was supposed to be permanent internal exile. He was named the Noble laureate in Literature in 1970, an award formally conferred in 1974, after he was deported from the U.S.S.R. Solzhenitsyn spent the next two decades writing at Stanford University, returning to Russia after the fall of communism, where he continued to incisively critique communism, Western modernity, and his country’s newfound democracy. His life project, one might say, was to reveal physical and spiritual captivity, to free the soul from barbed wire.

Solzhenitsyn’s thirty-volume Complete Works are forthcoming in Russian, but in the meantime, you might recall a series of his “Miniatures” that First Things published a few years ago. Prose-poems they are sometimes called, giving a glimpse into this great soul of our age. There is, for instance, this note of somber hope, the humble “Rooster Song” of a master:

Rooster Song

With the depopulation, abandonment, and extinction of our villages, we have forgotten, and younger generations have never even heard, the many-voiced rooster roll call of midday. In sunny summertime, from one yard to the next, across the street, and farther, beyond the village outskirts, how marvelous is this chorus of triumphant life.

Little else can bestow such tranquility upon the soul. Not drowned out by any noisy bustle, this vivid, vibrant, succulent, stalwart cry conveys to us that throughout these parts there reigns a blessed peace, an untroubled calm. That’s how today has unfolded so far, and why shouldn’t it continue? Carry on, everyone, your benign pursuits.

Right here, somewhere, he saunters about proudly, all white and orange, with his sumptuous, knightly scarlet comb.

Comports himself gloomlessly.

If only we could.

The chorus of triumphant life–this last Miniature, on the communion of humanity, is especially poignant:

Remembrance of the Departed

It is an act bequeathed to us in deep wisdom, by men of holiness. We come to understand its purpose not in vigorous youth, amidst the company of loved ones, family, friends; but with age.

Parents have passed; peers now pass as well. Where go they? It seems unguessable, unfathomable, beyond our grasp. Yet as with some foreordained clarity, it dawns for us, it glimmers—no, they have not vanished. And no more shall we learn of it, while we live. But a prayer for their souls—it casts from us to them, from them to us, an impalpable arch of measureless breadth yet effortless proximity. Why, here they are, you can almost touch them. Both unknowable are they and, as ever, so familiar. Except, they have fallen back in years: Some were older than we, but now are younger.

Focusing, you even inhale their answer, their hesitation, their warning. In exchange, you send them your own earthly warmth: Perhaps we too can help somehow? And a promise: We shall meet.