Last week I reflected on the genius of Solzhenitsyn’s great novel, In the First Circle.
Some readers weighed in on other aspects of Solzhenitsyn’s thought, especially his famous Harvard Address, given in 1978, four years after arriving in the United States as an exile from Russia.
The Address was quite a shock in its day, much talked about and not a little bit resented by the liberal elites. For instance, there were Solzhenitsyn’s harsh words about our abandonment of South Vietnam.
The most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?
Let’s just say that fashionable opinion was very angry when one of it’s dogmas was called into question—and the dogma that the Vietnam War was wrong, wrong, wrong was (and remains) central to the liberal American worldview.
But the irritation went deeper.
Solzhenitsyn’s picture was one-sided, of course. He knew that America had real virtues, and he was crystal clear about the fact that it was a very good thing to live in America, where, in contrast to the Soviet Union, a basic (and decent) legality obtained. But he was not interested in cheerleading. He was a moralist to the core, and when asked to speak he focused on what he thought was wrong, precisely because he wanted to exhort Americans to correct their course. Solzhenitsyn basically accused America of sliding into a condition of soulless, spineless materialism. He pointed out that we worship the hearth gods of health, wealth, and hedonism.
Many have said as much. When someone accuses America of succumbing to “secular humanism,” they are saying something similar. But I think Solzhenitsyn added an important insight. He saw that one of the strengths of the West—it’s commitment to the rule of law—had become a temptation.
Jabs at “legalism” run throughout the Harvard Address, which, given Solzhenitsyn’s immersion in the Orthodox culture of Russia, is not surprising. The expatriate Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky zeroed in on legalism as one of the great spiritual vices of the West.
What Lossky meant (and Solzhenitsyn as well) was that people in the West tend to set up institutions and official mechanisms to express and embody their spiritual values. The problem is that in so doing these values tend to become routine, and they lose their grip on the human heart. Or worse: we substitute loyalty to an institution or a set of procedures for the more demanding requirement of loyalty to moral truths.
As I have suggested, this is a common Eastern Orthodox (and especially Russian) criticism of the West. We have very reliable courts and police who accord us our civil right, this line of criticism observes, but we lack social solidarity. And, as Solzhenitsyn points out, we hide behind legality as a way of evading our deeper responsibilities.
I find myself sympathetic to this line of criticism. In my career in academia I have seen many administrators hide behind procedures. It’s the perfect way to avoid personal responsibility. “My hands are tied,” I’ve heard managers say, and so hard decision aren’t made.
But there’s a deeper temptation. One feature of modernity has been the dream of designing a constitutional system or rule of law or an economic system that miraculously requires no virtue. Our private vices will be counter-balanced or coordinated or canceled out.
It is a dream of justice without virtue, and it seems to me that it is a very powerful modern dream, as common on the political right (“the invisible hand”) as the political left (getting rid of “special interests”). It’s a dream that attracts us, because it allows us to imagine ourselves serving the common good while we worship our hearth gods of health, wealth, and hedonism.
I’m not altogether convinced that Solzhenitsyn actually cared enough about the West to discipline himself to enter fully into its spirit—both good and malign. He lived in order to write his great novels about the twentieth-century Russian experience. But on this point I think he has something important to teach us, as does the Russian Orthodox tradition more broadly.
He puts the point with nuance: “It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have.”
He does not dismiss the positive goods that come from a well-considered and well-administered legal system or institution. But it is not enough. We need to purify our souls if we are to ourselves capable of public leadership that fully serves the common good.
That sound right to me. After all, it’s the gist of what St. Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians when he tries to explain to his readers what makes for a well-ordered Christian community. As St. Paul sums up: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1).
January 10th, 2011 | 5:48 pm
+1 for mentioning Lossky
January 10th, 2011 | 10:26 pm
By smooth,bland legalism I suspect he may be refering to the awful Supreme Court decisions in the Dred Scott case and the Roe v Wade case. Dred Scott eventually morphed into the civil war. We have lost much of our moral leadership by the continued tolerance of abortion. By the way, Mr. S lived just down the road from a buddy of mine who owns an ancestral home in the woods of Vermont. He was very reclusive, I often wanted to walk down the road and see if we could strike up a friendly conversation about Christianity. But he was on a mission to write. It was a bit odd that he chose to live in one of the most secular parts of the US, but I suppose it reminded him of home. I thought his most important book was clearly the Gulag A., a 2 x 4 upside the head of Western man regarding the real story of Soviet Communism. From the moment this book was published, communism was finished.
January 11th, 2011 | 5:38 am
The Orthodox observation about the susceptibility to legalism applies not only to the West in general but more particularly to the Catholic Church. The Reformers separated from it much as the first Christians separated from the synagogue. The Roman church was seen as legalistic, or pharisaic. The pope, the successor to Peter, the “apostle to the circumcised,” was castigated as the personification of the Judaizing tendency that Paul, as he relates in Galatians, criticized Peter for.
Synagogue and church. Peter and Paul. Or is the tension one that would be better described as that between Thomas Aquinas and Augustine? Whatever the terms of the dialectic, the Church needs both. (Yes, it needs the synagogue, the stem of Jesse, which it’s been grafted onto, but that’s a topic unto itself.)
The Orthodox as well as Protestants criticize Catholicism for being too dry and legalistic? That means it needs to up its dose of Augustinianism? Or maybe what it needs more of is Eastern influence, or Orthodoxy, that other lung of the Church, as John Paul called it.
In my brief exposure to Orthodoxy, I’ve been impressed by the richness of the Christian spirituality on offer there but disappointed by the dearth of systematic theology. I don’t entirely trust my impression, because it conforms so neatly to the stereotype and because the experience it’s based on is so limited. Still.
There’s a certain majesty to Catholic theology. Not that I can claim expertise in it, just a sort of long familiarity with its style. And maybe an affinity for it. I’m reassured by the clarity, the consistency, the orderliness and intellectual rigor that you find even at the level of individual encyclicals, for example. The West has its own charism. So does the East. I love them both. Ut unim sint.
January 11th, 2011 | 6:41 am
The legalist believes that, in this world, all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men. His object is, given that all men are rogues, to find procedures for eliciting justice from their united actions.
Against this “smooth, bland legalism,” Carlyle was right, when he said that “In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his “honour of a soldier,” different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God’s Heaven as a God-made Man that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs.”
January 11th, 2011 | 8:31 am
[...] Solzhenitsyn and his remarks regarding the West. [...]
January 11th, 2011 | 8:36 am
[...] Solzhenitsyn and his remarks regarding the West. [...]
January 11th, 2011 | 10:18 am
Nicholas,
You’re not too far wrong about the Orthodox and systematic theology. There are a few Orthodox books designed to set out our theology systematically, like Fr. Pomazansky’s, but by and large they aren’t popular with the Orthodox because for whatever reason they just don’t care for the genre.
January 11th, 2011 | 10:24 am
They say Solzhenitsyn was a real unlikeable bastard in his personal life. Makes me like him that much more.
January 11th, 2011 | 12:40 pm
“Solzhenitsyn’s picture was one-sided, of course. He knew that America had real virtues, and he was crystal clear about the fact that it was a very good thing to live in America, where, in contrast to the Soviet Union, a basic (and decent) legality obtained. But he was not interested in cheerleading. He was a moralist to the core, and when asked to speak he focused on what he thought was wrong, precisely because he wanted to exhort Americans to correct their course.”
Funny, when left wing types do the same, caugh, they are acussed of hating their country, if not of treason. Heck, I even recall your neoconservative hero (Irving Kristol) complaining about the moralism of left wing critics of Nixon….
January 12th, 2011 | 1:39 pm
“We have very reliable courts and police who accord us our civil right, this line of criticism observes, but we lack social solidarity.”
As opposed to post-Soviet Russia, which has very corrupt courts and police who systematically deny civil rights, but which also lacks social solidarity.
Solzhenitsyn was prone, as I noted the first time around, to make invidious comparisons between the grubby reality of the United States and the shining ideal of some mythical Mother Russia which never did and never could exist.
As far as social cohesion goes, I put the U.S. pretty close to the top of the heap, not excluding some of the more homogeneous and authoritarian Asian states. Particularly when the going gets tough.
January 12th, 2011 | 1:41 pm
“+1 for mentioning Lossky”
Even as Lossky’s exaggerations and distortions of the “mystical theology” of the Orthodox Church are being pointed out by prominent Orthodox theologians such as Metropolitan John (Zizoulis) and Olivier Clement.
January 12th, 2011 | 1:47 pm
“You’re not too far wrong about the Orthodox and systematic theology. There are a few Orthodox books designed to set out our theology systematically, like Fr. Pomazansky’s, but by and large they aren’t popular with the Orthodox because for whatever reason they just don’t care for the genre.”
The reason for this is a very different conception of “theology”. The West treats it as a science or academic discipline, whereas the East considers theology to be contemplation of the mysteries of God. Western theology tends towards the cataphatic–positive assertions of what God is, and all that falls out from that.
Eastern theology is apophatic: God is transcendent in his essence, absolutely unknowable to mere creatures such as ourselves, therefore the only true statements we make are those about that which God is not. It requires a certain dose of intellectual humility to admit this, something Western theology has pretty much lacked since the successors of Thomas Aquinas forgot his emphasis on the via negativa.
At the end of the day, the Christian East still holds to the definition of Evagrius Ponticus: “A theology is one who prays truly, and if you truly pray, then you are a theologian”.
Of course, that would put most theology departments out of work, so I don’t think it is likely to catch on at Catholic universities.
January 12th, 2011 | 1:49 pm
“Funny, when left wing types do the same, caugh, they are acussed of hating their country, if not of treason. Heck, I even recall your neoconservative hero (Irving Kristol) complaining about the moralism of left wing critics of Nixon….”
Perhaps because the ideals to which those moralists pointed were precisely the horrors of the Soviet Union and North Vietnam that Solzhenitsyn himself denounced so eloquently? It’s not moralism to say X is bad, and then to favor Y, which is morally even more repugnant. It’s just cynical.
January 13th, 2011 | 12:58 pm
Solzhenitsyn was the pre-eminent thinker on moral issues of the 20th century.
In my estimation, he contributed more to true humanitarian thought than anyone else.
His unbelievably acute intellect combined with his personal experiences with the century’s totalitarian movements…….resulted in a literary contribution that is unrivaled.
He once said……”the salvation of the world lies in all men being concerned for all others.”
That sounds familiar.
And if you want to read something that will leave you in awe?
Read the chapter “the Ascent” from Gulag Archipelago vol. 2……….and you will ascend to the top of modern western literature.
Kudos to Reno for highlighting an eminently worthwhile writer.
January 13th, 2011 | 1:07 pm
PS……..”the letter of the law is death…but the spirit brings life.”
I think that’s what he meant.
January 14th, 2011 | 6:59 am
Stuart:
You may disagree with left wing criticisms of US society. What I see as a double standard is that you suspect the motifs of left wingers for cirticisim American society (and call it “treason”), and then come here and defend the ones made by conservatives.
And certainly it is not moralism to defend X as good (when, as the Vietnam war, it IS bad) on the premise that Y (comunism) is bad too. That is, at best, sloppy reasoning or pure hipocresy. Lets not talk about the Kristol-Nixon example I gave…
January 14th, 2011 | 10:19 am
Sergio…..not to intrude on your discussion with Stuart…but this may be helpful.
Solzhenitsyn, while not a militarist, was decidely NOT a pacifist. That is an aspect of his philosophy that is rarely discussed or understood in the West. AIS firmly believed in a righteous use of force to combat totalitarianism. And that is the spirit of his Harvard comments. He saw the Vietnam War as a battle against Communism, and would have been unpopular with the Leftists of the West for that perception.
January 17th, 2011 | 12:52 am
Thanks Rusty for helping us remember Solzhenitsyn and his importance. When I heard of his death, I wrote a tombeau for Solzhenitsyn (there’s no music but word “obituary” just doesn’t seem to fit it) to be part of the First Things blog. For one reason or another, Jody wasn’t able to post it. At the time I found the reactions to the man’s life tepid. Readers here might disagree but they might find interesting the clipping from the New York Times (Friday, June 9, 1978) and the picture of the writer next to a smiling Derek Bok that’s part of the piece. You can see it at http://www.refinersfire.us/page5/page5.html in an essay called “In Memory.” I think the picture was taken before the speech.
January 17th, 2011 | 7:58 pm
Great link……Mark.
Does justice to the real Alexander the Great.
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