“Men Have Forgotten God” –
The Templeon Address Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on
the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books,
collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight
volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that
upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the
main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our
people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten
God; that's why all this has happened.
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only
be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has
since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of
universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the
principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be
unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men
have forgotten God.
The
failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a
determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these
was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it.
It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with
health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but
sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible
explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to
their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment
could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so
obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
The
same kind of defect, the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension,
was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the satanic
temptation of the "nuclear umbrella." It was equivalent to saying:
Let's cast off worries, let's free the younger generation from their duties and
obligations, let's make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of
defending others-let's stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East, and
let us live instead in the pursuit of happiness. If danger should threaten us,
we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb; if not, then let the world burn in
Hell for all we care. The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary
West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error: the belief that the
defense of peace depends not on stout hearts and steadfast men, but solely on
the nuclear bomb...
Today'
s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding
centuries, would have called forth the cry: "This is the Apocalypse!"
Yet
we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Dostoevsky
warned that "great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually
unprepared." This is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that
"the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of
evil." Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this
will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and
combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already
come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all
five continents of the earth...
In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal
was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia
was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church
of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how tosafeguard its
people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two
centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords
of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country
became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people,
the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking,
the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying
force of the nation.
But
in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal
schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter's forcibly imposed
transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the
expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided
Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle
poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and
opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually
disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health
was threatened.
