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Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Courage to be Christian

March 21, 2013 By 2 Comments
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

In these dark days in which the power of secular fundamentalism appears to be on the rise and in which religious freedom seems to be imperiled, it is easy for Christians to become despondent. The clouds of radical relativism seem to obscure the light of objective truth and it can be difficult to discern any silver lining to help us illumine the future with hope.

In such gloomy times the example of the martyrs can be encouraging. Those who laid down their lives for Christ and His Church in worse times than ours are beacons of light, dispelling the darkness with their baptism of blood. “Upon such sacrifices,” King Lear tells his soon to be martyred daughter Cordelia, “The gods themselves throw incense.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Christianity, Joseph Pearce March 21, 2013

Christopher Dawson and the History We Are Not Told

February 16, 2013 By 1 Comment
christopher dawson

Christopher Dawson

by Jeffrey Hart

A people that no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The temples of the gods are the most enduring works of man. -Christopher Dawson

The first impression one has upon opening a book by Christopher Dawson is of what can be called the romance of learning, a romance experienced as an independent aesthetic category apart from the substance of that learning. We experience here the aesthetic appeal of sheer erudition, the sort of excitement that pervades Montaigne’s Essays, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Browne’s Religio Medici, and many passages in Paradise Lost. It is the special aesthetic appeal of Old Books, an appeal that Walter Pater and T. S. Eliot knew well how to exploit. 

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Catholicism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, History, Jeffrey Hart, Modern Age February 16, 2013

Solzhenitsyn’s Prophetic Voice: Biographer Joseph Pearce Discusses Critic of Communism

February 4, 2013 By 4 Comments

by Annamarie Adkins & Joseph Pearce

SolzhenitsynAfter the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people predicted that global affairs had reached “the end of history” and that democratic capitalism had definitively triumphed.

Now, as the West teeters on the verge of economic crisis and suffers from the increasing statist imposition of illiberal dogmas, the prophetic voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn — one of the 20th century’s greatest writers who saw the same errors at the heart of both the capitalist and communist systems — seems more timely than ever.

According to Solzhenitsyn biographer Joseph Pearce, the heroic Russian dissident knew that the materialism that shaped the culture of both capitalist and communist societies was ultimately inhuman because of its denial of spiritual values and because it led to serious environmental degradation. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Capitalism, Communism, Joseph Pearce February 4, 2013

Remembering an Eastern Orthodox Prophet: Nicholas Berdyaev

January 16, 2013 By 12 Comments
Nicholas Berdyaev

Nicholas Berdyaev

by Bradley J. Birzer

One kind of weird but enticing academic puzzle for me is discovering and delving into the works of interesting figures of the 20th century who have been largely forgotten. And, by “interesting figures,” I mean especially those who espoused types of religious humanism and their allies.TIC mastermind Winston Elliott feels the same way, and one of the purposes of founding TIC was to bring the memory of these humanists back to the public and honor each as a vital ancestor to our own broad cause in the twenty-first century.

Everyone remembers, for example, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and, more recently, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Even if one hasn’t read any of their respective works, their names circulate with familiarity even in the darker corners of American civilization. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christopher Dawson, Nicholas Berdyaev January 16, 2013

Men Have Forgotten God: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

December 1, 2012 By 2 Comments
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

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. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Culture, History, John Barnes, Orthodoxy, Religion, Russia December 1, 2012

Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk, and the Moral Imagination

March 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

by Edward E. Ericson, Jr.

In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming my way along, I relived many episodes, including ones that I had quite forgotten. Also, I came upon old essays and reviews by various hands. One said in part, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn primarily is a man of moral imagination.” The author was none other than Russell Amos Kirk, and the citation came from his review of my 1980 book Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision.

As I reread that review, I was happily put in mind once again of the important influence that Russell Kirk had exerted upon me. To be sure, influence does not yield xerox-copy duplication. Kirk’s Gothic imagination, with its ghosts and gargoyles, has no deep hold on my affections. Nor has this Chicago native fallen under the sway of what I shall call his rural romanticism. But I did at that moment begin trying to articulate for myself the nature of my indebtedness to Kirk. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Edward E. Ericson, Ideology, Modern Age, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk March 30, 2012

Silence in the face of Evil

February 17, 2012 By 3 Comments

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

―Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Quotes February 17, 2012

Beauty Will Save the World-A recommendation

June 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

beauty

by Winston Elliott III

An excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture found in Beauty Will Save the World  (by Gregory Wolfe):

Dostoevsky once enigmatically let drop the phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes; but whom has it saved?  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Books, Gregory Wolfe, Winston Elliott III June 2, 2011

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the Spiritual Life of a Nation

March 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse …by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.

For books on or by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Quotes March 6, 2011

Two Years After the Death of Solzhenitsyn

August 11, 2010 By 7 Comments

by Brad Birzer

Death of Solzhenitsyn“Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels? Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year. And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners’ barges moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar. They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in somewhere, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The complaints of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to with an inch of their lives. We have reviewed and considered all the methods of delivering prisoners, and we have found that they are all. . . worse. We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any that were good. And even the last human hope that there is something better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope. In camp it will be . . . worse.”—End of Volume 1 of the Gulag.

A week ago today we passed the second anniversary of the death of the Russian prophet, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the truly great men of our day. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bradley J. Birzer, Communism, Conservatism, Foreign Affairs, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan August 11, 2010