Morality. Dare we write the word and offer it to our secular culture? It usually brings cries of dogmatism, fanaticism, zealotry. We have two recent examples: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and John Gardner.
Solzhenitsyn has been writing of morality for some time. His view of the artist is that of poet-priest, of bearer of moral truth to a world morally bankrupt, a novelist in the tradition of Tolstoy. So long as Solzhenitsyn told the truth about the Soviet Union we cheered. But when he had the audacity last month at Harvard University to claim that Western society, too, was morally impoverished, many of us jeered.
The Nobel Prize winner, admitting that he was an outside observer, in his commencement address “A World Split Apart,” questioned our materialism, our manipulation of the law, our decadent art, and our lack of political courage. (For those who would like to read the complete text, see the July 7 issue of National Review in your local library.)
Solzhenitsyn questioned these things from a Christian perspective, which was the most disturbing aspect of all to secular journalists and commentators. I do not agree with his answer—a return to some sort of benevolent, righteous one-person rule. Democracy has in it the possibility to right its wrongs. Only a government by the people can keep in check the sins of the people. Yet, I cannot fault his analysis. In fact, at some points he sounded like Jesus in his arguments with the rulers of his day. Or Amos.
“People in the West,” said Solzhenitsyn, “have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law.… Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law.… 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.… 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.… Wherever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.”
Jesus told the Pharisees that they were tombs filled with dead men’s bones because they, too, manipulated the law. Amos told the Israelites, “I hate, I despise your feast days.… Though ye offer me burnt offerings and meat offerings, I will not accept them.… But let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:21–22, 24). The letter and not the spirit of the law suffices in our society. That is not to say that you should do away with the letter to correct this problem. It is to say that you must fulfill both aspects of the legal system: the law itself, and that which underlies it. If you disregard one or the other you disregard both.
We don’t like to hear that we are a corrupt, doomed society. We can criticize ourselves but we don’t want outsiders to do so. That may be another reason why people have reacted so vehemently to what Solzhenitsyn said. Yet he spoke as a friend, a resident-in-exile. He stated clearly that were he in the East he would speak of the “calamities” of the East and he did so when he still lived there at great cost to himself. Not surprisingly he found himself a “prophet not without honor, save in his own country.” Because he is here, he chose to deal with our calamities: “There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art.…” Has he said anything other than what such Christian thinkers as Francis Schaeffer or Malcolm Muggeridge have been saying? Or what John Gardner says in his new book On Moral Fiction (Basic Books, 1978)?
Gardner, a prize-winning novelist, though not with the international reputation of Solzhenitsyn, has also spoken the word morality to our society. The reviewers jeered him, too. He writes that our society is without a moral foundation and that we can see this illustrated most vividly in our fiction. As with Solzhenitsyn, people have accused him of attacking our society with a cleaver rather than a stiletto (though at least no one has claimed that he has no right to do so). Gardner’s and Solzhenitsyn’s approach admittedly is heavy-handed and single-minded; a prophet with a vision can be as irritating as sand in the eyes. But since when have true prophets been comfortable? Prophets want their listeners to heed what they have to say to them. At times you must throw some sand to do that.
Gardner thinks that an artist to be an artist must work from a moral perspective, must uphold certain absolute moral truths, and must try to move men to behave rightly. Although Gardner might consider Solzhenitsyn a propagandist (it’s hard to understand the distinction he makes between moral art and propaganda), that is also Solzhenitsyn’s position. In the recently published Gulag Archipelago Three (Harper & Row, 1978), he writes: “For them, for today’s zeks [prisoners] my book is no book, my truth is no truth, unless there is a continuation, unless I go on to speak of them, too. Truth must be told—and things must change! If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen, what is the good of them. Are they anything more than the barking of village dogs at night?” (p. 478).
There the similarity ends. Although Gardner says that we need to uphold absolute moral truth, he does not know where the foundation for such truth is to be found. Solzhenitsyn says it is found in the Christian faith. He is right.
The Soviet novelist found it the hard way, through the prison system in the U.S.S.R. Because of that experience, gruelingly and lovingly told in the three volumes of Gulag and in his other books, he has won the right to speak on the spiritual state of Western society. We should listen. It is a proof of the validity of his charges that we have rejected his moral indictment. The worst corruption of all is the corruption that refuses to recognize itself. In such decadence there is no cure. In Christian terms, the honest recognition of sin is the first step toward repentance and salvation.
In the final installment of Solzhenitsyn’s “experiment in literary investigation,” he tells the stories of escape attempts and hunger strikes, of resistance to the archipelago, the prisons scattered across the Soviet Union like islands in a sea. He explains in his foreword that these are lighter words than the dark words of the first two volumes. Yet, it follows on the theme of the last part of the second volume, “The Soul and Barbed Wire,” where he blesses prison life for his conversion. He writes in volume three that “dismayed by the hopeless length of my sentence, stunned by my first acquaintance with the world of Gulag, I could never have believed at the beginning of my time there that my spirit would recover by degrees from its dejections” (p. 37).
When Solzhenitsyn told the 1978 graduating class of Harvard that the Soviet people were spiritually stronger than people in the West he was talking about the men and women he knew in prison and in exile. Such as the religious poet Anatoly Vasilyevich Silin, who in prison mentally wrote and memorized poetry. Or the Baptists he met who were imprisoned for their faith. Or those who staged the long hunger strike at Kengir prison. Or the men who spent all their time planning and attempting escapes.
These people struggled even though they knew that their struggles were doomed to fail. Their stories are moving but ultimately more depressing than the bleakness of the first two volumes. Nothing changes. Perhaps the prisoners had it better for a short while at Kengir, or for a few days some men managed to elude the police, but eventually the guards and the dogs and the barbed wire regain the power. Volume three ends; the archipelago remains.
This work should not be underestimated; as difficult as it is to read, and it must be read, Gulag is a massive achievement. It is more impressive when we learn that at no time during its writing was the author able to have the numerous parts of the narrative before him.
Christians know that when persecution comes and a person’s faith is tried he becomes stronger spiritually. Can we in the West confidently say that we could survive what the Soviet people have survived? Can Western Christians say, without doubt, that we could overcome the harsh persecution of the Soviet Union—or of Uganda, or of North Korea, or of many other places in the world today?
Morality. Dare we write the word? Dare we not?—C.F.
