Schall on Solzhenitsyn

Fr. Schall speaks:

The virtue that I most associate with Solzhenitsyn is "courage"—not military courage but intellectual courage, the courage to tell the truth when the regime, any regime, is built on a lie. The soldier is courageous in war. The prophet is courageous in peace, or at least the relative peace of the totalitarian state in which war is mostly directed not against enemies, but only against its own citizens. We think an internal war like this cannot happen in democratic societies. We are not cautious. Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address at Harvard in 1978 to assure us that such a war can and is happening in our very souls... "...it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not thorough states, not between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts." This, of course, is the teaching of Scripture. I remember that when I first came across that passage I took it to class and read it aloud. I could no help it. The passage continues: "This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains...an un-uprooted small corner of evil." Aristotle would have no trouble with this. The doctrine of original sin is here, as is the presence of hope in the hearts of men if they would but just greet it... A poignant passage in the Gulag Archipelago recalls the moment when Solzhenitsyn realizes that he is free of the tyrants and the ideology precisely because everything is taken away from him. When nothing else can be done, the powers of the state no longer can reach him through fear or pain. Hobbes, as the spokesman of modernity, had said that men's ideas could be controlled through fear of violent death. In prison, Solzhenitsyn learned, with Socrates, that something worse than death is found even in this world. Given a choice between death and doing evil, Socrates said, we do not know that death is evil. Solzhenitsyn realized this truth also... Solzhenitsyn began a 1974 address entitled "Repentance and Self-limitation in the Life of Nations," a theme we find in John Paul II's Memory and Identity, with these memorable words: "The Blessed Augustine once wrote: 'What is the state without justice but a band of robbers?' Even now, fifteen centuries later, many people will, I think, readily recognize the force and accuracy of this judgment...

Read the whole thing. Then go and read Solzhenitsyn, or Joseph Pearce on Solzhenitsyn.