Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Templeton Prize on May 10, 1983 when he was 64
years old. “The Templeton Prize honors a living person who has made an
exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether
through insight, discovery, or practical works.” It was on the occasion of this award, that
Solzhenitsyn gave the speech "Men have forgotten God". Here’s the
amazing speech below.
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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.
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.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew
from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that
"revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely
true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized,
militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within
the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their
psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than
all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely
incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the
central pivot.
The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed
an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy.
Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been
elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed
through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious
circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of
priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of
God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate
tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age
without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their
deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens
of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden
to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from
their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the
faith by threats and lies...
For a short period of time, when he needed
to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a
friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later
years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window
dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West.
Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be
judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he
undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev
simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying
religion.
But there is something they did not
expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant
atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy
is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of
the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda
directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for
their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray
at Easter are clapped in punishment cells--they could not suppose that beneath
this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It
is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually
devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of
believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but,
as is always the ca se in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of
God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.
It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for
no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter
what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish
Christianity.
The West has yet to experience a Communist
invasion; religion here remains free. But the West's own historical evolution
has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious
consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and
rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle
Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of
strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous
than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual
erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more
lofty than the "pursuit of happiness, "a goal that has even been
solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been
ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been
replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has
become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human
heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to
make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide
of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is
ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and
more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger
generation to atheism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout
the United States, reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world,
or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what
further evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are
completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain
oneself from ignoble acts?
Or why should one refrain from burning
hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact
corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a
younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation
we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human
nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we
forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all
moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot
in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under
that system does indeed attain "equality"--the equality of destitute
slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of
today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher
the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically,
does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates
by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion
of material goods nor in merely making money.
This deliberately nurtured hatred then
spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds,
and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is
perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In
the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon,
but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and
pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine
plan, tries to put himsef in the place of God.
Here again we witness the single outcome
of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once
again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
With such global events looming over us
like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and
inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides
in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or
evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable
key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their
bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. The free people of the West could
reasonably have been expected to realize that they are beset · by numerous
freely nurtured falsehoods, and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so
easily. All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today's world are
fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator
of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.
The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the
task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force,
not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and
within every society. This is especially true of a free and highly developed
society, for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon
ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily unthinking
selfishness, are pulling tight that noose...
Our life consists not in the pursuit of
material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire
earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something
higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one
rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it
direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the
indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out,
participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of
existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our
entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must
grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two
centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink
of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for
the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned.
Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate
twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is
nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the
thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a
whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the
human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will
be ours alone.
(World copyright ©1983 by
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn; translator: A. Klimoff; reprinted by kind permission
of the author.)
