Further thoughts on Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

I previously posted stuff here Tom Faranda's Folly: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and here Tom Faranda's Folly: More on Solzhenitsyn

Go here for additional reflections -

Solzhenitsyn and His Critics – The Acton Institute

Solzhenitsyn’s critique of modern societies went much deeper than ideology. He drew from a Christian moral tradition, not a political platform. He yearned for a “moral doctrine of the value of the individual as the key to the solution of the social problems.”

The solution for Russia, he wrote in 1974, lay in its willingness to take on a “deliberate, voluntary sacrifice,” not in the name of a collective society but by each and every person, uniquely made in the image of God.

A society so vicious and polluted, implicated in so many of the crimes of these last fifty years — by its lies, by its servility either willingly or enforced, by its eagerness to assist or its cowardly restraint — such a society can only be cured and purified by passing through a spiritual filter. And this filter is a terrible one, with holes as fine as the eye of a needle, each big enough for only one person.

Solzhenitsyn understood this as a national spiritual renewal — even spiritual battle. This, he believed, was how a sick society gained the path to moral soundness. Material well-being, intellectual accomplishments, technological breakthroughs, captivating new ideologies would not cure the sickness.

And here –

Of Good and Evil – WSJ.com

For the rest of his life, Solzhenitsyn engaged in what he called "a struggle with falsehood," caring not a whit what his critics thought. His 1978 Harvard commencement speech solidified his reputation as a prickly recluse. But his diagnosis of threats to the West — not least those from within — remains bracing.

Solzhenitsyn warned of "an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses," and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil . . . evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature." His own prison-camp experience after World War II told him evil was all too real and had to be confronted.