WE HAVE CEASED TO SEE THE PURPOSE, is the title of ten of the essential speeches of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, edited by his son Ignat Solzhenitsyn which has just been published by the University of Notre Dame Press. His Nobel Lecture in 1972 focuses on the necessity of art and literature to promote truth, beauty and goodness in the midst of a twentieth century dominated by the spirit of Munich: “a timorous civilized world, faced with the onslaught of a suddenly revived and snarling barbarism, has found nothing with which to oppose it but concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a malady of the will of affluent people; it is the chronic condition of those who have abandoned themselves to the pursuit of prosperity at any price, who’ve succumbed to a belief in material well-being as the principal goal of life on earth. Such people – and there are many in today’s world – choose passivity and retreat, just so long as their accustomed life may be able to last a little longer, just so long as the transition to hardship might be put off for another day.” Writers and artists should try to defeat the lie and expose the repulsive nakedness of violence.

When BBC Radio invited him to speak in 1976 he turned his eye on the West which he saw as blind to the world situation and lacking courage and reason. Socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives. Present day Europe is nourished on the world view that there is no higher power above Man who is the center of the universe and its crowning glory whose welfare is the priority of government. Its leading thinkers and free press denied and concealed the oppressive realities of Communism. The Soviet judges at the Nuremburg trials were every bit the murderers that the Nazi defendants were. He describes the fallacy of socialism as seeming to equalize people in material matters which requires compulsion to level out the basic elements of personality. It hypnotizes modern society and prevents it from seeing the mortal danger it is in. Contemporary British society is living on self-deceptive illusions in both the world of politics and the world of ideas. We must make room for the Spirit which alone distinguishes us from the animal world.

In a speech at Stanford in 1976 he addressed the concept of freedom. He held the view that the life aim for each of us isn’t a boundless enjoyment of material goods, but, rather, a departure from this Earth as better persons than we arrived, a spiritual improvement. Freedom today has been shallowed to trivial things: commercialization, misinformation, advertising, filthy magazines and movies, amusement, deception, short-term solutions, popularity, clemency for terrorists, legally irreproachable but morally debased. Genuine human freedom is a God-given inner freedom with moral responsibility, self-limitation and honor.

When he spoke at the Harvard Commencement in 1978 he began with observations about the loss of civic courage in the United Nations and the ruling and intellectual elites as seen in the press which caters to what is fashionable and follows the herd. The cult of earthly well-being results in concessions, surrender and retreat when faced with conflict and the loss of the will to defend itself. The root cause is the Enlightenment idea of man as the center of existence. The humanistic way of thinking did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor any task higher than the quest for earthly happiness. There is a final emancipation from the moral heritage of Christian centuries. Man’s sense of accountability to God and society has grown utterly faint. Is man truly above everything, and is there no Supreme Spirit above him? It must no be that the assessment of a president’s performance is reduced to the question of how much money one makes, or to the price of gasoline.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn  gave a lecture on receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983. He repeated the proverb on the disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all these things have happened”. Militant atheism sought to destroy Christianity in Russia and secularism is doing the same in the West. He criticized his predecessor, Billy Graham, in the receipt of the prize the previous year for saying after a trip to Moscow that he hadn’t noticed the persecution of religion in the USSR. “Material laws alone neither explain our life nor give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology [his university degree was in physics and math which he taught in schools] will never reveal the indubitable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each one of us, unfailingly fortifying us with the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die.”

After reading all these speeches I come away with the sense that the truths he celebrated are as applicable today as they were when he gave them. We are called to a higher purpose than material comfort. We must realize the evil that men can do if they are unchecked by divine accountability, moral responsibility, self-limitation, courage, honesty, and honor. Technological progress will not save humanity. Power corrupts. “Liberty and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts: liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty.” He raises the questions: what are we living for, what is the meaning of life? We have ceased to see the purpose. Timeless truths that need answers.