MM#243--That's Why All This Happened

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, i am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. As is our new custom, let's go first to our first pull quote. Over a half a century ago, while I was still a child, i recall hearing a number of older people offering 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. Men have forgotten God And that's why all this has happened. And those were the words of Alexander as the AVH Sotsunitsyn, as he accepted the Templeton Prize, which was awarded to people working in the field of religion in 1983. Mother Teresa was its first winner in 1973. Sotsunitsyn, as you might remember, was a Soviet dissident and outspoken critic of communism at the height of the communist movement during the late Cold War. He is best known as a brilliant novelist. He was born into a family of devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church that was against the 1920s strong movement of anti-religion. However, as Alexander grew up, he lost his faith in Christianity. He became an atheist and embraced Marxism-Leninism. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, he wrote a private letter to a friend where he critiqued and criticized the Soviet leader at the time, joseph Stalin. He was quickly arrested by the secret police, sentenced to eight years in the gulag and then internal exile. During his imprisonment in what was later known as the Gulag system, he gradually began to believe again in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. His best book that he had written was the Gulag Archipelago, which was written in 1973. Let's go back to this speech. What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can be only 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-mulation 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. Extremely powerful words. I would urge you to read this transcript. I will put a link in the show notes to the full transcript. Let's go back for some more. But there is something they did not expect that in a land where churches had been leveled, where a triumphant atheism had rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy are utterly humiliated, 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 those camps themselves, those who gathered 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 millions of millions of believers. It is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out. But as is always the case 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 formidable communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity. Despite the brutality of Lenin in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, despite Stalin, despite Khrushchev, christianity remained beneath the surface of the Russian people. And then comes Alexander's prophetic warning to us Americans in the West. The West has yet to experience a communist invasion. Religion remains free, but the West 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 emity, to say nothing of the tide of secularism which, 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, and this speech was given in 1983 in London, england. Solzhenitsyn had given similar speeches after being exiled from his home country in 1974. He gave a commencement address at Harvard in 1978. Yes, of all places, harvard. I'm not sure they knew what he was going to talk about there by inviting him, but in fact, the great law professor Robert George at Princeton now was in the audience at Harvard at that commencement in 1978. He wrote in First Things Magazine of this speech, reflecting back upon it in a 2018 article. He says this When people forget God, when they come to suppose that they don't need him, they don't need his grace or his guidance, when they fall into that hyperistic air of imagining that they are too smart and sophisticated to believe in him, a catastrophe always ensues. This was no novel insight or discovery of Solzhenitsyn's. It is, in fact, the central teaching and theme of the prophets, all the prophets, and not just the biblical ones. The whole 20th century could be a century where most of the world forgot about God. And how are we doing in the 21st century? George wrote somewhere else, and here is our nugget of wisdom, or nuggets of wisdom for today. He wrote this Our own worst selves are our unvirtuous selves. Our own worst selves are ourselves when we lack the self-mastery that possession of the virtues, including the virtue of courage, makes possible. Our own worst selves are slaves, not to alien masters, but to our own weaknesses and wayward desires. Our own worst selves are what we are encouraged by so much of our culture today to be. When we are our own worst selves, what we seek are ephemeral and ultimately meaningless things, such as pleasure, status, social acceptability, wealth, power and celebrity, things that are not bad in themselves, since they can be used for good ends, but things that are not good in themselves either, and they can lure us into supposing that and acting as if they were. When we are our own worst selves, we fall, fail. Rather, we fail in our duty to bear faithful witness, because the desire for ephemeral things in a fear of losing them paralyzes us When we are our own worst selves. we lead lives that are marked by those vices against which sultans need to ralde railed 40 years ago Materialism, consumerism, self-indulgence, narcissism. We place the focus on doing as we please, no matter what we please, getting what we want, no matter what it is we happen to want, instead of seeking what is true because it's true, what is good because it's good and what is right because it's right. We seek what we desire for no better reason than are happening to desire it. Indeed, we fall into the profound moral and philosophical error of imagining that the human good consists in the satisfaction of human desires. We have talked about the war of virtue in the last couple weeks, and now we end this series of laments with a powerful reminder of what happens when we forget God, when we forget virtue, when we engage in the war on virtue, when we become our worst selves. We can no longer point towards someone or something else. We have to point to ourselves. The self-hatred is everywhere around us now. So, in today's mojo minute, let us read Alexander Solzhenitsyn, so we don't forget about God. He lived through a terrible time in his country that shoved God aside. He saw the worst of humanity. Let us accept his nugget of wisdom as just that wisdom, something in somebody we can learn from. And let us also absorb those powerful words from Robert George, as he wrote Seek what is good because it's rather, seek what is true because it's true. Seek what is good because it's good and what is right because it's right. Next week, we will study the great philosophers of Augustine and Aquinas. Let us be open to their teachings, because if we fail to read them, to study them and to learn from them, alexander Solzhenitsyn will have given us a warning, his warning in 1983, of what he lived through that men have forgotten God And that's why all this happened.