Return to God

Solzhenitsyn speaks out

"The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction," the stern speaker warned his hushed audience. "We can only reach with determination for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away . .. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide."

The man at the lectern in London's Guildhall last week was Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received this year's $170,000 Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion. The award, inaugurated in 1972 by U.S. Mutual Fund Wizard John M. Templeton, cited the Nobel-prizewinning Soviet exile as a "pioneer in the renaissance of religion in atheist nations" and a "living symbol of the continuing vitality of the Orthodox tradition of spirituality."

Solzhenitsyn's address was an extension of his last major public statement, the 1978 commencement speech at Harvard University, in which he assailed the West for its materialism, spiritual vapidity and timidity in the face of Communism. Last week the author said that Western secularism has been gaining force since the late Middle Ages and that this "gradual sapping of strength from within" is perhaps a more dangerous threat to faith than violent attack from outside, as under Communist rule.

In the sweep of Solzhenitsyn's apocalyptic warnings, there was one note of optimism: "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."

Although he did not mention him by name, Solzhenitsyn sharply attacked Protestant Evangelist Billy Graham, last year's Templeton prizewinner, for "his deplorable statement that he had not noticed the persecution of religion in the U.S.S.R." during a visit last year. Solzhenitsyn also accused the World Council of Churches for seeming "to care more for the success of revolutionary movements in the Third World" than for denouncing religious persecution in the U.S.S.R.

At a subsequent meeting with several journalists, Solzhenitsyn offered the most detailed account he has yet given of his own religious pilgrimage. His first memory is of being hoisted above the heads of adults during an Orthodox service so that he could see what was happening: "Through a crowded church passed a number of men from the Cheka, the early form of security services, in their high, triangular caps, of course without taking their hats off as is the custom in any church. They tramped through all the way to the altar and began grabbing all the sacred vessels.

"As a youth, I was harassed and persecuted for my belief in God," said Solzhenitsyn, who resisted atheist indoctrination until age 15. In later years, "I considered myself as a Marxist, but deep inside me the attachment to the church, to the faith that I had always had as a child, lived on."

After military service in World War II, the author was arrested for writing letters criticizing Stalin and sentenced to hard labor in the Gulag. "I was eight years in camp and that, of course, induced a lot of thought. I met a great many Orthodox and had a lot of discussions with them. After that, I was mortally ill in camp, and, faced with that mortal illness, I found anew my faith."

Shortly after the 1962 release of his first work, the prison-camp novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn composed a prayer-poem, which became part of the body of work honored by the Templeton Foundation. Solzhenitsyn recalled last week, "I was being subjected to increasing pressure and harassment. At this time I experienced a feeling that I had support--supernatural support. I wrote [the prayer] in the consciousness of the various outcomes that could be called my fate: maybe this is the last moment. Maybe this is it." But it was only the beginning. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.