By DONALD DeMARCO
Without the truth we are in the dark, not knowing how to think, judge, act, or live. Please tell us the truth. Please dispel the darkness. Readers of The Wanderer will understand my plea without my needing to divulge names. We do, as Marshall McLuhan explained to us, live in a global village. Distance has been obliterated. Light is needed more than ever before.
In contrast to the truth problem that now plagues virtually all the Catholics the world over, I want to use this space allotted to me to say something positive, something about a man whose essential mission in life, despite extraordinary obstacles that were put in his path, was courageous enough to announce the truth. I am referring to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn whose centennial we celebrate this year on December 11.
In 1918, shortly after the pregnancy of Solzhenitsyn’s mother was confirmed, his father was killed in a hunting accident. Taisaya, who never remarried, encouraged her son’s literary and scientific gifts and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith. The widowed mother passed away in 1944. Solzhenitsyn grew up in a political environment in which one did not dare write or speak the truth.
Nonetheless, for this great writer, the truth won out. In his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech, he stated that “during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known.”
The most memorable phrase he uttered at this time was: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
Eight years later, after escaping a totalitarian regime, he gave the commencement speech at Harvard University. He was careful to preface his 1978 remarks by reminding the 20,000 attendees that Harvard’s motto is Veritas.
“Truth is seldom sweet,” he remarked; “it is invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.”
His listeners did not exactly reciprocate his offer of friendship. Many booed when they heard him say that “a decline in courage may be the most striking feature in the West in our day. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.”
There was no love lost when he criticized the spiritual vapidity of the pop culture and its materialistic society. “The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits . . . by TV stupor and by intolerable music.”
Solzhenitsyn, this courageous and celebrated writer, found himself in the pincers between a totalitarian regime which suppresses truth and a liberal society that rejects it. Appropriately, he titled his memoir, The Grain Between Two Millstones. The Christian implication in the title is evident.
Truth is a paradox. Although we were made for truth, and truth provides us with an indispensable light, we often hide from it, reject it, distrust it, and replace it with lies.
“Men are most anxious to find truth,” wrote the esteemed philosopher/historian Etienne Gilson, “but very reluctant to accept it. We do not like to be cornered by rational evidence…even though truth is there in its commanding objectivity….Finding the truth is not so hard; what is hard is not to run away from it once we have found it.”
In an address Solzhenitsyn gave in 1975 to the AFL-CIO in Washington, he pointed out that the system created by Bolsheviks in 1917 caused calamitous problems in the Soviet Union. He described how this system “in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing six million people to die in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.”
Reinforcing the point, he alluded to how interest in truth was not strong enough to motivate people to come to the rescue of these starving citizens. These people “died on the very edge of Europe. And Europe didn’t even notice it. The world didn’t even notice it — six million people!”
Gilson’s phrase, “commanding objectivity,” is noteworthy. “Truth is incontrovertible,” declared Winston Churchill. In the face of the Nazi menace, he did not cower and say, “Who am I to judge?”
“Panic may resent it,” he went on to say, “ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.” Solzhenitsyn avoided panic, shunned ignorance, and deplored malice. He raised the banner of truth far above these paralyzing and cynical attitudes. And this is why, 100 years after his birth, his words are regarded as a beacon of light.
Truth requires a host of virtues, not the least of which are courage and humility, qualities that are not often possessed by the same individual. We need courage, because truth can be unpopular, difficult, and run contrary to the party line. We need humility to acknowledge that the truth is sourced in something other than myself, and ultimately in God. “The simple step of a courageous individual,” Solzhenitsyn tells us, “is not to partake of the lie.”
No doubt the Christian religion by which his mother raised him had a salutary and lasting effect. “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people,” he states, “I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
The simple truth is that God, and not man, is Truth. It is inevitable that the apotheosis of man leads to the dethronement of God. We can thank Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his courageous stand on behalf of truth on the 100th anniversary of his birth and long thereafter.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University. His latest book, Apostles of the Culture of Life, is available through amazon.com.)
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