By James M. Kushiner -
In his Templeton Address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”
How did Solzhenitsyn come to agree? He looked back:
“Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 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 60 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.’”
This amnesia was widespread:
“What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘Men have forgotten God.’”
He describes the state of forgetting: “The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.” That is, the human mind, deprived of God-consciousness, bends toward evil.
Is forgetting something that just happens? We may forget by means of distraction, preoccupation, or trauma. But we may also forget by studied avoidance, neglect, or deliberate suppression—all the while imagining that we no longer need what we are leaving behind.
But, Solzhenitsyn noted:
“Dostoevsky warned that ‘great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.’ This is precisely what has happened.”
“By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.”
The educated forgot God; the uneducated would get the needed help from the new atheistic state:
“Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.”
“To achieve its diabolical ends. Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood.” “Control” and “devoid” are key words: destroy or neutralize men’s memories and traditions and rule over them.
Like Orwell’s 1984, “The Obsolete Man” shows what a diabolical state can do, bent on severing Man from his memory. Today, Man’s fall, God’s interventions, and Christ the Savior are being closeted in the West.
We can call such a state diabolical, as Solzhenitsyn suggests, and note the prediction of Dostoevsky that he cited: “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” Solzhenitsyn:
“Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth.”
Indeed. For not only does Man seem bent on forgotten God, but also in the name of freedom, they have foolishly loosed the devil, the wolf, the “Howling Man.”
Confident, Proud, Independent, Secular Man has supposed that locking up God instead of the Tempter will give us more freedom, more choice! He has chosen Barabbas and handed over Christ, to death, burial, to be forgotten.
But God has not forgotten Man, triumphing through the Cross and raising Christ from the dead. All things he promised will come to pass. He will not forget, nor should we dare, even for a moment.
