Solzhenitsyn's Fire

NEEDING A SPIRITUAL BLAZE –

“The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one.

But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs... as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. … a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their reserves of mercy and sacrifice…
All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty.
… “If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

It will demand a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled on, as in the modern era.
This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but – upward.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Harvard Address 8 June 1978]