Men Have Forgotten God – Alexander

Solzhenitsyn
by Chris Banescu

source: http://orthodoxnet.com/blog/2011/07/men-have-forgotten-god-alexander-solzhenitsyn/

As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my

beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a
secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and
promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and
increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our
nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-
called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased
from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of
delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.
It is no coincidence that as Marxist ideologies and secularist principles engulf
the culture and pervert mainstream thinking, individual freedoms and liberties
are rapidly disappearing. As a consequence, Americans feel increasingly more
powerless and subjugated by some of the most radical and hypocritical, least
democratic, and characterless individuals our society has ever produced.
Those of us who have experienced and witnesses first-hand the atrocities and
terror of communism understand fully why such evil takes root, how it grows
and deceives, and the kind of hell it will ultimately unleash on the innocent
and the faithful. Godlessness is always the first step towards tyranny and
oppression!
Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”
address, given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion
on May of 1983, explained how the Russian revolution and the communist
takeover were facilitated by an atheistic mentality and a long process of
secularization which alienated the people from God and traditional Christian
morality and beliefs. He rightly concluded: “Men have forgotten God;
that’s why all this has happened.”
The text of his Templeton Address is provided below. The parallels with the
current crisis and moral decay in American society are striking and
frightening. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!
***
“Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1
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.
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.
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be 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-mutilation
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.
The same kind of defect, the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine
dimension, was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the
satanic temptation of the “nuclear umbrella.” It was equivalent to saying:
Let’s cast off worries, let’s free the younger generation from their duties and
obligations, let’s make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of
defending others-let’s stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East,
and let us live instead in the pursuit of happiness. If danger should threaten
us, we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb; if not, then let the world burn
in Hell for all we care. The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary
West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error: the belief that the
defense of peace depends not on stout hearts and steadfast men, but solely on
the nuclear bomb…

2
Today’ s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to
preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!”
Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch
us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And he
predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the
demon of evil.” 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…
In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame,
or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then
steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the
first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people
under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries,
while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of
Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country
became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people,
the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking,
the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and
unifying force of the nation.
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by
an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s
forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state,
and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And
along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of
secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the
course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the
time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian
educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was
threatened.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its
seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily
begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before
known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as
that practiced by Marxism. 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.

3
The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of
victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans
were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the
popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the
hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances.
Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests,
monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God,
were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of
the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or
shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the
faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of
laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring
up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their
children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith
by threats and lies…
For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle
against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church.
This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of
showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended
to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of
religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most
liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant
steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied
Leninist obsession with destroying religion.
But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches
have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled
for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and 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 the
camps themselves, those who gather 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 many 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 formidably
Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it
attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.

4
The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here
remains free. But the West’s 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 rancor, to say nothing
of the tide of secularism that, 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.
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the
West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of
happiness, “a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions.
The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries;
banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class
considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that
evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political
system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an
integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before
the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward
the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious
essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. If
a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States,
reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world, or a major
newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further
evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are completely
unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from
ignoble acts?
Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis–race, class,
or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist
teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred
of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of
capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited
freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under
Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate
forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any
person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that
system does indeed attain “equality”–the equality of destitute slaves. This
eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today’s free
world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of
prosperity or even of abundance–the more vehement, paradoxically, does this
blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by
its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of
material goods nor in merely making money.

5
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself,
to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The
embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly
hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it
has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been
voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist,
instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place
of God.
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East
and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason:
Men have forgotten God.
With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire
mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that
the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human
heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true
even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories
that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a
dead end. The free people of the West could reasonably have been expected to
realize that they are beset · by numerous freely nurtured falsehoods, and not
to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily. All attempts to find a way out of
the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness,
in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and
we shall seek it in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too
impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not
by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us
individually, and within every society. This is especially true of a free and
highly developed society, for here in particular we have surely brought
everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily
unthinking selfishness, are pulling tight that noose…
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for
worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional
stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble
and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws
alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and
physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator
constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly
granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die.
And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less
force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to
insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death,

6
we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we
have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be
opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be
directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the
landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment
amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as
these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish
and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. Templeton
Prize Lecture, 10 May 1983 (London).

7
8