{"id":75027,"date":"2024-07-10T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=75027"},"modified":"2024-07-05T17:28:36","modified_gmt":"2024-07-05T21:28:36","slug":"solzhenitsyns-conversion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2024\/07\/solzhenitsyns-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"Solzhenitsyn’s Conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn\u2019s\u00a0 The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation<\/a>\u201d exposed the evils of Soviet Communism by documenting the atrocities in the Soviet prison camps, where he himself was confined for nearly a decade.\u00a0 Another theme in that three-volume expos\u00e9 was how he himself was converted to Christianity.<\/p>\n

Gary Saul Morson, a professor of Slavic literature at Northwestern, tells about how that happened in his article for the Wall Street Journal<\/em> [behind a paywall] entitled How Solzhenitsyn Found Himself\u2014and God<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Solzhenitsyn<\/a> was hardly a dissident when he was arrested and sentenced to an arctic prison camp for ten years of hard labor.\u00a0 He was a committed Marxist who was serving as a captain in the Soviet army that was invading Germany when he was arrested for letters he had written to a friend criticizing Stalin\u2019s conduct of the war.\u00a0 For that he was sentenced to eight years in a prison camp, plus permanent exile in Siberia.<\/p>\n

Morson says that Solzhenitsyn\u2019s spiritual awakening began in a prison hospital when he heard of a prayer by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and mocked it as obvious hypocrisy.\u00a0 Another prisoner replied, \u201cWhy do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?\u201d\u00a0 Solzhenitsyn began to realize that atheism \u201chad been planted in me from outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

He began to see the connection between conditions in the Soviet Union and its ideology of materialism and atheism.\u00a0 \u201cIf people are nothing but material objects,\u201d summarizes Morson, \u201cif there is nothing resembling what we call the soul, then concepts like \u2018the sacredness of human life,\u2019 \u2018human dignity\u2019 and \u2018the inviolability of the person\u2019 are merely bourgeois mystification.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Communist ethics taught that the end always justifies the means, judging everything not in terms of some absolute principle but whether or not the result advances the cause of the Communist party.\u00a0 The notion that the ends justifies the means was absorbed even by the prisoners.<\/p>\n

Prisoners who thought this way concluded that they would \u201csurvive at any price,\u201d which meant \u201cat the price of someone else.\u201d Others might hesitate, but when party members were arrested, they were already prepared to betray others and, if they were intellectuals, to devise sufficient justification.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the final stage for Solzhenitsyn in his conversion to Christianity was not his perception of other people\u2019s evil, nor of the collective evil of the Soviet system, nor of the evil of Communist ideology.\u00a0 Rather, he had to face his own evil.<\/p>\n

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The final step to faith comes when you don\u2019t simply blame \u201cthem\u201d but realize your own sinfulness. Solzhenitsyn reflected on how, as an officer, he had looked down on ordinary soldiers and, even after he\u2019d been arrested, made one of them carry his bags. Now, whenever he mentions the \u201cheartlessness\u201d and \u201ccruelty\u201d of his executioners, Solzhenitsyn writes, \u201cI remember myself in my captain\u2019s shoulder boards\u201d and ask if he and those like him were any better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

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Speaking with Solzhenitsyn after he\u2019d undergone an operation, prison doctor\u00a0Boris Kornfeld\u00a0attributed his own Christian conversion to the recognition that no punishment is entirely undeserved. \u201cIt can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact,\u201d the doctor told him, \u201cbut if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply,\u201d you will identify a transgression for which you hadn\u2019t paid the price.<\/p>\n

Kornfeld was murdered within a few hours of this conversation. \u201cThere was something in Kornfeld\u2019s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for\u00a0myself<\/em>,\u201d Solzhenitsyn wrote. \u201cI had gone over and re-examined myself .\u00a0.\u00a0. why everything had happened to me. .\u00a0.\u00a0. And I would not have murmured even if all that punishment\u201d were still greater.<\/p>\n

The torturers may have escaped punishment, Solzhenitsyn concedes, but they \u201care departing downward from humanity,\u201d while we, as compensation, experience an unexpected way to develop the soul. When Solzhenitsyn recognized the many ways he had contributed to the evil he saw, he found faith. \u201cGod of the universe! I believe again!\u201d he wrote in a prison poem. \u201cThough I renounced You, You were with me!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Upon his release after eight years, Solzhenitsyn became a devout member of the Orthodox Church.\u00a0 But notice how his conviction by the Law led him to the Gospel.<\/p>\n

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The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s\u00a0 “The Gulag Archipelago” exposed the evils of Soviet Communism by documenting the atrocities in the Soviet prison camps, where he himself was confined for nearly a decade.\u00a0 Another theme in that three-volume expos\u00e9 was how he himself was converted to Christianity. 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