(Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, whose writings revealed the sordid underside of the communist system, was expelled from the USSR in 1974.  In June, 1978 he was asked to give the commencement address at Harvard University.  I don’t know what they expected to hear, but here are some excerpts from what they did hear.)

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.”  Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit.  And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings.  Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.  There is some bitterness in my speech today, too.  But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.  Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.  There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.  There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development.  I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him.  This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.  There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation.  It works as a sort of petrified armour around people’s minds.

However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature.  That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.  Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years.  Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.  Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.  State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic.  The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.  In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse.  All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society.  As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life.  There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time.  I am referring to the calamity of a de-spiritualised and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth.  Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.  We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey.  On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.  We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.  We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society.  Is it true that man is above everything?  Is there no Superior Spirit above him?  Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place?  Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.  It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.