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.'
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Templeton Lecture, May 10, 1983. (Among many other fine selections of Solzhenitsyn's work, this address can be found in The Solzhenitsyn Reader edited by Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney.)
This post was originally entered on my "other blog"-- the literature-oriented The Book Den. If you haven't been over there yet (or if it's been a while since you have) you might be interested in recent posts about Dale Ahlquist's overview of GK Chesterton (The Apostle of Common Sense); Alessandro Manzoni's epic novel, The Betrothed; Douglas Brinkley’s The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc; Gene Kranz' Failure Is Not An Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond; and the most recent of all, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's dramatic new biography which explores the cruelty and injustice of Islam's abuse of women, Infidel.
