Alexander Solzhenitsyn,266 the Russian novelist, historian and critic of Soviet totalitarianism, takes up Dostoevsky’s phrase in his Nobel Prize Lecture in 1970.267 He admits that he had dismissed this notion on beauty for years, wondering when such a thing had ever happened in the bloodthirsty history of humankind, but acknowledged ‘there is a special quality in the essence of beauty’. Simone Weil saw a synthesis between truth and beauty, and Solzhenitsyn also intertwines the two: he opens his lecture with Dostoevsky’s phrase, ‘Beauty will save the world’, and concludes it with a Russian proverb: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’. His mature discernment is that Dostoevsky words are a prophecy. He points out that secular materialistic society had long since
discarded the trilogy of Truth, Good and Beauty as an outworn formula, but art continues to give us part of that trilogy’s ‘secret inner light’, which we sometimes receive, albeit dimly and briefly, as insights which logical processes of thought cannot attain. Clément and Solzhenitsyn believe the true artist who has a sense of
262 Simone Weil, Waiting for God, p. 64, cited by Willox, ‘The Cross’.
263 Daniel J O’Leary, Already Within: Divining the Hidden Spring (New York: Columbia Press,
2007).
264 Fyodor Dostoevsky, 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881. For discussion on Russian
spirituality, philosophy and literature see Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, faith and fiction (London: Continuum, 2010).
265 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. by Alan Meyers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
Part III, Chapter 5.
266 Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born three years before Olivier Clément on 11 Dec 1919 and died
one year before him on 3 August 2008. Solzhenitsyn helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag and Soviet Union’s forced labour camp system; the Gulag was the Central Administration of the Corrective Labour Camps. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from Russia to the West in 1974, but returned in 1994 after the fall of the Soviet Union.
267 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for the ethical force with which he
had pursued the indispensible tradition of Russian literature’. His lecture was delivered only to the Swedish Academy. See, Nobel Lectures: Literature 1968-1980, ed. by Tore Frängsmyr and Sture Allén (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1993). Also see:
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html, [Accessed 2 July 2015].
the spiritual harmony of the world with all the beauty and savagery of man’s contribution to it, attempts to communicate this poignantly to others. Even in poverty, prison or illness, Solzhenitsyn reflects, the sensation of stable harmony will never leave the artist; the true artist ‘realises that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God’s heaven.’
Solzhenitsyn’s own writing is a beautiful and artistic expression with which Clément empathises in its call to draw the whole of humankind towards unity, ‘a one indivisible humanity’.268
Solzhenitsyn appeals for ‘an irreversible march of the nations of the whole world towards unity.’ Only dypsichia, the divided heart destroys unity by untruth – the contradiction between what is said and what is done.269 It is a march that must be given a spiritual character, reflects Clément, because humanity is becoming materially but not spiritually united. The
understanding of both these writers is expressed through the recurring leitmotif of ‘death and resurrection’. Clément, who found the ‘fathers’ of atheistic nihilism had no answer to the question of death – it was not a topic of discourse for Marx, observes that Solzhenitsyn, through his descent into hell during the initiations of the Gulag reached a Christian depth where men are no longer separate, where there is only a single humanity in the ‘Homo Maximus’: ‘one man’.270
Solzhenitsyn evoked a concept of the Fatherland as a communion of people that includes all persons living and dead, stretching back over centuries, ‘woven together by a thread of memory, hope and sacrifice’. This memory is carried in the language of a people that shapes and enriches the soul of a nation;271 Clément uses a phrase of Charles Péguy272 that describes this shared memory as a ‘trial run’ or the beginning of the communion of saints. Allchin endorses this perception in his recognition of the importance of Welsh poetry, and sees an analogy between the person and the nation expressed by Jacques Maritain and the Welsh poet: ‘the nation like the person needs to respect the rights of others, but it has its own rights
268 Clément, The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn, p. 209. 269 Ibid., p. 12.
270 Clément, Ibid., p. 11; ‘Homo Maximus’ is the phrase of Nicholas of Cusa.
271 On this theme see A M Allchin’s discussion on nation and language in ‘Diversity of Tongues:
curse of Babel or gift of Pentecost’, in Allchin, Praise, pp. 124-141.
272 Charles Péguy (1873-1914), French poet, essayist and editor. His two main philosophies were
socialism and nationalism. He became a devout but non-practising Roman Catholic by 1906. He died in battle in the First World War.
which also need to be respected.’273
To threaten to destroy the language of a people is to threaten their ‘identity as a people and as people’. Allchin judges that the gift of tongues at Pentecost that enabled all to hear in their own language, is theologically an ‘affirmation of the importance and worth of human diversity against all tendencies to monolithic or imposed uniformity,’274
a belief declared by both Clément and Solzhenitsyn, who writes as editor of a book of dissident writing, From under the Rubble,275 a person is of vital importance, ‘The person is not a part of the whole, he comprehends the whole within itself.’ Solzhenitsyn judges the vocation of great literature is to be ‘the living memory of a nation. It maintains and reactivates its forgotten history [...] preserves the language and soul of a nation.’276
In this sense he believes that twentieth century literature of Russia lost continuity through the intervention of power.277
In an attempt to touch modern secular man Solzhenitsyn makes an appeal to artists, especially writers, believing only beauty can help humankind to enter more deeply into the experience of being which renews the sense of wonder at the gift of life and compassion for the other. Speaking of the world’s different value systems which seem to render us incapable of compassion for distant suffering he sees art and literature have a role in overcoming man’s detrimental peculiarity of hearing only from his own personal experience. Nearing the end of the twentieth century, John Paul II makes a similar call to artists, stating ‘every genuine art form in its own way is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world’, artists by their nature ‘are alert to every “epiphany” of the inner beauty of things;’ the Pope goes on to write, ‘Beauty is a key to the mystery and call to
transcendence.’278
Solzhenitsyn’s vision for the future of Russia is both Slavophile and Orthodox with an emphasis based on social conviviality and communitarian life – ‘an
273 Allchin, Praise, pp. 136-137.
274 Ibid., pp. 130-131. The Soviet Union attempted to force ‘Russianisation’ of culture and
language on its satellite nations.
275 Vadim Borisov, ‘Personality and National Awareness’, in From Under the Rubble, ed. by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (London: Collins, 1975); cited in Allchin, Praise, p. 137.
276 Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Peace Lecture; Clément, The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn, p. 212. 277 Clément, The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn, p. 212.
278 Pope John Paul II, Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Artists, 1999, 6;
<http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1999/documents/hf_jp- ii_let_23041999_artists.html> [Accessed 25 June 2015].
ecclesiology of communion’.279 Solzhenitsyn rises above Russian polemics between a universality, which can be seen by Russian critics as the West, and the Slavophilism of the nineteenth century, that continues today as nationalism. Clément judges that Solzhenitsyn is in line with other great Russian writers, ‘who have never been more universal than when they are being most Russian.’280
It would seem this is true also of Clément who deeply appreciates the French language and France, yet his message is of universal and global importance.