David Walsh in Voegelin View

David Walsh with a thoughtful essay at VoegelinView on Solzhenitsyn’s thought and life.

“Yet limitless cruelty could not succeed in its most important goal. It could not kill the human spirit. That is Solzhenitsyn’s legacy to world history.

It surely ranks with the greatest medical or technological breakthroughs of our era. None of the latter succeeded in conquering the mortality that is the fate of every living being. Yet Solzhenitsyn did accomplish just such a remarkable feat. He uncovered what is indestructible in a person. Religion and philosophy had always talked about the immortality of the soul, but few had so clearly lived it or, if they did, articulated it so deeply. For Solzhenitsyn, immortality was not a vague notion of another life but that part of himself that could not be destroyed. ”