Early last week, we lost one of the last great men of the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was perhaps best known in the West as a Russian anti-communist dissident. Less well known to many people was his fierce criticism of the post-Enlightenment West, a criticism that won him as much enmity from cultural and political elites in the US and Western Europe as his criticisms of communism had in the USSR.  Yet I believe that this later stand, against what he called “anthropocentricity” (the belief that humanity is the center and measure of all things), is his true legacy and his greatest gift to us.

A man of tremendous moral courage, Solzhenitsyn suffered torture and imprisonment for over eight years as a result of criticisms of Stalin’s government made while he was a soldier in WWII. His unprecedented efforts to convey his experiences in Russia’s gulags (forced labor camps) to people in the West after his release won him the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature.  It also won him twenty years of forced exile (spent mostly in Cavendish, Vermont).  His sufferings for his political and moral views won him widespread sympathy and praise in the West, culminating in 1978 when Harvard University awarded him an honorary doctorate.  His commencement address — in which he gave a stinging rebuke of Western culture, criticizing its cultural arrogance, materialism, lack of moral courage, and amorality — brought much of that praise and sympathy to an end.

The extent of the ambivalence towards Solzhenitsyn among most commentators in the West even now, thirty years after that address, was evident in their tributes to him in the wake of his death.  One observer pointed out that most of the tributes boiled down to, “Yes, he was a great and heroic man, but can you believe all the crazy things he said?”  The commentators’ incredulity is entirely understandable: Solzhenitsyn alone among modern laureates opposed the fruits of the Enlightenment.  His conviction that the West’s decision to make man and not God the measure of all things — a key aspect of Enlightenment philosophy — was a critical mistake that poisoned all of its future accomplishments made him a lone voice in the wilderness.  It also made him great.

His message that a society or culture that loses its belief in the transcendent eventually loses its capacity for virtue, courage, or even survival itself is one that all of us in the West need to hear and be reminded of. Americans especially need to be reminded of his message that a focus on “rights” and the rule of the letter of the law are no substitute for virtue. And all Westerners should bear in mind his conviction that an arrogance and disregard for non-Enlightenment cultures lie behind the often unstated belief in the inevitability of Western cultural hegemony — that no culture will resist because it’s irresistibly attractive — and the corresponding belief that countries who resist assimilation should be maligned or punished.

Solzhenitsyn’s critiques of the West undoubtedly make most of us uncomfortable — after all, he struck at the heart of many of our worldviews. But his courage and clarity of spiritual vision was of a kind rarely seen in men of his station or occupation anymore. His conviction that God, not man, was the center and measure of all things led him to condemn and oppose communism and socialism.  It also lead him to condemn Western Enlightenment liberalism. Those of us who claim allegiance to the transcendent would do well to listen to the witness of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and reevaluate whether we have really only been rendering unto Caesar the whole time.