This year is the 50th anniversary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the book documenting Communist atrocities that woke up even many left-leaning Western intellectuals to the evils of the Soviet Union.
Gary Saul Morson has written a brilliant account of the book and its impact for the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil with the deck “Published 50 years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Soviet Union’s barbaric system of forced labor camps is arguably the 20th century’s greatest work of nonfiction.”
Shakespeare and Schiller clearly did not grasp evil, Solzhenitsyn instructs, because their villains “recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black,” but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains stopped at a few corpses “because they had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.”
Read that again. Think about it.
The insight about the moral inversion of considering evil to be a positive good is an echo of Scripture:
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)
The prophet cites the converse problem as well: considering what is good to be evil.
Similarly, after St. Paul lists a catalogue of evildoing, he notes a further overarching perversion:
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32)
It is one thing to do them, but it is an even greater sign of a “debased mind” to “give approval” to those who do them! It is bad to be disobedient to parents, but it is monstrous to approve of being disobedient to parents, to think that authority in the family is a bad thing.
This moral inversion is why self-righteousness–a spirit of legalism and self-justification–so often bears fruit in sin, as in the scribes and Pharisees who “are like whitewashed tombs,” who, though they think of themselves as righteous, “devour widows’ houses” (Mark 12:40) and within “are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23:27-28).
Solzhenitsyn names the enabling mindset that creates this moral version on a vast scale: ideology. The term means “the science of ideas.” Human beings develop abstract ideas and then turn them into a system that they impose on all of life. Marx put forward his economic theories, which the Communists applied with rigor to actual human beings in the nation they ruled, resulting in the Gulags. Some of the Nazis were reportedly nice people, but the force of their ideology led them to commit unspeakable atrocities.
A major evil today that ideology defines as good is abortion, the killing of unborn children. The ideology of feminism turns that into a good thing to do. So does the ideology of moral libertarianism, the view that defines morality as whatever I “choose.”
But hasn’t religion, including Christianity, been used in this way? Certainly inquisitions, holy wars, heretic-burning, and other cruelties are common throughout the history of the church. I think the problem is that we are always tempted to turn Christianity into an ideology. Whereupon we can use it as a cover and a rationalization for our sins.
Christian nationalism, liberation theology, Catholic integralism, Reformed theonomy, Pentecostal dominionism, and the social gospel of mainline Protestantism are all Christian ideologies, and they can all be misused as pretexts to justify evil.
But Christianity is not a set of abstract ideas that we can turn into a system to serve our own ends. Yes, it contains ideas, but it deals not with abstractions but with mighty realities that hold us to account. Properly, in Solzhenitsyn’s terms, Christianity causes its adherents to “recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black.” At that point, Christianity offers the atonement accomplished by God Incarnate.
Photo: Gulag Prisoners in Perm (undated, but before 1947) by Mikail Solokov via Radio Free Europe, Public Domain
HT: Harold Senkbeil
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