January 23, 2025 • 47 mins
This episode explores Alexander Solzhenitsyn's transformative journey from a loyal communist and soldier to a profound voice against tyranny through his experiences in the Gulag. We discuss the themes of resilience, faith, and truth as vital tools for resisting oppression and the importance of living authentically in today's fragmented world.
• Overview of Solzhenitsyn's early life and education
• Arrest and imprisonment leading to personal transformation
• Reflection on faith emerging from suffering
• Impact of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" on Soviet society
• Significance of "The Gulag Archipelago" and its global influence
• Examination of faith as a means to resist tyranny and foster compassion
• Closing thoughts on Solzhenitsyn's relevance in contemporary discussions on faith and meaning
Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How do you bring it home to them?
By an inspiration, by a vision,a dream?
Brothers, people, why has lifebeen given you?
In the deep, deaf stillness ofmidnight, the doors of the death
cells are being swung open andthe great soul people are being
(00:24):
dragged out to be shot.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
I'm your host, Travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(00:54):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide
it's great entertainment,thrilling entertainment.
(01:16):
It's the inside story, packedwith.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was bornin 1918 in southern Russia, just
after the Bolshevik Revolution.
(01:36):
His father died before he wasborn, leaving his mother to
raise him alone in a countrytorn apart by war and poverty.
A gifted student, solzhenitsynexcelled in school.
Country torn apart by war andpoverty.
A gifted student, solzhenitsynexcelled in school and became a
teacher and a writer.
When World War II began, hejoined the Red Army, serving as
an artillery officer on thefront lines.
But in 1945, everything changed.
(01:59):
Solzhenitsyn was arrested forcriticizing Stalin in a private
letter to a friend.
He was sentenced to eight yearsin the Gulag, soviet labor
camps designed to crush thehuman body and spirit and make
them compliant.
For the first three years hewas sent to the brutal labor
camps where he hauled heavyloads, endured freezing
conditions and watched fellowprisoners die of starvation and
(02:21):
abuse.
These were years of bitternessand disillusionment.
He had been a loyal communist,but the camp stripped away his
faith in the Soviet system.
In 1948, he was transferred toa special camp for scientists
and engineers, where conditionswere less harsh.
It was there that he beganreflecting deeply on his life
(02:41):
and on the human condition.
His bitterness gave way tointrospection.
He realized his pride,selfishness and complicity in
the system he once supported.
By the time of his release in1953, solzhenitsyn had found a
deep, abiding faith in God.
He would later write thatprison stripped away his
illusions and brought him closerto the truth about himself and
(03:02):
the world.
Bless you, prison, he famouslysaid for having been in my life.
After his release, he was exiledto a remote village in
Kazakhstan where he worked as ateacher.
During this time, he secretlybegan writing about his
experiences in the camps.
In 1962, his novella One Day inthe Life of Ivan Denisovich was
(03:23):
published, revealing the truthabout the Gulag to the Soviet
public for the first time.
The book was a sensation, butit also made him a target of the
Soviet authorities.
Throughout the 1960s and early1970s, solzhenitsyn continued to
write in secret, smugglingmanuscripts out of the country.
His famous work, the GulagArchipelago, was a sprawling,
(03:44):
deeply personal expose of theSoviet labor camp system.
It was published in the West in1973 and caused an
international uproar.
The Soviet government, furiousand humiliated, declared him a
traitor.
In 1974, solzhenitsyn wasarrested and exiled from the
Soviet Union.
He settled in Vermont in theUnited States, where he
(04:06):
continued to write and speak outagainst communism.
For two decades he lived aquiet life, raising his family
and producing more works.
In 1994, after the fall of theSoviet Union, solzhenitsyn
returned to Russia.
He spent his later yearsreflecting on his homeland's
history, culture and spiritualfuture.
Reflecting on his homeland'shistory, culture and spiritual
(04:26):
future.
Until his death in 2008,solzhenitsyn remained a voice
for truth, freedom and faith.
Through his life, faith shapedhis resilience, writing became
his weapon against tyranny, andhis works were rooted in
suffering, redemption andcourage, and they changed the
world.
With no further ado, I'd liketo bring on Professor Larry.
Hi, larry.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Hi Travis.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Welcome to our podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
I think you wrote a book that was kind of a sleeper
on society.
I mean, it's kind of everychapter I read I put about three
to five wows in the margins andI say this is so prophetic
every time what these authorswere saying 50 and a hundred
years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, it's, it's funny.
The one of the things I'vediscovered is that it's very
hard for people to read thesedays.
Um, a lot of different thingscalling for their attention.
And these writers, you knowthey reach you, but you need to
have the time to contemplatewhat they're saying.
(05:31):
You know, yeah, you need to beable to really give it the
attention that they're askingfrom you.
But once you give them theattention, boy, they pay you
back in completely differentways of looking at the world and
(05:54):
confirmations of things you'vefelt about yourself in the world
that nobody else is confirming,and encouragements in these
strange ways.
So once I started writing it,you know I started with one
chapter I started with I wrote aessay for Christian Century on
(06:16):
Solzhenitsyn back when I was ingraduate school.
That was really the seeds ofthe whole thing, because
Solzhenitsyn is kind of a modelof somebody who forged a
different way of looking at theworld he was living in.
(06:39):
It was just totally antitheticalto the Stalinist authoritarian
regime and he paid a heavy pricefor it.
But he ended up winning theNobel Prize and becoming a
world-famous writer.
But even he, as famous as he isand was, people have a hard
(07:03):
time reading because the Gulag,his masterpiece, is three
volumes long.
Yeah, masterpiece is threevolumes long, yeah.
And so if and there are, thereare alternatives, you can go
online and they'll, they'll be asomebody will summarize it in
15 minutes for you, or so theywill say, and you'll say, well,
gee, that wasn't all that great,you know, the guy could
summarize it in 15 minutes.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
But if you give yourself over to it, you know,
if you have the confidence thatthis is going to be worth the
effort, there'll be passagesthat will just change your world
.
So once I found that in him, Ifigured, well, there's probably
other Russian dissidents likehim that I don't know anything
(07:54):
about, or that nobody's told meabout, that do a similar thing.
And so I started looking forthem and it took me back to the
classic, you know, Dostoevskyand Tolstoy, and and uh but uh,
looking at him through new eyes,because I saw, basically, them
(08:15):
in a new context, and that'swhat started it.
And so then there were otherChristian writers.
I didn't, you know, whenSolzhenitsyn first came out, he
wasn't really considered aChristian writer, he was
considered an anti-Sovietdissident.
You know, he was a Sovietdissident who had a kind of high
(08:40):
stoicism.
High Stoicism, somebody whosurvived these Russian prison
camps in Siberia and wrote abouthis experiences in those camps.
But when I read it I sawclearly this guy is a Christian.
(09:00):
It was clear that this wasStoicism at a higher level.
I mean, he had a sense of thegoodness of life in the midst of
these prison camps where hewould see these people, you know
, turned into animals and theircaptors, you know, turned into
(09:25):
worse animals and he would seeGod working out his plan in him.
And it was just mind blowing,you know it was.
And I got to before we leavetoday or tomorrow, whenever we
(09:45):
tape these.
There are a few passages Iwanted just to read from him as
an example of the kind of thingthese writers have to say that
you don't hear very often, for avariety of reasons, and we'll
(10:08):
talk about those reasons too howthe conversation about faith
got taken over by theologicalissues, as opposed to, you know,
living faith, uh accounts anduh dialogue with the culture,
which is really where it's atyou know, living, living, faith,
(10:32):
accounts and dialogue with theculture, rather than, rather
than, theological ghettos right,right and and that's, that's
okay.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
You just nailed, like , why this book stood out to me.
It's like wow, none of theseguys are arguing some minutiae
point about theology.
This is more about just how tobe a Christian in the world and
how being a Christian critiquesthe world.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
And not so much in a condemning way, but more in a
just, honest way.
What is good or bad about whatis happening in the culture?
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yes, revelatory.
Yeah, because they that, andthat's one of the things they
all share is that they convictthemselves as much as they
convict other people.
Yeah, like when solstice andit's in the, the gulag
archipelago let me just go therebecause, since we brought him
up, the way it's structured isit starts with his arrest and
then he tells you about hisarrest, and then he tells you,
(11:37):
then he stops, he just stops itthere, and then he tells you
about the rest of all hisfriends.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, the whole first chapter is called Arrest.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, and then the arrest of all the guys that he
met later on in the prison campsand then the history of
arresting in the SovietStalinist fascist regime, and so
you get like a whole chapter ortwo chapters just on the arrest
(12:04):
and then interrogation thefirst interrogation he had, then
all his interrogations, thenthe interrogations of all his
friends, and then theinterrogations of all the guys
he met in the camp and then thehistory of interrogations, and
so that's why the thing is threevolumes long.
But while you're reading itthere are these moments like the
(12:30):
time he got arrested.
Let me just tell you this story, because he got arrested and he
was fighting in World War IIagainst the Nazis.
He was an artillery captain andthey found in one of his
(12:52):
letters he said somethinginsulting of Stalin.
So they charge you withinsubordination.
And he said that he wasn'tbeing insubordinate, he was just
saying what it was like.
So they said well, ok, we'regoing to.
You know, we're going to chargeyou with treason or
semi-treason or whatever it was.
They charged him and they'regoing to send him to a
(13:16):
reeducation camp.
But they didn't have a cell forhim, so they wanted him to go
home and come back tomorrow.
So he's talking about walkinghome to his house, his apartment
and seeing all these peoplethat are not going to go to
prison tomorrow walking around.
(13:37):
And he's thinking you know, dothese people know they're free?
Do they know that there arepeople walking among them who,
tomorrow, they're going to bethrown into a prison camp?
And why am I going to go back?
It's stupid.
I shouldn't go back.
I should run away or, ifnothing else, I should get on
(14:00):
the subway platform and startscreaming.
I should get on the subwayplatform and start screaming.
There's an injustice in thiscountry.
It's being run by this fascistauthoritarian who calls himself
the king of the people.
How can you let this go?
And then he says of course, ifI did that, nobody would have
done anything.
They would have just watched asthe police put a handcuff on me
(14:24):
and take me back to the station.
I would have had my two secondsof pleasure acting out being
angry.
But that's not good enough.
And so, somewhere in my mind, Irealized I needed to do
something more.
Mind.
(14:50):
I realized I needed to dosomething more, that my
conscience told me I had to gothrough this in order to expose
the lie of this entire systemand to write the book that
Pasternak never wrote, that hewanted to write, saying that the
Russian people had beenoccupied by an alien political
(15:11):
ideology and unless they stoodup and spoke back to their
leaders, they were going to besubjugated to it, even if they
won the war against the Nazis,even if they won the war against
the Nazis.
So he ends up going back, andthen that's when he's sent to a
prison camp.
And he wasn't a good prisoner.
(15:34):
He talked back to the guards,he gave people crap, and so he
kept getting sent to worseprisons.
So they'd say, you know, you,talk back to me.
We're going to send you tofurther east.
And he'd say, screw you.
And then they'd send himfurther east and further east.
(15:57):
So finally he got to the worstprison camp in the Gulag and
they were transporting him tothe worst gulag.
And he said I hear this is theworst gulag you guys are sending
me to.
And he goes yeah, this is theworst, everybody says it.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
And he said, well, good, because now you have
nothing over me anymore.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
What are you going to do to me?
I'm going to the worst prisoncamp.
There's nothing you could dobut the part I wanted to read
you one.
I'm going on too long so youcould cut me when you want
Travis, but there's a quote herewhere he's in the train and
(16:48):
he's going to from one prisoncamp to the next.
This is the only time he gotamong free people and he's on
the train and he's listening topeople in the train and
everybody's arguing about stuffand complaining.
And one guy's arguing that um,telling his friend that they're
(17:13):
sending him to this new job andhe's going to have to spend
three weeks in siberia everymonth or two uh, and, and what a
pain it is.
Someone else is complainingabout the food on the train and
the lack of uh, of effectiveheaters, and so he's he's being
(17:35):
sent off and he's listening tothis and he's thinking to
himself what would I tell thesepeople about?
How lucky they are that they'renot being sent into a prison
camp, that having to take a jobin a city you don't want for two
weeks isn't the worst thingthat could happen to a human
(17:56):
being, and you shouldn't pollutethe atmosphere of the train
with all this bitching andmoaning, right?
So he writes this passage.
You know well what would I sayto these people.
I am going to finally tell themwhat I think of them and me and
(18:18):
the world condition here, whenI get to write my book.
But I can't write my book yetbecause I don't have any pencils
or paper.
I have to memorize these things.
But when I finally do write thebook, this is what I'm going to
say in the book.
So this comes across.
(18:40):
I'm going to read thisparagraph here.
This comes across as stoic, butI think it's also sort of
Christian stoicism if there issuch a thing Right which he
makes clear in his laterwritings.
Stoicism if there is such athing Right which he makes clear
(19:01):
in his later writings, andstoicism if there is such a
thing which he makes clear inhis later writings.
So he says how do you bring ithome to them?
By an inspiration, by a vision,a dream.
Brothers, people, why has lifebeen given you?
In the deep, deaf stillness ofmidnight, the doors of the death
(19:26):
cells are being swung open andthe great soul people are being
dragged out to be shot.
If you want, I'll spell it outfor you right now.
Now, this is what I love aboutthis guy, right?
He's not going to wane, lyricalall the time.
He's going to spell it out foryou.
(20:03):
Do not pursue what is illusoryProperty and position, all that
is gained at the expense of yournerves decade after decade, and
is confiscated in one fellnight.
Live with a steady superiorityover life.
Don't be afraid of misfortuneand don't yearn for happiness it
is, after all, all the same.
The bitter never lasts foreverand the sweet never fills the
cup to overflowing.
(20:25):
Rub your eyes and purify yourheart and prize above all else
in the world those who love youand wish you well.
Do not hurt them or scold them,and never part with them in
anger.
After all, you simply do notknow.
(20:47):
It may be the last act beforeyour arrest, but the convoy
guards stroke the black handleson their pistols in their
pockets and we sit there, threein a row sober fellows, quiet
friends.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
That was in the book, right.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
That's in the book.
I quote it.
It's in the first volume of theGolog Archipelago and there's a
funny moment.
The guards are complaining tohim, saying you know, you damn
prisoners, you always you know,we have to send you to these
(21:30):
worst camps and we're the oneswho end up riding in these
trains for 25 hours out toSiberia, trains for 25 hours out
to Siberia.
And Solzhenitsyn says to theguys you know, how can you be
complaining?
You know you're the guys whoare taking me to prison and
you're complaining.
And they say well, you know,you're free to have lunch.
(21:56):
We can only eat, we can't drinkor anything.
So Solzhenitsyn orders himselfa beer when the waiter goes by
and they can't stop him becausethey don't want people to know
they're KGB a beer and theycan't drink beer because they're
(22:20):
on duty, so they have to watchhim drink a beer.
So he's thinking these thoughtsabout what he would say when he
writes the great masterpiecethat's going to make dialectical
materialism obsolete as a worldidea, and drinks his beer,
imagining how great it's goingto be when he finally gets his
pencil and can write thesethings down.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
That is awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
It's so awesome and it's so inspiring because you're
thinking there.
You know we have online allthese you know things about how
to write, you know, and books onhow to write and brainstorming
techniques and everything.
And here's a guy you know.
He just had a story to tell anda faith to express and he
(23:14):
didn't have tricks of the trade.
In fact, all that stuff wasjust more of the problem that he
wanted to pierce with the truthof his experience, and he does
it.
And then, as you know, thelonger you read it, the more
(23:37):
amazing it gets, because this isjust.
This is just the beginning ofthe guy's life and story.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah, so so here's an example.
One thing I was thinking islike everyone knows about the
Holocaust, Like it happened,happened to get like every movie
made about it, Every book,every every bit of awareness.
It's like the russian gulags.
This is almost like the firstI've heard of it when I read
(24:05):
your book oh yeah and it's notlike I didn't know the nazis, I
mean not like I didn't knowstalin and them didn't yeah kill
millions of people.
I found that out, um, you know,later in life, though it wasn't
like in college or anything, Idon't know.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I don't know if no one was talking about it or what
, but well, yeah, well, thething, the thing about it is
that people talked about it, butthey talked about it in the
abstract, you know, it was sortof like the way we talk about,
uh, prisoners in othertotalitarian countries or even
in our own political prisonersand things.
It seems abstract unless you'rethere or you know someone who
(24:47):
was there, or you get on thetrain with Solzhenitsyn and ride
to the furthest camp in Siberand he takes you into the cells
and what the people say and whatthey're experiencing, yeah.
You got to have that firsthandexperience and that's what
(25:09):
happened with the GulagArchipelago was he won the Nobel
Prize in 1970.
That's really early.
I didn't realize it was thatearly.
I didn't read him until muchlater either, and then when I
read him it was sort of like Imean, what is it?
19 years later, the SovietUnion falls it.
(25:46):
Just the whole.
Yeah, the whole.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
It seems to me like from Like I got the Gulag on
audiobook now and I've beenthrough the intro and the first
chapter of Arrest, and in theintro they talk about how, um,
various communist sympathizerscouldn't really defend it
anymore when they read it.
They're like we don't like thisbook, but now I can't change my
(26:11):
mind.
Now.
It's like it exposed it even tothemselves.
Even the ones that were, likeyou know, defensive about it,
once they read it they were like, yeah, this is not going to
work.
Um, and furthermore, it itseemed that the implications for
the whole soviet union was justa matter of time once that book
(26:33):
got out exactly they did notwant that book to get out, and
it's kind of crazy to think thatone guy kind of almost brought
it down with a pen, pen andpaper or pencil.
Well, it's mythic, I'm surethat's an overstatement, but
it's not too much of anoverstatement because it was so
powerful.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
It's such an exposure into such a secret world.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, an exposure into such a secret world, yeah.
And then the way you know, andthe fact that he went into his
own culpability of it.
You know, he didn't know aboutit either.
He was a soldier on the frontlines fighting the Nazis.
He didn't know that half of theguys who should be fighting the
Nazis were in prisons of theirown country.
(27:18):
It was bizarre.
And then he finds himself thereand it's like, oh my God, this
is worse than I had imagined.
And then his plan on how he wasgoing to fight back by winning
the Nobel Prize, becausePasternak won the Nobel Prize
(27:40):
but the Soviet regime wouldn'tlet him go to accept it and give
the Nobel Prize acceptancespeech because they were afraid
that Pasternak would expose theauthoritarian regime.
And Pasternak didn't go andSolzhenitsyn decided he would
(28:03):
win it and he would write thebook that would expose the
Soviet system, and then he'dleave, then he'd go west because
he couldn't live there anymoreif they, if he had exposed it
that blatantly, which is what hedid, yeah, which is a story in
(28:27):
and of itself yeah, in the bookyou outline that how, how he was
pretty much mad at how how lamepasternak was with his platform
well, yeah, when he won, youknow, he thought well, thought
well, now, gee, you know youshould just go.
You should just go and give thespeech and never come back, and
you'd be the most famous writerin Russian history.
(28:49):
But now I have to do it, nowthat, in and of itself would
make an amazing movie.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yes, it would be the transition from Pasternak to
Solzhenitsyn.
Yeah, and what they saw andwhat they, what they were
writing about, and and thentheir their own personal, um,
you know, the beef that he had,that that pasternak didn't,
didn't have the courage toexpose everything well, you know
it's.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
It's interesting, the um you mentioned before by I
was.
I'm interested in Thomas Merton, and in the 50s Thomas Merton
corresponded with PasternakBecause Pasternak had just
written Dr Zhivago.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
And it had come out and it was a bestseller.
After the war.
The English translation was abestseller.
After the war.
The English translation was abestseller in 59.
And Khrushchev had replacedStalin.
So Russia was beginning to thaw, a little bit democratic and
compete with the West incultural and in economic ways
(30:03):
rather than in military ways,although it still was the heart
of the Cold War.
So Merton writes a letter toPasternak telling him how much
he liked Dr Zhivago, but thatthe book would be misunderstood
in the West because it's asymbolically spiritual book.
(30:26):
And if I have one bit of adviceabout the response of the West
to your book, it would be don'tlet them make it into a movie,
because if it becomes a movie,everything you say in that novel
(30:46):
will be lost and turned into alove story.
And then they did.
And then they did.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
That is so funny.
Merton said that to him.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, wow, and because Merton was corresponding
with a Russian, the FBI thoughthe was corresponding with a
communist and so he got an FBIfile.
Oh, wow, entirely of letters towriters, back and forth to
(31:19):
writers, but primarily hisletters to Pasternak and
Pasternak's letters to him, andyou can read them all now.
They're all in print and youknow, and they're funny because
he tries to explain.
You know that this is going tobe put on screens, it's going to
be made into a love story, andeven if they make it a great
(31:41):
love story, they'll misseverything you're talking about,
about dissent against theseauthoritarian ignorances that
are dumbing down our culturesand putting them against one
another and ruining worldcivilization.
And so they had, they hadcommon accord in their uh, in
(32:05):
their spiritual uh, orientations.
But, uh, the movie wasultimately made.
People still like it.
I, I like the movie, but it'snot.
It's not half as good as thebook.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Well, it's not, Probably not what the book was
supposed to be right.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, it wasn't what the book was.
You know, the book had a lotmore passages like the one I
read from Solzhenitsyn of a guywho supported the revolution
being felt like he was betrayedwhen the Bolsheviks took over
and turned it into anauthoritarian regime.
He thought he was overthrowingthe czar to become a more
(32:49):
democratic society and get ridof serfdom and all of that.
And then it turns out that itwas not that at all.
It was, if, if anything, almostthe opposite, and so that's
that's the story you don'treally see highlighted in the
movie.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
That's part of that how did you kind of compile the
other writers?
Was it one by one?
Or did you kind of brainstorm?
Who else would fit what youwere, what you were thinking and
what you even meant bysubversive orthodoxy?
Or did that name come later?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Well, that name came later.
The word that the Soviets, theMarxist critics, had for
Solzhenitsyn was plebian.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Oh yeah, which I never quite knew what that word
meant.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah, well, in the Marxist jargon, a plebeian was
somebody who was working class,who had an understanding, a life
(34:04):
understanding that the systemwas screwing him, but lacked a
political, economic critique asto how to set it right.
So the plebian was sort of anuneducated, mature Marxist yes,
uneducated critic who neededdialectical material.
Do is educate the masses totheir place in history.
(34:27):
And the reason that theplebeians didn't pick up on this
was because they were mostlyreligious, and religion, of
(34:53):
course, for Marx was the opiateof the masses, but he meant that
not necessarily in a bad way.
There are other passages inMarx where he says religion is
the only thing answering theneeds of the plebeians, who
realize that the system thatthey're living in is oppressing
(35:16):
them, but they don't know whatto do.
So it gives them the spiritualtools to survive it and to fight
back with virtue.
And so when I read Solzhenitsyn, I realized well, he's not just
fighting back with virtue, he'sfighting back with a critique.
(35:36):
And I think that's true of allprogressive Christians, and a
lot of them are what theMarxists would have called
plebeians.
They know that they need achange, but they're just not
sure how to change it.
(35:56):
But they're going to find out,like Solzhenitsyn did.
And then I looked around andthere were a lot of them.
There was, like Martin LutherKing, right Progressive
Christian, gandhi, progressiveHindu, lech Waleswesa,
progressive Catholic, that wasnevertheless also a plebeian, a
(36:20):
worker, who wasn't part of theCommunist Party, didn't want to
be part of the Communist Party,didn't think that a materialist
understanding of the world wouldgive him enough of an insight
as to the way power was reallybeing dispersed to really fight
back effectively.
(36:41):
So I went looking for thosepeople and my first book was I
tried to get different religions.
It was called the IgnorantPerfection of Ordinary People,
because that's what the Marxistscalled the plebeians.
They were perfect in theirunderstanding of their place in
history, but ignorant as to howto change it.
(37:05):
But the people that I werelooking at were the religious
people who said well, religionalso gives you a way to fight
back and virtue isn't aspowerless as you think.
Virtue is more powerful thanyou think.
And so I had Gandhi.
I had a chapter on Gandhi, Ihad one on Solzhenitsyn, I had
(37:29):
one on Lech Walesa.
I had one on Elie Wiesel in theprison camps, his Judaism
fighting against the Nazis.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah, I know that name.
Yeah, and I don't know how tosay it as well as you.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah, yeah, just with a V, like Simone Weil is with a
V, rather it's a W, but there'sa V sound is with a V rather
it's a W, but there's a V sound,yeah, so I think when we go to,
when we go to bonus episodesand we get past the main book
characters.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
I'd like to dig in on Simone Ve, ellie Wiesel and
maybe there's a Frankl oh yeah,victor Frankl yeah, they wrote
about the Holocaust, right yeahthat'd be great if you know all
those.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
You quote Simone Weil a lot.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah, yeah, I like her, but you know, she died when
she was 34.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
other people.
I wonder about you, um, if youknow, like I don't know, I don't
know if your scope is justeverything or what, but do you
know chesterton?
I mean you know chesterton, butI mean I was going to say um
bonhoeffer, and then, and thenflannery o'connor, and her
contribution seems to be fit fitright in well, the subversive
orthodoxy is mostly Christian.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I mean well, it is all Christian.
Some people may quibble aboutthe doctrines of some of these
Christians, you know, but all ofthem considered themselves
Christian and were inspired bythe Christian inspiration and
revelation and messianic promise.
And they were all looking atthe modern world through the
(39:17):
eyes of faith and saying thatthe materialist perspective on
existence doesn't give youenough of a.
I'll use this word againbecause I've used it a lot today
fight back.
That isn't violent, it'sunderstanding.
(39:39):
You know how you can fight backwith truth and with courage and
not necessarily become likeyour oppressor.
You know the model of Christiannonviolent resistance is
(40:00):
powerful.
But then you know, withSolzhenitsyn it's different.
It's the fight back of truthteller.
You know of saying truth topower and winning the Nobel
prize and redoing philosophy andrethinking may, helping people
rethink their place in the world.
That's powerful too.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
And I do have a great quote from Bonhoeffer that I I
took out today that I was goingto read, if you wanted me to do
the intro, but just to get ontape, because who knows if we'll
ever get other things.
I wanted to read you this quotebecause this is from Bonhoeffer
(40:46):
, his letters from prison, whichis even better than his cost of
discipleship, especially if youknow Schultz and Hitson's story
.
You know Bonhoeffer was in aNazi prison, so he's writing
(41:08):
this to his friend and they'retalking about how do you
minister to a world come of agewhich, from their point of view,
was, you know?
How do you give homilies orsermons to a world that has seen
(41:29):
the triumph of Adolf Hitler?
Seen the triumph of AdolfHitler Because they were still
in the war and there was noguarantee that Germany wouldn't
win the war.
In fact, some people, even inthe West, put their money on him
and there were Germanhistorians, philosophers, saying
(41:51):
that Hitler was the next stepin world history and that.
So Bonhoeffer is writing theseletters.
You know sort of like thatquestion that Solzhenitsyn asked
himself.
You know, how do you?
What would you say to thesepeople if you could?
You know what would you say so.
This is at the end of one ofhis letters and he says this is
(42:15):
Dietrich Bonhoeffer from theletters present Living
unreservedly in life's duties,problems, successes and failures
, experiences and perplexities.
In so doing, we throw ourselvescompletely into the arms of God
(42:35):
, taking seriously not our ownsufferings but those of God in
the world, watching with Christin Gethsemane.
That, I think, is faith, thatis metanoia, and that is how one
becomes a Christian.
Now, that's a nice epigram forthese figures, because I would
(43:03):
say very few of them, maybe oneor two, are really academic
theologians.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
I can tell you who is the academic I didn't connect
with.
Yeah, fry, yeah, when I lookedat videos of all these people,
they're all very engaging andFry is about as boring as you
can get.
So I would never havediscovered Fry without you.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Well, I saw an interview with Fry one time with
Bill Moyers, and Bill Moyersthought he was great because he
was the one.
Moyers did all those interviewswith Joseph Campbell right.
So he's trying to get NorthropFrye to be as engaging as Joseph
Campbell, but he's not.
He's just this boring guy andhe's sort of explaining his
(43:52):
ideas and at one point Moyers istrying to get him to speak out
and so he says well, you tell usin your books, you tell us that
literature is deeply involvedin history.
What can you tell us about therole history, the literature,
(44:15):
plays in history?
Tell us about that.
And Fry says to him well, whatis history?
But the phantasmagoria of thehuman imagination?
And that's it.
That was his answer.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
And then you got with Solzhenitsyn.
You know, live with a steadysuperiority over life.
You know, look these bastardsin the eye.
You know you have nothing to beashamed of.
You know your problems are yourcourage, you know, and all this
inspirational stuff.
And then you get these guysthat are saying very similar
(44:56):
things, fry, but in a verybookish way and so he's no fry.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Fry will be a comedy episode for me.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
This is the quick, this is the quintessential
professor guy, like like an snlskit character yeah, it gave a
series of talks, one time at theCornerstone Festival in
Bushnell Illinois, theCornerstone Music Festival 250
(45:29):
Jesus Rock bands.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
It ran for about 25 years.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
You had friends that used to go there.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Yeah, and they had a counterculture tent and they
would bring in guys who'dwritten books like mine and and
talk about things, and so I wasin the counterculture tent for
five days and I gave an hour aday and I had to explain to them
what, what this was all about.
(45:55):
So I have some some riffs on onhow they all fit together.
But it was so funny because Imet some of the most interesting
people in the world in thoselittle corn fields that were all
cut down to make room for like50 stages.
(46:18):
For all these every high schooljesus band, every you know top
singer.
It was something else.
It was amazing, amazing place,but anyway, great talking to you
all right, thank you so muchall right travis great talk to
you soon.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Bye, you know there's something here for all, of
whether you're a skeptic or abeliever or somewhere in between
.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
exploring what this means tohave a life of deep meaning in a
world that feels increasinglyfragmented and dealing with
nihilism.
(46:53):
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
This has been the SubversiveOrthodoxy Podcast with Travis
(47:20):
Mullins and Professor.
World's got more.
How do you bring it home to them?
By an inspiration, by a vision,a dream?
Brothers, people, why has lifebeen given you?
In the deep, deaf stillness ofmidnight, the doors of the death
cells are being swung open andthe great soul people are being
(00:24):
dragged out to be shot.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
I'm your host, Travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(00:54):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide
it's great entertainment,thrilling entertainment.
(01:16):
It's the inside story, packedwith.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was bornin 1918 in southern Russia, just
after the Bolshevik Revolution.
(01:36):
His father died before he wasborn, leaving his mother to
raise him alone in a countrytorn apart by war and poverty.
A gifted student, solzhenitsynexcelled in school.
Country torn apart by war andpoverty.
A gifted student, solzhenitsynexcelled in school and became a
teacher and a writer.
When World War II began, hejoined the Red Army, serving as
an artillery officer on thefront lines.
But in 1945, everything changed.
(01:59):
Solzhenitsyn was arrested forcriticizing Stalin in a private
letter to a friend.
He was sentenced to eight yearsin the Gulag, soviet labor
camps designed to crush thehuman body and spirit and make
them compliant.
For the first three years hewas sent to the brutal labor
camps where he hauled heavyloads, endured freezing
conditions and watched fellowprisoners die of starvation and
(02:21):
abuse.
These were years of bitternessand disillusionment.
He had been a loyal communist,but the camp stripped away his
faith in the Soviet system.
In 1948, he was transferred toa special camp for scientists
and engineers, where conditionswere less harsh.
It was there that he beganreflecting deeply on his life
(02:41):
and on the human condition.
His bitterness gave way tointrospection.
He realized his pride,selfishness and complicity in
the system he once supported.
By the time of his release in1953, solzhenitsyn had found a
deep, abiding faith in God.
He would later write thatprison stripped away his
illusions and brought him closerto the truth about himself and
(03:02):
the world.
Bless you, prison, he famouslysaid for having been in my life.
After his release, he was exiledto a remote village in
Kazakhstan where he worked as ateacher.
During this time, he secretlybegan writing about his
experiences in the camps.
In 1962, his novella One Day inthe Life of Ivan Denisovich was
(03:23):
published, revealing the truthabout the Gulag to the Soviet
public for the first time.
The book was a sensation, butit also made him a target of the
Soviet authorities.
Throughout the 1960s and early1970s, solzhenitsyn continued to
write in secret, smugglingmanuscripts out of the country.
His famous work, the GulagArchipelago, was a sprawling,
(03:44):
deeply personal expose of theSoviet labor camp system.
It was published in the West in1973 and caused an
international uproar.
The Soviet government, furiousand humiliated, declared him a
traitor.
In 1974, solzhenitsyn wasarrested and exiled from the
Soviet Union.
He settled in Vermont in theUnited States, where he
(04:06):
continued to write and speak outagainst communism.
For two decades he lived aquiet life, raising his family
and producing more works.
In 1994, after the fall of theSoviet Union, solzhenitsyn
returned to Russia.
He spent his later yearsreflecting on his homeland's
history, culture and spiritualfuture.
Reflecting on his homeland'shistory, culture and spiritual
(04:26):
future.
Until his death in 2008,solzhenitsyn remained a voice
for truth, freedom and faith.
Through his life, faith shapedhis resilience, writing became
his weapon against tyranny, andhis works were rooted in
suffering, redemption andcourage, and they changed the
world.
With no further ado, I'd liketo bring on Professor Larry.
Hi, larry.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Hi Travis.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Welcome to our podcast.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
I think you wrote a book that was kind of a sleeper
on society.
I mean, it's kind of everychapter I read I put about three
to five wows in the margins andI say this is so prophetic
every time what these authorswere saying 50 and a hundred
years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Yeah, it's, it's funny.
The one of the things I'vediscovered is that it's very
hard for people to read thesedays.
Um, a lot of different thingscalling for their attention.
And these writers, you knowthey reach you, but you need to
have the time to contemplatewhat they're saying.
(05:31):
You know, yeah, you need to beable to really give it the
attention that they're askingfrom you.
But once you give them theattention, boy, they pay you
back in completely differentways of looking at the world and
(05:54):
confirmations of things you'vefelt about yourself in the world
that nobody else is confirming,and encouragements in these
strange ways.
So once I started writing it,you know I started with one
chapter I started with I wrote aessay for Christian Century on
(06:16):
Solzhenitsyn back when I was ingraduate school.
That was really the seeds ofthe whole thing, because
Solzhenitsyn is kind of a modelof somebody who forged a
different way of looking at theworld he was living in.
(06:39):
It was just totally antitheticalto the Stalinist authoritarian
regime and he paid a heavy pricefor it.
But he ended up winning theNobel Prize and becoming a
world-famous writer.
But even he, as famous as he isand was, people have a hard
(07:03):
time reading because the Gulag,his masterpiece, is three
volumes long.
Yeah, masterpiece is threevolumes long, yeah.
And so if and there are, thereare alternatives, you can go
online and they'll, they'll be asomebody will summarize it in
15 minutes for you, or so theywill say, and you'll say, well,
gee, that wasn't all that great,you know, the guy could
summarize it in 15 minutes.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
But if you give yourself over to it, you know,
if you have the confidence thatthis is going to be worth the
effort, there'll be passagesthat will just change your world
.
So once I found that in him, Ifigured, well, there's probably
other Russian dissidents likehim that I don't know anything
(07:54):
about, or that nobody's told meabout, that do a similar thing.
And so I started looking forthem and it took me back to the
classic, you know, Dostoevskyand Tolstoy, and and uh but uh,
looking at him through new eyes,because I saw, basically, them
(08:15):
in a new context, and that'swhat started it.
And so then there were otherChristian writers.
I didn't, you know, whenSolzhenitsyn first came out, he
wasn't really considered aChristian writer, he was
considered an anti-Sovietdissident.
You know, he was a Sovietdissident who had a kind of high
(08:40):
stoicism.
High Stoicism, somebody whosurvived these Russian prison
camps in Siberia and wrote abouthis experiences in those camps.
But when I read it I sawclearly this guy is a Christian.
(09:00):
It was clear that this wasStoicism at a higher level.
I mean, he had a sense of thegoodness of life in the midst of
these prison camps where hewould see these people, you know
, turned into animals and theircaptors, you know, turned into
(09:25):
worse animals and he would seeGod working out his plan in him.
And it was just mind blowing,you know it was.
And I got to before we leavetoday or tomorrow, whenever we
(09:45):
tape these.
There are a few passages Iwanted just to read from him as
an example of the kind of thingthese writers have to say that
you don't hear very often, for avariety of reasons, and we'll
(10:08):
talk about those reasons too howthe conversation about faith
got taken over by theologicalissues, as opposed to, you know,
living faith, uh accounts anduh dialogue with the culture,
which is really where it's atyou know, living, living, faith,
(10:32):
accounts and dialogue with theculture, rather than, rather
than, theological ghettos right,right and and that's, that's
okay.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
You just nailed, like , why this book stood out to me.
It's like wow, none of theseguys are arguing some minutiae
point about theology.
This is more about just how tobe a Christian in the world and
how being a Christian critiquesthe world.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
And not so much in a condemning way, but more in a
just, honest way.
What is good or bad about whatis happening in the culture?
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Yes, revelatory.
Yeah, because they that, andthat's one of the things they
all share is that they convictthemselves as much as they
convict other people.
Yeah, like when solstice andit's in the, the gulag
archipelago let me just go therebecause, since we brought him
up, the way it's structured isit starts with his arrest and
then he tells you about hisarrest, and then he tells you,
(11:37):
then he stops, he just stops itthere, and then he tells you
about the rest of all hisfriends.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, the whole first chapter is called Arrest.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Yeah, and then the arrest of all the guys that he
met later on in the prison campsand then the history of
arresting in the SovietStalinist fascist regime, and so
you get like a whole chapter ortwo chapters just on the arrest
(12:04):
and then interrogation thefirst interrogation he had, then
all his interrogations, thenthe interrogations of all his
friends, and then theinterrogations of all the guys
he met in the camp and then thehistory of interrogations, and
so that's why the thing is threevolumes long.
But while you're reading itthere are these moments like the
(12:30):
time he got arrested.
Let me just tell you this story, because he got arrested and he
was fighting in World War IIagainst the Nazis.
He was an artillery captain andthey found in one of his
(12:52):
letters he said somethinginsulting of Stalin.
So they charge you withinsubordination.
And he said that he wasn'tbeing insubordinate, he was just
saying what it was like.
So they said well, ok, we'regoing to.
You know, we're going to chargeyou with treason or
semi-treason or whatever it was.
They charged him and they'regoing to send him to a
(13:16):
reeducation camp.
But they didn't have a cell forhim, so they wanted him to go
home and come back tomorrow.
So he's talking about walkinghome to his house, his apartment
and seeing all these peoplethat are not going to go to
prison tomorrow walking around.
(13:37):
And he's thinking you know, dothese people know they're free?
Do they know that there arepeople walking among them who,
tomorrow, they're going to bethrown into a prison camp?
And why am I going to go back?
It's stupid.
I shouldn't go back.
I should run away or, ifnothing else, I should get on
(14:00):
the subway platform and startscreaming.
I should get on the subwayplatform and start screaming.
There's an injustice in thiscountry.
It's being run by this fascistauthoritarian who calls himself
the king of the people.
How can you let this go?
And then he says of course, ifI did that, nobody would have
done anything.
They would have just watched asthe police put a handcuff on me
(14:24):
and take me back to the station.
I would have had my two secondsof pleasure acting out being
angry.
But that's not good enough.
And so, somewhere in my mind, Irealized I needed to do
something more.
Mind.
(14:50):
I realized I needed to dosomething more, that my
conscience told me I had to gothrough this in order to expose
the lie of this entire systemand to write the book that
Pasternak never wrote, that hewanted to write, saying that the
Russian people had beenoccupied by an alien political
(15:11):
ideology and unless they stoodup and spoke back to their
leaders, they were going to besubjugated to it, even if they
won the war against the Nazis,even if they won the war against
the Nazis.
So he ends up going back, andthen that's when he's sent to a
prison camp.
And he wasn't a good prisoner.
(15:34):
He talked back to the guards,he gave people crap, and so he
kept getting sent to worseprisons.
So they'd say, you know, you,talk back to me.
We're going to send you tofurther east.
And he'd say, screw you.
And then they'd send himfurther east and further east.
(15:57):
So finally he got to the worstprison camp in the Gulag and
they were transporting him tothe worst gulag.
And he said I hear this is theworst gulag you guys are sending
me to.
And he goes yeah, this is theworst, everybody says it.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
And he said, well, good, because now you have
nothing over me anymore.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
What are you going to do to me?
I'm going to the worst prisoncamp.
There's nothing you could dobut the part I wanted to read
you one.
I'm going on too long so youcould cut me when you want
Travis, but there's a quote herewhere he's in the train and
(16:48):
he's going to from one prisoncamp to the next.
This is the only time he gotamong free people and he's on
the train and he's listening topeople in the train and
everybody's arguing about stuffand complaining.
And one guy's arguing that um,telling his friend that they're
(17:13):
sending him to this new job andhe's going to have to spend
three weeks in siberia everymonth or two uh, and, and what a
pain it is.
Someone else is complainingabout the food on the train and
the lack of uh, of effectiveheaters, and so he's he's being
(17:35):
sent off and he's listening tothis and he's thinking to
himself what would I tell thesepeople about?
How lucky they are that they'renot being sent into a prison
camp, that having to take a jobin a city you don't want for two
weeks isn't the worst thingthat could happen to a human
(17:56):
being, and you shouldn't pollutethe atmosphere of the train
with all this bitching andmoaning, right?
So he writes this passage.
You know well what would I sayto these people.
I am going to finally tell themwhat I think of them and me and
(18:18):
the world condition here, whenI get to write my book.
But I can't write my book yetbecause I don't have any pencils
or paper.
I have to memorize these things.
But when I finally do write thebook, this is what I'm going to
say in the book.
So this comes across.
(18:40):
I'm going to read thisparagraph here.
This comes across as stoic, butI think it's also sort of
Christian stoicism if there issuch a thing Right which he
makes clear in his laterwritings.
Stoicism if there is such athing Right which he makes clear
(19:01):
in his later writings, andstoicism if there is such a
thing which he makes clear inhis later writings.
So he says how do you bring ithome to them?
By an inspiration, by a vision,a dream.
Brothers, people, why has lifebeen given you?
In the deep, deaf stillness ofmidnight, the doors of the death
(19:26):
cells are being swung open andthe great soul people are being
dragged out to be shot.
If you want, I'll spell it outfor you right now.
Now, this is what I love aboutthis guy, right?
He's not going to wane, lyricalall the time.
He's going to spell it out foryou.
(20:03):
Do not pursue what is illusoryProperty and position, all that
is gained at the expense of yournerves decade after decade, and
is confiscated in one fellnight.
Live with a steady superiorityover life.
Don't be afraid of misfortuneand don't yearn for happiness it
is, after all, all the same.
The bitter never lasts foreverand the sweet never fills the
cup to overflowing.
(20:25):
Rub your eyes and purify yourheart and prize above all else
in the world those who love youand wish you well.
Do not hurt them or scold them,and never part with them in
anger.
After all, you simply do notknow.
(20:47):
It may be the last act beforeyour arrest, but the convoy
guards stroke the black handleson their pistols in their
pockets and we sit there, threein a row sober fellows, quiet
friends.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
That was in the book, right.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
That's in the book.
I quote it.
It's in the first volume of theGolog Archipelago and there's a
funny moment.
The guards are complaining tohim, saying you know, you damn
prisoners, you always you know,we have to send you to these
(21:30):
worst camps and we're the oneswho end up riding in these
trains for 25 hours out toSiberia, trains for 25 hours out
to Siberia.
And Solzhenitsyn says to theguys you know, how can you be
complaining?
You know you're the guys whoare taking me to prison and
you're complaining.
And they say well, you know,you're free to have lunch.
(21:56):
We can only eat, we can't drinkor anything.
So Solzhenitsyn orders himselfa beer when the waiter goes by
and they can't stop him becausethey don't want people to know
they're KGB a beer and theycan't drink beer because they're
(22:20):
on duty, so they have to watchhim drink a beer.
So he's thinking these thoughtsabout what he would say when he
writes the great masterpiecethat's going to make dialectical
materialism obsolete as a worldidea, and drinks his beer,
imagining how great it's goingto be when he finally gets his
pencil and can write thesethings down.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
That is awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
It's so awesome and it's so inspiring because you're
thinking there.
You know we have online allthese you know things about how
to write, you know, and books onhow to write and brainstorming
techniques and everything.
And here's a guy you know.
He just had a story to tell anda faith to express and he
(23:14):
didn't have tricks of the trade.
In fact, all that stuff wasjust more of the problem that he
wanted to pierce with the truthof his experience, and he does
it.
And then, as you know, thelonger you read it, the more
(23:37):
amazing it gets, because this isjust.
This is just the beginning ofthe guy's life and story.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah, so so here's an example.
One thing I was thinking islike everyone knows about the
Holocaust, Like it happened,happened to get like every movie
made about it, Every book,every every bit of awareness.
It's like the russian gulags.
This is almost like the firstI've heard of it when I read
(24:05):
your book oh yeah and it's notlike I didn't know the nazis, I
mean not like I didn't knowstalin and them didn't yeah kill
millions of people.
I found that out, um, you know,later in life, though it wasn't
like in college or anything, Idon't know.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
I don't know if no one was talking about it or what
, but well, yeah, well, thething, the thing about it is
that people talked about it, butthey talked about it in the
abstract, you know, it was sortof like the way we talk about,
uh, prisoners in othertotalitarian countries or even
in our own political prisonersand things.
It seems abstract unless you'rethere or you know someone who
(24:47):
was there, or you get on thetrain with Solzhenitsyn and ride
to the furthest camp in Siberand he takes you into the cells
and what the people say and whatthey're experiencing, yeah.
You got to have that firsthandexperience and that's what
(25:09):
happened with the GulagArchipelago was he won the Nobel
Prize in 1970.
That's really early.
I didn't realize it was thatearly.
I didn't read him until muchlater either, and then when I
read him it was sort of like Imean, what is it?
19 years later, the SovietUnion falls it.
(25:46):
Just the whole.
Yeah, the whole.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
It seems to me like from Like I got the Gulag on
audiobook now and I've beenthrough the intro and the first
chapter of Arrest, and in theintro they talk about how, um,
various communist sympathizerscouldn't really defend it
anymore when they read it.
They're like we don't like thisbook, but now I can't change my
(26:11):
mind.
Now.
It's like it exposed it even tothemselves.
Even the ones that were, likeyou know, defensive about it,
once they read it they were like, yeah, this is not going to
work.
Um, and furthermore, it itseemed that the implications for
the whole soviet union was justa matter of time once that book
(26:33):
got out exactly they did notwant that book to get out, and
it's kind of crazy to think thatone guy kind of almost brought
it down with a pen, pen andpaper or pencil.
Well, it's mythic, I'm surethat's an overstatement, but
it's not too much of anoverstatement because it was so
powerful.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
It's such an exposure into such a secret world.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, an exposure into such a secret world, yeah.
And then the way you know, andthe fact that he went into his
own culpability of it.
You know, he didn't know aboutit either.
He was a soldier on the frontlines fighting the Nazis.
He didn't know that half of theguys who should be fighting the
Nazis were in prisons of theirown country.
(27:18):
It was bizarre.
And then he finds himself thereand it's like, oh my God, this
is worse than I had imagined.
And then his plan on how he wasgoing to fight back by winning
the Nobel Prize, becausePasternak won the Nobel Prize
(27:40):
but the Soviet regime wouldn'tlet him go to accept it and give
the Nobel Prize acceptancespeech because they were afraid
that Pasternak would expose theauthoritarian regime.
And Pasternak didn't go andSolzhenitsyn decided he would
(28:03):
win it and he would write thebook that would expose the
Soviet system, and then he'dleave, then he'd go west because
he couldn't live there anymoreif they, if he had exposed it
that blatantly, which is what hedid, yeah, which is a story in
(28:27):
and of itself yeah, in the bookyou outline that how, how he was
pretty much mad at how how lamepasternak was with his platform
well, yeah, when he won, youknow, he thought well, thought
well, now, gee, you know youshould just go.
You should just go and give thespeech and never come back, and
you'd be the most famous writerin Russian history.
(28:49):
But now I have to do it, nowthat, in and of itself would
make an amazing movie.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Yes, it would be the transition from Pasternak to
Solzhenitsyn.
Yeah, and what they saw andwhat they, what they were
writing about, and and thentheir their own personal, um,
you know, the beef that he had,that that pasternak didn't,
didn't have the courage toexpose everything well, you know
it's.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
It's interesting, the um you mentioned before by I
was.
I'm interested in Thomas Merton, and in the 50s Thomas Merton
corresponded with PasternakBecause Pasternak had just
written Dr Zhivago.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
And it had come out and it was a bestseller.
After the war.
The English translation was abestseller.
After the war.
The English translation was abestseller in 59.
And Khrushchev had replacedStalin.
So Russia was beginning to thaw, a little bit democratic and
compete with the West incultural and in economic ways
(30:03):
rather than in military ways,although it still was the heart
of the Cold War.
So Merton writes a letter toPasternak telling him how much
he liked Dr Zhivago, but thatthe book would be misunderstood
in the West because it's asymbolically spiritual book.
(30:26):
And if I have one bit of adviceabout the response of the West
to your book, it would be don'tlet them make it into a movie,
because if it becomes a movie,everything you say in that novel
(30:46):
will be lost and turned into alove story.
And then they did.
And then they did.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
That is so funny.
Merton said that to him.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Yeah, wow, and because Merton was corresponding
with a Russian, the FBI thoughthe was corresponding with a
communist and so he got an FBIfile.
Oh, wow, entirely of letters towriters, back and forth to
(31:19):
writers, but primarily hisletters to Pasternak and
Pasternak's letters to him, andyou can read them all now.
They're all in print and youknow, and they're funny because
he tries to explain.
You know that this is going tobe put on screens, it's going to
be made into a love story, andeven if they make it a great
(31:41):
love story, they'll misseverything you're talking about,
about dissent against theseauthoritarian ignorances that
are dumbing down our culturesand putting them against one
another and ruining worldcivilization.
And so they had, they hadcommon accord in their uh, in
(32:05):
their spiritual uh, orientations.
But, uh, the movie wasultimately made.
People still like it.
I, I like the movie, but it'snot.
It's not half as good as thebook.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Well, it's not, Probably not what the book was
supposed to be right.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yeah, it wasn't what the book was.
You know, the book had a lotmore passages like the one I
read from Solzhenitsyn of a guywho supported the revolution
being felt like he was betrayedwhen the Bolsheviks took over
and turned it into anauthoritarian regime.
He thought he was overthrowingthe czar to become a more
(32:49):
democratic society and get ridof serfdom and all of that.
And then it turns out that itwas not that at all.
It was, if, if anything, almostthe opposite, and so that's
that's the story you don'treally see highlighted in the
movie.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
That's part of that how did you kind of compile the
other writers?
Was it one by one?
Or did you kind of brainstorm?
Who else would fit what youwere, what you were thinking and
what you even meant bysubversive orthodoxy?
Or did that name come later?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Well, that name came later.
The word that the Soviets, theMarxist critics, had for
Solzhenitsyn was plebian.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Oh yeah, which I never quite knew what that word
meant.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah, well, in the Marxist jargon, a plebeian was
somebody who was working class,who had an understanding, a life
(34:04):
understanding that the systemwas screwing him, but lacked a
political, economic critique asto how to set it right.
So the plebian was sort of anuneducated, mature Marxist yes,
uneducated critic who neededdialectical material.
Do is educate the masses totheir place in history.
(34:27):
And the reason that theplebeians didn't pick up on this
was because they were mostlyreligious, and religion, of
(34:53):
course, for Marx was the opiateof the masses, but he meant that
not necessarily in a bad way.
There are other passages inMarx where he says religion is
the only thing answering theneeds of the plebeians, who
realize that the system thatthey're living in is oppressing
(35:16):
them, but they don't know whatto do.
So it gives them the spiritualtools to survive it and to fight
back with virtue.
And so when I read Solzhenitsyn, I realized well, he's not just
fighting back with virtue, he'sfighting back with a critique.
(35:36):
And I think that's true of allprogressive Christians, and a
lot of them are what theMarxists would have called
plebeians.
They know that they need achange, but they're just not
sure how to change it.
(35:56):
But they're going to find out,like Solzhenitsyn did.
And then I looked around andthere were a lot of them.
There was, like Martin LutherKing, right Progressive
Christian, gandhi, progressiveHindu, lech Waleswesa,
progressive Catholic, that wasnevertheless also a plebeian, a
(36:20):
worker, who wasn't part of theCommunist Party, didn't want to
be part of the Communist Party,didn't think that a materialist
understanding of the world wouldgive him enough of an insight
as to the way power was reallybeing dispersed to really fight
back effectively.
(36:41):
So I went looking for thosepeople and my first book was I
tried to get different religions.
It was called the IgnorantPerfection of Ordinary People,
because that's what the Marxistscalled the plebeians.
They were perfect in theirunderstanding of their place in
history, but ignorant as to howto change it.
(37:05):
But the people that I werelooking at were the religious
people who said well, religionalso gives you a way to fight
back and virtue isn't aspowerless as you think.
Virtue is more powerful thanyou think.
And so I had Gandhi.
I had a chapter on Gandhi, Ihad one on Solzhenitsyn, I had
(37:29):
one on Lech Walesa.
I had one on Elie Wiesel in theprison camps, his Judaism
fighting against the Nazis.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeah, I know that name.
Yeah, and I don't know how tosay it as well as you.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah, yeah, just with a V, like Simone Weil is with a
V, rather it's a W, but there'sa V sound is with a V rather
it's a W, but there's a V sound,yeah, so I think when we go to,
when we go to bonus episodesand we get past the main book
characters.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
I'd like to dig in on Simone Ve, ellie Wiesel and
maybe there's a Frankl oh yeah,victor Frankl yeah, they wrote
about the Holocaust, right yeahthat'd be great if you know all
those.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
You quote Simone Weil a lot.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah, yeah, I like her, but you know, she died when
she was 34.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
other people.
I wonder about you, um, if youknow, like I don't know, I don't
know if your scope is justeverything or what, but do you
know chesterton?
I mean you know chesterton, butI mean I was going to say um
bonhoeffer, and then, and thenflannery o'connor, and her
contribution seems to be fit fitright in well, the subversive
orthodoxy is mostly Christian.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I mean well, it is all Christian.
Some people may quibble aboutthe doctrines of some of these
Christians, you know, but all ofthem considered themselves
Christian and were inspired bythe Christian inspiration and
revelation and messianic promise.
And they were all looking atthe modern world through the
(39:17):
eyes of faith and saying thatthe materialist perspective on
existence doesn't give youenough of a.
I'll use this word againbecause I've used it a lot today
fight back.
That isn't violent, it'sunderstanding.
(39:39):
You know how you can fight backwith truth and with courage and
not necessarily become likeyour oppressor.
You know the model of Christiannonviolent resistance is
(40:00):
powerful.
But then you know, withSolzhenitsyn it's different.
It's the fight back of truthteller.
You know of saying truth topower and winning the Nobel
prize and redoing philosophy andrethinking may, helping people
rethink their place in the world.
That's powerful too.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
And I do have a great quote from Bonhoeffer that I I
took out today that I was goingto read, if you wanted me to do
the intro, but just to get ontape, because who knows if we'll
ever get other things.
I wanted to read you this quotebecause this is from Bonhoeffer
(40:46):
, his letters from prison, whichis even better than his cost of
discipleship, especially if youknow Schultz and Hitson's story
.
You know Bonhoeffer was in aNazi prison, so he's writing
(41:08):
this to his friend and they'retalking about how do you
minister to a world come of agewhich, from their point of view,
was, you know?
How do you give homilies orsermons to a world that has seen
(41:29):
the triumph of Adolf Hitler?
Seen the triumph of AdolfHitler Because they were still
in the war and there was noguarantee that Germany wouldn't
win the war.
In fact, some people, even inthe West, put their money on him
and there were Germanhistorians, philosophers, saying
(41:51):
that Hitler was the next stepin world history and that.
So Bonhoeffer is writing theseletters.
You know sort of like thatquestion that Solzhenitsyn asked
himself.
You know, how do you?
What would you say to thesepeople if you could?
You know what would you say so.
This is at the end of one ofhis letters and he says this is
(42:15):
Dietrich Bonhoeffer from theletters present Living
unreservedly in life's duties,problems, successes and failures
, experiences and perplexities.
In so doing, we throw ourselvescompletely into the arms of God
(42:35):
, taking seriously not our ownsufferings but those of God in
the world, watching with Christin Gethsemane.
That, I think, is faith, thatis metanoia, and that is how one
becomes a Christian.
Now, that's a nice epigram forthese figures, because I would
(43:03):
say very few of them, maybe oneor two, are really academic
theologians.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
I can tell you who is the academic I didn't connect
with.
Yeah, fry, yeah, when I lookedat videos of all these people,
they're all very engaging andFry is about as boring as you
can get.
So I would never havediscovered Fry without you.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Well, I saw an interview with Fry one time with
Bill Moyers, and Bill Moyersthought he was great because he
was the one.
Moyers did all those interviewswith Joseph Campbell right.
So he's trying to get NorthropFrye to be as engaging as Joseph
Campbell, but he's not.
He's just this boring guy andhe's sort of explaining his
(43:52):
ideas and at one point Moyers istrying to get him to speak out
and so he says well, you tell usin your books, you tell us that
literature is deeply involvedin history.
What can you tell us about therole history, the literature,
(44:15):
plays in history?
Tell us about that.
And Fry says to him well, whatis history?
But the phantasmagoria of thehuman imagination?
And that's it.
That was his answer.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Sounds about right.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
And then you got with Solzhenitsyn.
You know, live with a steadysuperiority over life.
You know, look these bastardsin the eye.
You know you have nothing to beashamed of.
You know your problems are yourcourage, you know, and all this
inspirational stuff.
And then you get these guysthat are saying very similar
(44:56):
things, fry, but in a verybookish way and so he's no fry.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Fry will be a comedy episode for me.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
This is the quick, this is the quintessential
professor guy, like like an snlskit character yeah, it gave a
series of talks, one time at theCornerstone Festival in
Bushnell Illinois, theCornerstone Music Festival 250
(45:29):
Jesus Rock bands.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
It ran for about 25 years.
Speaker 3 (45:33):
You had friends that used to go there.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
Yeah, and they had a counterculture tent and they
would bring in guys who'dwritten books like mine and and
talk about things, and so I wasin the counterculture tent for
five days and I gave an hour aday and I had to explain to them
what, what this was all about.
(45:55):
So I have some some riffs on onhow they all fit together.
But it was so funny because Imet some of the most interesting
people in the world in thoselittle corn fields that were all
cut down to make room for like50 stages.
(46:18):
For all these every high schooljesus band, every you know top
singer.
It was something else.
It was amazing, amazing place,but anyway, great talking to you
all right, thank you so muchall right travis great talk to
you soon.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Bye, you know there's something here for all, of
whether you're a skeptic or abeliever or somewhere in between
.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
exploring what this means tohave a life of deep meaning in a
world that feels increasinglyfragmented and dealing with
nihilism.
(46:53):
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
This has been the SubversiveOrthodoxy Podcast with Travis
(47:20):
Mullins and Professor.
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