BRANDS OF CHRISTIANITY

...In American Poetry Review Denise Levertov called him "a Christian of that essential kind that sees in the gospel a powerful revolutionary message" and in that sense President Park has been right to see in him a threat, just as the Soviet government has been right to see a threat in Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Orthodox and Baptists, the Jews, all those whose lives proclaim that man does not live by state-certified bread alone...

...Read Orwell on Stalinism and English liberal academics who tried to make murder and deceit sound like the social equivalents of minor surgery...

...In Commonweal John Lukacs' recent article spoke of Solzhenitsyn's prophetic importance to the West, and in the New Yorker George Steiner pointed out the difference between Solzhenitsyn's view of freedom and that of the liberal West: where the West has come to equate freedom with the right to choose between all possible alternatives, for Solzhenitsyn and other Russian Orthodox thinkers there is no real freedom outside of Christ and the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus...

...In South Korea the Catholic poet Kim Chi Ha has written about a dictator enraged by people whose "fearlessness comes from that cursed Jesus...

...We seem to have forgotten that we have been entrusted with the great task of transforming the world," writes Baraba-nov...

...I refuse to believe that my moralism, my thirst for 'justice,' my dream of founding a heaven on earth, has already resulted in our present-day ocean of tears...

...Christian activism must lead not to a reformation but to a transformation of Christian consciousness and life, and through it to a transformation of the world- Only when we have entered upon this path shall we be able to answer the challenge of godlessness...

...defeat was a bad thing, he told Barbara Walters* and yet he would n>t say, and thank God he didn't, that the U.S...

...The difficulty is not between left and right...

...It must mean not only a breakthrough into eternity, but the presence of eternity in our own tune...

...Only then shall we be able to answer the call of those who are close to the Light, but who are prevented from communing with it by our own negligence and inertia...

...We must speak of what is beyond modernism and conservatism alike, of what is eternally living and absolute in this world of the relative, of what is simultaneously both eternally old and eternally young...

...Before I have even crossed* the threshold of, the Church, I hold her responsible for £ child's tears, not taking the trouble to con-sider that, outside the Church, I will never find a meaning for those tor-tared tears, and so will not even be able to wipe them away...

...Evgeny Barabanov's "The Schism Between the Church and the World makes it clear in the most powerful and Christian terms that the Church has betrayed its mission throughout the world, not only in Russia...

...There has been a recent flurry of* books and articles which indicate a new consciousness, and some of them rode in on the wave of Solzhenitsyn's success...

...So writes the pseudonymous F. Korsakov, in "Russian Destinies," one of the essays in the book...

...We can begin to see Solzhenitsyn better if we see him not as an isolated prophet but as a spokesman for a persecuted prophetic community, and we can begin to understand that community by looking at From Under the Rubble (Little, Brown, $#.95), an anthology edited by Solzhenitsyn, written by people who are suffering for their independence and their Christianity...

...But it is deeper and much more complicated than that...

...Alexander Dolgun's Story-an American in the Gulag (Knopf, $10.00) is one...

...The , Russian phurch looks strange and scary from here, and so we dismiss it as a weird form of nationalism...

...Is this just a matter of anti-Communism becoming respectable again...

...and his statements about Vietnam have been odd:-the U.S...

...There are things here we need to be reminded of...

...It could look that way-a lot of the people who have defended Solzhenitsyn look the other way when President Park imprisons his dissidents- but something else is going on and only a few people have noticed it...

...The reviews of Cardinal Mindzenty's memoirs were surprisingly sympathetic, and not too long ago the late Lionel Trilling dared to write sympathetically of Whittaker Chambers in The New York Review of Books...

...It is between Solzhenitsyn's brand of Christianity and the more frivolous sort we have become used to in the West, the religion of million-dollar churches and theology schools, youth rallies and prayer breakfasts...

...Maybe the world is ready for Orwell at last-not so much the Orwell of 1984 and Animal Farm, as good as those books are, but the Orwell of the essays and book reviews, the decent socialist who was outraged at lies, the denial of the simplest and most important forms of freedom, and the corruption of language which is the necessary tool of the modern state...

...those .who try to escape are apparently culturally aberrant...

...Interviewers who have tried to understand Solzhenitsyn without approaching his Christianity have missed the point...

...In the New York Times you read that the Buddhist faith has been completely stamped out in Tibet, because it was considered decadent by the government-it doesn't matter that 90 percent of the people believed and practiced itand in the same issue North Korea's Kim II Sung takes out a full page ad which is full of the kind of prose you can expect from bureaucrats who have put their minds on automatic pilot, the North Korean equivalents of the men who gave us "protective reaction strike" and "inoperative...

...Some of the same people who object to the prosecution of a skin magazine find it forgivable that a poet who doesn't sing the praises of Caesar is jailed, or if not forgivable it is at least something to be washed away in the great progress the state has made in, say, popular education -even though what people get to read once they learn how will be prose-by-the-yard turned out by government hacks...

...Of course this temptation is not confined to Communist countries alone...

...There are still some incredible people whose response to Soviet or Maoist totalitarianism is to act as if it were all something "they" are prone to culturally, or are willing to accept, culturally...

...Free Angela, remember...

...But free becomes a very slippery word in this company...

...I don't think too many people would argue that Solzhenitsyn more than any one person has helped to clarify these things for us...

...The essays were written for Russian readers-there is, for example, a good criticism of Sakharov by Solzhenitsyn-but if some of it gets too Russian for you, skim it and read on...

...Both get embarrassed, defensive, or evasive when anyone is so gauche as to mention the Soviet persecution of Jews, faithful Christians, and people who think...

...This isn't czarist nostalgia...

...There is an intensity to some of the essays in this book which we are used to see-,ing in very few writers-Berdayev, msrybe, and in the West Pascal or Beroaoos...

...For this and other equally dangerous words he is in prison, in danger of death...

...another is Sanya: My Life with Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Bobbs Merrill, $8.95), by Natalya Reshtovskaya, Solzhenitsyn's embittered first wife...

...Everyone who wonders about the relevance of Christianity to the modern world should read this staggering book...

...Thomas Merton used as an epigraph to one of his books a quotation from Gabriel Marcel: 'Today the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which- almost without being aware of it- so many human beings today have yielded...

...should have used any means to win)-granted this, he still cannot be dismissed as some have dismissed him, as' a left-over from the cold war, a naive Slavophile, an authoritarian anti-democrat...

...It is as revolutionary as the Fathers of the Church, and as new as the gospels...

...Granted that some of his comments on American politics go down the wrong way (his criticism of Ellsberg, for, example, did not contain any hint of a realization that deliberate lying had become government policy...

...It is a criticism of Christians for having accepted the world's definition of religion, a call to abandon false traditions and to assume the daring proper to Christians...