Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli

In 1970, Russian writer and activist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Stripped of his freedom, he had spent eight years in prisons and forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Prize because he had made the world aware of the dehumanizing and repressive measures of the communist state.

On June 8, 1978, four years after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union, he gave the Commencement Address at Har­vard University. Everyone was excited. Solzhenitsyn had taken up residence in America, where there is the rule of law to guarantee individual rights, where there is the freedom to speak, and where the state exists to serve the people.

As he rose to the podium to deliver his address, students and professors, visitors and the media anxiously awaited his denunciation of the lack of freedom, the disregard of individual rights and the exaltation of the state over the individual under communism. He certainly did not disappoint them when he acknowledged that our country is founded on the principle that the government exists to serve the people. But then he shocked his audience when he went on not to extol, but to excoriate our society.

In past decades, there has been such technological and social progress, he said, that every citizen has the opportunity to accumulate material goods, money and leisure to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. But there is a downside to such prosperity.

The more individuals have to enjoy, the less likely they are inclined to renounce their pleasure and their enjoyment for the common good. With disappointment, Solzhenitsyn looked at America and at our legal system that has moved to canonize liberty at any cost.

So extreme and unbalanced has our legal system become that, in 1992, the Supreme Court said, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, of the mystery of life” (Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992). This is the most asocial, amoral and atheistic definition ever issued by the high court. There is no room for others. It is only what I want, what I understand, or what I say is right.

Tragically, in this understanding of freedom, there is no room not only for others, but no room for the Other. God has no place in such a view. His law is of no concern for the individual. We fashion our laws according to our values.

Today, we are so concerned with the enjoyment of unlimited freedom that our laws have made it a priority to protect individual rights without regard, in some cases, for the common good. But laws that guarantee unlimited liberty are not the final solution to a good society. Solzhenitsyn summarized this thought in his oft-quoted remark:

“I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”

Solzhenitsyn counseled us not to be so wrapped up in the exercise of our legal rights that we no longer uphold our moral obligations. He said that we were becoming so interested in what life had to offer the individual that we forget the other.

As we enter upon a new year, it is good to recall some fundamental truths. First, the world is wider than ourselves. Second, the unrestrained pursuit of our own comfort and pleasure is not the goal of life. Third and most importantly, God who does exist and cares for all of us calls us to love one another, as he loves us. Charity is the soul of liberty; and love of others, the way to love God.