Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #2: Surviving the Gulag: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.
How do you bring it home to them? By an inspiration, by a vision, a dream? Brothers, people, why has life been given you? In the deep, deaf stillness of midnight, the doors of the death cells are being swung open and the great soul people are being dragged out to be shot.
Speaker 3: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 about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide it's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story, packed with.
Speaker 3:Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in southern Russia, just after the Bolshevik Revolution. His father died before he was born, leaving his mother to raise him alone in a country torn apart by war and poverty. A gifted student, solzhenitsyn excelled in school. Country torn apart by war and poverty. A gifted student, solzhenitsyn excelled in school and became a teacher and a writer. When World War II began, he joined the Red Army, serving as an artillery officer on the front lines. But in 1945, everything changed.
Speaker 3:Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a private letter to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, soviet labor camps designed to crush the human body and spirit and make them compliant. For the first three years he was sent to the brutal labor camps where he hauled heavy loads, endured freezing conditions and watched fellow prisoners die of starvation and abuse. These were years of bitterness and disillusionment. He had been a loyal communist, but the camp stripped away his faith in the Soviet system. In 1948, he was transferred to a special camp for scientists and engineers, where conditions were less harsh. It was there that he began reflecting deeply on his life and on the human condition. His bitterness gave way to introspection. He realized his pride, selfishness and complicity in the system he once supported. By the time of his release in 1953, solzhenitsyn had found a deep, abiding faith in God. He would later write that prison stripped away his illusions and brought him closer to the truth about himself and the world. Bless you, prison, he famously said for having been in my life.
Speaker 3:After his release, he was exiled to a remote village in Kazakhstan where he worked as a teacher. During this time, he secretly began writing about his experiences in the camps. In 1962, his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, revealing the truth about the Gulag to the Soviet public for the first time. The book was a sensation, but it also made him a target of the Soviet authorities. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, solzhenitsyn continued to write in secret, smuggling manuscripts out of the country. His famous work, the Gulag Archipelago, was a sprawling, deeply personal expose of the Soviet labor camp system. It was published in the West in 1973 and caused an international uproar. The Soviet government, furious and humiliated, declared him a traitor.
Speaker 3:In 1974, solzhenitsyn was arrested and exiled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont in the United States, where he continued to write and speak out against communism. For two decades he lived a quiet life, raising his family and producing more works. In 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. He spent his later years reflecting on his homeland's history, culture and spiritual future. Reflecting on his homeland's history, culture and spiritual future. Until his death in 2008, solzhenitsyn remained a voice for truth, freedom and faith. Through his life, faith shaped his resilience, writing became his weapon against tyranny, and his works were rooted in suffering, redemption and courage, and they changed the world. With no further ado, I'd like to bring on Professor Larry. Hi, larry.
Speaker 1:Hi Travis.
Speaker 3:Welcome to our podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:I think you wrote a book that was kind of a sleeper on society. I mean, it's kind of every chapter I read I put about three to five wows in the margins and I say this is so prophetic every time what these authors were saying 50 and a hundred years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's funny. The one of the things I've discovered is that it's very hard for people to read these days. Um, a lot of different things calling for their attention. And these writers, you know they reach you, but you need to have the time to contemplate what they're saying. You know, yeah, you need to be able to really give it the attention that they're asking from you. But once you give them the attention, boy, they pay you back in completely different ways of looking at the world and confirmations of things you've felt 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 a essay for Christian Century on Solzhenitsyn back when I was in graduate school. That was really the seeds of the whole thing, because Solzhenitsyn is kind of a model of somebody who forged a different way of looking at the world he was living in.
Speaker 1:It was just totally antithetical to the Stalinist authoritarian regime and he paid a heavy price for it. But he ended up winning the Nobel Prize and becoming a world-famous writer. But even he, as famous as he is and was, people have a hard time reading because the Gulag, his masterpiece, is three volumes long. Yeah, masterpiece is three volumes long, yeah. And so if and there are, there are alternatives, you can go online and they'll, they'll be a somebody will summarize it in 15 minutes for you, or so they will 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:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you give yourself over to it, you know, if you have the confidence that this is going to be worth the effort, there'll be passages that will just change your world. So once I found that in him, I figured, well, there's probably other Russian dissidents like him that I don't know anything about, or that nobody's told me about, that do a similar thing. And so I started looking for them and it took me back to the classic, you know, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and and uh but uh, looking at him through new eyes, because I saw, basically, them in a new context, and that's what started it. And so then there were other Christian writers.
Speaker 1:I didn't, you know, when Solzhenitsyn first came out, he wasn't really considered a Christian writer, he was considered an anti-Soviet dissident. You know, he was a Soviet dissident who had a kind of high stoicism. High Stoicism, somebody who survived these Russian prison camps in Siberia and wrote about his experiences in those camps. But when I read it I saw clearly this guy is a Christian. It was clear that this was Stoicism at a higher level. I mean, he had a sense of the goodness of life in the midst of these prison camps where he would see these people, you know, turned into animals and their captors, you know, turned into worse animals and he would see God working out his plan in him. And it was just mind blowing, you know it was.
Speaker 1:And I got to before we leave today or tomorrow, whenever we tape these. There are a few passages I wanted just to read from him as an example of the kind of thing these writers have to say that you don't hear very often, for a variety of reasons, and we'll talk about those reasons too how the conversation about faith got taken over by theological issues, as opposed to, you know, living faith, uh accounts and uh dialogue with the culture, which is really where it's at you know, living, living, faith, accounts and dialogue with the culture, rather than, rather than, theological ghettos right, right and and that's, that's okay.
Speaker 3:You just nailed, like, why this book stood out to me. It's like wow, none of these guys are arguing some minutiae point about theology. This is more about just how to be a Christian in the world and how being a Christian critiques the world.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:And not so much in a condemning way, but more in a just, honest way. What is good or bad about what is happening in the culture?
Speaker 1:Yes, revelatory. Yeah, because they that, and that's one of the things they all share is that they convict themselves as much as they convict other people. Yeah, like when solstice and it's in the, the gulag archipelago let me just go there because, since we brought him up, the way it's structured is it starts with his arrest and then he tells you about his arrest, and then he tells you, then he stops, he just stops it there, and then he tells you about the rest of all his friends.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the whole first chapter is called Arrest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then the arrest of all the guys that he met later on in the prison camps and then the history of arresting in the Soviet Stalinist fascist regime, and so you get like a whole chapter or two chapters just on the arrest and then interrogation the first interrogation he had, then all his interrogations, then the interrogations of all his friends, and then the interrogations of all the guys he met in the camp and then the history of interrogations, and so that's why the thing is three volumes long. But while you're reading it there are these moments like the time he got arrested. Let me just tell you this story, because he got arrested and he was fighting in World War II against the Nazis. He was an artillery captain and they found in one of his letters he said something insulting of Stalin. So they charge you with insubordination. And he said that he wasn't being insubordinate, he was just saying what it was like. So they said well, ok, we're going to. You know, we're going to charge you with treason or semi-treason or whatever it was. They charged him and they're going to send him to a reeducation camp. But they didn't have a cell for him, so they wanted him to go home and come back tomorrow.
Speaker 1:So he's talking about walking home to his house, his apartment and seeing all these people that are not going to go to prison tomorrow walking around. And he's thinking you know, do these people know they're free? Do they know that there are people walking among them who, tomorrow, they're going to be thrown 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, if nothing else, I should get on the subway platform and start screaming. I should get on the subway platform and start screaming. There's an injustice in this country. It's being run by this fascist authoritarian who calls himself the king of the people. How can you let this go? And then he says of course, if I did that, nobody would have done anything. They would have just watched as the police put a handcuff on me and take me back to the station. I would have had my two seconds of pleasure acting out being angry. But that's not good enough. And so, somewhere in my mind, I realized I needed to do something more. Mind. I realized I needed to do something more, that my conscience told me I had to go through this in order to expose the lie of this entire system and to write the book that Pasternak never wrote, that he wanted to write, saying that the Russian people had been occupied by an alien political ideology and unless they stood up and spoke back to their leaders, they were going to be subjugated to it, even if they won the war against the Nazis, even if they won the war against the Nazis.
Speaker 1:So he ends up going back, and then that's when he's sent to a prison camp. And he wasn't a good prisoner. He talked back to the guards, he gave people crap, and so he kept getting sent to worse prisons. So they'd say, you know, you, talk back to me. We're going to send you to further east. And he'd say, screw you. And then they'd send him further east and further east. So finally he got to the worst prison camp in the Gulag and they were transporting him to the worst gulag. And he said I hear this is the worst gulag you guys are sending me to. And he goes yeah, this is the worst, everybody says it.
Speaker 3:And he said, well, good, because now you have nothing over me anymore.
Speaker 1:What are you going to do to me? I'm going to the worst prison camp. There's nothing you could do but the part I wanted to read you one. I'm going on too long so you could cut me when you want Travis, but there's a quote here where he's in the train and he's going to from one prison camp to the next.
Speaker 1:This is the only time he got among free people and he's on the train and he's listening to people in the train and everybody's arguing about stuff and complaining. And one guy's arguing that um, telling his friend that they're sending him to this new job and he's going to have to spend three weeks in siberia every month or two uh, and, and what a pain it is. Someone else is complaining about the food on the train and the lack of uh, of effective heaters, and so he's he's being sent off and he's listening to this and he's thinking to himself what would I tell these people about? How lucky they are that they're not being sent into a prison camp, that having to take a job in a city you don't want for two weeks isn't the worst thing that could happen to a human being, and you shouldn't pollute the atmosphere of the train with all this bitching and moaning, right? So he writes this passage. You know well what would I say to these people. I am going to finally tell them what I think of them and me and the world condition here, when I get to write my book. But I can't write my book yet because I don't have any pencils or paper. I have to memorize these things. But when I finally do write the book, this is what I'm going to say in the book. So this comes across. I'm going to read this paragraph here.
Speaker 1:This comes across as stoic, but I think it's also sort of Christian stoicism if there is such a thing Right which he makes clear in his later writings. Stoicism if there is such a thing Right which he makes clear in his later writings, and stoicism if there is such a thing which he makes clear in his later writings. So he says how do you bring it home to them? By an inspiration, by a vision, a dream. Brothers, people, why has life been given you? In the deep, deaf stillness of midnight, the doors of the death cells are being swung open and the great soul people are being dragged out to be shot. If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Now, this is what I love about this guy, right? He's not going to wane, lyrical all the time. He's going to spell it out for you.
Speaker 1:Do not pursue what is illusory Property and position, all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life. Don't be afraid of misfortune and don't yearn for happiness it is, after all, all the same. The bitter never lasts forever and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part with them in anger. After all, you simply do not know. It may be the last act before your arrest, but the convoy guards stroke the black handles on their pistols in their pockets and we sit there, three in a row sober fellows, quiet friends.
Speaker 3:That was in the book, right.
Speaker 1:That's in the book. I quote it. It's in the first volume of the Golog Archipelago and there's a funny moment. The guards are complaining to him, saying you know, you damn prisoners, you always you know, we have to send you to these worst camps and we're the ones who end up riding in these trains for 25 hours out to Siberia, trains for 25 hours out to Siberia.
Speaker 1:And Solzhenitsyn says to the guys you know, how can you be complaining? You know you're the guys who are taking me to prison and you're complaining. And they say well, you know, you're free to have lunch. We can only eat, we can't drink or anything. So Solzhenitsyn orders himself a beer when the waiter goes by and they can't stop him because they don't want people to know they're KGB a beer and they can't drink beer because they're on duty, so they have to watch him drink a beer. So he's thinking these thoughts about what he would say when he writes the great masterpiece that's going to make dialectical materialism obsolete as a world idea, and drinks his beer, imagining how great it's going to be when he finally gets his pencil and can write these things down.
Speaker 3:That is awesome.
Speaker 1:It's so awesome and it's so inspiring because you're thinking there. You know we have online all these you know things about how to write, you know, and books on how to write and brainstorming techniques and everything. And here's a guy you know. He just had a story to tell and a faith to express and he didn't have tricks of the trade. In fact, all that stuff was just more of the problem that he wanted to pierce with the truth of his experience, and he does it.
Speaker 1:And then, as you know, the longer you read it, the more amazing it gets, because this is just. This is just the beginning of the guy's life and story.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so so here's an example. One thing I was thinking is like 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 first I've heard of it when I read your book oh yeah and it's not like I didn't know the nazis, I mean not like I didn't know stalin and them didn't yeah kill millions of people.
Speaker 3:I found that out, um, you know, later in life, though it wasn't like in college or anything, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know if no one was talking about it or what, but well, yeah, well, the thing, the thing about it is that people talked about it, but they talked about it in the abstract, you know, it was sort of like the way we talk about, uh, prisoners in other totalitarian countries or even in our own political prisoners and things. It seems abstract unless you're there or you know someone who was there, or you get on the train with Solzhenitsyn and ride to the furthest camp in Siber and he takes you into the cells and what the people say and what they're experiencing, yeah.
Speaker 1:You got to have that firsthand experience and that's what happened with the Gulag Archipelago was he won the Nobel Prize in 1970. That's really early. I didn't realize it was that early. I didn't read him until much later either, and then when I read him it was sort of like I mean, what is it? 19 years later, the Soviet Union falls it. Just the whole. Yeah, the whole.
Speaker 3:It seems to me like from Like I got the Gulag on audiobook now and I've been through the intro and the first chapter of Arrest, and in the intro they talk about how, um, various communist sympathizers couldn't really defend it anymore when they read it. They're like we don't like this book, but now I can't change my mind. Now. It's like it exposed it even to themselves. Even the ones that were, like you know, defensive about it, once they read it they were like, yeah, this is not going to work.
Speaker 3:Um, and furthermore, it it seemed that the implications for the whole soviet union was just a matter of time once that book got out exactly they did not want that book to get out, and it's kind of crazy to think that one guy kind of almost brought it down with a pen, pen and paper or pencil. Well, it's mythic, I'm sure that's an overstatement, but it's not too much of an overstatement because it was so powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's such an exposure into such a secret world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, an exposure into such a secret world, yeah. And then the way you know, and the fact that he went into his own culpability of it. You know, he didn't know about it either. He was a soldier on the front lines fighting the Nazis. He didn't know that half of the guys who should be fighting the Nazis were in prisons of their own country. It was bizarre. And then he finds himself there and it's like, oh my God, this is worse than I had imagined.
Speaker 1:And then his plan on how he was going to fight back by winning the Nobel Prize, because Pasternak won the Nobel Prize but the Soviet regime wouldn't let him go to accept it and give the Nobel Prize acceptance speech because they were afraid that Pasternak would expose the authoritarian regime. And Pasternak didn't go and Solzhenitsyn decided he would win it and he would write the book that would expose the Soviet system, and then he'd leave, then he'd go west because he couldn't live there anymore if they, if he had exposed it that blatantly, which is what he did, yeah, which is a story in and of itself yeah, in the book you outline that how, how he was pretty much mad at how how lame pasternak was with his platform well, yeah, when he won, you know, he thought well, thought well, now, gee, you know you should just go.
Speaker 1:You should just go and give the speech and never come back, and you'd be the most famous writer in Russian history. But now I have to do it, now that, in and of itself would make an amazing movie.
Speaker 3:Yes, it would be the transition from Pasternak to Solzhenitsyn. Yeah, and what they saw and what they, what they were writing about, and and then their their own personal, um, you know, the beef that he had, that that pasternak didn't, didn't have the courage to expose everything well, you know it's.
Speaker 1: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 Pasternak Because Pasternak had just written Dr Zhivago.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it had come out and it was a bestseller. After the war. The English translation was a bestseller. After the war. The English translation was a bestseller in 59. And Khrushchev had replaced Stalin. So Russia was beginning to thaw, a little bit democratic and compete with the West in cultural and in economic ways rather than in military ways, although it still was the heart of the Cold War. So Merton writes a letter to Pasternak telling him how much he liked Dr Zhivago, but that the book would be misunderstood in the West because it's a symbolically spiritual book. And if I have one bit of advice about the response of the West to your book, it would be don't let them make it into a movie, because if it becomes a movie, everything you say in that novel will be lost and turned into a love story. And then they did.
Speaker 1:And then they did.
Speaker 3:That is so funny. Merton said that to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, and because Merton was corresponding with a Russian, the FBI thought he was corresponding with a communist and so he got an FBI file. Oh, wow, entirely of letters to writers, back and forth to writers, but primarily his letters to Pasternak and Pasternak's letters to him, and you can read them all now. They're all in print and you know, and they're funny because he tries to explain. You know that this is going to be put on screens, it's going to be made into a love story, and even if they make it a great love story, they'll miss everything you're talking about, about dissent against these authoritarian ignorances that are dumbing down our cultures and putting them against one another and ruining world civilization. And so they had, they had common accord in their uh, in their spiritual uh, orientations. But, uh, the movie was ultimately made. People still like it. I, I like the movie, but it's not. It's not half as good as the book.
Speaker 3:Well, it's not, Probably not what the book was supposed to be right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it wasn't what the book was. You know, the book had a lot more passages like the one I read from Solzhenitsyn of a guy who supported the revolution being felt like he was betrayed when the Bolsheviks took over and turned it into an authoritarian regime. He thought he was overthrowing the czar to become a more democratic society and get rid of serfdom and all of that. And then it turns out that it was not that at all. It was, if, if anything, almost the opposite, and so that's that's the story you don't really see highlighted in the movie.
Speaker 3: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 you were, what you were thinking and what you even meant by subversive orthodoxy? Or did that name come later?
Speaker 1:Well, that name came later. The word that the Soviets, the Marxist critics, had for Solzhenitsyn was plebian.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, which I never quite knew what that word meant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, in the Marxist jargon, a plebeian was somebody who was working class, who had an understanding, a life understanding that the system was screwing him, but lacked a political, economic critique as to how to set it right.
Speaker 1:So the plebian was sort of an uneducated, mature Marxist yes, uneducated critic who needed dialectical material. Do is educate the masses to their place in history. And the reason that the plebeians didn't pick up on this was because they were mostly religious, and religion, of course, for Marx was the opiate of the masses, but he meant that not necessarily in a bad way. There are other passages in Marx where he says religion is the only thing answering the needs of the plebeians, who realize that the system that they're living in is oppressing them, but they don't know what to do. So it gives them the spiritual tools 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's fighting back with a critique. And I think that's true of all progressive Christians, and a lot of them are what the Marxists would have called plebeians. They know that they need a change, but they're just not sure how to change it. But they're going to find out, like Solzhenitsyn did.
Speaker 1:And then I looked around and there were a lot of them. There was, like Martin Luther King, right Progressive Christian, gandhi, progressive Hindu, lech Waleswesa, progressive Catholic, that was nevertheless also a plebeian, a worker, who wasn't part of the Communist Party, didn't want to be part of the Communist Party, didn't think that a materialist understanding of the world would give him enough of an insight as to the way power was really being dispersed to really fight back effectively. So I went looking for those people and my first book was I tried to get different religions. It was called the Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People, because that's what the Marxists called the plebeians. They were perfect in their understanding of their place in history, but ignorant as to how to change it.
Speaker 1:But the people that I were looking at were the religious people who said well, religion also gives you a way to fight back and virtue isn't as powerless as you think. Virtue is more powerful than you think. And so I had Gandhi. I had a chapter on Gandhi, I had one on Solzhenitsyn, I had one on Lech Walesa. I had one on Elie Wiesel in the prison camps, his Judaism fighting against the Nazis.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know that name. Yeah, and I don't know how to say it as well as you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, just with a V, like Simone Weil is with a V, rather it's a W, but there's a 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 episodes and we get past the main book characters.
Speaker 3: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 yeah that'd be great if you know all those.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You quote Simone Weil a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I like her, but you know, she died when she was 34.
Speaker 3:other people. I wonder about you, um, if you know, like I don't know, I don't know if your scope is just everything or what, but do you know chesterton? I mean you know chesterton, but I mean I was going to say um bonhoeffer, and then, and then flannery o'connor, and her contribution seems to be fit fit right in well, the subversive orthodoxy is mostly Christian.
Speaker 1:I mean well, it is all Christian. Some people may quibble about the doctrines of some of these Christians, you know, but all of them considered themselves Christian and were inspired by the Christian inspiration and revelation and messianic promise. And they were all looking at the modern world through the eyes of faith and saying that the materialist perspective on existence doesn't give you enough of a. I'll use this word again because I've used it a lot today fight back. That isn't violent, it's understanding. You know how you can fight back with truth and with courage and not necessarily become like your oppressor. You know the model of Christian nonviolent resistance is powerful. But then you know, with Solzhenitsyn it's different. It's the fight back of truth teller. You know of saying truth to power and winning the Nobel prize and redoing philosophy and rethinking may, helping people rethink their place in the world. That's powerful too.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I do have a great quote from Bonhoeffer that I I took out today that I was going to read, if you wanted me to do the intro, but just to get on tape, because who knows if we'll ever get other things. I wanted to read you this quote because this is from Bonhoeffer, his letters from prison, which is even better than his cost of discipleship, especially if you know Schultz and Hitson's story. You know Bonhoeffer was in a Nazi prison, so he's writing this to his friend and they're talking about how do you minister to a world come of age which, from their point of view, was, you know? How do you give homilies or sermons to a world that has seen the triumph of Adolf Hitler? Seen the triumph of Adolf Hitler Because they were still in the war and there was no guarantee that Germany wouldn't win the war. In fact, some people, even in the West, put their money on him and there were German historians, philosophers, saying that Hitler was the next step in world history and that.
Speaker 1:So Bonhoeffer is writing these letters. You know sort of like that question that Solzhenitsyn asked himself. You know, how do you? What would you say to these people if you could? You know what would you say so. This is at the end of one of his letters and he says this is Dietrich Bonhoeffer from the letters present Living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in the world, watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith, that is metanoia, and that is how one becomes a Christian. Now, that's a nice epigram for these figures, because I would say very few of them, maybe one or two, are really academic theologians.
Speaker 3:I can tell you who is the academic I didn't connect with. Yeah, fry, yeah, when I looked at videos of all these people, they're all very engaging and Fry is about as boring as you can get. So I would never have discovered Fry without you.
Speaker 1:Well, I saw an interview with Fry one time with Bill Moyers, and Bill Moyers thought he was great because he was the one. Moyers did all those interviews with Joseph Campbell right. So he's trying to get Northrop Frye to be as engaging as Joseph Campbell, but he's not. He's just this boring guy and he's sort of explaining his ideas and at one point Moyers is trying to get him to speak out and so he says well, you tell us in your books, you tell us that literature is deeply involved in history. What can you tell us about the role history, the literature, plays in history? Tell us about that. And Fry says to him well, what is history? But the phantasmagoria of the human imagination? And that's it. That was his answer.
Speaker 3:Sounds about right.
Speaker 1:And then you got with Solzhenitsyn. You know, live with a steady superiority over life. You know, look these bastards in the eye. You know you have nothing to be ashamed of. You know your problems are your courage, you know, and all this inspirational stuff. And then you get these guys that are saying very similar things, fry, but in a very bookish way and so he's no fry.
Speaker 3:Fry will be a comedy episode for me.
Speaker 1:This is the quick, this is the quintessential professor guy, like like an snl skit character yeah, it gave a series of talks, one time at the Cornerstone Festival in Bushnell Illinois, the Cornerstone Music Festival 250 Jesus Rock bands.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:It ran for about 25 years.
Speaker 3:You had friends that used to go there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they had a counterculture tent and they would bring in guys who'd written books like mine and and talk about things, and so I was in the counterculture tent for five days and I gave an hour a day and I had to explain to them what, what this was all about. So I have some some riffs on on how they all fit together. But it was so funny because I met some of the most interesting people in the world in those little corn fields that were all cut down to make room for like 50 stages.
Speaker 1:For all these every high school jesus 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 much all right travis great talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Bye, you know there's something here for all, of whether you're a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between. With some deconstruction journey, we're going to be exploring what this means to have a life of deep meaning in a world that feels increasingly fragmented and dealing with nihilism. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and share this with anyone who might find these conversations meaningful. This has been the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast with Travis Mullins and Professor. World's got more.