The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of destroying each other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom – in this case, our Earth – divided against itself cannot stand. (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

Notes:

a) Solzhenitsyn is concerned to describe “world powers” which have to do with the “stand” of the whole “Earth”. These multiple world powers with ontological import constitute the gigantomachia. Since these world powers are constitutional, they are “profound” and their shapes are “manifold”.

b) Solzhenitsyn is particularly concerned to describe those seemingly opposed forms of the gigantomachia
which are “split” and whose “profound and … alienating” manifestations are “rifts” which “are more numerous than one can see at first glance.” These are the giants and the gods and and the “manifold” effects of their “interminable battle” throughout the world.

c) Solzhenitsyn cites “the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces.” Where the danger is constitutional and concerns first principle, it can only be reinforced, not obviated, by the attempt to form some of compromise solution on the basis of what has actually gone wrong – allegiance to a certain logic at origin. Much of Solzhenitsyn’s address is given over to the description of this logic. (For the question of ‘ontology’ vs ‘logic’, see notes c) and d) of Live not by lies.)

d) It will be important to observe what rival “power” or fundamental logic Solzhenitsyn suggests over against the powers of the “split”. How is one to find it and to participate in its difficult shape?

The World Split Apart segments continue here.