If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era. (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

Notes:

a) At the end of his address, Solzhenitsyn returns to the need for a “turn”, for a “major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance”. This “watershed” or “turn” will take place, he thinks, not in the usual course of history, but at “a new height” or “a new level”. This “new level” is the gigantomachia. The first part of the turn must be made from history to it.

b) But within the gigantomachia, the turn must be completed by a crossing over to Plato’s child ‘holding to both’. The logic of the giants and the gods must be left behind for the third position where both are possible together: “where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages [as advocated by the Olympic gods], but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era” [as advocated by the titanic giants].