Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life? (Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Commencement Address At Harvard, June 8, 1978)

Notes:

a) “Expansion” is the principle of both the giants and the gods. Both want to expand indefinitely at the expense of the other. What Solzhenitsyn terms “spiritual development” takes place, by contrast, through the acknowledgement of limits and boundaries and the subsequent refusal of “expansion”.

b) Our spiritual life can and should be “integral”, exactly and only because origin is first of all “integral” and “complete”.

The World Split Apart segments continue here.