Many Russians and much of the American Left still do not like to admit that millions were butchered in horrific camps in the name of secularism. Solzhenitsyn would not pretend that secularism in Russia was "hijacked" by the wicked Stalin, a distinction that may have made him more acceptable to the Western leftists who wanted to preserve some of their childhood ideals.

Lenin, Solzhenitsyn said, was a butcher like Stalin. Solzhenitsyn told the truth and many wanted to hate him for it, but the monstrous butcher bill from the Soviet Union grew too great even for them. His stupendous gift with words, the equal to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, forced him to the attention of the world.

In the West those opposed to communism, on the left and the right, welcomed his genius, until the prophet turned his clear eye on them.

Some Western secularists, libertine materialists, made the mistake of assuming that any enemy of their Soviet enemy was their friend. Solzhenitsyn was opposed to cultural degeneracy in Soviet and Western guises. A culture of consumption and an age which assumed that the ability to do a thing meant that it should be done had no place for excellence or the carefully cultivated soul. Solzhenitsyn saw plainly that much of what we called progress was what most people at most times would have called rotting from the head down.

Secular Harvard gave him a prize, but he made the mistake of thinking Harvard wanted his best thinking at a commencement. I will never forget talking to a witness of that event so infuriated by it that he was still shaking with rage years later.

Though our generation claims to adore authenticity such boldness was too authentic. His books were too long and difficult, so people quit reading them, but have learned to blame the author for their functional illiteracy. It grew fashionable to say that Solzhenitsyn had done his job and that his time was past. Certainly he was imperfect, too apt to ramble and though no anti-Semite, he was often insensitive to Jewish issues and concerns.

He was hated and ignored less for the forgivable imperfections of a man born in 1918 who suffered tortures and exile, but more for the way he insisted that humanity live up to the ideals of the gospel. He wanted men to be as good as they could be, as free as they could be, and as happy as they could be. He was not deluded, ever, by Utopian fantasy. He saw through the delusions of the right and the left and so angered ideologues who thought that Old Russia could easily be restored or that a New Secular Man (either in the Soviet or Western style) would be anything but old man made even more miserable.

In the end, it was less that Solzhenitsyn was a man of the past, than that he was a man of a better future living in a twenty-first century still caught in the backwash of 1914-1918. We have yet to escape the horrors and deceptions that began in World War I. Solzhenitsyn lived in his heart and mind in a world that was ruled by Christ.

Like Jeremiah, he died in the hands of men who could not understand his last words to them. The Biblical and the Russian prophet both live now in a world that is perfect. Their jeremiads can end. They can at last see perfection. They were never men of their age, thank God, but they are the men of the Age to Come.