HE EXTRAORDINARILY DEFENSIVE reaction which followed Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn's celebrated 1978 Harvard commencement address suggests that his remarks touched a nerve in our body politic. Although Solzhenitzyn was speaking to an American audience, his remarks apply more generally to citizens of all modern liberal democracies. He accused such societies of a kind of moral bankruptcy, symptom of which is a decline in courage or a loss of will, which leaves liberal democracies, and United States in particular, incapable of self-defense. Solzhenitzyn's analysis is not a manifestation of any contemporary political disposition, although it is radical in literal sense. He does not see West's moral bankruptcy as a recent or accidental development, and Americans cannot claim to have remedied problem by electing Ronald Reagan and beefing up defense budgets. If Solzhenitzyn is correct, all of us living in liberal democracies are in serious trouble no matter what we spend on defense hardware. But an overwhelming chorus denies validity of charge, or denies that Solzhenitzyn could know us well enough to level it. He is dismissed as a hater of free press and a moralizer who longs for a return to theocracy. Whatever one's reaction to Solzhenitzyn's formulation of issue, it is impossible for thoughtful men and women who reflect on our situation not to share his serious concern about foundations of liberal society. Solzhenitzyn charges that twentieth century's moral poverty is manifest in its shallow and selfish legalism and its rampant devotion to body and material goods, untempered by any notion of duty or self-restraint. It is result, he believes, of a mistake root, at very basis of human thinking in past centuries, that is, in Western view of world. The mistake itself is identified by Solzhenitzyn as anthropocentricity, which is the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. We may restate this to say that, according to Solzhenitzyn, defect of prevailing modern view is its misunderstanding of relationship of man to God. That is, defect is associated with modern understanding of religion. If we seek an answer to his charges, we must thus recognize at outset that center of our concern will be status of piety. Now, it seems to be case that at least some of great thinkers behind modern conception of liberal society believed that most urgent part of their task was to supply a critique of religion. This critique was intended to liberate political life from influence of religious myth or superstition, and from pernicious effects of Christianity in particular,