A second prolific writer and public intellectual has died in the space of a few days. But their lives couldn't have been more different.

One was an avowed atheist in a deeply religious country. The other was decidedly religious in the midst of a formerly Communist (hence, atheist) society.

Of course, I won't expect any of the obituaries proliferating the news and Internet to expound on the philosophical foundations of Vaclav Havel's thinking and action, foundations that had religious convictions at their core.

Such religious convictions drove him to a view of politics and life summarized in the motto that "truth and love will overcome lies and hatred."

I wrote two years ago about Vaclav Havel upon the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. I was learning about him then. I'm still learning now.

Such as this paragraph from his groundbreaking essay, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978), which seems not only prescient but prophetic for our present time. In evocatively describing the de-humanizing tendencies of the bureaucratic dictatorships in Eastern Europe at the time, Havel writes:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

Strikes me as a particularly poignant definition of what we call "ideology." It also seems to go a long way to describe the kind of deadlocked, parochial, impotent politics currently being practiced in the country Christopher Hitchens adopted as his home.

And if we're honest with ourselves, his words go for Republicans and Democrats, independents and libertarians, Occupiers and Tea Partiers, and everyone in between, all alike.

Requiescat in pace, Vaclav Havel. Rest in peace. And may the rest of us inherit your restlessness for "living within the truth."