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Georgii P.
Fedotov
BERDYAEV -- THE THINKER
[Translated by Fr. Stephen Janos*]
On 24 March 1948 at his home in Clarmart near Paris died
Nicholas Alexandrovich Berdyaev -- a distinguished Russian
religious philosopher. Russian society was little attentive
to the workings of his sharp and untiring thought. It
responded most force fully of all against his political
attacks often surprisingly and paradoxically. Comparatively
few had the pleasure to know and to love him as a man. But
all the world knew Berdyaev as a religious philosopher. In
Europe and in America he was warmly esteemed moreso than
among the Russian emigration or finally even Russia itself.
Probably since Berdyaev -- with his philosophy of
personalism, freedom and creativity -- was spiritually
connected more with the West than with Russia; but at the
same time he carried within himself many precious elements
of the Russian world-view (via Dostoievsky, Khomyakov, Vl
Solovyov) which manifest to the West a new revelation. The
West erred, finally, in regarding Berdyaev as a typical
expression of Russian Orthodoxy -- this continued
misunderstanding troubled even Berdyaev himself. But we
would be criminally unjust in ignoring this great Russian
thinker, a writer not of school-books nor academic
dissertations, but pages full of living (the fashionable
term existential) meaningful insights -- directed to each
person. Berdyaev wrote heatedly, often in conflict on
several fronts, not fearing exaggerations nor
contradictions."Spiritual shining is not without suffering"
he once said in the last of his books. The encountering of
these contradictions would further suggest denying the unity
of his thought. But this impression is completely mistaken.
The contradictions accumulate at the surface, in his
reactions, moreso rather than in his convictions. He remains
true to his fundamental living intuition, which coalesced
into an entire metaphysical world-view already in his first
significant books: "The Philosophy of Freedom" (1911) and
"The Meaning of Creativity" (1916).
Berdyaev in his youth had many teachers, quite far apart and
dissimilar. Among western "fathers" it is sufficient to name
Jakob Boehme and Kant, Marx and Nietzsche. His combining of
these incompatible figures spun off thought in an eclectic
synthesis. Their incompatibility he reconciled but possibly
modified -- molded in personal experience into a completely
new and original world-outlook. Such was Berdyaev's
philosophy: hostile to every systematism, unusually radical
both in expression and in essence, but issuing forth from an
unity of living and moral experience. This unity we too
shall try to ascertain in a few most distinct and solid
directions. The personal living intuition of Berdyaev -- was
of a pervasive sense of evil ruling in the world. With this
intuition he carries on the tradition of Dostoievsky (Ivan
Karamazov), but also that of the Russian revolutionary
intelligentsia, with which he likewise shattered spears
during the first years of his idealist confession (the "Vekhi/Signposts"
period). The struggle with evil -- a revolutionary-chivalrant
posture in relation to the world --distinguishes Berdyaev
from many of the thinkers of the Russian Orthodox
renaissance. Neither humility towards nor an aesthetic
acceptance of the world as a Divine all-unity (the basis of
Russian "sophiology") -- but rather a struggle with the
world in the image of our nature, social and human,
constitutes the nerve-base of his creativity. Berdyaev
almost always needed to find himself repelled by some
particular lie or other, in order to examine its truth. He
openly declared himself a dualist. Monism, to which the
majority of philosophers -- especially the Russian -- are
inclined, was always alien to him. This is why he
immediately repudiated Plato, and to the end remained
faithful to Kant, in spite of all the striking dissimilarity
of their spiritual types. Between the true world
"things-in-themselves" and the world of appearances there
mustneeds be an abyss for which to enable Berdyaev to
believe in the Divine origin of the world. The Manichaean
(or Marcionistic) temptation of an evil god-creator was once
to tempt him. He persevered through in his own studies about
the fall-into-sin. Very much radically like a Calvinist, but
with this antithetically so in almost everything from him.
The consequences of sin impressed themselves strongly upon
Berdyaev -- not in man, but rather in nature. Berdyaev saw
natural evil not only in the fierce struggle for existence,
in suffering and in death, but in the fact itself of
necessity, of non-freedom, which comprises the essence of
the matter. Man, with his possibility of spiritual freedom,
is flung into the blind mechanistic world, which enslaves
and destroys him. In the final years of his life, having
become familiarised with the philosophy of German
existentialism, Berdyaev intensified his world-negativity.
Evil -- is in the objectification itself of the world, in
that what presents itself to us as a collection of things or
objects. But this is an evil nightmare of our sinful sleep.
Authentically there are only subjective realities, ie. free
spirits. Liberation from the power of the world or of things
comprises the value of human life.
Because of his strong sense of world evil Berdyaev was not
able to admit of any optimistic theodicy. God is not the
autocratic ruler of the world. The very thought itself,
making God responsible for evil, inevitably provoked in
Berdyaev a promethean revolt. He preferred atheism --
militant in the name of justice and compassion, rather than
faith in an all-powerful Providence. Berdyaev believes in
God, Who having created the world, puts off from Himself the
all-powerfulness for the sake of the freedom of creatures --
even if this freedom proves itself harmful. The Love of God
is in this, that He shares in the suffering of mankind which
has evilly abused its freedom. Through the Incarnation and
Passion God makes love possible in man's answer to Him. But
God is not without power. He acts in the world through man,
inspiring him, sending him His Grace. But this grace does
not manifest itself irresistibly. Man is able to reject it
or to follow after it. But without it, without God man has
fallen powerless, and his deeds are without hope. This truth
Berdyaev stressed emphatically during the period of his
youthful struggle with the atheistic intelligentsia.
Berdyaev believed in the co-operation /synergia of God and
man, in God-manhood -- the concept of which he learned from
Vl. Solovyov. Berdyaev speaks about the Kingdom of God as
about an ultimate ideal, but the Kingdom is built up not
only by God, but also by the efforts of man. Thus the
religious philosophy of Berdyaev structures itself not only
upon the teaching about God, but likewise the teaching about
man: about the anthropologic in theologic thought.
The immense religious significance of man -- is in this,
that he, in spite of his having fallen, has within himself a
divine origin "the image of God", which sojourns there in
his spirit, in his "I", in his person. His bodily and
soulful existence is immersed in the world of fallen nature
and is enslaved by it; but his spirit or personhood remains
the bearer of freedom. Berdyaev does not despise the body in
the manner of the Platonists -- where the body constitutes
an organ of the soul, for the purpose of expressing itself
to the outside. However, in distinction from contemporary
sophiologists, the interest of Berdyaev is concentrated on
the spirit of man. Four basic concepts, mutually interwoven
in the form of various aspects of one idea, define the
religious theme of Berdyaev: Personality, Spirit, Freedom
and Creativity. Not without reason do some of his important
books bear the titles: "The Meaning of Creativity",
"Philosophy of the Free Spirit", "About the Destiny of Man".
Personality in the thought of Berdyaev is radically distinct
from individuality -- as a self-imaged clumsy combination of
features. Individuality or the individual belong to the
natural world and share in slavery and death with it.
Berdyaev is an enemy of individualism, of world-building
according to bourgeois standards, but he loves to describe
his philosophy as personalism. This terminology, probably of
German origin, has been transplanted into France under the
influence namely of Berdyaev and his French disciples. In
the English language its coursings stumble against major
difficulties.
Personality is the spiritu-creative and free
source-principle in man. Reputed as difficult, the
definition of spirit is in that of the schools, where it is
set over against soul. Berdyaev does not give a definition.
He sets spirit in contrast to soulful-bodily man as the
source of freedom in the realm of necessity. But he does not
restrict spirit to its manifestations in religious life.
Knowledge, art, human relationship -- these all are spheres
of spirituality. Where there is spirit, there is freedom.
But it is only freedom that reigns in the Kingdom of God. In
our life it permits of luminous moments, and breakings-forth
from the natural world. In the struggle with natural slavery
man has God as guide and inspirer. But his freedom also is
preserved in the relationship to God. Revelation Berdyaev
recognises not as an external authority, but as a freely
chosen path, in agreement with experience and the supreme
needs of personality. Berdyaev does not want to be in
slavery to God, and all slave-like forms of divine-worship
are to him alien and even abhorrent.
For the metaphysical foundations of such freedom Berdyaev
posits an original theory, in part borrowed from Jacob
Boehme, a German mystic of the XVI-XVIIth Centuries.
According to Boehme, there is something ontologically more
primordial, than God. Divinity, the Divine world is more
primordial than the personal God, and the Abyss (Ungrund) is
more primordial than Divinity. This Abyss contains within
itself all possibility, like Aristotelian matter. For
Berdyaev, however, it is pure freedom. In other words,
freedom is not created by God, but He Himself is born (not
in the order of time) from freedom and from this freedom,
from this Something, which potentially contains within
itself All, He creates the world. From there to the
foundation of the world and of man lies freedom, and it is
freedom not only for good but also for evil. This idea of
Boehme bears Berdyaev another service: it explains the
presence of evil in the world, ie. it makes theodicy
possible; it also defines the freedom of man not only in
relation to the world, but also to God. But such a concept
of freedom is difficultly to be conformed with the Christian
thinking of God as Absolute Being. We have here a matter
with the most vunerable point in the philosophy of Berdyaev.
But just as original is Berdyaev's concept of creativity.
This creativity is the purpose to the life of man upon the
earth -- that for which God created him. The fall-into-sin
does not abrogate his calling, since it preserves his
freedom. If Christianity is a religion of salvation, then
this salvation is through creativity, and not only through
ascetic cleansing from sin. Sometimes however, Berdyaev sets
creativity opposite to salvation or saintliness as another
path in life. Not denying the need for ascesis as a means of
self-discipline, he is opposed to its over-estimation, which
from means makes it into an end-value. Even a sinful man is
able to create. Sin distorts all human creativity, but does
not remove its value. All Platonic-derived systems of ethics
and aesthetics, ie. idealist systems, see the concept of
creativity in discerning and following after the divine
prototypes or Ideas, lying within the fabric of the created
world. Reacting against Realism (Naturalism) -- which seeks
a mimicking in nature or life, Idealism however limits all
human creativity to a mimicking, or reproducing of the
already given, or concealed in the world of Ideas. Berdyaev
is determined to assert that in creativity is the
possibility of something new, ie, new even for God. God
wants from man the continuation of His creation, and because
of this has given to man a creative basis (His image). In
this is the meaning of all the tragic experiment, by which
creation reveals to God its free existence. Sin makes
impossible not creativity, but rather its fulfillment. All
creativity, under the conditions of the fallen world, is
doomed to failure. And chief among these failures, according
to Berdyaev, is the objectification of the creative act, ie.
the transforming of it into a product or thing, subordinate
to the law of necessity. A book, a painting, even a symphony
-- is dusty and burdened down with the weight of the world:
only remotely do they conform to the creative vision about
perfectly free thought and life. Even more objectified, ie.
our unfree endeavours in the social institutions fashioned
by mankind. The creative fire chills down into lava, which
itself makes an hindrance for creativity. This means that
for Berdyaev it is a valuing of the creative act, and not of
its result -- not the "product" of art or thought. From this
it is obvious, that he is an enemy even of the tendency for
stylistic perfection: an enemy to every classicism. Pushkin
does not find a spot in his "Russian Idea". This disregard
for perfectness explains also the writing style of Berdyaev
himself. The enemy of every system, not believing in the
possibility of thought which is free from contradiction,
Berdyaev strives to preserve in his writings as might be
possible the full freedom of his boiling, agitated thought.
And needless to say, he does not stoop to demonstrations.
Like the French poet Peguy, he rushes everything to a
certain new expression the concept of which, not having been
explicated among the generally-given, he hurls off to thread
in and anew he returns to it. He is a master of adept
picturesque expressions, but often they drown amidst the
rough drafts. We however have premonitions of a lustrous
writer's gift -- untidy like an old Russian garden,
overgrown with weedy grass.
Inevitably unsuccessful, the doomed failure of all human
creativity Berdyaev terms its eschatology. This is an
indication of the end, the finite boundary, the mortality of
the world and of man. But the end is not final, the failure
is not terminal. God saves the creativity of man and
resuscitates him beyond the bounds of history, in the
Kingdom of God. It is easy and tempting to inscribe Berdyaev
within the lineage of spiritual anarchists. But this
inclusion would be mistaken.
Understandably, interesting persons for him are always on
the pathway of society. And he passed on through the
temptation of Stirner. For him as a socialist, and not
without the help of Khomyakov, it became apparent that
personality is not able to realise itself in separation from
another "I". Solitude signifies for it dessication and ruin.
I discover myself through the Thou. And not only in the
romantic confluence of two, but also in We, as the free
interaction of the many. Berdyaev readily adheres to
Khomyakov's teaching about Sobornost', as the resolution of
the conflict between the individual and the collective in
social action, love and consciousness. Most of all however,
he pointed out the pitfall threatening personality in its
emergence onto the social plane. This is the pitfall of
objectification, the education of the institutions, of
chilled-down forms in place of real (existential)
communality. Affirming communality, Berdyaev leads into the
struggle with society. "Social" for him generally implies a
vicious idea. Apart from all the sin and wickedness by which
social life is burdened, even the very character of the
social, as something commonly vulgar, is vicious. The
strongest of all the sinfulness of society manifests itself
in the state -- in all of them, and not only the in the
tyrannous. But even in marriage is prosaic dullness
extinguishing love. And the Church, as an institution, is a
social objectification, ie. the deformation of the Church as
communality in Spirit and in love. Berdyaev during the
course of his own dutiful Christian life never ceased to
expose the sins of the historical church, just like the sins
of the state. He saw this as mainly a prophet-like or
"prophetic" -- as he loved to say somewhat modestly --
service. He considered among prophetic literature his own
philosophic publications, particularly "Sub Species
Aeternitatis". Refraining from the vocation of theology,
together with the hint of disrepute attaching to theology
itself, he possessed the lofty consciousness of a Christian
prophet in the expose' and style of contemporary journalism.
In all of this is comprised his social service to the
Church.
Contending with sociality, Berdyaev remained a socialist his
whole life. He was never an orthodox Marxist, however, since
he was never a materialist. But even with Marx his break was
neither complete nor final. In the emigration he gradually
returned to the teachings of his youth. In Marx he valued
first of all his critique of the capitalist system,
ruthlessly exposing its masks and fictions. But he also saw
in this inclinations of humanism, struggling against the
dehumanisation of the machine labourer and the impersonal
regime of ownership. The publication of the early
pre-Marxist writings of Marx assisted not a little
consolidating this examination into Marx as an humanist --
leading Berdyaev to forget sometimes, how much Marx himself
contributed to the depersonalisation and mechanisation of
the proletariat and workers movement.With Berdyaev socialism
displays comparatively little pity or caritative-love
motifs. Or otherwise even it prudently hides behind the
indignation against the exploitation of man. The
significance of the socialist movement for Berdyaev -- is in
the liberation of personality in the classless society.
Personality here also is at the forefront, and his socialism
Berdyaev proposes to term personalism. Against the etat/statism
of Marx or his disciples, Berdyaev sometimes proposed the
communal or co-operative socialism of Proudhon, giving
personality a greater guarantee of freedom. But possibly
there is yet another motif, itself strong and personal in
the socialist complex of Berdyaev: his dislike for the
bourgeoise. This dislike was not so much directed against
the bourgeoise as the ruling class in contemporary society,
as rather against it as a psychological type: against
"bourgeois" in the French meaning of the word -- a petty
avaricious hedonist, having lost both faith in all the noble
values and any aptitude for heroic virtues. The attitude of
Berdyaev towards the bourgeoise has nothing in common with
the envy of the proletariat. It is closer to the distaste of
the painter, the bohemian, but in it is something also of
the gentry disdain towards the brazen-upstart, the
petty-shopkeeper, which replaces the noble-born gentlemanly
type: having for itself nothing of a moral justification. In
the socialism of Berdyaev there is yet much of the
gentleman, like in the anarchism of Tolstoi. Berdyaev
extended his disdain for the bourgeois-plebes even to the
past and did not want to see in this class any historical
contributions. Neither contemporary science nor Dutch
painting, nor the emancipation of the serfs -- from the
medieval communes up to the French Revolution -- for
Berdyaev it is not connected with the bourgeoise. Even Marx
was more equitably disposed as to its liberating mission.
Berdyaev clearly regarded the slavery of antiquity and
medieval serfdom as better than capitalism. And evidently,
it was not the situation of the working classes nor the
extent of their exploitation that defined his preference.
As steady as were the socialist sympathies of Berdyaev, in
contrast his political views were fluidly unsteady. One
thing was utmost for him: the defence of personality and its
freedom -- and that only in the highest of its
manifestations: of thought, consciousness and word. Towards
political forms he was almost indifferent, often changing
his sympathies. Partly this resulted from his disdain for
the formal basis in life generally, especially regarding law
in social life. During the years of the revision of his
revolutionary outlook (1900-1910) Berdyaev was very modest.
He agreed on the constitutional monarchy, and he recognised
democracy as relatively best among political forms. But
further along all the moreso his disdain for democracy waxed
into criticism. Especially in those years when he had
encounters with the Third Republic in France. Finally, the
chief cause of Berdyaev's coolness and even revulsion to
Western democracy was its social substrate: the bourgeoise
in its decadence. Philistinism and vulgarity, ruling the
preferences and tastes of a society rushing after the baser
pleasures as the value and meaning of life, the levelling
down to the average man as the criterion of value -- all
this was repulsive to Berdyaev with his spiritual
aristocratism. Particularly shocking to him as a philosopher
was the newest philosophical basing of democracy upon
relativism. Having renounced the Christian idealism of its
youth, and even the rationalism of its mature years,
contemporary democracy seeks for its justification the
principle of majority-rule within the relativeness of every
truth and every value. But such a world-view destroys
culture and de-personalises man. Political atomism -- having
isolated personality within contemporary democracies (more
exactly 19th Cent.), and having destroyed all the complex
fabric of the old social associations except for the state
-- would not such understandably evoke a protest from
Berdyaev with his ideal society.
However, all these proper motifs for rejecting democracy do
not redeem that sophistry which, the further on the more
heatedly it appears in the argumentation of Berdyaev. This
motif is the formalism of democracy. On his lips formality
means a fiction. This means that freedom of expression, of
the presses and so forth, so vital for a philosopher,
suddenly becomes vapid, just a matter concerning the masses.
Berdyaev adopts here the hyperbolic language of early
socialism, which was inappropriate and an hundred years
outdated. Berdyaev as may be overlooked all the success of
the labour movement, with its powerful unions, well-known
political influence and even a bit of social prosperity. The
proletariat for him remains eternally the hungry, hopeless
and dark masses, not even perceiving the need for freedom.
Freedom for it is the freedom of the unengaged cabman in the
well-known anecdote of Proudhon. Only by a complete
breaking-away from the living working class is it possible
to explain this aberration of philosophy.
In two practical and important points Berdyaev parts company
with contemporary democracy and approaches fascism in its
Russian or Western form. First, in his absolute refusal of
economic freedom. He is right, certainly, that socialism is
impossible without a restriction of freedom in the economic
sphere. But together with contemporary socialists -- not
wanting to search out the new combination of the principles
of personal freedom and social regulation -- he beforehand
and completely gives away to the state the power of owning
everything. With this he deprives both peasants and
craftsmen of any self-sufficiency and use of ownership; and
including the "free" tradesmen -- the state gives no one the
unlimited mastery of their fate. The remaining spiritual
freedom -- for those few who live by creation of spiritual
values -- he, not observing this of himself, constructs an
island of freedom for thinkers and poets in the ocean of
universal slavery.
If in a complete denial of economic freedom Berdyaev comes
nigh to communism, then in the corporative organisation of
the state he separates the principles of both eastern
(soviet) and western fascism. The "formal" grouping of
citizens according to territorial districts and political
parties he contrasts in their organisation against
professional workers corporations. He presumes that the
interconnections of workers are more real than those of
locality or political. This was perhaps true during the
renaissance of the creative and ethical medieval attitude
towards work, as also towards art and duty. Under
contemporary utilitarianism, particularly in connection with
the destruction of the multi-party system, the corporate
system lays the political basi s for tyranny. Thus Berdyaev,
of all the socialist forms most of all hated the state,
retreats before it along almost all fronts -- because of his
animosity towards the spiritual type of the bourgeoise.
Consistent with the wavering of his political thought, he
changed also his attitude towards bolshevism in Russia.
There was a time (1917-22) when his indignation against
communist tyranny knew no bounds. He himself lived in the
country of the proletariat revolution and saw its human, and
not only doctrinaire, face. Even then already he accepted
some things in it: eg., the exposing of the broad masses to
culture and even righteous retribution. In effect, Berdyaev
accepted the idea of deMaistre, that the revolution -- is
the judgement of God upon the nations. From this Christian
idea (not particularly bound up with his personal theologic
views) Berdyaev reached the conclusion, that it is not
possible to go against the judgement of God: every
counter-revolution is doomed, and the revolution can be
overcome only from within, in its own immanent evolution.
This determined his negative attitude to the Russian
White-movement and almost all the political emigration, from
the extreme-right to the socialists fighting bolshevism, as
foreign and hostile powers enslaving Russia.
Finding himself in the emigration against his will (Berdyaev
was banished from the USSR), he was quickly compelled to
carry on the struggle on two fronts: against capitalism and
communism simultaneously. This was a position worthy of a
philosopher and Christian. One of his pamphlet-books "The
Truth and Falsehood of Communism" by its very title
evidences his twofold position.
However, at the time of the Second World War this balance
was shifted -- in favour of Soviet Russia. Berdyaev found
himself in the captivating flow of Russian patriotic
sentiments flaring up with unusual force amidst the Russian
emigration in France. And although from his articles of the
time the social, and particularly the anti-capitalist notes
predominate, nationalist motifs of pro-soviet strategy are
beyond dispute. Russia was presented as the liberator of the
world from Hitlerite fascism. The similarity of the two
totalitarian regimes was forgotten. There was the belief,
not without basis, in the approach of great changes in the
inner policies of the bolshevik party. It was then that
Berdyaev wrote a book, one of the last of his books -- "The
Russian Idea" -- where he expressed, unexpectedly for him, a
slavophilic faith in the unique religio-historical vocation
of Russia. Over the course of many years he had fought
against nationalism as one of the terrible poisons of our
epoch. Together with Vl. Solovyov he affirms an universal,
but diverse calling for each nation. Even now he did not
reject this belief. But Russia has a particular pre-eminence
among other nations: in the very strength and quality of its
religious world-perception. "The Russian nation appertains
to a religious type"... "The ethical idea of the Russian man
is very distinct from the ethical idea of the Western
nations, and this is moreso a Christian idea." And the
Russian idea is more "communal" than the Western. This
because "for the New Jerusalem" "the way is prepared in
Russia". The social revolution in Russia is a way-station on
this path.
Many associates and students of Berdyaev were profoundly and
deeply astonished by this final swerving of the teacher. It
was particularly strange that Berdyaev, who all his life
went against the currents prevailing against him, appeared
in the opposite majority-camp concerning the fluid
current-events of the day. A thought was suggested about a
weakening of his spiritual powers from old age. However,
even more than the events that occurred, Berdyaev was
disappointed on his expectations from the Soviet Union. He
had already lifted up his own voice in defence of freedom of
the word, trampled down in Russia. His associates thought
that at the end nothing remained of his initial enthusiasm.
However, he did not want to express in print his own new
pent-up indignation -- so as not to give additional
arguments to the proponents for war against the USSR. He was
most of all fearful of the war on the world.
The unique characteristic Russian religiosity in "The
Russian Idea" Berdyaev terms eschatologism. His selection of
typical Russian thinkers according to this schema suffers
from a certain artificiality. Neither Pushkin, nor the
earthy successors of the Moscow tradition enter into the
lines of "The Russian Idea". The rising of the Russian
revolution, long before its outbreak, the whirlwind of
destruction and the eschatological is explained by the
significant idea whose meaning comprises all the thousand
year history of Russia. But this choice of a Russian pathway
is significant for Berdyaev himself. He is himself actually
the most eschatological of all the Russian religious
thinkers. Like many people of his generation, he transfers
over into Christian eschatology the revolutionary moods of
the epoch. The eschatologism of Berdyaev arises from
completely other religio-psychological roots than the
traditional, particularly Orthodox, Christian. Neither the
departure from history nor the consciousness of the
nothingness of the human cultural act generates his thirst
for an end. A revolutionary discontent by everything
existing gives rise to it, as by also an anxiety about the
certain and radical transfiguration of the world. The
eschatology of Berdyaev is not a rejection of history, but
rather the completion of it.
Berdyaev considers himself chiefly a philosopher of history.
His attitude to the basic forms of the Fall of the world --
in space and in time -- is not identical. The spatial world,
comprising in itself matter, enslaves man. The world of time
comprises the possibility of history as the arena of human
collective creativity. True, human creativity is realised in
history only partially. But these failures, and even its
death, make history not so much absurd but rather tragically
incomplete. Everything existing needs to be consumed in the
fire of personal and historical catastrophes. But the end of
history for which Berdyaev thirsts is not only the
annihilation of the social, but also the actualisation of
the Kingdom of God. The judgement and condemnation of evil
are but a subordinate moment in the triumph of the Kingdom.
Berdyaev was even ready to admit the apokatastasis of Origen
-- universal salvation, if it did not hinder his recognised
ultimate value of freedom. Hades is God's punishment, but
the right of the creature's freedom. The eschatology of
Berdyaev is completely optimistic, in spite of its
catastrophe. The catastrophe itself, certainly, is the
source of joy for a revolutionary spirit, like a tragic play
for Nietzsche. We saw, however, how the world in this
universal eschatology falls upon all human creativity making
impossible, contrary even for Berdyaev, any finished
continuing perfection.
And yet, on the plane of history, ie. eschatology, a final
temptation lies in wait for Berdyaev. He knows and loves to
repeat, that all history is woven together with
transgressions. But the final Hosanna compels him often to
forget, that history is a field of freedom and struggle.
Good and evil struggle in the worldly processes through man.
In this struggle personality is often doomed to be the
sacrifice of absurd social forces. Not only nature but also
history crushes and destroys it. And God expects from it a
resistance to working in history with the power of evil. The
temptation of Berdyaev -- is to admit the rationality of
history en bloc, compelling personality to bow down before
it. God, Who for him is silent in nature, speaks in history
-- and not only through the prophets chastising it, but also
through its transitory and sinful leaders. This is the
temptation of optimistic Hegelianism, so fatal for the
Russian intelligentsia beginning with Belinsky, through the
Marxists, up through our "revolutionaries" of all sorts.
Monism, which Berdyaev the philosopher shunned, entrapped
him on history. Wanting to submit neither to the laws of
nature, nor to human or even divine authority, Berdyaev
inclined his haughty head in front of history, in one of its
most terrible and repulsive phases: in front of the
communist revolution.
Might this political, although perhaps final sin, compel us
to forget about the account of the value of life, about the
exceptional spiritual beauty and nobility of the departed
teacher? Time quickly heals political wounds. "The Twelve"
of Blok does not stir us to esteem of the poet, in the
manner that Pushkin was dear to us all, in spite of "To the
Slanderers of Russia". N. A. Berdyaev enters certainly into
the history of Russia, as an image of a living and suffering
religious seeker and fighter, as a man, the first revealing
to the West the riches and complexity and contradictions of
all the profound Russian religious genre.
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