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N.O. Lossky
N. BERDYAEV
Nicolay Alexandrovich Berdyaev, the best-known of modern
Russian philosophers, was born in 1874 in the province of
Kiev. He studied at the Kiev University in the faculty of
Law, but did not graduate there, for in 1898 he was arrested
for taking part in the socialist movement. In his youth he
thought of combining marxism with neo-kantianism, but he
soon gave up both those theories, became interested in
Vladimer Soloviev's philosophy and then began independently
to work out a Christian world conception. A similar
evolution took place in the case of Sergey Nikolaevitch
Bulgakov who in 1901 was professor of political economy at
the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, in 1918 became a priest
and in 1925 was appointed professor of dogmatic theology at
the Orthodox Institute in Paris. In 1903 Berdyaev and
Bulgakov came to Petersburg in order to found a new journal
VOPROSI ZHIZNI (Problems of Life). They asked me, as one who
was less compromised politically than the others, to obtain
permission in my name from the Government to publish the
journal; I complied, but unfortunately the journal continued
for one year only. In 1922 the Soviet Government arrested
more than a hundred professors and writers accusing them of
being in disagreement with their ideology and exiled them
from Russia. Among the philosophers in that group were
Berdyaev, Bulgakov, I.Ilyin, Lapshin, S. Frank, Karsavin and
myself. At first Berdyaev settled in Berlin and afterwards
moved to Paris where he worked chiefly at the Y.M.C.A. From
1926 till the end of 1939 he was the editor of the religious
and philosophical journal PUT. Nicolay Alexandrovich died
suddenly, while working at his writing table, on March 24,
1948. Berdyaev wrote a great many books and articles. Most
of them have been translated into many languages. I will
mention only some of the most important of his books:
SUBJECTIVISM AND IDEALISM IN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY: A CRITICAL
STUDY OF N.K. MIHAILOVSKY, 1900; SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS,
1907; THE NEW RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS AND SOCIETY, 1907; THE
PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM, 1911; THE MEANING OF THE CREATIVE
ACT, 1916; DOSTOEVSKY'S WORLD CONCEPTION, 1923; THE
PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY, 1923; THE MEANING OF HISTORY,
1923; NEW MEDIEVALISM, 1924; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE
SPIRIT: CHRISTIAN PROBLEMATICS AND APOLOGETICS, 2 vols,
1929: THE DESTINY OF MAN, AN ESSAY IN PARADOXICAL ETHICS,
1931; THE SELF AND THE WORLD OF OBJECTS, 1934; MAN'S SLAVERY
AND FREEDOM, AN ESSAY IN PERSONALISTIC PHILOSOPHY, 1939; THE
RUSSIAN IDEA: THE MAIN PROBLEMS OF RUSSIAN THOUGHT OF THE
NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES, 1946; AN ESSAY IN
ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS, 1947.
Berdyaev's principal translated works are the following:
CHRISTIANITY AND CLASS WAR, Sheed and Ward, 1933; THE
BOURGEOIS MIND AND OTHER ESSAYS, Sheed and Ward, 1934;
DOSTOEVSKY, Sheed and Ward 1934; FREEDOM AND THE SPIRIT, G.
Bles, London 1935; THE MEANING OF HISTORY G. Bles 1936; NEW
MEDIEVALISM; SPIRIT AND REALITY, G. Bles 1940; A. KOMIAKOV;
SLAVERY AND FREEDOM, Scribner's Sons 1944; THE RUSSIAN IDEA;
AN ESSAY IN ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS; AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
Y.M.C.A. Press, Paris 1949 (Available in English). O.F.
Clarke, INTRODUCTION TO BERDYAEV, 1949; Matthew Spinka,
NICHOLAS BERDYAEV: CAPTIVE OF FREEDOM, Westminster Press,
Philadelphia 1950.
According to Berdyaev, the fundamental opposition with which
we should start in formulating a theory about the world is
that between spirit and nature, and not between the
psychical and the physical. Spirit is the subject, life,
freedom, fire, creative activity; nature is the object,
thing, necessity, determinateness, passive endurance,
immobility. To the realm of nature belongs all that is
objective and substantial (by substance Berdyaev understands
unchanging and self-contained being), multiple and divided
in time and in space; not only matter but mental life on
that view belongs to the realm of nature. The realm of
spirit is of a different character: in it division is
overcome by love; hence, spirit is neither an objective nor
a subjective reality (PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE SPIRIT, Chap.
I). Knowledge about the spirit is attained not through
concepts of reason or logical thought but through living
experience. All philosophical systems not based upon
spiritual experience are naturalistic; they are expressions
of lifeless nature.
God is a spirit. He is really present in the life of the
saints, the mystics, men of high spiritual life, and in
man's creative activity. Those who have had spiritual
experience need no national proof of God's existence. In Its
deepest essence the Deity is irrational and superrational;
attempts to express it through concepts are inevitably
antinomic; i.e., the truth about God has to be expressed in
pairs of judgements that are contradictory to each other.
The Deity transcends the natural world and can only reveal
Itself symbolically. Symbols in religious philosophy are
necessarily connected with myths, such as the myth of
Prometheus, of the Fall, of redemption and the Redeemer.
This interpretation of the symbolism of religious truth must
not be confounded with modernism according to which symbols
are merely subjective expressions of the inmost reality. In
Berdyaev's view symbols are the actual natural reality taken
in connection with its supernatural significance. Therefore,
the birth of the God-man from the Virgin Mary, His life in
Palestine and His death on the cross are actual historical
facts, and at the same time they are symbols. Thus,
Berdyaev's symbolism is not Docetism; it does not lead to
iconoclasm or undermine Christianity. It is a REAL SYMBOL.
He calls such events as the birth of the God-man from the
Virgin Mary and His death on the cross, "symbols" because
they are an expression in the earthly reality of relations
between spirit and the nonspiritual principle which subsists
in a still deeper and more primary form in the domain of the
Divine life itself (FREEDOM AND THE SPIRIT, chap.II).
According to Berdyaev, man's spiritual being is closely
connected with the Divine spirituality, and he opposes his
view to dualistic theism and to pantheism, regarding both
those theories as the outcome of a naturalistic religious
philosophy. His conception of the relationship between God
and the world can be gathered from his doctrine of freedom.
Berdyaev distinguishes three kinds of freedom; primary
irrational freedom, i.e., arbitrariness; rational freedom,
i.e., the fulfillment of moral duty; and finally, freedom
permeated by the love of God. Man's irrational freedom is
rooted in the "nothing" out of which God created the world.
That "nothing" is not emptiness; it is a primary principle
prior to God and the world, containing no differentiation,
i.e., no division into a number of definite elements.
Berdyaev borrowed this conception from Jacob Boehme (German
mystical philosopher, 1575-1624) who designated this primary
principle by the term UNGRUND (the groundless, the abyss).
In Berdyaev's opinion Boehme's UNGRUND coincides with the
conception of the "Divine Nothing" in the negative theology
of Dionysius the Areopagite and with the teaching of Meister
Eckhardt (1260-1327) who distinguished between GOTTHEIT and
GOTT, Godhead and God. (1)
Berdyaev says: "Out of the Divine Nothing, or of the UNGRUND,
the Holy Trinity, God the Creator is born." The creation of
the world by God the Creator is a secondary act. "From this
point of view it may be said that freedom is not created by
God: it is rooted in the Nothing, in the UNGRUND from all
eternity. The opposition between God the Creator and freedom
is secondary: in the primeval mystery of the Divine Nothing
this opposition is transcended, for both God and freedom are
manifested out of the UNGRUND. God the Creator cannot be
responsible for freedom which gave rise to evil. Man is the
child of God and the child of freedom - of nothing, of non-
being, (greek equivalent). Meonic freedom consented to God's
act of creation; non-being freely accepted being" (THE
DESTINY OF MAN, 34). Hence it follows that God has no power
over freedom which is not created by him: "God the Creator
is all-powerful over being, over the created world, but He
has no power over non- being, over the uncreated freedom"
(ibid.). This freedom is prior to good and evil, it
conditions the possibility of both good and evil. According
to Berdyaev, the actions of a being possessing free will
cannot be forseen even by God, since they are entirely free.
Berdyaev denies God's omnipotence and omniscience and
maintains that He does not create the cosmic entities' will,
which springs from the UNGRUND, but merely helps that will
to become good; he is led to that conclusion by his
conviction that freedom cannot be created and that if it
were, God would be responsible for cosmic evil. A theodicy
would then be impossible, Berdyaev thinks.
Evil arises when the irrational freedom leads to the
violation of the Divine hierarchy of being and to seperation
from God owing to the pride of the spirit desiring to put
itself in the place of God. This results in disintegration,
in material and natural being, and in slavery instead of
freedom. But in the last resort, the origin of evil remains
the greatest and most inexplicable mystery (AN ESSAY ON
ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS, 127).
The second freedom, that is, the rational freedom which
consists in submission to the moral law, leads to compulsory
virtue, i.e., again to slavery. The way out of this tragedy
can only be tragic and supernatural: "The myth of the Fall
tells of this powerlessness of the Creator to avert the evil
resulting from freedom which He has not created. Then comes
God's second act in relation to the world and to man: God
appears not in the aspect of Creator but of Redeemer and
Savior, in the aspect of the suffering God Who takes upon
Himself the sins of the world. God in the aspect of God the
Son descends into the abyss, into the UNGRUND, into the
depths of freedom out of which springs evil as well as every
kind of good." God the Son "manifests Himself not in power
but in sacrifice. The Divine sacrifice, the Divine self-crucification
must conquer the evil meonic freedom by enlightening it from
within, without forcing it, without depriving the created
world of freedom" (DESTINY OF MAN, 34-35). This doctrine,
Berdyaev says, is not pantheism. "Pantheism does contain
some truth, and that is the truth of negative theology. But
the falsity of pantheism lies in rationalizing the mystery
and translating the truth of negative theology into the
language of the positive" (THE DESTINY OF MAN, 35).
Berdyaev is particularly concerned with the problem of
personality. Personality, he says, is a spiritual and not a
natural category; it is not a part of any whole; it is not a
part of society - on the contrary, society is only a part or
an aspect of personality. Nor is it a part of the cosmos: on
the contrary, the cosmos is a part of man's personality.
Personality is not a substance, it is a creative act, it is
unchangeable in the process of change. In personality the
whole is prior to the parts. Being a spirit, personality is
not self-sufficient, not egocentric, it passes into
something other than itself, into "thou" and realizes a
universal content which is concrete and different from
abstract universals. The unconscious elemental ground of
human personality is cosmic and tellurgic. The realization
of personality means the ascent from the subconscious,
through the conscious, to the superconscious. The human body
as an eternal aspect of personality is a "form" and not
merely a physico- chemical entity, and it must be
subordinated to the spirit. Bodily death is necessary for
the realization of the fullness of life; that fullness
presupposes resurrection in a perfect body. Sex means
bi-section; an integrated personality has no sex, it is
androgynous. Man's creative activity is complementary to the
Divine life; hence it has a theogonic and not merely an
anthropological significance. There is eternal humanity in
the Deity and that implies that there also is Divinity in
man. (2) Man's essential nature is distorted because he fell
away from God; beings separated from God and from one
another have no immediate experience of spiritual life; they
suffer from the disease of isolation. Instead of the
immediate experience which reveals the life of the subject,
of the existential self, distorted reason develops away of
cognizing the world in an OBJECTIVE form. Man exteriorizes
his subjective sensations, projects them and builds out of
them objects which stand over against him, form a system of
external reality, forcibly act upon him and enslave him The
world system created by such objectificaton is nature as
opposed to spirit; it is the world of appearances, of
phenomena, while the true, fundamental reality is spirit,
the world of NOUMENA, i.e., a world cognized in and through
immediate spiritual experience and not through
objectivization. (3)
Berdyaev takes it to be a great merit of Kant's to have
drawn a distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal
world, but thinks Kant was mistaken in regarding the
noumenal world as unknowable; the defect of this philosophy,
in Berdyaev's view, is that he failed to explain why man
makes use of knowledge in its objectified form. According to
Berdyaev this form of knowledge arose as a consequence of
the sin of falling away from God which leads also to a
mutual severance between persons. Does nature consisting of
objects exist in man's mind only, as Kant thought, or is it
a special cosmic realm generated by sin? Berdyaev says "the
subject is created by God, the object is created by the
subject" (AN ESSAY ON ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS). This does
not, however, by any means imply that he, like Kant, regards
nature studied by natural sciences as merely a system of our
presentations. To understand Berdyaev's position it is
essential to remember that in his view sin leads not merely
to objectification through cognition but actually creates
nature as a lower realm of being. "Evil gives rise to the
world bound by necessity, in which everything is subject to
causal relations" (SPIRIT AND REALITY). "If the world is in
a fallen state, this is not the fault of the mode of
cognizing it - as L. Shestov maintained, for instance - the
fault lies in the depths of the world's existence. This can
be best pictured as a process of splitting up, division and
alienation which noumenal subjects undergo. It is a mistake
to think that objectification takes place in the cognitive
sphere only; in the first instance it takes place in reality
itself. It is produced by the subject not only as a knower
but as a living being. The fall into the objective world
took place in the primary life itself. But as a result of
this we regard as real only that which is secondary,
rationalized, objectified, and doubt the reality of the
primary, the not- objectified" (AN ESSAY ON ESCHATOLOGY AND
METAPHYSICS, 77). Nature as a "system of relations between
objects" has the following characteristics: (1) the object
is alien to the subject; (2) the personal, the unique and
individual is submerged by the general, the
impersonal-universal; (3) necessity, determination form
without is predominant, freedom is suppressed and hidden;
(4) life adapts itself to mass movements in the world and in
history, and to the average man; man and his opinions are
socialized and that destroys originality. In this world of
objects life is lived in a time which is divided into the
past and future, and that leads to death. Instead of
"existence" as a unique and individual creative activity of
the spirit, we find in nature mere "being" determined by
laws. The use of general ideas about this uniformly
recurrent being serves as a means of communication between
the isolated selves which create social institutions; but in
this sociality, subordinated to conventional rules, the
subject remains solitary. Fortunately, however, in his
"existential depths" man still preserves the communion "with
the spiritual world and the whole cosmos" (ibid., 61). Man
is a "dual entity, living both in the phenomenal and the
noumenal world" (ibid., 79). Hence, "the noumena can break
through into the phenomina, the invisible world into the
visible, the world of freedom into the world of necessity"
(ibid.,67). That victory of spirit over nature is achieved
through sympathy and love overcoming isolation by
communication of the "I" and "thou" in immediate spiritual
experience which is of the nature of intuition and not of
objectivization. "This knowledge is 'the conjugal' union of
personalities based upon true love" (Solitude and Society,
118). There can be no marriage between universals, between
"objects": marriage is only possible is respect of "I" and
"thou" (ibid., 109). Spiritual knowledge is the meeting
between two subjects in the mystical experience in which
"all is in me and I am in all" (ibid., 115, 148). Berdyaev
designates such direct spiritual communication by the term "communalty."
It creates unity on the basis of love. Love is a free
manifestation of the spirit. Hence it is a communal, soborny
unity, to use that term in the sense given to it by
Khomiakov. "The free spirit is communal, and not
individualistically isolated" (An Essay on Eschatological
Metaphysics, 21).
Regeneration of the fallen man means his deliverance from
nature as created by the objectifying process; it manes
victory over servitude and death, the realization of
personality as a spirit, as an existence which cannot be an
object and cannot be expressed by general ideas. Therefore
Berdyaev calls his philosophy existential or personalistic.
But he thinks that true personalism is to be found not in
Heidegger or Jaspers but in St. Augustine who put into the
foreground the conception of the "subject." The society, the
nation, the state are not personalities; man as a person has
a higher value than they. Hence it is man's right and duty
to defend his spiritual freedom against the state and
society. In the life of the state, the nation and society we
often find a dark, demoniacal force which seeks to
subordinate man's personality and make it merely a tool for
its own ends (Solitude and Society, 177). In social life
man's conscience is distorted by the process of
objectification and by conventional rules. The pure,
original conscience can only manifest itself in and through
personality; everything must be submitted to the judgement
of that "existential" conscience, unspoiled by
objectification.
In his ethics Berdyaev struggles against the imperfect good
developed in the social life on the basis of
objectification. He expounds it is his book The Destiny of
Man which he calls "an essay in paradoxical ethics." As an
epigraph to this remarkable book Berdyaev chose Gogol's
saying "It is sad not to see any good in goodness." The
whole of Berdyaev's ethics boldly reveals the sad truth that
"there is very little good in goodness, and this is why hell
is being prepared on all sides" (The Destiny of Man, 358).
The fundamental paradox of his ethics is that the very
distinction between good and evil is, according to him, a
consequence of the Fall which is "a manifestation and trial
of man's freedom, of man's creative vocation" (ibid., 362).
The experience of good and evil arises when irrational
freedom leads to severance from God: "The world proceeds
from an original absence of discrimination between good and
evil to a sharp distinction between them and them, enriched
by that experience, ends by not distinguishing them any
more" (ibid., 47); it returns to God and His Kingdom which
lies beyond god and evil (ibid., 371). The paradox is this:
"It is bad that the distinction between good and evil has
arisen, but it is good to make the distinction, once it has
arisen; it is bad to have gone through the experience of
evil, but it is good to kn ow good and evil as a result of
that experience" (ibid., 49).
Berdyaev gives the name of "ethics of law" to ethics which
takes cognizance only of the middle part of the course,
i.e., only of the distinction between good and evil. In
analyzing legalistic ethics and legalistic Christianity
Berdyaev shows that they are adapted to the requirements of
social everyday life and therefore are full of conventions
and lead to hypocrisy and tyranny. He proposes to evaluate
the rules of this ordinary morality from the point of view
of "pure consciousness" and not of man's temporary needs. He
wants to create a "Critique of pure Conscience" similar to
Kant's "Critique of pure Reason." Berdyaev makes use of the
Freudian discoveries to show up the sadistic elements in
legalism, and the impure subconscious sources of the
rigorous demands made by many champions of "the good;" for
instance, he traces all fanaticism, all concern for the "far
off" at the expense of the "neighbor," to a lack of real
love, namely of the love for the concrete individual person
and to replacing it by a love of abstract theories,
programmes, etc., backed up by the pride of their authors
and champions.
Berdyaev does not by any means propose to cancel the ethics
of law or the legal forms of social life. He merely demands
tolerance in the struggle with evil and points to a higher
stage of moral consciousness than the ethics of law. That
higher stage is expressed by the ethics of redemption and
the love of God; it is based upon the descent of the God-man
into the world and His acceptance of suffering out of love
for the fallen. Berdyaev pictures this descent of God as the
tragedy of God's love for all creatures. As already
mentioned, he maintains that in so far as the world contains
irrational freedom, it is not created by God, but is rooted
in the Ungrund, a potency which is independent of God and is
the basis both of God and of the world. In God this
irrational freedom is overcome from all eternity; in the
world it is not overcome; it plunges the world into evil and
makes its history a tragedy. Irrational cosmic freedom is
not subject to God. Hence God's love for the creature
inevitably acquires a tragic character: the Son of God can
only help the world by personally entering the world tragedy
so as to realize from within the world the unity of love and
freedom which leads to the world's transfiguration and
deification. This aspect of God's relation to the world is
specially emphasized in Berdyaev's book FREEDOM AND THE
SPIRIT: the victory of the Logos over darkness, the
"nothing" is only possible if the Divine life be a tragedy
(I, 240). "God Himself longs to suffer with the world"
(251). The coming of Christ and redemption are "a
continuation of the creation of the world, the eighth day of
creation, a cosmogonic and anthropogonic process" (254).
Transfiguration and deification are only possible through
ascent to the third kind of freedom penetrated by the love
for God. Hence it is clear that they cannot be achieved
compulsorily: they presuppose man's FREE love of God. Hence
Christianity is the religion of freedom. In all his works
Berdyaev fervently and insistently defends man's freedom in
matters of faith. Chapter VI-X of FREEDOM AND THE SPIRIT are
specially devoted to the subject of freedom and free
creativeness which God expects of man as His friend. The
church, Berdyaev says, must give a religious sanction not
only to the holiness that seeks personal salvation, but also
to the genius of poets, artists, philosophers, scientists,
social reformers who consecrate themselves to creativeness
in God's name (230). "In the salvation of the soul man is
still thinking of himself" (64), but creativeness in its
inner meaning implies thinking of God, of truth, of beauty,
of the higher life of the spirit. In his book THE DESTINY OF
MAN Berdyaev repeats that not only the ethics of redemption,
but also the ethics of creativeness is a way to the Kingdom
of God
Social life, Berdyeav maintains, is an organization based to
a greater extent upon falsehood than upon truth. Pure truth
is often not safe but destructive; it acts as an explosive
and leads to judgement being passed on the world, and to the
end of the world. Pure truth is existential; in social life,
we use objectivized knowledge which arrives at truth which
is no longer existential, but is adapted to the needs of
millions of man (FREEDOM AND THE SPIRIT, 57). In the state
and in the church as a social institution we often find not
the existential spiritual reality but conventional symbols:
"Titles such as Tsar, General, Pope, metropolitan, bishop
are all symbols. All hierarchical grades are symbols. In
contradistinction to them we have such realities as saint,
prophet, creative genius, social reformer. Thus the
hierarchy of human qualities is real" (ibid., 64).
The Kingdom of God is permeated with love for all creatures,
both holy and sinful. "The morality of transcendent good
does not by any means imply indifference to good and evil or
toleration of evil. It demands more and not less;" it aims
at "enlightening and liberating the wicked" (THE DESTINY OF
MAN, 372). Hence, true moral consciousness cannot rest
content while there exist wicked souls suffering the
torments of hell. "Moral consciousness began with God's
question: 'Cain, where is thy brother Abel?' It will end
with another question on the part of God: 'Abel, where is
thy brother Cain?" (ibid, 351). "Paradise is possible for me
if there is no everlasting hell for a single being that has
ever lived. One cannot be saved singly, in isolation.
Salvation can only be a communal, universal deliverance from
torments" (AN ESSAY ON ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS, 205).
Berdyaev is convinced that ways of redeeming evil and
conquering hell can be found and believes in universal
salvation, apocatastasis. He regards the development of
creative activity as one of the best ways of combining
freedom and love.
In FREEDOM AND THE SPIRIT there is a chapter called
"Theosophy and Gnosis" in which Berdyeav subjects to a
scathing criticism modern "theosophy." He points out that in
theosophy there is no God, but only the divine, no freedom,
no understanding of evil; it is a species of naturalastic
evolutionism. It attracts people by its fictitious gnosis,
by its claim to the knowledge of the Divine world. The
Church must oppose to it the real gnosis and free itself
from antignosticism which has in a sense become identical
with agnosticism. With regard to ancient gnosticism the
Church feared that is was allied to magic, but the modern
man who has passed through all kinds of temptations can no
longer be protected against them by artificial barriers.
"The method of protecting there little ones from temptation
has been grossly abused in the history of Christendom," says
Berdyeav, as he calls for free creative development of the
human spirit in the name of God.
Berdyaev's social theories are closely connected with his
religious philosophy. Many of his works deal with the
philosophy of history or with the philosophical aspects of
political problems - e.g., THE MEANING OF HISTORY, THE
PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY and NEW MEDIEVALISM. The historical
process, according to Berdyaev, consists in the struggle of
good against irrational freedom and is "a drama of love and
freedom unfolding itself between God and His other self,
which He loves and for whose reciprocal love He thirsts"
(THE MEANING OF HISTORY, 52). "Messianism is the fundamental
theme of history - true or false, open or secret messianism"
(AN ESSAY ON ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS, 174). The credit
for discovering this truth belongs to the Jewish nation.
"Three forces operate in world history: God, fate, and human
freedom. That is why history is so complex. Fate turns man's
personality into the playground of the irrational forces of
history. At certain periods of their history nations are
particularly subject to the power of fate; their freedom is
less active and man feels forsaken by God. That is very
noticeable in the fate of the Russian people, and in the
fate of the German people. Christianity recognizes that fate
can be overcome - but it can only be overcome through
Christ."
When irrational freedom gains the upper hand, reality begins
to disintegrate and revert to the primeval chaos. This is
depicted with the greatest vividness by Dostoevesky,
especially the novel THE POSSESSED (see Berdyaev's
DOSTOEVSKY'S WORLD CONCEPTION, one of the best things he
wrote). In social life revolution is an extreme form of the
return to chaos. Berdyaev's work contains many valuable
ideas about the nature of revolution and the character of
its leaders. "Revolutions," he says, are preceded by a
process of disintegration, a decline of faith, the loss by
people of a unifying spiritual center of life. As a result
of it the people lose their spiritual liberty, become
possessed by the devil;" the leading part among them is
played by the extreme elements, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, men
who imagine themselves to be free creators of a new future,
but in truth are passive "mediums of formless elements; they
are really turned not to the future but to th past, for they
are slaves of the past, chained to it by malice, envy and
revenge" (PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY). Hence, revolutions can
do nothing but destroy; they are never creative.
Creativeness begins only in the periods of reaction that
come after a revolution: the new forms of life for which the
people had been prepared by their past then come to be
realized. But even the creative epochs of history have never
achieved the ends men had set for themselves. "Not one
single project elaborated within the historical process has
ever been successful" (THE MEANING OF HISTORY, 237). In the
Middle Ages the compulsory Catholic and Byzantian theocracy
was a failure. True, it is to the credit of that period that
it hardened man's will by the discipline of the monastery
and of chivalry; thanks to the medieval Christianity man
rose above nature; his bond with the inner life of nature
was severed: "The great Pan was dead" for him and man came
to look upon nature as dead mechanism. But he severed
himself not only from nature; at the period of the
Renaissance and of humanism he also fell away from God. The
watchword of our own time is "the liberation of man's
creative powers;" the center of gravity is transferred from
the Divine depths to the purely human creativeness which
seeks to perfect life by subduing nature without God's
gracious help. Regarding nature as a dead mechanism, modern
man has worked out a positivistic science and technics which
interpose machinery between man and nature. The power of
machine helps man in his struggle with nature but at the
same time it disintegrates him: he begins to lose his
individual image, "is depersonalized and submits to the
artificial machine-made nature which he himself has called
into being." Thus the epoch of extreme individualism ends by
the loss of individuality; nonreligious humanism lead to the
dehumanization of man. Such an end was to be expected,
because man who is severed from the higher principle, who
has ceased to strive for the realization of the image of God
in himself, is doomed to be a slave of the lower elements.
New forms of slavery are threatening man; they are the
result of socialism which replaces true "togetherness"
(SOBORNOST) based upon love and the religious
transfiguration of the creature, by the false, based upon
the compulsory service of the individual to society for the
sake of satisfying its material needs. It is significant
that modern socialism has been founded by a Jew, Marx, a
representative of the nation which "passionately demanded
the fulfillment of truth and happiness on earth" and
rejected the true Messiah because he came in the form of a
servant and not as an earthly king-liberator. The Jews are
still expecting paradise on earth and are wholly turned to
the future; hence, they are ready to declare war on all
historical and sacred traditions, on all that has been
handed down through the ages from one generation to another;
a Jew easily becomes a revolutionary and a socialist (THE
MEANING OF HISTORY, 199).
It must not be imagined, however, that Berdyeav is an
anti-Semite. Like Vladimir Soloviev, he thinks very highly
of the Jewish people. There is no trace of anti-Semitism or
of undue fear of socialism in his teaching. He readily
points out the valuable aspects of socialism. He champions a
special variety of it which he calls PERSONALISTIC and
maintains that socialization of the economic life can only
he useful of "the supreme value of the human personality and
its right to attain the fullness of life be recognized"
("The Problem of Man," l.c). But the efforts to realize
socialism will transform it "into something quite different
from the socialist ideal." Socialism will reveal fresh
discords in the human life. It will never achieve the
liberation of human labor which Marx sought to achieve by
binding labor, it will never give man wealth or establish
equality, but will merely create new emnity between men, new
separateness, and new, unheard of, forms of oppression (THE
MEANING OF HISTORY). The elimination of hunger and
destitution "does not solve the spiritual problem;" man will
be "faced as before with the mystery of death, of eternity,
of love, knowledge and creativeness. Indeed it may be said
that when the social life is more rationally organized, the
tragic element in life - the tragic conflict between the
individual and society, the person and the cosmos,
personality and death, time and eternity - will grow in
intensity" (SPIRIT AND REALITY).
Berdyeav points out, however, much in the same way as
Bulgakov, that it is precisely the historical failures which
lead to true achievements: the failures rouse the will to a
religious transformation of life (THE MEANING OF HISTORY,
chap. X), to transferring the center of gravity from the
disrupted earthly time to the eternal time in the Divine
life. In that DIvine life universal resurrection is achieved
-the necessary condition of solving the moral contradictions
of the earthly life. Even man's economic activity must
undergo a profound change: basing itself on "the love for
nature's inner being" it must become a force that leads to
resurrection, whereas the modern technics remain in the
realm of death (PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY). "The only kingdom
which can be successful is the Kingdom of God" (AN ESSAY ON
ESCHATOLOGICAL METAPHYSICS). That kingdom is not in the
historical, but in the existential time. The difference
between these two kinds of time is this: the historical time
"may be symbolized by a line stretching forward to the
future, to the new," but in the existential time "there is
no distinction between past and future, beginning and end."
Hence life in the Kingdom of God is not a part of history,
but is metahistorical. The meaning of history lies "beyond
the confines of history," in metahistory. It must not be
imagined, however, that history and metahistory are entirely
separate: "Metahistory is continually present as the
background of history. That which is metahistorical breaks
up both the cosmic endless sequence of events and the
determinism of the historical process: it disrupts
objectivization. Thus, the coming of Jesus CHrist is pre-
eminently a metahistorical event; it took place in the
existential time" (ibid.). In the same way all true creative
activity on the part of man "takes place in the existential
time" and is "divinely human" (ibid.). But the realization
of the creative impulse in history - i.e., in our
objectified world - is always imperfect and always ends in
tragic failure. "World history knows the most terrible
creative failure - the failure of Christianity, of CHrist's
work in the world. The history of Christendom has been but
too often a crucifixion of CHrist" It must not be supposed,
however, that human creativeness, distorted by
objectification, is completely wasted. "The Resurrection as
the end which includes all individual creative achievements"
imparts meaning both to the personal and to the historical
existence. That end is the metahistory of the Kingdom of God
in which objectification is overcome, and the opposition
between subject and object holds no longer. In our world
"the sun is outside of me" and that "indicates my fallen
condition" but in the transfigured world "it must be within
me and radiate from me" (ibid.). A personality capable of
worshiping the Holy and serving it follows the path that
leads to the perfection of the Kingdom of God. It develops
within a community containing an infinite multiplicity of
beings, sharply distinguished from one another in quality
and HIERARCHICALLY interrelated. Berdyaev devotes a whole
book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY, to proving that the
egalitarian strivings of democracy, socialism,
internationalism, etc., lead to the destruction of
personality and are prompted by the spirit of non-being, of
envy, resentment and malice.
All the distortions of personality that take place in our
fallen world are overcome through a long process of
development in many world aeons. "If we refuse to accept the
slavish and terroristic doctrine of everlasting damnation,
we must admit the pre-existence of souls on another plane
before their birth and their passing through other planes
after death. The theory of reincarnation on one place is
incompatible with the wholeness of personality and the
unchangeability of the very idea of man, and is untenable;
but the idea of reincarnation on many planes, which makes
man's destiny dependent upon his existence on planes
different form that of the objective phenomenal world, may
be accepted. Leibnitz rightly spoke of metamorphosis and not
of metempsychosis" (ibid.).
Berdyaev wrote often and at length about Russia. He says
that "as intended by God, Russia is the great integral unity
of East and West, but in its actual, empirical condition it
is an unsuccessful mixture of East and West." He traces the
origin of Russia's ills to the wrong correlation in it of
the masculine and the feminine principles. At a certain
stage of national development among the Western peoples, in
France, England and Germany "the manly spirit rose up and
imposed form upon the elemental forces of the people
organically and from within" (PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY).
There was no such process in Russia, and even the Orthodox
religion failed to provide that discipline of the spirit
which Catholicism with its firm and clear-cut lines built up
in the West. "The Russian soul remained unbounded, it was
not conscious of any limits and spread itself out
indefinitely. It demands all or nothing, its mood is either
apocalyptic or nihilistic and it is therefore incapable of
building up the half-way kingdom of culture." In accordance
with these national characteristics the Russian thought,
too, is directed chiefly "toward the eschatological problem
of the end, and apocalyptically colored" and penetrated by a
sense of the impending catastrophe (this phrase was
originally used by Ern and Prince E. Trubetskoy). The
eschatological bent of the Russian mind and its lack of
interest for the "half-way kingdom of culture" is fully
expounded in Berdyaev's book THE RUSSIAN IDEA. He
particularly has in mind Dostoevsky, Vladimir Soloviev, K.
Leodorov, and Prince E. Trubetskot. Berdyaev himself is one
of the most striking representatives of this trend of the
Russian thought.
Even Christian-minded philosophers in reflection on the
significance of their own nation in the historical process
fall into the temptation of naturalism, in the sense of
attaching too high a value to the empirical national
character. In his book on A. S. KHOMIAKOV Berdyaev notes
this defect among the Slavophils in so far as they have a
tendency to admire the Russian people's natural
characteristics and the historical forms of their national
life. Modern Russian philosophers are on their guard against
this tendency.
Berdyaev belongs to the group of thinkers who strive to
develop a Christian world conception and whose work is the
most original expression of Russian philosophical thought.
It was begun more than a hundred years ago, with the
founders of the Slavophil movement Ivan Kireyevsky and
Khomiakov, but came into its own much later, under the
influence of Vladimir SOloviev. A whole galaxy of religious
philosophers appears after Soloviev. Among them are Price S.
N. Trubetskoy, Prince E. N. Trubetskoy, N. Feodorov, Father
Pavel Florensky, Father Sergius Bulgakov, Ern, Berdyaev,
Karsavin, S. L. Frank, S.A. Alaxeyev (Askoldov), I.A. Ilyin,
Father Vassili Zenkovsky, Father G. Florovsky,
Vysheslavtsev, Arsenyev, Novgorodtsev, Spektorsky. Some of
those philosophers, for instance Father P. Florensky, Father
S. Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Karsavin, Frank, have worked out
entire systems of Christian philosophy. Some of their ideas
are not in strict conformity with the traditional doctrines
of the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches; moreover, it may
be said with regard to some of their theories that they
disagree with the data of religious experience and
intellectual intuition, and should therefore be rejected in
the course of further development of the Christian world
conception. One fo such theories is Berdyaev's teaching
about the UNGRUND as a primordial principle giving rise on
the one hand to God and on the other to the will of the
cosmic entities.
Berdyaev is wrong in thinking that his UNGRUND is identical
with the "Divine Nothing" of Dionysius the Areopagite. The
Divine Nothing in every respect transcends all possible
determinations and is so perfect that it cannot be
adequately expressed by means of our conceptions. When the
Areopogite passes to the positive theology - for instance,
when he interprets the Supreme principle as personal and at
the same time superpersonal - he does not rationalize it,
but still remains true to the negative theology: thus, if
the one God is tripersonal, the word "person" can only
designate here something that is analogous to the idea of a
created personality, but not identical with it. Mystical
experience, so admirably described in Otto's book DAS
HEILIGE, wholly confirms Dionysius the Areopagite's teaching
of the "Divine Nothing" as a primordial and absolutely
perfect principle.
Neither mystical experience not intellectual intuition find
any evidence of a "nothing" existing independently of God
and utilized by Him for the creation for the creation of the
world. Philosophers and theologians wrongly interpret the
statement that "God created the world out of nothing" by
supposing that some king of "nothing" served as material out
of which God created the world. That statement has a very
simple and at the same time a much more significant meaning:
God created the world without borrowing any material either
from within Himself of from without; He creates cosmic
entities as something ontologically entirely new as compared
with Him. The will of the created beings is also His
creation. It is free because in creating personality God
endows it with a superqualitative creative force, giving it
no empirical character whatever - neither goodness, nor
wickedness, neither courage nor cowardice, and so on. Each
personality freely develops its own empirical character, or
its essence (ESSENTIA) and transcends it in the sense that
it remains capable of working it out afresh. Having created
our will as free, God never forces it, because freedom is a
necessary condition of the attainment of perfect goodness by
the person, but at the same time of course it conditions the
possibility of evil.
Freedom of the creatures' will is quite compatible with
Divine omniscience. God is a supernatural being, He
therefore is not separated form the future by the relation
of precedence: He cognizes the future as well as the present
and the past not by means of inference but through
contemplation or direct perception. This was pointed out as
early as the sixth century A. D. by Boethius.
During the many years of our friendly intercourse, Berdyaev
and I disputed over questions of epistemology. Berdyaev
affirms that there are two kinds of knowledge: intuition
with regard to spiritual reality and objectivization with
regard to nature. I maintain, on the contrary, that both are
higher and the lower realms of being are known through
intuition, i.e., through direct contemplation )see e.g., my
book on THE SENSUOUS, THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE MYSTICAL
INTUITION).
As already pointed out, Berdyaev's doctrine of the UNGRUND
and of the creatures' will not being created by God, cannot
be accepted as a part of the Christian philosophy. But this
by no means implies that the rest of his system must be
rejected also; the main content of it is unaffected. The
essential theme of Christian philosophy is the doctrine of
the absolute good, realizable on in the Kingdom of God, and
of the imperfections of our sinful world. Berdyaev's
greatest merit lies in showing in a highly original way "how
little good there is in our goodness," in our individual,
social, and even ecclesiastical life. Like L. Tolstoy he
boldly denounces the wrongs of our way of living and teaches
us to detect those of them which, through force of habit, we
fail to see. He vividly depicts the whole of the historical
process as a struggle between good and evil, the end of
which can only be attained beyond history. He convincingly
shows that everything earthly must perish except the rays of
the Kingdom of God which find their way into the historical
process because the God-man Jesus Christ does not withhold
from us Hid gracious help.
Highly valuable, too, is Berdyaev's contention that the
doctrine of terrible torments of hell, hopeless and lasting
for ever, has a sadistic character. No theodicy can be
formulated apart from the doctrine of apocatastases or
universal salvation. A noble feature of Berdyaev's
philosophy is his defense of the truth that Christianity is
a religion of love and therefore of freedom and tolerance.
Great credit is due to him also for his criticism of
socialism, communism, the bourgeois spirit, and for his
struggle against any attempts to make relative values
absolute. He criticizes modern class struggle from the point
of view of the Christian ideal. As to the principle of
social life, Berdyaev champions the traditions of the
Western-European and Russian humanism, namely, the absolute
value of personality and its inalienable right to spiritual
freedom and decent conditions of life. He convincingly shows
that those principles can only he consistently substantiated
on the basis of a Christian world conception.
There are people who in their wish to be more Orthodox than
Orthodoxy itself condemn Berdyaev's work as dangerous to the
Church. They forget that the historical life of
Christianity, ecclesiastical practice and traditional
theological teaching suffer from many defects which have
driven wide circles of society away from the Church. In
order to bring them back, much work is needed by such laymen
as Berdyaev who snow that those defects may be removed
without damage to the foundations of the Christian Church.
By expressing the essential truths of Christianity in new
and original terms, different from the style of the
traditional theology, such philosophers as Berdyaev awaken
an interest in Christianity in many minds that had turned
away from it, and may succeed in drawing them back to the
Church. Men like Berdyaev lend powerful support to the work
of perservering and developing the civilization that defends
the absolute value of personality - and for this, all praise
and honor to them!
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