(In her brilliant new opening essay, Banerjee says of Berd...)
In her brilliant new opening essay, Banerjee says of Berdyaev "he was never more than a curious but unwelcome guest in history. He fearlessly engaged it on the level of ideas while remaining alien to its means and ends, gifted with an incurable longing for transcendence."
(In The Destiny of Man, Nikolai Berdyaev sketches the plan...)
In The Destiny of Man, Nikolai Berdyaev sketches the plan of a new ethics. This new ethics will be knowledge not only of good and evil but also of the tragedy which is constantly present in the moral experience and complicates all of man's moral judgments. It will emphasize the crucial importance of the personality and of human freedom. The new ethics will interpret moral life as a creative activity; it will be an ethics of free creativeness, an ethics that combines freedom, compassion, and creativeness.
(In this book, Nikolai Berdyaev examines the struggle agai...)
In this book, Nikolai Berdyaev examines the struggle against slavery in its diverse forms. When he speaks of slavery and freedom, although he also uses these terms in a political sense, the underlying meaning is metaphysical: for Berdyaev, political slavery and freedom are rooted in our metaphysical slavery and freedom.
(In this remarkable, moving book, which may be the most po...)
In this remarkable, moving book, which may be the most powerful expression of the country's mystical roots in print, Berdyaev is not so interested in the empirical details of Russian history as he is in "the thought of the Creator about Russia." The Russian idea is thus a mystical one. Religion and philosophy, not economics or politics, determine history and society.
Nikolai Berdyaev was a religious philosopher. His brand of Christian existentialism fell between what he considered the spiritual errors of atheistic existentialism and the social errors of Russian orthodoxy.
Background
Ethnicity:
Berdyaev's father, Alexander Mikhailovich Berdyaev, came from a long line of Kiev and Kharkov nobility. Nikolai's mother, Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva, was half-French and came from the top levels of both French and Russian nobility. He also had Polish as well as Tatar origins.
Nikolai Berdyaev was born on March 19, 1874, in Kyiv, Ukraine. One source says that he was born on March 6. He was the son of Alexander Mikhailovich Berdyaev and Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva.
Education
Nikolai Berdyaev spent his childhood at home, without any friends his own age. From this early time on he always felt hostility and alienation toward the outside world, for which this solitude could be responsible, at least partly. This had a heavy influence on his philosophy, which is very subjective and very idealistic. He was constantly creating his own inner world to counterpose it to the material world outside, in which he saw so many injustices and imperfections.
Berdyaev read a lot from a very early age, a habit which he kept till the day he died. His father's library provided him with the works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kant, whom he read when he was only fourteen years old. However, the only area of traditional systematic learning that Berdyaev was good at were the languages. Like most of the aristocrats at the time, he was fluent in French and German, because he was exposed to them from early childhood. A couple of decades before his time French was the spoken language of Russian nobles, some of whom actually had trouble speaking Russian.
Berdyaev decided to devote his life to philosophy, and, breaking an old tradition of his family, left military school to apply to a university. In 1894 he passed the entrance examinations to the University of Kyiv and started studying natural sciences. A year later he changed his area of study to jurisprudence.
The end of the nineteenth century was the time of great revolutionary activity among the Russian intelligentsia, especially college students. Berdyaev, like many educated people of that period, became a Marxist and took part in the political processes. In 1898 Berdyaev was arrested in a student demonstration and was expelled from the university. He was released with a warning, but later his involvement in the illegal press was discovered and he was sentenced to three years of exile in Vologda province in central Russia. Partly because of his family's influence these measures were moderate compared to those taken against professional revolutionaries, many of whom spent decades in prisons and exile, and extremely moderate compared to Stalin's prisons and labor camps. During the three years in Vologda Berdyaev experienced no physical and hardly any moral discomfort.
He became an Honorary Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge University in 1947.
In 1904 Berdyaev and his wife moved to St. Petersburg, the capital of the country. It was the center of intellectual, philosophical, literary, and revolutionary activity. Berdyaev became an important part of this rich and eventful life of the city. He also participated in many spiritual, religious, and mystical discussion of different sects and other groups.
During this period of his life, Berdyaev completely moved away from the radical Marxists, who aimed towards an armed revolt against the regime. His attention focused on the metaphysical and spiritual development, rather than a political struggle. It was during this time when the Orthodox Church became an important part of his life. This turn toward the church is sometimes called conversion, but this term is not really appropriate in this case. Berdyaev had been an Orthodox Christian and sincerely believed in God all his life, but at this point, religion and religious philosophy became a major part of his work.
In 1912 Berdyaev with his family traveled to Italy. In Florence, under the influence of the wonders of the Italian Renaissance, Berdyaev wrote one of his most important books, The Meaning of the Creative Act. Being in the country that practically gave birth to human creativity, it would have been strange if he had not written this book. This book made its author widely known in philosophical circles.
Back in Russia Berdyaev continued to participate in religious activities. He even dared to publish an article criticizing the Holy Synod of the Russian Church for ordering a group of monks to abandon their set of teachings that did not fit the official church doctrine. He was arrested on the charge of blasphemy, the punishment for which was a life-long exile to Siberia. The verdict was prevented from being carried out by the Revolution of 1917.
Berdyaev greeted the fall of the monarchy in February 1917 with great enthusiasm, but he assessed the October Revolution differently - as the triumph of the destructive principle in the Russian revolution. He participated in the work of the Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov Religious-Philosophical Society and was the founder of the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture (1918-1922), which became a non-Marxist spiritual center and continued the traditions of the Russian Silver Age after the Bolshevik coup. In 1919 Berdyaev was elected as a professor of Moscow University. Despite the fact that Berdyaev was remote from actual political struggle, in 1922 he and other outstanding figures of Russian culture were forcibly deported from Soviet Russia to Germany.
In 1922 Berdyaev founded the Religious-Philosophical Academy in Berlin, and in 1923 he became the dean of the Russian Scholarly Institute, established in Berlin to educate the Russian émigré youth. Also in 1923, he became a member of the council of the Russian Student Christian Movement, in which he participated until 1936. In 1924 he moved to France, where he edited the religious-philosophical journal Put' (The way; 1925-1940). The Religious-Philosophical Academy that he had founded also moved to Paris, and there he read lecture courses on "The Problems of Christianity," "The Fate of Culture," "Man, the World, and God," and so on. Berdyaev was one of the few Russian émigré thinkers who did not confine himself in the émigré milieu. During his lifetime he wrote a great many books that were published not only in Russian but also in other languages. His religious existentialism found a response among a number of West European thinkers; his philosophical ideas were esteemed highly by such figures as Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Barth. Berdyaev had a particular influence on the philosophical circles gathered around the journal Esprit, which was founded by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932 and inaugurated French personalism. In 1947 Cambridge University awarded Berdyaev the title "Honoris causa." Berdyaev died in 1948 in a suburb of Paris.
All his life Berdyaev was a deeply religious man. He was never satisfied with the sinful and unstable material world. He was looking for something better, something eternal. Religion provided this eternal and perfect world, the world of God. As I mentioned many times earlier, Berdyaev's views on philosophy and life, in general, can be traced back to his religious beliefs. His idea of freedom comes from the belief in God, who created the world out of freedom, and who gave freedom to humans. His idea of creativity comes from the idea of God, the creator. His idea of objectification is based on the idea of the ultimate unobjectified spiritual reality, which is the world of God.
Berdyaev was an Orthodox Christian, even though he felt a great antipathy toward the official Church. Orthodox Christianity is a major part of Russian culture, and despite the fact that Berdyaev was skeptical toward traditions, which he saw as suppression of his freedom, he could not escape its influence. This religion also corresponds to the inner nature of Berdyaev: it puts a great emphasis on man, it provides a high degree of freedom, and it is more mystical, more spiritual, than many other versions of Christianity.
Berdyaev chooses Christianity because of its idea of Jesus, the man-God. One of the major points in Berdyaev's philosophy is that in order to know something, a person must make it a part of himself. The idea of God being a man serves this purpose. God is brought down to earth, he becomes understandable. Man can now understand the feelings of God, because they are similar to his own, and they can be made a part of him.
This, however, creates a problem that is avoided by Berdyaev. If God is brought down to earth than he becomes a part of the material world. The process of objectification, which Berdyaev despises, takes place. The difference between God, the spirit, and man-God is the same as between a creative conception and a creative product. Something has to be lost when God becomes a part of the sinful and fallen material world. Berdyaev, however, does not even address this problem.
The question that is discussed by Berdyaev is the problem of evil in the world. For centuries theologians attempted to justify the existence of evil in the world ruled by just, omniscient, and omnipotent God. Berdyaev does not try to do this. Instead, he rebels against this entire approach. "We must completely abandon the rationalistic idea that God is the king of the world, that He rules the world of nature, the world of phenomena... God rules in the kingdom of freedom, not in the kingdom of necessity, in spirit, not in the deterministic nature."
His idea is once again that the world that we live in is merely a phase of the ultimate spiritual reality, the "kingdom of freedom." According to Berdyaev, evil and suffering exist in this objectified world because it is not ruled by God. The way to overcome evil is through redemption and creativity which is a pathway to the "kingdom of freedom." Although Berdyaev does not state it, this idea may provide a solution to the problem of man-God being the objectified "version" of God. Since God does not rule the material world, he had to come there in the form of Jesus, he had to become a part of it to save man from sin and evil.
The point in Christianity that is contradictory to Berdyaev's philosophy is the idea of the eternal torments in hell. It also contradicts one of the major ideas of Christianity itself, that states that Jesus came to save and not to judge. Christian love, which to Berdyaev is identical to freedom, becomes limited by the fear of punishment. He explains this contradiction by saying that the concept of fear was necessary at the early stages of Christianity because people were not mentally and psychologically ready to accept the idea of unconditional love. Later, however, the concept of punishment corrupted the church, made it a social institution rather than a spiritual one. The ethics of redemption, originally preached by Christianity, was replaced with the ethics of law. This created formalism, legalization, and rationalization of the official Church, which is the main reason for Berdyaev's opposition to it.
Politics
Although a revolutionary himself, Berdyaev could not accept the Bolshevik regime, because of its suppression of personal freedom, and its main principle of domination of the society over the individual.
Views
Berdyaev was influenced by Marxism early in his life; he was attracted by its social activism and its utopian vision of an era at the end of history when the ills caused by class would be at an end. But he found that Marxism, like atheistic existentialism, traps humanity in history and in time by denying the spiritual element in the human makeup.
Quotations:
"I can not call myself a typical Orthodox of any kind, but Orthodoxy was near to me (and I hope I am nearer to Orthodoxy) than either Catholicism or Protestantism."
"Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history."
"The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question."
"There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world."
"Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man."
Personality
For Berdyaev's life-long interest in eschatology - an examination of the end of the world as humanity now knows it - Berdyaev is often considered an apocalyptic writer. It is that overarching quest for meaning in life that led Berdyaev to affirm the universal values of the spiritual realm in contrast to what he considered the deadly time-bound values of the atheism that attracted so many of his generation.
His parents did not impose any restraints on him, and as a result, he could never accept any kind of authority. When later he went to a military school, this hatred of any suppression of personal freedom grew even stronger. Throughout all his life and in all aspects of it, Berdyaev disliked uniforms, ranks, and formalism.
Interests
eschatology
Philosophers & Thinkers
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant
Connections
In 1904 Berdyaev met and married Lydia Yudifovna Trusheff, who was the daughter of a prominent attorney. He was deeply in love with Lydia, who shared all the difficulties of his life.