[In the following excerpt, Lampert elucidates the concept of "God-Manhood" in Berdyaev's thought.]

[The idea of God-Manhood] summarizes the quintessence of Berdyaev's thought. He begins and ends his reasoning not with God or man, but with God and man, with the God-man, with Christ and God-manhood. This defines both the content and "style" of his thought. Without bearing this in mind it is hardly possible to discern the inner motives and trace the complex thread of his argument. "Both philosophy and theology should start neither with God nor with man, but rather with the God-man. The basic and original phenomenon of life is the meeting and interaction of God and man, the movement of God towards man and of man towards God" (Freedom and the Spirit).

Men have seldom been able to realize fully the fundamental fact of religion, namely, that God is both the wholly "Other One," transcendent and utterly beyond the world and man; and yet creates and reveals himself to man, enters into him and becomes the inmost content of man's very existence. How can that which is transcendent to man be equally immanent in him, and consequently in so far not transcendent at all? How can that which is immanent in man be transcendent and wholly beyond him? In face of such a dilemma there seems to be no other solution than to reject either the one alternative, viz., God-in-the-world and man (this view is sometimes called dualism); or the other, viz., God-beyond-the-world and man (monism)—with all the far-reaching and disastrous consequences of both points of view.

This paradox indicates how the problem of religion presents itself to Berdyaev. Both points of view he regards as a witness to the limits and impotence of discursive reasoning, which is incapable of comprehending the mystery of the living correlation of God and man, of the transcendent and the immanent, of the absolute and the relative, of the one and the many, of the whole and the part, and so forth. If we understand all these concepts as static and immovable entities, as it were congealed into logical crystals, then God himself must needs appear to be a sheer misunderstanding, evident to anyone familiar with the elements of logic: he is, so to say, hot ice, bitter sugar or a round square. Yet logical contradiction and impossibility is no evidence of actual impossibility. Life itself is such a contradiction and impossibility to Berdyaev; and these contradictions, which he seeks to bring to light and to transcend in all their implications, point to the mystery of God-manhood, to the mystery of the vital meeting and all-pervading mutual penetration of God and man. God-manhood is in fact that coincidentia oppositorum (to speak in the terms of the mediaeval theologian Nicolas of Cusa), the coincidence and unification of opposites, of God and man and God and the world, which unites what discursive reasoning is incapable of uniting, and renders every moment and atom of life and being a witness to the supreme simultaneous oneness and duality of God and man.

Berdyaev's intention is not to propound a metaphysical doctrine; he wants to describe as it were intuitively a mystery which belongs to the very depth of being and is revealed in existence itself. The mystery of God-manhood is, indeed, unfathomable, irrational, inexpressible in terms of the objectivized world, where one object displaces the other, where all things are extraneous to one another and mutually exclusive. And only in as much as the grip of this objectivized world is loosened, only in so far as man is freed from the world of divided and isolated things and objects, can he become aware of true life in its unity and multiplicity, in its absoluteness and relativity, in its transcendence and immanence, in its agony and bliss—in other words, in its God-manhood.

The idea of God-manhood is clearly of primary importance for Berdyaev's teaching about God and man, on which we shall dwell in more detail presently. But it has also more general implications. It does not merely denote a special understanding of the relation between God and man, but in general expresses a particular feeling for an ethos of life; an ethos which above all finds itself up against any static attitude to life where everything tends to become fixed, divided and "extrinsic"; where all things remain impenetrable substances, opposing unsurmountable barriers to one another and creating estrangement and limitations. God-manhood is to Berdyaev the revelation of the way out of the isolated state of the "natural world." It gives birth to striving for the infinite, for fullness and boundlessness of life, where nothing is external or "extrinsic," as in the world of lifeless things and objects, but all is within and all is known from within. In fact, for Berdyaev nothing in life is "objective" at all, but all is profoundly "subjective," i. e., all is inherent in the knowing, experiencing and living subject; in other words all is existential.

Thus the idea of God-manhood leads us to those elements in Berdyaev's thought which he himself describes as "existential" partly under the influence of certain modern philosophical currents.

So-called existential philosophy, as well as theology, goes back on the one hand to the phenomenological school (Husserl), and on the other to Soren Kierkegaard, and is without doubt one of the most significant movements in contemporary thought. To begin with, it breaks with the abstract tendency of philosophical thinking and seeks a more immediate, concrete, "intuitive" vision of life. We have already noted that this was the concern of the Russian philosophical tradition in the early twentieth century and before, with its radical criticism of West-European abstract, idealistic thought and its claim to a more realistic, intuitive world-outlook. Modern existential philosophy moves on the same lines. Its main concern is to view the essence of being not in general, abstract principles and ideas, but immediately in man's own personal existence. The unusual categories with which it operates—anxiety, fear, anguish, triviality, death—are taken from the experience of human life and replace the categories of substance, cause, quality, quantity, etc., which are ultimately mere abstractions. Yet phenomenological and existential philosophy as it is expressed by its most brilliant representatives, like Hartmann and Scheler, either denies man, his activity and creativeness (cf., Scheler's Vom Ewigen im Menschen)—the same, though in a different sense, applies to the school of so-called dialectical theology, which to some extent derives its origin from the "existential" movement—or denies God and is openly atheistic (cf., Heidegger's sensational book Sein und Zeit, whose popularity, however, is due more to fashion than to real appreciation). Berdyaev is pre-eminently a Christian. Christ the God-man is the vital pivot of his thought. Furthermore he is a humanist, in the deepest and true sense of the word. He believes in and seeks for the truth of man.

In the first place it is important to elicit how Berdyaev's existential philosophy states the problem of knowledge. How do we approach reality? What is the relation between "thought" and "being?" Berdyaev's answer may be summarized in the following way: as long as the knowing subject and the known object are conceived as divided, as long as reality presents itself to us "objectively," or rather in an objectivized way, so long must knowledge needs remain inadequate to reality, i. e., a knowledge pertaining to disparate, disintegrated being (cf., Solitude and Society, the title of whose Russian original is I and the World of Objects True cognition presupposes unity or oneness of "being" and "thought," a unity which transcends the very differentiation and opposition of subject and object. And this unity is initially present in the creative act of knowledge. Moreover, Berdyaev seems to deny the very problem of traditional epistemology in as much as it is concerned with the question as to whether one should or should not recognize the known object as a primary independent reality. As is well known, this problem finds its classical expression on the one hand in scholastic and Thomist "realism," for which the known object must have a primacy over the knowing subject; and on the other hand, in "Idealism," which tends to deny objective reality and reduce it to concepts or sensations arising in the mind of the knowing subject.

Berdyaev. does not admit that knowledge is at all determined by the opposition of "subject" and "object," or of "thought" and "being," in as much as they face each other in an extraneous way. The very fact of cognition is for him an event in being, a revelation of its ontological nature. Being can never be objectivized or exteriorized, whether in theory or in practice; it is revealed in man's very existence, from within; it is co-inherent and co-existent in man.

We are naturally inclined to identify reality with objectivity; and to prove the reality of something usually means to prove its objectiveness and extrinsicality. While this may be true to some extent (in fact, to a very limited extent) of purely external things accessible to our empirical perceptions, it cannot be applied at all to spiritual realities. "The discovery of reality," says Berdyaev, "depends on the activity of the spirit, on its intensity and ardour. We cannot expect that spiritual realities will be revealed to us in the same way as objects of the natural world, presented to us externally, such as stones, trees, tables, chairs, or such as the principles of logic … In the realm of spirit reality is not extraneous, for it proceeds from the spirit itself" (Freedom and the Spirit). Thus it is not objectivity which is the criterion of reality, but, paradoxically enough, the criterion is the reality itself as revealed in man's existence.

In this way Berdyaev hopes to guard knowledge from "ossification," from the conversion of its content into static "tilings," which to a large extent has come about in so-called scientific thought. He regards cognition as an integral, creative act of the spirit, which does not know anything external at all, for which everything is its own life, everything is within, "in the depth."

The question however arises as to whether such a theory of knowledge does not render cognition objectless altogether, and consequently devoid of content. Is it not threatened by "evacuation," and thus by becoming a knowledge of nothing at all? Does not Berdyaev assume that there is nothing transcendent to and beyond man, or if so, only as an "object" or "thing," i. e., as something ultimately false and unreal? The inner logic of his thought in no way suggests such an inference, although some of his utterances, particularly in the discussion of the more practical implications of his epistemology, might lead to such conclusions. Berdyaev's theory of knowledge is indeed "objectless," in the sense that the object of knowledge is not fixed into "thinghood," that its content does not denote a "something" which exists on its own account, in isolation, out of vital relation with concrete human existence. But it is surely not objectless in the sense that it precludes anything but the knowing subject, which is actually one of the worst forms of Idealism and subjectivism, and which, as we have seen, Berdyaev explicitly repudiates. Moreover, his existentialism even presupposes man's self-transcendence—to God, to other men and to the world. Yet such self-transcendence is an inward process, not an outward one into the world of isolated, extraneous things. Man becomes aware of other reality than himself only in awareness of its relation to his own being, in self-awareness; and this latter is the initial fact of his self-determination to anyone or anything. The relation of man to God and to man is an event within his very existence, in his inmost profundity; it is an inherent part of his own destiny. "Return into oneself and self-awareness," says Berdyaev, "imply out-going to the other one and self-transcendence" (The Meaning of Creativeness). Such is the Copernican discovery of his existentialism, not less significant than the "Kopernikanische Tat" of Kant.

All this makes the fundamental difference of Berdyaev's thought from every kind of psychologism and solipsism. Psychology regards man as cast into the objectivized world: the "soul," "psyche," remains a solitary, self-contained unit, an unrelated and isolated being. To this Berdyaev opposed what he calls pneumatology, which considers man above all as a spirit, equally personal, free and self-determining, yet always open, continually surpassing itself, and vitally correlated with God, other men and the world at large. "Man's spirit is not an inert substance, self-contained and self-sufficient" (Freedom and the Spirit). In fact Berdyaev does not recognize it as a "substance" at all, if substance means a limitable, finished, static reality. "Spirit is existence," i. e., a reality which transcends all limitations and divisions, all fixity and immobility.

This theory of knowledge has far-reaching implications for Berdyaev's religious outlook and his philosophy of the Christian revelation.

In the first place, his existentialism precludes a thorough distinction between so-called natural and supernatural knowledge. This distinction in itself he regards as a product of objectivized thinking, in as much as it implies that men can think of God out of direct relation with and so to say in abstraction from, the Christian revelation. If the Christian revelation is an event within human existence, in the very depth of being, which it is indeed pre-eminently, it must be recognized as intensely relevant at the initial stage of our knowledge of God and the ultimate meaning of life. An act of faith is thus implied not only in the realm of "supernatural" revelation, but in all true knowledge. Only return to the ultimate depth of being renders philosophical thinking a possibility at all. The two ends of the chain of human thought must be integrated into a single existential intuition. "One cannot arrive at God, to him there are ultimately no 'ways'; one can only go out from God; he is not merely at the end: he is at the beginning" ("The Russian Religious Idea" in Problems of Russian Religious Consciousness). "I am the way, the truth and the life" (John xiv. 6).

In this sense Berdyaev almost identifies philosophy with mysticism. Their difference is as it were of a quantitative rather than qualitative nature. The true difference lies not so much between mystical and philosophical knowledge, as between what he calls the "mysticism of perfection," or "elevation of the soul to God," and the mysticism of penetration into the mysteries of being, of divine and human life, or of philosophical gnosis, a kind of second-sight or insight into the supreme meaning of all things. In this latter sense Berdyaev regards as mystics such men as Jacob Bôhme, Baader, Dostoevsky, Solovyev, Léon Bloy, who were, however, all more or less far from being "perfect." He even defines mysticism as "knowledge which has its source in vital and immediate contact with the ultimate reality … It is derived from the word 'mystery, ' and must therefore be regarded as the foundation and source of all creative movement" (Freedom and the Spirit).

The other religious implication of Berdyaev's existentialism is his belief in the reciprocity of every act of God's revelation to man. "In as much," he says, "as revelation is an event within man, in the very depth of human destiny, it presupposes not only the one who reveals, but the one to whom the revelation is made too; in other words, it implies man's active and creative participation. Revelation cannot operate on man automatically and mechanically, independently of who and what he is" (The Meaning of Creativeness. Cf., Freedom and Spirit).

Berdyaev repudiates the traditional theological view that revelation is based on belief in the "moderately normal," unchangeable, natural human being, who belongs to an eternal natural order. Any idea of finiteness, of a finished objective order, be it supernatural or natural and social, he regards as primarily responsible for the false and disastrous conservatism of certain forms of Christian consciousness, wherein man is left with only one task—to conform to and obey this order, the very permanence of which is considered to be a preordained condition of revelation. Moreover, revelation itself is believed to be an entirely "objective" act, independent of any creative participation of man in it. To this view Berdyaev opposes the idea of man's free creative relation to God and his call to interaction with him. Such opposition to any fixed permanence of both the "supernatural" and "natural" orders marks Berdyaev's revolutionary, dynamic, and active Christian consciousness, which looks to the things to come and expects man to change creatively the outer and inner conditions of life.

The idea of divine-human interaction brings us back to the fundamental assumption of Berdyaev's philosophy, that of God-manhood, which we shall now endeavour to analyse in its main elements.

It has already been noted that Berdyaev is not concerned to frame a rational doctrine of God and man, and that he does not attempt to co-ordinate or synthesize the divine and human principles in a rational system. He thinks of God-manhood not conceptually, but rather mythologically. "Christianity is entirely mythological, as indeed all religion is; and Christian myths express the deepest and most central realities of the spiritual world. It is high time to cease being ashamed of Christian mythology and trying to strip it of myth. No system of theological or metaphysical concepts can destroy Christian mythology and it is precisely the myths of Christianity which constitute its greatest reality; for it becomes an abstraction as soon as it is freed from them" (Freedom and the Spirit). And he adds that materialism and positivism equally live by myths, whether they be those of material nature or of scientific knowledge.

What, then, is the content of the myth of God-manhood? This is described by Berdyaev as the "drama of love and freedom between God and man; the birth of God in man and the birth of man in God." "Spiritual experience shows us that man longs for God, and that God longs for man and yearns for the birth of man who shall reveal his image." This fact finds its fullest and most concrete expression in Christianity, in which "the humanity of God is revealed and the divine image of man." Berdyaev sees the depth of true life in this primordial divine-human mystery, in the meeting and mutual relatedness of God and man. He does not conceive of religious life (just as in his analysis of knowledge) as a confrontation of an unchangeable, static and ultimately lifeless religious "subject" with an equally changeless and static religious "object," and is in consequence compelled to recognize a reciprocal relation and interaction between God and man, that is, precisely "the birth of God in man and the birth of man in God, and the revelation of God to man and of man to God."

Within the depth of spiritual life there is unfolded before us the religious drama of God's dealings with man and man's with God. Without God and within human nature alone there can be no spiritual life. That quality of life which is called spiritual can only exist in man if there is something to deepen his life, something to which he can transcend himself … On the other hand, if there were nothing but the divine nature, if God had, as it were, no other self except himself, there would be no original phenomenon in spiritual life, and all would disappear into an abyss of divine selfhood and undifferentiated abstraction. God must limit himself and go out into the other self, that is into the being of man.

Berdyaev distrusts all systems of rational theology; he accuses them of disregarding the problem of God-manhood and thus leading to an objectivized, "idolatrous" conception of the relation between God and man. He describes in rather horrifying words the notion of God prevalent in some of these systems:

God conceived as a metaphysical transcendent being, as an immutable inert substance, represents the latest form of idolatry in the history of the human spirit. Monotheism can in fact be a form of idolatry … Man in bondage to the objectivized world conceives of God as a great exterior force, as a "super-natural" power in every respect comparable to a "natural" power. God is merely the highest and most perfect of all forms of power, or in other words a projection of natural being. This supreme power demands to be appeased. The transcendent God avenges himself like the gods and man of the fallen world.

But Christianity appeared in the world to conquer decisively both idolatry and servitude. It affirmed the religion of the Trinity, in which God revealed himself as Love and the Beloved.

Berdyaev, then, does not think of God except in relation to man. Surely this does not imply that God per se is not at all, or that man supplies something which is lacking in God. Yet since God is Creator, since he created man, the living personal being related to him who is the living personal Creator, he cannot but be himself supremely related to man, for every living and personal act becomes real only in this relatedness. The fact that God "longs for man, for his other one, for the free response of his love," shows not that there is any insufficiency or absence of fullness in the being of God, but on the contrary the superabundance of his plenitude and perfection (cf., Freedom and the Spirit). Just because God's life is "agreement of contraries," he embraces both the perfection of his eternal transcendent being and the distinct and vital experience of man's relation to him. In this sense every act of God's revelation to man, and of man's participation in it, does not concern and affect man alone but also God, i. e., it is an essentially divine-human act. Berdyaev is even bold enough to refer to the amazing words of the Catholic mystic, Angelus Silesius, who says, "I know that without me God could not endure for a moment. Were I brought to naught, he would yield up the ghost for lack of me" (Der Cherubinische Wandersmarm)—words which may well disturb and alarm us. But this utterance expresses for Berdyaev a truth of innermost spiritual experience—an existential truth, not a metaphysical proposition. As such it does not necessarily lead to pantheism (which has become the bogy of rationalist theologians). Hence the abundance of symbolic and mythological language in his theology, which is "safer" and indeed more adequate to express the mysteries of divine-human life than abstract metaphysics. "To speak of God-manhood, of God's reciprocal relation to man, is a mythological representation and not a philosophical proposition; it is to speak the language of the prophets of the Bible rather than that of the Greek philosophers."

Three fundamental problems are bound up in Berdyaev's thought with the idea of God-manhood: the problems of creativeness, of freedom, and hence of evil.

God-manhood is the call to mankind to manifest the image of the Creator in human life. Man is a creator, in virtue of his divine-human (theandric) nature and of the image and likeness of God in him. This is the ontological and ethical basis of Berdyaev's teaching about man. And he takes on the task of discovering, defining and justifying the image of the Creator in man. In the world today, in which the image of man is threatened with destruction, mancreator is and must become the supreme Christian ideal. Berdyaev is no doubt justified in his profound dissatisfaction with the traditional Christian attitude to this problem. Christians have too often reduced the whole issue to a mere submission of the creative act of man in all spheres of cultural and social life to religion and religious authority. Here the creative act—whether cognitive, artistic, ethical, social or technical—was regarded as of essentially secondary significance, as of inferior quality and even harmful from the religious point of view. A sharp distinction was drawn between the "sacred" and the "profane," which resulted to begin with in Christians living in two different rhythms, the religious rhythm of the Church, governing a limited number of days and hours in their life, and the unreligious rhythm of the world, governing a greater number—in other words in secularization; and finally this involved man's rise against religion as a tyranny, in an attempt to establish autonomy for his creative dignity and achievements. To the idea of a mere subordination of the creative act of man to a hierarchically superior power, Berdyaev opposes the idea of the intrinsic religious value of this act in its free realization, the idea of its existential meaning. "God expects from man a free creative act," for truly "My Father worketh hitherto and I work," and "the works that I shall do he [man] shall do also; and greater works than these shall he do" (John v. 7; xiv. 12).

It must be understood that Berdyaev's apologia for creativeness has little or nothing in common with the modern ideas of "activism." The technical and economic processes of our civilization demand of man that he should always be "doing" something: a perpetual frenzied activity and the use of every moment of time for action. Such activism threatens to eliminate all contemplation from life. This means that man will cease to pray, that he will have no longer any relation to God, that he will no longer believe in the possibility of dis-interested knowledge of truth. Yet man is determined in relation not only to time, but also to eternity. He cannot be absorbed in the flux of time, in a ceaseless actualization of every instant, in the mad precipitancy of the temporal process. Man is called to recollect and to be-think himself in utter silence, to realize the depth of life revealed in his relatedness to life eternal. In as much, then, as the creativeness of modern activism is a denial of life eternal, in as much as it binds man in time, Berdyaev rejects such creativeness. No doubt man is called to activity and work—he cannot and should not remain simply a contemplative, for neither God nor the world is a spectacle: he must continue God's own original creative act; he must transform and organize the world. Yet man is above all a meeting-point of two converging worlds, the eternal and the temporal, and hence is not only vitally related to time but also to eternity. This, too, pertains to the supreme existential truth about man. When man is turned into the tool or object of an impersonal activistic process in this world he is no longer a free personal human being; in fact, he ceases to be creative. For true creativeness frees man from the flux of time; it turns his gaze to Heaven, it reunites human existence with its sources in God-manhood, and modifies the natural configuration of things.

Many are alarmed and repelled by Berdyaev's exaltation of creativeness, and objections have been raised from all sides to the very understanding of man as creator and as called to creativity. It may seem however that his critics, who accuse him of over-valuing and divinizing man, of "titanism" and humanism, have largely misunderstood the particular way in which he posits the whole problem. After all, to have a high idea of man as creator and as called to participate in God's creative action is in itself far from being an invitation to proud and egocentric independence, for man bears primordially and irrevocably the seal of God's creative power who made him "in the beginning." "It is strange to think," says Berdyaev, "that God could have created something small and insignificant as the crown of his creation. It is impious and blasphemous to have a low opinion of God's idea, and to hold it in contempt as despicable and of no account" (The Meaning of Creativeness). Man's creativeness is therefore not his autonomous right or claim, but rather his duty before God and the fulfilment of his will: not to be creator and not to live creatively, not to take part in God's unceasing creative action in the world, is disobedience to God, and in the last resort rebellion against him. Such is Berdyaev's approach to the problem. It may be asked whether Christianity has freed Prometheus from his fetters, or has chained him still more heavily. I believe that it has freed him, for he was chained not by God, but by the demons of nature with whose power he was wrestling.

Berdyaev himself wrote a great deal about the falsehood of humanism, in which man has asserted himself without and against God and has gradually cut himself off from the sources of being; moreover he has shown that this led in its turn to a denial and destruction of man, for "Humanism has destroyed itself by its own dialectic" (The End of Our Time; cf., The Meaning of History). But to the question as to where the falsehood of humanism lies, why it is impotent, why it is experiencing such an overwhelming crisis to-day, he answers not that it has overstressed the dignity and calling of man to creativeness, but that it has not done this enough, and so has in fact resulted in man's degradation and denial. It did not give man his full dignity, which reaches to the heavens, to God, and this fatally under-estimated him. Berdyaev wants to overcome humanism, not against man, in order to degrade him, but in the name of the God-man, and hence in the name of man. Most of the anti-humanistic tendencies of to-day, on the other hand, imply derogation of man and dehumanization of life and thought. So-called dialectical theology (Karl Barth, E. Brunner and others, see above) is particularly interesting and significant in this respect. It has shown not only an acute and just reaction against humanism, but also a revolt, an almost demonic revolt, against any link and vital relation between the creature and his Creator: hence a revolt against the eternal mystery of God-manhood, which is revealed in Christ and must be revealed in Christ's humanity.

Berdyaev stands firm in his conviction that Christianity is human, that, in fact, herein lies its distinctness, though many Christians have maintained, and continue to maintain, the contrary. His vision of man in the light of the mystery of God-manhood has rendered his thought essentially and profoundly Christian.

The most important works of Berdyaev are devoted to the problems of ethics; and he once said that he considered his ethics to be Christian in as much as he has succeeded in showing them to be human. Even the Destiny of Man, one of his most abstruse, complex books, which is largely inspired by the themes of eschatology, by the agony of pondering on the problem of evil and Hell, is actually about the simple truth of being human, which many modern theologians are so much inclined to despise. He has shown the emergence of a morality which paves man's way to Hell, paves it by its devotion to the "good," to moral principles and ideals, and heralds a path which would free man from this hell of goodness. And he is ready to place himself beyond good and evil in order to ask whether that which has long been held to be good and evil is really good and evil.

We turn to the second problem connected with the idea of God-manhood, that of freedom. This problem in general, as well as in the particular context of Berdyaev's philosophy, is bound up with very complex metaphysical presuppositions and implications, which in view of the nature of the present essay cannot be expounded: I shall therefore confine myself simply to a few hints as to how Berdyaev formulates the problem.

In common speech, and even in philosophies, the concept of freedom has two different connotations. There is freedom as a way, freedom as choice, choice between good and evil, freedom by which truth or God is recognized and accepted, but which in itself is undetermined by anything or any one. And there is freedom as an aim to be achieved, freedom in the truth, freedom that is in God and a gift of God. When we say that man has acquired freedom because his higher nature has conquered the lower, because reason has come to control his passions, we are speaking of freedom in the latter sense. It is the freedom of which the gospel says, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John viii. 32). Here truth brings freedom, and freedom is as it were not first but second. When, on the other hand, we say that man freely chose the path of life and in freedom came to truth, we are speaking of freedom in the former sense, of freedom which is "first" and not "second."

Now this first kind of freedom may issue not only in good, but in evil as well. It bears no guarantee of goodness, no certainty that man will follow the right path and will come to God. Moreover, as Berdyaev says, this freedom has a "fatal tendency to destroy itself, to turn into its opposite and precipitate man into anarchy, which in its turn brings slavery and tyranny" (Philosophy of Freedom). "We know in our own experience that the anarchy of passions and the lowest impulses of our nature, which live each for its own ends, bring us into a real state of slavery, deprive us of the freedom of the spirit, and end in disintegration" (Freedom and the Spirit). This applies equally to personal and social life. Freedom which remains "formal," objectless, incapable of positive choice, indifferent to truth, leads to the dis-integration of man and of the world. Thus, taken in itself, the first kind of freedom is powerless to preserve and maintain true freedom, and always threatens man with destruction.

Berdyaev maintains the distinction between the two freedoms. But the defectiveness, or rather the potential defectiveness, of the first kind of freedom does not lead him to an unqualified upholding of freedom in the second sense, of freedom that is in truth and goodness, of freedom which is regarded as identical with truth and reasonableness. For him the will to self-determination must have the primacy over reason. He is aware that a mere freedom of reasonableness too may destroy itself, may bring about the power of compulsory goodness and give rise to a religious and social life in which freedom turns out to be a child of necessity. If the first kind of freedom may lead to anarchy, the second may lead to theocratic or "totalitarian" despotism. This is witnessed to by innumerable pyres lit by Christians and non-Christians alike to burn heretics in the name of truth and its liberating power. Such freedom does not know what Dostoevsky expressed in the striking words of the Great Inquisitor to Christ: "Thou hast desired the free love of man. The freedom of his faith has been dearer to thee than anything else … In place of the hard and ancient law, man was to decide for himself, in the freedom of his heart, what is good and what is evil." In these words Berdyaev's own faith may be discerned. Like Dostoevsky, he rejects "miracle" and "authority" as violations of human conscience, as the denial to man's spirit of his freedom.

"I can receive the supreme and final freedom from truth alone, but the truth cannot force or compel me: my acceptance of the truth pre-supposes my freedom, my free movement in it. Freedom is not only an aim but a path .… Freedom has brought me to Christ, and I know no other path leading to him. Nor am I the only one who has passed through this experience. No one who has left a Christianity based on authority can return to anything but a Christianity which is free … I admit that it is grace which has brought me to faith, but it is grace experienced by me as freedom. Those who have come to Christianity through freedom bring to it that same spirit of freedom" (Freedom andithe Spirit). "A man who has achieved a definite victory over the seductive temptations of humanism, who has discovered the hollow unreality of the divinization of man by man, can never hereafter abandon the liberty which has brought him to God, nor the definite experience which has freed him from the power of evil"(ibid.).

And finally:

When man returns to God after an experience of apostasy, he knows a freedom in his relations with him untasted by one who has passed his life in the peace and security of his traditional faith, and who has remained within the confines of his spiritual inheritance (ibid.).

What, then, is Berdyaev's answer to the question of the relation between the two forms of freedom? Sometimes their relation appears to him a continuous irreducible conflict, for "man moves from the first kind of freedom to the second, and from the second to the first, but everywhere freedom is poisoned from within and dies" (Freedom and the Spirit). Life itself is a proof of such constant conflicts. In fact there is no solution save in the coming of Christ the God-man. "Only the New Adam can take from freedom its deadly effect without compromising freedom itself … The grace of Christ is the illumination of freedom from within and hence knows no outward restraint or coercion. It differs from the truths of this world and from the truths of the 'other world' as understood by sinful man, which all seek to organize life by constraint and end by depriving him of the freedom of the spirit. The light of Christ illuminates the dark irrationality of freedom, without, however, imposing limitations upon it." The very nature of Christ's grace is shown by Berdyaev as both divine and human, for it proceeds not only from God but from the God-man, from God's eternal God-manhood. Hence man has a part in it and shares it freely. In the power of the mystery of God-manhood God meets the beloved creature, and the reciprocation of his love is infinitely and supremely free. (It may be noted in parenthesis that this view has nothing in common with Pelagianism, which seems to be a typically Western heresy: its very approach to the problem of the relation between God and man is alien to Berdyaev, being as it is the result of an incipient disintegration of the Christian myth of God-manhood.)

Here are a few truly inspiring passages from Freedom and the Spirit where Berdyaev presents his Christian interpretation of freedom:

It is Christianity alone which can comprehend the fundamental mystery of human freedom, which is inseparably linked with the union of two natures in Christ the God-man; a union which, however, does not in any way annul their distinction. The source of man's freedom is in God, and that, not in God the Father, but in God the Son, while the Son is not only God but man … that is, Eternal Man. The freedom of the Son is that in which and by which the free response to God is effected. It is the source of the freedom of the whole human race, for this freedom is not only that of the old Adam but also of the spiritual Adam, that is, of Christ. It is in the Son that the free response is given to the call of divine love and to God's need of his other one, a response which is heard in the heavenly and spiritual sphere and which is re-echoed upon earth and in the natural world … The whole generation of Adam is in the Son of God, and it finds in him the inner source of its liberty, which is not only a freedom like God's, but freedom in relation to God and in its attitude towards him. To receive the freedom of Christ is not only to receive the freedom of God but to receive also, by partaking of Christ's human nature, that freedom which enables man to turn to God." And further, speaking about the Cross: "God the Son, veiled beneath the form of a crucified slave, does not force recognition of himself upon anyone. His divine power and glory are manifested in the act of faith and free love. The Crucified speaks to the freedom of the human spirit, for without a free act on the part of the spirit there can be no recognition of him as God. A crucified God is hidden as well as revealed. The constraint exercised by the natural world wholly disappears in the act of divine revelation, for everything turns on the existence of inner freedom. Man, obsessed by the forces of the external world, sees nothing in the Crucified but a human being suffering torture and humiliation, and the consequent defeat and annihilation of truth so far as this world is concerned. Divine truth seems to be powerless … But the religion of truth crucified is the religion of the freedom of the spirit; it possesses no logical or juridical power of compulsion and is revealed as love and liberty.

The mystery of freedom, then, and the solution of its inherent tragedy must be sought for in the Christian revelation of God-manhood, in Christ the God-man, crucified and risen.

Nonetheless the light that proceeds from Christ and illuminates all the paths of human freedom does not render Berdyaev in any way insensitive to the overwhelming power of evil, sin and suffering born from this freedom, and does not make him content and happy in an easy-going optimism. In fact, as we have already seen, awareness of evil and sin in the world and the capacity for suffering and compassion are for him preeminent signs of a true Christian spirit. "Man is a creature who suffers and is compassionate, who is sensitive to pity, who in these ways proves the dignity of human nature" (Spirit and Reality). In the face of the evil and agonies in the world Berdyaev refuses to accept any conception of God's providence which establishes a rational or moral expediency and "final causality." "In this world there are irreconcilable good and evil, unjust suffering, the tragic destiny of great and just men. It is a world in which prophets are stoned and unjust men, the persecutors and crucifiers of the just, are triumphant. It is a world in which innocent children and innocent animals have to suffer. It is a world in which death, evil and anguish reign supreme. Is Divine Providence effective in this world?" (ibid).

In this very question we feel Berdyaev's deep awareness of that terrible age-long action brought for their sufferings by stricken mankind against God—a challenge to the Hidden God to reveal himself. At one time Berdyaev was a convinced atheist; but, like many other people who have seriously and deeply questioned about the meaning of life and have sought the truth, he was an atheist, not because of intellectual difficulties which stood in the way of his belief in God, but for moral reasons, because spiritually he could not solve the agonizing problem of theodicy, viz., of the "justification" of God in face of the tragic strickenness of the world and man. And may it not be that the overwhelming fact of boundless evil and innumerable sufferings in the world is indeed the only serious objection to faith in God? This is surely why, among the rebels against God, there are people of a deeply sensitive conscience, imbued with the thirst for truth and justice. The historical destiny of the Russian people is a striking witness to this.

Thus no optimistic teleology is capable of facing, not to speak of solving, the problem of evil. To solve it one must first of all taste the tragedy of evil; evil must be lived through, or rather lived out from within; one must experience all the paths and possibilities of freedom. "Good," says Berdyaev, "is revealed and triumphs through the ordeal of evil." He answers the argument against God from the existence of evil in the world by affirming that the very existence of evil is a proof of the existence of God. "If the world consisted wholly and solely of goodness and righteousness there would be no 'need' for God, for the world itself would be God. God is, because evil is. And that means that God is because freedom is" (Dostoevsky; cf., Freedom and the Spirit).

Berdyaev as it were offers man the way to light through darkness, through the abyss and chasms of freedom. It almost seems that he, not unlike Dostoevsky and other Russians, wants to know evil, so that in the experience of this knowledge it may be overcome. This is a dangerous truth (and what truth is not dangerous!); it is a truth only for the really free and spiritually mature. Only a slave or a spiritual infant could understand it to mean that one must consciously take the path of evil in order to be enriched and to arrive happily at the good. Berdyaev is no evolutionist for whom evil is but a moment in the development of good—such a point of view is fundamentally untragic and optimistic (besides being morally vicious), and for this reason alone quite alien to him. "Only the unmasking of evil, only deep suffering from evil, can raise man to greater heights. It is precisely self-satisfaction in evil which means utter ruin … Evil is the tragic path of man, his destiny, the trial of his freedom. But it is not a necessary moment in the evolution of good … Man may be enriched by the experience of evil, become more acutely conscious; but for this he must suffer, realize the horror of perdition, expose evil, cast it into the fire of Hell and expiate his guilt" (Dostoevsky).

Evil, then, is overcome from within, through living it out, through deep inward awareness of its meaning, through inner illumination—in other words, existentially. "And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not" (John i. 5). This is the path of Christ's redemption. God who came down to earth and became man shared the destiny of stricken and sinful humanity, and in this sharing redeemed it. "Christ has died, and we must freely accept death as the way to life and as an interior moment of it" (Freedom and the Spirit). The cross of Christ is the revelation of the meaning of evil and suffering, and the only adequate answer to the question, "Is Divine Providence effective in the world?" God does not explain or justify the anguish of life, but takes it on himself, tastes its full horror, and in so doing illuminates it. Thus the problem of evil points as well to the twofold mystery with which life is bounded—to God-manhood, in whose power tragic existence becomes and is Christian existence.

"The transfiguration of the life of the world into eternal life is the supreme goal of all things. The way which leads to it involves the free acceptance of the cross, suffering, and death. Christ is crucified above the dark abyss in which being and non-being blend one with the other. The light which shines from the Crucified is a light shining in the darkness. It is this light which both illuminates the shadows of being and overcomes the darkness of non-being" (op. cit.).