SOURCE: "Nicolas Berdyaev, the Philosopher of Personalism," in Christian Thought from Erasmus to Berdyaev, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962, pp. 214-24.

Among those who repudiate our secularist civilization most consistently, comprehensively, and vehemently is the Russian religious philosopher, Nicolas A. Berdyaev. Since his acceptance of the Christian world-view he had been a man in revolt against a world in revolt against God. Having rejected God, our era is now in the process of repudiating man, as far as his spiritual nature is concerned. This is seen in such movements as fascism and communism; for having rejected God, we are now renouncing man.

Berdyaev was born in Kiev of an old aristocratic family, and although in opposition to it, he retained the best features of his aristocratic upbringing throughout his life. His father, a retired officer in the Cavalier Guard, placed him in the Pages''Corpus. But soldiering was not Nicolas' chosen career; he was a serious, studious youth, eager to learn the meaning of life. Thus philosophy was his most congenial study. After graduating from the military school, he entered Kiev University. Previously, he had read philosophy "on his own." At fourteen he had already read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. He bears witness to the potent influence exerted on him during his later life by the biblical prophets, Job, the Greek tragedies, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Dickens, Balzac, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Tyutchev. At the University he fell under the spell of Marx and played a prominent part as leader of the student Marxist circle. He was consequently expelled from the University and exiled for three years to the Vologda province, although during the last year he was allowed to reside at Zhitomir. But he affirms that he never was an orthodox Marxist, nor a materialist or a positivist. He writes in his spiritual autobiography:

During a certain period of my life I have been an atheist, if one understands by that term an antitheist, the rejection of the traditional religious notions about God. But I have not been an atheist, if by that term one understands the rejection of the supreme spiritual principle of spiritual values independent of the material world. I have not been a pantheist.

But the deterministic, anti-humanist character of orthodox Marxism, the doctrinaire denial of the ethical nature of man, soon compelled Berdyaev to part company with his fellow-revolutionaries. He had learned from Kant that the highest value in the world is the human personality, and this conviction remained fundamental to his creed throughout his whole life. He had supposed in joining the Marxist circle that the new revolutionary gospel was humanistic. But a closer acquaintance with the movement convinced him of the contrary; he saw with grief that among the Marxists there was no more respect for personality than among the bourgeoisie. It was this that caused him to break with the revolutionaries and gradually turn to, and accept, the essentially Christian interpretation of the meaning of human existence. Dostoevsky's influence contributed mightily to this change, particularly his concept of Christianity as depicted in "The Grand Inquisitor," to which Berdyaev never tires of referring. Nevertheless, he insists in his autobiography that he never experienced a "conversion" as that occurrence is commonly understood: "I did not experience the crisis of conversion perhaps for the reason that my spiritual life consists of crises." His religious goals have been twofold: "the search for meaning and the search for eternity. The search for meaning was my first search for God, while the search for eternity was my first search for salvation." " … I am more a homo mysticus than a homo religious. " Nevertheless, he remained all his life opposed to the "official" Orthodoxy of the Russian Church, at times even violently criticizing it:

I never pretended that my religious thought had a churchly character. I sought the truth and experienced as truth that which was revealed to me. The historic Orthodoxy has appeared to me insufficiently ecumenical and limited, almost sectarian. I am not a heretic [he had been so accused] and least of all a sectarian; I am a believing free-thinker.

During the First World War he published an article severely denouncing the Holy Governing Synod. He was to be tried in court as a "blasphemer"—a crime punishable by permanent exile to Siberia. But the trial was postponed on account of the War and was never resumed. Because of his individualist interpretation of Christianity, he is not to be regarded as a typical representative of Russian Orthodoxy. That purpose could be served far better by Father Sergius Bulgakov, who likewise had passed from Marxism to Christianity, but became a priest and in the end—as dean of the Orthodox Academy in Paris—the outstanding theologian of his Church. Berdyaev at best represents the free, lay character of Russian religious thought.

When the First World War broke out, and particularly after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in October of 1917, Berdyaev found himself violently opposed to the new regime. In a book written during that time, but not published until later when he was already abroad, Berdyaev savagely denounced the secularist and atheistic intellectuals of Russia for the "treason" they had committed against the Russian people that revenged itself upon them in such a ghastly fashion in the Revolution. But he likewise condemned the Revolution. And although he was appointed by the faculty of the University of Moscow to the chair of philosophy, a man of his convictions could not long retain the post. He was twice arrested and jailed, and finally in 1922 was expelled from Russia along with seventy like-minded members of the intelligentsia. At first, he lived in Berlin, but two years later he moved to Paris, where he remained the rest of his life. The books he wrote during this period of exile brought him to the attention of the world. But, as he has recorded in his spiritual autobiography, "I am not satisfied with any of the books I have written, or any word I have spoken."

Berdyaev is the philosopher of freedom par excellence. As a Kantian, he learned from his master that human personality is of the highest value, and he spent a lifetime elaborating that thesis. Dostoevsky taught him the religious significance of spiritual freedom, a lesson Berdyaev enforced in all his books. But before he was able to affirm and expound his own religious convictions, he had to establish them philosophically. For he was a religious philosopher, not a theologian. In his estimation, most modern philosophy since Kant has been anti-religious—particularly that of Marx and Nietzsche. They denied the authentic personality of man—Berdyaev's cardinal tenet. Consequently, he repudiated them.

For a long time he also struggled with Kantian epistemology, which had dug an impassable gulf between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. But in the end he returned to his first love, Kant, and placed him, along with Plato, on the highest pinnacle of philosophical fame. For Kant as a dualist affirmed the existence of the noumenal, as well as the phenomenal, world, thus placing the spiritual world upon a sure and certain foundation. And although Kant himself did not successfully blaze a path to the apprehension of the spiritual world, he prepared the way for others to do so. Berdyaev writes of him: "Among the philosophers Kant possesses the greatest significance. The philosophy of Kant is philosophy of freedom."

Berdyaev is one of those who, following in the footsteps of Kant, blazed a path to the spiritual realm by his Christian personalism, or existentialism. He defines the latter as " … the knowledge of the human existence and the knowledge of the world through the human existence." He classified himself as belonging to that type of philosophy which is nowadays called "existential" (not that of Heidegger and Jaspers, but of Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche). "The principal characteristic of my philosophical type consists above all in having placed at the basis of philosophy not being, but freedom. Not one other philosopher has done that, it seems, in such a radical form." For him, then, personality, the existent subject, is primary, while being, the ontological object, is secondary. Being denotes matter, existence stands for the spiritual entities. Accordingly, "existence is not essence, is not substance; it is a free act." He therefore inverts the Cartesian dictum, "I think, therefore I am," and asserts instead, "I am, therefore I think." Thought cannot exist by itself, in isolation, any more than the grin of the Cheshire cat can persist "on the vacant air," after the cat has disappeared. Thought necessarily presupposes a thinker. Reality does not exist before the perceiving subject but after it. Only the existential subject is real and free; the object is contingent and determined. Consequently, the identification of the "objective" with the "real" as made in "scientific" thinking, is an error. Scientific knowledge deals exclusively with objects, things; as such it is eminently justified within its own proper limits, and even is immensely beneficial and useful. But there are no meanings in objects; therefore, science cannot find or yield any meanings, whether positive or negative. Nor is there meaning in any mechanical contrivance, no matter how ingenious, save the function which its designer built into it. Meanings are created solely by persons, by subjects capable of a purposeful action; hence, meanings are subjective, not objective. Accordingly, apart from the reality of the spirit or of persons, there exist no meanings.

As a deduction from this radical form of his existentialist philosophy, which affirms the subject as the only real existent, Berdyaev chose the concept of objectification for his special emphasis.

I do not believe in the solidity and durability of the so-called 'objective' world, [he writes], the world of nature and history. Objective reality does not exist, it is only an illusion of apprehension; only the objectification of reality exists which is born of a certain direction of the spirit.

In the last years I have formulated that problem [subject-object relationship] as an estrangement, by the process of objectification, of the solely real subjective world. The objective world is the product of objectification, it is a fallen, shattered, and fettered world .… Reality for me is not at all identical with being and even less with objectivity. The subjective and personalist world is the only genuinely real one.

Stated as simply as possible, objectification means converting a subject—a spiritual entity, into an object—a thing or a commodity. The commonest and the most reprehensible of such cases is that of treating a man as a thing—an inveterate and almost instinctive practice in family, social, industrial, and national relations. When one spouse regards the other as a convenience, the value of which consists primarily in the use he or she may be made of; when in society human beings are looked upon primarily as laborers or professionals or judged by the size of their bank account; when industry looks upon employees as mere "hands," a commodity to be hired for the sake of profitable production of goods; when a political ruling system uses men as means to power, as cannon fodder for the purpose of imperialistic expansion; "in short, wherever man is used as a means rather than an end, objectification takes place."

Accordingly, all present-day civilization, since it represents man's creation, is thus "objectified," for in it men deal with one another not in the personal "I-Thou," but the impersonal "I-It" relationship (to use Martin Buber's phrase).

The spirit in culture, religion, morals, science, art, and law is the objective spirit .… The objectified culture … is as indifferent and harsh toward human personality, as lacking in perception of the inward existence, as is history and all the rest of the objectified world .… Thus making an idol of culture is as inadmissible as is its barbaric rejection. It is necessary to accept and endure the tragic conflict .… It is necessary to accept history, to accept culture, to accept that fearsome, tortuous, fallen world. But the last word does not belong to this objectification. That word is spoken by another order of existence. The objective world will be extinguished in eternity—eternity enriched by the experienced tragedy.

The results of objectification are destructive of human personality, dehumanizing. Any genuinely personal communion on that basis is impossible. Consequently, social relations assume a lower, impersonal level, because community is not possible without communion.

This leads to Berdyaev's concept of human personality, which he regards as of the greatest value. He asserts that he accepted Christianity because he found in it a much more firm ground for his faith in man's supreme destiny than anywhere else. Man partakes of both the bodymind organism and of the spirit. Thus he is a microcosm, the meeting point of two disparate elements, but comprising a unitary being. Since our natural and social scientists and psychologists by and large ignore or deny the spiritual nature of man, this failure of theirs constitutes the greatest danger to our culture, which thus becomes depersonalized. But Berdyaev vehemently protests against it by insisting that man is both a body-soul organism and spirit, both an object and a subject. In so far as he is the body-soul entity, he is an object in bondage to the laws governing all matter. Within this physical realm he is determined and therefore unfree. He may, and often does, live predominantly in this realm—in the Pauline phrase, he is of the flesh. Berdyaev's term for such a man is that he is an individual, but not a person. Only as man develops his spiritual nature and makes it the dominant element in his life does he become a person. He writes:

Personality is not the same thing as the individual. An individual belongs to the natural, biological category. Not only the animal and the plant, but also the diamond, the glass, the pencil are of this category. Personality, however, belongs to the spiritual, not the natural, category.… It is a break-through of the spirit into nature. Personality is not attained without an effort of the spirit over the psychical and physical nature of man. A man may have a brilliant individuality without being a person.

This for Berdyaev is no mere theoretical datum. For him as an existentialist it is of immense personal concern. It is not a matter of indifference whether or not a man is a person. It is his duty; if he is a slave to anything, whether external or inward, he has failed in the supreme task of life.

But how does an individual attain the status of a person? Or in Christian terms, how is man saved from his "fallen" condition, in which he is alienated from God by his own self-assertion—the original sin (an act which Berdyaev places in the pre-existent realm)? By God's grace, man can be saved; for despite his "fall," he still possesses free will. His destiny is bound up with the freedom of choice which is within his power. For God has provided in Jesus Christ a way of redemption. The unique doctrine of Incarnation reveals the divine plan of salvation of all mankind, if mankind chooses to accept it. For Christ is not only the supreme revelation of what God is, but also of what man may and ought to be. God the Word became man, the Godman. Thus "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." Man, too, may experience a basic transformation of his "fallen" nature into that of the son of God. Berdyaev speaks of this spiritual transformation as theanthropy, the attainment of the divine-human personality, which in his estimation is the only proper concept of personality. In this he follows the ancient Eastern Christian tradition (formulated principally by Irenaeus that "the Logos of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who, on account of his great love became what we are that he might make us what he is himself), but uses the more modest and more accurate term, the "divine-human." The result of redemption is the freedom of the sons of God: "Man ought to be free, he dares not be a slave, for he ought to be man. Such is the will of God."

Since man is a free spirit, capable of apprehending God's revelation of Himself, Berdyaev asserts the necessity of such a revelation. It takes many forms, but it is always a spiritual experience. The Father reveals Himself in nature, but were we to depend on this revelation alone, our knowledge of God would certainly be inadequate and even erroneous. One may see this result in the recent "naturalistic theology." It is only in the Son that the deepest spiritual levels of divine revelation are reached. But in the end, only when the human spirit meets the Divine Spirit in an existential encounter is there an immediate, intuitive apprehension of God. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. For Berdyaev, such an experience is the only adequate "proof of the existence of God; hence, along with Kant, he rejects the traditional ontological "proofs" such as those of Thomas Aquinas. "God is not Being and the categories of being are not applicable to Him, but belong ever to thought. He exists—is the Existent—and one can think of Him only existentially and symbolically." God is never an object, but a subject.

Our knowledge of God is, therefore, basically intuitive, subjective, experiential, or, if you will not blanch at the word, mystical. It is neither exclusively intellectual, emotional, volitional, nor intuitional, but rather integral, combining all these four together with the indefinable additional element which results from this integral approach.

But just because man is a free ethical agent he is capable not only of responding voluntarily to God's love, but also of repudiating it, rebelling against it and falling away from God. This results in his misery and suffering. God does not inflict it; man causes it to himself. Striving to affirm himself, to become man-god, he destroys himself, often involving others in his ruin. Hence, society is involved in destruction brought upon itself by its own choices. Modern secularism denies the spiritual nature of man and thus depersonalizes him. Berdyaev sees in this our supreme danger; he describes the results of the process as follows:

The living sources of creation, both human and superhuman, dry up; the aim and object of creation, which are also superhuman, disappear; and the result is man's complete disintegration. For, when man follows the path of self-affirmation, ceases to respect the higher principle and asserts his self-sufficiency, he exterminates and denies his true self according to the laws of an inexorable dialectic .… he becomes the slave of the baser processes, disintegrating with the elements of his own nature and becoming the victim of the artificial nature of the machine he has conjured up into life, and these de-personalize, weaken, and finally annihilate him.

The Christian ethic of redemption is contrary to the worldly standards of value. For it, man as a spiritual being, and not a high standard of living and of economic well being, is of the highest value. "Man shall not live by bread alone," even though it is of concern to Christians that mankind lack not bread. The aim of the Christian ethic is the renewal of the spiritual main-springs of human personality—the spiritual transformation of men and women. A civilization is Christian only to the degree to which it subserves this aim. For there can be no good society without good men and women. All improvements—technological, political, economic, or cultural—if they exclude this kind of basic transformation, are superficial and wholly inadequate.

This, then, is the primary and paramount task of the Christian Church—the transformation of human motivation by subjecting it to the will of God. It cannot be effected forcibly, for the life of the spirit is the life of freedom. God compels no one, forces no one; but to reject Him is to choose evil and its consequent suffering. To charge Christianity with failure to impose salvation upon society after the pattern of the "Grand Inquisitor," or of communism, is to misunderstand the Christian redemptive ethic completely. The "failure of Christianity" is chargeable only to the failure of Christians.

Because the method of Christianity is solely that of persuasion by word and life, the demand for an imminent transformation of the world is a symptom of misunderstanding of its character. Such a demand rests either on a mistaken notion of the apocalyptic hope or, more commonly, on the identification of Christianity with the secularist "progress." Thus the radical doctrine of Berdyáev that man "has a right to hell, as it were," has a direct bearing on his view of history. Berdyaev is not a historian in the accepted professional sense of the word; rather he is a philosopher of history, concerned with discerning its meaning. In the first place, then, he affirms that history can have no meaning except on a religious basis; to him, history is a process wherein the human drama of redemption from sin is played, is a return of the fallen man to God. He thus recurs to Origen's conception of history even to the extent of affirming the pre-existent phase in which both Origen and Berdyaev have placed the "fall" of man. The central point of history, conceived as a redemptive process of the fallen man, is the coming of Christ. Historically, it had been the principal task of the Christian Church to witness to the fact of the Incarnation of the Word and the consequent possibility of the theandric transformation of man. But unfortunately, the Church had on the whole been unfaithful to its task and had compromised with the world; the Western Church became a papal caesarism while the Byzantine Church became caesaropapism. In the modern era it has not sufficiently withstood the corroding influence of secularism.

Furthermore, history has meaning because it tends toward a God-appointed goal. Berdyaev thus not only rejects Nietzsche's notion of the "eternal recurrence," but even more vehemently repudiates the secularist concept of automatic and inevitable "progress." No such mechanical concept can have authentic meaning, because it lacks true teleology—an end toward which it aims. Such "progress' is not going anywhere; therefore, it is essentially meaningless. Men cannot determine the cosmic goal, since they themselves are the product of, and determined by, the cosmic forces. For all mechanical forces as conceived by the natural sciences are determined by natural laws and therefore purposeless. Only God can purpose an end and thus impart meaning to history; for this end will be triumph of meaning. Thus the meaningfulness of history is possible only to those who believe in God and His purpose for the world.

This eschatological faith cannot be realized within human history, within time: it extends beyond time into eternity. However, a believer in God need not await it passively, as if it were an event wholly outside and beyond the possibility of his cooperation in bringing it about. In fact, he has a duty to cooperate with God in bringing it about; for although it is an event primarily determined and wrought by God, man may contribute to its accomplishment. Since "The end of history is the end of that exteriorization and objectification, a return to inwardness," man has a part to play in it. For he can surely do his share; in fact, without such an effort on his part, "the Kingdom would be delayed."

And the ultimate goal is the Kingdom of God, when He will be all in all, and when all evil will be vanquished. "The final victory of God over the forces of Hades cannot be accomplished by the division into two kingdoms—divine and diabolic, the saved and those damned to eternal suffering—it can be attained only as one kingdom." But how that can be done without violating man's freedom Berdyaev does not say.