SOURCE: "Nicholas Berdyaev, Captive of Freedom," in Twentieth-Century Thinkers: Studies in the Work of Seventeen Modern Philosophers, edited by John K. Ryan, Alba House, 1965, pp. 205-12.

Reinhold Niebuhr once referred to Nicholas Berdyaev as the outstanding religious personality of our time. Evelyn Underhill and the late Goeffrey Francis Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, echoed this sentiment. He has also been called the "supreme Russian philosopher," passionately interested in the moods and ideas of his time. The London Times said that in a lifetime he had accepted and denied with equal vehemence more ideas than most men even fleetingly dream of. The New York Times called him the most exciting writer on contemporary religious themes. He was a man as pugnacious as Léon Bloy in his search for the Absolute, but agonizingly aware of freedom and its responsibilities, a "nay-sayer" to life at one moment, and boldly assertive the next; exhibiting an almost neurotic sensitivity at one time, and at another a stoic courage.

This spiritual anarchist, as he described himself, gives us a great insight into his personality in his Dream and Reality. He tells his autobiography is not to be a diary in the sense of André Gide's Journal or the confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau and St. Augustine, but rather a philosophical autobiography of what he calls a "history of spirit and self knowledge".

There is an almost Kierkegaardian anxiety in Berdyaev—a persistent feeling of alienation and aloneness despite his constant political and social and ideological involvements. As he once phrased it: "Nothing is my own and all things are mine". He tells that as a child he was never conscious of belonging to his parents, and was repelled by family ties. Even family resemblances he considered an affront to the dignity of the individual human person.

Berdyaev was born in Kiev, the first center of Christianity in Russia, in 1874. He died an expatriate in Paris in March 1948, much to the relief of his fellow emigrés. As a twenty-year old youth Berdyaev turned to Marxism, was arrested twice in the next four years by Tsarist police, and later exiled to Vologda for two years. After the October revolution he was twice arrested by the Soviets, as by this time he had become disenchanted with Marxism, and was not hesitant in saying so. Despite his dislike of Marxism he taught at the University of Moscow, but was eventually exiled to Berlin and later moved on to Paris.

Berdyaev's family, though of Muskovite origin, belonged to the aristocracy of the southwest, and were strongly influenced by the West. French was the language of the home. His mother was a beautiful, aloof aristocrat who was never quite convinced that the Berdyaev family into which she had married was normal. His aunt owned a hundred and fifty thousand acres in Kiev, and had palaces in Warsaw, Paris, Nice, and Rome.

As a child of fourteen, the young Berdyaev was devouring Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Surprisingly enough, he attributes his religious awakening, not to the Bible, nor to the Orthodox Church, but to Schopenhauer, who also brought home to him the tragic sense of the pain of human sensitivity. From his earliest years he was deeply conscious of what was believed to be the destiny of the Russian people; he was conscious of remaining a nobleman even as he sought justice for the oppressed in revolutionary activity.

Through his childhood Berdyaev nursed resentment against the semi-feudal society of his parents, and the Church, which he felt to be a political tool. But although on occasion extremely critical of orthodoxy, Berdyaev seems to have been considerably influenced by the Orthodox Church, and affiliated himself as an expatriate only with those congregations that were linked to the Moscow patriarchate. Basic to his worship was the concept of 'sobornost', a unity born of voluntary togetherness, a common mind of the assembled faithful. His early bias against the church was probably derived from his father's free-thinking tendencies and Voltairean scepticism. It was probably to Voltaire, discovered in his father's library, that Berdyaev himself owed his lifelong interest in the philosophy of history. His studies in history led him to this conclusion that nothing seems to succeed in history, but that all things acquire their significance in it.

Berdyaev was not aware of a specific moment of conversion, although he had no great reluctance for dramatizing his many great decisions. Philosophically, Kant was a great influence in his life, and the one whom he regarded as the philosopher of freedom par excellence. Yet he says in the same breath, "I have never complied with any philosophical tradition". Even Karl Marx in his later days is said to have remarked, "I am not a Marxist." Berdyaev too, even when he saw in Marxism an articulate protest against the inequities of his world, never admitted himself to be completely a Marxist. Not only would his anarchic spirit resist the relentless restraints on human personality, but idealism was the philosophy he represented himself as embracing at this period.

This realism was not the idealism opposed to realism in the traditional philosophic sense; neither does it seem to represent any abstract metaphysics.

His Destiny of Man contains praise of Kant, but he rejects the Kantian noetic, and actively opposed the neoKantianism of the Russian intelligentia which he felt reduced authentic Kantianism thought to a kind of ethical moralism. Kant's greatest contribution in Berdyaev's opinion was his conviction that true morality was within and not empirically arrived at.

Berdyaev's disenchantment with Marxism was by no means based on a regard for capitalism, which he considered the greater evil, and one doomed to destruction. No party or system could long interest this restless spirit who was really interested in a personalistic socialism, free of both collective and individual restraints.

Of enormous influence on Berdyaev was Dostoevsky, whose character Stavrogin, in The Possessed, he longed to be identified with as a young man. He loved to dramatize himself as the aristocrat of the Revolution, "the dark haired nobleman gleaming with life, and wearing the mask of cold aloofness." Dostoevsky he considered the artist of terror who gave artistic utterance to the anguish and sense of alienation which Berdyaev never completely lost. He says: "The heroes in Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's novels were of greater importance for me than philosophical and theological schools of thought, and it was at their hands that I received Christianity." It is indeed quite questionable, as will be indicated later, how much Christianity Berdyaev actually accepted. His mystical anarchism is well-expressed in the words of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov: "I accept God, but I do not accept His world."

It is perhaps to Dostoevsky that Berdyaev owes his belief in a spiritual freedom in Christianity which is free of restraint from either God or man. In his book on Dostoevsky, Berdyaev states that his turning to Christ was not a turning to the Christ of the Gospels, but to the image of Christ as contained in the story of the Grand Inquisitor.

Tolstoy's influence was perhaps less significant, although his background was more like Berdyaev's own. Tolstoy, a count, was also a member of the repentant, breast-beating aristocracy, deeply disturbed by the social irresponsibility of the landed gentry and the general pointlessness of life as he saw it.

One might concentrate on two particular aspects of Berdyaev's thought which are of more than average importance: his concept of the divine and his concept of freedom.

Reference has already been made to his independent Dostoevskian approach to the majesty of God. Berdyaev never accepted the concept of a transcendent God in the Christian sense. Berdyaev sees God not as Lord, but as Liberator from the slavery of the world.

He says:

"It is unfortunate that Christians have come to speak or drone in the language of meek obsequiousness called humility, and to conduct themselves accordingly, for this belies the Christian conception of man as a Godlike spiritual being."

Berdyaev is a believer in God because he is primarily a believer in man. His is a metaphysics of freedom not of being, for freedom is more ultimate than being itself. His God is a limited God, a God who knows needs and suffering, and who can be enriched by human creativeness. "God has need of man, of his creative response to a divine summons." Or again: "God desires a free creative daring in man."

He accepted as a motto for his book, The Meaning of the Creative Act, the motto from Angelus Silesius: "I know that without me God cannot exist for a single second. If I cease to be, He too, must necessarily cease to be."

God is not reached by reason but by mysticism, and the greatest of the mystics to him was Jakob Boehme from whom the rather bizarre theory of the Ungrund is derived. From the primordial Absolute itself God the creator comes. Freedom is not dependent on God, but externally exists in the primordial nothing out of which God creates. It is, in a sense, anterior to God himself. God is powerless over the anterior realm and is thus exonerated from responsibility for evil. As in White-head, creativity is strongly emphasized, but there is no theory or analogy by which meaningful parallels of human and divine creativity may be drawn. God to the degree that He is known, is known in the language of symbolism.

Lacking a theory of analogy, Berdyaev's anthropomorphism is one of concept not merely of idiom or methodology. Both the theory of freedom and his theory of the divine result from his agony of being unable to resolve the problem of evil. Berdyaev rejects categorically the idea of Providence, stating that if God is present in evil and suffering, in destruction and misery, in plague and cholera, then faith is impossible and rebellion justified. God reconciles man to the suffering of creation not because he reigns, but because he suffers. All theological attempts to resolve the problem of evil Berdyaev sees as intolerable rationalizations. Evil springs from indeterminacy which Providence itself cannot banish.

Berdyaev also expresses horror at the notion of God's seeing from all eternity the outcome of human history. Man is not merely a creature, but self-creative, and in creating self, creates deity. Hell is rejected as totally incompatible with the notion of divinity. He proclaims with much heat that if hell is a reality than he is an atheist.

Berdyaev describes himself as a seeker of truth, a rebel desirous of freedom to the bondage of life, to things, objects, abstractions, ideologies, and the fatalism of his-tory. His search was for an anti-hierarchical personalism—and he phrases it eloquently:

"As the result of a long spiritual and intellectual journey I have arrived at a particularly keen awareness of the fact that every human personality, the personality of the least significant of men, bearing as it does within itself the image of the highest existence, cannot be a means to any end whatever."

He summarizes his views of the anti-freedom forces in his theory of objectivization. As Spengler's civilization is a sclerosed culture that has lost its creative power, so Berdyaev's objectivized man is a destroyed personality. Objectivization is defined as an operation whereby man is brought to servitude, alienation, law, hostility, impersonality, and death. Personality to him is prior to being itself, for being as conceptualized becomes an abstraction—and consequently an enslaving factor.

Personality, as essentially spiritual, exists in the world of freedom, a subjective force in the world of objects. It is not even caused by God—for this to Berdyaev would be a form of objectivization. Objectivization is impersonality, the "ejection of man into the world of determinism." It creates the sociological realities of community, state, nation, and church and imposes restrictive laws of universal obligation. Man's duty is the duty of "transcension", the by-passing of the world of objectivization to the inner core of existence which is the meeting ground with the reality of God, other people, and interior values.

The vague reality of transcension is defined by Berdyaev as an "active dynamic process", an immanent aloofness from depersonalizing society, a realm of freedom where one achieves alike, strength against catastrophe and a direct confrontation of life's supreme personal values. Transcension thus becomes the realization and fulfillment of personality as objectivization is its negation.

Personality as an "individually unrepeatable form" is forever unique as opposed to the world which emphasizes the restricting common aspect of things.

It is indeed important to note that objectivization extends not only to the material conditions of existence but to any systematized or organized rationalization—hence the existentialistic dislike for any systematic philosophy. Moreover, "the criteria of truth is found in the subject and not in the object." And again: "It is expressly in subjectivity and not in objectivity that primary reality is found."

Objectivization is most obvious in the form of society itself which imposes relationships and restrictions inimical to personality. Especially in organic theories of society is man considered a mere subjected part of a whole.

In culture too human nature is seen by Berdyaev as objectivized, exteriorized, and depersonalized. Creativity and artistic genius is inhibited by the "congested and crystallized conditions of culture."

The state is similarly a great depersonalizing agent, possessing no ontological validity other than the exteriorization of the people themselves, ever ready to encroach upon the rights of the human person.

It would be an oversimplification to see in Berdyaev's thought a simple antithesis between spiritual and natural values, since man's slavery may be to himself as well as to nature, war, nationalization, the bourgeois spirit, collectivism, eroticism, aesthetics, and even history.

Berdyaev remains something of a paradox: a philosopher who despised discursive reason; a cadet who hated the military; a fearful hypochondriac who worked calmly through revolution and bombardment; a lover of God who was never quite at home in God's world. Berdyaev was indeed a man of great religious sensibility, but though he believed that a philosophy of personality could be worked out only on a Christian basis, he was hardly a Christian in any recognizably orthodox sense of the term. A man of great insights and great prejudices, he nevertheless, as has been said, underscored and emphasized the fact of freedom when much of the world was ready to forget it.