Nikolai Berdyaev

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

Before God the creator lies an abyss of freedom; God is not a master

Both personal and impersonalStated explicitly

Berdyaev rejects both the God of school theology, conceived as monarch and cause of the world, and the idea of an indifferent Absolute. Following Böhme and the Eckhart of the Gottheit, he distinguishes between the groundless Divinity, the Ungrund, which no category reaches, and the Trinitarian God who arises from that abyss and creates. From the same ground springs an uncreated freedom, which God did not make and for which he is not responsible; hence he is not the author of evil, and instead of ruling man like a master he suffers with him. He insists that God is not an object nor a being among beings: every objectification falsifies him. In The Destiny of Man and Spirit and Reality he describes him as Spirit and as personality, yet reachable only by the apophatic way and by the experience of freedom.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The person is free spirit, not a part of the world nor an object

A created, immortal soulStated explicitly

Berdyaev opens Slavery and Freedom by stating that man is an enigma in the world, perhaps the greatest of all. He distinguishes carefully between the individual, a biological and social category forming part of the species and the State, and the person, a spiritual category which is part of nothing, but a whole containing the universal within itself. The person is not a fixed given but a task: it is realised in freedom and in the creative act, and may be lost in the slavery of objectification, when the human being treats himself or others as things. In The Destiny of Man he links it to the image of God and to immortality, which he conceives not as the soul's natural survival but as a personal victory over death. The true self is personal, unique and unrepeatable.

Why do we suffer?

Evil springs from a freedom prior to God; God suffers with man

Separation from GodStated explicitly

Berdyaev rejects both theodicies that justify suffering as a divine plan and the idea that God inflicts it as punishment. Following Böhme, he places the root of evil in an uncreated freedom, prior to being, of which God is not the author: man can choose non-being, and that choice introduces the rift. To it is added objectification, the process by which spirit cools into necessity, State, class and thing; the introduction to The Meaning of the Creative Act describes the human spirit as captive to the givenness of the world. In Dostoevsky's World-View he reads the tragedy of freedom as the key to the novels. God does not watch from outside: in Christ he suffers with man, and suffering can be transfigured into creation, though it is never fully explained.

What happens after death?

Immortality is the person's conquest, not a natural fact; against eternal hell

Eternal life and resurrectionStated explicitly

In the third part of The Destiny of Man, devoted to eschatological ethics, Berdyaev holds that death is the deepest evil and, at the same time, the only thing that gives life its tragic meaning: endless life in time would be a nightmare. Immortality does not seem to him a natural property of the soul, but a spiritual conquest of the person in union with Christ, who overcomes death through resurrection. He is repelled by the idea of eternal hell as punishment, which he regards as a sadistic objectification of human justice; he prefers to think of hell as a subjective state of closure and hopes for the salvation of all, though without making it dogma. His vision is active: the human being must cooperate creatively in the transfiguration of the world, not wait passively for judgement.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Redemption is not enough: man answers God with the creative act

Through grace and loveStated explicitly

Berdyaev accepts redemption in Christ, but considers that historical Christianity reduced it to an ethics of obedience and fear centred on the individual salvation of the soul. In The Meaning of the Creative Act he holds that creativity is not only a struggle against evil and sin, but creates another world and continues the work of creation: God expects from man a free and creative answer, not merely his repentance. In The Destiny of Man he distinguishes three ethics, of law, of redemption and of creativity, and asks that the third complete the other two. The goal is not to escape the world, but to cooperate in its eschatological transfiguration. Grace does not cancel freedom: God and man need each other, and a forced salvation would be a form of slavery.

Is a teacher necessary?

Religious authority is objectification; spirit is passed on only in freedom

No spiritual authorityStated explicitly

Berdyaev is one of the most tenacious critics of authority in religion. In Freedom and the Spirit he argues that faith imposed from outside, by an institution or a teacher, is a form of objectification that turns the truth of the spirit into external law and the believer into a subject. He was raised in Orthodoxy and defended it as a mystical tradition, but rejected its clerical and authoritarian version, which earned him a blasphemy trial in 1913 for defending the monks of Mount Athos against the Synod. In Self-Knowledge he confesses that he could never submit to any authority and that freedom was the theme of his whole life. He acknowledges masters, Böhme, Dostoevsky, Soloviev, but as interlocutors, not as guides to be obeyed: spiritual truth passes from freedom to freedom.

Is the world real?

The world of objects is objectified, fallen spirit; spirit is what is real

Appearance over the one realityStated explicitly

Berdyaev distinguishes between the world as it is given to us, the world of objects, necessity and causality, and primary reality, which is spirit, freedom and person. In Solitude and Society and Spirit and Reality he argues that the objective world is not ultimate reality, but the result of a process of objectification in which spirit is alienated, cools and becomes subject to necessity; the introduction to The Meaning of the Creative Act calls that state the captivity of spirit. He does not deny its existence, but considers it a fallen and provisional state of existence, which human creativity and God's action must transfigure at the end of time. True reality is deeper than the objectified world.

What is love?

Love is directed to the person and affirms it for eternity

Love of God and neighbourStated explicitly

Berdyaev thinks of love from his philosophy of the person. In The Destiny of Man he distinguishes love, which is directed to the image of God in the other and affirms it for eternity, from compassion, which is directed to the other's suffering; both are necessary and neither suffices alone. Authentic love is always personal and free: it cannot be imposed or turned into law, and love for an abstract idea, be it humanity or the State, can become cruel to concrete persons. In The Meaning of the Creative Act he devotes pages to erotic love, in Soloviev's wake, and considers it a form of creativity transcending family and procreation. Love, like creativity, is man's answer to God, and a force against the objectification that turns the other into a thing.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Freedom is uncreated, prior to being; it is the first truth of spirit

Real free willStated explicitly

Few thinkers have given freedom so radical a place as Berdyaev. In The Philosophy of Freedom, Freedom and the Spirit and The Destiny of Man he holds that freedom was not created by God, but springs from an abyss prior to being, Böhme's Ungrund; hence it is not an attribute God grants and can withdraw, but the very ground of existence. Three theses follow: God is not responsible for evil, which arises from freedom; the human being is capable of creating something really new, not contained in what came before; and every form of determinism, natural, social or theological, is an objectification that enslaves. In Self-Knowledge he says freedom was the fundamental intuition of his life and that he preferred freedom with suffering to imposed happiness.

Why meditate or pray?

He left no doctrine of prayer; he prefers mysticism as experience of spirit

Did not address it

Berdyaev did not write on prayer as a practice nor propose a method of meditation. In Freedom and the Spirit he devotes a chapter to mysticism and the spiritual path, where he distinguishes authentic mysticism, a free encounter of the human spirit with God, from forms that dissolve the person into the impersonal, and he warns against an asceticism reduced to technique or fear. In The Meaning of the Creative Act he holds that ascesis is necessary but not sufficient, and that the creative act is also a form of relation to God that monastic spirituality ignored. In Self-Knowledge he acknowledges that his religious life was more one of thought and inner struggle than of regular practice. No precise position on why to pray can therefore be attributed to him.

Can reason know the ultimate?

Objectifying knowledge cannot reach spirit; knowing is a creative act

The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

Berdyaev is no irrationalist: he wrote demanding philosophical works and argued with Kant, Hegel and phenomenology. But he holds that rational knowledge, as science practises it, is a form of objectification: it turns what it knows into an object separated from the subject, subject to categories and necessity, and hence cannot reach spirit, freedom or the person, which are never objects. In Solitude and Society and Truth and Revelation he proposes an existential knowledge in which the subject participates in the known and which is a creative act of spirit, not a passive reflection. Revelation, too, is not a set of objective propositions: it is given in spiritual experience and is deformed when dogmatised. The ultimate is known from within.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

No kingdom of Caesar is sacred; the true revolution is of the spirit

The revolution is innerStated explicitly

Berdyaev lived political history at close range: he was a Marxist, exiled by the tsar, a witness of the revolution, which he said he lived as part of his own destiny, interrogated by the Cheka and expelled in 1922. He never preached withdrawal from the world, and from Paris he defended a personalist socialism and criticised both capitalism and communism. But his conclusion, in The Spiritual Foundations of the Russian Revolution, The Origin of Russian Communism and The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, is that no political order can be sacred, and that social revolution without a transformation of spirit reproduces slavery in another form: Russian communism is for him secularised Russian messianism. The task is a personalist and spiritual revolution, transfiguring the world through freedom and creativity.