Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (/bərˈdjɑːjɛf, -jɛv/; Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; March 18 [O.S.March 6] 1874 – March 24, 1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher.

Biography

Berdyaev was born near Kiev in 1874 into an aristocratic military family. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Berdyaev, came from a long line of Kiev and Kharkov nobility. Almost all of Alexander Mikhailovich's ancestors served as high-ranking military officers, but he himself resigned from the army quite early and became active in the social life of Kiev aristocracy. Nikolai's mother, Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva, was half French, coming from top levels of both French and Russian nobility. Greatly influenced by Voltaire, Berdyaev's father was an educated man that considered himself a free thinker and expressed great skepticism towards religion. Nikolai's mother, Orthodox by birth, was in her views on religion more Catholic than Orthodox. Berdyaev, was a very religious man and a Christian philosopher, but he despised the official Orthodox Church.He spent a solitary childhood at home, where his father's library allowed him to read widely. He read Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kant when only fourteen years old and excelled at languages.

Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career and entered the Kiev University in 1894. This was a time of revolutionary fervor among the students and the intelligentsia. Berdyaev became a Marxist and in 1898 was arrested in a student demonstration and expelled from the University. Later his involvement in illegal activities led to three years of internalexile in Vologda in northern Russia—a mild sentence compared to that faced by many other revolutionaries.

In 1904 Berdyaev married Lydia Trusheff and the couple moved to Saint Petersburg, the Russian capital and center of intellectual and revolutionary activity. Berdyaev participated fully in intellectual and spiritual debate, eventually departing from radical Marxism to focus his attention on philosophy and Christian spirituality. In Christianity and Social Reality he tells about his journey from Marx to Christ, and he tells his disillusionment with both the revolutionaries and the Church.

A fiery 1913 article criticising the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church caused him to be charged with the crime ofblasphemy, the punishment for which was exile to Siberia for life. The World War and the Bolshevik Revolution prevented the matter coming to trial. After the October Revolution of 1917 Berdyaev fell out with the Bolshevik régime because of itstotalitarianism and the domination of the state over the freedom of the individual. Nonetheless, he was permitted for the time being to continue to lecture and write.

His disaffection culminated in 1919 with the foundation of his own private academy, the "Free Academy of Spiritual Culture"00. This was primarily a forum for him to lecture on the hot topics of the day, trying to present them from a Christian point of view. Berdyaev also presented his opinions in public lectures, and every Tuesday he hosted a meeting at his home because official Soviet anti-religious activity was intense at the time, and the official policy of the Bolshevik government, with its Soviet anti-religious legislation, strongly promoted State atheism.

In 1920, Berdiaev became professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow, although he had no academic credentials. In the same year, he was accusedof participating in a conspiracy against the government; he was arrested and jailed. It seems that the feared head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, came in person to interrogate him, and that Berdyaev gave his interrogator a solid dressing-down on the problems with Bolshevism. Berdyaev's prior record of revolutionary activity seems to have saved him from prolonged detention, as his friend Lev Kamenev was present at the interrogation.

Novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago (published in 1973) recounts the incident as follows:

[Berdyaev] was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there. [...] But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a "point of view"!

The Soviet authorities eventually expelled Berdyaev from the RSFSR in September 1922. He became one of a carefully selected group of some 160 prominent writers, scholars, and intellectuals whose ideas the Bolshevik government found objectionable, and who were sent into exile on the so-called "philosophers' ship". Overall, these expellees supported neither the Czarist régime nor the Bolsheviks, preferring less autocratic forms of government. They included those who argued for personal liberty, spiritual development, Christian ethics, and a pathway informed by reason and guided by faith.

At first Berdyaev and other émigrés went to Berlin, where Berdyaev founded an academy of philosophy and religion. But economic and political conditions in Weimar Germany caused him and his wife to move to Paris in 1923. He transferred his academy there, and taught, lectured, and wrote, working for an exchange of ideas with the French intellectual community.

During the German occupation of France, Berdyaev continued to write books that were published after the war—some of them after his death. In the years that he spent in France, Berdyaev wrote fifteen books, including most of his most important works. He died at his writing desk in his home in Clamart, near Paris, in March 1948.

Philosophy

Berdyaev's philosophy has been characterized as Christian existentialist. He was preoccupied with creativity and in particular with freedom from anything that inhibited creativity, whence his opposition to a "collectivized and mechanized society".

According to Marko Markovic, "He was an ardent man, rebellious to all authority, an independent and "negative" spirit. He could assert himself only in negation and could not hear any assertion without immediately negating it, to such an extent that he would even be able to contradict himself and to attack people who shared his own prior opinions."

He also published works about Russian history and the Russian national character. In particular, he wrote about Russian nationalism that:

The Russian people did not achieve their ancient dream of Moscow, the Third Rome. The ecclesiastical schism of the seventeenth century revealed that the muscovite tsardom is not the third Rome. The messianic idea of the Russian people assumed either an apocalyptic form or a revolutionary; and then there occurred an amazing event in the destiny of the Russian people. Instead of the Third Rome in Russia, the Third International was achieved, and many of the features of the Third Rome pass over to the Third International. The Third International is also a Holy Empire, and it also is founded on an Orthodox faith. The Third International is not international, but a Russian national idea.

He was a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church, but was often critical of the institutional policies and un-Christian behavior within it. He was a Christian universalist, and he believed that Orthodox Christianity was the true vehicle for that teaching.

The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from Clement of Alexandria to Maximus the Confessor, were supporters of Apokatastasis, ofuniversal salvation and resurrection. ... Orthodox thought has never been suppressed by the idea of Divine justice and it never forgot the idea of Divine love. Chiefly — it did not define man from the point of view of Divine justice but from the idea of transfiguration and Deification of man and cosmos.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed his regional governors to read Berdyaev's 'The Philosophy of Inequality'.

Works

The first date is of the Russian edition, the second date is of the first English edition

• The New Religious Consciousness and Society (1907) (Russian: Новое религиозное сознание и общественность, Novoe religioznoe coznanie i obschestvennost, includes chapter VI "The Metaphysics of Sex and Love")
• Landmarks (1909)
• The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia (1910; 2014)
• The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916; 1955)
• Dostoevsky (1923; 1934)
• The Meaning of History (1923; 1936)
• The End of Our Time [a.k.a. The New Middle Ages] (1924; 1933)
• Leontiev (1926; 1940)
• Freedom and the Spirit (1927–8; 1935)
• The Russian Revolution (1931; anthology)
• The Destiny of Man (1931; 1937)
• Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard N. A. Beryaev 1936
• Christianity and Class War (1931; 1933)
• The Fate of Man in the Modern World (1934; 1935)
• Solitude and Society (1934; 1938)
• The Bourgeois Mind (1934; anthology)
• The Origin of Russian Communism (1937; 1955)
• Christianity and Anti-semitism (1938; 1952)
• Slavery and Freedom (1939)
• The Russian Idea (1946; 1947)
• Spirit and Reality (1946; 1957)
• The Beginning and the End (1947; 1952)
• Towards a New Epoch" (1949; anthology)
• Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (1949; 1950)
• The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1949; 1952)
• Divine and the Human (1949; 1952)
• Truth and Revelation (n.p.; 1953)