Nikolai Berdyaev

Works

• 1916The Meaning of the Creative Act

  Creativity is the human being’s answer to God: in creative acts freedom breaks through the necessity of the given world.

• 1946The Russian Idea

  An interpretation of Russian thought from the Slavophiles to the religious renaissance as a search for the Kingdom of God and for social justice.

Position

Berdyaev is on the map as a philosopher of freedom and a leading voice of the Russian religious renaissance. Taking up Jakob Böhme’s “Ungrund”, he held that freedom is uncreated and precedes being, even God; evil springs from this freedom, and so does the possibility of creation. In “The Meaning of the Creative Act” (1916) he made creativity the vocation of the human being, a continuation of God’s creation rather than mere obedience. From this he developed a personalism that defends the person against the collective and against an objectifying thought that turns persons into things. As a former Marxist he read Russian communism in “The Origin of Russian Communism” (1937) as a secularised form of Russian messianism, and in “Christianity and Antisemitism” (1938) he condemned antisemitism as incompatible with Christianity. Solovyov and Dostoevsky were his main Russian sources; in 1914 he criticised Florensky’s “Pillar” as “stylised Orthodoxy”. In Paris he was in dialogue with Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Mounier, whose personalism he influenced. Critics have found his style prophetic rather than argumentative, and his hopes for a renewed Soviet Russia after 1945 were controversial among émigrés.

Life & context

Nikolai Berdyaev was born on 18 March 1874 in Kyiv into a noble family with a military tradition; his mother came from the princely Kudashev family. He attended the Kyiv cadet corps and studied at Kyiv University, where he joined Marxist circles. Arrested in 1898 and expelled from the university, he was exiled to Vologda in 1900–02. His first book, “Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy” (1901), with a preface by Peter Struve, already showed his move from Marxism towards idealism. He contributed to the collections “Problems of Idealism” (1902) and “Landmarks” (Vekhi, 1909), lived in St Petersburg and from 1908 in Moscow, and in 1913 was charged with blasphemy for an article defending monks of Mount Athos; war and revolution prevented the trial. After 1917 he founded the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow and taught at the university. Arrested twice, he was expelled from Soviet Russia in the autumn of 1922 together with other intellectuals. After two years in Berlin he lived from 1924 in Paris and Clamart, edited the journal “The Way” (Put’) and worked with the YMCA Press. Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1947. He died in Clamart on 24 March 1948.

Further main works

• Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy (Sub’ektivizm i individualizm v obshchestvennoi filosofii, 1901)
• The New Middle Ages (Novoe srednevekov’e, 1924)
• The Origin of Russian Communism (Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma, 1937)
• Slavery and Freedom (O rabstve i svobode cheloveka, 1939)