The Meaning of the Creative Act

Introduction

Berdyaev wrote “The Meaning of the Creative Act” in 1912–14, partly during a stay in Italy, and published it in Moscow in 1916 with the subtitle “An Essay in the Justification of Man”. He regarded it as the book in which his own philosophy first took shape. Against a Christianity that sees the human being only as a sinner in need of redemption, he argues that the human being is called to continue God’s creation: in the creative act freedom breaks through the necessity of the given world. Berdyaev distinguishes three epochs, of law, of redemption and of creativity, and sees in art, love and mysticism signs of a coming religious epoch. Orthodox critics found the book close to Gnosticism and to the titanism of the Renaissance.

More works by Nikolai Berdyaev

• 1946The Russian Idea