BERDJAEV, NIKOLAJ ALEKSANDROVIČ. – Russian contemporary philosopher, b. in Kiev on 6 May 1874, d. in Paris on 23 March 1948. After completing his studies at the university of his native city, in 1898 he was involved in a political trial and exiled (1900–1903) to northern Russia. Having gone to Germany, he continued his philosophical studies there. In Russia, after abandoning Marxism and attempting to reconcile socialism with Kantian and idealist orientations, he converted to Russian Christianity and stood, together with V. Ivanov, S. Bulgakov and others, at the centre of the “Russian Renaissance,” a movement inspired above all by Dostoevsky and Soloviev. In 1911 he published *Filosofia della libertà*; in 1912 *Chomjakow*; and in 1916 *Il senso dell’attività creatrice*. After the outbreak of the revolution, he taught at Moscow University; but in 1922 he was expelled from Russia as an ideological opponent of communism. Going to Berlin, in 1923 he published *La filosofia della disuguaglianza* (against the authors of the Revolution); *Il senso della storia*; *La concezione di Dostojevskij*; and in 1924 *Il nuovo medioevo*. In 1925 he moved to Paris, where he published his other fundamental works: *La filosofia dello spirito libero* (1927; Italian ed., under the title *Spirito e libertà*, Milan 1947); *Sulla destinazione dell’uomo* (1931); *Io e il mondo degli oggetti*, essay of a philosophy of solitude and communion (1934; Italian ed., under the title *L’io e il mondo*, ibid. 1942); *Sulla schiavitù e la libertà dell’uomo* (1939); *L’idea russa* (1946); and in French, *Essai de métaphysique eschatologique* (1946); *Dialectique existentielle du Divin et de l’humain* (1947). Recently translated into Italian from the Russian, the language in which B. usually wrote, are *Le fonti e lo spirito del comunismo russo* (ibid. 1945) and *Il destino dell’uomo nel mondo contemporaneo* (Milan 1946).
B.’s philosophy may be described as “Russian existentialism,” as “subjective personalism,” and as “gnosis.” In his sincere concern for a philosophy intentionally Christian, B. does not sharply distinguish between purely philosophical and revealed data, so that in his thought three planes coincide: metaphysics, the supernatural order, and the mystical order. In his gnosis, B. is especially indebted to the ancient Gnostics Clement of Alexandria and Origen, to the German idealists Hegel, Schelling and von Baader; in his mysticism, moreover, he depends among others on Böhme; in his existentialism he approaches Bergson – forming a parallel current to the German and French ones – and is especially indebted to Dostoevsky. He acknowledges having accepted Christianity according to the spirit of freedom, as expressed in the *Legend of the Grand Inquisitor* (inserted by Dostoevsky in the novel *The Brothers Karamazov*). The motif of freedom, particularly in his conception of the Church as a community of unity, freedom and love, without external authority in matters of faith, connects him with the theological leader of the Slavophiles, Khomyakov.
B.’s philosophy aims rather at posing problems and questions than at providing solutions. He has explored various aspects of Christian anthropology and of the Church; and in his works on contemporary social and historical problems he often approaches Catholic doctrine, while frequently betraying an affinity with revolutionary and communist positions. Alongside his rejection of specifically Catholic truths (the primacy of the Pope, the authority of the Church), a marked trait of B.’s thought is a subtle subjectivism akin to Modernism. Driven by the impulse of free prophecy, he moreover preached the advent of a new creative Christianity, of a Third Kingdom, that of the Holy Spirit, underrating Redemption. Among other things, he teaches the presence of the mind in the soul, bases false appreciations on the Christian family and marriage, and denies the eternity of hell.