Berdyaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich

BERDYAEV, NIKOLAI ALEXANDROVICH. - Contemporary Russian 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, he was, in 1898, involved in a political trial and exiled (1900-1903) to the north of 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 center of the "Russian renaissance," a movement inspired above all by Dostoevsky and Soloviev. He published in 1911 the Philosophy of Freedom; in 1912 Khomyakov and in 1916 The Meaning of the Creative Act. After the outbreak of the revolution, he taught at the University of Moscow; but in 1922, he was expelled from Russia as an ideological opponent of communism. Having gone to Berlin, he published in 1923 The Philosophy of Inequality (against the authors of the Revolution); The Meaning of History; Dostoevsky's Conception, and in 1924 The New Middle Ages. Having moved, in 1925, to Paris, he published there his other fundamental works: The Philosophy of the Free Spirit (1927; Italian ed., with the title Spirito e libertà, Milan 1947); On the Destiny of Man (1931); I and the World of Objects, Essay of a Philosophy of Solitude and Communion (1934; Italian ed. with the title L'io e il mondo, ibid. 1942); On the Slavery and Freedom of Man (1939); The Russian Idea (1946); and in French, Essai de métaphysique eschatologique (1946); Dialectique existentielle du Divin et de l'humain (1947). Translated recently into Italian from the Russian, in which language B. was accustomed to write, are The Sources and the Spirit of Russian Communism (ibid. 1945), and The Destiny of Man in the Contemporary World (Milan 1946).

The philosophy of B. can be qualified as "Russian existentialism," as "subjective personalism" and as "gnosis." In his sincere concern for an intentionally Christian philosophy B. does not clearly 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. links himself especially 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 Boehme; in his existentialism he approaches Bergson - forming a current parallel to the German and French ones - and depends especially on Dostoevsky. He acknowledges having accepted Christianity according to the spirit of freedom, expressed in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (inserted by Dostoevsky in the novel The Brothers Karamazov). The motif of freedom, especially in the conception of the Church as a community of unity, freedom and love, without external authority in matters of faith, links him back to the theological head of the Slavophiles, Khomyakov.

The philosophy of B. aims rather at posing problems and questions than at giving solutions to them. He has deepened various sides 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 a kinship with revolutionary and communist positions. Besides the 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. Under the impulse of free prophetism he has moreover preached the advent of a new creative Christianity, of a Third Kingdom, that of the Holy Spirit, undervaluing the Redemption. Among other things he teaches the preexistence of souls, gives false appraisals of the family and Christian marriage and denies the eternity of hell.

Bernardo Schultze.