BERDJAEV, NIKOLAJ ALIKSANDROVIĆ. – Contemporary Russian philosopher, born in Kiev on 6 May 1874, died in Paris on 23 March 1948. Having completed 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, together with V. Ivanov, S. Bulgakov, and others, stood at the centre of the «Russian renaissance», a movement inspired above all by Dostojevskij and Soloviev. In 1911 he published The Philosophy of Freedom; in 1912 Chomjakov; and in 1916 The Meaning of Creative Activity. 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 there in 1923 The Philosophy of Inequality (against the authors of the Revolution); The Meaning of History; Dostojevskij’s Conception; and in 1924 The New Middle Ages. In 1925 he moved to Paris, where he published his other fundamental works: The Philosophy of the Free Spirit (1927; Italian ed., under the title Spirit and Freedom, Milan 1947); On the Destiny of Man (1931); I and the World of Objects, an Essay on a Philosophy of Solitude and Communion (1934; Italian ed. under the title The Self and the World, 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). Recently translated into Italian from Russian, the language in which B. usually wrote, are The Sources and Spirit of Russian Communism (ibid. 1945), and The Destiny of Man in the Contemporary World (Milan 1946).
B.’s philosophy may be described 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 three planes coincide in his thought: metaphysics, the supernatural order, and the mystical order. In his gnosis B. is linked especially to the ancient Gnostics Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and 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 Dostojevskij. He acknowledges having accepted Christianity according to the spirit of freedom expressed in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (inserted by Dostojevskij 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, connects him with the theological leader of the Slavophiles, Chomjakov.
B.’s philosophy aims rather to pose problems and questions than to provide their 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 revealing an affinity with revolutionary and communist positions. Apart from the rejection of specifically Catholic truths (the primacy of the Pope, the authority of the Church), a marked characteristic of B.’s thought is a subtle subjectivism akin to Modernism. Driven by free propheticism, he also preached the advent of a new, creative Christianity, a Third Kingdom, that of the Holy Spirit, while underestimating the Redemption. Among other things, he teaches the pre-existence of souls, offers false assessments of the Christian family and marriage, and denies the eternity of hell.