Nikolai Berdiaev

Berdiaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich


Born Mar. 6, 1874, in Kiev; died Mar. 24, 1948, in Clamart, France. Russian religious philosopher and mystic; associated with existentialism.

Berdiaev came from a noble family. He studied at the University of Kiev. During his student years he participated in the social democratic movement; he was persecuted by dismissal from the university and exile. His writing was published in programmatic collections of the Russian idealists, such as Problems of Idealism (1902), the antirevolutionary collection Signposts (1909), and From the Depths (1918). Berdiaev was the organizer and chairman of the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture (1918–22). In 1922 he was expelled from the country. Berdiaev founded the religious and philosophical journal Put’ (The Way; Paris, 1925–40) and headed the YMCA Press in Paris.

In his youth Berdiaev belonged to the so-called legal Marxists and attempted to combine Marxism with neo-Kantianism. He developed the theory of ethical socialism. Around 1905 he joined the god-seeking movement.

Berdiaev’s philosophical position and sympathies were determined by the conflict and interaction of two principles: an unlimited existential affirmation of the boundless creative drive as the spiritual foundation of the personality and the Christian principle of compassion. (Berdiaev himself recognized his closeness to Boehme, Nietzsche, Fichte, Kierkegaard, and Ibsen, as well as to the Russian religious tradition of the Slavophiles and Dostoevsky. His starting point was always Kant’s principle of dualism.) The duality of Berdiaev’s position, which was engendered by absolutizing each of these themes, resulted in a series of contradictions, especially in the contradiction between creativity and pity (the morality of creativity, or the cult of genius, and the Christian morality of atonement). In the spirit of the mysticism of Boehme and Schelling, Berdiaev affirmed the groundlessness of freedom and its superiority to being (and to god); therefore, man is not subject to god’s will. Berdiaev spoke of the absence of god in the world. However, Berdiaev also accepted the Christian eschatological doctrine of history ruled by god’s providence.

Complete alienation from the world (the kingdom of the “everyday” and of evil) and a yearning to transform the world were characteristic of Berdiaev. In his work the call to creativity as a means of changing the world was combined with the conviction that every creative act is doomed. Essentially, every act of objectification (embodiment in objects) by human creativity was identified by Berdiaev with alienation.

Berdiaev’s interest in the philosophy of history (The Meaning of History, 1923; The New Middle Ages, 1924; Fate of Man in the Modern World, 1934; The Russian Idea, 1946; and others) was linked to his main theme, the problem of the personality. Berdiaev did not recognize a progressive movement in history; he believed that the path of history is the uncovering of opposites—good and evil—and the tragic struggle between them, which ends with a departure into “metahistory” (the “kingdom of god”). In modern times Berdiaev found signs of the “barbarization” of European culture and the beginning of its twilight, which were related to the advance of “mass culture” (The End of Europe, Moscow, 1915). Berdiaev was one of the first critics of modern civilization as a technological civilization which, according to Berdiaev, was the result of the “triumph of the bourgeois spirit” (The Meaning of Creativity, Moscow, 1916). Berdiaev called for “salvation” through the individual creative moral act (sacrifice, love, and so forth) and for “personalistic revolution” instead of social revolution.

From the point of view of Christian socialism, Berdiaev recognized that the class struggle is a just reaction to social injustice and admitted the truth of the communist principle of socializing production. However, Berdiaev thought it was necessary to carry on a continuous ideological struggle against communism, which he viewed as an expression of bourgeois, antispiritual consciousness oriented to materialism and material wealth. Throughout his life Berdiaev criticized Marxism, which he considered a dualistic doctrine combining economic determinism with voluntarism and a secularized religious world view that expressed hopes for the proletariat’s messianic role.

Berdiaev was a fierce ideological opponent of the October Revolution (and of all sociopolitical revolutions). In the polemical book The Philosophy of Inequality (1918; published, 1923) Berdiaev stooped to a justification of the cruelties of the “organic” historical process (a disruption of which he considered revolution) and to a Nietzschean defense of social selection and the right of the “strong personality.” Later he considered it criminal to justify historical reality as reasonable and necessary. Remaining an ideologist of the “aristocracy of the spirit,” Berdiaev tried to make his understanding of aristocracy free of any class and hierarchical characteristics (On Human Slavery and Freedom, 1939; Self-Knowledge, 1949).

Berdiaev influenced the development of French existentialism and personalism. In the West, Berdiaev became known as the main exponent of the traditions of Russian religious idealistic philosophy and as an ideologist of anti-communism.


Lenin, V. I. “O Vekhakh.” Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 19.
Lenin, V. I. G. V. Plekhanovu, 30 iiulia 1901 g. (Letter.) Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 46, p. 135.
Luppol, I. “Novoe srednevekov’e.” Pod znamenem marksizma, 1926, no. 12.
Balakina, I. F. “Religiozno-ekzistentsialistskie iskaniia v Rossiinachala 20 v.” In the collection Sovremennyi ekzistentsializm. Moscow, 1966.
Lowrie, D. Rebellious Prophet: A Life of N. Berdyaev. New York, 1960.
Wernham, J. Two Russian Thinkers: An Essay On Berdyaev and Shestov. Toronto, 1968.


References in periodicals archive ?
Estos trabajos analizan las visiones tanto de filosofos (Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Ivan Il'in), como de teologos (Pavel Florensky, Georgy Fedotov, Vasily Zenkovsky), artistas (Leo Tolstoy, Viacheslav Ivanov, Maria Yudina) o testigos de la fe (Madre MariaSkobtsova).
He approvingly quotes Nikolai Berdiaev, who predicted in 1906 that Lenin's doctrines heralded a "religious socialist state" that would be "a new form of absolute state, unrestricted by any unconditional values or ideas, by any inalienable rights" (p.
These are works that Mjr describes as classics in the field of Russian studies and "...the first truly significant attempts by Russians themselves to describe Russian cultural and intellectual history." They are Saints of Ancient Russia by Georgii Fedotov, Ways of Russian Theology by Gerogii Florovskii, The Russian Idea by Nikolai Berdiaev, and the History of Russian Philosophy by Vasilii Zenkovskii.
Mackay also introduced me to the thought of the Dane Soren Kierkegaard, Russian Nikolai Berdiaev, and Spanish Miguel de Unamuno and their passionate criticism of nominal religiosity.
The best known of them, philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, strolled the deck wearing a broad hat and galoshes and carrying a thick cane.
The author's selection of the next two authors is puzzling, insofar as neither Nikolai Losskii nor Nikolai Berdiaev would consider themselves "sophiologists." Even the author's own exposition of Bulgakov shows how critical Losskii truly was of the former's philosophical framework.
He suspected that the growing metaphysical interests of Petr Struve and Nikolai Berdiaev were not intellectually serious.
The Transaction Edition contains a new introduction by Professor Maria Nemcova Banerjee that first appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of Modern Age under the title "Nikolai Berdiaev and Spiritual Freedom." A balanced and penetrating "reconsideration" of the Russian thinker's achievement that no student of Berdyaev can ignore, Banerjee's essay places and assesses Berdyaev's overall contribution and significance as an existentialist philosopher and an original interpreter of Russian philosophical and religious thought.
As a scholar affiliated with the prestigious Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, he published articles and books dealing with a wide variety of French and Russian writers and thinkers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Vasilii Rozanov.
Paris in the 1920s and '30s became the intellectual heart of Russian emigration, and Tataryn has focused on some of the brightest lights of the Russian Diaspora: George Fedotov, Sergei Bulgakov, Georges Florovsky, Vasilii Zenkovskii and Nikolai Berdiaev. Although many of these intellectuals had written about relations with the West while in Russia, in Paris these men daily found themselves living face to face with Western theology.
Tymieniecka's introduction to the theme of the conference and her inaugural lecture on the meaning of time in her theory of ontopoiesis, the papers are presented under six headings, followed by a "rejoinder" on the Russian philosopher and mystic, Nikolai Berdiaev. The six sections are "Paving the Way for the Ontopoiesis of Life," "From Lived Experience to Life," "Searching for New Inspiration in Husserl," "Along the Historical Itinerary," "Life and the Human Forge of Sense," and "The Aesthetic Significance of Existence."
Nikolai Berdiaev nacio cerca de Kiev en 1874, y despues de la revolucion rusa huyo a Alemania, y posteriormente a Francia, donde fallecio en 1948.