Record: 1

Title: N.A. Berdyaev.

Authors: Rutan, Gerard F.
Source: Perspectives on Political Science. Summer91, Vol. 20 Issue 3, p151. 8p.
Document Type: Article
Subject Terms: *POLITICAL science
Company/Entity: RUSSIAN Orthodox Church
People: BERDIAEV, Nikolai, 1874-1948
Abstract: Discusses the contributions of Nikolai Alexandrovitch Berdyaev to political theory from the foundation of Russian
orthodoxy. Berdyaev as a prophet; Belief in the Russian Orthodox faith; Appreciation of politics in the manner
generally found in the Western world; Comments on Berdyaev's works.
Full Text Word Count: 7691
ISSN: 1045-7097
Accession Number: 9604173492
Database: Academic Search Premier
N. A. BERDYAEV 
His Contributions to Political Theory from the Foundation of Russian Orthodoxy
In 988 A.D., Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized a Christian. More important for history, he issued a proclamation adopting orthodox Christianity as I the
official state religion of the new Rus kingdom. I From that time until 1917, almost a millennium, the Russian state and the Russian orthodox church were
joined; two sides of the same coin, the two swords (church and state) in the one realm. With the Bolshevik revolution and the advent of the Communist
regime, the position and socio-political role of the church was threatened but never actually extinguished. Even Stalin came to rely upon the Russian
orthodox church as a bulwark for patriotism in the war of 1941-1945. Since 1985, and the ever-quickening pace of change in the USSR under the
glasnost and perestroika policies of the Gorbachev regime, the Russian orthodox church has moved back toward its role as spiritual center for the nation
to again proselytize, preach, teach, and build. After eight decades and more of official atheism and hostility, religion literally has bounced back upon the
public scene. Along with Islam in the Moslem republics and Catholicism in the Ukraine and the other western republics (and, of course, Judaism),
organized religion appears to be the one major social institution that has held its vigor and cohesiveness in a polity now beset with the symptoms of
disintegration.

The Russian orthodox tradition in Russian life must be understood by one seeking to understand contemporary Soviet political phenomena. The student
of political science should have some grasp of the impact of that faith upon the political traditions and the political theory that make up what so many
have referred to as 'the Russian experience.' In this century, there are few better examples of that linkage of orthodox Christian belief to political theory--
specifically Russian political theory-- than the brilliant revolutionary, mystic, and penetrating political analyst N. A. Berdyaev. Arguably he offers one of the
best theological analyses, and the most philosophically eloquent case, for a Russian state centered upon the pillars of the Russian soul, the Christian
faith and Russian Christian vision.

That vision is of a Russia that is holy, a Russia that is faithful, a Russia that looks to the true freedom of the human person and the true brotherhood of all
believers--to a Russia where faith and state are separate but mutually supportive. Succinctly stated, the Russian orthodox foundation for Berdyaev's
political thought is one of enduring religious faith, enduring national identity, enduring love of God for man and man for God, and sheer human endurance
through faith in a world that is at best uncaring and often cruel. In a sense, his own life would be a living out, a witnessing, to this tradition.

Nicolai Alexandrovitch Berdyaev was born on the small family estate near Kiev in 1874. Within two years, his family was forced to sell the land because
of their increasingly desperate financial circumstances. Moving into the city of Kiev, in somewhat reduced conditions, the boy grew up under the direction
and tutelage of a moody but intellectual father, a wide-reading free-thinker who took a particular interest in shaping his young son's critical faculties. As
an antidote, his mother was quite the opposite. She was the product of old French nobility, loved the social life of the big city, and was deeply religious
and devoutly Roman Catholic. She was both a recusant and a highly ultramontane in her Catholicism. Nicolai was a late child, born a decade and a half
after his older brother. He thus became the 'baby' of the family in every respect and was badly spoiled as a child by parents who wanted desperately to
shield him from the increasing fiscal misfortunes of the family. Some later biographers (Lowrie 1965; Richardson 1968) note that throughout his life
Berdyaev found it difficult to accept authority, especially concerning his private thoughts and actions. He believed that he could do as he wished, think as
he wished, write as he wished--even when warned against these behaviors by the police. In his willful behavior as a child, he was aided and abetted by
his adoring parents, his older brother, and legions of devoted aunts and cousins who loved the baby of the family and forgave his faults. Besides, he was
so intelligent, so precocious.

He was sent away to school at around age nine, the common practice of the social class to which his family belonged. It was not a very prestigious or
distant school but the very best the family could afford. But instead of graduating from this military school and then entering the Corps of Pages, to which
his family's social position still entitled him, he chose instead to enroll at the University of Kiev. This was around his twentieth year, in 1894, and he notes
that he had earlier gone through 'a sudden inner transformation' that seemed to change his whole life, his personality, and to some degree his behavior.
In a single determination a few years earlier, he had decided to devote himself henceforth to philosophy. He knew at that moment of cosmic decision that
for the rest of his life he would be a philosopher.

The university in Kiev, like other universities in the empire, was rife with ideas, ferment, and longings for rebellion. AD these were to reach culmination a
decade later in the terrible abortive rebellion of 1905. Berdyaev gradually adopted the beliefs around him, turned against the entire social class into which
he had been born, and cut social and personal contacts with his family, especially his parents. He socialized almost exclusively with the despised Jewish
students at the university (to the horror of his parents, especially his mother). He threw himself into the clandestine political activity of these students and
friends, eventually entering into a group of political activists beyond the walls of the university out in the city itself.

Just at this time, Marxism was surging ahead among the intellectuals and more 'scientific' rebels in the society. The systematic answers contained in
Marxism appealed to a generation sated with the 'blood on the snow' recklessness and romanticism of earlier rebels, those who had a vague and quixotic
faith in bombs and the random assassination of archdukes and industrialists. Berdyaev became a Marxist, although he never was able to accept the
theory in toto. As a (unknown to himself) budding Platonist, he could never bring himself to believe that concepts such as truth and justice were eternally
changeable according to some economic conditions rather than being basic and permanent. But, as he would later write, "At that time I considered Marx
a man of genius" (Lowrie 1965, p. 16). His companion in these early ventures into Marxism at the university was Anatole Lunacharsky, who would later
become one of the prime colleagues of Lenin. They read, they wrote, they took part in public demonstrations against the government of the czar.
Inevitably, they came into conflict with--and gained records with--the police. In 1897, Berdyaev was arrested after such a demonstration. He had been
among those beaten back by whip-wielding mounted Cossacks. It was near the time for his graduation from Kiev University and could have been a major
moment of tragedy in his young life. But both his nerve and his luck held, and he was released with only a warning. Immediately he plunged back into
underground work, taking on increasing risk. In particular, he was one of the major founders of and workers at a covert press operation. Their
publications spread right across the empire, and they became a prime target for the police operations. Unavoidably, he was arrested and imprisoned. His
loving parents managed to have him released on bail after six weeks in prison, and the case dragged on for another two years! In May 1900, the twenty-
six-year-old revolutionary writer and printer was sentenced to three years' exile in the north, at Vologda. He was proud to be a 'martyr' for the revolution.
His father was embarrassed. His mother was devastated.

It was in his Vologda exile that Berdyaev wrote his first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy (1901). It was an analytic work,
critically so, of Michailovsky, the acknowledged leader of 'liberalism' in Russian intellectual circles. It was also openly critical of Marxism, his break with
historical (later to be called 'dialectical') materialism now coming into the open for the first time. After three years in exile, Berdyaev returned to Kiev to
continue his revolutionary thinking and writing undiminished but now outside of Marxist or even anarchist associations. Here he met his life-long friend
Serge Bulgakov, a young lecturer at the university. Bulgakov was also a disillusioned ax-Marxist, at the time interested in 'metaphysical' concepts of
justice. In 1903, Berdyaev wrote in Dream and Reality of his own emerging thinking as influenced by the metaphysical: "I finally move from positivism to
metaphysical idealism, and . . . change my attitude toward Marxism, from which I still retain a series of realistic social ideas, but which I deny as a world
view" (p. 83).

In 1903, Berdyaev moved to St. Petersburg to be in the very center of what he then perceived to be the intellectual life of the empire. But in 1908, he
moved on to Moscow because he found the intellectuals of St. Petersburg a concupiscent and frivolously thin stratum at the very top of metropolitan
society occupied primarily with "the erotic and the aesthetic." They were not interested in the deeply spiritual concerns that more and more had become
the focus of his labors nor the deep Russian personae that overlay his social formulations. After the horrors of 1905, many of the Moscow intellectuals
abandoned politics per se and turned more toward religion, toward a more spiritual or metaphysical understanding of human suffering and the conditio
humanae in a Russia immured in suffering. Thus it was in Moscow that Berdyaev quickly became a member and then a leader in the principal
philosophical-religious study group, the Soloviev Society, which was then under the direction of Prince Troubetskoy. It was in Moscow that Berdyaev
again embraced Christianity and the vision of the Russian orthodox church, tradition, and message with all its historical/intellectual accretions. He read
the church fathers. He made pilgrimages to ancient monasteries, visited and talked with holy men and women, and particularly became enamored of the
deep and moving rituals of the orthodox faith. His interest in politics qua politics continued to drain away as he moved more and more to the central
concern of his life: the fusion and yet the explication of historical-eschatological-metaphysical-mystical-Christian knowledge and understanding. By any
standard, he ceased to be a young philosopher interested in politics and became instead a young theologian interested in the eternal and heavenly
salvation of peoples (plural), in particular of his own Russian people.

In 1912, Berdyaev moved with his new family to Florence, for a year's stay in the Tuscan sun. It was here, in the city of Dante, that he had "a sudden new
vision of the whole of the world's history, human and divine (Lowrie [1965], p. 20)." He would later write that it was here, while walking the ancient streets
of Florence, that "the disparate pieces of earlier thinking suddenly fell into an integral pattern." In what he labeled "an ecstatic climax of creativeness," he
wrote his next great work, The Meaning of the Creative Act. This is the book that finally contained, in utero, the outline of the idea system that he would
spend the rest of his life developing. It was published in Moscow, in 1916.

What is this book about? That is a difficult question to answer. of the many grand concepts in the work, perhaps the most important is Berdyaev's
conception of the human as cocreator of reality (history) with God. His base reasoning is that humans must respond to God's creative love with a
creativity of their own. All that is, then, is made by God but also is made by humans in their love for God. Associated with this idea is that of epochs or
eras of history--or of creativity if you wish to use that term. There have been, he says, three great epochs: that of the law (the old Testament), that of the
redemption (the New Testament), and the epoch of creativity (roughly from the Fall of Jerusalem to the present). It was in Florence that Berdyaev saw
the beginnings of the new epoch or era, that of the spirit. The new epoch was dawning, and it was to its announcement and explanation that he now
devoted his labors. This new epoch was to see the creativity of humankind in the realm of the spirit, that is, it would still be a time of creativity by humans
in response to the timeless creativity of God, but now (in time) humans increasingly would create in the domain of the spiritual rather than in the purely
physical. This spiritual creativity would continue to affect and suffuse all human actions, those multifarious activities of the past that would continue into
the new epoch but that would now be more and more spiritual in focus and concern and value.

Yet another basic theme of The Meaning of the Creative Act is that humans are free agents in their loving response to God and thus in their creativity in
the new epoch. This freedom of will is the element that makes humans human, the significant factor that separates us from all the rest of God's vast
creation. Nothing else in creation is free to choose to respond or not to respond, to engage in creation or to perhaps destroy instead. From this work
forward, this overriding emphasis upon human freedom, in all its manifold aspects, was to become the hallmark of Berdyaev's thought and writing. It is
here, in the cardinal and dominant placement of human freedom, that Berdyaev again returns to political philosophy and becomes irreplaceably important
in the political dialogue both in modern Russia and in modern political thought.

The Meaning of the Creative Act was denounced as philosophical decadence. Leading religious personages in Moscow called it heretical. But it was
widely read and made Berdyaev at last an important personage and thinker in Russian intellectual life. Lowrie notes that this publication, in 1916,
followed an article also published in Moscow in 1913 in which Berdyaev attacked and denounced the Holy Synod of the Russian orthodox church. He
was arrested (again) and charged with blasphemy after the 1913 publication. "only the outbreak of World War," writes Lowrie, "and the revolution that
followed, prevented Berdyaev from spending the remainder of his life in Siberian exile, the automatic penalty for such a crime" (pp. 20 21). The
metaphysical theologian cum political philosopher was saved by the war, and even more by the Bolshevik revolution.

From the time of the Bolshevik revolution on, Berdyaev and his family led an increasingly strenuous, even harsh, life. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow
intellectuals in the empire, Berdyaev had seen the revolution coming, for he knew the Marxists, their leaders, and their methods. As well, he had
foreseen that the revolution would introduce old evils under new names. Because of his unflinching and adamantine public stand for human freedom and
the dignity of the individual, he violently denounced the new regime and was increasingly repressed by it.

He criticized the new regime as being nothing more than nihilism, and particularly the celebration of that gloomy Russian nihilism. In its atheism and rank
materialism, he saw the very antithesis of the dawning epoch of the spirit, a cruel and cold decision to take the Russian peoples (the nations of the old
empire) down the path of antispirit and destruction--literally to perdition. As products of the bourgeois class, all three members of the Berdyaev family
were forced to work as 'volunteer' street cleaners, a job to which he later succeeded in a low-paying but formalized capacity. As well, they were all forced
to engage in other 'socially useful' actions whenever the mood took the local authorities. As former 'social parasites,' they were made to live through five
Russian winters in unheated rooms. Yet even now, Berdyaev's nerve, and luck, held as they had so long ago in his youth. For reasons unknown, the
Berdyaev names were among those of twenty families of outstanding intellectuals who were allowed special and comparatively generous food rations.
Berdyaev continued to write and also to lecture in The Free Academy of Spiritual Culture that he defiantly had organized and launched early in 1919!
Until he was arrested in 1921, the academy functioned freely and vigorously. So unique was it that during his interrogation by the CHEKA, the word
spiritual in its name was incomprehensible to one questioner, who demanded an explanation. Between the autumn of 1917 and the time of his arrest,
Berdyaev spoke freely in many meetings, was a state-employed lecturer at the University of Moscow (often delivering the lecture in his street-cleaner's
work clothes), and held weekly salons in his unheated apartment where absolute freedom of critical expression regarding any subject--including the
regime--was openly practiced. During this same period he wrote the manuscripts for four books.

He was arrested in 1921, taken to the Lubyanka, and held in strict solitary confinement for six weeks. Finally he was removed from his cell and marched
directly to the office of the chief of the CHEKA, Felix Dzershinsky. It was midnight, and his interrogation by the head of the Soviet secret police was about
to begin. He was so lucid, so intellectual, so forthright, that Dzershinsky ordered his release with (again) a 'warning.' This warning had the same effect as
that of czarist authorities in 18g7. He was arrested anew in the summer of 1922. This time an order of banishment was issued against him. He was to
leave the Soviet Union immediately and was under sentence of death should he ever return. Passage was arranged to Germany by a surprisingly helpful
Soviet regime, which in the end placed the Berdyaev family among approximately seventy influential and respected intellectuals and their family
members being banished from the land of the revolution as 'hopelessly inconvertible to Communism.' Berdyaev would live the rest of his life in exile, in
Berlin, in Paris, and finally in the quiet suburb of Clamart. But his luck would hold: he became the editor-in-chief of the largest publisher of Russian-
language books outside the Soviet Union, YMCA Press, in Paris. After the German invasion in 1940, he became a recluse in Clamart, thinking, writing,
and often dashing off articles that were drolly as critical of the authorities and the Hitler regime in Germany as anything clandestinely published by the
resistance. But he was never bothered by either the Vichy or the German authorities (one writer holds that he probably had a secret protector high in
Nazi circles, although there is no proof for this available) and was, at the liberation, still writing in Clamart with four new manuscripts upon his desk.

Writing was his life's work, his joy, his duty, his destiny. When asked his conception of heaven, he answered that it would be unlimited time to sit at his
desk and write. He was doing just that, the very thing he wanted to do, when he died on March 23, 1948, in Clamart. Even in death, his luck had held. His
funeral was one of France's first great ecumenical services. Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Russian orthodox clergy joined in the funeral. The hymns
were in French and Russian.

Berdyaev called his 'philosophy' existential, meaning that his thought was rooted in life experience, not in the cold realms of abstract reason. But it is
important to note that he never saw himself as in any way related to any other of the more trendy forms of existentialism, least of all to the atheistic
variety advanced by Jean-Paul Sartre (who, unfortunately, is now the name associated in the popular mind with the philosophy). Berdyaev did, of course,
share in the basic conviction of all existentialists, namely, that existence precedes essence. He differs from them uniquely in that he derives his primary
insights into religion, philosophy, and politics mainly from the Russian Orthodox tradition, from Boehme and Khomyakov and Dostoyevsky, from
Vysheslavtsev and Solovyov and Rozanov--and the many others in the rich literature of the Russian experience. He utterly rejected humanism. After
Marx and Nietzsche, 'humanism' was no longer possible even as an ideal, nor were the secular (social) values of the Renaissance in Western Europe of
which it--humanism--was the spiritual and critical foundation.

Existential philosophy permeates the whole of Berdyaev's thought. He starts not with some abstract concept but with the human person. Without keeping
this in mind, one cannot understand his thinking. The centrality of the human person, and more important, of the Divine Person, is all important. only
persons exist. only they are really 'real,' as opposed to the thoughts they may think. Thoughts (philosophies, systems, concepts, ideologies, laws, rules,
beliefs, perceptions) are not real but are only the symbols of reality. And therefore, being is different from person, that is, person is subject while being is
object. Subject is connected to the noumenal realm of spirit and freedom; object is related to the world of nature and determinism.

For Berdyaev, person ('personality') is the existing subject, is real, and is central. Being is the product of the thought of the subject. Being has no reality,
no existence, in and of itself. Because the highest achievement of the person is to experience, and to experience at the highest possible level, that must
take place by the entry of 'spirit'--and spirit can enter only that which is real, namely, persons who really exist. This is the single criterion for truth: Is the
question posed for persons, and can persons (subjects) alone experience it? For example, Berdyaev condemns Marxism among many reasons because
it makes a social class the repository of social, economic, and political morality. Class is an object, a product of a person's thought, and not a reality. The
person who suffers injustice under the doctrine of class conflict is real, and really suffers under real injustice. But the suffering is not balanced by the
good done to any other real entity, any other 'person' (subject). Subject is made to suffer under the delusion of doing good for an object of thought, which
has no real existence in the first place. "For Marx," he says, "class is more real than man." (The Meaning of the Creative Act, 1916, p. 287).

Berdyaev's existentialism is not idosyncratic or egocentric. In his work Slavery and Freedom (1943, p. 246), he argues for personhood or personalism,
not individualism. He writes "Personalism does not mean, as individualism does, an egocentric isolation." He appears to accept almost completely the
then-current (mid-1940s) concept of the human ego, especially in its more aggressive interpretation. He condemns ego as the enemy of personality and
proclaims that the real person emerges only in 'communion' with other persons (objects) when two persons or more freely share in the accomplishment
of shared tasks. There is an almost Dostoyevskian feel about this, a whiff of the hay being stacked by happy peasants in the hot afternoon sun as the
girls and women bring baskets filled with good Russian food and kvas (a peasant ginger beer brewed from leftover dark bread and assorted other
additions).

But what Berdyaev is doing is condemning that evil most to be feared when person is ignored and thoughts become objective realities: nihilism. If the
purpose of his life and work is to announce and give witness to the coming of the Age of Spirit, it is as well to fight against the cause of human (persons')
suffering in his century: nihilism. Nihilism is the death of the spirit, and thus a nihilistic regime is a regime of death.

For Berdyaev, anarchy bears the seeds of nihilism. If anarchy is to be prevented, the state must exist:
Authority, power, is a means of realizing the good of a state or a nation, of civilization or of mankind. But authority always has a tendency to be
transformed into an end in itself, and to substitute itself for all other ends. Here the rapprochement of means and ends takes place in just the wrong way,
that of accepting evil means as an end. ( The Destiny of Man, 1931, p. 177)

Yet as open to perversion as the state power may be, it is necessary. And as feared as anarchy must be, it must be distinguished from anarchism as a
philosophy:

It is a great mistake to identify anarchism with anarchy. Anarchism is not against order, agreement, harmony, but against authority, violence, the realm of
Caesar. Anarchy is chaos and disharmony, i.e., deformity. Anarchism is the ideal of a free harmony, determined from within, i.e., the victory of the
Kingdom of God over that of Caesar. Behind a despotic, violent state one usually will find hidden anarchy and disharmony. In principle a spiritually-
founded anarchism may be combined with the recognition of the functional importance of the state, with the necessity of state functions, but it cannot be
joined with the supremacy of the state, its absoluteness, its encroachment on man's spiritual freedom, its will to power. (The Russian Idea, 1947, pp. 154-
55)

Berdyaev was not, in the modern sense, a political theorist. He was not overtly a political philosopher. But he was a philosopher-theologian whose impact
on contemporary political theory arose from his deeply orthodox setting: he more than any other thinker-writer brought the riches of orthodox Christianity
and the ethics and morals flowing therefrom into the arena of modern political thought in his native Russia, in the West, and in contemporary theory. His
rejection of anarchy with an acceptance of anarchism is an attempt to bring to the life of the polity that free 'spirit' of cooperation that he knew from his life
in Russia (The Russian Idea, 1947, p. 155) and is but one example of the process he used to fuse his anthropology with his politics, with the whole
subsumed under his philosophy. He is giving witness, calling attention to the truth of human existential reality that must be seen and comprehended if
humans are to live good--and therefore fulfilling--lives.

Berdyaev went through a complex and dizzying spiritual evolution, from Marxist criticism to Christian Weltanschauung. To attempt to relate this to his
impact upon political thinking is difficult, indeed. Perhaps the best 'peg' upon which one can hang a skein of analysis is his concept of history. He is not
interested in what one morally thinks is history. Rather, the focus of his energies is the philosophy of history, specifically that spiritual reality he denotes
as "the historical" (The Meaning of History, 1923, 12-14 and 140 42). The historical bespeaks something beyond mere history. It is the spiritual meaning
of history, the Spirit moving through history and thus making it 'subject' rather than 'object.' It is 'person,' whereas mere history is 'thing' (idea). Thus, the
historical refers to persons (human beings) in their "fullness," meaning in their personal human experiences (existences). Because of this, it leads to an
experiencing of the ultimate reality, for true human experience always leads to a recognition of God.

There is about this a difficulty for the Western (read non-Russian) mind. Western concepts of history are of time passing, a series of cause-and-effect
events like box cars on a railroad propelled by the engine of time in their given order. one follows the other, all moved by the force driving them along.
The classical Russian conception, on the other hand, is of "an unfolding"--of events taking place because of an underlying reality (order). In this
conception, one does not speak of the 'history' of the rose blooming, for example, but looks upon its blooming as a single event 'unfolding,' as it should.

The blooming of a rose is the very essence of the spirit of the rose, for it is more than a series of random events. For Berdyaev, the life of the human
(man) is the life of the "Godman," God + man in one great schema, one great unfolding. To return to the analogy, to detail the time and minutiae of a
single blooming would be 'mere' history, the writing of a history of a rose. To grasp the spiritual significance of bloomingness is a great deal more: it is to
perceive the "historical" rose. Berdyaev exhorts his reader, then, to recognize and, more important, to experience the unity of his own destiny with that of
all humans, and with God. When man participates in such a common destiny, even here in this brief earthly span, under God, the organizational aspects
of life (state; society) will flow rather automatically out of the spiritual qualities experienced. By analogy: for Marx, once the liberated and empowered
proletariat seizes the reins of authority and controls the means of production and distribution, the organization of all public life (state; society) will flow
from the new reality sans class contradiction and conflict. One might sum it up by saying that both Marx and his erstwhile disciple believed in the dictum
of the proper predicate predisposing the proper object.

The mystical approach to the philosophy of history grows out of Berdyaev's Christian universalism that seemingly he inherited from (among others)
Solovyov. His firm and unshakable belief in orthodox Christianity, however, is different from that of Solovyov. Although he is a universalist, he is not so
pro-Catholic as his idol, and his thoughts and writing betray none of the Catholic social/political philosophy of the time. For example, none of the Catholic
'corporativism' of the late nineteenth century, the core of the best Catholic political/economic thinking of the time, shows up in Berdyaev. He has a high
regard for the Catholic (Western) tradition of thought, certainly higher and more knowledgeable than his understanding of Protestantism (which he tends
to dismiss in a rather out-of-hand manner!). He identifies Protestantism too closely with sheer humanism and therefore with nihilism. Because of his
mystical approach to history, the central peg (as we have called it here) of his skein of analysis, and because of his Russianism and commitment to
orthodoxy, one might have expected that Berdyaev would be--or would become--like so many of his contemporary Russian intellectuals anti-Western in
his thinking.

But he is not. Slavophilism and the unwitting glorification of the motherland is beyond his ken, and beneath his dignity both as a Christian and as a
Russian. In particular where his writings verge upon the political, they are free of that taint. Rather, if there is a bias, or at least an obsession, it is with
Marxist communism. In Letters to Mme. K (1940), in The origin of Russian Communism (1937), in Dostoevsky: An Interpretation (1923), in Freedom and
the Spirit (1928), and in Christianity and Class War (1931), and in other of his writings, Berdyaev attacks communism. And still, to be fair, Berdyaev
himself seems aware of his phobia and attempts to be more balanced:

My book, The Philosophy of Inequality (1923), was written in the summer of 1918 in an atmosphere of passionate resistance to the triumphant
communist revolution. It may be that the book reflects, too much, negative feelings which no longer possess me. I had not yet lived through the spiritual
catharsis, nor felt the depth of the spiritual experience of the revolution: I had not yet thought this experience through, to the end, in the light of religion. In
19231 still hold the basic hierarchic and social-philosophical thoughts I expressed in 1918, but my mood is more cleansed and purified from the power of
negative feelings, from all hatred, even if it should be kindled for the sake of a true idea or the true faith.... A spiritual experience of the revolution cannot
lead to a desire for restoration, i.e., for the rebuilding of the old world with all its injustice. It is evident that the injustice of the old world led to the injustice
of the revolution, and a return to the old would be senseless, the condemnation of our people's life to an endless whirlpool. We must get out of this evil,
exit-less whirl of the revolution and reaction into some sort of new life; we must proceed to creativity. (The Philosophy of Inequality, 1923, pp. 243-44)

In 1949, the year after his death, his autobiography was published. In it, Berdyaev wrote his final judgment upon the great ideological movement of his
time and his nation:
Communism, a religion, is the idolatry of the collective. The idol of the collective is just as repulsive as the idols of the state, nation, race, or class.
(Autobiography 1949, p. 265)

To the end of his life, he continued to reject with a particular vigor the ideology of his early youth. It suffused his writing, even though he was aware of this
fixation and strove to bring balance to it. Writing of the early Marx, Berdyaev notes the humanitarian impulse, the inspiration ('spirit') of decency. Marx's
"sources were humanistic" (The Russian Idea, 1947, p. 95), and his struggle against capitalism was a struggle against the dehumanization (deperson-
alization) of all persons and therefore a struggle on behalf of all persons. The rub comes, he writes, in the place that the struggle is given by Marx in the
lives of persons: the struggle is placed before personhood and therefore prostitutes persons (objective reality) to class struggle (subjective perception). In
the medieval period, he observes, there had existed belief in God without belief in man (person), the other half of the God + man ("Godman") equation of
the Age of the Spirit. Since the humanism and resultant nihilism of the Renaissance, there has existed belief in man without belief in God. The equation
still is not fulfilled--and Marxism as a philosophy ("the idolatry of the collective") is but the newest unfolding of the humanist, nihilistic dynamic at the end
of the waning age. It will have no role in the Age of the Spirit, and it shall suffer desuetude.

There is a famous philosophical distinction between 'knowing that' and 'knowing how' (Ryle 1949, pp. 27-32). To know that is to grasp the explicit
proposition: you know that today is Thursday, or that your shoe is untied, or that you are hungry. These are existential facts. You can verbalize them; you
can communicate them to others. To know how is to have a skill: you know how to tie your shoes, how to obtain food, how to read the calendar. You can
teach others these skills by demonstrating them, by showing what to do (how). It may be more difficult to verbalize the know how than it is to verbalize
the know that. Great athletes or artists know how, but may find it difficult to verbalize their own skill. An excellent jockey who has real knowledge and
understanding of horses may find it difficult to explain his or her practical knowledge. But both knowing that and knowing how are to some degree
conceptualizable and can be explained, perhaps with difficulty, to the uninitiated. They can be expressed in words.

To understand Berdyaev is to understand that there is yet another kind of knowing. This is not a knowledge of fact, for few or perhaps no 'facts' in our
understanding of the term are involved in this knowledge--and certainly none of the facts of government and politics as we have come to know and
understand them within our discipline. Nor is it a deposit of skill knowledge, for although this type of knowledge is harder to verbalize, it is still concerned
with facts of a sort, facts of performance and action and feel. It is, rather, a spiritual involvement with: an intuitive grasping of the sense of, of the
ambience of, of the nature of. (It is, in the best example, the knowledge of the divine love of God as only the human being can know it.)

This is the knowledge 'of.' Its central feature is the awareness, the presence of the spirit, of the historical (as opposed to mere history) essence. This is
the hallmark of the Epoch of the Spirit announced by Berdyaev in his Florentine stay. This is the fuller human response to God's creative love, blending
with man's own creativity. This 'knowledge of' is highly celebrated in the Russian orthodox faith, the liturgy being the highest form of that celebration.
What appears uninstructive (knowledge that) and obscurantist (knowledge how) to Western eyes is in reality a lifting up, an 'unfolding' of eternal
knowledge of. The chanting, the robes, the incense, the music, the ritual movements, all offer symbolic reiteration 'of' that which is known as other than
thesis or antithesis, as demonstrable fact or visible skill. The message of Berdyaev is that as human knowledge of the divine has moved from knowledge
that, to knowledge how, to knowledge of (based, of course, upon Divine Revelation), so the new Epoch of the Spirit will lead all humans into a new type
of knowledge of the affairs of this earth, including governance and politics. It is more complicated than simply announcing that good people will make
good politics and therefore have good government. Sin will still exist. The flesh will still be weak, and all temptation will still find mankind wanting in their
love of goodness. In the Epoch of the Spirit, we will all still be living in this old world, and no millennium will have yet dawned. But, and it is a significant
but, mankind as a whole will be more aware of the impulse to creativity, to joining with each other and the Divine in the creation of the new age, whatever
it is to be in its unseen particulars. There will be heightened self-awareness of humans, and of that Creativity preceding and beyond humans. This, says
Berdyaev, like nothing since the beginning of the Epoch of Creativity, will affect the whole of human activity and will reshape utterly our thinking
concerning power, and governance, and the political. What the specific problems and concerns and structures and resolutions will be we do not know.
We shall 'know that' at the appropriate time, just as we shall 'know how' to deal with those phenomena then. Now, in Berdyaev, we 'know of' the new
epoch. He has given us his witness.

There is a final question. Did Berdyaev appreciate 'the political' in the manner generally found in the Western world today? That is, did he see politics as
something unique unto itself, or was it subservient to another and greater dynamic? We know he kept the shell of his marxian (small m with the 'ian'
ending) analysis, even though he rejected Marxism outright. When we speak of 'politics,' are we speaking of the same phenomenon as Berdyaev?

This is a most difficult question to answer. In reading Berdyaev, one must throw away the usual methodology of understanding an author. This is a
mystical Russian, not an empirical American political scientist. He does not write numerical cookbooks. The best way that we can answer the question is
to take him at his own word, as slippery and mystical as that may be. In Christianity and the Class War (1931, pp. 72-3) Berdyaev wrote:

From the axiological viewpoint, we may fix this hierarchy of degree and value: first comes the spiritual, next the economic, and third, the political as a
means in relation to the economic. only the conscious subjection of politics to economics, while retaining the seniority of the spiritual, prevents politics
from becoming a fiction, masking and concealing economic interests. Axiologically we must think of society as something spiritual-economic, with the
necessary minimum of politics . . .

In The Divine ond the Human (1947, pp. 149-50) we find:

In politics falsehood plays a great role, and small place is left for truth. States have been built upon lies, and upon lies they have been demolished.... And
there has never been a revolution against the unlimited power of politics, for the sake of man and humaneness. Man should not have to stand the
outrage of his human dignity, violence or slavery. Herein is the moral justification of revolution. But not all the means employed by revolution are justified.
Revolution itself can commit outrage upon human dignity, it can violate and enslave people. The garment is changed, but the old man remains. And
humaneness does not triumph. Humaneness demands a more profound, spiritual revolution.

In these and many other of his works, Berdyaev appears to ignore the political as a separate realm of human activity, or indeed, of human creativity.
Rather, one might argue that his marxian shell remains: politics is simply the working out of economic relationships, and any good polity will see politics
subordinated to economics, and the whole existing within and under the spiritual--the guiding knowledge of the new epoch. Perhaps one could take
Berdyaev at his own word and say that he changed his ideological garments, but underneath the old man remained. His disdain for the political must
have flown equally out of his distinctly Russian spirituality.
Berdyaev, in his early days as a Marxist, saw politics as a snare and a delusion, a "mask." That vision remains in his later life, in all his work. He never
comes to accept the polity as something unique unto itself but rather as an object dependent upon a higher, greater subject. That object may be the
historical dialectic or the unfolding of the joint creativity of the Godman. In any case, it is the controlling reality, whereas the political is always the
dependent phenomenon. Thus, once again, if indeed the spiritual is to be the controlling reality of the epoch, it follows naturally that the politics of the
new epoch will be shaped utterly by that new knowledge, the knowledge of the spiritual. The proper predicate predisposes the proper object.

Nicolai Alexandrovitch Berdyaev was a prophet, a prophet in the real meaning of the term. He was not a fortune teller, nor did he predict the future.
Rather, he was a prophet in that special sense of being an interpreter of our time, speaking of things beyond our time. His interest was man, human
beings, persons in their full dignity as children of God. His interest in philosophy, or religion, or economics, or politics, or anything else always is under
the rubric of his existential interest in the betterment and welfare of his fellow human beings, in terms of their own experiences (not in terms of some
'world historical' ideology). He was a man of vision, seeing human history in a macrocosm as epochs of unfolding developments. He was a deeply
believing Christian of the Russian orthodox faith, whose fides (trust) in the utter compassion and love and redemptive sacrifice of God suffused all his
work. Unlike the Western tradition, it makes no sense to speak of Berdyaev if one attempts to shove aside or cover over his religious faith and the
absolutely central role it plays in his life and in his work(s). Truly, to understand even a little of Berdyaev is to wade deeply into his religious perceptions
and trust. There is no speaking of him without speaking of his faith. Thus this essay has spoken of 'knowledge of', of the dawning of the new epoch of the
Spirit, of Berdyaev's distrust of the political, and a few aspects of his contributions to political theory from the foundation of Russian orthodoxy.

NOTE
A note regarding articles: Berdyaev was a heroic producer of articles Probably the best contemporary inventory available is in the year-by year listing
offered in the work by Michael Alexander Vallon, An A postle of Freedom: The Life and Teachings of Nicolas Berdyaev. (New York: The Philosophical
Library, 1960).

BIBLIOGRAPHY of N. A. Berdycev's Books

Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy, (St. Petersburg: Electritcheskayar Tipografia, 1901).

The Meaning of the Creative Act, (New York: Harper and Row 1955). First published 1916.

The Meaning of History, George Reavey, trans. (London. Geoffrey Bles, 1936). First published 1923.

Freedom and the Spirit, Oliver Fielding Clarke, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 193S). First published 1928.

Christianity and the Class War, Donald Attwater, trans. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933). First published 1931.

The Destiny of Man, Natalie Duddington, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938). First published 1931.

The origin of Russian Communism, R. M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937).

Solitude and Society, George Reavey, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938).

Letters to Mme K, (Paris: Editerus reunis, 1940).

Dostoevsky, Donald Attwater, trans. (New York: Meridian Books 19S7). First published 1943.

Slavery and Freedom, R. M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943).

The Divine and the Human, R. M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949). First published 1947.

The Russian Idea, R. M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947).

SAMOPOZNANIE ['SELF-KNOWLEDGE'], (Paris: YMCA, 1949). Towards a New Epoch, R. M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949).

Dream and Reality, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950).

The Realm of the Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, Donald A. Lowrie trans. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952).

Truth and Revelation, R. M. French, trans. (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953).

Christianity and Anti-Semitism, Alan A. Spears and Victor B. Kantor, trans. (New York. The Philosophical Library, 1954).

The Philosophy of Inequality, from Michael A. Vallon, An Apostle of Freedom: The Life and Teachings of Nicholas Berdyaev. (New York: The
Philosophical Library, 1960).

REFERENCES
Lowrie, D. A. 196S. editor and trans., Nicoloi Berdyaev: Christian Existentialism. New York: Harper and Row Torchbooks.

Richardson, D. B. 1968. Berdyaev's philosophy of history: An Existentialist theory of social creativity and eschatology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Ryle, G. 1960. The concept of the mind. New York: Barnes and Noble. First published in London by Hutchinson, 1949.

Michael Alexander Vallon (as cited in note, above).

~~~~~~~~
By GERARD F. RUTAN

Gerard F. Rutan is a professor of political science at Western Washington University, Bellingham. His research interestS focus on religion and politics. He
was recently elected to the Executive Board of the Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
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