Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948)

  He participated in the current of theological renewal in Russian Orthodoxy and from 1910 committed his life to writing. Although close to revolutionary circles, his spiritual and religious opinions distanced him from Bolshevism. First arrested, he was finally deported from Russia in 1922 as an “ideological enemy” of the Soviet regime – he was the first Soviet dissident. He settled in Clamart, Paris, in 1924, where he died in 1948. It was there that he wrote his final books, now widely translated and justly famous, especially his The New Middle Ages.

He was the defender of a personal, existential, liberal, mystical Christianity. He represents a sort of spiritual anarchism, marked by a total independence of spirit and wholesale oppositions to dogma, to traditional, established Christian institutions and to party spirit.

Amongst over forty books, there are at least two of major significance. First, The Destiny of Man, his most accomplished, powerfully original work, which ends with a vibrant, magnificently-argued plea for universal salvation. Next, Spirit and Reality, a work described as “the strongest, most inspired and most stimulating work ever” by Olivier Clément (who converted to Christianity after reading it, and later became a famous theologian).

For Berdyaev, Mankind participates in a totally independent way in God’s creative act. God calls for our collaboration to build his Kingdom. In the constant construction of the world and of human history, we should not hide our talents and resign ourselves to inaction, lest the unending Creation of the universe should fail: “God will languish and suffer, for ever dissatisfied with his relations with his Other Self […] When Mankind dreams of God, of God’s tender love, of what God expects of him, it is then that he raises up the human inside himself, he makes the idea of humanity concrete, he affirms his creative nature.”

Another reality dominated Berdyaev’s thought, “Divine-Humanity”. This quality does not solely belong to Jesus, because humanity in its entirety, along with the whole universe, share in the divine nature. It is in our creative momentum and our individual acts of creation that we make real, by working with the Creator, the fulness of the life which God wants for us. Divine-Humanity does not express in a static way the condition of Jesus Christ, but expresses our belonging in Christ’s existence in a dynamic and creative way, where God’s-act-of-becoming-human and Mankind’s-act-of-becoming-divine are in constant, active harmony. “A collective and universal divine incarnation must come to fruition in humanity. Divine-Humanity is the natural extension of the Incarnation of God in Christ.”

Mankind contains a divine element. Grace becomes the revelation of the divine element within us, “the awakening of the divine in the human.”

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