Диалектика божественного и человеческого

by Nikolai Berdyaev, Николай Бердяев

Работы выдающегося русского религиозного мыслителя Н.А. Бердяева (1874-1948), вошедшие в это издание, написаны в разное время, однако их объединяет общая проблематика.

В них философ рассматривает диалектику взаимоотношений Творца и Его творения. "Его другого" - человека. Бердяев, всегда тяготевший к метафизике духа, отстаивает свободу представлений о Творце и откровении, присущую не ортодоксальной церкви, а мистикам: Экхарту, Кузанскому, Беме. Он утверждает: "Бог ждет от человека свободы, ждет свободного ответа человека на Божий зов. Подлинная свобода и есть та, которую Бог требует от меня, а не я требую от Бога".

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theology, Religion

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was born at Kyiv in 1874 of an aristocratic family. He commenced his education in a military school and subsequently entered the University of Kiev. There he accepted Marxism and took part in political agitation, for which he was expelled. At twenty-five he was exiled from Kiev to the north of Russia and narrowly escaped a second period of exile shortly before the Revolution. Before this, however, he had broken with Marxism in company with Sergius Bulgakov, and in 1909 he contributed to a symposium which reaffirmed the values of Orthodox Christianity. After the October Revolution he was appointed by the Bolshevists to a chair of philosophy in the University of Moscow, but soon fell into disfavour for his independent political opinions. He was twice imprisoned and in 1922 was expelled from the country. He settled first in Berlin, where he opened a Russian Academy of Philosophy and Religion. Thence he moved to Clamart near Paris, where he lectured in a similar institution. In 1939 he was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne. He lived through the German occupation unmolested. After the liberation, he announced his adhesion to the Soviet government, but later an article by him published in a Paris (Russian) newspaper, criticising the return to a policy of repression, was tantamount to a withdrawal of this. He died at Clamart March 24, 1948.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first, and yet only, book by Nikolai Berdyaev that managed to disappoint me somewhat. And that may be because I'm reading him on the heels of William Morris and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, but it strikes me that there's a significant blind spot in his writing that I hadn't managed to see before. Whether it was because I simply wasn't mature enough yet to have appreciated it, or whether I wasn't attuned to the sort of metaphysical questions that needed to be answered, even I still don't know yet. That said, though, here is my big problem with this book.

For Berdyaev, matter is dead weight. The grandeurs of virgin nature are fleeting and static. The physical world, with all its beauties--a prison. One needn't go far in his writing to see that to him, the material universe is redolent of necessity, of slavery, of magic and superstition, of the law of death. There are times when he borders, if he doesn't cross into, Gnosticism and Marcionism. This has some very unfortunate implications for his take on ecology: it simply doesn't interest him. He does carry some interest in the idea of apokatastasis as a cosmic salvation; his last chapter makes that abundantly clear. But for him, it is spirit that is saved and saving--the illusions of matter are to be swept clear of the porch. Berdyaev manages to avoid the complications by working in a critique of Descartes (without realising he's still somewhat stuck in Cartesian thinking), and by asserting that even non-humans - cats, dogs, even trees - have spirit that will participate in the eschaton and the salvation of the world.

Makes me want to go read Whitehead. Or Cobb, or Daly, or McKibben. Or Alfred Russel Wallace. Or Plotinus.

Still, this being Berdyaev, he has a great deal of interest to say on other topics. Even though he rejects the 'ontological metaphysics' of the ancient Greeks (facepalm there), he has a deep and touching appreciation for the historical and prophetic-messianic potentialities of Persian and Jewish thought. It is here that he senses a continuity, the way a finely-tuned historical mind can and ought to do, between the Persian and Jewish legacy of prophecy and eschatological comfort in the face of suffering, and the apostolic deposit in the thinking of Orthodox Russia - which took its Platonism, not neat as the Greeks did, but filtered through the Cappadocian Fathers Gregory the Theologian and Gregory of Nyssa.

He considers and correctly highlights the differences between the highest aspirations of Western theological thought - the legacy of German idealism (Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche), and that of Russian religious philosophy (Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Fyodorov). He makes the careful and necessary distinctions between circular modes of thinking about history and eschatological ones (and in so doing, unwittingly makes the case that Confucianism - particularly New Text Confucianism - has the same prophetic-messianic potentialities as Persian and Hebrew thought!). He rightly highlights that consideration of the theological and metaphysical 'weight' of history is a Zoroastrian and not an Orphic genius.

What he has to say on the subject of Christianity and its relation to materialisms of various sorts (Marxism and capitalism both included) is still very much needed and right; to be blunt, that's still one of the more endearing facets of his philosophical style. I can't help but applaud his uncompromising, and all too Russian, stances against torture and capital punishment, rooted as they are in the very best examples of Russian Silver Age thinking. However, as can be seen above, I take a somewhat more nuanced position as to what counts as 'materialism', and want to be careful not to fall into Berdyaev's quasi-Gnostic spiritualist passions. Matter still matters. God created it 'good'. It's only our own fall that has made it not so. If that makes me too 'Greek' and not 'Persian' enough, so be it.

[Steve Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many Christians, this will be a challenging book because it asserts - quite fearlessly too - that Jesus was both divine and human and that, in a dialectical way, we humans have a share in Jesus divinity. For me this argument was a er, revelation, and made sense of the Gospels in particular, and the New Testament and the Bible in general in ways that most Christians seem to find difficult if not impossible to accept. The way I see it is that that is sad for them. To accept that Jesus' human aspects could lead him to less than perfect behaviour, that the Bible was made by less-than-perfect human beings only under the impression that they were speaking God's word, makes Christianity possible, while to others it seems too outrageous for words. If I could give this book a hundred thousand stars, I would.