Nikolai Berdyaev

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality. If war should come, it will do so on account of our delusions, for which our hag-ridden conscience attempts to find moral excuses. To recover a sense of reality is to recover the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live, and thereby to gain the power of keeping this world from flying asunder (Nikolai Berdyaev)

NIKOLAI BERDYAEV philosopher, existentialist, Christian anarchist, born in Kiev on March 18, 1874 in a Russian aristocratic family. Nicknamed “the philosopher of freedom”, he was a vibrant man, rebellious to all authority and fixed ideas, an independent and negative spirit. He could not tolerate any assertion without immediately denying it, to the point that he was able to contradict himself, attacking those who shared his own opinions. For Berdyaev, man unites two worlds: the divine and the natural, the multidimensional and the ordinary. These two natures can unite through freedom and creativity, which represent the only ways out of human dualism. There is no objective reality, but only an illusion of conscience, an objectification of reality, created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom. According to Berdyaev, believing that the source of evil lies outside oneself is the cause of all cruel fanaticism and of any war and violence. The root of evil is in each of us, and we need to take full responsibility for it. In his work New Middle Ages (1923) he anticipates the failure of modern civilization. Man is faced with his most serious spiritual crisis, chained to forces greater than himself, which far from freeing him have made him a slave. All philosophies that expressed confidence in the future are faced with their own failure. “The feeling of evil becomes stronger and more acute in the new Middle Ages. The force of evil will grow and take on new forms to cause new pains. But man has been granted the freedom of the spirit, the freedom to choose his own path”.