Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was a Russian philosopher and theologian whose Orthodox Christian convictions shaped a distinctive form of existentialism and personalism. Freedom sits at the centre of his thought. He moved from the Marxism of his youth toward a religious outlook, while remaining a sharp critic of institutions, whether church or state.

He came from a family of the military aristocracy and grew up in a home he found stifling, educating himself largely through his father's library. He entered Kiev University in 1894, where he encountered Marxism and student radicalism. His revolutionary activity led to arrest and exile to northern Russia. Over time he abandoned deterministic Marxism and drew closer to religion, but he never trusted the church as an institution. In 1913 he attacked the Holy Synod so fiercely that he was charged with blasphemy.

The revolution of 1917 struck him as both a liberation and a spiritual catastrophe. He wrote against Bolshevism, yet in the early Soviet years he lectured in Moscow, taught at the university and founded a free academy of spiritual culture. In 1922 he was expelled from the country with other intellectuals. He settled first in Berlin and then in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life writing in Russian, German and French.

His work starts from a conviction that freedom comes before being. The spiritual world precedes the world of appearances, which can trap the person in a mediocre, bourgeois existence. A person is at once spirit, soul and body, and fulfils himself through creation, knowledge and love. Creative acts bring novelty into the world, and knowing is an active, searching process rather than passive reception. Berdyaev also reflected on anguish and nostalgia, which he saw as signs of human incompleteness before an ontological perfection.

Drawing on Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Vladimir Solovyov, he described his philosophy as a philosophy of freedom, of the creative act, personalist, spiritual and existential. His independence cost him favour with some Orthodox theologians, but his ideas shaped Christian existentialism and personalism. His name appears in the dedication of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.