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The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) believed that the dawn of the twentieth century would bring an end to the old atheistic and positivistic worldview and the beginning of a new era of the spirit. His philosophy goes beyond mere rational conceptualization and tries to attain authentic life itself: the profound layers of existence in contact with the divine world. He directed all his efforts-philosophical as well as in hi...

In Spirit and Reality, Nikolai Berdyaev explores the nature of spirit, describes how modernity has obscured the true meaning of spirit by distorting objectifications and symbolizations, and tells how human creative activity, in concert with divine activity, can overcome these distortions and lead us into the kingdom of authentic spiritual life. A great change is needed which will lead us into the kingdom of the spirit, and in this kingdom we w...

In this work, Berdyaev tells us that man's "I, " his consciousness, is thrust up against a world of impersonal objects (the "objectified" world) and thus finds itself in a condition of alienation and isolation. In five ontological and epistemological meditations Berdyaev clarifies this condition of "objectification" and suggests ways it can be overcome, based on his "personalistic, " "existential" philosophy. He shows how this philosophy can s...

This original translation of a key prophetic and apocalyptic work, written by Russia's greatest philosopher at the end of the nineteenth century, characterizes in bold strokes and with astonishing prescience the challenges that mankind faces as 'progress' races to bring history to an end, calling us to vigilance and resistance to evil. The passing of more than a century since it was first written has not caused this remarkable text to lose any...

This book is about Divine Humanity, man's creative collaboration with God in the world. Nikolai Berdyaev's reflections on Divine Humanity lead him to outline a dramatic philosophy of destiny, a philosophy of existence which unfolds in time and passes over into eternity, into a state which is not death but transfiguration. He describes his method as existentially anthropocentric and spiritually religious, the dialectic of this book is a dialect...

In The Destiny of Man, Nikolai Berdyaev sketches the plan of a new ethics. This new ethics will be knowledge not only of good and evil, but also of the tragedy which is constantly present in moral experience and complicates all of man's moral judgments. It will emphasize the crucial importance of the personality and of human freedom. The new ethics will interpret moral life as a creative activity, it will be an ethics of free creativeness, an ...

In this book, Nikolai Berdyaev examines the struggle against slavery in its diverse forms. When he speaks of slavery and freedom, although he also uses these terms in a political sense, the underlying meaning is metaphysical: for Berdyaev, political slavery and freedom are rooted in our metaphysical slavery and freedom. The philosophy of this book is deliberately personal, it is a philosophy of personalism. As a philosopher, Berdyaev not only ...

The Meaning of the Creative Act is a seminal work for Nikolai Berdyaev. It adumbrates a number of crucially important themes that he develops in his later works, notably creative freedom as an essential element of human life and human creativeness as complementary to God's creativeness. Berdyaev's aim is to sketch out an "anthropodicy, " a justification of man (as opposed to a theodicy, a justification of God), man is to be justified on the ba...

In this book, Berdyaev tells us that the creative development of the spirit and the free exercise of man's powers can be conceived only as the free cooperation of man with the work of God. Creative spiritual development represents a new principle which signifies an offering of human freedom to God, an offering which God expects from us. The life of the spirit is a creative and dynamic process. Spiritual development is possible only because the...

Nikolai Berdyaev describes this book as "a philosophical autobiography or a history of spirit and self-knowledge." This book is not only autobiographical, it is also a work of critical self-inquiry: Berdyaev subjects his ideas and his life to philosophical scrutiny, in order to discover his "own image and ultimate destiny." In passing, he elucidates the most important elements of his personalistic philosophy: freedom, creativeness, and divine-...

This book is the philosophical fruit of Nikolai Berdyaev's first-hand experience of, and reflections on, the crisis of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War and the Russian Revolution. Berdyaev tells us that the modern age, with its failed Humanism, is being replaced by a new epoch: "the new middle ages, " an epoch of darkness, an epoch of the universal night of history. Berdyaev asserts that this night is a good thing: in th...

Written at the beginning of the world apocalypse which was World War II, The Beginning and the End is Nikolai Berdyaev's main book on eschatology. He describes his book as an "essay in the epistemological and metaphysical interpretation of the end of the world, of the end of history", hence he calls it an "eschatological metaphysics." For Berdyaev the end of the world is a divine-human enterprise: man not only endures the end, but he also prep...

Scholar, mystic, Christian, Nicolas Berdyaev has profoundly influenced the religious thinking of our age. "He is one of the few who have found the Christian answer, " writes Evgeny Lampert, "and yet do not cease to question with those whose lives are still torn asunder by disbelief, doubt and sufferings, one of the few who dare to be, as thinkers, Christians and, as Christians, thinkers.

So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world." This is Nikolai Berdyaev's assessment of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), the great Russian novelist, religious thinker, and prophet. Berdyaev's aim in this book is to examine Dostoevsky's spiritual side, to explore in all its depth the way in which Dostoevsky perceived the universe and to rec...

In this book, Nikolai Berdyaev examines the fundamental problems of the philosophy of history. For Berdyaev the philosophy of history is a science of the spirit bringing us into communion with the mysteries of spiritual life. The real philosophy of history is that of the triumph of authentic life over death, it is the participation of man in another reality which is much deeper and richer than the external reality in which he is immersed. The ...

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. He helped establish a rich tradition of Russian spirituality, inspiring a whole generation of thinkers, who followed his many-faceted spirit into diverse realms, bringing together philosophy, mysticism, theology, poetry, and powerful visionary experience with a trenchant social message. Solovyov was also a prophet, having been granted three visions of So...

Less known in the anglophone world than Berdyaev (who was a pupil of his), or Martin Buber, Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), philosopher, mystic, poet, has nevertheless a contribution of the first importance to offer to Western scholarship. He came from a rich and not yet fully understood tradition, his erudition was stupendous. Like his predecessors he was extremely sensitive to such problems as the religious meaning of history, of creativ...