Nikolai Berdyaev and Eschatological Providentialism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 18 March 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; 18 March, Old Style 06 March, 1874–24 March 1948), who was born in Obukhov, near Kiev, on this date in 1874. As with the dates for Pitirim Sorokin, Berdyaev’s birth date was “old style” and was changed after he was born. When Berdyaev was born, the calendar said 06 March, and this date was retroactively changed to 18 March under the Gregorian calendar.
Berdyaev has been called a Christian existentialist, a label that has also been applied to Garbriel Marcel, but it’s just a label, and should be taken with a grain of salt. In Berdyaev’s autobiography he sounds much more like an idealist than an existentialist, but he also says in his autobiography that, “…true existentialist philosophy is represented by St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, rather than by Heidegger, Jaspers, or Sartre.” (p. 97) We could say that Berdyaev is implicitly making a fallacious “no true existentialist” argument, but the distinction he makes is worth noting. If you define an exemplar from the outset, or several exemplars (as Berdyaev has done), and you don’t move the goalposts in the course of an argument, it isn’t a fallacy to insist upon what is a “true” existentialist and what is not a “true” existentialist by the stipulations one has established. Take the Christian existentialist label or leave it if you like.
And Berdyaev wasn’t always a Christian. Like many thinkers of the twentieth century, his path took him from traditional beliefs, through a Marxist period, and eventually back to Christianity. At the same time there were other philosophers taking the opposite journey from Christianity to Marxism. This was a well-trod path in both directions during the twentieth century.
Whatever the status of his Marxism, his Christianity, or his existentialism, Berdyaev was an aristocrat by birth. In his autobiography he writes, “I myself inherited a hot and irascible temper, a tendency not uncommon among the Russian gentry.” Then he relates an anecdote to illustrate his temper:
“When I was in exile in Vologda I struck a man, a local government official, because he pursued a young lady of my acquaintance in the street. When I had hit him I threatened him with dismissal from his job. On such occasions ‘the blood of my ancestors’ rushed to my head. I have even known real ecstasies of rage.”
He adds an especially telling coda to this:
“I myself, even while engaged in revolutionary activity and a convinced social-democrat, never ceased to be fundamentally, though unconsciously, a nobleman. It was so in my very repudiation of the world to which I belonged by birth and upbringing. I resented this, especially when I noticed that my origin produced a feeling of inferiority in my comrades.”
Like Berdyaev’s well-trodden path from Marxism to religion, this was another familiar staple of the twentieth century. It would be difficult to find a thinker more different from Berdyaev than Bertrand Russell, but Berdyaev’s description of his aristocratic background might well have been written by Russell (though I’ve never read of Russell assaulting anyone).
The incident in Vologda was while he was in internal exile, starting in 1897, for his revolutionary activities at university. He was later charged with blasphemy, but the revolution intervened and he was never tried. But he was in no better position with the communist regime that replaced the Tsarist regime. He was questioned by the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and though he wasn’t shot or jailed, he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922.
In it difficult to pigeonhole Berdyaev’s views, but his thought is not entirely isolated from what others were doing in philosophy of history. There is, for example, an unlikely intersection between Berdyaev and the previous two philosophers I have discussed, Raymond Aron and Patrick Gardiner. At the end of Gardiner’s The Nature of Historical Explanation he argues that materialist and idealist conceptions of historical explanation are based on different conceptions of what constitutes an explanation in history. Gardiner writes:
“Whether we regard human beings in their ‘physical’ aspects or in their ‘mental’ aspects depends upon our interests. The physiologist is interested in the behaviour of the blood-stream, the arrangement of the brain cells: the psychologist or the historian is interested in what people think, say, feel, do. There is no conflict, only a difference of point of view and purpose. Human beings are not ‘really matter’ or ‘really mind’: they are human beings. Different ways of talking about them, dictated by different interests, have been hypostatized into different ingredients.”
I noted in my episode on Gardiner the influence of Gilbert Ryle, and this is of a piece with Ryle’s denial of the “ghost in the machine” conception of the self — no more than mind is a ghost inhabiting a machine, is the body a machine haunted by a ghost. Taken seriously, this equally calls mechanism and idealism into question, though in practice the linguistic philosophers were only really interested in calling Cartesian privacy into question. For Gardiner, the whole man is not divided between ghost and machine, and it is implied that an adequate historical explanation could only be formulated in light of the wholeness of the person.
Aron is more explicit in the implications of his philosophy of history for its inconclusiveness in the absence of an adequate philosophical anthropology:
“…for man to be in entire harmony with himself, he would have to live according to the truth, he would have to recognize himself as autonomous both in his creation and in his consciousness of it. This would be an ideal reconciliation, incompatible with the destiny of those who do not set up an idol in the place of God. Human life is dialectic, that is, dramatic, since it is active in an incoherent world, is committed despite duration, and seeks a fleeting truth, with no other certainty but a fragmentary science and a formal reflection.”
Aron even adds the following in a footnote:
“A philosophical inquiry, partial as this one is, allows no conclusion… The omission is inevitable and intentional. The whole of this final Part transposes into anthropological terms the results already obtained and in itself represents a sort of conclusion, since it shows the meaning for life of the abstract propositions previously demonstrated.”
Both Gardiner and Aron looked forward to the possibility of a philosophical anthropology — Gardiner implicitly and Aron explicitly — that would fill the void that remains after their analyses. The both of them are either unwilling or unable to fill this void. Berdyaev steps into this void and is prepared to supply the philosophical anthropology that Gardiner and Aron imply, or perhaps we might even say they anticipate, but stop short of formulating. Chapter Three of Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man is his account of philosophical anthropology, and it is largely religious, though it is not the orthodox doctrine of any familiar sect:
“Man and humanity, the idea and the image o f man, have two eternal sources in the world of antiquity — the biblical and the Hellenic. It was there that man was formed and differentiated out of the primeval chaos. But though his first sources are Hebrew-Hellenic, it was only in Christianity, through Christ and the Christian revelation, that man found himself, reached spiritual maturity and became free from the power of the lower natural elements. In the person of Christ the God-Man man has fully come to exist. The fundamental Christian conception of man is real and not symbolic. It implies die transfiguration and illumination of the created nature of man, i.e. the actual attainment of the highest qualities and not a symbolic representation of non-human values in the human world. The central anthropological idea of Christianity is the idea of Divine humanity, of real divinely human kingdom. Christianity leads to the deification of the human and not of the angelic or the animal nature, because Christ was the God-man and not God-angel. Symbolic hierarchism is divinely angelic and not divinely human.”
Berdyaev mentions Max Scheler frequently, which is consistent with his interest in philosophical anthropology, which Scheler shared. In his autobiography he mentions meeting Scheler in Berlin, as well as Keyserling and Spengler. Spengler was a disappointment. Scheler was brilliant in conservation, he said, but this meeting, too, was a disappointment: “I felt, nevertheless, the lack of any dominant and integrating idea in his outlook.” Berdyaev’s dominant and integrating idea was his Christian philosophical anthropology, which raised eschatology over salvation history. He expressed his dominant and integrating idea in his autobiography Berdyaev in a passage that is a helpful overview of his conception of history:
“Russian thought has always been preoccupied with the problems of the philosophy of history, and my own keen interest in this subject developed in accordance with the tradition of Russian thought. In setting out to understand the nature of history I had one overwhelming impression, namely, that nothing seems to succeed in history and yet all things are significant in it. The meaning of history is beyond the confines of history. History has meaning because it comes to an end. Unending history, be it as progress or as regress, is the epitome of meaninglessness. Thus I arrived at the conclusion that the true philosophy of history is eschatological in nature: that is to say, the historical process ought to be understood in the light of the end. The philosopher of history, therefore, speaks as a prophet who proceeds from the unknown to the known, not from the known to the unknown.”
It is a journey, however, to get from philosophical anthropology to eschatology. The following from The Fate of Man in the Modern World gives a sense of Berdyaev’s point of origin in coming to grips with history:
“Man’s existence in this world is an historical existence. Existence is history. Besides this, history is the tragic conflict between the personal and the super-personal or the pre-personal. History never solves the conflict between personality and society, between personality and culture, personality and the mass; the conflict between quality and quantity. Personality is active in history, within history the individual is revealed, but history is merciless in its attitude toward personality and oppresses the individual. There is a meaning of history, and the recognition of this meaning belongs to Christianity.”
The particular way in which Berdyaev derives the meaning of history from Christianity is distinct from most providential philosophies of history. I said earlier that Berdyaev’s philosophical anthropology raised eschatology over salvation history. What do I mean by this?
We can make a distinction among religious or, as I would prefer to say, providential philosophies of history, between those that claim to be predictive of worldly events, and those that seek to transcend worldly events.
This is almost perfectly parallel to the distinction that can be made between historicists in Popper’s sense and historicists in Ranke’s sense. Popper criticized historicism as a failed and fallacious predictive science of history, believing that the task of finding laws in history is the same as saying that these laws can predict the future, thereby undercutting traditional speculative philosophy of history in the same motion as historicism (as Popper would define it). Ranke’s historicism isn’t about a predictive science of history or about finding laws of history, but about taking each period of history on its own terms, with Ranke asserting that every period is equidistant from God. Ranke, then, legitimizes his historicism by reference to a transcendence that stands outside history.
We find a similar distinction among providentialist philosophers of history. St. Augustine and Bossuet argue that God sets the course of the world, and salvation history manifested in the world is the evidence of divine intervention in the world. On the other hand, some philosophers no less attached to the role of divine providence eschew any realization of providence in the material world. In this camp we can place Simone Weil, and, I think also, Berdyaev. Like Weil, Berdyeav emphasizes eternity, though while Weil is a Platonist, Berdyaev is more traditionally religious, so that his eternity is an eschatology that lies outside and beyond history. At the same time, it is an eschatology firmly rooted in the human horror of death, and so it is something we can all understand:
“Death not merely makes life senseless and corruptible: it is also a sign, coming from the depths, of there being a higher meaning in life. Not base fear but horror and anguish which death inspires in us prove that we belong not only to the surface but to the depths as well, not only to temporal life but also to eternity. While we are in time, eternity both attracts and horrifies us. We feel horror and anguish not only because all that we hold dear dies and comes to an end, but still more because we are conscious of a yawning abyss between time and eternity. Horror and anguish at having to cross the abyss contain at the same time a hope that the final meaning shall be revealed and realized. Death holds hope as well as horror for man, though he does not always recognize this or call it by an appropriate name. The meaning that comes from the other world is like a scorching flame to us and demands that we should pass through death. Death is not only a biological and psychological fact but a spiritual fact as well. The meaning of death is that there can be no eternity in time and that an endless temporal series would be meaningless.”
My response to this is that Berdyaev has achieved an almost complete and perfect antithesis of naturalism without any condemnation or denial of the natural world. That is an achievement in itself. I agree with Berdyaev that death is a spiritual fact in addition to being a biological fact, but every other claim he makes is essentially a mirror image of how I would approach the human response to death, time, and eternity.
It is an inversion of my view, but not a negation. This is because Berdyaev has identified crucial human experiences, and any philosophy of history that honestly reckons with the reality of human life, which inevitably leads to death, needs to be equally straight-forward in acknowledging the horror and anguish, the desire for some consoling hope, the apparent senselessness of a life that must end, and the strange attraction of the idea of eternity.
