Berdyaev

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (pronounced Bird-yah-yev) was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, but he was never orthodox in either religion or politics. He was exiled to northern Russia when he was 25 for declaring that the church under the Czars was subservient to civil power. After the revolution, he was twice imprisoned and later exiled for criticizing Marxism. In 1923 he went to live in Paris, where he headed the Russian Y.M.C.A. press, edited his magazine, Put', and wrote at least 40 books.

Last week, in the study of a modest, middle-class home in suburban Paris, death came to Nikolai Berdyaev, 74, one of the great religious philosophers of his time.

Strongly influenced by the 16th Century mystic, Jakob Boehme,* Berdyaev made the cornerstone of his philosophy the concept of what he called "metaphysical freedom." He regarded creativity as man's highest expression of that freedom. Man cannot truly be redeemed, he thought, until he submerges even the problem of his own salvation in creative activity--artistic, intellectual, or in human relations.

This need for creativeness was the basis of Berdyaev's antiCommunist, anti-capitalist social philosophy, which he called "personalism." Like most 20th Century thinkers, he saw the contemporary world as in a state of flux between the final breakup of an old civilization and the beginning of a new. Christians, he argued, must concentrate on the new.

But, he wrote recently, "Christians will have to speak more than ever before of their own sins, rather than of the sins of the world. . . . They will have to stop ascribing their own failures to the operation of forces beyond their control."

Christianity's mission is "not to fear the social movement in the world, not to struggle purposelessly against it, but to spiritualize it and to try to cure it from the poison that has been mixed with it, the poison of hate."

* As well as by Marx, Kant, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

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