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Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) was an important Russian religious existentialist philosopher. As a young man he went to study at Kiev University, but he became a Marxist and was expelled by the authorities. He became deeply involved in intellectual and revolutionary activity, but after his marriage he left communism and became interested in Christian spirituality. He founded his own private academy where he lectured his ideas, and in 1920 became a philosophy professor at the University of Moscow. Soon, however, he was arrested by the Soviet authorities because of his anti-totalitarian and religious ideas, and was expelled from the USSR in 1922. For the rest of his life, until his death in 1948, he lived in Germany and France and wrote many essays and books.

Berdyaev envisions the human being as a subject who cannot be fully understood from an objective scientific perspective. As a human being, we are capable of freedom, creativity, love, spirituality, and we struggle to realize them, often with only partial or no success. Actual life is corrupt and painful, and we seek to rise towards higher spiritual levels of humanity. Indeed, humanity as a whole is involved in such a struggle, and as individuals we are always part of this historical struggle. Human history is a process that seeks to reach spiritualization.

The following text is adapted from Berdyaev’s late book The Divine and the Human (written in 1944-45), Chapter 7: “Fear.” Here he argues that fear debases our life and pulls us lower towards the unconscious animal in us. But precisely because of this it challenges us to overcome it and opens the door to the possibility of courage and transcendence. Fear is therefore a spiritual issue, which we cannot fully address through our unconscious life, not even through our conscious rational life, but through our “supra-conscious” – the free, creative, spiritual aspect of our being. In this sense he says, in the last paragraphs of the chapter, which is the key to the entire chapter (see below):

“Achieving fearlessness is the highest condition of man… The fact of fear is connected with the inter-relation among the conscious, the subconscious and the supra-conscious. Fear comes from the depth of the sub-conscious from the ancient origins of man. … It is only from the supra-conscious that the final and decisive victory over fear comes. It is a triumph of the spirit.”

Thus, the meaning of fear must be understood spiritually: It is a necessary part of the path towards spiritual transformation. This is indeed the main theme of the entire book: Life can be understood only as a historical process towards transcending the terrible human condition – its suffering and fear, its evil and violence, oppression, objectification and alienation. This is an existential process, in the sense that it requires our personal subjective awareness and free action. It cannot be understood from an abstract objective perspective. Likewise, fear is not an objective psychological fact, but part of the historical struggle towards overcoming our lower human condition. Berdyaev’s vision is thus dynamic, “vertical,” and also societal: Life is essentially a struggle of humanity as a whole to move from the terrible darkness below to the spiritual heights.

  Among the many definitions of man, we may include one which defines him as a creature who is put to the test of fear. And this might be said of every living creature. The fear felt by animals is horrible. It is painful to look into the eyes of a frightened animal. Fear comes from the dangerous and threatening condition of life in the world. And the nearer to perfection life is, the more individualized it is, the more it is threatened and exposed to great dangers and death. The necessity of defending oneself against danger is always present. The organism is to a remarkable degree constructed for defense. The struggle for existence, of which life is full, presupposes fear.

  It is a mistake to think that courage and fear entirely exclude each other. Courage is not so much the absence of fear, as victory over fear […] But everywhere and in everything, victory over fear remains a spiritual problem, the problem of conquering that which debases man. […]

  Fear governs the world. Power by its very nature uses fear. Human society was built upon fear and, therefore, was built upon lies, because fear is the father of falsehood. […] Fear in the life of society is the mistrust of man. And fear is always conservative, although on the surface it appears sometimes revolutionary. The fear of hell in religious life, the fear of revolution, or the loss of property, in social life, lowers the value of everything.

  Man lives in fear of life and in fear of death. Fear rules in the life of the individual and in the life of society. Anxiety, insecurity of life, eventually give rise to fear. But what is most serious is this: fear distorts thought and interrupts the knowledge of truth. Man stands face to face with a conflict between fear and truth. Tormented man fears the truth; he thinks that truth will injure him. Fearlessness in the face of truth is the greatest achievement of the spirit. Heroism indeed is fearlessness in the face of truth, in the face of truth and death.

  […]

  Fear always has a relation to suffering; it is experienced as suffering, and it is the terror of suffering. About suffering I will speak in the next chapter. But it is impossible to dissociate fear from this central fact of human life. Man is dragged away from the higher world and subjected to the lower world. This inevitably gives rise to fear and suffering.

  But the connection with the lower world is so close that the higher world itself begins to present itself like the lower world. Fear and suffering, the products of the lower world which enslaves man, may be experienced as though they came from the higher world, which should be a liberating power. Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) very well said that the love of God operates in the darkness, as a burning fire. Fear lowers the dignity of man, the dignity of the free spirit. Fear has always been regarded as shameful in war; it is then called cowardice.

  Man has reached the stage of overcoming fear in war; he has performed miracles of bravery; he has become a hero. But the great difficulty is to extend this to the rest of life and especially to the life of the spirit. We cannot repeat too often that emancipation from fear is the main spiritual task of man. Achieving fearlessness is the highest condition of man, and this is a matter of achievement because no one can say that he is beyond fear.

  The fact of fear is connected with the inter-relation among the conscious, the subconscious and the supra-conscious. Fear comes from the depth of the sub-conscious from the ancient origins of man. Consciousness may enhance fear, a heightened consciousness is associated with fear. It is only from the supra-conscious that the final and decisive victory over fear comes. It is a triumph of the spirit.

  It has been said that “perfect love throws away fear,” but perfect love is so rare that fear continues to govern human life. The fear in erotic love is very powerful; it exists in the depth of the sex life. Fear distorts the human, and in this lies the complexity of the God-human process [=the process of spiritualization].

In his writings, Berdyaev often emphasizes the tragic gap between the heights of human ideals and the lowliness of our actual reality, between our lofty vocation and our corrupt situation in the world. This tragic gap is a central theme in his book THE DESTINY OF MAN (1931) which discusses the topic of ethics, and specifically his idea of “Ethics of creativeness.” This approach to ethics is based on the human ability to create visions freely – in art and literature and science, but also in love and ethics. Truly ethical decisions emerge not from the will to follow the moral law (“The Ethics of law”), but from our freedom to create an ethical vision about how to realize our higher human tasks.

The problem with our creativeness is the tragic gap between our passionate ideals and their poor realization in the world. In our heart we create high visions full of spirit and enthusiasm, but once we try to realize them in practice, the result is cold and partial.

  From Chapter 3, Section 3

  Creation is the greatest mystery of life, the mystery of the appearance of something new that had never existed before and is not deduced from, or generated by, anything. Creativeness presupposes not-being, which is the source of primordial, pre-cosmic, pre-existent freedom in the human being. The mystery of creativeness is the mystery of freedom. Creativeness can only spring from fathomless freedom, because only such freedom can give rise to the new, to what had never existed before.

  […]

  Creativeness has two different aspects, and we describe it differently depending on whether we focus on one or on the other. These are the inner and the outer aspect. First, there is the primary creative act in which the human being stands face to face with God, so to speak; and second, there is the secondary creative act in which he faces other people in the world.

  The first aspect is the creative conception, the primary creative intuition, in which a human being hears in his mind the symphony, perceives the pictorial or poetic image, or is aware of a discovery or invention as yet unexpressed. In this primary act, the person stands before God and is not concerned with realization. If knowledge is given to me, that knowledge is at first not an actual book written by me, not a scientific discovery formulated for other people’s benefit to be part of human culture. In the first instance, it is my own inner knowledge, still unexpected, unknown to the world and hidden from it. Only this is my real first-hand knowledge, my real philosophy in which I am face to face with the mystery of existence.

  Then comes the secondary creative act that is connected with the human being’s social nature – the realization of the creative intuition. A book comes to be written. At this stage, the question of art and technique arises. The primary creative fire is not art at all. Art is secondary, and in it the creative fire cools down. Art is subject to law, and it is not an interaction of freedom and grace, as the primary creative act is. The human being, in realizing his creative intuition, is limited by the world, by his material, by other people. All this weighs on him and dampens the fire of inspiration.

  There is always a tragic discrepancy between the burning heat of the creative fire in which the artistic image is conceived, and the coldness of its formal realization. Every book, picture, statute, good work, social institution is an instance of this cooling down of the original flame. Probably some creators never succeed to find expression; they have the inner fire and inspiration but fail to give it form. And yet, people generally think that creativeness consists of producing concrete, definite things. Classic art requires the greatest possible adherence to the cold formal laws of technique.

  The aim of creative inspiration is to bring forth new forms of life, but the results are the cold products of civilization, cultural values, books, pictures, institutions, good works. Good works mean the cooling down of the creative fire of love in the human heart, just as a philosophical book means the cooling down of the creative fire in the human spirit. This is the tragedy of human creativeness and its limitation. Its results are a terrible condemnation of it. The inner creative act, in its fiery impetus, should leave the heaviness of the world and “overcome the world.” But in its external realization, the creative act is subject to the power of “the world” and is restrained by it.

  2. THE CREATIVELY INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER

  For the ethics of creativeness, freedom means not the acceptance of the law, but individual creation of values. […] A human being is not a passive executor of the laws of that world-order. He is a creator and inventor. Life is based on energy and not upon law. It may be said, indeed, that energy is the source of life. […] The ethics of law is concerned with the finite: the world is for it a self-contained system and there is no way out of it. The ethics of creativeness is concerned with the infinite: The world is for it open and plastic, without boundless horizons and possibilities of breaking through to other worlds. It overcomes the nightmare of the finite from which there is no escape.

  […]

  True life is creativeness and not [social] development, freedom and not necessity, creative fire and not the gradual cooling down and fixation involved in the process of unfolding and perfecting. This truth has particular importance for moral life. Moral life must be eternal creativeness, free and fiery, in other words perpetual youth and purity of spirit. It must rest on primary intuitions free from the ideas of the person’s social environment which paralyze the freedom of his moral judgments. But in actual life, it is difficult to connect to this youth of the spirit. Most of our moral actions and judgments do not come from that primary source. The ethics of creativeness is not the ethics of [social] development but of the youth and purity of the human spirit, and it springs from the fiery origin of life – freedom. Therefore, true morality is not the social morality of the herd.

The following text is slightly adapted from Berdyaev’s book Solitude and Society, written originally in Russian in 1934. In this book he discusses the human condition, and argues that we are pressured into an objectified world, a world of objects in which even we ourselves are turned into “things.” The result is human isolation and inauthenticity. To overcome this situation, we must remember to relate to others as companions in a community (as opposed to anonymous society) – through personal communication and participation, and by connecting with the divine creative powers within us which are our true nature.

From SECOND MEDITATION, Chapter 2: The existential subject and objective processes

  We need to show that understanding is a creative act in the depths of [our subjective] Being, a flash of spontaneous light, a passage from darkness to light. But understanding is not simply the illumination of [our subjective] Being, it is the light in the innermost depths of Being. In fact, knowledge is immanent in Being, rather than Being in knowledge. […]

  In the depths of [our subjective] Being there is an obscure irrational substratum which knowledge cannot grasp, but its task is to illuminate it. Knowledge hovers on the brink of the dark abyss of Being, but it should remain lucid and clear. As we have already said, knowledge is within [our subjective] Being, but what really takes place within [our subjective] Being is a transcending beyond the objective, and penetrating into the vast depths beyond any given Being. The function of knowledge is not to reflect, but to create. Beyond each stratum of Being there is a deeper stratum, and transcendence is the only way to reach this deeper stratum of Being.

  […] We should distinguish between two types of knowledge: There is, first of all, rational and objective knowledge which is limited to the boundaries of reason and which understands only the general. And second, there is the knowledge that is immanent in [our subjective] Being, and through it reason can transcend the general and understand the irrational and the individual. This knowledge is synonymous with community and participation.

  Both of these types of knowledge can be found in the history of human thought. Knowledge can thus be considered from two different perspectives: from the perspective of society, of objective and general communication between people; and from the perspective of community, of existential communion and of penetration into the heart of the individual. This is the very core of my thought. Objective knowledge is invariably social, because it fails to understand the existential subject.

  THIRD MEDITATION, Chapter 1: The self and solitude

  […] I am not because I think, but I think because I am. It is not true to say, “I think, therefore I am,” but rather, “I am surrounded on all sides by impenetrable infinity, and therefore I think.” I am, first of all. The Self belongs to the sphere of existence.

  The Self is primarily existential, and only secondarily an object. It is synonymous with freedom. The essential nature of the Self can never become objective. It cannot become an object precisely because it is the Self. As soon as it becomes an object it stops being a Self.

  […] To realize itself, the Self must fulfil two conditions: First, it must never be just an objective or social instrument. And second, it must always try to transcend itself. In the process of transcending itself, the Self tends to emerge from its seclusion and to unite with the Other Self, with other Selves, with the Thou, with its fellow-humans, with the divine world. There is nothing so despicable or destructive as egocentricity, as a Self absorbed in itself, ignoring other Selves, ignoring the world and its plurality and totality – in a word, a Self that fails to transcend itself.

  […] As long as a person does not feel himself at home in the world of his authentic existence, as long as he sees other humans in the light of this alien world, he can only understand the world and the humans in it as objects of the objectified world of necessity. But the objective world can never serve to liberate the human being from the prison of his solitude. Thus, the fundamental truth applies: No objective relationship can help the Self along the path of freedom and communion. In the depths of his solitude, a person grows acutely aware of his personality, originality and singularity. He also longs to escape from his solitary confinement, to enter into communion with the Other Self, with the Thou, with the We. The Self longs to emerge from its prison in order to meet and identify itself with another Self. But at the same time, it must do so carefully for fear of encountering nothing but the object. A person has a sacred right to his solitude as well as to his intimate life.

  […] The Self, when it is abstracted from the commonplace world of everyday life, longs for a deeper and more authentic existence. It alternates between its solitude and the everyday life of society. […] When a person becomes aware of himself as a person and aspires to realize his personality, he has to admit, first, his inability to continue his isolated existence. Second, he has to admit the great difficulties which assault him in his attempt to escape from his seclusion and identify himself with the Other Selves.