Nikolai Berdiaev and Spiritual Freedom: A Reconsideration

“Victory over death-bearing time has been the fundamental theme of my life,” says Berdiaev in the introduction to his Spiritual Autobiography.¹Composed during the last decade of his life, this retrospective narrative is, like everything that Berdiaev wrote, an essay in philosophical meditation. In his conception, memory is much more than the faculty of passive recollection. Instead, the act of remembrance seizes up the meaning of the lived past in a moment of creative vitality, assessing it in the urgency of a consciousness in contact with the eternal.

Born in an aristocratic family in Kiev, Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948) lived through the cataclysmic events of the first half of a century whose aftershocks still haunt us. Witness to two world wars, he observed the destruction of established cultures in the traumatic birth of new worlds, having experienced three Russian revolutions from close-up. Four times arrested on political suspicion, first by the Imperial and then by the Bolshevik police, he died an exile after years of intense intellectual activity, at a philosophical distance from actuality. He was never more than a curious but unwelcome guest in history. He fearlessly engaged it on the level of ideas while remaining alien to its means and ends, gifted with an incurable longing for transcen-dance.

The awareness of a spiritual realm beyond the mundane bustle of existence came early to Berdiaev. Characteristically, he first apprehended it in the dialectical moment of negation, as the pain of a lack. “The sense of having fallen into an inferior world was more familiar to me,” is how he puts it.²He admits to being unable to recall an experience of religious conversion, when the void of spirit was suddenly made full. But he singles out one ecstatic, soaring instant of transformation, which he marks as the initiation into his lifelong philosophical quest for spiritual freedom:

I remember a moment—it was summer in the country—I found myself in the garden, at the hour of twilight and my heart was heavy. . . . Under the clouds, night was growing thicker, but suddenly a light surged inside me. I do not call this moment a “conversion,” because I was in no way a sceptic before that, nor a materialist, or an atheist, not even an agnostic—and because even afterwards, my inner contradictions persisted; the perfection of inner peace did not follow from it and the anguish caused by complex religious problems did not cease. To give a true picture of my spiritual path, I must insist on freedom, as the origin and the end of my religious life.3

In biographical retrospect, Berdiaev’s intellectual trajectory seems marked by a recurrent pattern of withdrawal from an established mode of being, a rupture followed by a surge of creativity. At the age of twenty, his mental exit from the aristocratic world of his family tradition was linked to his first encounter with Marxism. It was a philosophical world view he would revisit critically at various points in his career.

But even in his youthful enthusiasm, he was not convinced by the systematic exposition of dialectical materialism as such. Rather, he responded to the winds of freedom he sensed blowing in the revolutionary élan of the Social Democrats he met. He was in tune with the cosmopolitan outlook of their intellectual exponents, many of whom were Jewish. And instinctively, he shared their opposition to capitalism, which he associated with the dead weight of bourgeois culture.

While insisting on social justice for the oppressed classes, Berdiaev maintained that a political revolution could at best bring only an incomplete liberation. Precocious and exceptionally well read, the twenty-year-old thinker understood that matter and all that pertains to it is essentially conservative. In debating the materialistic theses of Marxism within the Social Democratic gatherings in Kiev, he was taking on the impossible task of grafting spiritual sight onto the blind, toiling, still subterranean mole of history.

Berdiaev’s withdrawal from the arena of politics coincided with his move to St. Petersburg in the Summer of 1904. There he plunged into the dionysiac whirl of the Russian Silver Age and its rich literary culture. He became familiar with the leading personalities of Russian Symbolism, visionary poets like Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Viacheslav Ivanov, who propounded the doctrine of theurgic art. But of all of them, he was most fascinated by the originality and the verbal power of the essayist Vasili Rozanov. And yet, the latter’s conception of Christ as a lunar being who had made the fruits of this world taste bitter, was alien to him.

Soon enough Berdiaev would feel oppressed by the overwrought sensuality of the artistic milieu. He grew tired of the febrile discussions of Christianity and the impending apocalypse, which had first drawn him to the salon of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitri Merezhkovsky. Having initiated the series of lectures at the “Philosophical-Religious Society” with the topic “Christ and the World,” he gave up as futile the project of reconciling the Petersburg cultural elite with the more open-minded representatives of the Orthodox Church. For his part, he went on to explore the deep roots of Russian messianism by keeping company with a variety of God-Seekers among the common people.

The failure of the Revolution of 1905, with the pathos of roused but ill-led masses, moved Berdiaev to the quick. That debacle led him and other disenchanted intellectuals to a crisis of consciousness that culminated with the publication of Vekhi (Landmarks) in 1909. Berdiaev and his friend, Sergei Bulgakov, with whom he had collaborated in publishing the philosophical and religious reviews Novyi Put (“The New Path”) and Voprosy Zhizni (“Life Questions”), were the prime movers behind this effort.

Vekhi is a collection of essays, presenting an ideologically coherent attempt to analyze and demystify the mentality and the values of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. Its publication caused an immediate stir. Some saw it as a showpiece and an apology for the liberal spirit of compromise in matters of politics and social formation. Lenin denounced it in the crudest of terms.

Berdiaev’s lead essay, “Philosophical Truth and the Moral Truth of the Intelligentsia,”⁴initiates the discussion on a high philosophical note. It can be read as the seminal first sketch for all of his future meditations about the spirit of Russian Communism. In 1909, with the future of Russia still being weighed on the scales of history, Berdiaev’s diagnosis sounded more cautionary than prophetic.

With admirable pith and clarity, Berdiaev lays bare the poverty and the narrowness of thought embedded in the culture of several generations of Russian radicalism, from Belinsky to the Marxists. He discloses a virulent strain of pseudo-religious beliefs, barely concealed under the professions of atheism that united the various factions of that schismatic sect. The prime example of this is the elevation of the moral imperative of social justice as the highest category of truth (pravda), above and beyond the criteria of intellectual integrity associated with truth as veritas. He attributes this root phenomenon to “the orientation of their will,” rather than to a defect in thinking.⁵

But in his conclusion, Berdiaev mitigates his indictment of the misguided rebels by laying the blame squarely on those who still held the reins of power in Russia and ruled it in the name of a debased version of Christianity. He writes: “The Russian intelligentsia has been what Russian history has made it. The sins of our morbid history, of our historical system of government, and of eternal reaction are reflected in its psychological make–up.”⁶It is a very self-revealing assessment, showing Berdiaev’s irreducible sympathy for the gesture of human liberation, no matter how flawed. It also raises the question of responsibility for the evils in Russian society from the arena of politics to a meta-historical level.

As Berdiaev saw it, the course of historical Christianity, with its sins of omission and commission, can be traced back to its fall away from Christ and His gift of freedom into the trap of the temporal world. That conversion of freedom into necessity is perennially repeated in the tragic fate of creativity in human culture, which reifies every inspired act into an objective value or, worse still, degrades it into a commodity. Formed in the crucible of his personal experience of Christianity, the tragic sense of life is fundamental to Berdiaev’s philosophical outlook. But unlike for Nietzsche, who shared that sense with him, it is not an aesthetic but a spiritual value.

In Berdiaev’s conception, the advent of Christianity was not a historical but a metaphysical event. In his coming, Christ tore the curtain of human time asunder, and from across that rupture, which is also an opening to the eternal, He calls for a creative response from each individual. Thus raised, the question of Man-God is the central theme of Berdiaev’s philosophy. He returns to it again and again in manifold variations throughout his writings. It is the pivotal nexus linking his insight into spiritual freedom with his eschatolgical meditations on human destiny in this world.

The identification of Christ with the mystery of human freedom brought Berdiaev into an intimate dialogue with F. M. Dostoevsky, the visionary novelist whom he regards as the greatest of Russian thinkers. Indeed, he confided that his personal image of the Christ was formed in the likeness of the figure Dostoevsky conjured up, stepping out of eternity into the deserted square in Seville to stand face to face with the Grand Inquisitor.

Like Aliosha, Berdiaev reads “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” from the point of view of faith, as a poem in praise of Christ. And similarly, he also understands that Ivan, the youthful author of the poem, is on the side of the old ascetic with despair in his heart and contempt for the pitiful human specimen on his lips. In the Grand Inquisitor chapter of his brilliant study, Dostoevsky, he writes: “It is noteworthy that the extremely powerful vindication of Christ [which is what the Legend is] should be put into the mouth of the atheist Ivan Karamazov. It is indeed a puzzle, and it is not clear on the face of it which side the speaker is on and which side the writer; we are left free to interpret and to understand for ourselves: that which deals with liberty is addressed to the free.”⁷

As he explains in his Spiritual Autobiography, the book on Dostoevsky originated in the lectures he gave at the Writers’ Union in Moscow during the winter of 1920–21.⁸It was a time when the Soviet regime was still consolidating its grip on power and the implementation of the Bolshevik doctrine had not yet achieved Shigalev’s logical rigor. Brave voices from the recent past could still be heard at random, in nooks and crannies behind the official façade of Revolution.

Berdiaev opened the lecture series with a meditation on “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” which he called “the high point of Dostoevsky’s work and the crown of his dialectics.”⁹It goes unsaid that the events unfolding in the theater of history, with their grim conversion of liberation into enslavement and the trading of freedoms for bread, provided an existential subtext for Berdiaev’s reading of that dramatic poem. He argues that Dostoevsky’s conception of freedom is what lends such power and also the cruel edge to the novelistic situations into which he casts his rebellious characters. In Berdiaev’s own words: “He was ‘cruel’ because he would not relieve man of his burden of freedom, he would not deliver him from suffering at the price of such a loss, he insisted that man must accept an enormous responsibility corresponding to his dignity as a human being.”¹⁰

The discussion of the psychological and the moral dilemma posed by the choice between freedom and compassion in Chapter III (“Freedom”) and Chapter IV (“Evil”) of his Dostoevsky is central to Berdiaev’s understanding of the novelist’s spiritual universe. But it can also serve as an intellectual key to unlock the core of his own philosophical quest. In this double exposure, Berdiaev’s reading of Dostoevsky’s texts shows him at his best, disclosing his inner self in a dialogue of freedom within the aura of the eschatological Christ. It was that dialogue of faith Aliosha had offered, only to be rebuffed by Ivan.

Above all, Berdiaev insists on releasing freedom from the constraints of morality as codified by society’s laws. Nor does he accept a definition of freedom that reduces it to being an arbiter of the choice between good and evil, in the objective sphere of rationality. For Berdiaev, this “liberty of conscience,” which European humanism claimed as its signal value, is merely “a material liberty.”¹¹But even though it may only offer a partial liberation, this “first freedom” must be defended on its own level. By contrast, spiritual freedom vaults above the objective order of human morality. “Freedom cannot be identified with goodness or truth or perfection: it is by nature autonomous, it is freedom, and not goodness.”¹²

That radical disjunction between freedom and morality has deep roots in early Christian thought. Long before Dosto-evsky and Berdiaev, Saint Augustine had distinguished between two types of freedom—the freedom within the law (libertas minor) and the freedom beyond it (libertas maior). The first acknowledges the primacy of reason in the praxis of choosing between good and evil; the second emanates from Divine Grace and, as such, it operates beyond the scope of rationality.

As Berdiaev sees it, Dostoevsky’s originality lies in the way he recast the Augustinian problem of two freedoms by approaching it from the human rather than from the divine side. In his own intellectual transcript, Dostoevsky’s agonistic dialogue between Man and God emerges in the form of a paradox: “Free goodness, which alone is true, entails the liberty of evil.”¹³In Dostoevsky’s fictional world the existential path of amoral characters like Svidrigailov and Stavrogin illustrates the negative side of the conundrum. Starting with unlimited freedom, they experiment with all forms of evil and end up with the destruction of their own freedom, “its degeneration into an evil necessity.”¹⁴

Closing in on the paradoxical circle of his argument, Berdiaev goes on to say: “On the other hand, the denial of the freedom of evil in favor of an exclusive freedom of good ends equally in a negation of freedom and its degeneration into a good necessity. But good necessity is not good, because goodness resides in freedom from necessity.”¹⁵

The “good necessity” is the ostensible option advocated by the Grand Inquisitor. The logic of that choice excludes the living Christ from all the transactions of human history, replacing Him by a fraudulent authority that promises miracles of compassion in His name. Unlike his counterparts on the podium of Soviet actuality, the aged cardinal of the Roman Church understands that man does not live by bread alone. After all, Ivan, who authored the poem, is heir to the pseudo-theological mentality of the Russian radical intelligentsia. That is why the Grand Inquisitor commutes Christ’s death sentence to an ambiguous formula of dismissal: “Go and come no more.”¹⁶

The dilemma of choosing between freedom and compassion cannot be resolved within the parameters set up by the Euclidean mind. In the prologue to his fantastic poem, Ivan had trained the sharp edge of his either/or logic on the problem of unjustified suffering. His formulation of it may be encoded in the reductionist style of the Russian 1860s, but the question he raises is an ancient one. It has gnawed at the heart of every attempt to construct a philosophical theodicy. Of course, Ivan is no theologian and his purpose for revisiting the theme is strictly deconstructive. In arguing the case of outraged humanity, he is performing a symbolic tyrannicide against God the Creator, an effigy of power he has erected in imago patri. The procedures of his prosecutorial logic imitate those of revolutionary terror. God stands impeached for allowing the suffering of innocent children to run unchecked throughout human history. In Ivan’s tribunal, He will be convicted on the mutually contradictory charges of impotence and abuse of power.

Berdiaev reads Dostoevsky’s work in all its complexity as one continuous, spiritually intense struggle to answer Ivan’s arguments. His novelistic version of theodicy, just like Berdiaev’s own philosophical praxis, begins and ends with the attempt to justify the human personality in the light of Christ’s mysterious gift of freedom. Berdiaev writes: “I would sum it up in a paradoxical form, thus: The existence of evil is proof of the existence of God. If the world consisted wholly and uniquely of goodness and righteousness there would be no need for God, for the world itself would be God. God is, because evil is. And that means that god is because freedom is.”¹⁷

Throughout his life, Berdiaev has resisted and rejected Ivan’s anthropomorphic conception of God as power. He consistently refutes the idea that the divine can be derived from or linked to any form of secular or social authority. “God is less powerful than a policeman,” he says in his Autobiography.¹⁸For Berdiaev, God the Son was always closer to his mind and heart than God the Progenitor. Only a suffering God could reconcile him to the evidence of undeserved suffering in this world. The relation between the human and the divine, as Berdiaev encodes it in his metaphysical gloss on Christ’s message of salvation, is not one of power but of reciprocity. Only love in its pure form as spiritual energy gives a human meaning to the true dialectics of higher freedom.

Even though Berdiaev welcomes the passing of the Russian Empire, the revolution born of the war brought him no joy. Already in 1916, in political debates with members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Left Cadets, he had talked about the impending revolution as a “grave illness,”¹⁹an eruption that would inevitably disclose the deficiency of creative energy in Russian society. In the summer of 1917, he felt the rising tide of Bolshevism as an irrevocable fatum. During the five years he would spend under the Soviet regime, he was exposed to the “moral ugliness” ushered in by the triumph of the Bolshevik cause.²⁰A new human type seemed to have appeared in Russia, bearing little similarity to the old revolutionary intelligentsia as he had known it. Instead, these newly emerged men and women manifested some of the repulsive traits of fascist aggressiveness.

In his autobiographical retrospect, Berdiaev interprets the rise of European fascism as the raw response to Lenin’s accession to power. His opposition to Bolshevism was spiritual rather than political, but no more absolute than his rejection of what he sees as the lie at the core of bourgeois capitalism, with its debased notion of individualism.

When, in 1922, anti-religious persecution began in earnest, Berdiaev was arrested. During eight days of interrogation, he was brought face to face with Dzershinsky, the founder of the Cheka himself. Throughout this ordeal, he remained fearless and explained his convictions frankly and without guile. His demeanor led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union, as a subject adjudged irretrievable for the Revolution. This enforced exit from “the tragi-comedy of History” came as a liberation.²¹He perceived in it the “accomplishment of my destiny.”²²Nevertheless, the terminal separation from his homeland would weigh heavily on him for the rest of his life.

Berdiaev entered exile with a fully formed philosophical outlook. He would write and publish major new works and see them translated into many languages. These writings established him as an original thinker not only in France, where he lived, but also throughout and beyond western Europe. But if one thinks of his works as a single whole, one is struck by the coherence and the continuity of his thought. Much of what he wrote in the latter part of his life can be read as a series of brilliant variations on the great themes he brought with him from Russia.

The Meaning of Creativity, which appeared posthumously in French (Les sens de l’acte créateur, Essai d’une justification de l’homme [Paris, 1955]), is a case in point. Its original composition dates back to the winter of 1916, part of which Berdiaev spent in Italy. Written in a single blaze of inspiration, this visionary essay illuminates his philosophical conception of the creative act as the locus of a free encounter between the individual human self and the divine. The epigraph inscribes it with the daring thought uttered long ago by the great German mystic Angelus Silesius: “I know, that without me, God could not live an instant.” The full power of this paradoxical idea can only be grasped in the riddling, rhymed speech of the German saying: “Ich weiss, dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben, Werd’ ich zu nicht, er muss von Noth den Geist aufgeben.”²³

This early intuition, which pushes Christian thought to its limit, animates all of Berdiaev’s subsequent meditations about human destiny on this earth. Suspended over the borderline between transcendence and transgression, it contains the essence of theosis, a doctrine of human divinization incipient in Eastern Orthodox mysticism. Berdiaev read its imprint in the novels of Dostoevsky and in the arcane writings of his contemporary Nikolai Fedorov, who called on the living to resurrect the dead by the fiat of loving faith. For his part, Berdiaev interpreted the divine need for human co-creation as an urgent summons that historical Christianity had failed to answer. Like Dostoevsky and Vladimir Soloviev before him, he, too, placed this unfinished task in the future.

These metaphysical themes, often interlocked with questions arising from historical actuality or from the realm of Russian culture, would reappear. Berdiaev never stopped meditating on the meaning of his youthful insights. But his restless mind, seeking to recapture his own fully developed thought in the moment of vital comprehension, propelled him to pursue it in a new articulation. All his revisions are rewritings, often with an expanded ambit and a distinctly new context.

The presence of Renaissance Italy, with its art and humanistic culture, is deeply felt in The Meaning of Creativity. But the splendor of those achievements is filtered by Berdiaev through the prism of a very Russian anguish, bordering on dissatisfaction. Berdiaev stresses that Russia never knew a Renaissance. That may be why Russians are inclined to see the sphere of culture, and the values of European humanism in particular, as something inherently opposed to the sphere of religion. The urgent appeal of what Ivan Karamazov called the “accursed questions” precludes the patient labor required to build the mansion of a livable human culture. The Petersburg phase of Russian history, which gave birth to a literature that still defines Russian spiritual identity, was haunted by an apocalyptic premonition of its own demise.

Berdiaev understood the meaning of Russian cultural nihilism as the inverted form of its eschatological hope. As for himself, his nimble, deeply cultivated mind was at ease with the great works of European philosophy and literature. His most intimate affinities were with Romanticism, a movement he valued for unleashing a liberating surge of subjectivity. Classicism, with its ideal of symmetry and balance, left him cold. His particular sensibility did not incline him to celebrate the healing art of the Apollonian illusion of objectivity.

A true son of Russia, Berdiaev had a dash of the spirit of Heraclitus in his make-up, inimical to all thought of ontological stasis. In his Destiny of Man (1937) he contradicts his beloved master Jakob Boehme, who had located primal freedom, Ungrund, within God. For Berdiaev, freedom is uncreated and cannot be derived from being, not even from the divine being of the Pantocrator. He writes: “Out of the Divine Nothing, the Gottheit or the Ungrund, the Holy Trinity, God the Creator is born. The creation of the world by God the Creator is a secondary act. From this point of view it may be said that freedom is not created by God: it is rooted in the Nothing, in the Ungrund for all eternity. Freedom is not determined by God; it is part of the nothing out of which God created the world.” In Berdiaev’s conception, “Man is the child of freedom—of nothing, of non-being, to meon.”²⁴He refuses to rationalize this ontological mystery.

Berdiaev’s years in France, where he spent most of his exile, only deepened his Russianness. He relished the intellectual stimulation of his exchanges with French thinkers and was an active participant in the meetings at Pontigny.²⁵There, in a privileged sanctuary of free thought, he connected with the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, as well as with other personalities from the literary and academic worlds. The discussions at these conferences ranged from questions of literary and philosophical interest to the problems highlighted by current events and political trends. Berdiaev was charmed by the prevailing atmosphere of civilized informality, but he remained aware of the gap that separated him from his interlocutors. Russian thinkers, he mused, go to the essence of problems, while the French prefer to analyze them in their reflected form, as they appear on the cultural canvas.²⁶

Throughout his stay in France, Berdiaev was actively engaged in the intellectual life of the Russian emigré community, centered in Paris. These relations were more intimate but also more painful than his encounters with French intellectuals. As the editor of the philosophical and religious review Put,’ (a revival of the eponymous journal he had co-founded with Sergei Bulgakov back in 1916 in Russia), he was influential in the movement of Christian youth. He opened the pages of his review to all varieties of opinion and clashed, often bitterly, with the entrenched conservatism of emigré Orthodox clergy.

The thirties, with the rise of Nazism in Germany and the terror of collectivization in the Soviet Union, were a time of dark forebodings. Against this backdrop, the philosophical refuge at Pontigny felt like a fragile vessel floating in stormy waters. With an awareness of these distant threats encroaching on his consciousness, Berdiaev wrote his analysis of contemporary culture in The Destiny of Man. Widely admired in Europe from the moment it appeared, this work is now considered a cornerstone of modern philosophical anthropology, equivalent to the pioneering writings of Max Scheler and Ernst Cassirer.

From his early years, Berdiaev’s philosophical outlook resonated with the sense of impending endings. But never before did his eschatological vision cast the historical prospects of humanity in such dark hues. In Part II of The Destiny of Man (“Morality on this Side of Good and Evil”), he reads the signs of a terminal crisis of Christianity in his explanation of the deadly struggle between the fascist and communist versions of the same spiritual disease. “Liberation of labor is the liberation of personality from the oppressive phantasms of the bourgeois capitalist world,” he comments.²⁷But he soon adds that if the power of the Communist state takes over from the bourgeoisie the absolute right of property, this “might result in still greater restrictions of freedom.”²⁸Viewed through his spiritual lens, this is a time when the divine has been emptied out of the human personality. Abandoned by God to the fatum of a force of necessity that has no roots in God, humanity has become the tool of a power-drive which knows no meaning beyond itself.

The Origin of Russian Communism (1937), which confirmed Berdiaev’s status as a cultural historian, emerged out of the same time-frame. But to this reader it seems more gentle in its treatment of the modern human condition. It is as if a retrospective analysis of the ways of the Russian intelligentsia had brought him back in sympathy with the hopes of liberation he once shared with them. Paradoxically, Berdiaev, who lectured on Dostoevsky under the Soviet rule, now draws attention to the spiritual impetus within Bolshevism.

Berdiaev survived World War II and continued writing in Clamart, where he had retreated from Paris. His reputation was at its height when he died, at the threshold of the Cold War. His works, many of which appeared posthumously in English, spread his European fame into North America.²⁹He is remembered as an existentialist philosopher and an original interpreter of Russian thought. But after the collapse of Communism, with religion resurgent in all societies, it is his vision of humano-divinity that speaks most urgently to what ails us. Too often, religious expression looks backward, deriving authority from rituals that celebrate the divisive aggression of ethnicity. Berdiaev tells us that the failed apotheosis of the secular man calls for the supremely creative venture of theosis, a mystical process through which the human self meets the divine without disappearing in it.

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NOTES

1. Samopoznanie, Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii (Paris, 1949). I quote from the introduction, dated 1940, 8. All the translations from this text are mine. The autobiography is available in English translation, under the title, Nikolai Berdiaev, Dream and Reality, trans. by Katharine Lampert (New York, 1951).
2. Samopoznanie, Op. cit., Ch. I, 13.
3. Ibid., Ch. VII, 218.
4. Landmarks, A Collection of Essays on the Russian Intelligentsia, 1909 (Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Izgoev, Kistiakovsky, Struve, Frank), trans. by Marian Schwartz (New York, 1977). “Philosophic Truth and the Moral Truth of the Intelligentsia,” by Nikolai Berdyaev, 3–22.
5. Ibid., 4.
6. Ibid., 22. 7. Dostoevsky, trans. by Donald Attwater (New York, 1956), Ch. VIII, “The Grand Inquisitor. Christ and Antichrist,” 188.
7. Samopoznanie, Op. cit., Ch. IX, 253–258.
8. Dostoevsky, Op. cit., Ch. VIII, 188.
9. Ibid., Ch. III, “Freedom,” 67.
10. Ibid., 71.
11. Ibid., 69.
12. Ibid., 70.
13. Ibid., 70.
14. Ibid., 70.
15. The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Ralph Matlaw (New York, 1976), Part II, Book 5, “Pro and Contra,” Ch. V, “The Grand Inquisitor,” 243.
16. Dostoevsky, Op. cit., Ch. III, 87.
17. Samopoznanie, Op. cit., Ch. VII, 190.
18. Ibid., Ch. IX, 245.
19. Ibid., 248.
20. Ibid., 267.
21. Ibid., 264.
22. Smysl tvorchestva, Opyt opravdaniia cheloveka, 2nd ed., (Paris, 1985), in Vol. 2 of Sobranie sochinenii Nikolaia Berdiaeva.
23. The Destiny of Man, trans. by Natalie Duddington (London, 1937), Part I “Principles,” Ch. 2, “Origin of Good and Evil,” 25.
24. Samopoznanie, Op. cit., Ch. X, 268–309.
25. Ibid., 275.
26. The Destiny of Man, Op. cit., Part II, Ch. 4, “Concrete Problems of Ethics,” 216.
27. Ibid., 218.
28. N. O. Lossky, in History of Russian Philosophy, under the rubrique “N. Berdyaev,” gives a good bibliography of Berdiaev’s philosophical works. For a list of works Berdiaev wrote in France, see Samopoznanie, Op. cit., Ch. XI, “Ma philosophie definitive. Profession de foi. Le monde eschatologique. Temps et éternité,” 362.