Nicolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev is called “the Russian philosopher of freedom” because he placed freedom before creation. Academics call him an “existentialist” because his anti-objectivism thesis denigrated materialistic objectivism and elevated anthropocentric personality to divine status through its creative striving for mystical unity with the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

Perspicacious laymen who associate existentialism with egotistical subjective individualism have cause to doubt that Berdyaev was an existentialist, for he emphasized the communal person and repudiated the individualist most people are so fond of. The human being or person, by virtue of its personal relationship with the Supreme Being or Person, is endowed with the dignity of a personality that transcends the conditioned ego as well as its origin, the non-ego or external world.  Whereas individualists are "wolfish" and vicious, Berdyaev's person is virtuously communal and fraternal.  For personality is emancipation from slavery to the ego, and, at the same time, to the non-ego.

“Egocentricity is, indeed, the Original Sin,” Berdyaev pronounced. “The personality, on the other hand, is the reflection of the divine image and likeness and, as such, is the true path leading to God.”

In any case, our professor of primordial freedom would allow us the freedom to place the right label on his philosophy, even if that label is contrary to his own marking; for those of us who are, like Berdyaev, geniuses, are not beholden to the professions of professors and other elitists: "The genius lives near to primary reality and to real existence whereas the cultural elite is subject to the laws of objectivization and socialization."

Now to aver that the Supreme Being is a person is to say that the ideal form of being is human, is a person; to wit: a human being, made in the image of God. The personal prejudice – that we proceed with a human subject or a being who greets and manipulates objects, a being who thinks before he acts and is otherwise a defined being – may seem arbitrary, an act of arrant arrogance, a case of false pride and reactionary dignity, but it certainly accords with reality of the human condition, which is no less divine because it falls short of perfection. No matter how much the divines disparaged the humanist’s human being, Berdyaev, in accordance with the principle of love, refused to forsake humankind.

“Every moral act of love, of mercy, and of sacrifice brings to pass the end of the world where hatred, cruelty, and selfishness reign supreme,” said he. All human beings shall be voluntarily saved in the end. “Every creative act entails… the promise of the new, an ‘other’ world, where God’s power is revealed in freedom and in love.” Although infidels who have no faith in the personal efficacy of Jesus the Christ are bound to be ground into impersonal particles by the objective world, the persecutory and diabolical notion of an eternal hell reserved for nonbelievers is anti-Christian.  Man might creep like a lowly worm today, yet he must purpose more than mere salvation from the mire. “It is not possible for my faith to be shaken by man, however low he may sink; for this faith is grounded not on what man thinks about man, but on what God thinks about him.” Man has a positive, self-creative mission: in partnership with God, man climbs toward the peak of his mountain as he helps God build the mountain. Human history is the record of his ascent; history shall end in salvation; yet the summit cannot be reached in this world, wherefore man dies that he may be saved.

Fortunately for the future of modern Christian philosophy, Berdyaev was not a politician: elected professor at Moscow University in 1919, he was thrown out of Russia along with other outstanding undesirables in 1922. Berdyaev and other Russian intellectuals of his ilk had lost their enthusiasm for Marxism’s historical materialism when they personally experienced its impersonal grounds, the depersonalizing effects of the total imposition of a presumed good. They chewed upon idealistic notions instead; and then, wanting something more personal than the thin air they were vainly grinding their teeth on in hopes of finding a synthetic redemption, they eschewed idealism and searched for the Supreme Personality; in fine: the Godhead.  Universal salvation is not something to be imposed from without, but is to be achieved within, mentally, for no external law can touch a person intellectually without his consent – still, Christians should heed Paul’s admonishment to remain loyal to the governing authority and not despise the external law, for anarchy is chaos governed by terrorism. 

We have a tendency to become our own worst enemies in our divisiveness. Jews may become war-mongering, money-grubbing Philistines, and Christians may become Romans longing for a Pax Americanum if not an Imperium Christianum. The war banners take on a common, fascistic hue; the right-wing authoritarian battle for utopia results in dystopian rubble; no doubt the real enemy lurks within.  Professed Christians today are the foremost proponents of militant imperialism. Yet Roman imperialists condemned early Christians for being antisocial, for refusing to swear perfunctorily on the state gods and to serve in the military. Early Christians did not believe in national nor imperial gods, nor would they swear allegiance to flags associated with indivisible nations. And to this very day, reactionary Christians still deplore, albeit privately, the economic revolution and religious heresy that destroyed the catholic consensus and spawned and unleashed nations upon each other necks. The puritanical bourgeoisification of Hebraizing Philistinism with its commercial idolatry disgusts them even more than the old commerce in indulgences – at least that trade was on merits piled up in heaven. The immaculate idol of the true faith was within; yet the conservatives observed the traditional outward forms for the sake of public order – what good is faith without public works?

The protesting Christian bigots (by-godders) swore on their a priori, iconoclastic god of freedom, and took up the sword to carve out their own empires, warring against one another in the same profane and sacred name; and within each kingdom each man was a little king set against each and all by his greed. Everyone has a natural right to do as he likes as long as he can get away with it. “Help Yourself” is the slogan of the Philistine religion, because “God helps those who help themselves to whatever they can lay their hands upon.” The new churches provided scant salve upon the open wounds of the Protestant Reformation and Republican Reform.  Benjamin Disraeli, for example, reactionary proponent of British Imperialism, under the God of the Church of England mediated by the Queen of England, complained of “a spirit of rapacious covetousness, desecrating all the humanities of life… the besetting sin of England…. Since the passing of the Reform Act the altar of Mammon has blazed with triple worship. To acquire, to accumulate, to plunder each other by virtue of philosophic phrases, to propose an Utopia to consist only of WEALTH and TOIL, this has been the breathless business of enfranchised England for the last twelve years, until we are startled from our voracious strife by the wail of intolerable serfage.”

Alas, the neo-imperialist quests for allegedly democratic empire, purportedly to free people and to profit from forcibly freed markets to boot, would result in Hell on Earth, turning Earth into a mass graveyard instead of a Garden of Eden.  Whether ancient or modern, what could be more anti-social than the brutish war of all against all? “While he makes hell on earth,” remarked Berdyaev, “the bourgeois pretends to be preparing a future earthly paradise.” Business-as-usual kills organic life with its profitable organizations; it has no respect whatsoever for the spiritual life. And lest we draw too big a difference between rich and poor, we are reminded that both rich and poor are enslaved by the struggle for material gain. The climbers want a comfortable position; those who have one are self-satisfied, and they dread any questioning of the political system that flatters them; after all, who needs liberals after he is liberated from material want? But the war of all against all, howsoever uniformed, is bound to persist.  Smith and Marx were frustrated bourgeoisie. In the final analysis, capitalists and communists alike want the same damned thing: “The historical scene presents the tragic-comical picture of two bourgeois seizing each other by the throat, each imagining that he is defending some particular world opposed to the world of his enemy.” Ironically, all the parties of war are wont to decry the materialism of their opponents; perhaps it is death they want instead of the booty; a Captain Ahab shall appear: he shall swear on the principle of a thing and not the thing itself; he shall promise the crew his share of the loot; and he shall lead them all to Davy Jones’ Locker, save one Jonah left behind to warn the world – alas, once the whale of a tale is told, the world longs to participate in another adventure.

Of course the human being is socially inclined in one way or another. Fear alone inspires hate-based-love – hate-others group-love. Yet Berdyaev condemned the enslaving secular socialism of the soviets, the involuntary social salvation Russian revolutionaries were attempting to instantiate; the people would purportedly be united in a universal middle-class or classless society of equitably distributed plenty, thus would utopian peace be evenly installed on earth. But then what would become of human dignity if each person was of the same stature, up to his neck, so to speak, in depleted ordure? And it is capitalism that shall eventually, thanks to its fatal flaw, result in this sorry democratic state. Instead, Berdyaev embraced the voluntary spiritual communism of Christian personalism.

“[The bourgeois] is weighed down and darkened by his non-acceptance of the internal tragedy of life…. His ideal is that of worldly power and wealth…. Formerly the bourgeois was a psychological type, now he is the socially predominant type…. In Babylon appeared the first middle-class civilization recorded by history, and it dominated the whole East…. Ezekiel: ‘Her princes… are wolves ravening the prey….Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that defend themselves….’ The bourgeois type begins to predominate…. It is then that then nations are threatened with disaster…. Our civilization cannot endure the bourgeois destruction of eternity…. The concupiscence of the temporal… transforms life into an inferno. In its finite and vivid type the bourgeois is an apocalyptic image…. A Christian has no city – he is in quest of the City of God…. Whenever an earthly city is mistaken for the New Jerusalem, Christians cease to be pilgrims and the bourgeois spirit reigns supreme.”  

Although he sympathized with the anti-systematic thrust of existentialist thinking and described his philosophy as existential in the sense that it was a personal philosophy of life independent of the milling herd, Berdyaev eschewed card-carrying membership in the popular school of existentialism with its accursed atheistic sentiments. His sentiments were ultimately Judeo-Christian sentiments; in fine, sentiments rooted in revolt against the demonic striving for ungodly worldly empire. Berdyaev was not a terrorist: his revolt was spiritual. His so-called existentialism was spiritualism and it had little to do with existents other than to employ them as grist for the personal mill. One might do his best to overcome destructive evil with creative good at the personal level, but the Kingdom of God cannot be imposed on this world.

The Kingdom of God presided over by the Supreme Personality cannot be unless it is voluntarily and personally chosen. Persons who make that choice may appear to be solitary islands floating in the seas of social discontent, but they are not really alone. Solitaires look within and stand out from the crowd by virtue of their communion with their Lord, in whom they have their solace. That is not to say they live as monks live, to perfect themselves in monasteries. As far as Berdyaev was concerned, the monastery is just another form of enslaving objectivism, just another form of IT. And most Protestants, to be sure, including Luther, the monk-hating monk, would agree with him as a matter of habit. The lesson of the ninth-century destruction of the monastic dream has been forgotten. As we speak, humankind needs a viable alternative to the world as it is. People today are so anxious in their alienation that they would marry Jesus of Nazareth to Mary Magdalene and produce another Christ forthwith.  The creative artist may find solace in solitude, yet his beauty is produced by his longing for the beloved.  But nobody is good enough for him in this world. Perchance, if he is religiously inspired, as many past masters were, he may make good his escape, to that other world funereal preachers call the Better Place, and yet still, to enjoy dreaming, have subsistence in this world, by means of the good death; that is, a virtual death, that he might live. And to that end he must have a worldly establishment for his retreat.      

In any event, Berdyaev’s personalism idealizes the human person and continually strives to identify it with the Supreme Personality of Godhead – Jesus the Christ, the Instantiation of God, the one and only god-man. That this mystical unity is mythically and irrationally expressed does not abrogate the substantial reality of the struggle for eternity. Every human being partakes of the Holy Spirit of the Supreme Being whether s/he likes it or not; therefore no man is an isolated, desert island, a unique individual per se bound by the terms of existence to time and place. Humankind’s unity is found not in the objective ITs of family, tribe, clan, and nation. Unity cannot be realized through the imposition of idolatrous fictions or vain ideals. “"All possession, whether it is possession by base passion or by lofty ideas denotes the loss of the spiritual center in man," declared Berdyaev. Personal unity is found in the genuine spiritual commune of those solitaires who have surmounted the worldly isolation of individuates. Man is always higher than the groupings that would disintegrate his dignified person and enslave him objectively. There is no such thing as a national or international person, the very idea of which is a self-conceited, stupid, ludicrous lie. The nation is the projection of everything evil as a collective ideal. Wherever nationalism prevails, evil is called good – hate, violence, egoism, pride, and will to power are converted into virtues. A free people must not idolize Nation or the International or the Volk, must not capitulate and become slaves to "the People." The Volk are wont to crucify real persons, for real persons have a conscientious center rooted in God, with whom they commune as one.

"The fundamental nature of the person is not originality nor self-knowledge nor individual affirmation, Berdyaev insisted. “It lies not in separation but in communication.” And, “The individualist is the slave to himself, “he is under the spell of slavery to his own ego, and, therefore, he cannot resist the slavery which comes from the non-ego .... Man is always a slave of the non-ego through the ego…. The object world can make a person a martyr but it cannot make him a conformist." First of all, “Personality presupposes a going out from self to another and to other, it lacks air and is suffocated when left shut up in itself.” Furthermore, "Egocentricity is the original sin of man ... an illusory, distorted universalism ...  a false perspective ... under the power of objectivization, which it seeks to turn into an instrument of self-affirmation .... Man is the slave of the surrounding external world, because he is the slave of himself ...."

For Berdyaev, the freedom to do evil is a better good than an imposed good. He claimed that God made the world out of the stuff of freedom, which is somehow something more than naked nothingness; he claimed that this stuff was given to man not by God but is the stuff from which man’s worldly constitution continually emerges; wherefore our theosopher has been charged not only with Gnosticism and Cabalism but with the heresy of true Zoroastrianism, or Dualism – conversely, Zurvanism, or Monism, is Zoroastrianism’s heretical form.  Dualism is a convenient path to follow since one does not have to quibble over points of theodicy to explain why God would allow evil a place in his glorious creation. As Pierre Bayle noted well under the rubric, Manichaeism, in his fascinating talmudic Dictionary, dualism is the comfortable course of (static) logic. Simple-minded folk who have intolerance for ambiguity tend to agree; unfortunately for world peace, they unwittingly convert their own evils into goods, while abhorring the same evils in others.  

Despite the fact that no logically consistent jazz-cellar existentialist would dare define existentialism except to insist that it posits that existence precedes the being so ill defined by metaphysicians; despite Berdyaev’s personal repudiation of the existentialist fad created by the press after it asked a Parisian jazz singer what was going on after the war, and she answered “existing”; - Berdyaev’s occasional nods to Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and other supposedly non-systematic philosophers served to place him in the existentialist camp. He only visited that camp. Obviously, Berdyaev was personally a personalist, a person who believes personal becoming transcends or at least stands far above the particulars of individual existence and their organization into various objective systems. The personal being of becoming encompasses human nature and comprises a spiritual commune of persons unlimited by mundane individual existence and the material modes of communication that fascinate many existentialists.

Wanting something greater than existence placed before being, existentialists have not hesitated to construct their own pyramids in the air with several classical levels of being stepped up to the non-dimensional point at the apex, where being is identified with existence, where nothing more can be said until the descent is made; and then it is a matter of prejudice to say from whence one begins, from being or existence, or whither one is going, up or down, or in a circle, which is of course a line so far extended that its ends are bound to meet. But is not that the point, the very principle of the line? – To never stop moving? Since our physical motions are ground to a halt by the external world – from dust to dust – may our symbolic activities continue ad infinitum; and to that immortal end we should not agree on the definition of such terms as subject, object, being, existence, or in respect to the mystic ‘I’, individual, self, ego, person and the like; we should quibble over them, or simply interchange them whenever it suits our purpose, which is to never stop thinking when our motion is impeded.

Existentialists would enjoy the pristine virtue of Quietism if only they would be silent, but once they are moved to stand up and elaborate their views all over the philosophical terrain, they subject themselves to the application of definitive straightjackets, including gross materialism. By placing individual existence before being, material existence might be considered as the bottom of being, as if everything, including the psychological unity of the human soul, emerges from the matters of fact and the events of time and space. For Berdyaev the very notion of the soul as a unity derived from physical processes is false. The unity of the soul-process is the dynamic spiritual principle itself and not arbitrarily conceived points or 'souls.' 

Furthermore, the notion that the individual of individualism constitutes resistance to its environment and is thus constituted by isolated exercises of its own will is an illusion. Such an individual would have to be exterior to the world in order to rebel against it, hence the individual would have to be alienated, impersonal, and self-determined or self-caused, as if it were a god facing a violent enemy. The enmity projected onto a seemingly violent world would define the supposedly self-determining individual who blames the objective world for everything perceived to be in opposition; thus is he in fact determined by objectivity rather than his presumed subjectivity. As a 'subject' in distinction from 'object', he thinks he is a free individual, but the emperor has his foot on his neck. Since humankind is natural and human beings are a social species, the individual of existentialist individualism has dissociated himself from nature and society. For him, nature is dead; god is dead; society is dead. Since society comprises individuals, the person is dead as well, for the person is a social individual who enjoys not only individuality but the commune as well. Ironically, the individualist believes he is free when in fact he is enslaved. Today he is in reality the over socialized, bourgeois  individual of the militant protestant-capitalist system. He is fully engaged in the war of all against all where each individual crushes other and is crushed in the material arena of economic forces and interests. He has internalized the anti-social rules of engagement that subjugate him. Like a prisoner in Bentham's panopticon-prison, he is constantly under observation and control by unseen wardens. But he is a virtual slave; a slave not to his circumstances, but to himself. He is, as it were, self-imprisoned, and is like the animal that stays put when the fence is torn down.

Berdyaev was well aware of the hypocrisy of so-called existentialists who said they placed existence before being but who had to profess being in order to say anything at all. Although he did not mind being called an “existentialist”, a term very much in vogue at the time, he pointed out that existentialists actually laid stress on being with their ontological philosophies. If he were to be an existentialist, then he would get a leg up on them by being a real existentialist, by espousing freedom from being, or at least their sort of being: “I have put Freedom, rather than being, at the basis of my philosophy,” he claimed. True to his early Marxist training, he viewed metaphysics as nonsense. The philosophy of being that his predecessors professed as the subject of ontology was “a disastrous philosophy of nothing at all, except certain figments of the human brain.” Indeed, he said, being is contrary to freedom. Once a thing is, it is determined, hence no longer free. Thus does he leaves us gesticulating chaotically in empty space, for his contradiction of being would seem to deny the omnipotent being of the Supreme Being or God whom he confesses. That is, the Supreme Being would have to remain potent and never act in order to be absolutely free, for each and every act would serve to determine it.  In any event, how can anything be free if it is not something in the first place? We might leave these mysteries with God. Berdyaev himself was aware of his double-talk; he preferred envisioning to carefully analysis. Perhaps, like Ruskin, he was unsatisfied with a critical tract until he had contradicted himself several times. On the one hand, he said he was an existentialist to the extent he placed existence before being, then turned around and said: “The subjective approach is the only one likely to elicit a revelation of the original truth contained in primitive Being; objective or impersonal investigation only succeeds in revealing the secondary and reflective aspects of Being.” 

In any case, if personalists do seek God, then it is contradictory for them, at least to the extent that they are whole or sane or rational, to call themselves existentialists. If God is the Supreme Being, if God is the First Cause hence the very Ground of existence, and if being is seemingly nothing because it transcends our grasp, then being precedes existence, not the other way around, and to reverse things would be to turn the globe upside down and call its top its bottom and convert North into South. Yes, it is said that God works in mysterious ways. Again, if the Supreme Being precedes and creates existence as such, then how in the world can existence, as existentialists would have it, precede the being who created it from seemingly nothing, from the stuff of absolute freedom? It would be more logical, if we are interested in arguing our presumptions, to state the presumption more clearly, and to say that being precedes existence.

Thankfully for the further continuance of our arguments elsewhere, all sorts of mysteries ensue from a grammar that enables us to separate being from existence and to confuse or identify them as well simply to suit our ends. Love certainly does not abhor a mystery, and will pursue its objects endlessly, for love is really its own object, and cannot sit still, so life goes on as long as the world spins. For example, we might say that there are two kinds of being, one abstract, the other real, and hold that both kinds exist in their own ways, one being more real than the other, depending on our perspective and persuasion, and someone might insist that only the ideal is real, the rest being illusions which have no existence except as figments of the imagination, yet even that reality must be denied for the sake of consistency. The proposal to identify existence with material reality and being with mental reality is frowned upon because body and mind our confused one with the other in the first place. We might even close this ramble with a statement that Nicolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher of freedom, was a personalist existentialist because he placed absolute freedom, or rather “meonic freedom” (non-existent freedom) before the individual and society; but that is to say nothing, which might be a good thing for a Cabalist to say. Instead we call him the godfather of Personalism. 

QUOTED:

Dream and Reality by Nicolas Berdyaev
Slavery and Freedom by Nicolas Berdyaev, New York: Scribner's 1944
Solitude and Society by Nicolas Berdyaev, London: Centenary Press 1938
The Bourgeois Mind by Nicolas Berdyaev, London: Sheed & Ward 1934
Sybil, or The Two Nations, by Benjamin Disraeli
Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 67
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2^nd edition