Nikolai berdyaev biography of christopher

Christopher Stroop

Journal of Global History, 2018, vol. 13, issue 2, 188-208

Abstract: Building on recent research into the religious aspects of the Cold War and the humanitarian efforts of the American Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in early twentieth-century Europe, this article locates the historical origins of religious anti-communism in late imperial Russian reactions to the revolution of 1905–07. It explores the interactions of Russian Orthodox Christian intellectuals, especially Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, with prominent YMCA leaders such as Donald A. Lowrie and Paul B. Anderson, both of whom were mainline Protestants. Using Russian and US archives, the article documents the networks and mechanisms through which Berdyaev influenced his YMCA contacts. It shows that he shaped their efforts to fight communism in the interwar period and early Cold War through the promotion of religious values, or what Anderson referred to as ‘a Christian solution to international tension’. This concept was derived from early twentieth-century Russian ideas about the opposition between Christianity and ‘nihilism’ or ‘humanism’ as integral worldviews.

Date: 2018
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Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev ( 1874"1948) was a Russian political and Christian religious philosopher who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human individual. He was born in Obukhovo(now in Ukraine). Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career and entered Kiev University in 1894. It was a time of revolutionary fervor and he became a Marxist and was arrested at a student demonstration and expelled from the university. His involvement in illegal activities led in 1897 to three years of internal exile to Vologda in northern Russia, a milder sentence than faced by many revolutionaries. He later disavowed Communism and the Bolsheviks, which culminated in 1919 with the establishment of "Free Academy of Spiritual Culture." In 1920, Berdiaev became professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow. That year, he was accused of participating in a conspiracy against the government; he was arrested and jailed. A central theme of Berdyaev's later work was a philosophy of love. He was an Orthodox, but remained independent and somewhat "liberal." He wrote extensively on Russian nationalism, religion, and spiritual philosophy.

Christopher Bamford (1943"2022) was born in Cardiff, South Wales, and lived for a while in Hungary and then in Scotland. He studied as an undergraduate at Trinity University in Dublin and earned his master"s degree at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. For nearly thirty years, he was Editor in Chief at SteinerBooks (Anthroposophic Press) and its imprints. A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he lectured, taught, and wrote widely on Western spiritual and esoteric traditions. His books include a selection of his numerous introductions, Encountering Rudolf Steiner: Introductions to Essential Works (2022); Healing Madonnas: Exploring the Sequence of Madonna Images Created by Rudolf Steiner and Felix Peipers for Use in Therapy and Meditation (2017); An Endl

Nicholas Berdyaev stressed the primacy of culture and theological issues over politics and economics as truer forms of reality. He argued that only when society has realigned itself, individual by individual and community by community, “towards divine objects” could humanity save itself.

One kind of weird but enticing academic puzzle for me is discovering and delving into the works of interesting figures of the 20th century who have been largely forgotten. And, by “interesting figures,” I mean especially those who espoused types of religious humanism and their allies. One of the purposes of The Imaginative Conservative is to bring the memory of these humanists back to the public and honor each as a vital ancestor to our own broad cause in the twenty-first century.

Everyone remembers, for example, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and, more recently, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Even if one hasn’t read any of their respective works, their names circulate with familiarity even in the darker corners of American civilization.

At a different, slightly lower level hover Irving Babbitt, Hilaire Belloc, Paul Elmer More, Willa Cather, Christopher Dawson, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Josef Pieper, Walter Miller, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Russell Kirk.

But only a few remember eccentrics such as T.E. Hulme, Aurel Kolnai, Leo Ward, Sister Madeleva Wolff, Wilhelm Roepke, Romano Guardini, Gabriel Marcel, Owen Barfield, Theodore Haecker, David Jones, Tom Burns, and Bernard Wall.

Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948), a member of this last group, has been sadly neglected as well, at least by those in conservative and libertarian circles.

He was, not surprisingly, connected to many Christian Humanists of his day. He knew the Maritains well, and while C.S. Lewis mostly dismissed his work as a sideline show, Christopher Dawson considered Berdyaev’s thought central to the restoration of

*** This is a rough transcript of today’s show ***

It is the 24th of March 2022. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Today I am going to tell you the story of a remarkable Ukrainian philosopher and theologian who lived from 1874 to 1948, Nikolai Berdyaev- a remarkable time to live in Ukraine, Russia, and the Soviet Union (his hometown near Kyiv could be labeled as any of these things during his lifetime).

Those years also put him as an eyewitness to the end of the Tsar, the Russian Revolutions, and both World Wars, and he wrote over 400 books and articles in his career as a critic of Soviet communism and Christian in the vein of Soren Kierkegaard; that is, as a Christian existentialist.

“Christian existentialism” seems like a topic you would talk about if you wanted to sound smart… it can sound pretentious, but hear me out. “Existentialism” is simply a philosophy that centers human existence- not in the abstract but in the very concrete self that is conscious and capable of making decisions. The key to understanding the universe doesn’t start “out there” but with the real problems that face you- the individual!

And Berdyaev saw plenty of problems in his day. The decline of the Russian Empire in The 19th century was a significant blow not just to imperial designs but also for the Russian Church entwined with the Tsar.

By the time Berdyaev was a student at Kyiv University in 1899, he was a Marxist who believed the Tsar needed to be overthrown. His mother was a Christian, his father was a skeptic, and his views were closer to his father’s early in life. He was arrested for demonstrations at college and sent into exile.

During this time, he traveled through Germany and came back in 1907. Then he wrote that “by intricate and torturous ways I have come to faith in Christ and His Church.”

In 1913 he wrote a scathing attack on the church for using armed force to remove a group of monks from Mt.