Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev

1874 – 1948. I am in darkness and seek the light; I do not yet know truth but I seek it.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

We cannot think of God in terms analogous to what takes place in society or in nature. God is freedom; he is the liberator, not the master. God gives a sense of liberty, not of subjection. God is spirit, and spirit knows no such relationship as that of master and slave.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

God is love and sacrifice. The person of the Father predicates the persons of the Son and Holy Spirit. The hypostases of the Holy Trinity are also persons, because they presuppose each other, mutual love, and movement out toward another.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

There can be no judgment of God, for He is the source of all the values on which such a judgment could be based. God reveals Himself to us as the source of values, as infinite love.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

God desires that man should be. God does not wish to be alone. The meaning of existence is the conquest of loneliness, the acquisition of kinship and nearness.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The Kingdom of God is the Kingdom of Divine-humanity, in it God is finally born in man and man in God, and this is accomplished in the Spirit.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

All the complexity of religious life, the meeting and communion of God and man, is linked with the fact that there are two movements, and not one: from God toward man, and from man toward God.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

God is the Lover, and he cannot and does not wish to exist without the loved one.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The whole problem is that I must discover what God has concealed from me. God awaits an act of freedom on my part, free creativeness. My freedom and my creativeness are my obedience to the mysterious will of God.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

God is completeness toward which man cannot avoid striving.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

One must die, in order to live again. Man and the world are being crucified. But the final word will belong to the Resurrection.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The greatest error of historical Christianity is linked with the fatally limiting idea that the revelation is finished, and that nothing more is to be expected, that the building of the Church is completed and the roof laid on it.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

Spiritual life is the supreme reality in man's life: in it the divine is not proven, it is simply shown.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The spiritual life does not know the measure of figures: it only knows the unique, the one.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The final triumph of spirit would mean the fading & disappearance of the objective world as something not genuine; transition to the plane of the existential, to true existence, from symbolization to realization. Such occurs in true love, which brings down fire upon the earth...

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

Spirit gives meaning to actuality, rather than being itself, another actuality. Spirit is, as it were, the breath of God penetrating man's being and communicating a higher dignity, a higher quality of his existence, inner independence and unity...

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The prophets, the men of creative genius, come into this world from the noumenal world--they are ambassadors of spirit. But this is not a steady evolutionary process; rather, it is an intermittent breakthrough, a creative process.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

Man's alienation from the inner life of nature quite justly troubles him: he cannot bear the pressure of nature's mechanism: in reality he longs for the return of the cosmos into man. Man's fall away from God brought with it the fall of the cosmos away from man.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

There is no such thing as whole, uninterrupted being. Instead there are upsurges, explosions, abysses, paradoxes, things transcendent. Hence only freedom exists, only personality...Being is static: spirit is dynamic.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The idea of complete rationalization & socialization of all spheres of life by means of science is a false & thoroughly anti-Christian idea. Science is understood as scientism, the universalization of all degrees & forms of knowledge, which in fact have only partial significance.

[Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev @NikolaiAlexan15]

The most important thing is that in his relation to culture and technics, man should be master and not slave. When the principle of force is proclaimed, and force is set above truth and higher values, this means the death of civilization.