A mystic, an eclectic Christian personalist and existentialist. Together with L. Shestov, he is the most noted representative of Russian religious thought. His inspiration was derived from a multiplicity of sources: gnosis, the Fathers of the Christian Church, German mysticism, indigenous Orthodox and Slavophile traditions as well as Western philosophy.
According to Berdyaev, philosophy is concerned with acts of the human spirit which are inexpressible in rational discourse (hence the critique of Western rationalism), and which through myth and symbols (most fully expressed in Christianity) reveal the sense of existence for both man and the world, as well as their common destiny.
The triad which organizes the thought of Berdyaev consists of: the myth of the Fall  God/man  Eschaton, with the central motif being the divinely-rooted essence of man which had been lost and regained.
Sin, the choice of evil (the myth of the Fall), is due to freedom which was originally uncreated and prior to God. Both God and man have the same right to freedom, although it was improperly, albeit necessarily, utilized by man. Freedom to commit evil brought with it various enslavements embodied in the so called ‘realm of Caesar’ – the sphere of culture. Man’s entire history bears witness to the fact that people called to creative collaboration with God (who expects this from us, as creativity, along with freedom, is what commonly distinguishes us from the animals), are able to create culture, or its technological extension, civilization. This process which was initiated by the renaissance, culminates in developed capitalism as well as communism, the common characteristics of which are the objectification and decay of the sacrum, or the depraving of this concept. History as a process of the gradual negation of the divine element in man (a misleading myth of progress) subordinated it to the peripheral and not the central qualities of its being. Berdyaev calls this ‘objectification’. By criticizing the European tradition of ontological philosophy and placing it in opposition to his philosophy of freedom, Berdyaev contrasts the person, i.e., the spirit to the ‘objectified’ world of history and culture. He distinguishes between the freedom (activity) of a person and the necessity (social, political, biological, axiological, historical, determinism), which enslaves a person. By reducing himself to a phenomenological form of objectification, man lost his noumenal dimension which constituted a personal spirit which transcends the world.
It is the myth of the God/man relationship that enables the reconstruction of a human god-rooted whole. The incarnation and the sacrifice of God, its redemptive sense notwithstanding, indicates how to benefit properly from our prerogatives of liberation, how to regain our lost divine likeness and to creatively transcend the world of objectification into the infinity of the eternal life of the spirit. It is Christ – the God/man whose drama is acted out symbolically in the human spirit – who restores the god-rooted bonds which were rent apart by the choice of evil; being the epiphenomenon of the spirit (not vice versa), He is an example of the renewed-deification of fallen human nature, and at the same time of the world.
The meaning of history depends upon building the ‘state of the spirit’ which, however, is not contained in cosmic or historic time (the misleading conceptions of the salvation of man on earth, e.g. millenarianism, communism), but in endless existential time, in the dimension of the Eschaton. It is exactly during the period of the greatest breach with God, when man’s fall is at its deepest (developed capitalism, communism in Russia) that a ‘new Middle Ages’ is being born – a creative epoch transcending this world.
Up to now, man has controlled his freedom inappropriately, however, after the fall of the historical Church of Peter (he gives a sharp criticism of historical Christianity, which stands accused of the loss of the Christian calling of man) there will follow an era of the Church of John – directed towards eternity, the eschatological and reformed Christianity of spiritual dimension. A crucial role in this process falls to the Russian nation which not having followed the faulty Western method of development, and having preserved collective rather than individualistic relationships, is appointed with an apocalyptic sense and messianic mission even though affected by the oppressive communist totalitarianism – as the first nation to restore the spiritual dimension of Christianity. Although this results, (mainly from an act of God’s salvation) in the complete redemption from evil, this leads simultaneously to universal salvation, restoration, and to the apocatastasis.
Berdyaev’s philosophy of history exerted a decisive influence upon his understanding of the essence of communism (genuine hopes for the false kingdom), for which he was once well known.

Marek Styczyński (Witold Liwarowski)