The Meaning of History

Daniel Pipes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351479677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In her brilliant new opening essay, Banerjee says of Berdyaev "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 transcendence." Witness to two world wars, Berdyaev observed the destruction of established cultures in the traumatic birth of new systems. Arrested on political suspicion-by Czarist and then by Bolshevik police—he died in exile in France in 1948, carrying forth his intellectual work until the end.

Berdyaev considered the philosophy of history as a field that laid the foundations of the Russian national consciousness. Its disputes were centered on distinctions between Slavophiles and Westerners, East and West. The Meaning of History was an early effort, following World War I, that attempted to revive this perspective. With the removal of Communism as a ruling system in Russia, that nation returned to an elaboration of a religious philosophy of history as the specific mission of Russian thought. This volume thus has contemporary significance. Its sense of the apocalypse, which distinguishes Russian from Western thought, gives the book its specifically religious character.

In order to grasp and oppose the complex phenomenon of social and cultural disintegration, Berdyaev shows that human beings must rely upon some internal dialectic. After the debacle of the war, the moment arrived to integrate Russian historical experiences into those of a Europe, which, although torn by schism, still claimed to be the descendant of Christendom. The book is remarkable for its powerful stylistic grace, and astonishingly contemporary feeling.

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION

NIKOLAI BERDYAEV AND SPIRITUAL FREEDOM

“Victory over death-bearing time has been the fundamental theme of my life,” says Berdyaev in the introduction to his Spiritual Autobiography.¹ Composed during the last decade of his life, this retrospective narrative is, like everything that Berdyaev 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 Berdyaev (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 transcendence.

The awareness of a spiritual realm beyond the mundane bustle of existence came early to Berdyaev. 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.² He 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, Berdyaev’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 worldview 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, Berdyaev 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.

Berdyaev’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 Berdyaev 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 Berdyaev 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. Berdyaev 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.

Berdyaev’s lead essay, “Philosophical Truth and the Moral Truth of the Intelligentsia,”⁴ initiates 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, Berdyaev’s diagnosis sounded more cautionary than prophetic.

With admirable pith and clarity, Berdyaev 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, Berdyaev 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.”⁶ It is a very self-revealing assessment, showing Berdyaev’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 Berdyaev 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 Berdyaev’s philosophical outlook. But unlike for Nietzsche, who shared that sense with him, it is not an aesthetic but a spiritual value.

In Berdyaev’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 Berdyaev’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 Berdyaev into an intimate dialogue with Fyodor 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 Alyosha, Berdyaev 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 1920-21.⁸ It 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.

Berdyaev 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.”⁹ It 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 Berdyaev’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 Berdyaev’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 Berdyaev’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, Berdyaev’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 Alyosha had offered, only to be rebuffed by Ivan.

Above all, Berdyaev 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 Berdyaev, this “liberty of conscience,” which European humanism claimed as its signal value, is merely “a material liberty.”¹¹ But 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 Dostoevsky and Berdyaev, Saint Augustine had distinguished between two types of freedom—the freedom within the law (libertas minor) and the freedom beyond it (libertas maior). The fir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Translator’s Note
• I. On The Essence of the Historical: The Meaning of Tradition
• II. On The Nature of The Historical: The Metaphysical and The Historical
• III. Of Celestial History: God and Man
• IV. Of Celestial History: Time and Eternity
• V. The Destiny of The Jews
• VI. Christianity and History
• VII. The Renaissance and Humanism
• VIII. The End of The Renaissance and The Crisis of Humanism: The Advent of The Machine
• IX. The End of The Renaissance and The Crisis of Humanism: The Disintegration of The Human Image
• X. The Doctrine of Progress and The Goal of History
• Epilogue: The Will to Life and The Will to Culture