N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV)
Nicholas Berdyaev, Prophet for the Catholic Worker
Movement
Materialism Destroys the Eternal Spirit
by Nicholas Berdyaev, with an introduction by Mark
and Louise Zwick
This is the third article in a series on the saints and philosophers
who influenced Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day in developing the Catholic
Worker.
Nicholas Berdyaev (l874-l948) was one of the great personalists
and a "particular prophet" in the life of the Catholic Worker
movement, one who with the gift of his genius explored the meaning
of the life of the spirit in the twentieth century (William Miller,
A Harsh and Dreadful Love, Doubleday, l974).
Berdyaev, a Russian philosopher exiled for his opposition to
the Russian Revolution, saw the central historical problem of
his age as the ascendancy of the bourgeois spirit. For Berdyaev,
the word "bourgeois" designated not a social, economic, or ethical
condition but rather a spiritual state and a direction of the
soul. In his book on Peter Maurin where he comments on Berdyaev
and the Catholic Worker, Marc Ellis quotes Berdyaev on the bourgeois
spirit in its essence as a pursuit of the material aspects of
life and an endless search for the expedient and the useful. The
bourgeois is an idolator of this world. "Although the bourgeois
spirit had always existed in culture, it had reached its apex
in the nineteenth century. Berdyaev saw then that its concupiscence
was no longer restricted by supernatural beliefs as it was in
the past, no longer kept in bounds by the sacred symbolism of
a nobler traditional culture. The center of life, the spiritual,
had been exiled to the periphery. The triumph of the bourgeois
spirit led Berdyaev to declare that history was a story of failure.
Berdyaev lamented that the will to power and affluence had triumphed
over the will to holiness and genius." (Peter Maurin: Prophet
in the Twentieth Century, Paulist Press, l98l.)
Another important theme in Berdyaev's works which found an echo
in Peter Maurin and in the CW movement was an understanding of
history quite different from that of most historians and political
philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Berdyaev's
view of history is beyond time. For him history has nothing to
do with material success, with progress or achievement, or with
seeking the idolatries of power, lust or comfort. Berdyaev understood
that in the Incarnation and Redemption Christ stands at the center
of history and that the human person, made in the image and likeness
of God, is meant to participate with God in the building of the
New Creation.
The following are excerpts from the writings of Berdyaev:
Materialism Destroys the Eternal Spirit
Civilization is by its nature "bourgeois" in the deepest spiritual
sense of the word. "Bourgeois" is synonymous precisely with the
civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized
power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that
of the middle classes, it is attached and clings to corrupt and
transitory things, and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is
therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The
perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the
industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty
economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation
of spirituality. The industrial Capitalism of civilization proved
to be the destroyer of the eternal spirit and the sacred traditions.
Modern capitalist civilization is essentially atheistic and hostile
to the idea of God. The crime of killing God must be laid at its
door rather than at that of revolutionary Socialism, which merely
adapted itself to the civilized "bourgeois" spirit and accepted
its negative heritage.
Industrial-capitalist civilization, it is true, did not altogether
repudiate religion: it was prepared to admit its pragmatical utility
and necessity. Thus religion, which had found a symbolic expression
in culture, became pragmatical in civilization. It could, indeed,
prove useful and practical in the organization and fostering of
life. Civilization is by its nature pragmatical. The popularity
of pragmatism in America, the classical land of civilization,
need cause no surprise. Socialism, on the other hand, repudiated
pragmatical religion; but it pragmatically defends atheism as
being more useful for the development of life forces and the worldly
satisfaction of the larger masses of mankind. But the pragmatical
and utilitarian approach of Capitalism had been the real source
of atheism and spiritual bankruptcy. The useful and practically
effective god of Capitalism cannot be the true God. He can be
easily unmasked. Socialism is negatively right. The God of religious
revelations and symbolic culture had long vanished from capitalist
civilization, just as it had receded from Him.
The capitalist system is sowing the seeds of its own destruction
by sapping the spiritual foundation of man's economic life. Labour
loses all spiritual purpose and justification and, as a result,
brings an indictment against the whole system.
Civilization is powerless to realize its dream of everlasting
aggrandizement. The tower of Babylon will remain unfinished.
The Technological Society
The triumphant advent of the machine opened a new era in which
life loses its organic character and natural rhythm; man is separated
from nature by an artificial environment of machines, by the very
instruments of his intended domination of nature. As a reaction
against his mediaeval ascetic ideal, man puts aside both resignation
and contemplation, and attempts to dominate nature, organize life
and increase its productive forces. This, however, does not help
to bring him into closer communion with the inner life and soul
of nature. On the contrary, by mastering it technically and organizing
its forces man becomes further removed from it. Organization proves
to be the death of the organism. Life becomes increasingly a matter
of technique. The machine sets its stamp upon the human spirit
and all its manifestations. Thus civilization has neither a natural
nor a spiritual, but a mechanical foundation. It represents par
excellence the triumph of technique over both the spirit and organism.
The machine and technique are the product of the mental development
and discoveries of culture; but they sap its organic foundations
and kill its spirit. Culture, having lost its soul, becomes civilization.
Spiritual matters are discounted; quantity displaces quality.
The assertion of the will to "life," power, organization and earthly
happiness, brings about mankind's spiritual decline; for the higher
spiritual life is based upon asceticism and resignation. Such
are the tragedy and fate of historical destinies.
Civilization as opposed to culture, which is given up to the
contemplation of eternity, tends to be futurist. Machinery and
technique are chiefly responsible for the speeding up of life
and its exclusive aspiration towards the future. Organic life
is slower, less impetuous, and more concerned with essentials,
while civilized life is superficial and accidental; for it puts
the means and instruments of life before the ends whose significance
is lost. The consciousness of civilized men is concentrated exclusively
upon the means and technique of life considered as the only reality,
while its aims are regarded as illusory.
Technique, organization and the productive processes are a reality
while spiritual culture is unreal, a mere instrument of technique.
The relation between end and means is reversed and perverted.
This loss of any sense of purpose is the death of a culture.
The only real way to culture lies through religious transformation.
The Meaning of History
It is not an exaggeration to say that for many people the doctrine
of progress was a religion, that the religion of progress in the
nineteenth century was professed by many who had fallen away from
Christianity. An analysis of this idea of progress, with special
reference to its religious pretensions, will reveal the fundamental
contradiction that it involved.
The doctrine of progress is first and foremost an entirely illegitimate
deification of the future at the expense of past and present,
in a way that has not the slightest scientific, philosophical
or moral justification. The doctrine of progress is bound to be
a religious faith, since there can be no positive science of progress.
The nineteenth-century positivist doctrines of progress deliberately
stifled and suppressed the religious element in this belief and
hope. The theoreticians of progress opposed their faith and expectations
to the religious type of these dispositions. But what is left
of the idea of progress, once it has been emptied of its religious
content? How can such a mutilated idea be inwardly accepted?
In the light of the positivist doctrine of progress every human
generation, every individual, every epoch of history, are but
the means and instrument to an ultimate goal of perfection, this
ultimate humanity perfect in that power and happiness which are
denied to the present generation. Both from the religious and
ethical points of view this positivist conception of progress
is inadmissible, because by its very nature it excludes a solution
to the tragic torments, conflicts and contradictions of life valid
for all mankind, for all those generations who have lived and
suffered. For it deliberately asserts that nothing but death and
the grave awaits the vast majority of mankind and the endless
succession of human generations throughout the ages, because they
have lived in a tortured and imperfect state torn asunder by contradictions.
But somewhere on the peaks of historical destiny, on the ruins
of preceding generations, there shall appear the fortunate race
of men reserved for the bliss and perfection of integral life.
All the generations that have gone before are but the means to
this blessed life, to this blissful generation of the elect as
yet unborn. Thus the religion of progress regards all the generations
and epochs that have been as devoid of intrinsic value, purpose
or significance, as the mere means and instruments to the ultimate
goal.
It is this fundamental moral contradiction that invalidates the
doctrine of progress, turning it into a religion of death instead
of resurrection and eternal life. There is no valid ground for
degrading those generations whose lot has been cast among pain
and imperfection beneath that whose pre-eminence has been ordained
in blessedness and joy. No future perfection can expiate the sufferings
of past generations. Such a sacrifice of all human destinies to
the messianic consummation of the favoured race can only revolt
man's moral and religious conscience. A religion of progress based
on this apotheosis of a future fortunate generation is without
compassion for either present or past; it addresses itself with
infinite optimism to the future, with infinite pessimism to the
past. It is profoundly hostile to the Christian expectation of
resurrection for all mankind, for all the dead, fathers and forefathers.
This Christian idea rests on the hope of an end to historical
tragedy and contradiction valid for all human generations, and
of resurrection in eternal life for all who have ever lived.
One of the most obvious objections to the theory of progress
is the discovery of a great culture like that of Babylon, which
flourished three thousand years before Christ and attained a pitch
of perfection in many respects superior to anything of which the
twentieth century is capable. Yet it died and vanished almost
without leaving a trace.
Our habit of breaking up time into the past, present and future
does not entitle us to endow the last with more reality than the
first. From the standpoint of the present, the future is no richer
in reality than the past, and our efforts should be with reference,
not to the future, but to that eternal present of which both future
and past are one.
In a sense it may even be argued that the past is more real than
the future, that those who have departed from us are more real
than those who have not yet been born.
History is in truth the path to another world. It is in this
sense that its content is religious. But the perfect state is
impossible within history itself; it can only be realized outside
its framework. This is the fundamental conclusion of the metaphysics
of history and the secret of the historical process itself. In
its perpetual transition from one epoch to another, mankind struggles
in vain to resolve its destiny within history. Disappointed in
its expectations, feeling itself imprisoned within the circle
of history, it realizes that its problem cannot be solved within
the process of history itself, but only on a transcendental plane.
The problem of history is determined by the nature of time. To
solve it requires an inversion of the entire historical perspective,
a transfer of attention of extra-historical considerations, to
the urge of history towards super-history. We must admit within
the hermitic circle of history the super-historical energy, the
irruption within the relations of terrestrial phenomena of the
celestial noumenon--the future Coming of Christ.
Of Celestial History: God and Man
Before developing our metaphysics of history any further, we
must pause to consider the primal drama and mystery taking place
in the inmost depths of being. What is the nature of this drama?
It is that of the mutual relations between God and man. But in
what form are we to conceive it? I believe that this primal drama
and mystery of Christianity consist in the genesis of God in man
and of man in God. This mystery, is, indeed, implicit in the foundations
of Christianity. Historical destiny reveals more particularly
the genesis of God in man. This constitutes the central fact of
human and world destiny. But there exists a no less profound mystery,
that of the genesis of man in God, accomplished in the inmost
depths of the divine life. For if there is such a thing as a human
longing for God and a response to it, then there also must be
a divine longing for man the genesis of God in man; a longing
for the love and the freely-loving and, in response to it, the
genesis of man in God. A divine movement which brings about the
genesis of God implies the reciprocal movement of man towards
God, by which he is generated and revealed. This constitutes the
primal mystery both of the spirit and of being, and at the same
time of Christianity, which in its central fact, in the Person
of Christ, the Son of God, unites two mysteries. In the Image
of Christ is brought about the genesis of God in man and of man
in God, and the perfection of both is manifest. Thus, for the
first time, in response to God's movement and longing, a perfect
man is revealed to Him. This mysterious process occurs in the
interior depths of the divine reality itself; it is a sort of
divine history which is reflected in the whole of the outer history
of mankind. History is, indeed, not only the revelation of God,
but also the reciprocal revelation of man in God.
The whole complexity of the historical process can be explained
by the inner interdependence of these two revelations. For history
is not only the plan of the Divine revelation, it is also the
reciprocal revelation of man himself; and that makes history such
a terrible and complex tragedy. History would not be tragic if
it were only the revelation of God and its gradual apprehension.
Its drama and tragedy are not only determined in the divine life
itself, but also by the fact that they are based upon the mystery
of freedom, which is not only a divine, but also a human revelation--that
longed for by God in the depths of the divine life. The origin
of the world springs from the freedom willed by God in the beginning.
Without His will or longing for freedom no world process would
be possible. In its place there would be a static and pre-eminently
perfect Kingdom of God as an essential and predetermined harmony.
The world process, on the other hand, implies a terrible tragedy,
and history a succession of calamitous events in the centre of
which stands the Crucifixion, the Cross on which the Son of God
Himself was crucified, because God had desired freedom and because
the primal drama and mystery of the world are those of the relations
between God and His other self, which He loves and by which He
desires to be loved. And only freedom endows this love with any
significance.
This freedom, which is absolutely irrational and inapprehensible
to reason, offers a solution of the tragedy of world history.
It fulfills not only God's revelation in man, but also man's in
God; for it is the source and origin of movement, of process,
of inner conflict and of inwardly experienced contradictions.
An indissoluble tie exists therefore between freedom and the metaphysics
of history. The concept of freedom elucidates both the divine
life as a tragic destiny and the life of mankind and the world
as the history of a tragic destiny. There would be no history
without freedom. It is the metaphysical basis of history. The
revelation of history can be apprehended only through Christ as
perfect man and God, as their perfect union, as the genesis of
God in man and of man in God, and, finally, as God's revelation
in man and the reciprocal revelation of man in God. Christ, the
Absolute Man, the Son of both God and man, stands in the centre
of both celestial and terrestrial history. He is the inner spiritual
tie between these two destinies. Without His help the tie between
the world and God, between the plural and the unique, between
the human and the absolute reality, could not exist. In fact,
history owes its existence entirely to the presence of Christ
at its very heart. He represents the deepest mystical and metaphysical
foundation and source of history and of its tragic destiny. Both
the divine and the human energy flow towards and away from Him.
All historical tendencies which have striven to create harmony,
to overcome the dark premise, to subdue the turbulence of freedom
and supersede it by compelled and necesary good, are concerned
only with the secondary signs of the unique and primal mystery
of divine freedom. These tendencies have a wide currency, but
they should be unmasked in the light of Christian consciousness
as a temptation always besetting human destiny. One of the greatest
of Christian mysteries, that of Grace, which lies at the foundation
of the Church, symbolizes the transcendent reconciliation and
resolution of the fatal conflict between freedom and necessity.
It achieves a victory over the fatality of both freedom and necessity,
though the word "fatal" here is but an imperfect symbol. It is
the act of Grace which realizes the communion between God and
man and offers a solution of the problem posed by the divine drama.
We must, therefore, note that the principle of Divine Grace is
active in the history and destiny of both world and man together
with that of natural necessity. And without it neither this destiny
nor mystery would be fulfilled.
Sources:
Nicholas Berdyaev, The Bourgeois Mind.
________________, Freedom and Spirit.
__________________, The Meaning of History.
Matthew Spinka, Nicolas Berdyaev: Captive of Freedom, Westminster
Press, l950.
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