LEV SHESTOV
\ Speculation and Revelation
GNOSIS AND EXISTENTIAL
PHILOSOPHY
Nikolai Berdyaev
Published in Sovremenniye zapiski, no. 63 (1938)
1
Nikolai Berdyaev
is undoubtedly the foremost of those Russian thinkers who have been able to obtain
a hearing for themselves not only in their native country but in Europe as well.
His works have been translated into numerous languages and have everywhere encountered
the greatest sympathy and even enthusiasm. It will be no exaggeration if we set
his name alongside those of the presently best known and most significant philosophers,
such as Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Martin Heidegger. Vladimir
Solovyov has also been translated into many languages (in German a comprehensive
edition of his works has appeared), but he is much less known than Berdyaev and
has never attracted the interest of philosophical circles. It may be said that
in the person of Berdyaev Russian philosophical thinking appeared for the first
time before the forum of Europe [1] or, perhaps, even of the
whole world.
In our Russian emigrant literature, however, Berdyaev
is virtually unmentioned. In the fifteen years of his sojourn abroad he has published
a whole series of outstanding philosophical works: Freedom and the Spirit,
The Destiny of Man, The land the World of Objects, Spirit and Reality, and
The New Middle Ages. Also, in the journal Put ("The Way") which
he has edited, he has printed many longer and shorter articles on religious, philosophical,
and social problems. Nevertheless, almost no one has ever written about Berdyaev
in the Russian journals and newspapers. Why? It is difficult to say. In any case
it is not because people did not value him or were not at all, or too little,
interested in him. His themes and his approach to these themes could not but captivate
even those who stand aside from philosophical and religious questions.
Berdyaev's last book, Spirit and Reality,
is, to a certain degree, a commentary on and a summation of everything about which
he has previously written. But, as is always the case with him, each new book
introduces something that was not contained in the preceding ones. Already in
his previously published book The I and the World of Objects, something
new is noticeable: earlier he spoke only of "gnosis," while here he speaks also
of existential philosophy. The term "existential philosophy" was introduced by
Kierkegaard. But it must be stated at once that Berdyaev, although he values Kierkegaard
very highly, is so little interested in his philosophy that he says almost nothing
about it. At times he even talks of it in a sharply rejecting sense. In The
Destiny of Man we read, "In so ardent and significant a thinker as Kierkegaard
is found an element of unchristian maximalism, a maximalism without grace that
is opposed to love." Already from these words it is clear that, having appropriated
the Kierkegaardian term, Berdyaev is least of all disposed to accept what Kierkegaard
associated with existential philosophy.[2]
Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise. Berdyaev
takes his philosophical genealogy from the renowned German mystic Jakob Boehme
and, through Boehme, from German idealism. In this respect his last book is even
more expressive than the preceding ones. At present striving for a return to Kant
has clearly revealed itself in German philosophy: the writings of Jaspers, Hartmann,
and Heidegger sufficiently attest this. Husserl himself, who appears to have been
destined by fate to overcome the Kantian subjectivism, initiated this movement.
Berdyaev's last book, which always shows a predilection for the ideas of Kant,
is in this respect not inferior to the books of the German philosophers. Spirit
and Reality attempts in a certain sense to repeat anew or in a different way
the "Copernican feat" of the philosopher of Koenigsberg. The center of being must
be not the object but the subject. "The mystery of reality reveals itself not
in concentration on the object, but in reflection, which is directed to the act
accomplished by the subject." This thought, which was always dear to Berdyaev,
is carried through with special persistence in the last two books. Berdyaev hopes
that in this way he will manage to free cognition from the principle of adaequatio
rei et intellectus which arose out of Aristotelian doctrine and so shake off
all the compulsion and constraint that burden the human spirit. We shall see that
in this enterprise he had as little success as his inspirer Kant: compulsion and
constraint adjust themselves no worse to the subject than to the object.
This is so despite the fact that in his last book
Berdyaev carries through with even greater persistence than before the idea of
God-man which is so precious to him and in which he always perceived the most
complete expression of Christianity. In Spirit and Reality that "new" thing
of which I spoke is felt especially strongly. Until now Berdyaev has called Christianity
"theocentric" or "Christocentric." Now he begins to speak of the pneumacentricity
of Christianity. This, of course, does not mean that Berdyaev has renounced the
idea of God-man. But it undoubtedly means that in the two-member formula "God-man"
the emphasis is placed on the second member. This also, to be sure, is not entirely
new for Berdyaev: as always, even in his early books, he concentrates all his
attention on man. His philosophical evolution consists only in the fact that in
the formula "God-man" the second member is ever more strongly and sharply emphasized
and brought forward - and, of course, with the connection established by him,
it is brought forward at the expense of the first member. So that in the measure
that man grows and is enriched with independent content, God is correspondingly
diminished and impoverished. He is impoverished to such a degree that the formula
itself begins to lose its stability and threatens to be turned around: God-man
is ready to be converted into man-God.
I believe that I will be very close to the truth
if I say that this possibility became a reality in the philosophy of German idealism
(Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone). Of course, Berdyaev
is far from this. But his enthusiasm for Kant, as well as the certainty that the
way to truth goes through gnosis, makes him at times look at "free" German thinking
almost with envy. "Even in the Gospel," he writes, "the purity of the revelation
of the spirit is troubled by human limitation... The phenomenology of revelation
should lead to the consciousness of the truth that to the spirit, that is to say,
to freedom, belongs absolute primacy over all objectified being."
Freedom - this also is one of the fundamental ideas
of Berdyaev which is developed in all of his works with enormous passion and unfeigned
sincerity. Here an ardent follower of Jakob Boehme, Berdyaev constantly talks
about freedom. Like Boehme and the creators of German idealistic philosophy who
were brought up on Boehme, he considers freedom as premundane, uncreated. Phenomenology,
strictly speaking, has nothing to do with this: a century before Husserl introduced
the word phenomenology, Boehme already spoke sufficiently about freedom and said
that it was not created by God but is given to Him, as it is given to men. Schelling's
famous essay on the nature of human freedom, which comes entirely from Boehme,
proceeds from the idea that "the real living concept (of freedom) consists in
the fact that it is a capacity of good and evil" ("der reale lebendige Begriff
[der Freiheit], dass sie ein Vermцgen des Guten und des Bosen ist"). Berdyaev
asserts repeatedly that this essay by Schelling is the best that philosophy has
contributed on the theme of freedom. Freedom is premundane, uncreated; at the
same time it is the unlimited possibility of choice between good and evil. This,
of course, can hardly be called a phenomenology of revelation, if one understands
by revelation what we find in the books of Holy Scripture. There it is said neither
that freedom is uncreated nor that it is the capacity to choose between good and
evil. But neither Boehme nor the German idealists nor Berdyaev consider themselves
bound by Holy Scripture, more exactly, they are far from the idea that revelation
can be sought and found only in Holy Scripture. There is also another source of
revelation, and we have already named it: gnosis. In The Philosophy of the
Free Spirit Berdyaev speaks out in the most decisive way for that conception
of freedom that Boehme implanted in German philosophy. I shall quote Berdyaev's
own words, since his conception of freedom determines his whole philosophical
tendency, or since - to express it in the old language of Belinsky - in it lies
his pathos. In the face of the "brilliant dialectic" of Ivan Karamazov, Berdyaev
without hesitation utters the following thoughts: "A man of Euclidean, completely
rational intellect cannot grasp why God did not create a sinless, blissful world,
incapable of evil and of suffering. But a good human world, a world of Euclidean
intellect, would be distinguished from the evil world of God by the fact that
in it there would be no freedom, freedom would not enter into its design, man
would be a good automaton." And further: "The problem of theodicy can be solved
only through freedom. The mystery of evil is the mystery of freedom... Freedom
begets the good as well as the bad. That is why evil does not negate the existence
of meaning but confirms it. Freedom is not created; that is why it is not nature.
Freedom is pre-existent to the world, it is rooted in primordial being. God is
all-powerful over being, but not over Nothingness, not over freedom. And that
is why evil exists." And finally, "God is omnipotent in relation to being, but
this is inapplicable in relation to non-being."
I repeat: all these ideas belong to Boehme; they
are also developed in Schelling's essay that was mentioned above. Berdyaev himself
emphasizes this forcibly, in that he constantly refers to Boehme and Schelling.
In the universe there is both something and nothing. The nothing is not absolute.
Berdyaev distinguishes, again following Schelling, mк on from ouk on.
Non-being is mк on, that is to say, although it is nothing, it is a kind
of nothing to which enormous power is given over everything - both over God and
men. In the face of Nothingness - which is also freedom - even the omnipotence
of God must be limited. Berdyaev proclaims with all the eloquence of which he
is capable, indeed almost with prophetic inspiration: "Creation must be based
on bottomless freedom, which already before the creation of the world was contained
in Nothingness; without it creation was not necessary to God." In conformity with
this, "evil shows itself as the mover and instigator of the life of the world.
Without evil the primordial paradisiacal condition of the first Adam would have
remained for all eternity and the new Adam would not have appeared, the higher
freedom and love would not have been disclosed. The good which conquered the evil
is a greater good than that which existed before the appearance of evil." And
"redemption is not a return to the paradisiacal state before the fall into sin;
redemption is a passage to a higher state, to the disclosure of the higher spiritual
nature of man." "The primordial creation of the divinized world would not have
known freedom. The triumph over sin and evil is the divinization of the created
world."
If you were to ask Berdyaev whence he knows all
this, he would calmly refer you to gnosis: all this is known to him from experience
- not, to be sure, natural but "spiritual" experience. And he would refer to the
testimony of the great mystics, primarily the German mystics - Boehme, Meister
Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Tauler, and others. But does experience really give
"knowledge?" Kant himself, from whom Berdyaev learned so much, opens his Critique
of Pure Reason with the words, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge
begins with experience... But it does not follow that it all arises out of experience."
More than this: in experience as such there is still no knowledge. A new experience
which abolishes the old experience or radically alters it is always possible.
This applies in the same way to empirical experience as to that which Berdyaev
calls spiritual experience, in which he sees a breakthrough from other worlds.
Knowledge, every knowledge, every "gnosis" presupposes a formed experience - finished,
final. All of the judgments of Berdyaev that have just been quoted can rightly
be called knowledge precisely because this form - the form of universality and
necessity - is undoubtedly inherent in them. "The good which conquered evil is
a greater good than that which existed before the appearance of evil." If one
takes away from this judgment its universality and necessity, he also takes away
the compelling power connected with universality and necessity (it is all the
same whether it came from the object or from the subject); it ceases to be knowledge.
But meanwhile Berdyaev passionately fights in all of his books against this compelling
power and refuses to it in the most decisive way the right to accompany and protect
truth. He extols freedom as the supreme gift - to be sure, not of heaven, for
freedom is really uncreated - but nevertheless as a gift, and in every kind of
compulsion he is prepared to see and actually does see an infringement on the
most sacred rights of man.
But how would it be if one denied compelling power
to the judgments uttered by Berdyaev? He asserts, "freedom is uncreated," "the
good which conquered evil is a greater good than that which existed before the
appearance of evil," without darkness there can be no light, etc. So Boehme believes,
so also the German mystics believed. However, there have been, in fact, people
who thought and spoke differently. Berdyaev refers to experience, to intuition,
but we already know that experience does not guarantee truth; besides, if the
experience of different people bears witness to different things, then how is
one to know which experience reveals the truth? It is the same with intuition.
Who has not referred to intuition, who has not spoken even of intuitus
mysticus? Experience and intuition are obviously insufficient. When Spinoza
was asked whence he knows that his philosophy is the true one, he answered, From
there whence you know that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two
right angles. Berdyaev, of course, would not let this answer of Spinoza's pass:
in it he would perceive rationalism.[3] But, then, what answer
could he give? Or, to put it differently: How is it with the experience not of
limited rationalists but of important, great geniuses, prophets and mystics -
to whom belong, according to Berdyaev himself, Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Angelus
Silesius, Jakob Boehme, and others? This is a question of paramount importance
and requires thoughtful treatment.
Let us take, for example, Meister Eckhart. He declares,
You have been told that higher than everything is love, but I tell you that renunciation
is higher than love. It is necessary to decide, to choose - where is the truth?
There (i.e., with the apostle Paul) where love is placed above everything and,
consequently, above renunciation, or where renunciation is placed above love?
Or: the same Eckhart declares that God remained completely indifferent when He
heard the groaning of His crucified son. And he finds that "this is good: renunciation
is higher than love and mercy and sympathy." Higher not only for men but also
for God. But Kierkegaard asserts that God suffered immeasurably when He heard
the groaning of His son and was tormented in completely human fashion, just like
Kierkegaard himself, when he had to break off with his fiancйe, but immeasurably
more. Or: Angelus Silesius and Meister Eckhart speak about the idea that Deitas
is above God, or that God could not endure for a moment without man. Hegel places
these ideas in the center of his religious philosophy; the German theologians
(for example, the renowned Rudolf Otto) see herein a very profound insight, and
Berdyaev himself, when he quotes in the original extensive excerpts from their
works, thrills with joy, since he considers that here a breakthrough from another
world takes place. But it is indubitable that if Pascal had had occasion to read
the passages quoted by Berdyaev, he would have recalled the words of the Psalmist:
"The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14). "Experience" here
stands over against "experience." To which is preference to be given? And who
is it to whom it is given to decide about these preferences?
Berdyaev does not and can not raise such a question:
the uncreated freedom revealed by phenomenology in primordial being does not permit
an answer to it. But, meanwhile, in fact he cannot manage without an answer. He
chooses that experience which for some reason promises more to him personally
(more correctly: not he chooses the experience, but the experience chooses him)
- and on this he constructs his gnosis. And in order to put an end to the tiresome
questioning, he pleads that the experience favored by him testifies to a breakthrough
from other worlds, while every other experience has to do, as he puts it, with
the natural world. In this lies, if you wish, the attractive power of Berdyaev's
writings. In opposition to Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (to speak only
of modern figures), Berdyaev does not like to linger on questions and to detain
his readers on them - he always hastens to the answer which comes to him, as it
were, of itself. He speaks only in passing about "the brilliant dialectic of Ivan
Karamazov" (that is, about tortured children), but he is inexhaustible when he
has to speak of methods of overcoming the difficulties and horrors of life. He
even avoids the term "horrors of life" and never mentions irreparability. That
is why his writings bear a didactic, edifying character to a significant degree,
and it must be said that here, as if he had found his native element, he often
reaches magnificent pathos. And the more inspiredly he speaks on themes of this
kind, the more he becomes convinced that his words contain the only and final
truth, that they bring news of a real breakthrough from other worlds, and that
everyone who does not catch in them the highest truth thereby dooms himself to
"eternal perdition."
To be sure, against the idea of eternal perdition
commonly adopted by theologians no one has risen up with such energy as Berdyaev.
But on the other hand, how is it with people who remain indifferent toward the
commandments that come to us from other worlds? In Berdyaev's book The Destiny
of Man we read, "The moral consciousness began with God's question: Cain,
where is your brother Abel?" It ends with another question by God: Abel, where
is your brother Cain? We know what Cain answered God; he said: "Am I my brother's
keeper?" But what can Abel answer God, even if one assumes that, in contrast to
his brother, he turns out to consist of nothing but virtues. Freedom is irrational,
is it not? "Triumph over dark freedom," Berdyaev writes in the same place, "is
impossible for God, for this freedom is not created by God and is rooted in nonbeing."
But how can one demand or expect of man that he do what God Himself cannot do.
And, in general, is such a victory possible in our world or in other worlds? Can
anyone do that which God cannot do? Berdyaev asserts that the God-man can do this.
Whence does he know this? And why, if it is not given to God to overcome the freedom
that was not created by Him, should the God-man (who is of the same essence as
God) succeed in overcoming the freedom that was also not created by him? What
"gnosis" here reveals the truth to us? If one were to rely on "knowledge" with
its "possible" and impossible," then he would have to say about Christ the same
thing that Berdyaev said about God: Not he created freedom, not he is to control
and govern it. But such a test gnosis would not pass. It has grown quiet and no
longer ventures to recall the uncreated dark freedom which it called news that
broke through to us in the natural world from another, unnatural, spiritual world.
2
But this does
not mean that gnosis has given up its claims. It connects all of its claims not
with God, and not with the God-man, but with man, who is compelled and ready to
reckon with the "possibilities" established without him and not for him. That
is why in Berdyaev ethics grows so greatly and finally dominates all of his thinking.
To be sure, he speaks about a "paradoxical ethic" (such is the sub-title of his
book The Destiny of Man).[4] But a paradoxical ethic
does not cease to be an ethic, that is to say, it preserves both its autonomy
and its imperativeness. About Berdyaev's ethic the same thing may be said that
Deussen, who wished to bring Hindu thought together with European, said about
Kant's ethic: In it man as Ding an sich dictates his laws to empirical
man.
I do not have room to expatiate here on Fichte's
"ethical idealism." I shall only say briefly that Fichte's ethic not only does
not overcome the Kantian principle, so act that in your action an obligatory principle
of conduct for everyone should be expressed, but rather presupposes it. That is
the reason for the imperative form: You ought to be you yourself. Why "you ought"?
From whom does the order come? It is clear that ethics reserves the right to decide
whether man has fulfilled his duty, whether he has been "himself" in the sense
that it deems desirable - and in the first case it praises and in the second it
blames him. Hannibal was undoubtedly "himself" when, following the unprecedentedly
cruel and inhuman siege of Saguntum, after the exhausted populace of the city
surrendered unconditionally, he handed the city as well as its inhabitants over
to his ferocious soldiers, although he knew quite well that the soldiers would
destroy the city and slaughter all to the last person: men, women, old people,
and children. Also Titus, who acted in the same fashion with Jerusalem, was "himself."
In the case of both their breasts swelled, as true conquerors, when they looked
upon the brutalities of their soldiers. What, then? Must poor ethics also render
praises to them? It is clear that neither Scheler nor Berdyaev will demand this
of it.
As far as Berdyaev himself is concerned, despite
the fact that he speaks tirelessly of freedom and is deeply indignant at every
kind of "compulsion," he cannot get along without the term "you ought," as he
cannot live without air. He says, "Creative tension is a moral imperative and,
moreover, in all spheres of life." Or again: "Man must always act individually
and solve the moral task individually." In reference to Max Scheler and to Gurwicz's
book on Fichte he says, "To be a personality to the end and not to change one's
personality... is an absolute moral imperative." Berdyaev even considers it necessary
to regulate everyday human life in its trivialities: "When you experience pleasure
in the satisfaction of sexual passion or in eating, you ought to feel the poison
therein... but when you experience the pleasure of breathing mountain or sea air
or the fragrance of forests, here there is no lust." He says the same thing in
regard to spiritual lusts, when he unmasks cupidity, ambition, etc. To be sure,
Berdyaev is relatively lenient: Bernard of Clairvaux or Catherine of Siena were
inclined to be suspicious even of the fragrance of the fields. But that is not
the point. What concerns us now mainly and even exclusively is the strictly compelling
character even of the paradoxical ethic. The "you ought" preserves in Berdyaev
the same independence and power that have been characteristic of it since the
most ancient times among all peoples and that were brought forward with such decisiveness
by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason.
Of course, this does not go well with Berdyaev's
general task: he would like that his ethic be Christian and that it be distinguished
on principle from the pagan ethic. Such a distinction on principle he attempts
to find in the notion that all pre-Christian and extra-Christian doctrines do
not permit and do not accept the idea of "personality." But here he has to "stylize,"
for such an opinion does not correspond to historical reality. Both Greek philosophy
and Hindu wisdom always move the idea of personality into the foreground, and
with no less persistence than Berdyaev does. It is not without reason that Berdyaev
himself sees in Stoicism an anticipation of Christianity.[5]
The books of the Stoics were in fact the favorite reading of the early Christians.
Seneca was zealously read by all, and Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae
(Boethius was himself a Christian, but is silent about Christianity) even in the
Middle Ages was the handbook of the monks. With even more justice it may be said
that the idea of personality was always moved in Plato and Socrates to the first
place. The idea of personality was the natural presupposition of their ethic.
Socrates, who inherited the art of his mother, a midwife, assisted a man at the
birth of his personality. In his speech in Plato's Symposium Alcibiades
says that Socrates taught him "to be ashamed." That is, to distinguish between
his empirical and his higher individuality - thus precisely that which Scheler
and Berdyaev, Boehme and Schelling, call personality.
I repeat, ethics at all times set for itself the
task of liberating personality from the individuum. In this respect Hindu philosophy
is not in the least behind European. The tat tvam asi and the aham brahman
asmi (that, namely, "that thou art," - and "I am the All") not only does not
encroach upon the idea of personality but the whole meaning of this famous saying
consists precisely in that it vindicates, elevates and gives meaning to personality.
The Hindus fight only against what they call ahamkara ("egocentrism," "egoism,"
egotism"), but Berdyaev himself after all calls down all kinds of thunder against
egocentrism.[6]
I think that Berdyaev knows this without me. If,
for all that, in all of his books he so persistently awards to Christianity the
right to exclusive possession of the idea of personality, apparently he does this
only because the truth about the powerlessness of God to cope with that which
was not created by Him, revealed by gnosis, imperiously demands of him that he
await the overcoming of the evil reigning in the world not from God but from man.
What man is able to do will be done: God (like morality) can only bless the deed
of man, but man himself must destroy evil. In conformity with this, the fundamental
task of philosophy (according to Berdyaev: Christian philosophy) is, in the first
place, theodicy. It is necessary to show that God is not responsible for evil
and did not wish it, that evil came into the world without the knowledge of God
and will withdraw from the world without His assistance: God awaits from man (again
like morality) the decisive word, a deed, an answer.
The more the thought of God's powerlessness to overcome
evil takes possession of Berdyaev, the louder his admonishing voice grows. Here
is disclosed with special clarity what kind of perspectives gnosis opens to seeking
and suffering mankind. Gnosis gives birth to theodicy: the knowing person becomes
convinced that the chief, the most important thing in life is - "to justify God."
But since every "justification of God" is inevitably bound up with the admission
that evil came into the world independently of His will, all theodicies, no matter
how little similarity they may have with each other, are compelled to proceed
from the thought that God's possibilities are limited, and Leibniz, who called
our world the best of all possible worlds, in this formulation gave the fullest
expression to what is the very essence of theodicy. Thus, despite the venomous
mockery of Voltaire, it must be admitted with Schelling that in his theodicy Leibniz
did everything that a man is able to do who took upon himself such a risky task.
The theodicy of Jakob Boehme and of Berdyaev, who follows him in all things, proceeds,
as we have seen, from "knowledge" about the powerlessness of God and, in conformity
with this, comes down to a selection of considerations which show that the world,
even on the assumption of a powerless God, is nevertheless good. More than this:
The world to a considerable degree is good precisely because God is not omnipotent
and because Nothingness, freedom, which was not created by God but is nonetheless
the source and necessary condition of everything good about which man can dream,
found itself in the world through a play of chance.
To be sure, freedom makes evil possible. But gnosis
insists on its view: this possibility is in no way something negative but something
positive. Berdyaev becomes almost horrified at the thought that man should be
thrown into a world wherein there would be no uncreated freedom, which gives him
the possibility of doing evil: then he would be "an automation of the good." He
also "knows" firmly that fallen man, that is, man who has learned to know good
and evil, is higher than man in the state of innocence, because more has been
revealed to him. Even before that which Berdyaev baptizes with a philosophical
term as "the dialectic of Ivan Karamazov, i.e., before Dostoevsky's story about
tortured children - gnosis does not hesitate: yes, all this is undoubtedly evil
but God can do nothing here. The children must be handed over to torture in order
not to take away from the adults the possibility of choosing between good and
evil and not to deprive them of premundane freedom. Berdyaev hears the voice of
Schelling: "True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity, since spirit and
heart, bound only through their own law, willingly affirm what is necessary" ("Ьber
das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit," Werke, 7:391) - but he does not hear
Dostoevsky's question: Why should one recognize this devilish good and evil if
it comes at so high a price? He does not hear it not because he is an indifferent
or callous man. On the contrary, all of his writings testify that he is unusually
sympathetic. But the boy hunted down before his mother's eyes by the general's
dogs is a "fact," and the little girl who cries helplessly "My God, my God!" is
likewise a "fact." God cannot rescue the little girl, as He cannot tear the general's
dogs away from the boy. This is "holy necessity": one must not encroach on "the
freedom to choose between good and evil," fate's greatest gift to man. That is
why Ivan Karamazov's stories are designated by Berdyaev with the brief, calming
words "brilliant dialectic" and not only are not moved, as in Dostoevsky, to a
visible position but are, as it were, hushed up.
If Berdyaev, instead of praising "uncreated freedom,"
would dwell more on the terrors about which Dostoevsky tells us through Ivan Karamazov's
mouth, everything would be radically altered. He would curse this freedom, as
Karamazov and Dostoevsky cursed it; he would also curse the "knowledge of good
and of evil" that is bound up with this freedom and in which speculative philosophy
perceives the source of the highest spiritual values. At least he would then share
Dostoevsky's suspicion that the "knowledge of good and of evil" in no way testifies
to man's perfection and loftiness, but that one must see in it a fall and, indeed,
a fateful one - what Dostoevsky (obviously under the influence of the story of
the Book of Genesis about the fall into sin) expressed in the words "to recognize
this devilish good and evil." But I repeat, Berdyaev does not and can not do this.
Gnosis holds him firmly in its grasp and does not let him go. With "facts" one
must not dispute, one can do nothing against them: the boy was torn to pieces
by the general's dogs, the little girl was tortured to death by her fanatical
parents. And God did not protect them: it is clear that He could not. And if we
wish to "justify God," then there is only one way out for us: to concentrate all
our intellectual and moral powers on showing that it is impossible for God to
intervene and, through this, to persuade ourselves and others that this impossibility
is good. For the general to be free, it is necessary (Schelling's "holy necessity")
that the boy who was handed over by him to be torn apart by the dogs be without
protection.
We see that Berdyaev's theodicy and that of those
from whom he learned follow the same path that wisdom among all people at all
times has followed. The Stoic Cleanthes expressed this with words that, thanks
to Seneca and Cicero, became widely known: "fata volentem ducunt, nolentem
trahunt." Wisdom never went beyond the boundaries of that freedom which expressed
itself in the joyful readiness to submit to the inevitable, for wisdom always
based itself on gnosis, and where gnosis revealed "necessity" wisdom uncomplainingly
set up its "you ought" and saw in this the essence of freedom. In ancient as well
as in medieval and modern philosophy, freedom is not freedom to be in command
of reality but only freedom to evaluate reality in this or some other way: he
who bows down before necessity is led by fate, but he who does not bow down, who
accepts necessity unwillingly, is forcibly dragged along by it. On this also is
autonomous morality founded.
All of Berdyaev's reflections on "the meaning of
suffering" do not and can not arrive beyond the boundaries of that freedom which
the sages of antiquity already knew and proclaimed. And in this freedom he sees
the "illumination" that biblical revelation brought to men. But, I repeat and
insist: Neither the Bible nor revelation needed this "illumination." The wisdom
of all peoples and of all times already knew it - and not only among the Greeks
but among the Hindus (indeed, even in Buddhism) nothing but this illumination
is always the subject of discussion. If Berdyaev, however, very stubbornly denies
that wisdom can arrive at illumination through its own means, as he also denies
that the idea of personality was already fully worked out among the Greeks and
Hindus, this apparently is to be explained by the fact that he would like to have
as an asset of his philosophy not merely that which Holy Scripture brought.
Berdyaev is a philosopher of culture, and his ardent
devotion to the achievements of culture imperiously demands of him the acquisition
of exclusive possession of all these achievements. We have seen how he avoided
Karamazov's "brilliant dialectic." He could not bring himself to speak explicite
of that which is disturbed Dostoevsky. Another case: his interpretation of the
Book of Job. Quite like Kant (in his remarkable essay "On the Failure of All Philosophical
Attempts at Theodicy") he sees in the Book of Job only a dispute between the much-plagued
old man and his friends. The friends assert that Job is guilty and deserved all
the misfortune that befell him - while Job protests and talks about his innocence.
Everything ends with the intervention of God who, in this dispute, takes the side
of Job and condemns his friends. But this dispute is really only one episode taken
into the Book of Job. The meaning of the whole narrative consists in the very
fact that Job, contrary to the commands of wisdom, refuses to reconcile himself
to the horrors of his new existence and cannot do so, and that it is not so much
with his friends that he argues as that he appeals to the Creator. Initially he
restrains himself and declares at the first reports of the blows that overtook
him - just as is proper for a wise man: "The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken
away." Expressed in the language of the Stoics or of Berdyaev, Job accepts misfortune
in an enlightened way. But afterwards - and here the "Book of Job" really begins
- he seeks for the return of what he has lost and manifests in his seeking the
most extreme, unheard-of impetuosity and lack of restraint. The friends say of
him: "He drinks up scorning like water" (Job 34:7). And what they say is, indeed,
true! If Berdyaev's expression "a maximalism without grace" is rightly applicable
to anyone, it is precisely to Job. Job does not accept edification, he does not
listen to the voice of wisdom: he seeks the return of that which was taken away
from him - his riches, his health, his children. And because his friends cannot
give this to him and offer instead what men in such cases can offer - Stoic reflections
on the theme "fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt" (Job knew this without
them and expressed it in the words "The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away")
- and furthermore demand that Job should be satisfied with this kind of "freedom,"
a dispute arises between them. "You are all sorry comforters," Job says angrily,
but his friends reproach him that he is not willing and not able, as is proper
for a wise man, to endure sufferings in an enlightened way, to give them a meaning.
And, of course, in their way they are right. In some ways they may have exaggerated:
perhaps it would have been better not to speak to Job about his "guilt" - but
human consolations very rarely keep within the proper limits.
Let us recall what Vladimir Solovyov wrote about
Pushkin and Lermontov: they were both guilty and deserved their fate. But I say
once again: in the Book of Job the friends and their speeches are only an episode.
The essential things in it are the speeches with which Job turns to God. And even
more essential is God's reply. God recognized that Job was right - and he did
this not with words but by giving back to him everything that he had lost. About
this Berdyaev is silent, as Kant is also silent in the essay mentioned above:
God's role for them comes down exclusively to a justification of Job before morality.
Why do Berdyaev and Kant pass over in silence that God returned to Job everything
that he had lost? Why do they limit the role of God to a purely moral influence?
To this there can be only one answer: gnosis makes its right prevail; both Berdyaev
and Kant know with certainty that God can cleanse Job before morality but that
He is powerless to protect him from misfortune. In conformity with this, they
are convinced that they have interpreted the biblical narrative - after having
shortened (improved) it - in spirit and in truth, and that in general only an
understanding of Holy Scripture in which nothing that offends our knowledge is
presupposed is an understanding in spirit and in truth. Hegel expressed this in
his religious philosophy in the following words: "The miracle is only a violence
upon natural connections and thereby only a violence upon the spirit."
[1] His book The Philosophy of the Free Spirit (Fiiosofiya svobodnogo dukha)
was awarded a prize by the French Academy.
[2] If my memory does not fail me, Berdyaev speaks in one of his essays or addresses
about the lack of grace in Nietzsche's philosophy. In On the Destiny of Man
he uses the expression "the unclear prophetism of Nietzsche." It is significant
that Karl Jaspers, who values Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's talents even more
than Berdyaev, dissociates himself with similar energy from their ideas. Is this
a coincidence - or is an influence to be seen here (Berdyaev studied Jaspers thoroughly)?
In both cases the similarity is alike significant.
[3] Berdyaev even speaks of Spinoza's "limited rationalism," although it seems
to me that this is a slip of the tongue. The word "limited" is very unsuitable
for Spinoza, and it is not possible that so subtle a thinker as Berdyaev did not
feel this. All the more so - since the central chapter ("Death and Immortality")
of his book On the Destiny of Man is undoubtedly inspired by Spinoza's
reflections on the theme of amor erga rem aeternam et infinitam and by
his sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse. "Eternal life," writes Berdyaev,
"begins already in time, it can come to light in every moment, in the depths of
the moment, as the eternally present. Eternal life is not the future life, but
the life of the present, the life in the depth of the moment." A completely Spinozist
thought. And, in general, all of Berdyaev's "paradoxical ethic," like Kant's ethic,
is saturated with Spinoza's idea: beatitudo non est praemium virtutis, sed
ipsa virtus.
[4] "Kant with his teaching about intelligible character and
freedom was perhaps closer to the truth than other philosophers" (Spirit and
Reality, p. 102).
[5] Ibid., p. 97.
[6] Very instructive in this respect is the book Westliche und Ostliche Mystik
by Rudolf Otto, who has been mentioned above. Otto compares the mysticism of Eckhart
with the mysticism of Shankara, the most remarkable of the Hindu sages (eighth
century), and attempts to establish, on the one hand, a similarity and, on the
other, a distinction between them. In the first he succeeds brilliantly: the similarity
is truly striking. But no matter how much he endeavors to show the distinction,
he arrives at nothing but the bare assertion that Eckhart's mysticism is determined
"through the Palestinian-biblical ground on which it was raised." Palestine and
the Bible are felt in Eckhart only in his style (which is really marvelous and
has preserved the coloration and even the aroma of Palestine and the Bible). However,
his ideas (for instance, that about which I have already spoken briefly above
regarding Deitas, etcetera) he draws from the same source as Shankara -
from a realm to which the voices that resounded in Palestine and were engraved
in the Bible never reached and could not reach.
3
We have now
reached the most important but at the same time the most enigmatic and difficult
moment of that which Kierkegaard calls existential philosophy. Kierkegaard also
takes the Book of Job as the point of departure in his reflections. But in contrast
with Kant and Berdyaev, the "demands" of the much-plagued old man do not appear
to him only as a blameworthy maximalism; he sees in Job's audacity and lack of
restraint the only correct attitude of man towards God. Of course, he knows just
as well as Kant and Berdyaev how little the denouement of the Book of Job agrees
with the ideas about the "possible" and "impossible" that are rooted in us. He
also knows that it deserves moral condemnation as "a violence upon the spirit."
However, this not only does not embarrass him but inspires him to a new struggle
that is truly desperate and unprecedented in its intensity. "Gnosis," the whole
self-sufficient knowledge that is "emancipated" from God, does not appear to him,
as it does to Berdyaev, as a breakthrough from other worlds. Following Holy Scripture,
he connects gnosis with man's fall into sin and speaks of a "suspension of the
ethical."
"All that is not of faith is sin," Kierkegaard tirelessly
repeats the words of the apostle, and he interprets them in the sense that the
concept opposite to sin is freedom. But not that uncreated freedom about which
we have heard so much from Boehme, Schelling, and Berdyaev, not the freedom that
harmonizes, with holy necessity; not the freedom to choose between good and evil.
Such an understanding of freedom, in Kierkegaard's view, would decisively contradict
Holy Scripture. Freedom is possibility. And faith is a mad struggle for the impossible
- precisely that which Job undertook and about which Berdyaev and Kant are silent.
Faith begins where, according to all evidence, every possibility comes to an end,
where both our experience and our reason testify unhesitatingly that there is
not and cannot be any hope whatever for man. Greek philosophy, Kierkegaard writes,
began with "wonder," while the existential philosophy begins with despair. Faith
is the source of the existential philosophy, and precisely insofar as it dares
to rise up against knowledge, to put knowledge itself in question. The existential
philosophy is a philosophy de profundis. This philosophy does not ask, it does
not inquire, but appeals, by enriching thinking with a dimension that is completely
alien and incomprehensible to speculative philosophy. It awaits an answer not
from our reason, not from insight - but from God. From God, for Whom nothing
is impossible, Who holds all truths in His hands, Who rules over the present as
well as over the past and the future.
"Kierkegaard's friend" (Kierkegaard almost always
speaks through a mediator) flees from Hegel to the private thinker Job, in whose
brief remarks he finds more than in the systems of German idealism, than in the
"Greek symposium." Perhaps we find in his reflections on the Book of Job the most
irritating and challenging and, at the same time, the most attractive and fascinating
of everything that Kierkegaard wrote. When his friend, after he has turned away
from Hegel, goes to Job, he goes to him not for moral consolations, not for a
theodicy. He has already tested and rejected all moral consolations. And theodicy,
that is, the justification of God before reason, appears to Kierkegaard as the
most unsuccessful, most unfortunate, most fateful idea of all that human wisdom
has ever conceived. He seeks "repetition," that is, the same thing that Job aimed
for and that, in Kierkegaard's opinion, will in the future philosophy take the
place of the Greek recollection (anamnesis). He begs Job - and he hopes
that Job will not reject his request - to take him under his protection. Although
he did not have as much as Job and lost only his beloved, this was nevertheless
everything for which he lived, as for the poor youth of the fairy tale, who fell
in love with a princess, his love was the substance of his whole life. Everyone
knows that the poor youth will never see the princess as his wife. Kierkegaard
also knows this and speaks of it just as decisively as all. But everyone also
knows that Job, crushed by fate, must not hope for any "repetition." So long as
knowledge, so long as experience and reason preserve their sovereign rights -
there can be no talk of repetition. So long as knowledge preserves its rights!
So long as we seek the truth in experience and in our reason! But what impels
us to turn to knowledge? What binds us so much to experience and reason? Kierkegaard
raises the same question that Dostoevsky raised in his time: I am not able to
break through the stone wall with my head, but does this mean that the wall is
an insurmountable obstacle for all eternity? Experience and reason answer this
question affirmatively - but who has given experience and reason the right of
final decision? Who has suggested to us the certainty that our knowledge, even
the knowledge of facts, is something final and irrevocable? The Greek symposium?
German mysticism? Hegelian philosophy? And so Kierkegaard proclaims with senseless
audacity: Through reason Job lost everything, through reason the poor youth lost
the princess, and he himself Regina Olsen. But not to reason is it given to decide
human fate. Through the Absurd everything was given back to Job, through the Absurd
the poor youth will obtain the princess and Sцren Kierkegaard his bride.
At this point the existential philosophy becomes
for Berdyaev completely unendurable. To be sure, he leaves Job in peace - Job
who demands his riches and his wealth and his children back from God (and received
them - according to the Bible, of course). But with all the more force does he
fall upon the poor youth who seeks to obtain the princess, and on Kierkegaard
himself who cannot forget his Regina Olsen. And it must be said that his reasonings
are irreproachable. "Perhaps," he says, "God prefers that Kierkegaard should lose
his bride and that the poor youth should not obtain the princess... I even allow
myself to think that perhaps this would not be so bad. Regina Olsen would probably
have become a quite ordinary bourgeois woman and Kierkegaard, with a happy life,
would have written banal theological books but we would not have had his brilliant
works." Of course one could and should say the same thing about Job: if his misfortune
had not occurred, then there would not have been the incomparable book of Job,
But, indeed, Kierkegaard "knows" this just as well as all of us.[7]
He knows that Regina Olsen, seen with the eyes "of all," is a very ordinary creature.
Yes, seen with the eyes of all! But how many flaming pages has Berdyaev written
against "all" and "omnitude," how enraged he has been, following Nietzsche, over
the pretension of the "many, all too many" to trample and to annihilate individual
evaluations! But now, when an opportunity presents itself really to take the side
of the "individual person," Berdyaev goes over the side of his hereditary enemy
in the most decisive fashion. Kierkegaard would not have written his brilliant
books. This, of course, is correct: both wisdom and ordinary common sense speak
for this. Pushkin expressed it in his well known verses: "If banishment, incarceration
befall a poet - so much the better, say lovers of art. So much the better: he
draws and transmits to us new thoughts and feelings." But Gogol, indeed, burned
the second volume of his Dead Souls, Tolstoy rejected his War and Peace,
and even Shakespeare related to his similarly "brilliant" works with "sovereign
contempt." Yes, if Berdyaev had only spoken about common sense or human wisdom!
But he speaks in the name of God Himself, sets forth his judgments as a breakthrough
from the realm of the spirit. It might have been expected that he would here rise
up against "omnitude" and rejoice over the opportunity to stand on the side of
the "aristocratic" ("aristocratic" is one of the favorite qualifications of Berdyaev,
bringing him close to Nietzsche), solitary personality. And one must think that
he would have liked to do this. But, despite the fact that he transferred the
center of knowledge from the object to the subject, "gnosis" preserved all of
its coerciveness: it stands on the way and does not yield. God is powerless, He
is able to do nothing against mighty Nothingness.
"Kierkegaard died," Berdyaev writes, "without having
obtained Regina Olsen as his wife, Nietzsche died without being cured of his terrible
sickness, Socrates was poisoned, and that is all." All this, of course, is correct,
all this is irreproachable, all this is convincing. But, again, does not Kierkegaard
"know" all this just as well as all of us? If he nevertheless asserts that the
poor youth obtained the princess, that Job had his children, etc. returned to
him, he does this not because he did not know what all of us know but because
he feels de profundis that our knowledge, knowledge in general, cannot
be the source of final, definitive truth. The existential philosophy bases itself
on the Absurd and not only does not conceal this but emphasizes it at every opportunity.
The poor youth believes that the impossible, that which, according to our convictions,
is absolutely and eternally impossible, will become possible under the protection
of the Absurd. Faith is freedom. Not that uncreated freedom which joyfully harmonizes
with "holy necessity," not the freedom which chooses between good and evil, not
the freedom the very idea of which already presupposes the intrusion of evil into
life and which for Kierkegaard signifies the utmost bindingness taking its rise
from the fruits of the forbidden tree - but that created freedom which is born
out of the biblical "very good" and the great promise: "Nothing will be impossible
for you."
I will say it again (no matter how often one repeats
it, it is always too little): all the considerations that are brought forth by
wisdom and common sense in favor of the idea that there is no such freedom, that
such freedom belongs in the realm of the utterly fantastic and of crude superstition
(Kant's Schwдrmarei und Aberglauben), are very well known to Kierkegaard.
Over against Kierkegaard's poor youth Berdyaev sets another youth who dreams about
"knowledge of the mysteries of being or of scientific discovery of the mystery
of nature" and remarks ironically that "God cannot satisfy the wishes of this
youth." But does one really go to God for knowledge? And has knowledge really
ever introduced a man to a "mystery?" Kierkegaard's youth (more precisely: Kierkegaard
himself) sought with all the ardor of which a man is capable such knowledge and
such discoveries, and he was everywhere that one could learn anything at all -
he listened to the speeches of the Greeks at their symposia, visited the mystics,
studied modern philosophy right up to Hegel and Schelling - and ran from them
to the ignorant, half-wild Job (who, according to the Bible, was a righteous man)
for what he needed more than anything in the world but what, according to the
"knowledge" of the renowned teachers, nowhere existed and nowhere can exist: "repetition,"
which, indeed, is the fulfillment of the promise, "Nothing will be impossible
for you."
Again, it is beyond doubt that Kierkegaard knew
better than anyone else what he was undertaking when, under cover of the Absurd,
he decided to exchange the symposium and Hegel for Job. Job as a philosopher,
Job as a thinker (and precisely the biblical Job, not the Job embellished by enlightened
criticism) - -what could be more senseless, more absurd? If Kant had been in a
position to read Kierkegaard's Repetition, he would certainly have blushed
on account of it and would probably have written some variations on the theme
"About the Reveries of a Clairvoyant" or on "What Does It Mean To Orient Oneself
in Thinking?" For Socrates was really poisoned, the poor youth either contented
himself with a brewer's widow or remained a bachelor throughout his life, Regina
Olsen became the wife of Schlegel - all these are eternal truths over which God
Himself no longer has any power. All this is "self-evident." But is there really
in these self-evidences even the slightest trace of a breakthrough from other
worlds? Is not the transformation of "facts" into eternal truths only a matter
of the Kantian "synthetic judgments a priori?" The existential philosophy, however,
does not consist in the discovery of "self-evidences" but in their overcoming.
From this comes Kierkegaard's "maximalism," which Berdyaev qualifies with calm
certainty as "without grace." But does not precisely this "maximalism" tell us
about a "breakthrough?" Kierkegaard's overcoming of the self-evidences, more exactly,
his desperate, senseless struggle against them, is connected, as I have already
said, with the good news of the divine "very good" and of the "Nothing will be
impossible for you" that broke through to him. But reason does not accept this
news: it is perceived and becomes a truth only under the protection of the Absurd
- more exactly, of that which Kierkegaard calls faith.
On this basis there arose that terrible conflict
with Bishop Mynster by which the last months of Kierkegaard's life were marked.
Mynster was the head of the Danish Church. The whole population of Denmark honored
him as a deeply religious, devout pastor wholeheartedly devoted to his task -
indeed, almost as a saint. He was also the confessor of Kierkegaard's father and
was able to bring peace into his restless and tormented soul. For the information
of those who do not know it, I shall report here that Kierkegaard's father, when
he was only eight years old, cursed God in an attack of despair and that to his
death he could not divest himself of the fearful burden of the consciousness that
he had forever damned his soul. Kierkegaard himself, whom Mynster had carried
in his arms as a child and who never missed any of the bishop's sermons, knew
very well that in the person of Mynster Denmark had an exemplary spiritual leader.
But when, after Mynster's death, his son-in-law Professor Martensen, a convinced
Hegelian and future head of the Danish Church, called him in his funeral oration
a "witness to the truth," Kierkegaard suddenly lost patience and, with an impetuosity
that rarely manifested itself even in him with such force, declared a protest
against Martensen's words. In doing so he forgot everything: what Mynster had
done for the religious development of his native country, as well as how he was
able to support and strengthen the soul of his father (whom Kierkegaard revered)
and what he had done for himself. It is not given to one who testifies only about
the possible to be a "witness to the truth." To a witness to the truth it is revealed,
and he reveals this to others, that Job's slain children were returned to him,
that Socrates was not poisoned, that the poor youth obtained the princess, that
Regina Olsen became Kierkegaard's wife.
"For God nothing is impossible:" this is Kierkegaard's
most cherished, deepest - I am prepared to say - his only thought. But at the
same time, it is also that which distinguishes in a radical fashion the existential
philosophy from the speculative and gives rise to the threatening and irreconcilable
Kierkegaardian Entweder/Oder. Kierkegaard expressed this in another form
with the words "the suspension of the ethical." If the ethical is the highest,
then Abraham, the father of faith, is lost - he wrote. This, of course, does not
mean that he extolled "immorality." But even the noblest morality, if it becomes
the "highest," is transformed into the "devilish good and evil."
It is strange that Berdyaev, who in his book The
Destiny of Man comes so near to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and to his reflections
on good and evil (even in form the second part of this book, entitled "Ethics
Beyond Good and Evil" reminds one of Nietzsche), does not once ask himself what
induced Nietzsche, a gentle and soft man by nature, to praise cruelty so frenziedly.
Love, compassion, sympathy - these are themes to which so many enthusiastic pages
are devoted in all of Berdyaev's writings, but no matter how good and important
all this may be, not only does it not solve the tormenting problems of life but
it poses them with new force. And here Kierkegaard again approaches Dostoevsky,
who in the last years of his life wrote in his Diary of a Writer, "I affirm
that love for mankind, with the consciousness that it is impossible to help it,
is transformed into hatred." Dostoevsky turned out to be a seer: before our eyes
Nietzsche, when he arrived at the conviction that mankind, with all the terrors
to which it is doomed in its existence, is left to itself and its insignificant
powers and is compelled to seek salvation in morality (he said: "God is dead,"
"We have killed God."), proclaimed cruelty as the supreme principle. Kierkegaard
himself surpasses even Nietzsche when, in his Edifying Discourses, he develops
with such ecstasy, almost with voluptuousness, in a thousand different ways the
idea of the boundless ferocity of Christianity. To be sure, all this in Kierkegaard
is "indirect communications," but the essence of the matter does not change thereby.
Love, sympathy, compassion must be preached to callous people, shut up in their
petty and worthless interests. And this is a very important, very significant
thing, to which Berdyaev not without reason devoted his best powers and talent.
But for those who have been "opened up," for whom one's neighbor is neither object
nor subject and not even a "personality" but a living being like themselves -
love and compassion bring not solving answers but disturbing and tormenting, unescapable
questions. In this also lies the meaning of the reflections on the tears of children
and the final harmony that Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of his Ivan Karamazov.[8]
In correspondence with this, the redemption promised
by the prophets and carried out by Christ is understood differently, depending
on the person with whom one happens to talk about it. Berdyaev moves to the forefront
the great moral beauty of Christ's act of sacrifice. Of course, in his way, he
is right: this moment should not and need not be concealed. In our vale of tears
the consciousness that God has shared with us our sorrows and sufferings brings
great relief and consolation: everything Berdyaev has written on this theme is
excellent and leaves an indelible impression. But he is hardly right when he supposes
that all his reflections on this theme are an offense to the Jews and folly to
the Greeks. So it really once was, but long, very long, ago. In our times the
case is different; Berdyaev himself not without reason talks so much about the
disclosure of Christianity in history. At present the "suffering God" is "understandable"
to everyone, seems "natural" to everyone, and no one sees in this any folly, no
one is offended thereby. The historians even speak of a religion of the suffering
God in general and see in Christianity one of many religions of this kind. And
for the philosophers the suffering God opens up the possibility of calling themselves
bona fide Christians: herein is expressed, to speak in Hegel's words, the unity
of the human and divine natures. Man is condemned to suffer, God is condemned
to suffer - this is not a breach of the natural order of things, not a miracle,
not a "violence upon the spirit." To put it differently: we free ourselves of
the idea of God-man and arrive at man-God, in which our reason and our morality
recognize their own work that presupposes no revelation whatever. But there is
still one moment which Berdyaev almost passes over: God took upon Himself the
sins of the world. Luther says, "God sent His only begotten Son into the world
and placed upon Him all the sins of all men, in that He said: Be thou Peter that
denier, Paul that persecutor, blasphemer of God and doer of violence, David that
adulterer, that sinner who ate the apple in Paradise, that thief on the cross;
all in all, thou shalt be the person who committed the sins of all men."
Now this moment, which forms the essence of the
prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel and defines by itself the content of the great
deed of the redeemer that is unprecedented in its enormity, determines the direction
of the existential philosophy. If Peter did not deny, if David was not an adulterer,
if Adam did not taste the forbidden fruits - then everything that Kierkegaard
tells us about the poor youth, about Job, about his rights to Regina Olsen passes
from the realm of the eternally impossible into the realm of the real par excellence.
Of course, for our understanding all this is the height of nonsense and immorality,
as the faith that discloses itself in such impossibilities is also the height
of nonsense and immorality. Everything that we have both of common sense and reason
- small, great, and very great - all of our moral sense rebels in response to
the pretensions of such a faith. Kierkegaard understands this very well; that
is why he speaks so much about the Absurd and the suspension of the ethical. That
is why he also decided, before all of Denmark (now already before the whole world),
to protest when Martensen - it must be said, with all of his heart and in all
sincerity - proclaimed Mynster a witness to the truth. A witness to the truth
would be that person at whose word mountains begin to move and for whom nothing
would be impossible. But, Berdyaev angrily maintains, in that case, faith never
existed in the world: no one ever has really moved mountains, and even among saints
there have not been any persons who did not take the impossible into consideration.
Again this objection is irreproachable, as all of Berdyaev's objections are. But
Kierkegaard is really not at all concerned with irreproachabilities and objections;
he deliberately does not listen to them and does not wish to do so.[9]
He listens to something else: he listens to a voice which proclaims to him that,
when he gains faith, nothing will be impossible for him, that Peter will turn
out to be one who remained faithful to his teacher, that David will turn out to
be not an adulterer but the author of the Psalms, that Socrates will turn out
to be not poisoned, and Job one who has received back all that was taken away
from him.
To be sure, Kierkegaard confesses that he could
not make the movement of faith. But does this really weaken in any way the importance
of that which came to him from Scripture? Is it not rather the other way around?
And, in general, could any consideration whatsoever really weaken the importance
of that which he had heard? The moment came when all considerations ended: "In
order to find God it is necessary to lose reason." And not only that "discursive
reason" which the philosophers more or less willingly give up, but all reasons,
of every character and rank, whether great or small, that up until now have served
and continue to serve as the only source of truth for man. It is necessary to
renounce all of them, to free oneself from all of them. The genuine source of
truth is faith - faith, which not only does not give but overcomes the most indubitable
knowledge ("facts" and "immediate data") and, having overcome it, discloses its
superfluity and insignificance. We have heard that freedom existed before God,
that God has no authority over freedom - He is powerless before Nothingness. We
have heard that darkness is the condition of light; that freedom is freedom of
choice between good and evil; that a man who would not choose between good and
evil would be an automaton of the good; that he who, having come to know both
good and evil, would return to the good has an endless advantage over the innocent
man who did not know this difference. And we have heard all this from keensighted,
profound, wise people as truths revealed to us by the highest reason, as truths
that have broken through from other worlds.
However, these are not truths from other worlds
but Kantian synthetic judgments a priori, which serve as the necessary condition
of rational thinking. Uncreated freedom is a fiction; the certainty that he who
has come to know the difference between good and evil has "advantages," has more
"experience" than the man of paradisiacal ignorance, etc. - these are obsessive
ideas connected with the fruits of the forbidden tree. A freedom as well as a
Nothingness imperiously deciding our fate do not exist and have never existed,
but the free man was brought into being by the Creator and his freedom consisted
precisely in his having no need either for knowledge or the distinction between
good and evil. Paradisiacal ignorance is by no means poorer than the knowledge
of the fallen man. It is qualitatively different and endlessly richer and
fuller in content than all our knowledge. Some people (for instance, Dostoevsky
in "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man") have been able to catch a glimpse of this
mystery and even to tell about it.
The beginning of all knowledge is fear. When a man,
before he turns to God, begins to question: But what kind of God is this, and
does He correspond to the exalted idea about the Supreme Being that I have made
up for myself? - he repeats anew the sin of Adam, even though he imagines that
in this way he is realizing his freedom. He is testing God by means of that "knowledge"
which the fruits of the forbidden tree have brought him, without even suspecting
that his fear, that all his apprehensions, signify of themselves the loss of freedom.
The free man is not afraid, he fears nothing; the free man does not ask, does
not look around. That is why his relationship to God is expressed not in knowledge
but in faith. Faith is that freedom which the Creator breathed into man along
with life. And the existential philosophy - in opposition to the speculative -
no longer seeks knowledge and does not see in knowledge the final and only path
to truth. For this philosophy knowledge itself is transformed into a problem,
becomes problematic. And in that moment when it becomes problematic, it loses
its power over man: on the strength of the Absurd the poor youth obtained the
hand of the princess, Job's children were restored to him, Regina Olsen fell to
the lot of Kierkegaard. For God nothing is impossible: truths as well as reality
are in His hands. Human destinies are decided on Job's balances, not on the balances
of speculation.
4
I have said
before that in his last book, Berdyaev, in treating the idea of "God-man," stresses
more strongly than in his previous ones the moment of humanity, and that this
is the "new" thing in his evolution. But, in a strange way, in this book he emphasizes
the existential philosophy to a similar if not a greater degree, despite all his
attacks on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, over against whom he persistently sets the
German mystics. For the latter every praise seems to him insufficient. "Eternal
truth is conveyed by the voice of the prophet: 'Bring no more vain offerings to
Me. Learn to do good, seek justice, defend the orphan, stand up for the widow.'
And so also resounds the voice of Christ himself." Or: "The gospel is immersed
in the Judaic human atmosphere... Jesus Christ does not withdraw at all from the
manifold world, he does not renounce the sinful world... He lived among people,
among publicans and sinners, he attended banquets," etc. Berdyaev might also have
recalled how Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, restored sight to the blind,
resurrected the dead, etc. It might seem that that deep humanity with which Berdyaev's
writings are animated ought to have directed his attention to this side of Christ's
activity, and that, referring, like Kierkegaard, to Jesus' words "Blessed is he
who is not tempted because of me," he would have tried at least to some degree
to realize in the existential philosophy the idea: "For God nothing is impossible."
But Berdyaev cannot bring himself to this. Traditional
philosophy (or the so-called philosophia perennis) suggested to him the
certainty that for God there is also the impossible - and, indeed, much that is
impossible. That is why he carefully avoids a confrontation between gnosis and
the existential philosophy. But where, against his will, they accidentally collide,
gnosis turns out to be the victor. And the temptation of gnosis is so great that
Berdyaev even triumphs over its victory - indeed, I am almost prepared to say
- gives it his blessing. I would recall once again the words of Berdyaev already
quoted above, since under them is hidden the stumbling-block against which every
gnosis inevitably runs up. "For what is it possible to hope? That God is unbounded
possibility? But Kierkegaard died without having obtained Regina Olsen as his
wife, Nietzsche died without having been cured of his terrible sickness, Socrates
was poisoned, and that is all."
What could be more convincing than these words?
And who will bring himself to dispute with reason, which testifies to these truths?
Is it not clear - even to a blind person - that everything is as Berdyaev says?
But, first of all, is it appropriate to triumph here, is it appropriate to bless
reason which testifies about such truths that they are eternal and unchangeable?
This question arises with even greater urgency if one discloses the content of
what Berdyaev called the "brilliant dialectic of Ivan Karamazov." Before the eyes
of his mother a boy was hunted down by dogs, fanatical parents tortured a miserable
girl to death, etc. What can be done here? Has God Himself the possibility of
changing anything here? Or is He here powerless, because this is the realm in
which Nothingness rules? Berdyaev, who turns with his questions to reason or,
more correctly, is compelled to turn to reason, submissively and weak-willedly
accepts the answer that comes to him from reason: no one, neither men nor God,
can do anything here. Here everything is at an end forever. Socrates has been
poisoned, the dogs have gnawed the boy to pieces.
Did Berdyaev wish this? - Berdyaev, one of
the most humane not only of Russian but of European philosophers, the lawful spiritual
heir of that great tradition which Pushkin, the greatest of the Russians, implanted
in Russian thinking? Of course, he did not and does not wish it, but no one takes
his will into consideration. But where, then, is the freedom that he so selflessly
praised? To put it differently, is "uncreated freedom" which is compelled, according
to Schelling, to harmonize with necessity - indeed, even to bless it, to call
it holy - is such freedom still a free freedom, or was Luther right when he called
it an enslaved freedom? A freedom enslaved, paralyzed by gnosis? In the presence
of this question the meaning of the Kierkegaardian Entweder/Oder and the
eternal, irreconcilable opposition between speculative and existential philosophy
is explained with all terrifying clarity. Kierkegaard raises the same question,
but he directs it not to reason but to the Creator - and he does not ask but appeals
to Him. No matter how much reason may have tried to convince him that everything
is finished, that Socrates has been poisoned, that the boy has been torn to pieces
by the dogs - and no matter how much reason may have insisted that there is no
escape from its truths, that there is nowhere to flee from them - Kierkegaard
continues to repeat: For God nothing is impossible.
Even the truths proclaimed by God Himself do not
become final truths, independent of God, standing on their own. "Ego sum Dominus
et non mutor" does not at all mean, as the theologians suppose, that once
God has decided anything, He has already thereby bound both men and Himself. On
the contrary, the immutability of God means that everything, even the truths created
by Him, remain in His power and must obey Him. It will be said that this is arbitrariness
- the most terrible thing that it is possible to conceive. Quite true, for us
this is arbitrariness, and for us arbitrariness is senselessly terrible. However,
"beyond good and evil," for beings - to put it in another way - who have not tasted
of the fruits of knowledge, for beings associated with the primordial "very good,"
arbitrariness coincides with freedom. It is not terrible, it is kindly - preposterous
as this may sound to us. It does not harmonize with necessity, does not recognize
it as holy; it is itself holy. That is why, according to Kierkegaard, freedom
is not the capacity to choose between good and evil, as is commonly thought, but
freedom is - possibility.
Socrates was poisoned, Job's children were slain,
Abraham sacrificed his son - all these, reason seeks to convince us, are final,
definitive, eternal truths which, although they arose in time, will never pass
away and will never be swept out of being by any kinds of winds blowing from other
worlds. But is reason the master over truths and being? Are not the apostles and
prophets right when they say that human wisdom is foolishness before God? As long
as we trust in reason, possibilities are limited and "experience" proudly arrays
itself in the garments of eternity. But is reason really all-powerful? Has it
the right to dispense titles to eternity? With an audacity almost unheard of in
the history of modern thought Kierkegaard proclaims, reason is a usurper and impostor.
Truths must be sought not from reason but from the Absurd. By virtue of the Absurd
the poor youth obtains the princess as his wife, Abraham receives back the sacrificed
Isaac. Kierkegaard knows well that for everyone his words are madness. But the
prophets have prepared us for madness.
I have said that Kierkegaard's audacity is almost
unheard of in the history of modern thought. "Almost," for beside him there lived
in the nineteenth century still another man who sensed and endlessly loved the
"madness" of Scripture. For Dostoevsky, as we recall, the stone "walls," that
is to say, the "impossibilities" revealed by reason, are not a counterargument.
And again not because he does not know how "all of us" estimate the power of such
walls. He knows this extremely well - no worse than the authors of long treatises
on the theory of knowledge. "Before the wall spontaneous people and men of action,"
he writes, "sincerely give up... The wall for them has something calming, morally
decisive and final, perhaps even something mystical." I have already had occasion
to say more than once: it never occurred to the author of the Critique of Pure
Reason to criticize reason in this way. Even the German mystics, to whom Berdyaev
devotes so many ardent pages in his books, found in this wall something calming,
morally decisive and final. Did they not convert their truths that Deitas
is raised as many thousands of miles above God as heaven above earth, that God
is powerless before the Nothingness which is not a mere nothing but rather a dark,
soulless force that lets evil triumph over good on earth, and that kills righteous
men and totally innocent children - did they not convert these truths into a "holy
necessity," and did they not find in them something "mystical" par excellence?
People desire calming at any price and they find mysticism where they dream of
calming.
But how did it happen that the heartfelt humanity
of Berdyaev agreed to purchase calming - even if only a mystical calming - at
the price of those horrors that Ivan Karamazov portrays in Dostoevsky? Is it not
obvious that his freedom is enslaved by "gnosis," that this freedom is, to express
it in the words of Kierkegaard, in a swoon? Freely Berdyaev would not for anything
in the world - this I do not for a moment doubt - have accepted the judgments
of reason about the data of experience as definitive truths. Freely no one of
us would hand Socrates over to the power of Anytos and Meletos, the defenseless
boy to the general, the miserable girl to her fanatically cruel parents. If Berdyaev
agrees to this, it is only because some alien and hostile force has suggested
to him, as to all of us, the ineradicable conviction that it is given neither
to man nor to the Creator to struggle against the verdicts of reason. And it has
bewitched him to the point that in the attempts of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky,
and their like to cast off the power of reason and its compelling truths he sees
a "maximalism without grace," an "unclear prophetism," etc. The "spasms and cramps"
of those truly superhuman exertions of the will that are felt in Kierkegaard's
writings frighten him (although, when an opportunity presents itself, this does
not prevent him from talking about the quietism of the existential philosophy).
It may even be assumed that in Kierkegaard's dispute with Professor Martensen
about Mynster, Berdyaev would have taken Martensen's side, and precisely because
Mynster in his activity never strove for the impossible. And it is quite indisputable
that Martensen, had he had occasion to read Berdyaev, would have joyfully hailed
his words about Kierkegaard's maximalism without grace and would have found them
fully corresponding to his own judgments.
For Berdyaev an existential philosophy in the style
of Kierkegaard is not at all a biblical philosophy: its biblical ideas, as he
expresses himself, are "too short." As "long" biblical ideas he considers those
of traditional philosophy and of the mystics. And precisely because in the philosophers
and mystics he does not find any striving for the impossible. Even their breakthroughs
from another world do not insult and offend reason: "Quam aram sibi parare
potest, qui Rationis majestatem laedit?", "What altar can he who offends the
majesty of reason build for himself?" They, however, do not appeal but inquire,
that is, they do not even make the attempt to introduce a new dimension into thinking;
but this is the conditio sine qua non of the existential philosophy. Properly
speaking, if Berdyaev wished to be strictly consistent, he would have to charge
the prophets and apostles, who proclaim that human wisdom (gnosis) is foolishness
before God, with a maximalism lacking grace. But he nowhere and never says anything
like this. On the contrary, he himself is more than once enraptured by the audacity
of this kind of testimony about the truth. What is the situation here? Why is
Berdyaev so up in arms against Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and why does he pay
no heed to Dostoevsky's critique of pure reason? I think that it is because Berdyaev
- as is clear from what has been said above - is, first and foremost, a teacher
and a philosopher of culture. His task is to raise the level of human consciousness
and to direct the interests of people to high, but nevertheless realizable, ideals.
In this he sees the destiny of man; in this he also sees his own destiny as a
writer and preacher. And, of course, he is, in his way, indisputably right. In
our troubled and dark time Berdyaev's warning and instructing voice, his noble
struggle against obscurantism, against attempts to smother the spirit, have an
enormous importance; thousands listen to him and lovingly submit to him. Nevertheless,
this hardly justifies his striving to "reconcile" the existential philosophy with
the speculative, God-man with man-God, as Leibniz,[10] Kant,
Schelling, and Hegel did this. And who knows? Perhaps in the depths of his soul
he feels that the questions brought forward by Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky nevertheless
speak about the ''one thing necessary" and that the "short" idea that for God
all things are possible and that concerning the truth it is necessary not to inquire
of reason but to appeal to the Creator ("The righteous man shall live by his faith"
according to the prophet's words) bring us closer to Scripture than the long ideas
about Deitas, about uncreated freedom, about the necessity of evil, etc.,
developed by the German mystics and philosophers. Perhaps Berdyaev also feels
that the day may come when his "humanity" will reveal to him the true meaning
of that mad struggle regarding the impossible and of that freedom - not as the
capacity to choose between good and evil but as the presence of totally unlimited
possibilities - about which Kierkegaard, following Scripture, bears witness to
us in his books and diaries.
It cannot be denied: "to believe against reason
is martyrdom." Kierkegaard understood this no worse than others. He also knew
that, according to the teaching of the scholastics and according to general opinion,
"vituperabile est credere contra rationem", "it is blameworthy to believe against
reason." However, he felt with all his being the staggering dilemma: in order
to find God it is necessary to overcome reason and to suspend the ethical. So
long as reason rules over being, Job's children will not be returned to him; if
the "ethical" is the highest, then Abraham is lost; if speculative philosophy,
which has placed its Deitas above God, is right, then one will have to
admit, following Hegel, that all that is real is rational and that the horrors
of existence are unavoidable.
In order to support his paradoxical ethic, Berdyaev
refers to Moses and his laws - and again it seems that through his mouth truth
itself speaks. But Luther also remembered Moses. This, however, did not prevent
him from saying: As long as Moses stood on the mountain face to face with God
there were no laws, but when he came down to the people he began to rule by means
of laws. And not without reason do we read in the apostle, "The law entered, so
that the offense might abound." Before the face of the Creator there are no laws,
no "you ought," no compulsion; all chains fall away from man, and sins cease to
exist. Before the face of the Creator there revives in man the authentic freedom
created by God, that freedom which is boundless possibility limited by nothing
- like the freedom of God Himself. When and only when man finds genuine freedom
are all apprehensions and fears, and especially those fears before Nothingness
about which we have heard so much from the philosophers and mystics, revealed
(this is one of the most striking "revelations" taken from Scripture by the existentialist
philosophy) as the result of gnosis, of knowledge, and, therefore, as that terrible
fall into sin about which the first chapters of the Book of Genesis tell. But
Berdyaev thinks differently. He is prepared to struggle and in fact does struggle
against "legalism," but both the paradoxical ethic and the ordinary ethic are
alike afraid to renounce the idea of obligatoriness. He repeats tirelessly that
the first commandment is that man ought to love God, but not once does he recall
the passages in the gospel (Mark 12:28,29) where the question, What is the first
of all the commandments? is answered by Jesus: "The first of all the commandments
is, 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord."' Commandments, not good news,
break through from other worlds and reach man: gnosis requires this.
Of course, all this appears to the ordinary understanding
so senseless, incredible, and absurd that to "teach" it, to build culture on it,
seems just as hopeless as to count on the possibility of the greater dissemination
of Scripture, which is not at all adapted to that level of development at which
contemporary mankind finds itself. How is it possible to demand of educated (and
even of uneducated) people that they seriously listen to stories relating that
Job's slain children were returned to him, that the sacrificed Isaac was restored
to Abraham, that the poor youth obtained the princess as his wife, etc.? Although
I have already said this more than once, in conclusion I nevertheless consider
it necessary to repeat still again: Kierkegaard knew all this just as well as
Hegel and the participants in the Greek symposium. On the plane of customary thinking
all this is impossible; on the plane of customary thinking reason or common sense
flatten out revealed truth and press it into their dimension. That is why Kierkegaard
turns - more precisely, bursts - toward the "private thinker" Job. Where for reason
and its dimensions everything is at an end, there the great and final struggle
for possibility begins. At Job's cryings and wailings, as at the sound of the
trumpets of Jericho, fortress walls collapse; a new dimension of thinking that
never existed before is revealed. This dimension of thinking, which defines the
difference between the speculative and the existential philosophy, we shall seek
in vain among the Greeks or the great representatives of German idealism. No matter
how much they may talk about freedom, how greatly they may extol reason, the truth
remains for them a compelling truth: God has no power over Nothingness. If you
desire freedom, you must be satisfied with the Stoic "fata volentem ducunt,
nolentem trahunt." A man ought to value only that which is in his power (the
"possible") and be indifferent to everything that is not in his power (the "impossible").
And knowledge about what is possible and impossible is given to us by reason.
But the freedom created by God, which does not suffer
and cannot bear any compulsion, has an altogether different source that does not
coincide with our knowledge. It scorns knowledge and seeks not only what is in
our power but also what lies outside our power. And I think that when and if Berdyaev
will have to bring gnosis and existential philosophy to a confrontation with each
other, he himself will not hesitate in his choice. Then he will no longer apply
such terms as "lacking in grace" and "unilluminated" either to Kierkegaard or
to Nietzsche, but will save them up (if he still should find it necessary to keep
them) for Hartmann, Jaspers, Hegel, and Kant, perhaps also for Tauler and Eckhart,
despite their great, even immeasurable services to world culture. The beginning
of wisdom is the fear of God, not fear before Nothingness. And freedom comes to
man not from knowledge but from faith, which puts an end to all our fears.
[7] One must say that, in general, all of the objections directed against Kierkegaard
by Berdyaev are irreproachable. The only reproach that one could make against
him is that he forgets, as it were, that Kierkegaard himself develops all these
objections in his writings with enormous force ("to self-laceration") - like Dostoevsky.
Against my will I must recall this time and again.
[8] In this also lies the meaning of the famous letter of the "eternal student"
Belinsky in which, in defiance of Hegel, he dares to demand an account of all
of the victims of the Inquisition, of chance, etcetera.
[9] Here again the striking similarity between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky is revealed.
Dostoevsky responds to the "arguments" that are presented to him by making a derisive
gesture and sticking out his tongue. And he considers this a "counter-objection."
It is true that we find this in Notes from the Underground, which, as is
known, no one ever took into consideration. Nevertheless, Dostoevsky - even though
in an indirect form - said there everything that he needed to say.
[10] Leibniz's assertion that the eternal truths entered God's understanding without
asking His permission is an anticipation of Schelling's assertion that freedom
harmonizes with holy necessity: the precritical philosophy sought to reconcile
faith with reason just like the postcritical.
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