YAKOV KROTOV

March 5, 2001, 23.35 PM, Moscow

Myth and Reality of God

Today in the Moscow State Library of Foreign Literature Antoine Arjakovsky presented Russian edition of his dissertation on magazine Put' ("The Way"). This magazine has been published in 1925-1940 by Berdyaev. The book is over-filled with unknown facts from unpublished sources (the picture is from the book - the conference of 1934, Berdayev in the left armchair.)

Arjakovsky's main idea is that Russian Christian thinkers, represented in Put', has created mytho-logical (spelled mytho-logical, in two parts) epistemiology. For example, Berdyaev wrote that many things can be better expressed not through usual philosophical terms but through myth as a special semantic construction. Moreover, "myth" in this sense came out to be synonimous to "dogma."

Arjakovsky writes his dissertation for French intellectuals and he concentrates mostly on French connections of Berdyaev (like Maritaine.) But I think that more interesting is the coincidence of Berdayev's idea of "myth" with German thought (Thomas Mann, Carl Young) and English tradition. The famous talk of Tolkien with C.S.Lewis, when Tolkien managed "to witness" Lewis about the Gospel stressing that although Christian revelation is a sort of myth it is the sort of myth which is not a lie but the unique way to descrive a unique reality.