Nicholas Berdyaev“The will-to-power deprives of freedom
both those who wield and those who are subject to it, and Christ knew no
power except that of love, which alone is compatible with freedom. His
is the religion of unconstrained love between God and man, and the
attempts to actualize this in Christianity have generally been very far
indeed from our Lord’s own conception.”
~ Dostoievsky (sic) An Interpretation,
Translated by Donald Attwater (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1934), p. 204
“There are plenty of dead things in
Christianity, and their putrefaction spreads pestilence that can poison
the well-springs of life. In some respects Christians are more like
minerals than parts of a living organism: we are petrified, dead words
come out from our lifeless mouths. ‘The Spirit breatheth where he will,’
and he will not breathe upon souls that are religiously desiccated: they
must be first remade and baptized anew, but with fire. Progress of the
antichristian spirit, loss of faith, spread of materialism, these are
only secondary results, consequences of the stiffening and death that
has gone on within Christianity, in the lives of Christians. A
Christianity given over to stereotyped rhetoric, formal and spiritless
in its rites, debased by clericalism or laicizing cannot be a
life-giving force. Yet it is from Christianity that regeneration and
renewal of the spirit must come; if it is truly the timeless and eternal
religion, then it has to be the religion of the new age that is upon us,
and there must arise within her a creative movement as the world has not
known for a long time.”
~ Ibid. 225, 226
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