Nicholas
Alexandrovich Berdyaev
Nicholas Alexandrovich Berdyaev
Russian religious and political philosopher
(1874-1948)
“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.”
~ Dostoievsky (sic) An Interpretation, Translated by Donald
Attwater (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1934) pp. 225, 226
