Nikolai Berdyaev Quotes on Freedom
Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), Slavery and Freedom (1939), and the late The Realm of the Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1949) gave Russian religious philosophy its most influential twentieth-century statement of personalist freedom. The central commitment is that freedom is not a derivative property of created beings but the originary uncreated abyss (the ungrund Berdyaev took from Boehme) that precedes both being and the divine — the human person, made in the image of God, participates in this primordial freedom, and the entire history of human bondage to nature, society, and even religion is the long forgetting of this constitutive vocation. The framework, developed during Berdyaev’s exile in Berlin and Paris after expulsion from Soviet Russia in 1922, shaped the twentieth-century Christian existentialist tradition and the Eastern Orthodox reception of personalist philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:
“Freedom precedes being.”
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Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:
“Personality is created by God and is itself creative.”
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Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:
“Creativity is the response of human freedom to the divine call.”
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Attributed to Nikolai Berdyaev:
“Slavery to one's own self is the deepest form of slavery.”
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“There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism . … The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil , that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.”
Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147 -
“There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism . … The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil , that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence”
Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147