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Biography: Nikolai BerdiaevNikolai Berdiaev was born March 6, 1874 and died
March 23, 1948. He was a religious thinker and a philosopher. At
first, when he was in school at Kiev University in 1894, he believed
in Marxism, but changed his views later in life. He still believed in
Marxism, in that man could improve his lot, but he was against the
violence and crimes of the Soviet order. His main philosophy was
Christian Existentialism, which stressed the examination of the human
condition under a Christian framework. It was a philosophy of freedom
and personality. Its basic concepts were of creativity and
nothingness. He wrote in an unsystematic and mystical method in over
twenty books and many articles. He preferred this to using logic and
rationality. He believed that truth was not from a rational search
but from "a light which breaks through from the transcendent world of
the spirit." His philosophy believed that man's greatness was his
share in the world from the spirit. He believed that man's creativity
enabled him to find truth. He was influenced by philosophers such as
Schopenhaur, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.
Berdiaev studied at Kiev University in 1894, and
while he was there, he was involved in Marxist activities that in
1899 led to a three years exile to Volgada(northern Russia). When his
sentence was finished he traveled through Germany and came back to
Russia in 1904. The city he came back to was St. Petersburg, and he
took part in a large cultural and religious revival while he was
there. In 1907 he moved to Moscow and joined the Russian Orthodox
Church. He criticized the Holy Synod in an article and was tried for
it in 1914. His case was dropped in 1917 at the start of the Russian
Revolution. He became a professor at Moscow University in 1920. He
lost his job and was exiled again in 1922 for not agreeing with
Orthodox Marxism. Other expelled people joined him in Berlin and they
founded the Academy of Philosophy. In 1924 he moved the Aacadamy to
Paris. He continued to write books until his death in 1948.
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