Freedom and the Spirit

Semantron Press, June 2009. Paper Back. New. Nicolas Berdyaev’s “new ethics” encompasses not only knowledge of good and evil but also of the tragic, which, in his words, “is constantly present in moral experience and complicates all our moral judgments.” It is an ethics that emphasizes the personality, an ethics that arises in freedom and strives for compassion. Consistent with the whole of Berdyaev’s work, creativity not only animates but interprets moral life, bearing witness to man’s vocation as collaborator with God in the work of instituting goodness in the world. True creativity, he maintains, is not concerned with the new but with the eternal. “Eternity is attained in the actual moment, it comes in the present,” he writes. “Eternity is not a cessation of moment and of creative life; it is creative life of a different order…it is a mystery play of the spirit which embraces the whole tragedy of cosmic life.” In essence, Berdyaev’s is an ethics of Divine Humanity. He seeks to move beyond simplistic thinking about evil by recognizing its complicated nature. “If evil has a positive meaning and does not result in everlasting hell…evil proves to be an unrealized form of the good.” This “good” lies solely in “the enrichment of life brought about by the heroic struggle against it [evil] and the victory over it”—that is, evil’s transfiguration and redemption.