NICOLÁS BEDRIAEV kyiv 1874 PARIS 1948 A PROPHET OF OUR TIMES

“There were theocratic, papoccerasist, caesaropapist social systems that annihilated the personality, denied freedom of conscience and perverted the soul of the people, but these pseudo-Christian systems are called to disappear. Historically, Russian Orthodoxy was tied to petty merchants, French Catholicism to the aristocracy, German Protestantism to the bourgeoisie. The Spanish church was militant, pioneering and mediatic. But axiologically, the human being is above class and the State. The soul of the peoples is not the economy or the cult of Mammon, the god of commerce” writes Nicholas Berdiaev in “Christianity and the class struggle”.

  He was a Marxist in his youth, a revolutionary, a friend of Bulgakov and a critic of tsarism for which he suffered captivity in Siberia. He says in this book that basically Karl Marx was originally right when in capital he launched himself to convert the bourgeoisie, but he erred in the method. You cannot create good from evil or achieve egalitarian society through violence, destruction, rancor, envy.

At the same time, he enunciates an omen that is being fulfilled: the class struggle will fuel the gender war.

  In his exile from Paris and Berlin, this philosopher, one of the most enlightened minds that Russia has produced (he considered himself a Russian born into an aristocratic family and not a Ukrainian) wrote a series of books on philosophy and thought that they would provide the keys to what is happening today: the triumph of orthodoxy in the East and the demystification, if not the attack on Christianity in the West.

A new paganism, another middle age, a confrontation of values, war.

Arguing that in the Middle Ages people fought with their faces uncovered, now the great gurus of the economy and war hide behind the bulletproof corsage of politics and social networks. The nostramo is invisible. He never shows his face.

His conversion to Christianity was not without trauma and controversy. He criticized the Holy Synod for which he would be excommunicated.

Then the patriarch Pimen would lift the interdict. He was a humanist, a human being made of greatness and passions and baseness that can shout with Saint Paul, nothing human is foreign to me. That is why he criticizes Tosltoi in his idea of returning to evangelical principles and the idea of an exemplary incorruptible Christian. The Montanists fell into this heresy, a third-century sect that manifested itself again with the Albigensians.

  Montana considered the impure, the sinners, outside the church. Christ heals, Christ saves sinners, but his holiness is different from those saintly jerks with necks on one side who reject and cut off all those who are not theirs. A brilliant idea in his theology of the Orthodox Church is tradition and prayer.

  Gospel yes, but sometimes the sinful man does not meet the norm.

What a great vision. Reading his book on communism, I think that this Russian who did not want to align himself with the voivode Zelensky emerges as an inspiration of the Holy Spirit in our troubled dark days.

His doctrine reflects the redeeming humanity of the Savior who redeems the sinner. There are no explicit solutions at hand. Faith and hope of the resurrection be our vade mecum-

Berdiayev died in exile, he could not return to communist Russia and on the job site while he was writing an article. The eminent philosopher was not disgusted by infantry journalism