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The Destiny of Man-Berdyaev

If you are interested in a deep dive into this moment start with this book. I am now on my third reading in 5 years and finding more than I recalled. We do not read great books. They read us. https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-destiny-of-man-e188608351.html

This excerpt is not from the book but is aligned with it and elucidates.

History, Berdyaev claimed, is divided into three stages: the age of the Father, the age of the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit. The first age corresponds to the Old Testament and the Law of Moses. The age of the Son maps onto the Ne

w Testament and redemption from sin and death. The third age is still to come, and when it does it will change the dynamic and guide us beyond our habitual passivity in the face of the Divine. It will be our turn then to give something back to the Creator and thereby become creators ourselves. This, for Berdyaev, is the meaning of Apocalypsis – the unveiling in men and women of God's hidden purpose for the world. It is a transformation – a leap of consciousness – and an opportunity for ourselves, here and now, to quicken its advent. As he explains:

The Kingdom of God comes imperceptibly, without theatrical effects. It approaches in every triumph of humanness, in real liberation. In genuine creativity there comes nigh the end of this world, a world of inhumanity, of slavery, of inertia ... The end of time, the end of the world, the end of history is a passing over into another frame of consciousness. Within time the end is seen only as destruction, but in eternity as transfiguration.

And elsewhere-Cultures are creators as well as creations of values. There is a continues dialectics between the values and the culture. Cultures must always perceive values qua values rather than perceiving them as facts. Values are different from facts and cannot be rooted in the facts of the world as world is ethically neutral in itself.  Civilization consists of techniques and physical as well as social arrangements that ensure survival and preservation of the human collectivity. It relates more to the useful aspects of human creations. Such creations pertain to both material as well ideational aspects of given social reality. It treats both of them as facts. Ideational aspects of a given social reality i.e. customs, norms, traditions and institutions that belong to civilization, manifest the values of the culture that informs that civilization. But when embodied and manifested these values are perceived as social facts. Thus civilization consists not only of material goods and techniques but also of social and institutional framework that embodies the values of the culture as social facts. Techniques, Values and Human Destiny Culture and civilization refer to the domains of human creations that are dynamic and incessantly changing. Both culture as well as civilization are effected not only by their own constituent phenomena, but also by phenomena that are classified as constituents of other domains.