SALVATION AND CREATIVITY
(1926 - #308)
(Two Understandings of Christianity)
Berdyaev
_____________________
(Dedicated to the Memory of Vladimir Solov’ev)
“Serve ye one another, each by such gift,
as he hath received, as good stewards of
the manifold graces of God”.
(1 Pet. -- Ch. 4: 10.)
The correlation between the ways of human salvation and the ways of human creativity is very central, very tormenting and very acute a problem of our age. Man perishes and he has a thirst for salvation. But man is also by his nature a maker, a creator, a builder of life, and the thirst for creativity cannot be extinguished within him. Can man be saved and at the same time create, can he create and at the same time be saved? And how to perceive Christianity: is Christianity exclusively the religion of the salvation of the soul for life eternal, or is creativity of an higher life also justified by the Christian consciousness? All these questions torment the contemporary soul, though not always is perceived their depth. Wanting to set right their life vocation, their creative act of life, Christians do not always realise, that there is discourse about the very concept of Christianity, about the assimilation of its fullness. The torment of the problem of salvation and creativity reflects the schisms betwixt Church and world, the spiritual and the mundane, the sacral and the secular. The Church is concerned with salvation, the secular world however is concerned with creativity.Anti-Christian gnosticism triumphs, because Christianity does not reveal its own Christian gnosis. And so on in everything. We draw nigh to the final frontier. A secular, humanistic, balanced culture becomes all less and less possible. No one believes anymore in abstract culture. Everywhere man stands afront a choice.
The world is divided up into opposing principles. It is impossible for everything to transpire further such, as has transpired in recent history. And together with this is the impossibility to return to the old medievalism. The problem of creativity, the problem of Christian culture and society is insoluble by the churchly-hierocratic. This is a problem of a religious sanctification of the human principle, and not the restoration of governance of the angelic principle. Creativity is a sphere of human freedom, full of copiously-abundant love towards God, the world and man. To lead a way out from the crisis of the world and the crisis of Christianity is possible neither by the principles of recent history, nor by the principles of the old Middle Ages, but only by the principles of a new Middle Ages. Christian creativity will be a deed of monasticism in the world. The religious crisis of our epoch is bound up with this, that the churchly consciousness is impaired, it has not the comprehension of fullness. And sooner or later this fullness ought to be conceived of and ought to be revealed, that there is a positive creative developement in the world, and in culture it would be a revealing of human freedom in the Church, it would be a disclosure of the life of mankind in the Church, i.e. it would be subconsciously churchly. The creativity of man in the world would be the life of the very Church, as God-manhood. This does not at all mean, that all creativity and creating by man in the new history would be subconsciously churchly. This process would be twofold, in it would be readied the kingdom of this world, the kingdom of Anti-Christ. In humanism also there was a great lie, a revolt against God, it readied the destruction of man and the extinction of being. But it was also a positive searching out of human freedom, it was a disclosure of the creative powers of man. The further creative process in mankind cannot remain neutral, it ought to become positive-churchly, to be conscious of itself, or ultimately it will become anti churchly, anti-Christian, satanic. In the world, in culture there ought to be effected a real-ontologic separation, not formal and external-churchly, but innerly-spiritual and ontologically-churchly. In this is the meaning of our times. Divine energies are efficacious everywhere in the world through manifold and frequently undiscerned pathways. And it does not make sense to tempt “these little ones” of our time, the prodigal sons returning to the Church, by denying every positive religious sense of the creative processes, transpiring in the world.