Making Sense of History

Book reviewed: The Meaning of History by Nikolai Berdyaev

Russian thinkers do not loom large in the Western imagination. Having missed the Renaissance, Russia was a latecomer to philosophy, and its contribution to it is liable to be perceived as, if not peripheral, then at least derivative. The religious thrust of most Russian philosophers might also be a source of indigestion for the post-Enlightenment, rationalistic minds of the West. Perhaps, too, the Russians have just been poor self-promoters. Whatever the reason, Western readers have been largely content to draw their impressions of Russian thought from the well of literature; for those thinkers outside Russia’s literary canon, neglect seems to be the order of the day.

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) did not escape this fate, and not even his seven nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature were of much help. True to the saying that no man is a prophet in his own land, Berdyaev died not in Russia, but in France, where he’d spent the last days of his life following his exile from Soviet Russia. Yet he was an arresting thinker, and I count the discovery of his works as one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life. An exceptionally prolific author, Berdyaev passed away — appropriately enough — at his writing desk, leaving behind a vast oeuvre that counts at least two masterpieces. The Meaning of History is one of them. A historiosophical treatise published in the 1920s, it is a book as much for our times as for all times, and should be rescued from oblivion.

There is a “but,” though. The reader has to be willing to make room for religion to appreciate Berdyaev in general and this work in particular. Berdyaev writes that “there is no opposition between man and history, man’s spiritual world and the great world of history,” and he means it. Berdyaev’s historical outlook was conditioned by his philosophy and, as he lived an intensely religious intellectual life, there are no walls here between his theism and his view of history. History and metaphysics are intertwined and indissoluble. Most modern readers will be stumped by this. Our approach to history is materialistic. We are accustomed to regard history as just another branch of study that cannot divagate from the path of rationalism; it must at all costs remain impermeable to contamination by belief.

Berdyaev sees this as an enormous limitation that blinds us to the real workings of the historical process — the “historical,” as Berdyaev terms it, using an adjective in place of a noun the same way Carl Schmitt does with his “political.” History is not only driven by material and economic factors, but also by spiritual forces. A history that takes no account of them cannot be complete. Berdyaev finds that contemporary works of history — those about ancient peoples and cultures, for example — make for unsatisfactory reads. However well researched and scholarly, they lack an indication of some inner life, some key element that made the eyes of past generations contemplate the empyrean — in brief, they lack a soul. All one has is an arid record that fails to communicate the profundity of the human experience of those it purports to describe. To overcome this limitation, we must not only admit metaphysics into our study of history; we must strive towards it, towards what Berdyaev calls the metaphysics of history.

“Those were the times of miracles,” opens a biblical poem by the Russian poet Lev A. Mey (“To byli vremena chudes”). Those times of miracles were the cradle of Berdyaev’s historical process, the genesis of his metaphysics of history, a time when man and myth mixed freely. Back then the line between telluric and celestial history was blurred; only later was a fixed border established between the two and history cleansed of its celestial matter. (As with many other terms used by Berdyaev, there is no need to take “celestial history” literally; Berdyaev’s heaven is not so much a distant, transcendental sphere as the “deepest depth of our spiritual life.”) Historians began to treat the Bible as a historical document and naturally found it wanting. But the Bible — a text composed long before history morphed into an academic field — is not a historical record. Religious truth is not meant to compete with science, but to symbolize the deepest processes that colored the dawn of our history. In other (but still Berdyaev’s) words, it is not that, say, the theory of evolution is wrong; it just deals with secondary processes and has nothing to tell us about the primary ones. Only metaphysics does.

Berdyaev traces the genesis of the philosophy of history — and so of history itself — to Judeo-Christian theology. A Western-centric viewpoint, by today’s standards, but one that comes naturally enough to Berdyaev. “History is possible only with a conception of history, only when the process of world history is conceived as a catastrophic process,” he writes. The prebiblical man had an ahistorical view of history, since for him history was infinite and had no overarching point of resolution. The absence of a definitive event that would somehow bring history to a close made the ancient world static (Berdyaev claims that Hindu civilization was similarly ahistorical; as I know next to nothing about Hinduism, I will have to take Berdyaev at his word).

Aside from being ahistorical, the prebiblical man was also unfree. The mythology of ancient Greece and Rome paints a canvas of a humanity that was a plaything of immoral, capricious gods who indulged and punished mortals as their fancy pleased them. In one of the more interesting passages of his overwrought The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso notes that the Hellenic man’s obsession with hubris went hand-in-hand with his rejection of the idea that an agent was free to do anything. Crimes implied the presence of gods — but any such presence also implies the absence of free will, of responsibility, on the part of the agent. Things happened the way they did, fate reigned supreme, and virtue was no more glorious than depravity. It was a world that favored resignation and submission, not individual choice.

Judeo-Christianity changed all that. It is to the Bible that we owe our very understanding of history as a concept. The Jews, notes Berdyaev, were the first to create the “historical”; the messianism and eschatology of Judaic faith gave history its form, even if the “historical” of Judaism was specific to the Jewish nation and not humanity as a whole. Without eschatology — the sense of an ending — history is meaningless, like anything else that has no end. By giving history finiteness, Judaism gave it meaning. Christianity then fused the Judaic “historical” with Hellenic concepts (notably, aesthetics) and, by impregnating history with unique, non-recurring events (e.g., the birth and crucifixion of Christ, the Second Coming), rendered the historical process dynamic and bestowed upon man free agency. Pace the nauseating tropes about Christianity being a tool of enslavement, it released man from his yoke: he was now free to choose between good and evil, and, more importantly, he was liberated from the natural sphere on which he had previously depended. The importance of the emancipation from nature cannot be overstated; Berdyaev is convinced that the exceptional technological achievements of Western man could not have happened without the liberating power of Christianity. A civilization that is captive to animistic beliefs and the demons of nature, as the ancients were, could not have built railways or invented the telephone (or the Internet, while we are at it).

Christianity gave man history, lifted him from the stasis of antiquity, and ushered in the second period of our history — the Middle Ages. Making generalizations about a period lasting a millennium or so is a fool’s errand; many do it anyway, dismissing the medieval era as a dark lacuna, history’s Cretan labyrinth, from which man finally escaped during the luminous age of the Enlightenment. Berdyaev does not idealize the Middle Ages — no segment of the historical process deserves idealization in his eyes — but he regards all historical stages as essential in their own ways. The Middle Ages were a spell of adolescence for the West, a preparatory phase without which the flowering of the Renaissance would have been impossible. It was a time when man gathered his forces through the discipline of monastic life and knighthood — and the religious-cultural goal that it set for itself made it perhaps one of the greatest periods in human history. Ascetic and religious, the man of the Middle Ages steeled himself for the advent of the Kingdom of God, and he was not shy about using force to help bring it about. But this use of force laid bare the contradiction inherent in the Middle Ages. The road to the Kingdom of God does not lead through coercion and violence; the divine realm cannot be built with theocratic scaffolding. Like all historical periods, the medieval age was unable to resolve this dialectic and eventually ran aground. The anticipated kingdom never arrived, and the Middle Ages had to take a curtain call.

But Western man was now endowed with massive reserves of spiritual power, and he could spend it on the ascent to the peaks of his historical fate. Spend it he did. The Renaissance, the third historical period, was man’s zenith, his acme, the apogee of his civilization. Berdyaev describes the Renaissance as an attempt to overcome the stern puritanism of the Middle Ages and resuscitate the spirit of antiquity by seeking the perfection of form in all of man’s artistic endeavors. The Renaissance forged the human personality and strengthened his freedom. From the early stages of this period — a period of purity, of a truly Christian humanism — sprang the genius of Giotto, Dante, and Saint Francis of Assisi. But then something went wrong. In history, something always does. The ancients could search for perfection because their beliefs did not preclude the existence of perfection here on earth; the people of the Renaissance, who had perforce integrated the Christian experience of the Middle Ages, were hindered by the idea that the world was inherently flawed and paradise was elsewhere. Perfection was unattainable by default.

This was the dialectic of the Renaissance, and it was not meant to be resolved any more than that of the Middle Ages. Christian humanism gradually evolved into a non-Christian one; the center of gravity shifted from God to man, who had begun to turn away from his divine nature and replace the image of God with his own. Appearing first in the arts and sciences during the early Renaissance, humanism spilled over into religion (with the Reformation), into reason (with the Age of Enlightenment), and finally, into sociopolitical life (with the French Revolution) until it pervaded all domains of human existence. But when God goes, so do man’s creative powers. Man moves away from his inner life to the external one, but it is the inner life that is fundamental to his existence; the external one is only peripheral. God raises man and gives him vitality. If humanity does not carry within itself the image of God, its energy is sapped. Spiritual and creative impotence follow; disintegration and dehumanization set in. When the humanist man ejected his divine nature, he returned to the bosom of the natural sphere from which Christianity had liberated him, despite the growing sophistication of his external life. That is the ultimate tendency of humanism that is not buttressed by theism; it fosters a kind of individualism that recognizes no bounds or limits, and ends up spinning out of control. Non-Christian humanism turns into anti-humanism; such is its dialectic.

The Renaissance was followed by a fourth historical stage. Berdyaev struggles to give it a name, but he has no doubt about what it means and where it will take those who act out their lives on it. Having been made overlord of nature by the religion that had freed him from its elements, man proceeded to expand its domination by resorting to machines. Technology was, and is, central to man’s continued rise. The problem is that man now has nothing to rise to. Stripped of his divine nature, man is left with no all-encompassing purpose. The sky might be the limit, but if you are the sky itself? With nary a spiritual goal to serve as a celestial lodestar, humanity falls back on technological progress and makes technology its religion. Adopting the image of technology, man worships it and eventually becomes enslaved by it. That is our happy age of modernity. Call it what you like.

Critics looking for bones to pick will probably find them but, in the main, Berdyaev’s arguments are strikingly persuasive. Berdyaev is right about the importance of metaphysics in history. While any modern historian who decides to insert celestial history into a monograph will be referred to a psychiatrist, I must admit I can never get through a history book, no matter how comprehensive, without feeling that something essential was missed by the author and lost to the spume of time. Berdyaev correctly points to the long existence of the Jews — and to their improbable survival — as the most important evidence of the metaphysics of history; the chaplain in the famous story about Frederick the Great’s request for proof of God would have certainly agreed (as would have Norman Mailer, who, digging at the other end of the tunnel, concluded that Hitler could not be explained without the devil, a bee in Mailer’s bonnet that became the subject of his last novel).

Berdyaev rightly criticizes the idea that the history of human civilization is one of uninterrupted progress. He doesn’t much like progress — in the sense in which many understand it — and he excoriates the ideology of progress as a heartless philosophy that condemns much of humanity to be sacrificed for some lucky beneficiaries in the far-out future, a vampiric doctrine that uses past generations to fertilize the soil of a terrestrial paradise to come. “The religion of progress is the religion of death,” he says. Berdyaev justly sees capitalism and socialism as both sides of the same coin, something that has eluded, and continues to elude, so many (as I have written elsewhere, in the final analysis, a factory worker doesn’t much care whether his factory is owned by a plutocrat or a government putatively working on behalf of the proletariat; the important thing is what, and how much, he gets to do once his shift is over).

But his most fascinating argument concerns the dichotomy of culture and civilization. Berdyaev defines culture as man’s cultivation of his spiritual life and civilization as the cultivation of his exterior. Culture is the perfection of the inner world; civilization, of the external one. Culture also contains a dialectic; it carries at once founts of life and the seeds of its own destruction. At some point, even the most fecund culture begins to doubt itself, lose its vitality, and decay (though, according to Berdyaev, it never really dies; being eternal, culture simply retreats into the depths of civilization). Man loses interest in improving his inner life and sets off to improve life around him. Through this kinetic process, culture is transformed into civilization. Inevitably, the springs of creativity dry up. Civilization focuses on the optimization of the business of living; it exploits art as a tool to decorate itself. “Cultural beauty . . . turns into museums, filled with beauty’s corpses.” For Berdyaev, civilization is one vast museum, beautiful but uninhabitable. (Anyone who has visited some of Europe’s loveliest cities in recent years will understand this; a place like Venice, for example, once a powerful oligarchic city-state, is now little more than a tourist ghetto, drained of an organic, autonomous life of its own.)

But isn’t that a good thing? While civilization is democratic, culture is strongly aristocratic. Civilization is for the masses; culture, for the select few. Ernst Jünger illustrates this difference ludically in his journals, using the concepts of comfort (civilization) and luxury (culture) to make his point. Comfort is when Jünger’s electric shaver can be used with an outlet universally, in any modern hotel; luxury would be Jünger taking his barber with him on his travels, as in the times of Casanova. Having a barber in one’s retinue is charmingly extravagant, but I doubt many could afford to have one in Casanova’s times, not to speak of ours; standard electric sockets, on the other hand, satisfy the needs of all.

Unfailingly objective, Berdyaev acknowledges that the greatest cultural masterpieces were produced against the backdrop of misery and penury; palmy periods of stability that satisfy the needs of the majority are inimical to spiritual and creative exuberance. Culture spawns geniuses; civilization is their graveyard. A standard plug is less sexy than a personal barber you can take on your journeys, but in its satisfaction of the needs of all, it is a lot more moral. Isn’t, then, civilization more virtuous than elitist culture and more aligned with our egalitarian ethos? Not really, says Berdyaev. Civilization creates the cult of life — but life, the external life that civilization tends to so assiduously, is bereft of all meaning. The divine lights and intimations of eternity that once guided man are dimmed; all efforts go into the betterment of general conditions. But if there is no meaning, no one knows why life should be improved. What’s the point? If you don’t know where you’re going, and why, every road is a dead end; the march along the highway of progress is just a danse macabre. By its very nature, every civilization is therefore doomed.

This is a criticism that Berdyaev levels at all civilizations; he is especially scathing about ours, the civilization of the industrial age. He fulminates against capitalism, finding it even more ungodly than socialism, of which he is not very fond. He is adamant that capitalist society is destined to perish. “The industrial-capitalist system of civilization destroys the spiritual foundations of society, thereby preparing its own demise,” not least because it denies labor any spiritual purpose. While it might not be hostile to religion the way communism is, it merely co-opts religion for utilitarian purposes. There is little doubt what Berdyaev would have made of the current economic paradigm, in which man, at once unmoored and hubristic, is reduced to being a user and, ultimately, a product.

Since civilization always plunges man back into nature, every civilization contains elements of barbarity. That is the dialectic of civilization: the improvement of man’s external world makes him sophisticated, but the vacuity of his inner world makes him barbaric. Our industrial civilization contains such elements too, but they are like nothing that has ever been seen before. Whereas the barbarity that descended upon Europe in the wake of the decay of ancient Rome was a result of great displacement of peoples and smelled of “northern forests,” the barbarity awaiting us will be a “barbarity born of civilization itself, a barbarity smelling not of trees but of machines, a barbarity embedded in the very technology of civilization.” Civilization has the effect of dehumanizing man; the civilization of the industrial age amplifies that effect. Slipping into twilight, Berdyaev’s Western civilization is about to be blanketed by another “medieval night.” Berdyaev anticipates transhumanism, which, with its chilling dreams of fusing man with technology, is of course just another illusion. It might well succeed in optimizing man and enhancing his potential — but only by obliterating his humanness.

The Covid pandemic is a vivid illustration of all this. Our highly sophisticated civilization — in terms of technological advances, perhaps the most sophisticated in history — has provided us with cutting-edge technology and great material comforts. Yet it is the same civilization that, in March of 2020, decoupled man’s corporeal experience from his spiritual one. To protect their physical existence, people lost their ability to continue their social and spiritual life. It is the very sophistication of our civilization that enabled this, since it would have been impossible to force the population to stay at home for months at a time in the pre-Internet world, when most people could not work remotely and digital commerce did not obtain. Confined to their homes, tethered to computer screens for months on end — this became the “new normal.” When people were finally allowed to leave their homes, they had to follow dehumanizing public health regulations such as “social distancing” and mask-wearing (in another work, Berdyaev wrote that the human face is the portal to a person’s spiritual life — what happens when you cover half of it?). The use of vaccine passports and surveillance technology to “stop the spread” augured an unprecedented loss of privacy and dignity, ratcheting up our dehumanization. The response to the virus said less about the threat itself than about the society reacting to the threat; the crisis was less epidemiological than civilizational. But it was not a crisis of our civilization. Rather, it was an example of civilization as a crisis, and one consistent with Berdyaev’s conception of civilization as a phenomenon that is intrinsically hostile to humanity.

The response to the pandemic has affirmed Berdyaev’s apocalyptic warnings about the enslavement of people by technology. Technology has become the source of man’s divine power. It has made man so powerful he can change genders ad libitum and think up ways to make himself immortal. But our technology is a Faustian bargain. If it has indeed connected people in a way that could have never been imagined, it has also made them more lonely. In a way, modern tools of technology implemented “social distancing” before the pandemic, so it was easy enough to do so when “social distancing” became a legal imperative. But, as the pandemic showed, the value of countless friends on Facebook is limited if you are home alone under a virtual house arrest. Omnipotence? By carrying out research on dangerous pathogens to prevent plagues, man tries to dominate nature; when nature threatens him, man struggles to dominate himself. The lesson of the Tower of Babel goes unheeded; the self-appointed master of the universe is hoisted by his own petard.

As I was returning home one night recently, a scooter glided noiselessly past me in a deserted street. Androgynous, with a black mask over the face, the individual on the scooter seemed to be devoid of all humanity; the only sign of life was the music emanating from the softly glowing screen of a smartphone. This was the new man: sexless, faceless, and completely divorced from the texture of life, the scooter and the smartphone doing all the work for him. Watching the scooter disappear into the darkness, I wondered if I had seen a human at all. Was that a glimpse of the future? I can almost hear Berdyaev say yes.

Yet Berdyaev’s message is a lot less pessimistic than it might seem. History is not meant to be lived, but to be overcome. Berdyaev foretells a clash between good and evil, between God and the devil, between light and darkness; the meaning of history is rooted in the final outcome of that clash. This is of course the vision set out in the Revelation of Saint John, and so is not particularly original. But there is more to this. Berdyaev identifies four different states of man’s historical fate: barbarism, culture, civilization, and religious transformation. These do not need to be sequential and can overlap. Civilization is not a historical inevitability; in history nothing is inevitable. There is more than one road to Rome. Instead of evolving into a civilization, culture can undergo a religious transformation. That, Berdyaev says, is the way out.

A civilization cannot backpedal; it is too late for our techno-civilization to change gears. But the new medieval night prophesied by Berdyaev need not necessarily be a return to some benighted past. Instead, it could be a transition to a historical period that allows us to go into hibernation, and gather our spiritual and creative forces anew. When we re-emerge, we must use our replenished strength to overcome history. Since history is metaphysical, it can only be resolved outside of the historical process. That is the crux of Berdyaev’s historiosophy. History’s meaning will not be unlocked for as long as man insists on banishing metaphysics from history and on resolving history within the bounds of the historical process, which is why all of our sociopolitical projects, our doctrines and ideologies, our chiliastic exertions to build a telluric paradise, end in failure and history remains an enigma. Instead, man must seek to resolve the problem of terrestrial time (in which everything withers away) and enter eternity, to erase the border between telluric and celestial history, to rediscover those “times of miracles.” Only then, says Berdyaev, will the meaning of history be fully revealed.

For the modern reader, this is not much of an action plan. It’s all very good to write about celestial history, but someone has to get up early in the morning to make sure the trains run on time. But then Berdyaev is not interested in train schedules. All historical tragedies are outcomes of action plans and ambitious train schedules; those will not help us overcome history. Berdyaev is not prescriptive but contemplative, and his Christianity is equally mellow. Berdyaev’s God is strictly transcendental; as Berdyaev wrote in Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, God has less power here on earth than a policeman. Nevertheless, He exists — and where there is God, there is always salvation. God is there, eagerly waiting for us to come closer. Berdyaev invites us to make that leap — to contemplate what is greater than we are, to lift ourselves from the paludal basin of nature, and to recover our divine dimension. How far one wants to follow Berdyaev is up to the reader, but at the current historical stage, this message is as uplifting as any.