Nicolas Berdiaev

This article by Nicolas Berdyaev examines Vladimir Soloviev's thought on the relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity. The study adopts a historical, philosophical, and theological approach, tracing the evolution of Soloviev's religious consciousness from his Slavophile affinities to his final apocalyptic vision. The central idea is that Soloviev, by transcending the opposition between Slavophilism and Westernism, framed the problem of the reunification of the two Christian worlds as a fundamental spiritual requirement, grounded in mutual love rather than institutional agreements. Berdyaev shows that Soloviev underestimated the mystical dimension proper to each tradition — inner deification in the East, the loving impulse toward God in the West — and that it is in his later work, notably the "Tale of the Antichrist," that he arrives at a more accurate prophetic vision of the complementarity of the two Churches in the face of the threat of the Antichrist and pan-Mongolism.

This article presents the French translation, long unpublished, of a study by Nicolas Berdyaev published in Moscow in 1912, devoted to the religious consciousness of Leo Tolstoy. Proceeding through rigorous critical analysis, Berdyaev shows that Tolstoy's religious thought, despite its Christian appearances, remains entirely Old Testamental: a religion of law, self-salvation and moral commandment, it ignores grace, rejects redemption and fails to recognize the person of Christ. Tolstoy, a thinker of the Father without the Son, a naturalist rationalist close to pantheism and Buddhism, perceives neither the mystery of evil nor that of freedom. The theological contribution of the study is twofold: it precisely identifies the irreducible specificity of Christianity in the face of all reductive moralism, and it paradoxically situates Tolstoy as a providential critic of a hypocritical historical Christianity, an involuntary precursor of an authentic religious renaissance.

This article presents a personal letter by the Russian religious philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, written in 1907 and translated by Philippe Arjakovsky. It is an autobiographical testimony in which Berdyaev describes his inner conversion to Christianity, which occurred after a period of spiritual crisis and involvement in socialism. The central idea is that this conversion does not stem from an intellectual change, but from a profound existential transformation, linked to personal suffering and the discovery of Christ as the conqueror of death. Berdyaev affirms his vocation as a philosopher in the service of the religious cause, announcing a project of religious gnoseology in the tradition of Soloviev. The theological contribution of this document lies in the early formulation of a theology of joy and creative love, opposed to all "religious sadism," which foreshadows the major orientations of his later thought.

This article by Nicolas Berdyaev, translated from a text published in 1933 in the journal *The Way*, offers a philosophical and theological study of technology as the central problem of human destiny. Adopting a metaphysical and anthropological approach, Berdyaev analyzes technology not as a neutral reality but as a cosmogonic force that radically reconfigures the relationships between humanity and nature, time, and itself. The central argument is that technological domination threatens the image of God in humanity by substituting mere rationalized means for spiritual ends, while destroying psychic and organic life in favor of impersonal organization. The theological contribution of the article lies in its critique of the two insufficient Christian attitudes toward technology — neutrality and apocalypticism — and in its proposal of a renewed Christian anthropology, drawing notably on Fedorov, which subordinates technology to the spirit and orients it toward the creative and royal vocation of humanity.