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This article presents the French translation, long unpublished, of a study by Nicolas Berdyaev published in Moscow in 1912, devoted to the religious consciousness of Leo Tolstoy.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.