Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #10: No System Can Contain the Soul: On Freedom, the Creative Act, and the Person: Nikolai Berdyaev (part one)
Nikolai Berdyaev challenges both Marxism and bourgeois liberalism with his prophetic vision of freedom rooted in Orthodox Christianity, not in political centrism.
• Exiled Russian philosopher who viewed freedom as cosmic and primordial—the very ground of human existence
• Criticized the "bourgeois spirit" as a degrading clutching after security and small-mindedness
• Rejected institutional religion and revolutionary violence equally
• Believed human beings are co-creators with God, called to participation in divine creativity
• Saw Christianity not as a system of control but as a mystical inheritance alive with fire and risk
• Proclaimed "The Kingdom of God is freedom. It is not order. Order is the kingdom of Caesar"
• His works include The Meaning of the Creative Act, Freedom and Spirit, and Slavery and Freedom
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Nikolai Berdyaev stands as one of the most challenging prophetic voices of the 20th century, yet remains criminally overlooked in our conversations about meaning, faith, and resistance. Born into Russian aristocracy but drawn to Marxist revolution in his youth, Berdyaev's journey from revolutionary to Christian mystic offers a startling vision of freedom that transcends our tired political categories.
After being imprisoned by the very Bolsheviks whose ideals he once championed, Berdyaev returned to Orthodox Christianity—not as a system of submission, but as a mystical inheritance alive with fire and risk. When Lenin deported him on the infamous "Philosopher's Ship" in 1922, Berdyaev found not defeat but liberation, writing some of his most powerful works from exile in Paris.
What makes Berdyaev urgently relevant today is his refusal to be contained by any system. He was too radical for the church, too spiritual for the Marxists, too mystical for the liberals, and too prophetic to rest comfortably anywhere. In our age of algorithmic thinking and political polarization, his thought offers a way beyond the stifling binaries that dominate our discourse.
At the heart of Berdyaev's vision stands a revolutionary understanding of freedom. For him, freedom wasn't a political arrangement or consumer choice—it was cosmic, primordial, the very ground of human existence. Human beings are co-creators with God, called not to submission but to participation in divine creativity. "Christianity is the religion of divine and human freedom," he wrote. "Where there is no freedom, there can be no love, no creativity, no personhood."
This explosive vision of freedom led Berdyaev to critique what he called "the bourgeois spirit
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
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Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
A religion of progress, based on the apotheosis of a future fortunate generation, is without compassion for either the present or the past. It addresses itself with infinite optimism to the future with infinite pessimism for the past. It is profoundly hostile to the Christian expectation of resurrection for all mankind, for all the dead fathers and forefathers. This Christian idea rests on the hope of an end to historical tragedy and contradiction valid to all human generations, and of resurrection and eternal life for all who have ever lived all who have ever lived.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. I'm your host, travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state. We're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide technostate. We're living in full into a fading aristocracy of Imperial Russia.
Speaker 2:Berdeyev's life unfolded between two cultural earthquakes, the death rattle of the Tsarist regime and the rise of Soviet totalitarianism. He came of age as Russia staggered toward revolution and his thought carries the scars of collapse and the stubborn hope of resurrection. In many ways, berdeyev stands on a spiritual bridge between Dostoevsky, who foresaw the spiritual terror of freedom, and Solzhenitsyn, who chronicled the moral wreckage of its suppression. As a young man, berdeyev was drawn to Marxist activism. He was arrested and exiled in 1898 for revolutionary involvement, but he quickly found that materialist systems, even ones promising justice, left the soul starved. His early exposure to Marxism ignited a lifelong quest for a deeper liberation, not just political or social freedom, but existential and spiritual freedom, freedom as the very ground of being. He turned towards Orthodox Christianity, not in the institutional sense but as a mystical inheritance alive with fire and risk. Berdeyev's vision was shaped by the Russian Silver Age, a brief, shimmering moment of spiritual and artistic renaissance before the Bolshevik darkness fell. Alongside thinkers like Florensky and Bulgakov, berdeyev helped forge a Christian personalism rooted in freedom, creativity and dignity of the human person.
Speaker 2:But Berdeyev refused to be anyone's partisan. He was too radical for the church, too spiritual for the Marxists, too mystical for the liberals and too prophetic to be comfortable anywhere. Arrested again after the revolution, he was exiled from Russia in 1922 by a personal order of Lenin, put aboard the infamous philosopher's ship with over 150 other dissident intellectuals, he lived the rest of his life in exile in Paris, where he wrote feverishly in poverty and obscurity, from his cluttered apartment. He published books that challenged the dominant ideologies of his age the Destiny of man, Freedom and the Spirit, slavery and Freedom, the Meaning of the Creative Act. His style was not systemic, it was explosive, less a philosophy textbook than a running monologue with the infinite he looked a part of the prophet gaunt sharp eyes, wild hair and prone to outbursts of passion and brooding silence. Friends described him as intense, eccentric, allergic to small talk oh, I can relate to that and consumed with spiritual fire. He lived simply with his wife Lydia, and a fellow seeker who shared his exile and spiritual hunger. They had no children, but together they built a life of integrity, hospitality and truth-seeking.
Speaker 2:Berdeyev died in 1948, far from his homeland. He never saw the collapse of the Soviet system he was so clearly warning against. But his thought would quietly shape the post-war Christian imagination, echoing through the works of Dorothy Day, Gabriel Marcel and Jacques Maritain and preparing the ground for Solzhenitsyn's moral witness. Decades later, today, when ideology again threatens to eclipse the person, when spiritual yearning is met with cynicism and coercion, berduev's witness feels piercingly relevant. He reminds us that Christianity is not a cultural weapon nor a system of control, but a revolution of the spirit, a call to become fully human by becoming radically free. Call to become fully human by becoming radically free. He gives us no blueprint for utopia, only the dangerous freedom to create, to love, to stand before God without fear. He calls us to live as artists of the soul, even amidst the ruins of modernity. Stay with us as we explore the life and thought of Nikolai Berdeyev, exile, mystic, heretic, prophet and perhaps one of the most urgent voices of our time. So welcome, professor. Back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Well, it's great to be here, travis, still recovering from Chesterton.
Speaker 2:Yeah, chesterton was a fun time. You feel a little hungover. Chestertonian hangover you feel a little hungover.
Speaker 1:Chestertonian hangover. Well, yeah, you know, I think there is a kind of transition from Chesterton to Bredania.
Speaker 2:So he's a really important figure that's going to get us from Chesterton to Dostoevsky and further on into our 20th century quest. Yeah, and just to put that in historical context, can you briefly and succinctly give us the timeline between Dostoevsky to Solzhenitsyn? You said Pasternak and Berdeyev have been pretty much contemporaries.
Speaker 1:Well, I think their lives sort of lapped over, so they were alive at the same time for a few years, or 10 years or so. So I guess that technically makes them contemporaries at a certain point. But Dostoevsky, I think he died in 1881. So he's part of the golden age that preceded the 19th century and he sort of, you know, represented really a visionary, prophetic alteration of Russian literature into almost like secular scripture, a whole new psychological realism that is going to test the limits of modern art and modern thought and carry it into new territory. Rudenev was sort of a, you know, a revolutionary Marxist that found himself thrown in jail by the very people he thought would support his ideas.
Speaker 2:Which happened to Solzhenitsyn too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this radicalized him in a new way and it took him back to his Christian roots and his understanding of a prophetic Christianity that was built on freedom and creativity, that transformed societies and not a transformative society built on a small minority that were going to manage everybody else. Once he realized that exile was really going to open the doors to his freedom of thinking and his ability to be prophetic, he never looked back and I think your little summary of him is well put that you know, living in exile, living, you know, on the outskirts of exiled Russian intelligentsia, is not a bad place for a prophet to be, and he took it as liberation and as a calling and not as a punishment, which created all these incredible books that he wrote. And kind of a lot like Chesterton, if we think of Chesterton as a great apologetic voice at the turn of the century, voice at the turn of the century uh burdenius is a prophetic voice.
Speaker 1:Uh, you know, I not that chesterton wasn't prophetic, but burdenius hits all the notes of of a christian, uh and all, and even old testament prophet um well, would you do us a favor and read?
Speaker 2:Do you have your book out?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Would you read pages 42 and 43? My friend and I, Tyrell, shout out to Tyrell who loved this chapter. Tyrell sent me the things he had underlined and they're all the same stuff I had underlined. So if you just read your work in your voice from the first paragraph on 42.
Speaker 1:Is that the one that begins with one of the 19th century? Redenyev was one of those late 19th century. Is that?
Speaker 2:that. Yeah, from that paragraph to the bottom line after his quote on the second page, like it might be a lot, but it's just completely loaded with good stuff and it's in your voice and it's from the book, so I just think we should read it. It's so many, so many, so much of it we had underlined okay.
Speaker 1:Well, this is. This is for your friend here. Nikolai bordeyev was one of those late 19th century progressive Russian theocrats who became disillusioned with Marxism after the Bolsheviks threw him into prison. He then returned to his Christian faith with a new energy, commitment and resolve, developing most of his innovative ideas while living in exile in Paris, where he died in 1948. Bredaev was orthodox in his Christocentric theology, but avant-garde in his existential critiques of Marxism and the new bourgeoisie. Orthodox in his admiration of Christianity, of Dostoevsky, soliev and Tolstoy, but avant-garde in his application of their ideas to Russian literature and art and politics. He was orthodox in his use of Christian categories to launch moralistic critiques of contemporary thinkers and social trends, but avant-garde in his apocalyptic reading of history and his rejection of moral gradualism and material progress.
Speaker 2:And if you might pause for one interjection here, this next paragraph really describes what I see as American culture, and he was speaking to his culture back then.
Speaker 1:For him, the word bourgeois meant more than just middle class. It was a state of the soul characterized by a degrading clutching after security and a small-mindedness incapable of imagining a world much larger than one's own. The bourgeois didn't worship money per se, but they were addicted to personal success. But they were addicted to personal success, comfort, security and happiness. For these things they willingly compromised their honor, ignored injustice and betrayed truth, replacing these high values with trite moralisms and facile bromides that blurred important distinctions and justified selfish actions. Gone were the aristocratic intangibles and noblesse oblige. In came certainty, self-promotion and moxie. The bourgeois in other words was an idolater proud of his idolatry.
Speaker 1:And although the bourgeois spirit has always existed, bordeilleff believed that it had reached its peak in the late 19th century, when the desire for affluence triumphed over any residual aspiration for holiness, greatness or genius residual aspiration for holiness, greatness or genius. The moral debasement of Western civilization continued in the 20th century, with the middle class gaining such power and influence that the word bourgeois became synonymous with mean-spirited wealth, narrow-minded technological know-how and a preoccupation with worldly success. The cultural ideas of the knight, the monk, the philosopher and the poet were all suspended by the cultural ideal of the businessman and entrepreneur. The will to power had been usurped by the will to well-being. Berdenev remarks and this is a quote from Berdenev a religion of progress based on the apotheosis of a future fortunate generation is without compassion for either the present or the past. It addresses itself with infinite optimism to the future with infinite pessimism for the past. It is profoundly hostile to the Christian expectation of resurrection for all mankind, for all the dead fathers and forefathers.
Speaker 1:This Christian idea rests on the hope of an end to historical tragedy and contradiction valid to all human generations, and of resurrection and eternal life for all who have ever lived. Eternal life for all who have ever lived. That's part of Berdenev's book the Meaning of History, which I think is one of his more prophetic texts. That's cool. The bourgeois did not repudiate religion, but reinterpreted its value in terms of utility. Religion, but reinterpreted its value in terms of utility. The love of the poor moved to the periphery of the faith and was embraced only insofar as it didn't clash with one's personal economic interests. This inversion of means and ends, so central also to Matthew Arnold's critique of the modern Philistines in Culture and Anarchy, signaled for Berdyev the death of the spirit and the birth of the bottom line.
Speaker 2:Let's keep going to get his other quote here.
Speaker 1:And then he wrote the perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality. The industrial capitalism of civilization proved to be the destroyer of the eternal spirit and sacred tradition. Modern capitalist civilization is essentially atheistic and hostile to the idea of God. The crime of killing God must be laid at its door rather than at that of the revolutionary socialism, which merely adapted itself to the civilized bourgeois spirit and accepted its negative heritage.
Speaker 2:So the fun facts and the notable works. So your favorite was the meaning of history. We're going to go. Let's just give the audience what he did, do what he created. So his most notable works are the Meaning of the Creative Act, which is an interesting title because the new guy probably read that Rick Rubin and wrote a book called the Creative Act.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:It's called the Meaning of the Creative Act by Brett Berdea back in 1916. It'd be interesting to see if he used a lot of it or ideas from it.
Speaker 1:Or if he even heard of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that'd of it yeah.
Speaker 1:That'd be interesting Wow.
Speaker 2:So then, freedom and spirit, 1927, comprehensive philosophical work. Destiny of man 1931, deep meditative meditation on human nature, purpose and eschatology. He wrestles with a lot of theology in that one. Uh, most accessible and widely read book is that one destiny of man. Next is slavery and freedom, 1939, a powerful examination of the modern crisis, so that one has a lot to the capitalism and socialism. So that's pretty, pretty cool. If that's what you'd be interested in reading, then number five, the divine and the human, 1949 posthumous.
Speaker 2:So this came out after he died yeah, in his late work he reflects on the relationship between time and eternity, divine and human, freedom and providence. It's dense and mystical, rich with eschatological insight. Let's go. And then there's a few more philosophy. Philosophy of Freedom was an earlier one, 1911. Precursor to some of his later works Christianity and Class War, 1933. Critique of Marxism and its moral-spiritual implications. He argues that true Christianity is incompatible with class hatred or revolutionary violence. That's kind of awesome. Class hatred. We have a lot of class hatred currently in our country.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:He emphasizes oh go ahead.
Speaker 1:I'll just throw this in One of his sort of dialectical interventions was to critique Hegel and Marx's master-slave dialectic, which was also something that Nietzsche was fascinated by. Working out the master-slave dialectic. And Berdeyev said well, no, it's not. We don't really have a master-slave dialectic, we have the free and the bound dialectic. And free freedom is a cosmic attribute to the human identity that we're cosmically free from his point of view and that freedom precedes liberation and democracy and reform and revolution. It doesn't come after it. But as long as we begin with the master-slave dialectic, we're sort of perpetually bound to our own unfreedom, and that's why faith comes out of freedom and his Christian understanding of Christ's revelation of the freedom of man is central to his faith and his eschatology.
Speaker 2:I wonder if Berdeyev got that concept from the New Testament, where you have slave and master in the same church gathering together as brothers. Yeah, you know experiencing actual freedom together, despite their human socio situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, you know. No longer any slave or master, no longer any bound and free right. We're all one Brothers. And that was primary to his understanding of what a real revolution would be about would be overcoming that dialectic, not not making bets on it and and trying to pit one side against the other yeah, and then his other ones were um, beginning in the end, history, apocalypse and future of humanity.
Speaker 2:Gosh, this guy wrote some deep stuff truth and revelation, 1947, nature of truth, religious experience, inadequacy of dogma alone, and then these are super interesting concepts. He wrote about dream and reality, 1949, more poetic, introspective work where Berdeyev reflects on his own inner life, dreams, spiritual experiences and how they reveal eternal truths Part memoir, part mystical philosophy.
Speaker 1:Wow, you know I've been trying to get that. I wanted to have that copy so we could look at some of that. Maybe we can do that at another time. But it's fascinating to sort of see the kinds of experiences he had as philosopher, exile, you know, and his dream, his dreams and his understanding of himself. And that would be fascinating just on the face of it. But so we're just seeing his big picture today, so we don't have to go yeah, one thing that I was wondering about was like who knows about him?
Speaker 2:because I had never heard of him before. Your book and you know other people I've that have read the book they're like, wow, berdea is amazing. Um, why haven't more people heard about him? It sounds like people who knew about him were academic philosophers and theologians. He made it on their radars. Orthodox theological circles in Europe, catholic and Orthodox thinkers Merton talked about him, dorothy Day talked about him. So it's a lot of people in your book actually Existentialists andian mystics talked about him, and then russian studies. You might have heard about him. Why isn't more well known? Is that he's he defied categories. He was too mystical for mainstream philosophy, too independent for institutional religion, too esoteric for politics, and it made him hard to market and hard to canonize.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say. You know, you go into your professor at theology school and you say I've got my topic for my dissertation and he says well, who are you going to write about? You say Berdeyev. He says you might have to go to the literature department or somebody who's a little more open to rhetoric, because we're hardcore theologians here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Berdiav's not going to fit in this.
Speaker 1:Or comparative lit, or something like that. You know, I guess, guess you know it's interesting, because there really isn't a department of prophets, is there? I mean, there's, there's literature and there's philosophy, but there isn't, you know, a department of prophecy it's too hard to handle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, too hot to handle yeah no one wants to open up that box as a, as a study or a discipline. Yeah, the nature of it is like critiquing everything they're about or doing you know, even academia itself it's.
Speaker 1:it's putting your existential soul on the line, you know, and uh uh, for better or for worse. And then when you look at the fate of most of the prophets, you can see why it wouldn't be necessarily something, although I'm sure you know, there are people that have done their dissertations on the prophets and there's many great scholarly books on prophecy. Brueggemann wrote that Prophetic Imagination which is classic. Yeah, I don't remember him mentioning Berdeyev, though. I mean, I think they're mostly biblical models.
Speaker 2:So here's the 10 fun and or quirky facts about Nikolai Berdeyev. Number one he was expelled from the university for Marxist activism but later became one of Marxism's fiercest spiritual critics. Number two he hated institutions. He once said that every institution tends to become demonic, including the church Demonic. Number three he was deported on the philosopher's ship. I don't know why I can't say that word today. That is really cool. I never knew about that philosopher's ship. In 1922, Lenin exiled him with 150 intellectuals fearing their dangerous ideas.
Speaker 2:Berdeyev called it a death sentence for the soul of russia. Number four he loved dostoevsky and saw him in the brothers care, saw himself in the brothers karamazov, which next is dostoevsky. So that's kind of why we put him right before that because he loved, he loved dostoevsky. So we're kind of going backwards on the russian russian guys. Yeah, um, he saw ivan karamazov and the grand inquisitor as perfect. He loved Dostoevsky. So we're kind of going backwards on the Russian guys. He saw Ivan Karamazov and the Grand Inquisitor as perfect metaphors for modern spiritual crisis. Number five he claimed he never truly converted to Christianity. For him, it was less a moment and more a long return, a slow awakening to a truth he already suspected.
Speaker 1:Sounds like Chesterton.
Speaker 2:That's really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Number six he lived in voluntary poverty in Paris. Despite being from Russian aristocracy, he gave up the wealth for truth and paid the price. Number seven he didn't like being called an academic. He saw himself not as a philosopher in the scholastic sense, but as a prophetic voice, a witness to spiritual truth yeah, we just talked about that yeah, number eight.
Speaker 2:He believed creativity was divine. This is where a really unique contribution of him is this emphasis on creativity. He thought human beings were co-creators with god and that art and freedom were sacred acts of resistance yeah, rick rubin, if you haven't read him you gotta, you gotta get him.
Speaker 1:He's your man gosh rick rubin.
Speaker 2:You'll love. You'll love this book, the creative act, if you, uh, if you read it. He probably did. I I'm I'm suspecting, but anyways, we'll see. He once debated communists on stage and won over the crowd. His passionate defense of human dignity often left his ideological opponents shaken. And number 10, he was read and admired by both anarchists and Catholic mystics. Figures as diverse as Dorothy Day, jacques Maritain and even existential atheists found inspiration in his writings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, because of his deep spiritual humanism. You know, human beings are their freedom first and their dignity is central and everything else derives from that. Political systems, dignity and freedom are birthrights and you know, not all men are created equal. All men are created free. That's for him, it's primary, and out of that freedom comes their equality and their dignity and their capacity for creation and creativity and creation. So, wow, he's, wow, he's really a revolutionary voice that is worth paying attention to, even now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the points about that freedom and creativity together is that he didn't see Christianity as, or he was critical of Christianity in its authoritarian sense and he's critical of the secular left with its collectivism and kind of coercion. Yeah, the thing he saw in Christianity was a revolutionary spirit like existential resistance to both or to any other, any other influence other than love.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is kind of like making love a political resistance.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's why he liked Dostoevsky's grand inquisitor, identified with that story. That was written by one of the characters, a religious head of the Inquisition whose job it was to bring about the conversion of the masses through terror and violence.
Speaker 2:Was it a Christian character? The Inquisitor? Yeah, he was the Like a chorus of religion sort of character.
Speaker 1:He was like. I think he could be seen as the Antichrist, or he could be seen as the Pope or as the head of the Inquisition who had a philosophical justification for enforcing Christianity through violence, and we'll talk about it when we get to Dostoevsky. But the fascinating thing is that the conceit in the story is that Christ comes back, and so the Grand Inquisitor brings him in for interrogation, in for interrogation and he says okay, before we begin, I just want to let you know that at the end of the Bible it says you can't add anything to the Bible, so you can't talk. I'm the only one who can talk and I interpret everything you already said. The only one who can talk and I interpret everything you already said. So you just listen to me and I'm going to tell you how it's going to go. We got your number, we're running the show here. You can't talk anymore. So I don't really know why you came back again, because you're superfluous. And he goes on in that vein.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:And Christ is listening to this whole thing and then at the end he kisses the guy on the mouth and the Grand Inquisitor doesn't know how to take that Because he's not adding anything other than the kiss. So subversive it's. One of those great works that you know has led to countless theological and spiritual interpretations of that ending and even multiple interpretations by the characters in the novel. And so we have the intellectual brother who wrote it, his, his story, one way, and then his spiritual brother who hears it, sees it another way, and they debate the meaning of of his own story. And well, we'll talk about that when we get to dostoevsky. But you could see why that would fascinate, uh, per day. F because you know he's been around christ and and antichrists and prophets and false prophets, and he's seen the revolution, the great hope of the Russian revolution, and then it's betrayal and then it's turning into a anti-revolution and a totalitarian regime.
Speaker 2:And you know, and he's there just trying to speak the truth to power as best he can, uh, just powerful stuff this, um, this statement is interesting that his critique of both marxism and bourgeois liberalism was rooted in his orthodox faith, not not in some middle of the road centrism. Yes, that's interesting because he's not just.
Speaker 2:He's not saying here's the third way ideology, that's just called centrism yeah but he said it's this explosive belief in the human person, made in the image of a free, creative god. So it it's a very theologically rooted concept of freedom and resistance to right and left and any political ideology. Really, and here's one of his quotes, the kingdom of God is freedom. It is not order. Order is the kingdom of Caesar.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:This single sentence dismantles much of what has been passed on as political theology in the american landscape. And for birdie, birdie of faith was never about submission to an earthly order, left or right, but a spiritual awakening that resists all systems that dehumanize yeah, um, and we forget that.
Speaker 1:You know, um, birdenia was exiled to Paris, but then Paris got invaded by the Nazis in 1940. So he saw the face of Caesar in Russia and then he saw the face of Caesar again in the Nazi occupation in Paris, and both times it was. But that doesn't change my prophetic defense of human freedom Did you say face of Caesar in these characters?
Speaker 2:Yeah, did he frame it that way?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Or did you I'm sure he could have. Well, face of Caesar in fill in the blank is kind of a cool way to look at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, fill in the blank is kind of a cool way to look at it. Yeah, yeah, it's worship of power, and the effort that it takes to try to take away human freedom and divinity of God and his people made in his image is just, you know, basic sacrilege, I think. What was it that Chesterton called it? He called it a daily mysticism. You know an everyday mysticism, and I think for Berdanev it's. You know, mysticism is the same thing. It's a daily thing, uh, every moment of uh reality that if you're not seeing you're, you're betraying. Um and for. For chesterton, mysticism was the only thing that could keep you sane, because otherwise you end up on some sort of power trip where you're reducing, uh, the mystery to some sort of program that you got going, some system it sounds like he's.
Speaker 2:It sounds like, according to berdayev, there really is no freedom outside of christ yeah, yeah, I think for berdania, that's, that's what he's saying like. It's so theologically rooted.
Speaker 1:Creativity and freedom and love are all so divine, and that's what gives us human freedom interesting to compare him to Sartre, because Sartre famously said you know, he was never so free as when the Nazis occupied Paris, because it changed every choice he made into an existential choice about whether he was going to live or die, whether he was going to serve, whether he was going to serve live in freedom or live in fear. And there's that famous story where a student comes to him and says I have a difficult choice to make my mother's sick and I want to stay home and take care of her, but the resistance fighter that's my friend wants me to join his cadre and he tells me I should become a freedom fighter as part of the resistance. And I don't know whether I should stay home, take care of my mother or join the resistance.
Speaker 2:This was SART.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this was the question that was posed to Sartre and supposedly Sartre said well, there is no right or wrong answer. You're free. You have to choose and commit, and both of those choices are good choices. But you're free, that is to say, create. And so it was basically you know you're free, you create I'm not.
Speaker 1:Nobody can tell you what your conscience is, telling you the person that you should be, or what the choice is. And if you rely on the party to tell you, you're giving up your humanity and if you rely on your mom to tell you, you know you're giving up your autonomy as well. So you have to take responsibility right. Commitment is responsibility and responsibility derives from freedom. And it isn't to say that all those choices are relative, but in this particular case they're your own conscience and your own relationship to the divine. And Berdenev would probably see that clearer than Sartre. I think you know he's sort of saying God's asking you to make your, you know to make a choice about, you know who you are and and he, you know, know you want to co-create your life with him. You don't want to just choose independently of your role in the scheme of things.
Speaker 2:And along the lines of freedom is uh. Here's one of the readings that also, I guess, fuses the spiritual. The freedom is rooted in spiritual, spiritual truth and the creativity of god.
Speaker 1:Actually, yeah, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:I never linked those two freedom and creativity like like as your main, your main idea of freedom being rooted in the creation, creative act of god and and the ability for you to act in that way because you're in the image of that.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And he. But he kind of says that in this freedom, in the spirit book this reading this reading says um Christianity is the religion of divine and human freedom. It's not what the modern culture thinks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It brings not law, not commandments, not coercion, but the image of the God man and the call to freely follow him. Where there is no freedom, there can be no love, no creativity, no personhood. The kingdom of God is not established by force, nor can it be imposed from above. It must be born from within. In this lies the scandal and greatness of Christianity that it entrusts the fate of the world to the inner freedom of man. God does not desire slaves, but sons. Whoa.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine him saying that at a debate with a marxist?
Speaker 2:dude. They would just not even know what to do with that. They'd have to say it's hogwash, but it just it, but it just ignited everyone in the room's conscience oh yeah they know, they know it's true, just by hearing it, you know. It's like so evident in your spirit.
Speaker 1:In your spirit, if you can believe, you have one well, it's like the very thing which both excites and troubles you about your, your spirit. You know you're free, but you know that means you're responsible. So it's kind of like you're.
Speaker 1:you're you're not off the hook, but you're're not on the philosophership as an exile either. You're co-creating with the divine and you have a responsibility to yourself and to creation. Yeah, that's powerful stuff. I can see why the Creative Act book would be probably very inspirational. Check that out, see what he says there. And the other thing about that kind of thing, that kind of statement, is it's not really one that you can reduce to two competing syllogisms, you know, or break it down into some sort of analytic framework, because it's so existential in the sense of you know your definition of your own relationship to your choices is so subjective. So, kierkegaardian, you know that it doesn't lend itself to easily parsing. You either get it or you don't, or you either reject it or accept it. It's, it's pretty, you know, right out there.
Speaker 2:That's what's so powerful you can hear it in Birdejev and Kierkegaard is that that deeply honest challenge to yourself and like as a person, and like, as Kierkegaard was saying, like yourself, like, does yourself even know yourself? Sort of a?
Speaker 2:right a depth of, and I guess that's where existentialism is coming from, and therefore I think it was needed, like it's a needed discipline. Yeah, existentialism rather than a, rather than a um, philosophical idea. I think it's almost like an actual discipline to to know yourself and to know what's real. It's like a venture into how do I even know things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, epistemology yeah, what did? What did kirkagard say? The self was a relation to itself. Uh, and if you don't have a relation to yourself, then your self is a pretty profound beginning for philosophy, rather than just assuming that you know that you have a self because you buy clothes or whatever or you see yourself in the mirror, or whatever buy clothes or whatever, or you see yourself in the mirror or whatever.
Speaker 2:yeah, the that I, that whole concept in kirkagard, which I hear echoing in berdeev, is like if you, if you don't know, if you, if you're not so, to the modern person right now. Like if you can't sit under a tree quietly for 30 minutes, yeah, you probably don't know yourself at all, and I think our culture is in a crisis in that way. Like I don't think many people can sit under a tree quietly for 30 minutes. And I'm not making up some random arbitrary law, I'm just saying, like you can't, if you can't sit with yourself quietly with your thoughts and like relate to yourself and play back and think through and have a relationship with yourself, then there's a problem. You're completely disconnected and everything you're doing is a reflection of everyone else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you probably don't have a single original thought ricocheting around in your head right now, because you're so influenced by everybody else. And that concludes episode 10, part one on Nikolai Berdeyev. I hope you're resonating with the powerful ideas and these people's powerful stories. It might hit different depending on your spiritual location, whether you're agnostic, a skeptic, a believer or somewhere in between, on some kind of deconstruction journey. We're going to continue exploring what it means to live a life of deep meaning in a world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic.
Speaker 2:And this general revelation doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. It's not confined to pulpits or seminaries. The prophetic voice is breaking through in novels, poetry, charity work, art and the unexpected corners of culture, voices crying out from the edges of society. We hope you'll continue to join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. If you found this meaningful, please leave a five-star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation. Adios, spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff without a parachute, like I'm high on cannabis, and skip through fields naked, like I wonder if this has been a subversive orthodoxy podcast with tra Mullen and Professor Enchasti.