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that he emphasises the most in his lecture on Solovyov. 50 The strong
understanding of freedom that permeates all Solovyov’s writing on evil is his
most important influence on Men in this area, although it is a theme that is
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developed and adapted as we shall see below.
II. NIKOLAI BERDYAEV (1874-1948)

Berdyaev develops Solovyov’s ‘freedom’ in his work, The Philosophy of Freedom.
Men cites this work at the end of chapter 4 of Origins of Religion: the idea that
God should have created a world without suffering ‘is fruit of human
limitations and shows a lack of awareness of the meaning of existence, since
this meaning is bound up with the irrational mystery of the freedom to sin… If
evil were outwardly removed by force and compulsion, and if goodness were
something necessary and inevitable, then the work of each individual and the
perfection of being would be devalued… According to the plan of creation, the
cosmos has been set as a task, as an idea, which is to be creatively realised by
the freedom of the created soul’. 52
We shall consider how Berdyaev uses his conception of freedom to
explain the presence of evil in terms of ‘meaning’, beginning with his
understanding of the Fall. Then we shall review the limitations of this approach
as considered by Men.
For Berdyaev, the Biblical story of the Fall in Genesis 3 is the religious
‘source’ for understanding how suffering and evil came to be in the world, but
he tells us ‘it is important to understand the mythological and symbolic
character of the story of Genesis about Adam and Eve’. He goes on to tell us
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that while the Bible sends us back to the sources of existence, ‘there is no clear
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boundary distinguishing what is in time from what is before time’ since there
was no such boundary in the ancient consciousness.
There are also philosophical reasons why science has no access to the
story of the Fall. The role of science is to understand the structure of nature,
but it cannot understand the origins of the order of nature. The Fall itself is

50 Men, Lectures on Russian Religious Philosophy.
51 As it is for both Berdyaev and Bulgakov
52 Cited by Men, translated in Shukman/Roberts, p52
53 Berdyaev, Nikolai. The Philosophy of Freedom, Part 2 Chapter 5:1. Бердяев, Николай. Философия
Свободы [АСТ, Москва, 2010] [AST, Moscow, 2010] – can be found at http://www.krotov.info
54 Berdyaev, Philosophy of Freedom, Part 2 Chapter 5:1

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