Page 48 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 67

55
part of a ‘mystical dialectic’ that happens before/outside the creation of time
and even rationality. Rationality and time are both seen by Berdyaev as
by-products of the Fall. ‘All creatures are created by God before time and
before the world. All that is living is present in God’s plan of the universe,
before time and before the world realises itself in an ideal process of divine
dialectic’. 56 In this, Berdyaev seems to draw significantly on Solovyov’s
distinction between the divine world and the natural world. Berdyaev’s own
‘World Soul’ includes the unity of all created beings, and as a result of this he
emphasises that all are responsible for original sin. All took part in this Fall,
and this ‘taking part’ was a fee action. This is a ‘World Soul’ similar to that of
Solovyov, and therefore differs from that of Men.
For Berdyaev, evil is not a real existence, but a falsification, a fiction and
an appearance or illusion – it is the ‘ghost’ of a self-actualising ego misusing its
freedom. It finds its existence in ‘non-existence’. In God’s order, it needs to be
restricted back into this sphere of non-existence and destroyed. As
non-existence, it finds its origins neither in God nor outside God. This ‘non-
existence’ is important to Berdyaev, as in his view it excludes Manichaeism,
which he describes as where ‘the absolute and the relative are viewed in the
57
same dimension as co-relative and competing powers’. It is important for
Berdyaev that God is neither found guilty nor reduced in his might by the
existence of evil, which is ‘nothing’.
Berdyaev sees the existence of a heavenly hierarchy both in the divine
world and in the natural world that has fallen. Satan exists as fallen angel: ‘Evil
is creation that has made itself into a god. Evil is the violation of the heavenly
hierarchy of relative submission, after which the first in the heavenly, angelic
58
hierarchy becomes Satan or the Devil’. This concept of an angelic fall may be
found in the later works of Solovyov, but is developed by Berdyaev from the
beginning of his work and as we shall see is then developed still further by
Bulgakov and Men. For both angels and humans, freedom is their highest
quality. In the case of humans, it is connected with their being made in the
‘image and likeness of God’. As a result of its incorrect use, the world’s freedom
has been lost and it has become subject to the devil. Nonetheless, freedom is

55 Here we shall use the Present Simple in order not to imply that this mystical dialectic is
somehow chronologically related to the natural world.
56 Berdyaev, Philosophy of Freedom, Part 2 Chapter 5:1
57 Berdyaev, Philosophy of Freedom, Part 2 Chapter 5:1
58 Berdyaev, Philosophy of Freedom, Part 2 Chapter 5:1

46