Berdyaev, Nikolai - Truth and Revelation (Collier, 1962)

God is not power which displays itself in the
world; he is in the world incognito. He both gives

glimpses of himself in the world and at the same time
hides himself. It is in human freedom rather than in
necessity or in the coercion of man, or in causative
determinism, that he reveals himself. God determines
nothing and governs nothing. The emanation of what
is known as the grace of God is the freedom of man.
God is Mystery, God is the Truth of the world and
the Freedom of the world, he is not the world itself
nor is he government within it. One can say that God
is Love and Freedom because such conceptions are
derived from the highest spiritual experience of man
and not from experience of the world of nature and
society. It is difficult to believe in God without Christ,
without the crucified Son who has taken upon him
self all the suffering of the world. In the world God
suffers rather than governs. It is the prince of this
world who rules in it. But ideas associated with the
prince of this world have been transferred to God,
and this has been a cause of godlessness. Moreover
insofar as such conceptions of God are concerned
godlessness has been right.
-from Chapter 6
NICOLAS BERDYAEV
Translated from the Russian
by R. M. FRENCH
COLLIER BOOKS
NEW YORK, N.Y.
This Collier Books edition is published by arrangement with
Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated
Collier Books is a division of The Crowell-Collier Publishing

Company
First Collier Books Edition 1962
Copyright, 1953, by YMCA-Press

All Rights Reserved
Hecho en los E.E.U.U.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction 7
1 Existential Philosophy and Spiritual Experience.

Transcendental Man 13
2 Truth is not an objective Reality in the sphere

of things. Primary life which precedes the sepa
ration into Subject and Object. Degrees of Con
sciousness. The pragmatic, Marxist and Nietz
schean conceptions of truth. The human-ness of
truth. The act of knowing cannot be separated
from life as a whole 25
3 Revelation. The Spirituality 'and Universality of

Revelation. Degrees of Revelation. Anthropo
morphism, Sociomorphism and Cosmomor
phism. The human-ness of Revelation. Apopha
tics and Kataphatics. Theology and Philosophy.
Dogmatics and their symbolical character 49
4 Freedom, Being and Spirit. Essence and Exist-

ence. The Creative Act 71
5 Man and History. Freedom and Necessity in

History. Providence, Freedom and Fate 81
5
6 I Contents
6 New forms of Godlessness. Optimistic and Pessi

mistic Godlessness. Godlessness of the day and
Godlessness of the night. The Service that God
lessness renders in purging away servile Socio-
morphism and Idolatry 93
7 A break with the forensic interpretation of
Christianity and Redemption. The divine ele
ment in man. Redemption and Creative power.
Personal salvation and social and cosmic trans-
figuration 1 17
8 The Paradox of Evil. The Ethics of Hell and
Anti-Hell. Reincarnation and Transfiguration 13 1
9 The Revelation of the Spirit and of the age of
the Spirit. Transcendental Man and the New
Man 143
Appendix. Principal works by Nicolas Berdyaev 157
Introduction
THIS BOOK PUTS FORWARD a reconsideration of the funda

mental problems of Christianity in the light of spirit and
truth. I have made such a revision all my life, but I wish
now to do it more systematically and at greater depth. I
want to sum up a long process of thought. Is it possible
to come to a conclusion about Christianity in spirit and
in truth, founded as it is upon the authority of an ancient
and sacred tradition? This raises the question of the re
lation which holds between truth and revelation, and
whether a critique of revelation is possible. From the
point of view of the usual terminology, philosophy here
claims to sit in judgment upon. revelation. It puts itself,
so to speak, on a higher level than religion. In the nine
teenth century liberal protestant thought passed judgment
upon revelation from the point of view of scientific truth.
If that is the way in which the problem is conceived it
would seem that it cannot be justified. But all is not
quite so simple as it appears from the customary use of
words. One must remember what is said in the Gospel
about the coming of a time when man will worship God
in spirit and in truth.
When Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason, reason
passed judgment upon reason and recognized its limits.
7
8 I Inrroduction
A "Critique of Revelation" ought to be a critique made

in the light of revelation itself, a critique by the spirit
which is in union with revelation and not a critique by
reason which is alien to it. Man judges: such is his ex
orbitant pretension. And the claim has indeed been exor
bitant that finite man should dare to get to know infinite
truth. But it must be remembered that man has always
been the one and only organ which revelation has used
in order to reach man. Moses and the prophets have
spoken, the God-man Jesus Christ has spoken, the Apos
tles, the Saints, and the Mystics, the Doctors of the
Church, Theologians and Christian Philosophers-all have
spoken. We have heard no other voice, and when we have
heard the voice of God in ourselves that voice we have
heard through ourselves, that is to say through man. Reve
lation, the Word of God, has always passed through man
and the condition of man has been reflected in it; it is
marked by the limitations of the human mind. Human
thought may indeed expand and deepen just as it may
contract and play upon the surface of things.
Man cannot be automatic and entirely passive when he
receives, and assimilates, what God says to him. He has
always been active in the matter, active in either a good
or a bad sense, he has always brought his own anthropo
morphism and sociomorphism as a contribution from him
self. It is not upon revelation that man passes judgment
so much as upon his own human reception and under
standing of revelation. Revelation presupposes the exist
ence of a divine element in man, and that the human is
commensurable with the divine. Revelation is always
divine-human. If the critique of revelation is to be human
the revelation itself was human also. If we are to look at
the relation between truth and revelation philosophically,
it can only be done by a philosophy which is inwardly
based upon religious and spiritual experience, not by a
rationalist philosophy but by an existential philosophy
which recognizes that spiritual experience is primary. The
Introduction I 9
self-purging of revelation from sociomorphism, that is to
say from the transference to God, and to the relation of
God to the world and to man, of conceptions derived
from the slavish social relations which obtain among
human beings, the relation of master and slave, is a
spiritual task in which various agencies take part and
among them is biblical criticism.
This is the preparation from below for the crowning
revelation of Spirit, of the Holy Spirit; but that which
comes from below is always joined with that which comes
from above. The meeting and the union of the two move
ments from below and from above is the most mysterious
fact of human existence. There cannot be a philosophy
of human existence unless it is in inward union with that
fact. I think it apposite to remember some words which
can be read in Hermes Trismegistus. I quote from a
French translation which I have at hand: "Ne vois done
dans tout cela, mon fils, que des manifestations menteuses
d'une verite superieure; et puisqu'il en est ainsi, j'appelle
le mensonge une expression de Ia verite" ("Now see in
all that, my son, only a deceitful manifestation of a higher
truth, and since that is so, I call lies an expression of
truth"); and again, "Je comprends, o Tat, je comprends
ce qui ne peut s'exprimer, voila Dieu" ("I understand, ...
I understand that what cannot be expressed, that is God").
Behind that which jars upon us and even distresses us a
higher truth may be hidden to which we ought to break
through. God is that which cannot be expressed. That
then is the revelation of the Spirit. And of that which
cannot be expressed there cannot be any doubts. There
can be doubt only of what is expressed.
N.B.
Paris, 1947.
Truth and Revelation
Chapter I
Existential Philosophy and Spiritual Experience.

Transcendental Man.
I REGARD EVERY CLASSIFICATION of knowledge into dif

ferent spheres as relative and conventional, but never
theless I must definitely assign this book of mine to the
realm of philosophy rather than to the sphere of theology.
It is a pity that existential philosophy has become fashion
able, and that thanks especially to Sartre. Even Heidegger,
a writer to whom access is not very easy and whom few
people have read, has become fashionable. Serious phi
losophy ought not to be allowed to become a matter of
fashion: it just does not suit it. For all that, the course
which existential philosophy is taking is bringing to light
a crisis in the fortunes of traditional philosophy and shows
that it is entering upon new paths. A break is manifest
with the Greek intellectualism which scholasticism in
herited, with the rationalism of Descartes, and with Ger
man idealism.
Existentialism may be defined in various ways, but the
most important in my opnion is the description of existen
tialism which regards it as a philosophy which will not
accept objectifying knowledge. Existence cannot be the
13
14 I Truth and Revelation
object of knowledge. Objectification means alienation, loss
of individuality, loss of freedom, subjection to the com
mon, and cognition by means of the concept. Well nigh
throughout its history philosophical thought has borne
the mark of objectification, although the philosophies in
which it has been expressed have been of different types.
Empiricism has carried this impress of objectification just
as much as the most extreme form of rationalism. It is to
be found too in the newer forms of pragmatism and of
the philosophy of life, which always has a certain flavour
of biology about it. And whatever may be the desire of
Heidegger and Sartre to construct an ontology by bringing
into service the rational apparatus of the concept, they
are in the grip of objectifying knowledge and fail to break
with the tradition which comes down from Parmenides.
Being, to begin with, is already the offspring of objec
tifying thought; it is objective. Kierkegaard regarded as
existential only the knowledge which exists in the sphere
of subjectivity, not in that of objectivity, in what is indi
vidual rather than in the common. In this respect he was
a pioneer. It is Jaspers who remains most faithful to him.
Kierkegaard turned towards subjectivity and sought to
give expression to his own unrepeatable individual experi
ence. It is this that makes him so important. But he did
not take up a position which lies entirely on the other
side of the distinction between subject and object. He
preserved that distinction and at the same time took the
side of the subject.
Another definition of existential philosophy is this.
Existential philosophy is expressionist. In other words, it
seeks to express the existentiality of the cognitive mind
rather than something abstracted from that existentiality,
which is what objectifying philosophy seeks to do. In this
sense an element of existentialism behind the process of
objectification may be discovered in all great philosophers.
Existence (Existenz) is not essence, it is not substance,
it is a free act. Existentia takes supremacy over essentia.
Truth and Revelation I 15
From this point of view existential philosophy is akin to
every philosophy of action and all philosophies of free
dom. In Kant the sphere of freedom is in actual fact
Existenz: but he did not make this clear himself. Existenz
in its depth is freedom. This is to be seen both in Jaspers,
who allied himself with Kant, and again in Sartre who
has very little in common with him. The events which
take place in the existential sphere lie outside any causal
sequence. It is only in the sphere of objectification that
the causal link exists. It cannot, therefore, be said, for ex
ample, that God is the cause of the world. There can be
no causal relations between God and man. There is noth
ing which God determines. God is not a power "outside"
and "above."
It follows, therefore, that the traditional way of pre
senting the relation between freedom and grace in such a
form is out of date, it remains within the sphere of objec
tification. In actual fact, everything is within the existen
tial sphere, in which there is no objectivity whatever. We
have to steep ourselves in the depths of subjectivity: but
we must do it with the purpose in view of getting away
from the very antithesis between subject and object.
Heidegger and Sartre live in the realm of an objectified
world, a world of things, and this is the source from which
their pessimism arises. In Heidegger Dasein exists only as
something ejected into the world and there experiencing
Angst, care, hopelessness and death as the inevitable re
sult of its finiteness. Sarte admits that freedom is exter
nal to the world, but this does not help. It is all due to
the denial of the primary reality of spiritual experience.
The only metaphysics which existential philosophy can
recognize is a set of symbols of spiritual experience. Jas
pers also was of this opinion, but he put it in another
way, for to him there is in fact no spiritual experience.
The new path that philosophy is following takes for
granted a revision of the traditional philosophy upon
which Christian theology and the interpretation of Chris-
tianity have rested. It has always been linked with some

philosophy, and in this case with the philosophy which I
call objectified. The idea of God, of Providence, of Au
thority, the na'ively realistic conception of the creation of
the world and of the Fall, the notion that a rational
ontology is a possibility, all these have been due to that
same process of objectification. In some respects we
should feel more in sympathy with Hindu philosophy than
with Greek and in particular with Aristotle, for Indian
philosophy issues to a less extent from the antithesis of
subject and object.
There are various types of existentialism, the main dis
tinction being between its religious and its atheistic forms.
St. Augustine is to some extent a representative of the
first type (I speak of him now as a philosopher upon
whom I set a high value, rather than as a theologian of
whom I am not very fond) and so above all are Pascal,
Kierkegaard, and of course Dostoyevsky-who must be
regarded as a metaphysician also. The second type is rep
resented mainly by Heidegger and Sartre and also by the
followers of Nietzsche, who was a most complex phe
nomenon.
The difference between the two types depends primarily
upon whether or not they recognize the existence of spirit
ual experience as primary and qualitatively distinctive and
as preceding all objectification. The spiritual experience of
the inner man is not objectified; it is an existence which
precedes the formation of the world of objects and things.
It is in that that freedom discloses itself. In the spiritual
experience of man the mysterious secret of God, of the
world and of man himself, is revealed. Freedom, that is
to say the act of freedom, is in fact Existenz. Freedom is
the antithesis of objectification, which is always deter
mination.
But man is actually an objectified creature as well, he
is a being who belongs to nature and to society, and his
religious life flows on at two levels, as it were. One of
them is the sphere of objectified and socialized religion.
In this sphere everything is represented as coming from
without, out of an alien nature to which man ought to
be subjected. The events which occur in the realm of re
ligion are represented as natural and historical events.
The Church appears as above all an institution, of the
same kind as other social institutions. The sacraments of
Christianity assume a rationalized form and take on a
juridical aspect. God is represented as a monarch and
governor.
The animal nature of man, and indeed his social nature
too, is objectification and alienation rather than Existenz,
which is revealed only in subjectivity and individuality.
Man as an animal is an object, that is to say something
which is different from and opposed to the depth of his
existence. But there is in man a deep-lying stratum which
is anterior to objectification. It precedes his ejection into
the external; it is there before the division into subject and
object. In virtue of this dimension of depth, which in
Hindu terminology is both Atman and Brahman, man is
not determined by nature and society, there is freedom
within him.
This existential depth may be concealed; it can be sup
pressed and a man may not be aware of it. But it has
been the source of everything great which man has created
in history. Man as a purely natural and social being could
not be a creator of anything. That which appears to the
Marxists to be a "superstructure" is in fact the primordial
depth. Man is a being who belongs to two worlds. He is
not one adapted solely to the natural and social world,
he is always moving out beyond the boundaries of that
world and turning his attention to his other nature in his
creative acts.
Creative acts are acts of freedom. Without that pre
sumption there is no such thing as creative power. In
addition to natural and social man, that is to the deter
mined being who forms a small part of the colossal objec-
tive world, there is still transcendental man who cannot
be explained from without. No creative genius, and no
hero in Carlyle's sense of the word, could be explained
from the outside-there is always something almost
miraculous about his appearance. Man cannot be ex
plained solely from below, as Marx, Freud, Heidegger
and Sartre and all the materialists have wished to explain
him. There is something in man which is wholly inex
plicable if one views him solely from below, something
which comes from a higher world. No such explanation,
however strained, can give a satisfactory account of his
higher nature-and not only of his higher nature in a
spiritual sense, but of his occult nature also, which does
not come within the purview of average and ordinary
thought on the subject.
Man is a tragic being for the simple reason that he
finds himself placed on the frontier between two worlds,
a higher and a lower, and he includes both worlds in him
self. He cannot be entirely adapted to the lower world,
a fact which is plain from the revelation of human nature
in history. While at the same time at the very culminating
points of civilization the beast in man comes to light and
his primitive instincts come into play, instincts which
civilization is unable to subdue because it does not pene
trate into the depth of man. Yet side by side with this
there is always a revelation of the spiritual man as well.
In the concentration camps of Germany there were
not only civilized beasts who tortured their victims by
using instruments which technological civilization pro
vided, and maltreated people with the aid of the chemical
laboratory. There were also heroes of resistance, people
who were ready for sacrifice and supreme effort for the
sake of their ideas and beliefs. Man is a tragic being be
cause he has a double nature, because he belongs to two
worlds, and one world only cannot give him satisfaction.
Behind the natural man, and here I include social man,
is hidden the man whom I shall call transcendental
Transcendental man is the inner man whose existence lies

outside the bounds of objectification. It is to this man that
that which is not ejected into the external belongs, that
which is not alienated, nor determined from the outside,
that which marks him as belonging to the realm of free
dom. It is inaccurate and conventional to call this his
nature, albeit his highest nature, for freedom is not na
ture, spirit is not nature, it is a reality of another kind.
No theories of evolution can overthrow the existence of
transcendental man, for they are always concerned with
nature in a secondary sense, with the world of objects. In
the same way the empirical theory of knowledge cannot
overthrow Kant's transcendental theory of knowledge.
Transcendental man stands outside the division into
subject and object and, therefore, all the theories which
are derived from knowledge of the object can tell us noth
ing about him. All the arguments here belong to a sec
ondary sphere and cannot be extended to apply to the
sphere which is primary. The experience through which
man lives is at the same time divine and human, and from
that experience the whole of his religious and spiritual life
flows. This bears witness to the existence of transcendental
man behind natural man. And what we are discussing at
the moment is man, and human knowledge, not a knowl
edge which lies outside man as Husser! would like and as
purely monistic idealism would have. The category of the
holy, of the divine, inherent in man from the beginning as
a transcendental being is an a priori of religion.
Transcendental man is not what is called unchangeable
human nature, for it is not nature at all. It is creative
action and freedom. Neither spirit nor freedom is nature.
The nature of man changes, it evolves, but behind it is
hidden the transcendental man, spiritual man, not only
earthly man but heavenly man also, who is the Adam
Kadman of the Kabbalah. The changes which take place
in man during the course of history, which those who
insist so tenaciously upon the unchangeability of human
nature deny in vain, are entirely unable to refute the
existence of transcendental man. In this context the words
"changes" and the "uncbangeability" of man are used in
quite different senses. Transcendental man is on the fur
ther side of the already objectified antithesis between the
individual and the universal. He is both the individual
man and the universal man. But be is not universal rea
son, nor the Kantian transcendental mind, nor is he the
Hegelian world spirit. He is man.
It would also be quite untrue to say that there is a
dualism and a gulf between transcendental man and
earthly, empirical man-the dualism which exists between
the thing-in-itself and the appearance. Rationalism of that
kind has already become the rationalization which is ap
propriate to the objective world. It is not in the least sur
prising that such things are said, for it is very difficult to
put into words that which lies outside the antithesis of
subject and object and outside the sphere of objectifica
tion. Unlike Kant's thing-in-itself, transcendental man
operates in this world, he reveals himself in every great
creative man, when man has risen above himself as a
purely natural being. Transcendental man acts in this
world, but he comes out of another world, he is from the
world of freedom.
Transcendental man does not evolve, he creates. His
existence is the condition upon which the possibility of
religious and spiritual experience depends; it is, as it were,
an a priori of that experience. But he is not hidden, as in
Kant the thing-in-itself is hidden, he is disclosed for the
sake of the world and the processes that take place in
the world. It is here that the symbolical relations between
the two worlds have their existence. We must not yield to
the idea that the causal relations which hold already in
the objectified world exist also between transcendental
man and earthly empirical man. The relation between
them must be conceived as creative and free. Creative
power and freedom are opposed to causal relations and
determinism. T o think about freedom is always t o think
apophatically.
Given that a revelation of God in the world was a pos
sibility, God could not reveal himself solely to earthly
empirical man because transcendental man Adam Kad
man exists. But empirical, earthly man always limits reve
lation and frequently distorts it, by stamping it with the
impress of his own anthropomorphic and social ideas. The
real humanity of revelation, the humanity of God, comes
to light precisely from the awakening of transcendental
man, rather than from man with the limitations which the
facts of nature and society impose upon him. The critique
of revelation consists in bringing into view as far as may
be possible the transcendental man, who is also the hu
manized man. Humanization, however, in the interpreta
tion of revelation, is also at the same time its deification.
It is, that is to say, its emancipation from the distorted
limitations of empirical earthly man, the man who belongs
to natural and social conditions and is in the power of
objectification.
If the existence of transcendental man be not admitted,
it is impossible to make any pretensions to the knowledge
of truth, it is a priori to any apprehension of truth and
even to the very existence of truth. It is not a logical
a priori or an a priori of the abstract reason, it is an
a priori of the whole man, of spirit. It is the whole man
who receives and interprets revelation, not abstract, par
tial and merely psychological man.
And man does limit and distort revelation in conse
quence of his abstract and partial make-up, both natural
and social. Revelation is disclosed to the inner spiritual
man, to transcendental man. It is, as it were, an awaken
ing of the inner man, the existence of whom precedes the
emergence of the objective world. Truth is apprehended
not by the abstract, partial man who is referred to as rea
son, mind in general and universal spirit, but by the whole
man, transcendental man, the image of God; and God may
be entirely unrevealed in any given empirical man, who
sometimes reminds one more of the image of a beast than
of the image of God.
I am now speaking not of truths but of Truth. But
even the knowledge of truths in particular sciences as
sumes the existence of transcendental man, although he
does not come to full expression in them. Reason and
logic in man are human if regarded as belonging to tran
scendental man: they are neither non-human nor anti
human as the abstract idealists, Husser! and many others,
would have it.
Rationalism is something different from an abstraction
of reason from the whole man, from humanity, and there
fore it is anti-human even if at times it seeks to enter the
lists on behalf of the liberation of man. The task which
faces existential philosophy consists in the attempt to
make reason itself turn towards humanity. The question is
asked-by what organ can transcendental man be recog
nized? It is he himself who recognizes himself in an act
which precedes the falling apart into subject and object.
The universal spiritual experience of mankind provides
the evidence that this is possible.
In the light of an existential philosophy which envisages
the whole man, spiritual and transcendental, the setting in
which a great many of the difficult problems with which
Christian theology and metaphysics have to deal are
placed, would seem to be out of date and to carry a mean
ing which is merely exoteric and academic. The disputes
about the natural and the supernatural (a distinction in
vented by scholasticism and unknown to patristic writ
ings), the controversies about freedom and grace, about
natural and supernatural revelation, about natural reason
and ethics as contrasted with supernatural truth, all these
must be regarded as outworn and due to the wrong way
in which the problems were stated. The opposition be
tween supernatural and natural which comes from St.
Thomas Aquinas, between supernatural revelation and the
natural lines along which truth is reached, shows that the
thinkers are living in a derivative sphere, the realm of
objectification, that the emergence of spirit has not taken
place and that such ways of thinking are exoteric in
character.
Truth is always supernatural, its very meaning is that
the spirit has risen above the natural. From another point
of view supernatural revelation has included much that is
natural, much that is limited. And this is due to the fact
that man who takes the revelation to himself is a social
being living in the natural order, and thus the revelation
is subject to spiritual purification. Grace, which men have
objectified, is actually the divine element in man, the
eternal bond between transcendental man and God.
The fundamental antithesis is that between spirit and
nature, between the existential scheme of things and that
of objectification. Revelation is revelation of the Spirit,
but in history and the life of society it is objectified. There
is only a sacrosanct system of symbols which is preserved.
The fundamental question which confronts us is the prob
lem of Truth.
Chapter 2
Truth is not an objective Reality in the sphere of things.

Primary life which precedes the separation into Subject
and Object. Degrees of Consciousness. The pragmatic,
Marxist and Nietzschean conceptions of truth. The hu
man-ness of truth. The act of knowing cannot be sepa-
rated from life as a whole.
"I AM THE WAY, the truth and the life." \Vhat does this
mean? It means that the nature of truth is not intellectual
and purely cognitive, that it must be grasped integrally
by the whole personality; it means that truth is existential.
It means also that truth is not .given to men in a ready
made form, as though it were an article, or one of the
realities in a world of things, it means that truth is at
tained by the way and the life. Truth assumes movement
and an urge towards infinity; it is dynamic, not static.
Truth is a fullness which is not bestowed in its consum
mated completeness. Fanaticism has always been the re
sult of taking the part for the whole and men have been
unwilling to admit a movement towards completeness.
This is the reason that Jesus did not answer Pilate's
question, "\Vhat is truth?" He was the Truth, but he was
Truth which has to be unriddled in the course of the
25
whole of history. Truth is certainly not something in
knowledge which corresponds to a reality that lies out
side man. The knowledge of Truth is not the same thing
as objectivity: nor is it objectification, in other words it is
not an alienation and a process of cooling down. Truth is
primary, not derivative, that is to say it is not conformity
with something else. In its ultimate depth Truth is God
and God is Truth and this fact will be brought to light
throughout this book. Truth is not a reality, nor that which
corresponds to a reality. It is rather the meaning of reality,
its logos, it is the supreme quality and value of reality.
A spiritual awakening to Truth must take place in man,
otherwise Truth is not attained, or if it is, it is attained
in a torpid and fossilized state. Truth can sit in judgment
upon God, but only because Truth actually is God in his
purity and majesty, as distinct from God degraded and
disfigured by human ideas about him. Truth is not an
objective datum but a conquest which is won by the crea
tive act. It is a creative discovery rather than the reflected
knowledge of an object or of being. Truth does not face
a ready-made reality outside itself, it is the creative trans
forming of reality. A world which is solely intellectual, a
world of purely intellectual knowledge, is essentially ab
stract, it is to a notable degree a fictitious world. Truth
means change, it is the transfiguration of given reality.
What is called a fact, and to which a special reality is
ascribed, is already a theory. Truth is a whole even in
cases where it refers to a part. It is entirely wrong to
assign a purely theoretical meaning to Truth and to see in
it a sort of intellectual submissiveness on the part of the
cognitive mind to a reality presented to it from outside.
There cannot be a purely intellectual attitude to Truth,
an element of volition inevitably enters into it. Man does
not find Truth-locked up in things, the discovery of it is
itself the creative construction of Truth.
About Nietzsche's attitude to Truth I shall have some
thing to say later on. But he was right when he said that
Truth is a value that can be created by man. Only the

philosophical grounds on which he based this assertion
were poor and he was in error in ascribing a pragmatic
character to it. To maintain dogmatically that Truth is
something fixed and finished is a very great error. But
this underlies both Catholic and Marxist dogma alike.
Nietzsche absolutely repudiated what is called "objective"
Truth, Truth which is regarded as universally binding pre
cisely by virtue of its objectivity. Truth is subjective, it is
individual and universal in its individuality. It lies beyond
the antithesis of individual and universal. It is subjective,
in other words it is existential. But it would be still more
exact to say that it is on the further side of the antithesis
between the subjective and the objective.
The general validity of Truth applies only to the so
cialized side of it, to the communication of Truth to other
people. Truth is a quality, and for that reason it is aristo
cratic, as all qualities are. It is entirely wrong to say that
only what is obligatory is Truth. Truth may be revealed
to one single person and rejected by all the rest of the
world. It may be prophetic and the prophet is indeed one
who always stands alone.
But at the same time Truth by no means exists espe
cially for a cultural elite; that is the same sort of lie as
the democratic lowering of the quality of Truth. All men
are called to embrace Truth and share in it, it exists for
the sake of the whole world. But it is revealed only under
certain conditions and these are spiritual, intellectual and
cultural. When Truth in the course of its revelation is
socialized and adapted to the average man and the masses
of mankind, its quality sinks to a lower level, the depth
of it disappears for the sake of making it accessible to
all men. This has always happened in the history of
Churches. And this is what I mean when I speak of socio
morphism in relation to God. Truth about Spirit and
spirituality assumes the existence of a certain spiritual
condition, it takes for granted a certain level of spiritu-
ality. If that condition is not realized the Truth becomes
congealed and static, even ossified, and that indeed is a
state of things which we often see in religious life.
Truth is communal, that is, it postulates a sense of
community and brotherhood among men. But such com
munity and brotherhood easily degenerates into a com
pulsory authoritarian collectivism in which Truth is rep
resented as coming from outside and above, from the
collective organ. There is an absolute difference between
the life of community on the one hand and collectivism on
the other. The former is a brotherly communion in Truth
on the part of human beings whose freedom is an ac
cepted fact. Collectivism on the other hand is a com
pulsory organization of the community, it is the recogni
tion of the collective as a special kind of reality which
stands above human personality and oppresses it by its
authority. Community life is the effective realization of
the fullness of the free life of personalities. In the re
ligious life this is indeed sobornost which always takes
freedom for granted. Collectivism on the other hand is
the degeneration and disfigurement of human thought and
conscience, it is the alienation of thought and conscience,
it puts man into subjection to a fictitious and unauthentic
reality. This has a very important bearing upon the under
standing of the part which Truth plays in the life of men
in general as well as in their religious life. To community
life Truth can be revealed and, as Khomyakov thought, it
can be revealed to love. But it cannot be revealed to col
lectivism. The standard of what is of profit to any kind
of collective is one of falsehood rather than of Truth. In
this way the revelation of Truth has been distorted.
On the basis of Kantianism, the school of Windelband
and Rickert has attempted to regard truth as value and
obligation. There was a certain measure of truth in this
as contrasted with the realistic interpretation of truth
which takes it to be a thing. Truth is not a thing, not a
reality which belongs to the sphere of being, and which
is reflected in the mind which knows it and enters into

it from outside. Truth is the light breaking through reality
and transfiguring it; it is the introduction of quality into
the world as we are given it, a quality which that world
did not possess before the truth was revealed and recog
nized. Truth is not a correlative of what is called being,
it is the kindling of light within being. I am in darkness
and I search for light; as yet I do not know the truth
and I am seeking it. But by this very fact I am already
asserting the existence of Truth and light, though their
existence is existence of another kind than that of the
realities of the world. My search is already the light which
is being kindled and the truth which begins to be disclosed.
Another way of putting it is to say that Truth is value,
but out of this it has been possible for a special form of
scholasticism1 to develop. It goes deeper and it is more
accurate to say that truth is spiritual, it is the process of
instilling spirit into the world reality, into the world as it
presents itself to us. There is no such thing as abstract
intellectual truth; truth is an integral whole, and it is
acquired by an effort of will and feeling also. Imagination
and passion may be a source of the knowledge of truth.
When truth is made a matter of the intellect and reason
only, it is objectified, it is dragged into the condition in
which the world and man are here and now, and the light
in it is dimmed. The light and the fire are mighty symbols
for us as they were to the great seer Boehme. Objectifica
tion is above all else the dimming of the light and the
cooling of the flame.
But in the final end of things this objectified world
must go up in flames, and its hardened state must be soft
ened in the fire. The primary life, the primary reality
which must be captured by the philosophical knowledge
of truth comes before the division into subject and object,
1 Polin in his book on the creative power of values denies that

value has any relation to truth. In his view value is not connected
with reality, whereas truth is.
and disappears in objectification. Truth, integral Truth,
with a capital letter, is Spirit and it is God. Partial truths,
with a small letter, which are worked out by the various
social sciences, refer to the objectified world. But the very
process of knowing this world at all is a possibility only
because there is in the mind of him who knows it some
thing which corresponds, albeit unrecognized, to the one
Truth. Without that man would be overwhelmed by the
entanglements of the world's plurality, its evil infinity, and
he could never rise above it in knowledge.
That is not to say that only knowledge of the common
and the universal is possible and that knowledge of what
is individual is an impossibility. That is a question which
belongs peculiarly to the theory of knowledge and has no
direct bearing upon my subject of truth and revelation.
Truth is God, it is the divine light, and at the same time
truth is human. That is the fundamental theme of God
manhood. The knowledge of God is a human thing. The
grasp of truth depends upon degrees of awareness, upon
the expansion or contraction of the mind. There is no
averagely normal transcendental mind. Or rather, it does
exist, but it is sociological in character, not metaphysical.
But behind the varying degrees of consciousness stands
the transcendental man. It might be said that supra-con
sciousness corresponds to transcendental man.2 Truth is
revealed in various ways in accordance with degrees of
consciousness, and the degrees of consciousness them
selves depend upon the influence of the social environ
ment and social grouping. There is no binding intellec
tual truth. That exists only in the physical and material
sciences; least of all does it exist in the sciences which
are concerned with the spirit. Truth is human, and can be
born only of human effort, of the endeavour of every
human being.
But truth is also divine, it belongs to God-manhood.
2 I discuss this subject in The Destiny of Man.

And i n this lies all the complexity o f the problem o f reve
lation, which seeks always to be revelation of the highest
Truth. The fact that the disclosure of Truth depends
upon degrees of consciousness leads to this, that there is
no generally valid and intellectual Truth. The intellect is
too much at the service of the will. The knowledge of
truth rests not upon objective universal reason, nor upon
transcendental mind, but upon transcendental man. It is
precisely this link with transcendental man, who does not
reveal himself at once, nor easily, and who at times re
veals and at times conceals himself, which makes the
knowledge of Truth divine-human in principle, albeit not
in actual realization in fact. Truth, integral Truth, not
partial, is a revelation of the higher world, that is of a
world which is not objectified. It cannot be disclosed to
abstract reason, it is not merely intellectual. The knowl
edge of Truth postulates humanity of a clear and limpid
mind.
In the twentieth century, the conception of truth is

passing through a crisis. The crisis bad already come to
light in the thinkers of the second half of the preceding
century, but it is in our century that its effects have been
seen. The pragmatic current .of thought in philosophy
and science has set up a standard of truth which exposes
the very existence of truth to doubt and replaces it by the
idea of what is profitable and beneficial, of adjustment to
the conditions of life or of what is fruitful in the increase
of its powers.
Pragmatism itself, which has now well-nigh lost its im
portance, was not distinguished by the radical nature of
its thought and had no such revolutionary consequences
as other currents of thought have had. There is too
in pragmatism an undoubted element of truth, insofar
as it perceives the connection between knowledge and
life and the function of life. It is just in this respect that

Dilthey is not a pragmatist but a forerunner of existential
philosophy. Pragmatism recognizes the human-ness of
knowledge, in contrast with that abstract intellectual ideal
ism which absolutely separates knowledge from man. It
would regard as truth that which is of use, that which is
fruitful in results for man and promotes the growth of
the powers which belong to his life.
But it does not notice that it is in fact assuming the old
criterion of truth as that which corresponds with reality.
What is useful and profitable is that which corresponds
with reality, whereas that which does not so correspond is
hostile to life and barren. The creative character of knowl
edge protects itself, as it were; and yet in reality there is
no such creative character, just as there was none in the
old idealism.
Pragmatism is highly optimistic and fails to see the
tragic fate of truth in the world. And it is there that the
chief error and falsehood of that line of thought lies. In
reality there is a pragmatism of falsehood, the lie is often
useful to the organization of life, and that kind of lie
plays an enormous role in history. The leaders of human
societies have set a high value upon the lie which is so
cially useful, myths have been established for the sake of
it, myths both conservative and revolutionary, religious
myths, national and social myths. They have been promul
gated as truth, sometimes even as scientifically grounded
truth. The supporters of pragmatism very readily accept
the useful lie as the truth.
Illusions of the mind have a very real part to play in
the life of human societies; frequently they appear as very
solid realities. The willing and feeling of human beings,
when they assume a collective character, create realities
the tyranny of which weighs heavily upon the lives of
men. Emancipation from this tyrannical oppression of the
pragmatically useful lie always means the kindling within
man of another and a higher truth, which, it may be, is
by no means "useful." Man is called upon to liberate

himself from an incalculable number of religious and so
cial illusions, both reactionary and progressive. Even in
scientific knowledge these useful illusions have a place
though later on they are surmounted.
There is an eternal creative conflict between truth and
that which is of advantage and service at the moment.
Purified truth-that is, truth which bas creatively attained
the supramundane light-not only may not be service
able, it may even be dangerous to a world which is being
put into order. To long after pure truth which nothing
suppresses, however distressing it may be, is to reach out
towards the divine. The pure and undistorted truth of
Christianity which is not adapted to the interests of any
thing whatever might well be highly dangerous to the
existence of the world, to mundane societies and civiliza
tions. It might be a consuming fire which descends from
heaven.
But this truth which is revealed from on high has been
adjusted in the spirit of pragmatism to the interests of
organized societies and churches. Pragmatically advan
tageous truth, which bears fruit in the increase of power
in this world, is always associated with fear of enfeeble
ment and ruin, and with a threatening attitude on the part
of the powers which hold sway iJ;J. the world. The problem
of the relation which holds between truth and fear is a
very important one. The attainment of truth assumes
fearlessness, it postulates a victory over fear, for fear
lowers the dignity of man and crushes him. The world is
held in the grip of fear in a way which reminds one of
the terror antiquus.
By its very principles pragmatism does not achieve vic
tory over fear in the face of the forces of the world, it has
to be content with reaching only that truth which is sub
ject to the death-dealing stream of time. It cannot attain
to eternal truth. But Truth is the voice of eternity in time,
it is a ray of light in this world. Truth stands higher than
the world, and it judges the world. It judges revelation

also, insofar as revelation is adjusted to the world. There
is no religion which is higher than truth. This has been
popularized by theosophy.
But religious revelation must be the revelation of Truth,
the supramundane light which shines through the dark
ness of the world. It must be the supramundane freedom
which liberates from the slavery of the world. Truth is not
something which is of service to the world, but the su
preme value, and that is not to be understood in a men)}y
idealistic sense. Pragmatism has a certain partial validity
for the positive sciences, though not for the Truth, but
even in this field it is not fully and finaily true. Science
makes discoveries which may be so far from advantageous
that they are ruinous to the world-the fission of the
atom, for instance, which means in fact the fission of the
cosmos, in the stability of which men have felt too much
confidence. But a deeper and more radical crisis for
Truth is to be seen not in pragmatism but in Marxism
and Nietzscheanism.
In the writings of Marx a violent and profound shock
is administered to the old conception of Truth. He cast
doubt upon the idea of a truth which is universal and
generaily valid, and to this was due the drastic logical
inconsistency which he shows. Even so, Marxism regards
itself as a rationalistic doctrine. It is not accurate to say
that Marx doubted so-and-so, for he was never in doubt
about anything. What he did was to declare bitter war
against the old way of understanding theoretical inteiiec
tual truth which had united the majority of thinking peo
ple in the past, people for whom knowledge had been cut
off from life. What people had taken to be truth was
merely a reflection of the actual conditions of social life
and the conflict which had arisen within it. Every ideology
is simply a superstructure erected upon the basis of eco
nomics, which is the primary reality.
Marx aims at exposing the illusions of thought which
are brought to birth by a society in which class exploita

tion and the class struggle are taking place-illusions in
the sphere of religion, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and
the rest. It is often the case that he very rightly exposes
the class lie, the class distortion of Truth. But unfortu
nately he identified truth with the human conditions in
which truth is perceived, conditions which are determined
by social causes. It follows that in his case truth is turned
into a weapon to be used in the social class struggle. The
highest Truth for him becomes a weapon with which to
fight for social revolution. It was not only the lie which
was a matter of class, to say that may have been entirely
right, but truth also was a matter of class. There was a
different sort of truth among the proletariat from that
which belonged to the bourgeoisie. There cannot be a
universal truth which holds all mankind together, in the
same way as there cannot be any universal ethic.
This was an original form for pragmatism to take. Yet
Marx's materialism, highly debatable and inconsistent as
it was, needed realism, in the sense of correspondence be
tween the truth of knowledge and actual reality. This
realism was particularly naive in Lenin. But all the same,
truth is represented as that which serves and promotes
the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Truth is
known in praxis. It is only in practical action that reality
comes to light. Truth ought to contribute to the victory of
socialism. That is the only sort of truth which is acknowl
edged and valued, just as that is the only sort of freedom
which is acknowledged and valued.
Marx was a disciple of Hegel; he was a product of
German idealism. He had absorbed the Hegelian dialectic
and had made it profoundly his own, while at the same
time he gave it a different direction. Hegelian dialectic
helped him to interpret truth in a relative way by subordi
nating it to the flow of the historical process. The dialec
tical interpretation of truth means turning it into a weapon
in the struggle for power and authority which takes place
in history. This veneration for power in the sphere of his
tory Marx learned from Hegel. And the followers of Marx
who so frequently popularize him misuse dialectic to
justify any sort of serviceable lie they wish. The popu
larization has taken the form of maintaining that Marx
himself was not a utilitarian and that he spoke con
temptuously of utilitarianism as of a petty bourgeois set
of ideas.
But the theories of Marxism carry with them the
danger that any conclusions whatever may be drawn so
long as they are serviceable at a given moment, they in
volve in fact the risk of a crude analogy with power. The
human intercourse which rests upon the idea of truth has
become almost impossible for Marxists-even controversy
itself has become impossible, for the opinions of anyone
who criticizes Marxism are regarded as the ideological
craftiness of the class foe. There can be no question of
discussing supramundane truth, for that rises above the
clash of interests. Yet in its interpretation of truth Marx
ism is rent by logical inconsistency, though this escapes
notice because of the extreme dogmatism of the Marxists.
If truth is, as every ideology is, merely a superstructure
raised upon economics and no more than a reflection of
the social conflict at a given moment in history, what
becomes of the truth to which Marxism itself lays claim?
Is Marxist truth merely a reflection and expression of the
struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist system and
the bourgeoisie-simply a useful weapon in the conflict?
Or is it the discovery at last of essential truth which can
claim universal significance?
In the former case Marxist truth cannot lay claim to
any greater truthfulness than all the other truths which
establish themselves in history. It is simply useful and
profitable in the struggle for increased power and for the
triumph of the working class and the realization of the
socialist order. The well-nigh religious pretensions which
Marxist theory makes, the messianic hopes which are
based upon this totalitarian integral doctrine, fall to the

ground. The Marxists have never agreed that their doc
trine should accept a place on a level with other doctrines.
Yet in the second case, if it is admitted that at long
last in the middle of the nineteenth century a miracle was
worked and essential truth was discovered by Marx, the
real truth which possesses universal and even absolute sig
nificance, no mere reflection of the economics of its day,
not simply a useful weapon in conflict, but truth, the
truth which reveals the secret of the historical process,
then in that case the discovery itself collapses. That is to
say that a discovery of truth is possible, which does not
depend upon economics and the service it renders to
the class struggle, of truth which is lifted up to a higher
level than the actualities of history. Totalitarian, not par
tial, Marxism is compelled to incline now to one solution,
now to the other, without rising above the inconsistency.
In any case Marxism seeks to make truth subordinate
to the relativeness of the historical process and in so
doing brings to light the crisis in the conception of truth
which has been characteristic of the whole period. Marx
holds that being determines mind; and on this ground
puts forward a false classification of tendencies in philo
sophical thought, into idealist and materialist, and given
such a division Thomas Aquina� bas to be regarded as a
materialist. But it is taken for granted that the only sort
of being there is is material being, the historical and
economic being in the life of the world. Everything is dis
torted by this dogmatic assumption. Marxism denies both
the universality of truth and its individuality, the uni
versal and the individual are alike drowned in the col
lective.
Marx's thoughts were always fixed upon society, and
upon man as existing within society and for the sake of
it; his attention was directed towards the masses and he
looked for violent revolutionary movements to arise from
them. Nietzsche, the aristocratic thinker, was in every re-
spect a contrast to him. Nietzsche was concerned only

with separate individual people of an upper grade. But
in him we meet with a crisis in the conception of truth
which goes even deeper than in Marx. Yet in him also
there was an astonishing inconsistency. The difference be
tween Nietzsche's philosophy and that of Marx was that
the former was a philosophy of values whereas Marx's
was a philosophy of well-being, and the philosophical con
cept of value had no place in it.
A philosophy of values is concerned with quality,
whereas the Marxist philosophy deals with quantity. In
spite of the fact the Nietzsche sought to replace man by
the superman, he did accept the truth that man can create
values, and that he is called upon to create new values.
Truth in knowledge was to him a value to be created, not
a reflection of reality. Truth is a value which can be
created by the will to power; it is a necessity if that will
to power is to be realized. Through the truth which can
be created man rises to higher levels. Nietzsche was always
bent upon reaching the heights. But in turning truth into
an instrument of the will to power, he does in actual fact
lapse into pragmatism. and regards truth as that which is
serviceable to the process of life. He does this in spite of
the fact that he hated the idea of the "the useful," which
he justly looked upon as a very anti-aristocratic and most
plebeian conception. Supramundane truth is just that-it
is aristocratic and it must not be perverted to the service
of the processes of life, or of the will to power.
Nietzsche's influence tended toward the repudiation of
supramundane truth. His criterion was still biological, al
though his philosophy was not so much biological as
cosmic. The god whom Nietzsche worships is the cosmos
as Dionysus. To Nietzscheian ism, which assumed very
popular forms, there is no universal truth which is of
general validity any more than there is to Marxism. To
the man who rises above the rest of mankind truth is
something entirely different from what it is to the ordinary
pedestrian masses of man, just as his ethics are different

too. The man who thus rises above his fellows is also
guided by what is useful for the achievement of his power,
just as the man of the masses is in bringing a new society
into being. In both cases truth is measured by the service
it renders and the advantage which accrues from it in
the interests of the life which belongs to this objectified
world. Communion among men and a sense of their com
munity in the Truth is impossible, for there is no truth, it
is a relic of ancient beliefs, in the last resort of belief in
God. For truth is God.
Both Marx and Nietzsche point to a crisis in the con
ception of truth. They shook the eternal basis of it. But
what is there in those two writers which is nevertheless
worth keeping? From Marx should be retained the socio
logical interpretation of the conditions under which truth
is perceived, and the fact that the extent to which man is
open to accept or refuse truth, and consequently his lia
bility to falsehood and illusion, depend upon the social
conditions in which he lives. In the case of Nietzsche
what should be kept is his understanding of truth as a
creatable value, as creativity, rather than a merely passive
reflection.
Nietzsche is of fundamental importance for the con
struction of a new doctrine of man. Marx is of importance
solely for the theory of society; his doctrine of man in
terprets him merely as a product of society. The impor
tance of Nietzsche is immense in that he understands
truth dynamically, i.'l contrast to the old static interpre
tation of it. It is the fact that truth is a created value, it
is attained by the creative effort of man. Truth is not a
reality in the sphere of things which falls into man's lap.
Truth is the letting in of light into the world, and this
light which comes from truth ought to be spread abroad.
All men should have more and more the idea of truth
as the letting in of light, for their interpretation of it is
always exposed to the danger of becoming hardened in
rigidity, ossified as it were, and benumbed. It is not the

light of abstract reason, it is the light of the Spirit.
The criterion of what is of service and advantage ought
to be entirely discarded. But so also ought the criterion
which makes reason absolute in its claim to be the vehicle
of the knowledge of truth. The revolt against the dictator
ship of reason has taken various forms. J. de Maistre
was prepared to accept the absurd as the standard of
truth. Kierkegaard was ready to see it in despair, and
Dostoyevsky associated the knowledge of truth with suf
fering. The ancient Greek definition of man as a reason
able being has been overthrown. People have begun to
define man and interpret him from below. Such an under
standing of man has been greatly assisted by Freud,
psychoanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious. Phi
losophies such as those of Heidegger and S artre rest upon
this interpretation of man solely from below. But how can
such a base creature put forward a claim to the knowl
edge of Truth, a claim, that is, to rise above the degraded
state of man and the world? Whence comes the light?
Truth serves no man, and nothing; it is they who serve it.
The light of truth is the disclosure of the higher principle
in man.
III
Truth is not only capable of passing judgment upon

historical revelation, it is indeed bound to do so. Revela
tion in history has value only insofar as it is a revela
tion of truth, an encounter with truth, in other words if
it is revelation of the Spirit. Any element which is not
of the Truth and the Spirit in the revelation which takes
place in history has but a relative and transient signifi
cance, and in the last resort revelation must be purified
and emancipated from it.
Knowledge of truth is not knowledge of something
which is alien to oneself, of an object which stands over
against one. I t is rather communion with it, i t is the be
ginning of life in the truth. 3 Truth cannot be merely a
matter of intellectual knowledge, it is also a matter of
living. Truth is the meaning of life, and life must serve
its own meaning. But this service does not mean submis
sion to an authority which dominates life from outside
and above, it is a disclosure of the inward light of life.
Authority is always a product of objectification, and ob
jectification alienates. That element in revelation more
over which derives from authority and is a result of objec
tification has no more than an exoteric and social meaning
and has to be superseded in Spirit and Truth.
The usual question will be put-Where then is there a
standard of truth? What can be accepted as a judge of
truth, and is not the criterion subjective and arbitrary?
This is the common argument of people whose minds
adopt an entirely servile attitude to the idea of external
authority, which for some reason appears to them to be
an objective, secure and trustworthy standard. But why
should this be? If some external authority which has taken
shape in the course of history says that such and such a
thing is Truth, why should that be taken as convincing
and trustworthy? Authority surely is always something less
than that to which it refers. It is thus that Truth, which is
by nature spiritual, has material and forensic charac
teristics attributed to it.
In the final count we are bound to acknowledge the
fact that for Truth and the Spirit there are no criteria at
all outside themselves and always on a lower level than
they, since they are derived from the objectified world in
which Truth and Spirit are at a discount. The quest of
standards of truth leads us into a vicious circle from which
there is no way out.
An objective authoritative standard of religious truth
assumes a subjective belief in it, but it is a subjective
s Baader was well aware of this.

belief which in the course of history has taken on a col
lective and socialized character. From one form of subjec
tivity we inevitably come back to another. Subjectivity by
no means invariably indicates that which is arbitrary, nor
is it due to what people are fond of c alling "individu
alism." It may be an attribute of a group, it may be the
expression of the inward attitude of mind of a com
munity. That to which Khomyakov gave the name of
sobornost and which it is difficult to define in rational
terms, is not an "objective, " collective reality, it is an
interior quality. When I am within existential subjectivity
I am far from being in a state of isolation, I am by no
means "an individualist." Rather I become "an individu
alist" when I am precipitated into objectivity and a state
of objectification. It is precisely then that I tum into a
raging "individualist." Individualism and isolation are
among the things to which objectification gives birth.
There is a question which is put by people who are
wholly submerged in objectification and consequently in
the spirit of authoritarianism. It is "Where then is there
a fixed and abiding standard of truth?" And to that ques
tion I decline to give any answer. From this point of view
truth always stands in doubt, it is not fixed, it is prob
lematic. The acceptation of truth always involves an ele
ment of risk. There is no guarantee and there ought not
to be any. This element of risk lies in every act of faith,
which is the unveiling of things not seen. It is only the
acceptance of things visible, of the so-called objective
world, which is without risk. Spirit always presupposes
risk from the point of view of the objective world, which
works its violent will upon us. The absence of risk which
men are fond of asserting in recommendation of the Chris
tian Faith and which has taken the form of an organized
orthodoxy is sociological in character rather than spiritual,
and is due to that will to lead which is found in human
souls. This is particularly clear in the Roman Catholic
idea, which is socially organized to an especial degree.
Truth is not to be regarded as that which has been

always and by everyone recognized as such. That would
be to make the criterion quantitative and numerical. It
would be the realm of Das Mann. Tradition is of immense
importance in religious life and it is impossible to deny
that importance. It means the extension of individual ex
perience, it means inward communion with the creative
spiritual process of the past. But tradition is not an indi
cation of quantity, and it is not an external authority. To
trust in it requires a continuation of the creative process.
The knowledge of truth is attained by the aggregate of
the spiritual powers of man and not by his intellectual
faculties only. And this is determined by the fact that
truth is spiritual, that it is life and spirit.
The error, the lie in fact, is not intellectual in its origin,
nor is it theoretical in character, it is due to a false orien
tation of spirit and to an act of the will. The revelation
of the Truth is free and a matter of will ; it is not simply
an intellectual act, it is the turning of the whole human
being in the direction of creative value. The criterion lies
in this very act of the spirit. There is no standard of truth
outside the witness of the truth itself, and the search for
an absolute guarantee is a false track, for such a guaran
tee always degrades the truth. But such is the mind of
man on the confines of two wqrlds.
There are degrees in the apprehension of truth. Such
knowledge may be scientific or philosophical, it may be
religious knowledge or mystical gnosis. It is usual to set
knowledge and faith in opposition to one another, but
such an antithesis is relative. If on the one hand religious
philosophy or mystical gnosis presupposes faith, so also
on the other-though in a different degree--does knowl
edge which is purely philosophical, and even scientific
knowledge, even what are known as the exact sciences.
The sharp distinction between faith and knowledge is
academic and conventional. Both faith and knowledge are
linked with an act of the human spirit. Both faith and
knowledge mean a break-through to the light, a break
through this objectified world in which darkness prevails
over light, and necessity over freedom. Both in faith and
in knowledge transcendental man comes into action, for
empirical man is crushed by the world, by its endless
plurality and darkness.
Transcendental man always recognizes truth, it is he
alone who possesses the creative strength which is needed
even to recognize the world of phenomena as a world of
objectification which does violence to man. Man must
get to know it, in order to find his bearings in it and take
measures to defend himself against the menaces which
emanate from it. But the very recognition of the material
world as capable of being known assumes an elementary
act of faith, since even the objective world itself is not a
completely visible world and one which very easily enters
into us.
Science accepts a great deal on faith without being
aware of the fact. The most conspicuous instance is its
acceptance of the actual existence of matter, which is
highly problematic. There is a certain naivete in suppos
ing that the objective existence of matter can be scien
tifically proved. It is only scientific specialists who can
think such a thing, and so far as philosophy is concerned
they are completely naive. Materialism, for instance,
which philosophically is not even worth discussion, is
wholly based upon faith, and readily turns into a religion
of the most fantastic kind, as we can see in Marxism. It
is precisely critical philosophy which must recognize the
element of faith in scientific knowledge, an element which
has now a positive and now a negative part to play. A
decisive "no" is faith to the same extent as a decisive
"yes," and the very denial assumes an assertion, non
being presupposes being, lack of meaning takes meaning
for granted, darkness implies l ight, and vice versa.
Thu s, for example, the most thorough-going denial that
the world has any meaning takes it for granted that such
a thing as meaning exists. It is not a logical, but above
all an existential meaning which is in question. Man is
by nature a creature that believes, and he goes on believ
ing even when he lapses into scepticism and nihilism. He
may believe in nothingness or in non-being, and at once
this becomes expanded into a faith. There has never been
a philosophy which did not take some element of belief
for granted; the only question is to what extent and with
what degree of awareness. Materialist philosophy in par
ticular is naively believing. Religious philosophy in par
ticular is aware of the fact that it is believing. Negative
philosophy is not less dogmatic than positive.
On the other hand the most elementary and unen
lightened faith includes some element of knowledge, and
without it the simple-minded believer could make no affir
mation at all. Obscurantist belief is the refusal to give
this subject any thought. Everyone who believes must
regard his belief as true. But the recognition of anything
as true is already knowledge. When I utter the words of
a prayer I presuppose an element of knowledge, and with
out it the words would have no meaning. When I regard
my faith as mad-and in a certain sense faith is mad
I am asserting the truth of my madness, I am making an
affirmation through my spirit. I am affirming truth, even
in the event of my having no desire to hear anything
about the truth. Certainly it is not a matter of such great
moment what a man asserts or denies in his thought,
often enough his mind is very clouded and his thinking
superficial. When the atheist gives his mind to the pas
sionate repudiation of God he is in the last resort affirm
ing the existence of God. It might even be said that
atheism is a form of the knowledge of God, a dialectical
moment in the process of knowing God. Atheism is one
of the forms of faith.
A clear-cut antithesis between faith and knowledge be
longs to the objectified world and has been worked out in
relation to that world. But such an antithesis disappears
when attention is directed to spiritual experience and to

real existence which overcomes the division into subject
and object. Objective knowledge, objective truth, is a con
ventional phrase, and its importance is secondary. Objec
tive scientific knowledge is of immense significance for
man in his relation to the world, but it is concerned with
secondary matters rather than with primary, and a philo
sophical criticism assigns it a meaning which may elude
the erudite specialist. The learned, concerned as they are
with the fragmentary make-up of what is called the objec
tive world, discover truths, but not the Truth. These par
tial truths, however, cannot contradict Truth as a whole,
any more than they can supply a basis for it.
In the course of his acquisition of knowledge man rises
by degrees to a higher level, and he also sinks below it.
These two movements from below upwards and from
above downwards are inevitable, and without them man
cannot get his bearings in the world. Man should be ready
to sacrifice everything for the sake of the Truth, but Truth
is often bitter to the taste and he frequently prefers some
deceitful illusion which he finds elevating. At times it may
even be that such deception takes a form which leads him
in the pride of his heart to cast away every consolation
that the Truth bestows and to regard a state of despair
as the attainment of the highest Truth.
The men of our time must face the Truth and come to
terms with it, for that can give them hope and joy. In
this respect man is much given to crafty tricks. He finds
greater pleasure and more consolation in the rejection of
the Truth and in hopelessness. This is specially the case
among people of our O\vn day. It lies at the root of
Nietzsche's amor fati. But the goal of life is a vital inte
grated knowledge of Truth and union with it; in it is life.
Truth penetrates the world with flashes of light and trans
fi gures life. The enlightening rays of the Logos operate in
individual form and in every act of getting to know the
Truth which is scattered abroad among the partial truths
of scientific knowledge. Truth is God.
This differs from the usual interpretation of Truth as
a judgment which corresponds to reality. But that is a
diminished Truth, a truth which is directed towards actu
ality, a truth which has been adjusted. It is not the truth
of the light shining through. It is the truth of a reflection,
rather than the truth which brings about change. Logical
truth is contained in a judgment, but it is also sentence
passed upon the world and upon the wrongness of it. Then
it rises both above the world and above every judgment
about the reality of the world; it is supramundane. When
it is spiritual it is God, revealing himself in knowledge and
thought.
Chapter 3
Revelation. The Spirituality and Universality of Revela·

tion. Degrees of Revelation. Anthropomorphism, Socio·
morphism and Cosmomorphism. The human-ness of
Revelation. Apophatics and Kataphatics. Theology and
Philosophy. Dogmatics and their symbolical character.
IF THERE IS A Goo, he must reveal himself and provide

some means by which men may know about him. He re
veals himself in word, in what is known as Holy Scripture,
but not alone in that. The revelation of God to the world
and to man takes many forms, and every other way of
looking at the matter is less than human. There can be
no attainment of the knowledge of God, unless it be the
fact that God also is active in the matter, unless he goes
out to meet man. That is to say that the knowledge of
God presupposes revelation and that it is at once divine
and human. The most necessary thing to keep in mind is
that revelation is divine-human, it cannot be just one
sidedly divine. Revelation is not something which drops
into man's lap from outside and in which he has nothing
but an entirely passive part to play. If that were the case
we should be driven to think of man in the same way as
we do of a stone or a piece of timber. A lump of stone
49
or wood cannot in any real sense be a recipient of revela
tion, though even in them some sort of reaction in accord
with their nature must be assumed.
There must be a centre from which revelation emanates
and we are Christians in virtue of our belief in such a
centre. Unless we adopt a position of simple-minded
realism ( which in fact in all too many cases the doctrines
of theology do) we have to recognize, in interpreting reve
lation, that it is an inward and spiritual event which shows
itself in symbols in the facts of history. Revelation is not
to be conceived as an event, like the facts of nature or
history, although that idea of it is often held, even when
it is at the same time regarded as supernatural. The super
n atural character of revelation can indeed only consist in
the fact that it is a spiritual event.
It was in his interior being, in the depths of his spirit,
that Moses heard the voice of God, and all the prophets
heard the same divine voice in the same manner. The
Apostle Paul passed through his conversion and turned
from Saul into Paul as an event in his spiritual life, as a
spiritual experience. It was inwardly that he encountered
Christ. The appearance of Jesus Christ in the world was
indeed a historical phenomenon, which as a matter of fact
it is difficult to recognize. It can be taken as established
that a Life of Jesus as an event in history could only be
written with great difficulty. The Gospels do not consti
tute a historical document which could be used for such
a biography; it is only a spiritual Life of Christ that can
be written-and, what is more, that is very incomplete.
From behind history with all its relativity and debata
bility flashes of metahistory shine through. The relations
that exist between history and metahistory, however, can
not be explained in rational terms, just as the relations
between the phenomenal and the noumenal are also diffi
cult to express. Our knowledge has to be limited to the
fact that the metahistorical cannot be entirely reduced to
the historical if this is taken in a naively realistic sense. A
naive realism in the interpretation of revelation is open
to the same criticism as a naive realism in the acquisition
of knowledge in general. The Christian conception of the
divine Incarnation ought not to mean the deification of
historical facts. Christian truth cannot be made to depend
upon historical facts, which cannot be fully attested nor
ingenuously accepted as reality.
The natural and historical objectivization of revelation
is a secondary rather than a primary phenomenon. His
tory is an objectivization and a socialization of revelation;
it is not the primary life of the Spirit. It is to man that rev
elation is given and it ought to be accepted as for the bene
fit of the human mind. The miracle of revelation, which
is incapable of explanation in terms of historical causality,
is an inward and spiritual miracle. It takes place within a
human environment and through man, that is to say it is
dependent upon the condition of man. In this matter man
is never in an entirely passive state, and the active part
that man plays in revelation depends upon his thoughts
and the exertion of his will, as well as upon the degree of
spirituality that he has attained. Revelation takes my free
dom for granted, my act of choice, my faith in something
which is still invisible and which uses no force upon me.
Christ as the Messiah was an invisible fact and God
made his appearance not in royalty but in the form of a
servant. This is the divine kenosis. As Kierkegaard was
fond of saying, God is in the world incognito. Revelation
is always at the same time some measure of concealment.
Revelation as Truth presupposes the activity of the
whole man, and to assimilate it demands our thinking
also. Revelation is not intellectual truth but it does pre
suppose man's intellectual activity. We ought to love God
with our mind also, although the fundamental truth of
revelation should be within the attainment even of infants,
and we must not think-if we do already think in that
way-of revelation as automatically received by man in
virtue of a special act of God. There must be the free
consent of man not only to revelation but also to the very
creation of man.
Orthodox Protestants say that all the answers are to be
found in the Word of God, but it remains unexplained
by what criterion it is to be decided what is the Word of
God, and what is the human contribution. In Karl Barth,
the most notable of present-day protestant theologians , it
is left obscure to what extent the Word of God is a his
toric fact. The obscurity derives from the fact that Karl
B arth wants to keep himself absolutely free from philoso
phy, in spite of the fact that that is an impossibility for
theology. He has, it would seem, no desire to remain in
the realm of a na'ive historic realism, and he is apparently
even willing to admit biblical criticism.
Man has always been active in the reception and inter
pretation of revelation and this activity of his has been
both bad and good. Revelation cannot be something
which is finished, static, and which requires a merely pas
sive attitude for its reception. The old static way of under
standing revelation, as that which asks for just passive
obedience, is in fact one of the forms of that naturalism
which is so powerful in the realm of theology. The events
which are set forth in the Gospels and which are not like
ordinary historical events can be understood only if they
are also events of my spiritual experience and belong to
the spiritual pathway which I tread. The fact that men
have always attempted to expound and explain revelation,
that it has been a process of development in the Church
side by side with tradition, means that revelation has
always been subject to the judgment of reason and con
science, albeit of a reason and conscience enl ightened by
revelation from within, to the judgment, that is, of an
illuminated humanity. There is much more which is sub
ject to such a judgment, for instance, the idea of the eter
n al pains of hell, predestination, and the legalistic inter
pretation of Christianity. The old and frequently fossilized
manner of accepting and interpre�i.ng revelation clashes
not only with the philosophical and scientific mind, but
also with the moral sense, with humanity.
The point is by no means that it is necessary to correct
revelation and to supplement it by human wisdom. The
point is this, that in historical revelation we find much
that is human, too human, and certainly not divine. What
jars us and shocks us in what the orthodox call integral
revelation is not in the least the divine mystery and lofti
ness, but the human evil element which is well-known to
us. Pure humanity, however, actually is the divine in man.
In this lies the fundamental paradox of God-manhood. It
is precisely the human independence of the divine, human
freedom, and man's creative activity, which are divine.
It is possible to speak of the esoteric and the exoteric
in Christianity, though without ascribing a specifically
theosophical and occult shade of meaning to the words.
It is not to be denied that there are different degrees of
depth in the understanding of Christianity. The Chris
tianity of the intellectual level and that of the popular
level are one and the same Christianity, but they show
different degrees and forms of objectivization. This is a
matter of which Clement of Alexandria and Origen were
very well aware, and it was on these grounds that they
were accused of being gnostics. The gnosis of Valentinus
and Basilides broke down because they left man in the
power of cosmic forces, of a cosmic hierarchy. They had
but a poor understanding of the freedom of man and no
understanding at all of the possibility of transforming the
lower into the higher. In this respect there was much in
gnosticism which was pre-Christian and much that did not
belong to Christianity, and which passed over into theo
sophical doctrines, which were in fact cosmocentric. But a
truly Christian gnosis is a possibility, and such is the pur
pose of religious philosophy.
The popular forms of Christianity in which there is
always an admixture of ancient paganism are very direct
and emotional. But socialized religion makes itself felt in
them, the primitive stage of tribal socialization which
comes before the emergence of individual religious experi
ence and the individual religious drama. This is a form
of objectivization which goes much further back and is
much more primitive than the objectivization which arises
in theological systems and in more developed ecclesias
tical thought. The diffi culty of the problem lies in this.
How is one to escape these two forms of objectivization,
how to attain that state of purification which is at a higher
level than the forms in which religious revelation assumes
a sociological character and on the strength of that lays
claim to general validity?
Experience tells us that a process of rationalizing,
moralizing and humanizing the idea of God take place.
But this process is twofold in character. On the one
hand it is a process of cleansing. Xenophanes as long
ago as his day spoke against the naively anthropomorphic
elements in religion. But on the other hand this illuminat
ing process may lead to the repudiation of mystery, to the
rationalization which is another form of objectification,
objectification at the high points of enlightenment. The
painful and difficult nature of the problem is due to the
fact that God, in order to reveal himself to man, must
humanize himself. But this humanization is twofold, it is
both positive and negative. God can be understood as an
anthropomorphic person, and God may be understood as
the Truth which rises above everything human and above
the limitations which arise from the created world.
An exclusively apophatic understanding of God as the
isolated Absolute leads to the denial of the possibility of
any living relation between man and God. A confusion
takes place between Gott and Gottheit, to use the phrase
ology of Eckhardt, and the two are identified. There is a
purging Truth which is higher than this apophatic the
ology. But there is another side of Truth, one which is
the source of religious Truth, with which the experience
of union with God is associated, and with which God-
manhood is connected. This is the Truth of the pure
humanity of God. The conception of God as self-satisfied
and self-sufficient pure act, or as an autocratic potentate,
is lower than the idea of God as one who suffers and
yearns for an Other, as one who loves and gives himself
in sacrifice. The idea of the Absolute is in itself a cold
conception.
In reality a twofold process should take place, a process
which cleanses and liberates the idea of God from false
anthropomorphism, in which God appears as an affronted
and avenging being, and, on the other hand, a process of
humanizing the idea of God so that he is seen as a loving,
yearning, sacrificing being. In such an interpretation hu
manity is divine. It must be said again that this is the
fundamental paradox of the knowledge of God. The ortho
dox systems which always carry a sociological meaning
have been directed towards the lowering of man's status
rather than towards the raising of it. The experience of
the negative is positive; and man is at cross purposes with
himself, a creature in whom the absence of what is be
loved may be felt more powerfully and more keenly than
its presence. The teaching of negative theology is of a
God the immediate presence of whom may not be felt
although it actually exists in the depth. The purifying of
the knowledge of God and of the· awareness of God should
proceed in two directions, negatively in the direction of
apprehending God as a mystery which is inexpressible in
any human concepts and words whatever; and in a posi
tive direction as the apprehension of the humanity, that
is, of the divine humanity of God. This is the simple
Truth of the Christian revelation.
The doctors of the Church in formulating orthodox doc
trine made use of philosophical terms, such as for instance
nature, ousia or personality, and hypostasis; and the last
of these was the occasion of certain difficulties. But it
might also be said that God has no ousia. And those
whose desire it is to be completely free from philosophical
terms simply make use of them in a naive manner, as Karl
Barth does, for instance. When they say that movement,
becoming and need on the part of God would mean the
imperfection and incompleteness of God, they are using
words with an entirely conventional and merely human
meaning. With no less foundation it might be said that
movement and creative fulfilment on the part of God are
a mark of his perfection. The revelation of a suffering and
yearning God is higher than the revelation of a God whose
sufficiency and satisfaction are in himself.
Thus the loftiest humanity of God is revealed; humanity
becomes his unique attribute. God is mystery and free
dom. God is love and humanity. But he is not force or
power, dominance, judgment, punishment, etc., that is to
say he does not possess those entirely human and so
cialized attributes. God does not act in power but in
humanity. Revelation is human, if only because it de
pends upon faith and upon the quality of faith. God is
absolutely above all objectivization and he is not in any
sense at all an object or objective being. The inconsistency
and the paradoxical nature of the relation between the
divine and the human is resolved only in the divine mys
tery about which no human words can express anything
at all. Christianity has been the central fact in the humani
zation of revelation. But this process has not come to an
end. It can only be completed in the religion of the Spirit,
in the worship of God in Spirit and in Truth.
The revelation of God and of the divine is universal in
character. But the radiation of light from the one Sun is
brought about by degrees, and rays of light are, as it were,
crumbled and scattered, although the central ray remains.
The degrees of revelation correspond to the degrees of
consciousness, that is, to its breadth and depth. Revelation
not only moves from above; the way is prepared for it
from below also. The preparation for revelation from be
low on the part of man and his creative activity always
and everywhere means the permeation of man by the
divine ray which brings about a change in the human
mind. The activity of man is also the activity of God
and vice versa.
In this we meet a fundamental religious paradox which
it is always necessary to repeat. And, therefore, the de
grees of revelation or, as it is put, its development in his
tory, is not a development in the sense implied by the
theory of evolution. The evolutionary point of view is
inapplicable to religious life, whether historical or indi
vidual, although the actual fact of change and growth is
undoubted. It would also be inaccurate here to speak of
revolution, for revolution is defined too much in terms
of negative reactions, and easily breaks contact with the
depth. Revelation of the d ivine always bears the character
of a break-through of the other world into this world.
There is something catastrophic about it, something of an
upheaval. The light may be poured out in a flash, but
the outpouring of the divine light is limited by the condi
tion of man and of the people, by the limits of human
consciousness, by historical time and place.
This is specially apparent in the revelation of the Bible
where God is regarded in a way which conforms to the
mind and spiritual level of the ancient Hebrew people.
The ancient biblical idea of God can hardly be in har
mony with our religious thought. The prophets had already
broken through the limits of the biblical conception of
God, suited as that was to an ancient pastoral tribe. Our
God now is not an anthropomorphic and sociomorphic
tribal God, a God of battles, a vengeful and slaughtering
God. In the revelation he has given in his Son he shows
himself quite otherwise. Divine rays of light do remain in
the Bible for us too, but they are veiled in the obscurity of
a far-distant past. The anthropomorphism, the sociomor
phism, and the cosmomorphism which belong to its time
and place in history and to the limitations of ancient
Hebrew thought have left their mark upon the Christian
revelation also.
The eternal light was poured out in the Gospel, but it
was received into a human environment. The eternal truth
of Christianity is expressed in the limitations of human
language, and translated into the categories of thought of
the limited human world. God speaks to men in a lan
guage they understand. He descends to the human level.
Words are used which are customary among the people
of that time. This makes itself felt particularly in the para
bles in which there is much which may appear harsh and
even incompatible with the mind of Jesus Christ. Not only
is man made in the image and likeness of God, but God
also is made in the image and likeness of man. Feuerbach
was half right. It is particularly necessary to insist upon
the fact that ideas derived from social life and from the
life of the State have been transferred to God. God has
been regarded as a master, tsar, sovereign and governor,
while man is looked upon as a subject and a slave. The
master-slave relation is fundamental. God is offended as
people are offended. He is vengeful and he demands a
ransom. He institutes criminal proceedings against dis
obedient man. This has left a fatal impress upon men's
understanding of Christianity, but it has brought it more
within their reach.
Sociomorphism has entirely distorted the idea of God.
It has reflected the state of servitude which man experi
ences in society, while the thought of God as force, might,
and determining causality has its source in the life of na
ture and is cosmomorphic. The soul and mind of present
day man is now entirely different from his soul and mind
in earlier Christian ages. A ray of divine humanity has
lighted upon man inwardly. Christianity, therefore, ought
to be accepted and expressed differently now. We cannot
now, for example, go on with the monstrous quarrels
about predestination, about the fate of children who die
unbaptized and many other such matters. The forensic
interpretation of Christianity has now become intolerable
as has the old threat of hell about which even the Roman
Catholic authorities now advise that less should be said.
It is absolutely wrong to apply the category of causality
to God and to the relation between God and the world.
It is suitable only to relations which belong to the phe
nomenal world. God is not the cause of the world any
more than he is master and king, any more than he is
power and might. God determines nothing. When people
speak of God as the creator of the world they are speak
ing of something immeasurably more mysterious than a
causal relation. In relation to the world God is freedom
and not necessity, not determination. But when men speak
of freedom they are speaking of a very great mystery.
God has been turned into a determining cause, into power
and might, as he has been turned into a master and a
king. But God is not like anything of the kind. God i s
completely beyond the limits o f such terms.
In a certain sense there is less power in God than in a
policeman, a soldier or a banker, and we must give up
talking about God and about divine Providence in the
way that people speak about the administration of the
governments of this world. All this is false objectification.
Schleiermacher is wrong when he says that the religious
sense is a sense of dependence. Dependence is an earthly
thing. There are more grounds for saying that it is a
sense of independence. One can speak about God only by
analogy with what is revealed in the depth of spiritual
experience and not on the analogy of nature and society.
But what is revealed in the depth of spiritual experience
is freedom which is the antithesis of the determinism of
the natural world, just as love is revealed as the antithesis
of the enmity of the natural world. The purifying of reve
lation is the recognition of its humanity, but it is the
humanity of transcendental man, of the divine depth i n
man, n o t o f empirical m a n with his servile limitations.
It might be expressed by saying that God is human
whereas man is inhuman. The mystery of God-manhood
is indeed a very great mystery. It is that which marks the

limits of what is known as apophatic theology. God is
Mystery, not in the sense of being the unknowable, of
which there cannot be any experience at all, and with
which there can be no communion. God is the Mystery,
not only of divinity but of humanity also. Kataphatic the
ology has made the Mystery sociomorphic. This socio
morphism has certainly not been human; it has frequently
been inhuman and reflected the slavery which is sovereign
in the world. Christian society has striven, as indeed all
religious societies have striven, after success and progress
and the acquisition of power. Such is the law of the world
-although in a certain sense failure in the earthly sphere
is a symbol of something higher than success, and in this
is the mystery of the Cross. Even theological doctrines
have been adjusted to success and the acquisition of
power.
I have already said that theological doctrines have al
ways m ade use of the concepts and terms of philosophy.
The doctrines of theology have sometimes concealed this
dependence upon philosophy, in which case it is a matter
of no great difficulty to disclose it; sometimes, on the other
hand, they have recognized it openly . Thus the Eastern
doctors of the Church were openly neoplatonists . But the
dependence of theological doctrines upon philosophy at
once makes them relative. Dogmas, as theological doc
trine formulates them, are symbolic in character. The
mysterious side of revelation cannot be expressed in intel
lectual terms. Intellectual expression is always conditional.
But it would be untrue to say, as the modernists have
sometimes asserted, that dogmas have only a pragmatic
and ethical importance. Dogmas are of mystical signifi
cance, and final truth lies with mysticism rather than with
dogmatics. Dogmas always indicate a certain degree of
objectification, and they owe their existence to the need
for communication, that is to say to a social need.
Theology is always expressed in the derivative rather

than in the primary and it is always socialized, that is to
say objectified, to a higher degree than philosophy which
is more individual and more free. Orthodox theology in its
extreme form is usually born of the interests of some or
ganized religious society. It is always socialized in char
acter even if the fact be concealed. Hence comes to birth
the idea of authority which is essentially a social and utili
tarian conception. Therefore, the organized religious so
ciety, relying as it does upon authority, is always afraid
of mysticism, eagerly hunts out heresy and condemns it
as an obstacle in the way of maintaining authoritarian
forms of religious societies. So theologians have no love
for religious philosophy which is free and finds its support
in spiritual experience rather than in social authority and
lends itself with difficulty to serve the interests of what is
socially utilitarian. It is for this reason that the possibility
of Christian gnosis is by no means eagerly admitted. For
the same reason such teachers of the Church as Origen
and St. Gregory of Nyssa are not very much liked. Origen
was a holy man, and a martyr, but he was not canonized,
whereas Cyril of Alexandria, who was canonized, had vil
lainous traits in his character.
Utilitarianism has played an enormous part in religious
life in general and to some extent in Christian life in par
ticular. This utilitarianism is not only of this earth; it
belongs to heaven as well, and owing to this there are
revengeful eschatologies and eschatologies which bestow
rewards. Bossuet calls it heresy for a man to have any
opinion at all, and he defends utilitarianism against
Fenelon. The process of purification is before all else a
process of cleansing from utilitarianism, from socially or
ganized interests. Everything born of utilitarianism has
been exoteric. Philosophical, scientific and ethical criti
cism may be purgative in character. But it must rely upon
a deeper spiritual experience than the experience which
is socialized and objectified. We are not now in the period
of history in which "double truth" was necessary for self

defence; we can affirm a single truth. It is very na"ive to
argue that to admit a purifying criticism of revelation on
the part of the subject, that is to say, by man, makes reve
lation unstable, arbitrary, and "subjective," while at the
same time the recognition of "objective" revelation which
is liable to no criticism at all means that it is stable and
fixed. Surely "objective" revelation, which is regarded as
unshakable and independent of man, also presupposes
choice in such cases as for instance the Canon of Holy
Scripture, the Decrees of the Councils and Pronounce
ments of the Popes. That is to say it is human actions
which distinguish between that which is unshakable and
"objective" and that which is still not finally established
and is only "subjective." The "objective" has only the pre
eminence which belongs to antiquity and recognition by a
l arge number of people, and that is also "subjective" and
is a confirmation of human actions.
The whole argument from authoritarian objectivity
moves in a vicious circle. This is especially striking in
the case of papal infallibility. Here the whole problem lies
in the fact that what is called the "objectivity" of revela
tion presupposes faith, and faith, as a matter of fact, re
sides in the subject, not in the object. There is nothing
at all to be found in the object because it is not the object
which exists but objectification, and objectification is
brought about by the subject. The objectification of faith
takes place, but this objectification has strength when it is
an expression of community rather than of an external
and authoritative chain of individual men. Khomyakov
has called this inward community sobornost, and it is a
very important truth that the Christian life is realized not
only individually but also corporately. But sobornost is
not by any means objectivity in any na"ive sense of the
word. It is divine-human. Sobornost or community is cer
tainly not collectivism. It is not a collective which stands
over man. It has no objective, rational and juridical marks
which could be accepted as a criterion of truth. The cri

terion is to be found only in Spirit, the one and only
guide. There is no criterion of Truth outside the Truth
which is manifested in Spirit. It is very remarkable that
all the religious philosophy of India is founded upon the
inward authority of ancient sacred books and is an exposi
tion of the Vedanta. And at the same time this religious
philosophy is wholly free and takes many directions, for
example, such different directions as the doctrines of
Shankara and of Ramanuja.
II
The very conception of the creation of the world by

God stands in need of revision and deepening. As is well
known, the idea of creation has always been difficult to
rat.onal philosophical thought. It was foreign to Greek
philosophy, and foreign to Aristotle from whom catholic
theology drew inspiration. The widespread explanation
that God created the world either for his own pleasure
( this is a deplorable notion) or in order to reveal hi� love
to some other than himself is very na'ive. It has always
been assumed in this connection that God stands in no
need of anything, that the world and man are in no way
of any use to him, and that the creation of the world is a
mere arbitrary and fortuitous event. Theologians are quite
sure-though whence the knowledge is derived is not
known-that the creative act of God signifies nothing
within the interior divine life, and that it reveals no move
ment of any kind in it and no enrichment.
In actual fact the Aristotelian and Thomist u nderstand
ing of God as pure act ought to have meant that the crea
tion of the world is accomplished in eternity and that in
eternity the creative act is completed. But this means that
the creation of the world belongs to the inward life of
God, and that they are unwilling to admit. Besides, the
very concept of pure act ought to be abandoned as be
longing to an outworn philosophy. Here we meet with
the limits of possible human knowledge. But, so that the

drama of the creation of the world shall not be turned
into a comedy, into a game which God played with him
self without any meaning, the idea of uncreated freedom
must be admitted as a frontier-line idea. Then it is pos
sible to admit, as S. Bulgakov admits, that man expressed
consent to his creation. Otherwise this has no meaning.
Then it is possible to admit that man and the world an
swer the call of God, and this answer is not the answer
of God to himself. In the course of controversy orthodox
theologians are fond of appealing to the mystery which
cannot be violated by rational thought, but they plead the
mystery long after it has been violated by themselves and
after they have already said a great deal about it with
the help of rationalizing thought. They talk about the
mystery in order to reduce one to silence.
As bearing upon the matter we are considering, it will
be of interest to dwell upon the ideas of two present-day
theologians, one of them Protestant and the other Ortho
dox. I have in mind Karl Barth and Sergius Bulgakov. In
B arth's view the world was created as something outside
the sphere of the divine and the creation possesses no
independence. This thought is self-contradictory because
a world which lies entirely outside the sphere of the divine
ought rather to indicate the independence of what was
created. Why does any particular value attach to the
thought that the creator made a world to which he com
municated nothing that is divine, nothing which is like
himself? It would follow that God created a world which
was worthless. There enters into the very concept of crea
tion the worthlessness of what is created, and thus the
fact that it participates in non-being is emphasized. Here
the human concept of the creative act is distorted in con
sequence of a process of abstraction which is carried out
by human thought.
It is fundamental to Barth to stress the difference be
tween repeatability, which is always to be found in myth,
and uniqueness, singularity, which we see in biblical his
tory. He is definitely an anti-spiritualist and he decisively
insists upon the fact that man was made out of the earth
and for the earth. Biblical religious materialism is the
antithesis of the spiritualism of such Doctors of the Church
as Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa and many representa
tives of religious philosophy. All neoplatonism and all
spiritualization of the Christian revelation are antipathetic
to the most outstanding representative of present-day prot
estant theology. With conscious naivete he wants to be
lieve that he lives and moves in the artless realism and
even the materialism of ancient religious thought. An
ingenuous realism or religious materialism is also philoso
phy, but as distinct from spiritualism or idealism it is
philosophy on the popular level.
In this strange guise Barth apparently has a fellow feel
ing for Kant. His artlessness is not religious, it is a de
liberate philosophical artlessness. Barth counts as good
only that which is created by God. Man has been able
to create nothing good. Barth started from the tragic
Christianity of crisis in which echoes of Kierkegaard
make themselves heard, but he arrived at a biblical opti
mism. He criticizes the pessimism of Marcion, Schopen
hauer and others. The Barthian Christian still thinks of
God in a way which belongs entirely to the Old Testa
ment, as a Master who inspiies fear, and very many
other Christians do the same. But that way of thinking
about God ought to be superseded by the revelation of
the Son, and still more by the revelation of the Spirit.
It is as though Karl Barth were unwilling to allow that
listening to what God says convinces us not only of what
God is but also of what man is and what human con
sciousness is. He shows no desire at all to notice the fact
that the categories of mastery, power, subjection and
obedience are derived from the social life of men and are
servile in character. Disobedience, rebellion and revolt
may be signal obedience to the voice of God. It is even
probable that God loves those who struggle against him.

Dialectic theology, in effect, has ceased to be dialectic and
perhaps it never was dialectic. In Barth's system of dog
matics the volume devoted to the creation of the world
leaves entirely obscure what there is in the world which is
created by God and what is the product of forces belong
ing to the world itself, of cosmic and of human creative
power. In other words, we are not told whether or not
there is becoming and development in the world side by
side with disintegration.
It is all quite different in the case of the Russian Ortho
dox theologian, Sergius Bulgakov, and his defects are of
another kind. In contrast to Barth who desires to remain
a theologian pure and simple, and to produce an exegesis
of the glory of God, Bulgakov mingles theology and phi
losophy in a very high degree, but he does not produce
adequate justification and foundation for his philosophical
premises. Bulgakov has close links with German meta
physics of the beginning of the nineteenth century, and
especially with Schelling, as is apparent even from his
terminology. But fundamentally he is above all a platonist,
that is the line of descent in philosophy to which he be
longs. His sophiology is connected with the platonic doc
trine of ideas.
The system built up by Bulgakov suggests first of all
the rejoinder that he works with concepts which he ap
plies to the mysteries of the divine life. Fundamentally
the impression he conveys is that he is cognizant of the
inner life of God, of the divine Trinity. But this inevitably
shows itself as objectification. In reality it is only possible
to speak about God and his relation to the world and to
man in the language of symbols; it can be only by a
system of symbols of existential spiritual experience. The
old antithesis between transcendent and immanent is out
of date and ought to be discarded, but Bulgakov has not
altogether shaken himself free from it. In spite of every
thing his religious metaphysic is a metaphysic of an onto-
logical datum not of an act. His nature-philosophy is not
free from sophiological determinism. The problem of free
dom in such a system is full of difficulty and it finds no
solution, and the same is true of the problem of evil.
But side by side with all these defects in Bulgakov's
theology there is also much of positive value and much
that is new when compared with traditional doctrines. He
cannot accept revelation against his reason and conscience.
This makes itself particularly felt in his decisive and cour
ageous rejection of the eternal pains of hell which in his
view would indicate failure, the failure of God in his
design for the created world. In Bulgakov's view the crea
tion of the world takes place in eternity and not in time.
The ego, man, acquiesces in creation and takes part in it.
This is entirely admissible from iny point of view, for I
acknowledge a freedom which is uncreated. But it is dif
ficult to admit it from Bulgakov's own point of view, for
his outlook is what might be called divine monism. But
it is very true that God is not the cause of the world.
There is no antithesis between freedom and necessity in
God.
The problem which arises if God is higher than truth
and higher than goodness has been incisively stated by
Shestov, and is one which has great value as an expres
sion of the conflict with theological rationalism. But ex
treme irrationalism can dialectically tum into a new ra
tionalism. That constantly happens. The extreme denial
of the possibility of knowledge, agnosticism, is a form of
rational limitation. When Jerusalem is set in sharp con
trast with Athens we find ourselves in an awkward posi
tion. The possibility of spiritually clarified knowledge is
denied, and the possibility of merely rational cognition is
recognized. Barth in his theologizing wishes to remain on
the soil of Jerusalem only, but he must needs avail him
self of the services of Athens, and these services are at
times highly rational.
In a sense Bulgakov and Shestov are polar opposites.
Shestov sets revelation and faith in opposition to reason
and knowledge. Bulgakov wishes to make use of reason
and its apparatus of concepts for the knowledge of revela
tion which he desires to leave in an absolutely sure and
certain position. But both in one case or the other there is
difficulty about what I call the critique of revelation. A
critique of revelation presupposes reason clarified inwardly
by the truth of revelation, faith presupposes cognition by
spirit as a whole. A critique of revelation presupposes too
that God is not higher than Truth and is not subordinate
to Truth. He is existent Truth. God is mystery, but he is
also Truth, Spirit, freedom, love, conscience. God is the
overcoming for my sake of the pain of alienation, he is
for me the attainment of joy.
To speak of the spiritualization of revelation is not by
any means to give the word spiritualization an academic,
abstract, and highly rationalistic meaning. I am speaking
of Spirit in an entirely different sense, one which lies
wholly outside the traditionally academic antithesis be
tween spirit and matter or body. The body also can be
in the spirit; it can be spiritual. Spirit is certainly not the
substance which composes human nature as is held by
naturalistic metaphysics. Spirit is freedom, not substance;
it is the attainment of the highest quality and clarification,
it is to take possession of truth. The criterion of truth is
in the subject not in the object, in freedom, not in au
thority, the importance of which is merely sociological.
The criterion of truth is not in the world and not in so
ciety, but in Spirit, and there is no criterion of Spirit out
side Spirit itself.
Shestov sees freedom in revelation and faith; he sees
in them the victory over the barrier of necessity. But he
forgets the oppressive weight of authority which has been
associated not with knowledge and not with philosophy
but with a certain interpretation of revelation and with
faith. It was not Spinoza who preached fanaticism and
violence. He was the victim of fanaticism and violence,
and with all the limitations of his rationalism he embarked

upon the critique of r�velation. Tradition is twofold in its
nature, it is objectification of Spirit and in that sense it
is social, but it is also deeper than any objectification and
socialization and is a living creative link with the creative
spiritual experience of the past.
The critique of revelation of which I am thinking has to
take a line which is the direct opposite of that in which
it has moved from the beginning of modem times, in
natural religion and deism, in rationalism of all shades,
in rationalistic and moralistic interpretations of Chris
tianity, in the denial of mystery and the mystical side of
Christianity. In opposition to all this it must move in the
direction of mystery and mysticism and towards the over
coming of theological rationalism. It is not a critique by
the reason of the centuries of enlightenment, but a critique
by the spirit. The first move was in the direction of objec
tivization. The second move must take the opposite direc
tion, towards primary spiritual experience, towards the
existential subject, not towards the "natural," but towards
the reverse of objectified nature, towards spirituality.
Chapter 4
Freedom, Being and Spirit. Essence and Existence.

The Creative Ad.
THE FUNDAMENTAL difference which distinguishes the

various types of philosophy from one another must be
found elsewhere than where it is usually seen. The dif
ference arises out of the problem of the relation between
freedom and being, and that is a question which goes
deeper than the traditional problem of the relation be
tween freedom and necessity. From the thoroughgoing
ontological point of view freedom is regarded as subordi
nate to being, and to being which is determined. Does
precedence belong to being over freedom or to freedom
over being? Does not the final mystery of being lie in the
fact that freedom is more primary than it and precedes it?
And it may be for that reason that all ontologies are so
unsatisfactory, so intolerably rational, so permeated by
the concept, which is applicable to the phenomenal world
only.
As I have already said existential philosophy cannot be
ontological. Jaspers speaks truly when he says that the
sphere of freedom is Existenz, that the ego actually is
freedom of choice, that freedom is an absolute principle.
But with him freedom is contrasted with knowledge, and
71
that is true only if it is the objectivization of knowledge
which we have in mind. In reality freedom cannot be the
object of knowledge, but it is precisely in freedom that
we come into touch with the primary entity, and freedom
is more certain and reliable, more authentic than being.
Being is secondary and is a product of objectification. It
is the child of abstract thought. Freedom is more primary
than being and it cannot be determined by our being; it is
bottomless and without foundation. In determination and
rationalization, that is to say in objectification, freedom
disappears. That is why it is so difficult to define freedom.
It shrinks from definition.
If there were no freedom, then what we call being
would include no element of mystery. Transcendental man
is not being in the sense of the sphere of objectification,
he is freedom. Freedom presupposes an act which pro
ceeds out of it. But the act is always a creative act. An
element of newness comes to light in it, whereas the emer
gence of newness is inexplicable from the closed circle of
being. The mystery of freedom is the mystery of creative
power as well. But the possibility of slavery is also in
cluded in it; such a possibility belongs to unclarified free
dom, to the will to power and domination. At the basis
of world life lies an act of primary freedom, but the free
dom is linked with a cosmic aim, it is not isolated. In a
certain fashion directed freedom gives rise to necessity.
Enmity and division give rise to the fettered condition of
the natural world. The longing of the primary will, free
dom, can establish both necessity and slavery.
It is owing to this that the problem of freedom is so
complex. In any case the sphere of existential freedom is
one which is distinct from the sphere of objectified and
determined nature. Freedom is not only the freedom of
man but also the fate of man. This fated freedom is a
most mysterious phenomenon in human existence. Fate,
on which Greek tragedy was based, goes back to the pri
mary freedom, to the tragic principle which is included in
it. Tragedy in the Christian world is the tragedy of free

dom, not the tragedy of fate. It is that kind of tragedy
which we find in Dostoyevsky.
Kant understood perfectly the difference between the
realm of freedom and the realm of nature, but he did not
draw the necessary metaphysical inferences from it. Free
dom is both the possibility of what is fated and the possi
bility of that which is of grace. Clarifying grace is indeed
the highest freedom. God acts in freedom and through
freedom, and outside freedom there is no grace. The
traditional antithesis between freedom and grace in theo
logical literature is superficial and does not get down to
the root of the matter. When man is entirely free then he
is in grace. This is the awakening of the divine element
in man. If he is without freedom the reception of grace
is impossible; there is no organ for the purpose, and with
out grace there is no decisive emancipation of man from
necessity, slavery and fate.
It is all the while the same mystery of God-manhood. If
we adopt the old terminology which has become fashion
able again nowadays we must say that freedom presup
poses the precedence of existence over essence. Essence
is indeed congealed and chilled being. Primary existence
is freedom and act, it is creative power. It is only in a
derivative sphere that existence comes under the sway of
congealed and chilled being. The p rimary thing is move
ment; immovability is secondary, it is the outcome of a
certain direction in movement. The metaphysics of Par
menides and the Eleatics are therefore mistaken; they are
concerned with what is secondary rather than with what
is primary. Heraclitus was more in the right but even he
did not get right down to the primary. Sergius Bulgakov
is not able to solve the problem of freedom or the prob
lems of creativity and evil because he takes his stand on
ontological ground, that is to say upon what is secondary.
All Christian metaphysics should have been formulated in
the light of this primacy of freedom over being; then a
different meaning would have been given to everything.

Or, to speak more accurately, everything would have
been given a meaning, which is not the case in the tran
scendent ontological doctrine of static being, of the deter
mination of freedom by being. Christian metaphysics
ought to be in the first place a philosophy of history.
Freedom must be looked at dialectically, and in move
ment, it is full of contradictions, and even a false affirma
tion of freedom is possible when it is understood in a
static way, formally, and represented as easy rather than
difficult. The freedom of man is limited on all sides, it is
subject to limitation within him also. But all the while
man has to fight a battle for freedom, a fight which some
times assumes heroic proportions. Freedom encounters
opposition and man must overcome the resistance. If his
freedom does not meet with opposition it begins to break
down. The freedom of bourgeois society is like that. But
man takes the wrong road, a road which leads in the
opposite direction, when he acknowledges only the free
dom given him by truth which is already recognized, and
denies the freedom which awaits him in the very search
for truth and the conquest of it. That is the sense in which
freedom is understood in every totalitarian and integral
standard of orthodoxy, whether Roman Catholic or
Marxist.
It is written in the Gospel, "Ye shall know the Truth
and the Truth shall make you free." The final and de
cisive liberation can be reached only by the vital assimila
tion of truth. In the last resort this is divine freedom, the
freedom of the Kingdom of God, freedom which is finally
united with grace. Such union and identification of free
dom with grace is not in evidence in the orthodox doc
trines of the historical Churches, and still less can it be
provided by Marxist or communist orthodoxy, though this,
nevertheless, does lay claim to it. Man's position is on the
road and not at the final attainment, not at the end to
which the road leads. Along that path man seeks and ex-
plores the truth, and he goes on seeking and exploring
even when the primary ray of truth has already entered
into his soul. Truth is not given in a ready-made and a
finished form, not even the Truth of revelation. No reve
lation whatever ought to lay claim to finality and com
pleteness, it goes on to the end of the world.
The attainment of truth assumes the way and the life.
Christ is the Truth, the Way and the Life, the sure and
unfailing way and life. And in the way and the life free
dom is a necessity in order that the fullness of truth may
be attained. When in the course of following the way
men maintain that the revelation of the truth which must
bestow real freedom is final and complete they fall into
the wiles of anti-Christ, and the seductive lure of the
"Grand Inquisitor." This temptation of the Grand In
quisitor is one which lies in wait for all secularized non
religious and anti-religious currents of thought, and all
doctrines which lay claim to the final possession of truth
and acknowledge only that freedom which will be be
stowed by their truth. But one must fight not only for the
sake of freedom but also under the banner of truth.
Jaspers says that the exercise of freedom in the search
of the transcendent is the source of religion. He himself
takes his stand on non-religious ground, although he be
longs to people who are deeply moved by religion. But
he is right when he speaks of the exercise of freedom as
a condition for the attainment of truth about the tran
scendent.
There is still one more distinction to be noted in the
understanding of freedom. There is a miserly freedom
which is concerned to guard and hoard and there is a
bounteous freedom which is creatively generous. The first
is the sort of freedom which may be called bourgeois and
which is maintained by a world which is disintegrating
instead of being creative. Freedom is not only a choice of
path, freedom is also creative power. A sceptical with
holding from the choice of path may lead to the loss of
freedom, and to its impotence. Freedom is unbreakably

linked with creative effort. But there can be no other
creative effort than that of the free man. The derivative
and objectified order of the world is the realm of neces
sity, and freedom has to break through into it. The free
creative act operates in an environment of darkness and
meets with resistance from necessity. From this comes the
difficulty and complexity of the creative act, from this too
the tragedy of creative power.
The very personality of man, the disclosure within him
of the image of God, is the product of a creative act, of
free creative action. Human thought, including theological
thought, is much inclined to take the line of least resist
ance, and readily tends to regard freedom as conditioned
by the closed system of being. But this is the denial of
freedom. Out of it a fundamental and insoluble antinomy
makes its appearance : in the divine eternity everything is
foreordained and everything is foreseen, yet nevertheless
in the process of becoming within time man is endowed
with free will which may make changes in what is divinely
predetermined and foreseen. Theologians may argue that
the act of free will was foreseen by God, for all things
soever are within his sight. But by this very fact he also
is predetermined, for God is present in everything. Around
this there have been endless controversies in Christian
thought in the West, about the relation between freedom
and grace. This was a problem which Luther, Calvin, the
J ansenists, the Jesuits, and in fact everybody had to face.
Every rationalized, every intellectualist ontology has al
ways been inauspicious for freedom, and when it has
admitted the existence of freedom it has given rise to
insoluble contradictions. The very antithesis between free
dom and grace in which grace is understood as a tran
scendent power acting from without and from above, leads
to insurmountable difficulties.
There is still one more false way of understanding free
dom, and that is to interpret it as the autonomy of the
various differentiated spheres of human life-the auton

omy of thought, the autonomy of morals, the autonomy
of politics, economics and so forth. Every sphere is sub
ject to its own law and is divorced from the single syn
thetized spiritual centre. But man, the integral man, falls
into a servile dependence upon the l aws of the separate
spheres of life and quite certainly he is not free. Philo
sophical and scientific knowledge, the State and politics,
economics, all of them with their own laws are free, but
not man himself. It is on this soil that scientism has sprung
up, and philosophy which takes no account of the inward
existence of man has been founded. On the same ground
Machiavellian politics and etatism, and the capitalist sys
tem have been established, which refuse to acknowledge
any submission to ethical principles. On the same ground
again a legalistic moralism has been set up, and so forth.
What must be striven for is not a false autonomy of the
various spheres of culture and social life, but the freedom
of the whole man.
The determinism of the objectified world distorts re
ligious thought also. It distorts both the doctrine of God
and the doctrine of man. Revelation is frequently under
stood as a form of divine determinism. This arises from a
natural interpretation of the relation between creator and
creature. The divine determinism is an echo of the deter
minism which belongs to this world. But given a spiritual
understanding of the relation between God and the world
everything is changed. When that is interpreted in a
spiritual way everything becomes creative in character. I
have already said many times that spirit is not being, that
spirit is freedom, that it is a creative act which is effected
in depth, it is what nowadays is called Existenz. The
creative philosophy of freedom, which is not ontological
but existential, must interpret revelation as a process of
cleansing and liberating from the determinism of nature
and society. Creative activity is always the creation of
something else. In a certain sense, in fact in a more pro-
found sense, it may be said that the transcendent comes

to birth in the creative effort which is a union with eternal
creativity. Ends are not set before men from without and
from above by the transcendent understood objectively.
They are born in creative effort. But creative effort may
be objectified. It may grow feeble and cold and then its
results may appear as objective being.
When present-day philosophers say that value has no
objective basis they are right, but frequently they do not
understand the profoundly philosophical significance of
the pronouncement they are right in making. Even Nietz
sche did not understand this. The creative act in which
values are created embraces the cosmos, it is not an iso
lated fact. He who creates is a microcosm. Empirical man
limits and distorts this creative act. The act of appraisal
which must always be made by man if he is to rise above
a given situation which is doing violence to him is asso
ciated with the imagination. But the appraisal is linked
also with knowledge though not with objectified knowl
edge nor with rationalized knowledge. Many present-day
philosophers are not willing to recognize this link and
to them the creation of values has no bearing whatever
upon the cognition of being, since knowledge is for them
always objectifying knowledge, that is to say it is the
cognition of being, which is taken as a datum.1
If value is unreal it does not correspond to any objec
tive reality. If it is a product of the creative imagination
it does not therefore follow that it bears no relation to
existential realities which are by no means congealed or
objectivized, but are dynamic and creative. In a certain
sense my ego itself is a creative act. The world is my
creative act. Another man is my creative act. God is my
creative act. This last certainly does not mean that God
becomes within the world process, as the German idealists
of the beginning of the nineteenth century thought. Beauty
1 Thus, for example, in Polin and many others; this goes back
to Nietzsche.
in the world is a creative act not an objective reality.
Creative transformation must therefore go on all the time.
When I say : "God is," or "man is immortal," I effect a
creative act. And outside this creative act there are no
realities in the realm of things, given from without, though
this does not mean that there are no realities in another
sense. Kant himself did not understand his own words
about what are called the moral postulates, of God, im
mortality and freedom. Either this bears a very super
fi.cial and narrowly moralistic meaning or it means a
creative act achievable by man.
Sooner or later a revolution in thought must take place
which will set it free from the power of the objective
world, from the hypnosis of so-called objective realities.
Then the interpretation of revelation too will be trans
ferred to existential subjectivity. Then also Truth will be
understood, not as determinism (logical general validity)
but as existential freedom. The essence of the world-if
indeed we are to use the debatable word "essence''-is
creative act. But the creative act functions in a world in
which there is the determinism which is proper to objec
tivization, in which freedom is not only limited but all
too often actually destroyed. To this is due the extraor
dinary complexity and inconsistency of man's situation
in the world. He is in a state of. inward slavery also. This
inconsistency of the position of man in the world is espe
cially noticeable in the problem of the relation of human
personality to history. This has its bearing upon the place
and role of revelation in history.
If the critique of revelation depends upon the philo
sophical, scientific and ethical thought of man, there is a
very much deeper dependence of philosophical thought
upon revelation. People of our time, who have broken
away from all religious belief, still unconscious and unob
servant of the fact as they are, are living by ancient re
ligious beliefs although these have lost their ancient form.
It must needs be so because man is a historical being.
Chapter 5
Man and History. Freedom and Necessity in History.

Providence, freedom and Fate.
IT IS DIFFICULT to express mystical experience in rational

thought and language; it lies beyond the sphere in which
the laws of logic operate. But the mystical experience of
history does exist, although its very existence is but rarely
acknowledged. Usually historians do not recognize it. To
them it is only history as objectivization which exists. But
in history also irruptions of the spiritual world do occur.
What is known as historism is. an entirely false interpre
tation of history, it is relativism which can never get into
touch with the meaning of history.
To Hegel history is, as it were, a continuous disclosure
of Spirit, it is the History of Spirit because Spirit is his
tory. He deifies history because he allows the existence
of objective Spirit, and because he is a monist and an
optimist. In his remarkable idea of the cunning of reason
in history he brought to light the tragedy of what is indi
vidual. But he remains indifferent to that tragedy, and I
shall say more about this later on. There are two experi
ences. There is the experience of the supreme value of
human personality which may not be turned into a means
81
82 I Truth and Reve]ation
to an end, which is not the offspring of the wor1d and
which rises above the wor1d. And there is the experience
of the meaning of history, hidden behind its meaningless
ness. Both these sorts of experience ]ead to a third and
painful experience of the tragic conflict between man and
history.
Man is a historical being. He realizes himself in history,
and he cannot throw off the burden of history or free
himself from responsibility for it. Man cannot make his
way out of history and he cannot repudiate his dignity as
made in the image of God. Nor can he consent to being
turned into a means employed by a pitiless and inhuman
historical process. It is man that makes history, history
is not a phenomenon of nature, and it is to be supposed
that he makes history for his own sake. But history has
been criminal, its course has been marked by violence
and bloodshed, and it has displayed no inclination at all
to have any mercy upon man. It has crushed him. Hegel's
cunning of reason has been used by men and peoples for
the realization of their own ends.
To Hegel the highest end was the decisive triumph of
the world Spirit, of its self-consciousness and of its free
dom. Everything partial, everything individual is but a
means to the triumph of the common and universal. The
making of empire, war, and revolution, by means of
which the ends of history have been realized have always
been the triumph of the common and universal, the shoul
dering aside and the crushing of everything partial and
individual. By such means have all States been founded,
and by the same means destroyed. And the economic de
velopment of human societies which has as its end the
satisfaction of men's material needs, upon which the very
possibility of their existence depends, is interested in the
common, not in the individual. Man is a mere statistical
unit. Capitalist society is a plain instance of this, and
perhaps the same is true of communist society.
History is always a disillusionment for human person-
ality and it always wounds it very deeply. To a notable

degree history is the history of crime, and all the dreams
of idealists about a better state of society have ended in
criminal deeds. Torrents of blood have been shed when
ever States have been founded, or their borders enlarged,
and all revolutions designed to overthrow them have been
swamped in blood also. The solitary and unrecognized
J. J. Rousseau did not foresee how his ideas would be put
into effect by the Jacobins. Karl Marx did not foresee
how his ideas would be realized by the Russian com
munists. Nor did Nietzsche foresee the use to which his
ideas about German racism would be put and how they
would serve to realize an imperialist will to power.
But in this connection what is most astounding and
tragic is the fate of Christianity. In the legend of the
Grand Inquisitor the genius of Dostoyevsky has described
how Christ will be met should be come to earth again.
And that is how everything happens in history. History
is a terrible failure and at the same time it has a certain
meaning and man cannot simply walk out of it. Indeed
there is nowhere for him to go. History is not the incar
nation of Spirit as Hegel and others have thought, it is
not a progressive march and the triumph of world reason,
nor is it progress along a straight and rising line. History
is a horrible tragedy. Everything is distorted in it, all
great ideas are disfigured. And revelation has been per
verted in it.
History is objectivization; the creative movement in a
vertical direction in which there was always a breach of
historical causality is later objectified in a horizontal line.
The objectification of spirit which takes place in history
is an act of my spirit. I chose this path and I revolt
against it. And I cannot refuse the two theses of the
antinomy. On the one hand I accept history as my path,
the path of man, and on the other hand I indignantly tear
the mask from it and rebel against it. My destiny is linked
with the destiny of the world; I cannot separate them.
The world has taken the path which leads to the objecti
fication of existence and I am precipitated into this
process, and I am answerable for it. I cannot simply shift
the responsibility for it onto other shoulders and draw
myself apart, claiming to be clean from the mire of his
tory. History has set its ineffaceable stamp upon me. Yet
at the same time I am a free spirit, a person who bears
the image and likeness of God, not only the image of the
world. It is here that the difficulty and indeed the tragedy
of my position lies. One must preserve one's freedom in
the realm of necessity. It is not an easy, it is a difficult
freedom, it is a freedom which is aware of resistance.
History treats me very roughly, and it shows not the
slightest concern for my well-being. That is one aspect
of it. But history is also my history. I have indeed had a
share in its happening. If man holds the cosmos within
him, there is all the more reason for saying that he in
cludes history within him. In the spiritual depth of me
in transcendental man-the contradiction is removed. The
history of Israel, Egypt, Persia, Babylon, Greece, and
Rome, of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance occurred
with my participation, it is my history and for that reason
only can it be intelligible to me. It is my path, my quest
and my lure. Its falls and its uplifting are mine. If for
me this were mere objectification in which everything is
received from without only, then I should be able to
understand nothing of it. The Russian revolution too hap
pened with my participation. I am answerable for it. It
is simply my pathway and my experience; I ought never
to adopt the pose of the man who looks upon himself
as the only one in the right and other people as living in
falsehood and wrong. I ought not to regard anything as
entirely outside myself. I too am answerable for the act
of Cain.
History is alien to me as objectivization and as estrange
ment, and yet it is near akin to me, it is indeed my own.
Within the confines of our world there is no way of escape
from this contradiction. By nature and destiny man is a

historical being, he is linked not only with all history but
also with all cosmic life. What is to be saved-if indeed
we are to use that expression-must be not only oneself
but all history and the whole world too. I have no right
to get myself ready for heaven by casting anyone into
hell. That is quite the worst method of preparing oneself
for heaven, although this method has often been adver
tised in early instructions on the ascetic and spiritual life.
Those were precisely the days when man had to be sub
missive to history as a datum given to him from outside
himself, and obedient to the forces which are dominant
in it, but not in fact to have any share in it.
There is a very great deal in history which has been
regarded as sacrosanct, and what was historically sacro
sanct has become part and parcel of revelation. But in
that case history has in no degree been accepted and men
have taken no active part in it. It is the reverse which is
true. Nothing in history ought to be regarded as sacrosanct
and to nothing in it should an attitude of submissiveness
and obedience be adopted. But the needful thing is that
history should be received into oneself and that an active
part should be taken in its destiny. I accept history not
because I am part of history but because history is part
of me. That means that I accept it not as an obedient
slave but as a free man. Historical revelation too I cannot
take from without as something which is an authority for
me. I accept it as something which happens in my spiritual
life, an event in my spiritual experience, as a symbol of
the spirit which is eternal in its significance. Outside this,
historical revelation is objectivization which has merely a
sociological significance. History which has come to me
from outside as objectivization is vitiated by a relativism
from which there is no way out, everything in it is rela
tive, all is in a state of flux, and there is nothing upon
which reliance can be placed.
There are certain points in history which some people
wish to regard as stable and firm and sacrosanct. But it

is impossible to maintain this. Historical criticism destroys
it. What must be acknowledged is the break-through of
metahistory into history, and it is only in the metahis
torical that the element of the sacrosanct is found. But
the metahistorical which has entered into history is liable
to be easily objectified and then again everything becomes
relative and conditional. Then we have to wait for a fresh
break-through of the metahistorical. It is with this that the
prophetic side of religious life is associated. In the strict
sense of the word sacred history does not exist, it is only
sacred metahistory that exists. But the frontiers between
history and metahistory are difficult to mark out. His
torism is false not only as a scientific and philosophical
Weltanschauung, it is false as a religious belief also.
Yet at the same time Christianity is historical, it is the
entrance of God into history and it confers a transcendent
meaning upon history. Christianity accepts a meaning for
history; it cannot be thought of, as pagan religions can be
conceived, as outside history, and this is due to Christian
messianism. But in spite of that history distorts Chris
tianity, and that frequently to the extent of making it
unrecognizable. The realized expression of Christianity in
history has been its great failure. This is a fundamental
antinomy which is insoluble within the confines of his
tory. It is absolutely fruitless to moralize in the abstract
about history; it leads to nothing whatever. History must
either be entirely repudiated, as it is in Indian thought and
by Schopenhauer and, with particular consistency, by Leo
Tolstoy, or it must be received into oneself while one
makes an effort not to be infected by the evil of it. I
ought to be free from the power of the world and I ought
to take upon myself what is done in the world without
withdrawing from it into the realm of the abstract. And
all this is very difficult to do.
II
The philosophy of history is concerned with the funda
mental antinomy between freedom and necessity, between
the freedom of man and his lot in history. The massive
scale of history impresses man and imposes itself upon
him to the extent of overwhelming him. The fate of
Hegel's philosophy of history has been remarkable. He
regarded his philosophy as a philosophy of freedom. It
was above all a philosophy of spirit, and it was precisely
to the understanding of spirit that he brought freedom as
its essential definition. And at the same time Hegel in
actual fact denied freedom. To him freedom was an
acknowledged necessity, that is to say it was a product
of necessity. He definitely reacted against Kant's interpre
tation of freedom. Kant in reality acknowledged freedom
more than other philosophers. Hegel's freedom is the free
dom of the universal and not of the individual. In the last
resort it is the universal spirit which is free and not the
concrete individual man, who is offered as a sacrifice to
the universal spirit. It was against this that Belinsky
protested and at a still deeper level Dostoyevsky and
Kierkegaard.
The Marxist philosophy of history has completely in
herited Hegel's way of understanding freedom, and the
Russian communists have merely popularized Hegel's
idea. In Hegel's view freedom was effectively realized in
the Prussian State, and to communists it is embodied in
the Soviet State, in the collective. But to their way of
thinking human personality is certainly not endowed with
freedom. Freedom is simply the service of the universal
spirit embodied in the State, or the service of communist
society, the Leviathan, the collective. Absolute idealism
also denies freedom and so does dialectic materialism.
The extent to which Marxism depends upon Hegel is
enormous.
But the opposite error against which protest must also
decidedly be made is to understand freedom as wholly
formal, empty, liberal and too easy. Freedom as the crea
tive act of man does not operate in empty space, it stands
face to face with the resistance of the solid grandiose ne
cessity of nature and history. It is not only freedom which
operates in history, freedom which comes as it were from
another world, but also harsh necessity behind which may
be concealed an evil basely misdirected freedom. Hegel
bowed submissively before this iron necessity and lent it
the shelter of his philosophy of spirit. But freedom can
act in resistance to necessity. History is indeed the arena
of a conflict between freedom and necessity and in it there
is always some measure of freedom and some measure of
necessity. I call freedom empty when it is unaware of re
sistance, when it is too easy. It is by conflict and in the
experience of resistance that freedom is tempered and
strengthened. In a vacuum in which there is no resistance
freedom disintegrates, bourgeois egoistic and miserly free
dom is like that. Freedom demands sacrifice and self-sur
render. Self-assertion is the last thing it is.
It is possible to misuse freedom for base ends. Things
which in no sense belong to freedom of the spirit may be
used to defend it, but it is in reality only those who recog
nize the existence of spirit who can defend freedom of the
spirit. If materialism is consistently followed out it in
evitably leads to the denial not only of freedom of the
spirit but also of freedom in general. Absolute idealism
too is inimical to freedom in the same way, it is only
personalist philosophy which can defend freedom. His
torical necessity is a very heavy burden upon my freedom,
but there is no need to personify historical necessity, nor
to see fate in it. Behind historical necessity, solidly com
pact, grandiose and overwhelming as it is, there may be
concealed acts of freedom in the past. Clashes among
the different freedoms of various orders are constantly
occurring.
Without freedom no history would exist. Without free
dom it is reduced to the cosmic cycle. Historical time, as
distinct from cosmic time, presupposes freedom, but free

dom which operates in historical time has its roots in
existential time. Behind the history of the world meta
physical and metahistorical forces are hidden, and it i s
this that accounts for the extreme complexity of history.
In history I ought to act as a free spirit and as a historical
being. I am compelled to act in contradiction to the world
and myself, and dangers lie in wait for me on all sides,
for my freedom is no facile and empty thing. It must all
the time define its attitude to truth and to historical
reality. Man is fated to move forward along the path of
history.
But as history follows its course there may be periods
of Godforsakenness, and the way may pass through dark
ness and propinquity to hell. This is simply the testing
of man's strength, it is simply the path he treads. But in
the final resort the victory goes to light over darkness.
This decisive and final victory, so far as we are concerned,
remains an invisible thing. It is a matter of faith and hope.
In empirical phenomenal actuality we do not see the vic
tory of light, and in history there is no triumph of good.
We live in a period which may be described as an ad
vance into the night. But in the night there may be in
deed the very strongest light. History is by no means a
rational process in which the progressive triumph of
reason comes to pass. Volcanic and irrational forces are at
work in it, and they are at times concealed and suppressed.
But from time to time they break out in wars and revolu
tions.
These irrational forces endeavour to gain a victory
over rationalization. But this can never wholly succeed.
We live in an age when the irrational force of history
is brought to light at a single stroke, all solid bodies are
fused and chaos breaks out, and at the same time the will
to an extreme rationalization of life (for example, in
Marxism) becomes manifest. But this very rationalization
becomes an irrational force. The great experiment made
by the Russian people displays the irrationality of the

rational. Such then is one of the paradoxes of history.
The irrational cannot be finally overcome by the rational,
it can only be overcome by the supra-rational. This is the
explanation of the impotence of rational humanism in
conflict with the inhumanity of the age and with the repu
diation of man. Hence too the feeble defence of rational
rights and rational freedom, in the face of their threat
ened destruction by the rationalized irrational. And hence
again the weakness of Christianity which has become too
rationalized and too socialized as a result of adaptation
to a disintegrating social order.
From all appearances we are forced to acknowledge
that history is a great failure. It is a failure in terms of the
insurmountable conflict between man and history. All the
great movements of history which have been brought
about for the sake of man have ended in showering griev
ous blows upon him. And how many movements there
have been which quite certainly have not had the welfare
of man as their object. In the course of history man has
been tortured by those who were possessed by a fatal
power. History is a failure again because within it the
conflict of freedom and necessity is unresolved, necessity
constantly gets the upper hand of freedom. And yet again
history is a failure because in it the creative act of man
is objectified and in that way chilled. It loses its fire and
is adapted to the level of the average man. Man is con
tinually moved by dreams of Utopia, in which his con
flict with history will be surmounted, as will the conflict
between freedom and necessity, and between creative
power and objectification. But he is continually disillu
sioned by these Utopias which he has tried to realize.
The fate of Marxism is typical in this respect, and it must
be remembered that its doctrinal strength was very great.
The tragic situation of man in history always remains
and there is no way of getting over it as long as man re
mains within history. History remains an evil force in
relation to human personality, but this force is within
man. History may be brought into man, it may be recog
nized as his own particular destiny. The recognition ?f
the failure of history by no means indicates that it is de
void of any meaning and that man must repudiate it, or
that he can escape from it. He must live out his destiny in
history and in doing so bring transcendent meaning and
light into it. The most grandoise attempt to reconcile
obligation (in the Kantian sense ) and historical reality
was made by Hegel. But the antinomy between man and
history, the conflict of that which ought to be and that
which is, is only soluble if it is seen in an eschatological
perspective. The meaning of history is transcendent in
relation to the phenomenal objectified world. History is
not the development of Spirit, as German absolute idealism
thought, it is tragic and tom by contradictions.
But the question which chiefly interests us at the mo
ment is that of the fate of revelation in history. Christian
revelation occurs in history and Christianity attaches spe
cial importance to history. But the question of the limits
of the absolute truthfulness of revelation is closely con
nected with this, and this is the source of its relativeness
and the obscuring of the eternal by the temporal. Revela
tion had to enter into history in order that the destiny
of man might be fulfilled. That destiny is linked with the
metahistorical and transcendent in relation to this same
history. And revelation must be freed and purified from
the power of the historical, or, to speak more truly, from
the power of historism, from the process of making what
is relative absolute. Here lies the importance of historical
biblical criticism. The time is coming when this liberation
and cleansing will become necessary for the very existence
of the Christian faith, exposed, as it is, to the very greatest
dangers. This means the end of historical Christianity and
the transition to eschatological Christianity. The transi
tion will certainly not be the advent of a naturalistic re
ligion as was supposed when the period of modem his-
tory began, when the time had not yet come; and the
moment in the dialectic of the spirit was not the same
as it is now. We live on the eve not of naturalistic re
ligion, but of spiritual religion. And this new spiritual age
is preceded by new forms of godlessness which also must
be looked upon as the existenial dialectic of the human
and the divine.
Chapter 6
New forms of Godlessness. Op timistic and Pessimistic

Godlessness. Godlessness of the day and Godlessness
of the night. The Service that Godlessness renders in
purging away servile Sociomorphism and Idolatry.
WE LIVE IN AN entirely different world from the world of

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth
century godlessness is something entirely different. Dur
ing the two last centuries there was what may be called
a daylight godlessness of enlightenment; it was based
upon belief in the supremacy of reason. I say "belief' be
cause belief in reason, which has now been shaken, did
then exist. Present-day godlessness must be described as
godlessness of the night and it reflects the yearning, the
horror and the despair of the men of our time. Everything
has become more extreme and stripped bare of all disguise.
Man has moved out of the central realm of the rational,
and at the same time atheism has become more complex
and subtle. It is not, as formerly, associated with ele
mentary materialism and positivism, with an optimistic
belief in endless progress and the leading role of reason.
It used to be the case that reason on becoming aware of its
independence revolted against God. Now it is the irrational
93
force of life which revolts against God. They used to say:

the world in itself is good and unfolds itself endlessly;
therefore there is no God and there is no need for one.
Now they say: the world is bad and has no meaning, there
is no progress and, therefore, there is no God.
The old rationalism has been shattered, both by con
temporary philosophical and scientific thought and, what
is still more serious, by life itself, by the irrational proc
esses which take place in it. The world is now passing
through a state of darkness and Godforsakenness to a
greater extent than at any other time, and this Godfor
sakenness of the world and man becomes the principal
argument against the existence of God. God has, as it
were, departed from the world, and the old doctrine of
Providence simply gives rise to derision and indignation.
People think that they must make their way out of the
darkness and loss of meaning by their own strength; still
more often they think that to emerge from the darkness
is entirely impossible. When the measureless sufferings
of men, the unheard-of cruelty and the triumph of evil
upon the earth are attributed to the sinfulness of man
and explained as the chastisement of God, one's sense of
justice is moved to revolt. There has always been sinful
ness, and it has been by no means the sinners themselves
who were the chief sufferers. H Providence is taken to
mean the chastisement of God falling upon men, not only
may a rejoinder be provoked but a feeling of indignation
aroused also.
The problem of theodicy remains unsolved. All the
rational solutions with which the courses of instruction in
theology are filled are bankrupt. The Godforsaken state
of the world remains a very mysterious thing. It is to be
remembered that the last words of Jesus were "My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" These words are
repeated by an innumerable host of people an uncount
able number of times. It is plain that what is called
Providence can also be expressed by saying that God
abandons the world, that he goes away from it. The
destiny of the world and of man is in a mysterious way
realized through Godforsakenness also, through the de
parture of God from the world. This is a dialectical
moment in the process of God-manhood. I am speaking,
of course, not of a logical dialectic, but of an existential
dialectic. The experience of Godforsakenness may be
understood as the testing of human freedom. This testing
of freedom is carried out even in the repudiation of
freedom. Man renounces his freedom very easily.
The most terrible forms of godlessness are certainly not
those which are displayed in the militant and passionate
struggle against the idea of God and against God himself,
but those which are shown in the godlessness of practical
life, in indifference and coldness. These forms of godless
ness we often meet among nominal Christians. The pas
sionate up-surging revolt and fight against God may lead
to more light and to loftier religious thought. Godlessness
may even be of service and may be a means of cleansing
and a way of liberation from servile conceptions of God
which are the disfigurements of sociomorphism. The in
dignation which Christians display against atheists and the
militant godless is often base; it is their own distorted
conception of God and their own godless lives which have
been the cause of this godlessness. They have ascribed to
God the worst of properties, self-satisfaction, stupid ob
stinacy, cruelty and a love of profound obeisance.
It does not become Christians to be self-satisfied and to
despise those to whom the problem of God is a torment.
It certainly does not become them to despise Nietzsche,
for example. The godless may be better than those who
say, "Lord, Lord." Godlessness has its interior dialectic.
At first God is denied in the name of man, in the name
of his freedom and creative activity. But in the end it
comes to the denial of man himself, but now in the name
of something which is non-human and suprahuman, which
takes the place of the divine. This is particularly clearly
seen in the fate which overtook Nietzsche's ideas. The

whole dialectic of humanism is connected with this. The
transition from the self-assertion of man to the denial of
man, from the denial of God to the affirmation of false
gods may take both crude and subtle forms. But it always
means a break in the divine-human link.
From the psychological point of view there are two
forms of godlessness. There is a godlessness which is self
satisfied and optimistic, when man feels a sense of relief
at the thought that there is no God. It presupposes belief
in reason, in the power of man, in the reasonableness of
matter itself, in endless development. And there is the
godlessness which suffers, which is tragic, which says that
God is dead, in the way Nietzsche said it. One says,
"Thank God, there is no God and we are free to settle
down on the earth." The other says, "What a horrible
thing it is-that there is no God. Everything is in ruins;
life has no meaning for us." Godlessness may be calm,
even full of good will, and by no means hostile to those
who do believe in God. And it may be malicious, bluster
ing and sinister. There is a godlessness which arises from
compassion, from love for what is good and just, and there
is a godlessness which revolts against goodness itself and
which is prepared to persecute cruelly those who believe
in God.
Again, there is on the one hand godlessness and on the
other opposition to God. Theoretical atheism by no means
inevitably means fighting against God, but it can tum
into a fight against God. The atheism of the anarchist
Bakunin sometimes conveys the impression of a fight
against God and not merely of a theoretical denial of the
existence of God. It must always be remembered that
godlessness may be a protest against false and servile ideas
about God. In this sense atheism even deserves sympathy.
The denial of the existence of God has often been felt
as liberation from an unworthy conception of God, in
which he was thought of as master while man was con-
ceived as a slave. The idea of God has been so changed
that it stands for the denial of human dignity and human
creative power, and the fight against God is turned into
a fight on behalf of man, so terribly has belief in God
been distorted by the process of objectification and social
ization. God has been made use of in the defence of evil,
wrong and injustice.
Present-day philosophers often deny God and the divine
because they imagine him as an objective being who
stands above men and lords it over them. But in reality
the divine is indissolubly linked with the human, and that
is what the conception of God-manhood means. Human
creativeness itself is divine-human creativeness, and the
worth and dignity of man are due to the fact that the
divine is imaged in him. If there were not in man that
divine element which lifts him up above nature and society
he would be wholly determined by nature and society and
could not be regarded as a free and creative being. But
what gives rise to godlessness most of all is the traditional
doctrine of Providence, for this leads to contradictions
from which there is no escape. It is precisely the idea of
Providence which has been pressed into service to justify
evil and inertia on the part of man. And in this connec
tion a fatal part has been played by the application of the
language of causality to God . and his relation to the
world. But there is no sense at all in which God is a
cause. He causes nothing and determines nothing. If in
deed we are to use the expression "Providence" at all we
must recognize its extraordinarily mysterious quality, its
absolute unlikeness to the terms which are applicable
to the world of phenomena. The operation of grace is an
action of divine freedom not of divine necessity. It is an
operation within human freedom itself, it is the disclosure
of the divine in man.
It must be acknowledged that out-and-out consistent
godlessness does not exist. Man is more inclined to be an
idolator than an atheist. He recognizes the "divine" even
when he denies God and there is in him a need of the

"divine" which cannot be overcome. He deifies the most
diverse objects, he deifies the cosmos, man and humanity,
he deifies society, the State, abstract good or justice or
science, he deifies race, nationality or class, he deifies a
particular social order, socialism, and he makes a god
of his own godlessness.
The existence of the divine and of the holy is a priori
to all human judgments of value and every attitude of man
to life. The godless may be by nature very religious peo
ple. The godless Marxists are great believers. The divine
and the holy exist for them although they are unwilling
to acknowledge the fact. There are no thoroughgoing
consistent nihilists, for of nihilism itself, of the very idea
of nothingness, a god is made. It is not so much atheism
that exists as anti-theism. Theism has been affirmed in
terms that have called for protest, and the impress of a
servile sociomorphism and idolatry has often left its mark
upon it. The protest against such servile forms of the
worship of God does not amount to a denial of God, for
another way of understanding God is a possibility. What
needs doing is to investigate the reasons and motives
which lie behind the assertion of godlessness and what
arguments are brought forward to support it.
Godlessness may justify itself on various grounds,
scientifically positivist, moral, social. In the second half
of the nineteenth century many members of the intellectual
classes in Russia and in Europe generally had persuaded
themselves on allegedly scientific grounds that there was
no God and that belief in God was incompatible with
the existence of science. One is bound to say that this
argument for atheism is most naive and feeble. It was
based upon the belief that an absolute supremacy belongs
to science, not only over knowledge as a whole but also
over the whole of human life ; that science was capable
of solving all problems. In the twentieth century, however,
although positivist science, and in particular physics and
chemistry, achieved success on a colossal scale, this belief

that science was able to answer every question no longer
holds good, as may be seen in so notable a scholar, astron
omer and physicist as Eddington. The very existence of
matter in which the old science believed strongly, asso
ciated as it was, consciously or unconsciously, with ma
terialism, has had doubt cast upon it. Everything has be
come problematic at the very foundations of science.
And science, this very science which makes such re
markable discoveries, does not reckon to associate itself
with any philosophical theories at all. But the assumption
that science has proved that God does not exist is one
which is made, not by science itself, but by a philosophical
theory with which it is associated. Scientism is not sci
ence but a worthless philosophy, and it presupposes belief.
The non-existence of God is also an invisible thing, that
is to say it is a matter of faith. Real science which always
knows its own limits can say nothing about God either
negatively or positively. It cannot prove that there is no
God any more than it can prove that there is a God. The
question of the existence of God is the concern of a totally
different sphere of thought from that of science, which is
concerned with knowledge of the natural world. The argu
ments for atheism which are derived from the natural
sciences are just as weak as the arguments intended to
support belief in God which are based upon those same
natural sciences. Christian apologetics which seek to ward
off the attack of the natural sciences upon belief in God
are very feeble and out of date. Arguments from the
natural sciences may be entirely ignored.
But Christian thought ought to be set absolutely free
from its association with forms of natural science which
are out of date and with which it has been connected
in the past. The natural science of the Bible is knowl
edge which belongs to the childhood of mankind, and
it is impossible to attach any serious importance to it
in these days. What is of really serious importance is
the possibility of conflict between Christian thought and
the historical sciences. Historical knowledge may cause
embarrassment to Christian belief to the extent that that
belief seeks to find its basis in historical facts. This is
the very serious subject-matter of biblical criticism which
one cannot brush aside with a gesture. It is also the
theme of the critique of revelation to which this book
is in the main devoted. It is only the worship of God in
Spirit and in Truth which is at too high a level to be
embarrassed by difficulties connected with historical sci
ence. But historical science also shows itself unaware of
its own limits when it supposes for example that it can
solve "the problem of Jesu s . " That is a problem which
belongs to the relation between history and metahistory.
The metahistorical which is always set in motion and dis
closed in a vertical direction, not horizontally, is, so far
as historical science is concerned, revealed as a historical
movement in a horizontal direction. What historical sci
ence sees is not the primary break-through of the nou
menal world into this phenomenal world, but what is
already a derivative objectivization. That is why historical
science, for all its knowledge, and for all its devotion to
the discovery of truth, can say nothing in reality about
the revelation of God in history.
What is known as the mythological theory, which de
nies the very fact of the existence of Jesus, has its u seful
side, for it shows the absolutely hopeless position of sci
ence in the solution of the "problem of Jesus." A his
torical biography of Jesus cannot in actual fact be written
and the Gospels cannot be acknowledged as historical
documents. But that only proves that the reality of Jesus
Christ is borne witness to by the faith of the Christian
community, and that outside that community it is a reality
of h istory which is scarcely noticeable. No historical neces
sity of any kind can bring force to bear upon faith. Faith
is an act of freedom. The life of Jesus Christ entirely re
fuses to lend itself to historical objectification. It abides
within the realm of Christian experience and that not

individual only but also corporate, as the experience of
the community. The ethical and social themes of godless
ness are much more powerful. The one really serious
problem in this connection is the problem of theodicy.
How is the existence of an almightly and all-gracious
God to be reconciled with the evil and suffering that are
in the world? This is a question which has been raised
not only by the godless and in the interests of godlessness,
it has been raised also by people who believe in God, from
Marcion to Dostoyevsky. Marcion who was regarded as a
heretic and was cast out by the Church, was quite helpless
in his attempt to solve the problem which he had raised.
But he was right in the disquietude he felt about the
matter. His motives were ethical. He was highly sensitive
to the fact of evil and this was frequently not the case
among people who were orthodox. Was it possible to wor
ship the creator of the world-this world full of evil and
suffering-as the true God? Was it possible that Christ
was the Son of such a God? No-the true God is one
who is invisible, remote, one who never created a world
such as this. Christ is the Son of that invisible remote
God, a good God, and he came to redeem the created
world from evil, he revealed a God of love. The creator
of the world is an evil God, vengeful and chastising. It is
he who holds power in this world. The good God is not
a God of power, he is simply the God of truth and right.
This theme of Marcion's has been echoed in various
forms of religious thought right down to that of the pessi
mists of the nineteenth century. But in an age in which
faith has been lost Marcionism reappears not in a re
ligious but in an anti-religious form. One can trace the
ideas of Marcionism among the atheists of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Man has become more sensitive
to evil than to sin, behind the consciousness of which
evil had disappeared, and in particular he has become
more sensitive to suffering. Man may rebel against God
as the result of suffering and he desires to make a new

world, one in which such suffering will not find a place.
Out of a desire to destroy suffering and to construct a
world in which such suffering would not exist, he may be
the cause of immeasurable suffering, but that, of course,
he regards as only for the time being. This is the funda
mental moral inconsistency of the atheistic revolutionary.
Godlessness can be pessimistic in character, but in the
history of European thought it assumed a sharply opti
mistic tone. Such was the case above all with the god
lessness of the philosophy of eighteenth-century enlighten
ment, the godlessness of the encyclopaedists, Holbach,
Helvetius and others. This does not apply to Voltaire who
was not one of the godless, although his God was but a
sorry sort of rational God. The godlessness of the eight
eenth century was always associated with an optimistic
belief in reason and was as a rule allied with materialist
philosophy. This continued into the nineteenth century
too. The alliance between rationalism and materialism
displays a striking inconsistency. In itself materialism can
not admit this belief in reason. Matter in itself is irrational.
Neither is there any ground at all for associating belief in
endless progress with materialism.
Both belief in reason and belief in progress are a heri
tage from earlier times when people's outlook upon the
world was different from what it is now. The materialist
and rationalist atheism of the eighteenth century is now
completely out of date, and many of its arguments are re
peated only by Marxists in a form which is complicated
by arguments concerned with social questions. But this is
not so much thought as propaganda. Feuerbach's atheism
went very much deeper. It was the atheism of a most
remarkable and still inadequately appreciated thinker.
Like Marx, Feuerbach would have been inconceivable
without Hegel. In Feuerbach's view the mystery of the
ology is revealed in anthropology. His anthropology is re
ligious in character, the indelible stamp of his theological
past lies upon it, and perhaps it even shows traces of the
old German mysticism. Religion is the alienation of human
nature into the realm of the transcendent. God is made in
the image and likeness of man, and belief in him is the
result of the poverty and degradation of man. For the man
who is rich and aware of his own worth and dignity, belief
in God will disappear. All the riches of man will be re
stored to him, and there will be no need for him to trans
fer these riches into the realm of the transcendent. It is
man himself who has created God, but it has to be con
ceded what a grandiose creation this was.
Feuerbach's whole position is built up on the remark
able Hegelian idea of alienation, which in Hegel himself
means the self-estrangement of spirit, that is to say, it pre
supposes the existence of that same spirit. It involves the
denial of the mystery of God-manhood and that means
that it is monophysite in the line it takes. But in the event
of the disappearance of belief in God will man's alienated
highest nature be returned to him? Given the materialist
outlook to which Feuerbach was disposed, no higher hu
man nature exists and no riches at all will be restored to
him. Such higher nature assumes the existence of the divine
in man. It presupposes an element of likeness to God.
The going out of the ego to the non-ego, to an other, the
love upon which Feuerbach wished to base his religion of
humanity, is a relic of Christian ity in him. But it was not
so much man that Feuerbach made into a god as hu
manity, that is, racial man; his philosophy was anti-per
sonalist. In historical Christianity man has been humili
ated, his creative power has been denied and this has
been one of the principal sources from which godlessness
has arisen.
The godlessness of Marxism is derived from Feuerbach,
that is from Feuerbach's idea of the alienation of human
nature in religion. This idea of alienation was transferred
by Marx to economic life, and here there was more truth
in it than there was in its reference to religion. But
Marxism supplemented Feuerbach's arguments by others
which were derived from social problems. Religious be
liefs were born of man's dependence upon the irrational
forces of nature and society, over which man had not
yet secured control. They are the result of lack of or
ganization, of the anarchic state of society and of the
weakness of man. Belief in God has been brought into
service in defence of social injustice and to repudiate
human activity, and so religion is opium for the people. In
a socialist society in which the collective reason gets the
mastery over elemental forces, belief in God will die a
natural death.
Only it was not foreseen that belief in God and in the
spiritual world may be a result of being too greatly over
organized, a condition in which the individual man may
be stifled. Marxism ignores the individual aspect of re
ligion entirely. It has no psychology. But Marxism, which
arose out of Hegel's philosophy, continues to believe in a
meaning and a reason for the historical process which is
leading up to the perfect state of society. Idealistic ele
ments remain in it and belief in the divine remains in it.
For all its denial of God, the messianic idea plays a vigor
ous part in it. The properties of spirit are transferred to
matter. In Soviet Russia there are scarcely any philoso
phers of note. Philosophy is the business of the collective.
But there is one original thought which is advanced by
this collective activity. It goes with a decisive denial of
mechanistic materialism, in which movement is always the
result of a jolt from without. Opposed to this is movement
from within, self-movement. Inward freedom, rationality
and creative effort are ascribed to matter. If there is a
dialectic which is proper to matter, that means that a
rational principle is inherent in matter. Marxism does not
succeed in being a consistent and thorough-going atheism
in the sense that it denies every divine and sacred prin
ciple.
The Marxist claim to be the expression of scientific
socialism is based upon philosophical naivete. There is a
scientific side to Marxism. Marx was a first-rate and schol
arly economist, but with him socialism is not a science
but a religion. It was a messianic belief in a perfect world
which is coming, and this faith is an invisible thing which
serves as a substitute for the transcendent. Marxism
turned into one of the forms of the deification of society.
This deification took other forms as well. Thus Auguste
Comte's positive religion of humanity is a deification of
society. Comte also was a believing atheist and he wanted
to found a new religion. He was no less a collectivist than
Marx, and he also fought against individualism. The soci
ologist Durkheim reaches the point of turning society into
a god who creates logical and ethical laws. According to
Durkheim the religious beliefs of mankind have not been
pure illusions behind which no reality whatever is hidden.
The true reality has been hidden behind all religious be
liefs, from totemism onwards. This was a real religion of
society. But all this belongs to the old forms of atheism
or to the old forms of idolatry.
With Nietzsche a new and subtler form of godlessness
begins. It ceases to be optimistic and it does not now mean
belief in the supremacy of reason. It is a tragic godless
ness. The influence of Nietzsche upon his contemporaries
was enormous and a number of different currents of
thought have their origin in him . His influence is felt in
tendencies of thought which reveal a sense of the tragic
in life. Together with Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard he
brings to light the tragic element in the European world
of the nineteenth century. "They have killed God," said
Nietzsche, and he speaks of that as of a great disaster.
Nietzsche cannot live without the divine and the sacred,
and the God who has disappeared must be replaced by
something. To him the superman was a new form of the
divine, a supreme value which man must create. But man
himself Nietzsche despised and he looked upon him as a
shame and a disgrace. The murder of God was also the
murder of man. Nietzsche's atheism was not in the least a
humanist atheism.
The tragic situation of Nietzsche, as I have already said,
was due to the fact that he was struggling passionately to
wards the divine heights while all the time he was con
vinced of the baseness of the world and the baseness of
man. Nietzsche had a profound reverence for creative
power and he raised the problem of creativeness in a
more trenchant form than anyone else. He sought the
ecstasy of creation and he attained it, and by it he tri
umphed over the suffering which was sent to him from
above. He made a cult of suffering and he estimated the
worth of man by his ability to endure it. He rejected God
not at all because it is difficult to reconcile the existence
of God with the unmerited suffering in the world. There
was no element of Marcionism in him. He repudiated the
Christian God rather because He brings consolation and
happiness. Christianity gives a meaning to suffering and
that Nietzsche could not endure. To him it meant the de
nial of the tragic p rinciple. He wanted suffering and he
did not want consolation.
But the Christian theme is still there in Nietzsche. He
was a man whom Christ had wounded. This passionate
foe of Christianity was nearer to it than Goethe who
wished it well. But Christian consolation, as for that
matter all forms of consolation, was to him a cause of
suffering and a reason for revolt. He waged war on behalf
of the tragic interpretation of life which in his view was
connected with dionysism. He could not accept the con
solation which comes from the idea of progress, and from
the triumph of reason and from the possibility of human
happiness any more than he could endure Christian con
solation. But with all that it has to be said that he did not
know or understand Christianity. All he saw was the petty
bourgeois Christianity of his day. The new form of athe
ism is based not on the clash between belief in God and
the necessity in nature or the necessity which science can
reveal, but on the clash between belief in God and the
freedom and creative power of man. The same thing can
be seen in the new forms of Marxism, but there it is ex
pressed in a manner which is na!ve from the philosophical
point of view.
Dostoyevsky belongs to the nineteenth century, indeed
he did not live to the end of it. But he is at the same time
our contemporary too. He felt a great deal of all this
before the appearance of Nietzsche and before the tri
umph of Marxism. The matters which distress the people
of our day had been already stated by him. He is a fore
runne r of the dialectic of modern forms of godlessness; he
foresaw the coming of the godless collective. Kirilov antici
pates much that is in Nietzsche and his godlessness is dif
ferent from that of the rationalist godless. Raskolnikov,
Ivan Karamazov, and the heroes of The Possessed had
to face the tormenting theme of ends and means, of the
justification of the suffering in the world. The godlessness
of Dostoyevsky's heroes, like that of Nietzsche, was a
tragic godlessness.
Nicholas Hartmann advanced his own particular basis
for atheism. It is all constructed as the reverse of the
Kantian defence of belief in God. Kant subjected all the
traditional rational proofs of the existence of God to dras
tic criticism. It is impossible to . prove that God exists, but
the existence of God is a moral postulate. If there is no
God the moral life of man collapses. The one proof of
the existence of God which remains to us is the moral
proof. Nicholas Hartmann maintained the reverse. He
claimed that there is moral proof that God does not exist.
It is perhaps impossible completely to prove that God
does not exist, but if he exists then the moral life of man
collapses, man has no responsibility and no moral activity,
he creates no values, everything proceeds from God and
God is answerable for everything. He puts all objective
teleology in antithesis to the freedom of man. It is man
himself who sets his own aims before him, and, therefore,
it is necessary on moral grounds to postulate that God
does not exist.
It was probably the first time that thought of this kind
had been opened up. It is based upon the conviction that
the existence of God cannot be squared with the free
dom of man. Luther maintained this in an extreme form
for a precisely opposite purpose in his passionate defence
of the slavery of the will. But in actual fact the traditional
doctrine of Providence leads to the same result. It has
never been convincingly shown in what way the omni
presence of an almighty God is to be harmonized with
the freedom and activity of man. Nicholas Hartmann's
defence of atheism is one of the extreme inferences which
can be drawn from the traditional doctrine of God which
is recognized as orthodox. It is in that that its interest lies.
Here the centre of gravity is in the clash between the
existence of God and the freedom of man, not between
the existence of God and the necessity and regular rhythm
of nature.
We must not fail to note still another form which pres
ent-day godlessness assumes, and that the most sinister
form. It is the godlessness of racialism and national so
cialism. This is the deification of the cosmic forces which
brought into being the chosen German race and its leader,
the deification of a natural force, of blood and soil. A
Weltanschauung of this sort, which is not founded upon a
genius of its own and has no systematic method such as
there is in Marxism, may be described as mystical natur
alism or mystical materialism. In a form which is much
more extreme and hopeless than it is in Marxism it leads
to the denial of man, the denial of his dignity and worth.
It is the most extreme form of anti-humanism. Godless
ness is combined with inhumanity. We must not be led
astray by the fact that with all this the divine is constantly
affirmed and even God is constantly spoken of. All this
is only one of the expressions of the dialectic of godless
ness combined with the dialetic of humanism. God is de-
nied in the deification of cosmic forces, man himself is

denied in his self-assertion in nationality and race, which
acknowledges nothing higher than itself.
The latest new form of godlessness has made its ap

pearance in certain currents of existential philosophy, first
and foremost in Heidegger and Sartre. The existentialism
of Pascal and Kierkegaard and my own is religious in
character. Jaspers who has close connections with Kierke
gaard, also cannot be called an atheist. In a real sense
there is a transcendent element in him. But Heidegger's
existentialism and especially Sartre's are of another kind.
The author of Sein und Zeit passed through a Roman
Catholic school, and in his philosophy, which seeks to
dispense with God, there are clear traces of catholic the
ology. In his view this is a fallen world, though what it
fell from is unknown since he speaks of nothing at all in
any way high enough to fall from. His view of man is
taken solely from below and, as always in that sort of
way of understanding the world, it remains incompre
hensible how the lower is able to bring the higher into
being. Materialism maintains this with open eyes, but
Heidegger is not a materialist.
Being is fallen and guilty in its very structure. This is
catholic theology without God. It is a very pessimistic
philosophy, more pessimistic than Schopenhauer's. Much
of it is an inheritance from German pessimistic meta
physics, but like Nietzsche, he has no wish to find conso
lation, for example, the consolation which Buddhism gives.
Dasein, a word which replaces man or subject or con
sciousness, is cast into this fallen world. In this world
Dasein experiences fear (Angst) , trouble and the ending
of its existence, that is to say death. Dasein is subjected
to Das Mass, to a tedious banal existence in which no one
thinks independently and no one forms a judgment of his
own, but everyone thinks and judges entirely as others
do, that is to say namelessly and impersonally. But Hei
degger himself rose above Das Mass, and so to rise above
it is a necessity for the very act of cognition. Heidegger
denies the existence of depth but in spite of that a voice
out of the depth is heard as we read him. Duality is still
there. The idea of non-being, of nothingness, takes a very
prominent place in his thought; indeed it might even be
supposed that his philosophy is a philosophy of non-being.
The last word belongs to death, there is no infinity in man,
everything in him is finite. But some reminiscences of the
old German mysticism are left in Heidegger. For this rea
son his non-being may be taken to approximate to the
Ungrund of Boehme. And then his metaphysics can be
expounded as apophatic theology with a pessimistic tinge
about it. Heidegger does not preach atheism but his teach
ing about Dasein and Sein, and his way of understanding
the world is still atheistic and is atheism of the new type.
It is not like the atheism of the nineteenth century.
In contrast to Heidegger, Sartre declares himself an
atheist and even says that he is the most consistent and
thoroughgoing of atheists. He begins his great philo
sophical book with a trenchant denial of all mystery. He
thinks that philosophy has definitely arrived at the point
when it can assert that behind the world of phenomena
(he uses this word not in the Kantian sense but as Husser!
uses it) there is nothing. The world is exhausted by ap
pearing, and there is nothing else. To him the world is
absurd, meaningless, nauseating. Man is degraded and
filthy. The book ttre et neant conveys an impression of
profound pessimism and leaves one with no hope at all
of a better life. It is a philosophy of neant. But later on
be begins to declare himself an optimist and makes an
appeal to man's sense of responsibility and to his activity
and endows him with freedom through which he can
fashion a better life and emerge from the filth and deg
radation which Sartre describes in his novels. The free-
dom of man i s not his nature, his essence, i t i s rather an

act, it is existence and to that supremacy belongs. The
freedom of man has its roots not in being but in non
being, it is not determined by anything at all. This is a
true thought and I myself have often developed it, but
here it is associated with a false metaphysic. To Sartre
the freedom of man is connected with godlessness, to him
God is an enemy of human freedom. He regards himself
as a more consistent atheist than are the Marxists, for
they acknowledge that there is a meaning in the historical
process and look to it for support. In spite of their ma
terialism they believe in the triumph of social reason,
their optimism is objective. This is an inheritance from
Hegel's philosophy of history.
Sartre, on the other hand, considers the historical
process as devoid of meaning. He seeks no support in it
and wishes to rely simply upon the freedom of man. Man
is made into a god. But the niant in Sartre is of a dif
ferent kind from the niant in Heidegger and again in
Hegel. In Boehme's teaching the Ungrund precedes being
and it is fecundating. It is the same in Hegel's thought,
where the negative gives birth to becoming. But Sartre
compares the niant to the worm which is the cause of
the apple's becoming rotten. This means that non-being
in his view comes after being . and is a corruption of it.
On that account it is incapable of giving birth to anything
positive. His philosophy is one which belongs to the end
of an age rather than to the beginning. Decadence and
transition through darkness are reflected in it. Freedom is
an ideal principle in Sartre, and that sets a limit to the
gloom of his philosophy. But this freedom is empty and
futile, it leads to no result and has no aim in view. The
fundamental mistake is in his unwillingness to admit that
a denial presupposes an assertion of something positive.
That is why a consistent and thoroughgoing godlessness
carried through to the end is impossible. Sartre is highly
characteristic of the forms which godlessness assumes in
our day. The clever psychologist in him gets the upper
hand of the profound metaphysician. And in him French
intellectualism is well maintained.
Atheism is concerned with outworn and distorted forms

of the knowledge of God. One of the principal sources
of godlessness must be sought in rational concepts about
God, in the application to God of terms which are only
suitable to the world of phenomena. And that is to deny
the fact that God is Mystery which cannot be expressed
in any rational concepts derived from experience of the
natural and social world. It is thus that the ideas of
domination, of might, of causality and so on have been
transferred to God. When Christianity thinks of God in
that sort of way it gets very near to the most conservative
type of Islam. It is only the mystics who have risen above
this. In speaking of God we cannot even say that he is
being, that he is an objective reality. All these limiting
concepts about God mean objectification in the interests
of social organization . God becomes an object, people
think of him as an object and apply to him what they
are accustomed to apply to the world of objects.
In this connection Indian religious philosophical thought
is nearer to the Truth than Greek and mediaeval thought.
But it has its limits and it has no understanding of God
manhood. Here we meet with a paradox, at first sight
with a contradiction. But a contradiction may be a path
way to Truth. When an impassable gulf has opened be
tween God and man and the world, and the notion of
transcendent authority has been made to depend upon
the fact, it is precisely those categories which are derived
from this fallen world which are being applied to God,
and the transcendent gulf has been taken as a parallel to
the relation between master and slave. And such a way
of understanding it clashes with the Christian idea of
God-manhood, with the incarnation of the divine in the
human. And on the contrary to think of God as Mystery,
to whom no relations derived from the fallen world are
applicable, may mean an inward and profound nearness
between God and man. Then only that which is derived
from the depths of spiritual experience, the experience of
transcendental man, is applicable to God. A real incar
nation of divine humanity is a possibility only with the
acknowledgment of divine mystery, of supra-rationality,
and it is an impossibility if relations derived from the
fallen world are transferred to God. An absolute distinc
tion between all the relations which hold between God
and the world on the one hand, and on the other all the
relations which exist within the fallen world-the world
of nature and society-is what makes a profound nearness
between the divine and the human possible.
Traditional theology has never been the theology of the
Holy Spirit. It has remained not only within the limits of
the second revelation of the New Testament which has
not been understood in the Spirit, but even within those
of the Old Testament revelation and of the Old Testa
ment conceptions of God. The mystery of the divine incar
nation could therefore never be grasped. The revelation
of the Spirit is the revelation of the Trinity. This revela
tion of the Trinity remains in tl:Ie shadow or, more exactly,
in obscurity in historical Christianity. In the depth of exis
tential experience, which is spiritual experience, God is
revealed as belonging to an altogether different scheme
of things from that which we are accustomed to look
upon as reality. It is impossible for us to find a basis for
our faith through anything else than the divine mystery
itself, we cannot find it for example, through being and
our concept of being. It may be said that God is a reality
because that has an existential meaning for us. It is pos
sible to say that God is Spirit, but Spirit is not being.
What is most chiefly needed is to talk about God not in
monotheistic terms, but to speak about him as the Trinity
1 14 I Truth and Revelation
( though certainly not thinking of this in the manner of
academic theology ) , it is only so that interior life and
movement can be admitted in him.
God is not power which displays itself in the world;
he is in the world incognito. He both gives glimpses of
himself in the world and at the same time hides himself.
It is in human freedom rather than in necessity or in the
coercion of man, or in causative determinism, that he
reveals himself. God determines nothing and governs noth
ing. The emanation of what is known as the grace of God
is the freedom of man. God is Mystery, God is the Truth
of the world and the Freedom of the world, he is not the
world itself nor is he government within it. One can say
that God is Love and Freedom because such conceptions
are derived from the highest spiritual experience of man
and not from experience of the world of nature and so
ciety. It is difficult to believe in God without Christ, with
out the crucified Son who has taken upon himself all the
suffering of the world. In the world God suffers rather
than governs. It is the prince of this world who rules in it.
But ideas associated with the prince of this world have
been transferred to God, and this has been a cause of
godlessness. Moreover insofar as such conceptions of God
are concerned godlessness has been right.
Reflections upon the forms which godlessness takes in
our time leave us with the conviction that the most dif
ficult problem i s still the problem of the relation between
faith in God and the acknowledgment of freedom for
human creative power. Luther raised this question in an
acute form in his day. There is only one possible way out
of this difficulty and that is to recognize the great truth
that God and the divine find visible expression not in
domination but in freedom itself, not in authority, but in
humanity, in God-manhood. Then it is that God is under
stood not as a diminution of human freedom and activity
but as the condition upon which they are possible. If there
is no God there is no truth and right which rise above
the wrong o f nature and society, man i s wholly subject
to nature and society, and he is the slave of natural and
social necessity. Belief in God is the charter of man's
liberty. Without God man is subject to the lower world.
All intellectual proofs of the existence of God are bank
rupt; they belong to the world of thought and they stay
there. But what is possible is an inward existential meeting
with God.
Chapter 7
A break with the forensic interpretation of Ch ristianity

and Redemption. The divine el ement in man. Redemp·
tion and Creative power. Personal salvation and social
and cosmic transfiguration.
FROM THE VERY earliest times religious beliefs have been

permeated by the sense of man's guilt and an eager longing
for redemption from that guilt. Man is highly sensitive to
threats and i s very easily frightened. Fright is one of the
most primitive affects of the human mind. Religious beliefs
have reflected the fallen state of man and the way in which
the relations between God and man were conceived has
readily taken the form of a criminal trial and has reflected
ancient forensic ideas. Anthropomorphic ideas of God
have ascribed to him such states of mind as feeling in
sulted, angry or vengeful. This has been the case even in
highly rationalized theology which has denied any affective
passionate nature in God. The judicial relations which
belong to human society have been objectified in the rela
tions between God and man. Objectified sociomorphic
language has left its mark even upon Holy Scripture. It
must definitely be recognized that religious beliefs and
the manner in which God has been thought of have been a
way in which human cruelty has found expression.
1 17
This human cruelty has been alienated into the sphere of

the transcendent and ascribed to God, and even people of
a fairly high level of thought have become completely
reconciled to such cruelty. They have seen transcendence
in cruelty and terror, whereas all the while it was just
immanence. Even upon certain words in the Gospel the
stamp of human cruelty is impressed, for example in the
words about hell, at the end of some of the parables. Many
of the controversies belonging to the patristic and espe
cially the scholastic periods are extraordinarily cruel and
terrifying in character. Exception has to be made only of
a few Greek doctors of the Church and especially of
Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa. There was cruelty also
in the epistles of St. Peter, only in the epistles of the
Apostle St. John it had no place. In traditional theology
human l ife has been regarded as a penal p rocess which
God has set on foot against man the criminal. The penal
interpretation of redemption belongs not only to St. An
selm of Canterbury and official catholic doctrine, it has
penetrated deeply into Christianity. There is deep-rooted
cruelty in the thought of St. Augustine, of St. Thomas
Aquinas, Calvin and many others.
Christian people have even been capable of quarrelling
in all seriousness about whether children who have died
unbaptized will burn in the fires of hell, and whether the
representatives of other Christian confessions or all those
who are not Christians at all will go to hell. It is difficult
for us even to grasp the state of mind of one who could
admit the idea of eternal hell and become reconciled to
it, of a system of punishments which is reminiscent of
some harsh penal code ( but a code which at least can
claim superiority from the fact that it does not last on
into eternity ) . In an age of greater humanity all this has
now become impossible. It is not a question of mitigating
the punishment which is imposed by penal legislation, but
rather of getting rid of the penal and juridical element
from religious belief and religious thought altogether. The
cruelty o f this world has been exactly paralleled b y the

cruelty of the other. To the Emperor Justinian the suffer
ing of this earthly life was so small a thing ( though the
pain was not for him, of course ) that he needed suffering
in the life beyond as well.
If people turned to God their action has brought n o
release from the cruelty o f the world and from the terror
it gives rise to, it has simply meant the transference to
God of the cruelty of the world. The very doctrine of
immortality has had penal chastisement attached to it.
And this punitive element is to be found also in the theo
sophical doctrine of the transmigration of souls, but that
is at least not eternal hell. Theologians have said a great
deal about the truth that all graciousness and love are
inherent in God, but there was nothing whatever to be
seen of it. God has been depicted as evil and merciless,
and this has been a reflection of human wickedness and
pitilessness. This maliciousness of God, which roused
Marcion to rebel, is associated with a certain interpreta
tion of redemption, with the doctrine of the sinfulness of
human nature, and with teaching about hell. It was desired
by this means to keep a hold upon man and especially
upon the human masses, to hold them in submission and
obedience. But there are two sorts of anthropomorphism :
There is the anthropomorphism which believes in the
inhumanity of God, in which he is very like men and
women, and there is the anthropomorphism which be
lieves in the humanity of God. It is only the second sort
of anthropomorphism which reveals the highest in man
and is a divine anthropomorphism; there is a divine
humanity.
When we make judgments about God or when we pass
judgment upon him we can do this only from the point
of view of the highest, of the divine, within ourselves.
And the very revolt against God may be the action of
God within us. The highest humanity is the divine in man
and the human in God, this is the mystery of God-man-
hood. It is the deep-down mystery of Christianity when
it is set free from false anthropomorphism and layers of
sociomorphism. The inhumanity of man which plays so
enormous a part and influences even religious thought
itself is a non-human element in him, whereas the divine
in man is human. The relation between the divine and the
human therefore is a mystery which is incomprehensible
from a purely rational point of view. The forensic inter
pretation of Christianity was the anthropomorphic and
sociomorphic rationalization of this mystery. But it was
in this way that the ground was adapted to the low human
level in the interpretation of redemption, which has its
place at the very heart of Christianity.
The religious thought of India is far removed from this.
The forensic way of understanding the relations between
man and God are entirely alien to Indian religious
thought. But a positive may sometimes be due even to a
negative. A failure to understand the principle of per
sonality is one of the limitations of Indian thought. The
forensic interpretation of Christianity was aided by the
fact that God and man were recognized as persons, and
it is with personality that men have associated the sense
of responsibility and indeed those conceptions of affront
and anger which have been ascribed to God. It was not,
however, a spiritual but a juridical way of understanding
personality which prevailed. In fact the very idea of sal
vation includes a juridical element and is exoteric in char
acter. It is in the main biological symbols which are used
in the Gospel, but there are juridical symbols also. This
is a case of the limitation of human language, even the
language of Holy Scripture itself. But those who defend
the forensic manner of stating the Christian faith and
especially the juridical presentation of the fact of redemp
tion commonly make their appeal to the Apostle Paul.
He did indeed state a doctrine of redemption which is not
to be found in the Gospels in that same form, and he
connected it with the concepts of ransom, justification and
so forth. The very phraseology is conditional and speaks
of the limitations not only of language but even of thought,
the thought which rises to greater heights among such
doctors of the Church as, for example, Origen and St.
Gregory of Nyssa.
In the Apostolic age the thought of St. John the Apostle
reached a higher level, and that quite apart from the ques
tion whether or not he was in actual fact the author of
what is attributed to him. The Apocalypse is written in
an entirely different spirit. The forensic element is in part
of Jewish origin and in part derived from Roman law.
The religious philosophical thought of India in this respect
reaches a higher level. The forensic interpretation of Chris
tianity inevitably leads to the assertion of transcendent
egoism. The legalistic interpretation of redemption does
not rise above this egoism. The word redemption is asso
ciated with the word ransom, with the discharge of a debt
payment of which the Creator demands. But this is a
crude form of sociomorphism. In a spiritual sense salva
tion can only be understood as the attainment of perfec
tion, as becoming like God. The very idea of justification
brings falsities in its train and may lead to the degenera
tion of Christianity. It is difficult even to grasp the idea
that God needed that there should be some process of
justification, which is the outcome of criminal proceed
ings, or that he needed to reeeive a ransom. But in a
deeper sense it is in actual fact a real change which God
needs, and that is the transformation of man and a crea
tive response to the appeal of God.
It must be said to the honour of Russian philosophical
religious thought that it has always reacted vigorously
against the forensic interpretation of Christianity and of
Redemption. The coming of Christ has been understood
not as a reparation for sin, nor as the offering of a ransom,
but as a continuation of the creation of the world and the
appearance of the New Adam. From this source another
way of understanding Christianity takes its rise, and the
same idea of God-manhood is associated with it. Such a
way of understanding Christianity is to be seen in Nes
melov, in Vladimir Soloviev and to a certain extent in
Bulgakov also. But not all the inferences which might be
drawn from this have in fact been drawn. In man there is
a divine element, and grace itself, if it is not understood
in a legal way and not associated with the idea of au
thority, is the disclosure of the divine element in man,
it is the awakening of the divine in him. Transcendent
man acts in empirical man, the heavenly eternal man in
the earthly and temporal man. The relation between him
self and God appears to be forensic only to empirical man
locked up in this earthly life. True and deep anthropology
is the revelation of the christology of man. I wrote on this
subject some while ago in The Meaning of Creativeness.
What God expects from man is not servile submission,
not obedience, not the fear of condemnation, but free
creative acts. But this was hidden until the appointed time.
The revelation which is concerned with this cannot be
divine only, it must be a divine-human revelation in which
man takes an active and creative part. Then the false and
degrading sense of sin will be overcome, not that the sense
of sin will be destroyed, but it will have light thrown upon
it. Sin does not lie in disobedience to the commandments
and prohibitions of God, but in slavery, in the loss of free
dom, in subjection to the lower world, in the severance of
the divine-human link. This is a terrible testing of human
freedom. The great worth and dignity of man has never
yet been really recognized in historical Christianity. It has
been acknowledged in humanism, but with a breach of
the divine-human link, with the denial of the truth that
man is the image and likeness of God and made after a
pattern from a higher world. And thus it is that humanism
may in its dialectic lead to the denial of man, and shake
the stability of the human image, for the image of man
is also the image of God. It is in this that the tragedy of
man lies, the tragedy which he must live through in

freedom.
The Eucharistic Sacrifice ought to be entirely freed
from traces of the forensic interpretation. It is the great
sacrifice of God himself, of man, and of the whole world
for deliverance from suffering and pain. Compassion lies
at the heart of it.
The problem of predestination has occupied a central

position in Western Christian thought as a whole, both
catholic thought and to a still greater extent protestant.
Christian controversies in the West have been carried on
around the subject of predestination, it was the question
of freedom and grace. St. Augustine had an overwhelming
influence on Western Christian thought, on catholic and
protestant thought alike. By him the subject of freedom
and grace was turned into the theme of predestination. It
is in Calvin that this idea appears in its most extreme
form, and it is one which moves the conscience to rebel.
The question of predestination never played so great a
part in the Christian thought of the East, in Orthodoxy.
It had scarcely any interest either for the Greek fathers
or for Russian Christian thought. This is a very charac
teristic fact. The idea of pre destination is indissolubly
connected with the juridical way of understanding Chris
tianity and it loses all meaning if another way of inter
preting it is adopted. Predestination is predestination to
salvation or perdition. But salvation and perdition are
judgment, in this case judgment pronounced by God in
eternity. It is an unjust decision in a criminal process be
fore the proceedings have been begun and even before
the crime has been committed. But in that case, not only
the perdition which follows the crime, but even the crime
itself is predestined.
If this is thought out to the end, then the coming of
Christ the Redeemer will not be for the betterment and

salvation of men but it will make things worse and even
intensify the ruin. Christianity may be a trap ; for to those
who accept baptism and enter the circle of Christianity
responsibility is terribly increased, and from them is asked
what is not asked of those who are outside that circle.
Certain words of the Apostle Paul may be understood as
meaning that there is greater danger for the Christian
than for the non-Christian. It all hung together as a sys
tem of intimidation. It was the terror and humiliation of
man that found an outlet in the doctrine of predestination.
It is a matter for wonder how the human conscience
could become reconciled to Calvin's monstrous doctrine
of predestination. In a mitigated form it is to be found
also in many other writers. Calvin has the merit of having
carried the idea to the length of absurdity ; he made it a
reductio ad absurdum. But it must be said that predestina
tion is a danger which waylays every doctrine which
asserts that God has endowed man with freedom knowing
beforehand that this freedom may lead him to perdition.
To acknowledge a degree of freedom of the will greater
than Calvin or even St. Augustine allowed provides no
relief at all to the situation . Freedom of the will, in giving
rise to sin, sets a trap in the interests of judgment and
punishment. It is a doctrine conspicuous for its penal
teaching. The results of acts of free will which has its
origin not in man himself but in the last resort in God,
are foreseen by God in eternity and that means they are
predestined by him.
Predestination is the final issue of the traditionally
orthodox theological system. It is only if the existence of
an uncreated freedom is acknowledged that the conclusion
of predestination can be avoided. It is indeed a surprising
fact that the human conscience has been able to reconcile
itself to the doctrine of predestination. Yet the conscience
of some very notable and deeply believing people has been
reconciled to it, and men and women have even derived
from this doctrine inspiration which has made them capa

ble of high achievement. In such activity they have tried
to capture indications of their own election, as have the
orthodox Calvinists. But the link between the doctrine of
predestination and the juridical interpretation of Chris
tianity is open to no doubt whatever. Given a radical re
jection of such a legalistic way of understanding Chris
tianity no room is left for predestination, it simply has no
meaning. Predestination is a monstrously unjust, arbitrary
and despotic judgment, but all the same judgment it is.
But salvation can be understood as the attainment of a
perfection like divine perfection, as a movement upwards
towards completeness. Since there is no process at law
at all, and there is only a struggle for completeness and
likeness to God there cannot be either a worsening or
betterment in the sense of the outcome of a trial. There
can be no sentence, nor traps of any sort through which
the burden of man is greatly increased.
It is simply that in man the divine principle is revealed,
the divine-human link is strengthened. Man passes through
an experience of testing. The freedom of man does not
mean responsibility before a court but the creative power
in him through which he gives an answer to the divine
appeal. If all this be recognized man's ancient terror is
conquered, that fear which people have sought to make
the basis of his religious life. The worship of God in spirit
and truth is the conquest of fear, and the true mystics
have risen to it. The idea of predestination is a survival
of superstitious religion. It is the old idea of fate which
has taken another form. Present-day Protestants, even
those of the Barthian group, do not bold the old doctrine
of predestination, and this is undoubtedly a step forward.
But one must go further and definitely repudiate the jurid
ical way of understanding Christianity. Russian religious
thought and philosophy have moved in that direction. The
Cross, Crucifixion and Sacrifice are far from implying a
juridical interpretation of Christianity. They can be taken
in a spiritual sense as the cleansing of the path which
leads upwards, as the acceptance of the suffering of the
world for the sake of victory over that suffering, as a
bond of union with every suffering creature.
The knowledge of God has suffered from the pressure
of two opposed tendencies in thought and from the exis
tential dialectic which has been evolved in these two
tendencies. They are on the one hand God without man
and on the other man without God. Each of these has
shown the same failure to give due place to the truth
about God-manhood and divine-humanity. Man's concep
tion of God has been distorted because it has left man
out of account and been hostile to him; and this in spite
of the Chalcedonian definition, which has remained a
dead letter, a fate indeed which has befallen all abstract
dogmas which have sought to rationalize a mystery. The
new Christian thought-and the emergence of such is a
necessity if Christianity is not doomed to death-will
apprehend the relation between the divine and the human
in a different way. Then the transcendence of God is given
an entirely different significance. The traditional way in
theology of understanding the transcendence of God
means objectification and has, therefore, been a source of
slavery. But transcendence can have an entirely different
existential meaning. It can indicate a transcending of the
limits of what is human. In that case the existential dia
lectic consists in the fact that the process of transcending
to the divine in itself marks the attainment of the highest
humanity. Likeness to God does not mean the diminishing
or the extinguishing of what is human, it means the attain
ment of humanity at its maximum.
This thought has found no place in the traditional text
books on the spiritual life. The suggestion has been that
one should empty oneself of everything human, not get
rid of the bad only but make a general clearance of all
that is human as such, in order that the divine may enter
into man. This shows the existence of a monophysite train
of thought, though there was no wish to acknowledge it,
and with it went a corresponding degradation of the status
of man. It reflected the debased condition of a being who
was under judgment and awaited a severe sentence. This
being so, it was difficult to justify the creative power of
man, and this creative vocation of his never has been
justified in traditional Christian thought. The creative
power of man has indeed been justified in the history of
Christian Europe, but this has happened outside the
sphere of Christian thought and in the last resort in oppo
sition to it. It is to this that the interior tragedy of hu
manism is due.
The question goes deeper than the way in which it is
commonly stated. It is not a question of the justification
of human creative power in culture and science and the
arts and in social life, which has been conceded since the
time of the Renaissance. After a period of resistance to
all creative effort the Catholics have been ready to recog
nize the creative strength of man in the sphere of culture.
They have even been fond of calling themselves heirs of
the ancient humanism. But this has changed nothing in
the religious mind. It has not set man free from religious
degradation and fear. The question involved is the re
ligious meaning of creative power, and the human crea
tive effort which God expects . as an enrichment of the
divine life itself. It is what may be called the gnostic idea
of creative power and it has been the principal theme of
my life and my thought from the time when I wrote The
Meaning of Creativeness onwards. It is an esoteric idea
in the sense that it is not a revelation of God but some
thing which he has kept secret. It is something which God
does not reveal directly to man, but he looks to man to
complete the revelation himself.
In Christian thought this means a new revelation of
man and the cosmos, and of the mystery of divine crea
tion. It means a break with all legalistic ways of under
standing Christianity and religion in general. It also means
the end of the interpretation of Christianity as a religion

of individual salvation, which has in fact been a legalistic
way of understanding it. But in reality the Gospel was
the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God and
that indeed is almost its only content. The Kingdom of
God is not individual salvation. The Kingdom of God
is both social and cosmic transfiguration.
People are fond of saying that the creative power of
man is in no sense necessary for individual salvation to
eternal life. And that is true. But it is necessary for the
Kingdom of God, and for fullness of life in the Kingdom
of God, and everything which is great in human creative
effort enters into the Kingdom of God. The emphasis
which has been placed exclusively upon personal salva
tion has been a source of reactionary tendencies in Chris
tianity and been used to justify existing evils. It has been
put to terrible misuse and Christianity has been deprived
of its wings. The prophetic and messianic side of Chris
tianity has been crushed and become an object of sus
picion. Christianity is a religion of social and cosmic
transfiguration and resurrection. This has been almost for
gotten in official Christianity. The Christianity which has
been turned solely towards the past, and which lives by
the dying light of that past, is coming to an end. If it is to
go on living a creative life it must turn and face towards
the future, to the light which issues from that which is to
come. This will mean a break with the forensic interpre
tation of religious life, with all its fears and nightmares.
But one more question remains, the question of the
Last Judgment. Can Christianity abandon the expectation
of the Last Judgment? In my view what is at issue here
is not the refusal of what is eternal in the idea of the Last
Judgment. The very phraseology is forensic in character.
The Last Judgment is, as it were, the end of a criminal
trial and the awaiting of a final sentence. This phrase
ology is exoteric and does not reach down into the hidden
depth. At a greater depth it means awaiting the day of
the triumph of divine truth and right and the final victory
over every sort of wrong. Every man knows in himself
the judgment of conscience. But the word "judgment"
here does not carry the implications of criminal law. It is
all the while the same question of the limitation and rela
tive nature of human language and of its permeation by
sociomorphism. But spiritually man ought to rise above
this limitation, and the mystics have done so. The Last
Judgment which has its place both in the individual life
of men and women and in the life of the world, is, as it
were, an immanent conviction which removes the mask
from wrong. But this immanent disclosure is accomplished
through transcendent truth and right which surpasses
everything which is merely human. God will not judge
the world and mankind, but a blinding divine light will
penetrate the world and man; and this will be not light
only but also a scorching and purifying fire. In that puri
fying fire all evil, though not living creatures, must be
burnt up. And that will lead to transfiguration, to the
new heaven and the new earth. Man moves towards this
end through suffering and darkness. The measure of truth
which the nightmarish and exoteric notion of predestina
tion contains is merely this, that man must live out his
destiny, and that is simply a pathway.
Chapter 8
The Paradox of Evil. The Ethics of Hell and Anti-Hell.

Reincarnation and Transfiguration.
IT IS A IDGHLY characteristic fact that nowadays even the

most orthodox creeds prefer to say much less about the
eternal pains of hell. The Roman Catholic Church, which
has been very fond of frightening people with hell in order
to keep souls in submission, now recommends that the
subject of hell should not be talked about too much. If in
the past the fear of hell kept people in church, nowadays
it hinders them from going to . church. The height which
ethical thought has reached may be measured by its atti
tude to the idea of eternal hell. It is even one of the chief
hindrances to the return of a dechristianized world to
Christianity. People prefer not to be imbued with religious
beliefs which threaten them with perpetual penal servi
tude. There is quite enough hell in this world to ensure
its projection into the next. The majority of Christian peo
ple at the present day to whom the mediaeval ways of
thinking are strange prefer not to dwell upon this mat
ter, but it would be well if they did think about it.
The idea of the eternal pains of hell is one of the most
terrible figments of a terrified and unhealthly human
131
imagination. The force of primitive instincts of sadism
and masochism which have played no small part in re
ligious life is to be felt in it. Spiritual religion ought to
be entirely purged of this.
Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the whole matter
is that the idea of hell is connected with a notion of jus
tice which is derived from the instinct of revenge. We see
this in St. Augustine, in St. Gregory the Great, in St.
Thomas Aquinas and in Calvin, although in the last of
these justice has a very small part to play. In all this the
forensic way of understanding Christianity reached its
ultimate expression. If it is true, the justice of the Supreme
Judge who imposes the sentence is at a much lower level
than that of ordinary earthly justice in an earthly court.
The sentence of hell is imposed by an almighty and all
gracious God, and yet it is he who brought everything
into existence, including human freedom, who foresaw
everything and, therefore, predestined it. A sentence for
eternity is passed upon the deeds committed by a weak
finite creature within a very short space of time, by a
creature who is entirely in the power of God. There is
nothing here which recalls even the very limited justice
of men, to say nothing of divine justice. St. Augustine
even thought all human beings without exception did in
justice merit the eternal pains of hell, though the Supreme
Judge excepts certain of them from this just fate; to them
he communicates saving grace, and predestines them to
salvation. It would be difficult to devise anything more
abominable.
Tenacious defenders of hell usually say that people des
tine themselves to hell by the use to which they put their
freedom ; and that God cannot bring them into heaven by
force, for God can say of himself-though he says it with
sorrow-that he will not force his mercy upon men.
Although there is justice in this there is nonetheless a
transference to the divine life of relations which exist in
earthly life, and there is a rationalization of what is abso-
lutely irrational. This rationalization is intolerable not to

reason, which can put up with a great deal, but to the
moral sense, which is the activity of the truly divine prin
ciple in man. To call in the aid of the idea of free will in
defence of hell is to push the matter into the background,
but it offers no solution of the question at all, for the
very idea of free will is a conception of criminal law and
as such entirely inapplicable to the divine mystery with
which we are dealing. It is of the first importance to grasp
the fact that the idea of hell deprives the spiritual and
moral life of man of all meaning since it sets the stamp of
terror upon it. The whole of life is lived in a state of terror
and the intimidated man will agree to anything in order
to escape the pains of hell. This takes all the value and
all the dignity out of the spiritual life.
It is abundantly clear that the idea of hell, for which
there is a p sychological basis, has been before all else
disciplinary, sociological and political in its significance,
and the same is true of harsh penal legislation. It is much
to the honour of Sergius Bulgakov that in the third volume
of his system of Dogmatic Theology he definitely rebels
against the idea of eternal hell . In doing so he is carrying
on the tradition of Russian religious philosophy and ex
pressing the Russian idea.1 To him an eternal hell means
the failure of God. It is the defeat of God by the powers
of darkness. A long while ago I suggested the thought
that "eternity" of suffering means not an unending length
of time but simply intensity of suffering experienced in a
certain moment in time. In Sergius Bulgakov's view evil
has no depth and, so to speak, exhausts and destroys
itself, and in his opinion the idea of the eternity of hell
cannot be accepted by the conscience. I should say that it
is unacceptable not to empirical man but to transcendental
man. I should say further that we know well enough what
the experience of hell is, but religious belief consists in
1 With many other of Bulgakov's ideas I definitely disagree.

the very fact that this hell will not be eternal. Belief in hell
is disbelief. It is to have greater faith in the devil than in
God. Hell is an exoteric idea.
Those who defend the doctrine of hell usually appeal to
texts in the Gospels and this is regarded as a very strong
argument. It is a question of the language of the Gospels
and of the inerrancy of the texts of the Holy Scriptures.
That language was relative and adapted to the circum
stances in which Jesus lived and preached, to the tradi
tional and religious ideas which were cherished in that
environment. The parables, which are of the first im
portance in this connection, are worded entirely in the
language and concepts of the Jewish circles of that time.
The parables even assume the existence of a social order
which exists no longer, and in the Gospels the divine light
is broken up and obscured in that limited human environ
ment. An absolute and eternal light shines in the Gospels,
but there is also a great deal which is petty and unaccept
able and in need of clarification. I need not mention the
fact that the phrase "ages of ages" does not mean "eter
nity" but only a more or less extended period of time.
The most important point is that the people of that time
believed in the pains of hell and it was necessary to speak
to them in a language which they understood. The human
nature of Christ included all the limitations of that na
ture except sinfulness.
The literal acceptance of the text of the Gospels not
only leads to the contradictions which biblical criticism
discloses, but also it cannot be reconciled with the higher
level of moral consciousness which has been reached
under the influence of Christianity itself as it has carried
on its work beneath the surface of life. There must, there
fore, for that reason be a spiritual esoteric way of reading
the Gospels. There exists an eternal spiritual Gospel and
in relation to that the significance of the historical Gospels
is not absolute. In the history of Christianity the objec
tification of the Gospel has taken place, it has been ad-
justed to the social organization of the Church. But behind
that there is still the greater depth which lies outside the
antithesis of subject and object and outside what is of
service from a social point of view. At this greater depth
the question of hell is stated in an entirely different way,
one that is quite removed from the intimidation which has
been justified as a measure of training and discipline. The
point at issue is this : Is the Christian religion a religion
of fear? Is religion in general based upon fear? Can there
be a final conquest of fear?
A distinction must be drawn between the psychology
and the ontology of hell. A psychology of hell is admis
sible and even necessary. Man has some experience of
hell, he lives through its torments. But the ontology of
hell which it is desired to construct is impossible and
inadmissible. It is one of the most ugly and repellent
things that have taken shape in the human mind. Man
not only all too often creates a hell in earthly life, he
does it too in his own head and in the eternal life beyond.
He infects and obscures the light of revelation by his own
darkness. In the region of hell there is not one single ray
of divine light, although God must be all in all. A good
Catholic, one who was filled with love, once said to me
that God made hell as a special sphere, as a prison pre
pared for those who were condemned, but we do not
know whether there will be many people inhabiting it,
perhaps there won't be a single one. The intentions of that
man were as humane and loving as could be, but his
actual idea was horrible and likely to give rise to god
lessness in its most extreme forms. The construction of a
prison for those who are condemned for ever was part
of the divine plan in creating the world. That being so
God could not but foresee what a number of condemned
would be cast into this prison. That prison acquires an
ontological significance. And the prison, in the last resort,
belongs to the Kingdom of God, just as in the last resort
the prisons of the kingdom of Caesar also belong to the
Kingdom of God. The prison is the expression of the

highest justice.
But if we repudiate too earthly a way of understanding
justice, a way which belongs to Caesar, then we must
acknowledge that the idea of hell divides the world and
mankind into two opposed parts which abide for ever
the Kingdom of God and the realm of good on the one
hand, and on the other the kingdom of the devil and the
realm of hell. The kingdom of hell coexists with the King
dom of God. And this evidently enters into the plan of
creation. God cannot conquer the darkness of hell. Yet
in a human plan of construction there is some foresight
of what will be. All the more, therefore, there must be
foresight in the divine plan. But there is this difference,
that human foresight is not predestination owing to the
limitation of human powers, whereas the divine foreseeing
is always predestination also. Time does not exist for
God. What man thinks of as that which is possibly coming
is to God already eternally realized, that is to say the
pains of hell are already actual, since they were part of
the plan of creation. Survivals of Manichaeism are present
in the doctrine of hell, and even with some deterioration
as compared with Manichaeism. The good God does not
finally conquer the evil god.
There is no shared, no corporate destiny of mankind,
and an eternal division is made part of it. Either I shall
be cast into hell and my good friends will be in heaven,
or they will be cast into hell and I shall be in heaven. But
neither of these alternatives can be accepted by con
science. Men must all be saved together. It does the
greatest honour to such Greek fathers of the Church as
Origen and St. Gregory that they rejected belief in an eter
nal hell and admitted that even the devil would be saved.
But Origen's opinion was condemned by organized ortho
doxy; he was not canonized although in his life he was a
saint and a martyr. And St. Gregory of Nyssa, in whose
view salvation could only be an experience enjoyed in

common, lapses into silence. St. Augustine, who was one
of the founders of hell, is acclaimed by all Christian
Europe, catholic and protestant alike. All thought on the
subject of hell was kept within the limits of human rational
concepts, as every ontology has been. It has been a ration
alized form of human cruelty. In opposition to this we
might say, in Kantian phraseology, that the non-existence
of hell is a moral postulate.
II
The idea of hell is inseverably linked with the paradox

of evil. However much men have striven to rationalize
the psychological and moral theme of evil they have never
been able to cope with the difficulty. Evil is a scandal not
only to man but to God. For almost inevitably God is
held to be responsible for it. The devil, who is a very
vague figure, becomes a weapon in the hand of God, and
through him the ends of Providence are realized. So it
works out according to the Book of Job, and it is the
view put forward in the prologue to Faust. No independ
ent power is ascribed to the devil, he can do virtually
nothing creative. Evil is negative and it has an illusory
power, simply because it steals . from good. But nonethe
less the devil succeeded in becoming the prince of this
world and its ruler. In this fallen world everything is
much more of the devil than of God. But what is still
more important and more terrible is that the devil suc
ceeds in creating his eternal kingdom of darkness and
suffering, that is to say-hell. Hell is an undoubted suc
cess for the devil and a revelation of his might. But it
still remains a paradox that men should wish to regard
hell with its eternal suffering as a department of the King
dom of God, the one in which punitive justice flourishes
triumphant. This is to acknowledge that God in eternity
wanted a hell and that he wanted evil, as that which leads
to hell, for evil is a consequence of the freedom which
God imparted to his creatures.
Freedom is a fated thing for man. There is no rational
way out of the contradiction which this involves. Theo
logical thought is entangled in contradictions because it
takes conceptions which are drawn from the life of this
world and suitable to this world only, and applies them
to the divine life. Hell belongs to this world and not to
the world beyond, just as evil too belongs to this world.
Evil is essentially paradoxical and the paradoxical nature
of it is shown by the fact that evil may be a pathway to
good, while the fight against evil may itself be evil. The
existential and unrationalized way of understanding evil
is above all else to interpret it as the testing of freedom.
This is in no way connected with any thought of an
ontology expressed in concepts. It is a description of
spiritual experience. Perhaps it will be said that this is a
justification of evil. But in reality a much greater justifica
tion of evil lies in the assertion that God makes use of it
for the purposes of good and to secure the triumph of
his justice. The testing of evil is the testing of suffering
and pain.
But freedom assumes the experience of evil. Compul
sory good, good imposed by force, would be the very
greatest of evils. Dostoyevsky showed that he understood
this better than anyone in the way he describes the Uto
pias which are to bring paradise on earth, in the dialectic
of The Grand Inquisitor. It is against this above all that
protest is necessary as against a sharp division of the
world into two parts, into the world of light and good
and the world of darkness and evil. This is to prepare
the way for hell and by this the ethics of hell are deter
mined. The ethics of hell also control those who acknowl
edge no religious beliefs at all. They frequently belong
to revolutionaries, for instance the Marxists. The moral
paradox of evil consists in this : that it arouses in those
representatives of good who wage war against evil an
evil and pitiless attitude of hatred towards those who are
evil and who are considered to be evil, towards one who
is conceived as an enemy, for instance. Thus the fight
against evil is turned into an evil. In the name of virtue
and justice they start torturing people. In the name of
humanity they begin to show inhumanity. The enemies of
freedom, whether actual or imaginary, are deprived of
freedom and treated with violence. To the intolerant they
start behaving with intolerance, and they start shooting
those who shot.
It is a moral paradox from which there is no way out,
and it is an expression of the paradox of evil. One must
fight against evil. Evil ought to be burnt up, but it is evil
that ought to be consumed, not evil people. Those who
fight against evil are not, generally speaking, very desirous
that evil people should be freed from evil. All too often
what they want is that the evil people should perish with
the evil. This is, in fact, the ethic of hell, a preparation of
an eternal hell for evil people. Dante placed his enemies
in hell and that is why Fedorov has called him a revenge
ful writer. But Dante's frightful world of hell cannot be
restored today. It is possible to have an ethic of anti-hell
which does not recognize the possibility that anyone
should be thrown into hell and . which desires the salva
tion of all men, which believes in the enlightenment and
transfiguration not only of those who are evil, not only of
Cain and Judas, but even of the devil himself; that is to
say, it desires a brotherly salvation in common and recog
nizes the responsibility of all for all. Flowers may bloom
out of the mire and filth, but that is because the seed of
eternal life has been cast upon that soil. Even at the height
of his progress man may experience a fresh submergence
in matter, but this submergence cannot be final in human
destiny.
The idea of hell is a conception of false religious indi
vidualism and transcendent egoism. This satanic notion
arises out of an evil and degenerate form of the idea of
justice, and thus the origin of the idea of justice is made
clear; it is a sense of revenge as many sociologists have
maintained. Revenge has played an enormous part in re
ligious belief and moral ideas. Even to this day men have
not got rid of the conception of a vengeful God. Even
the language of the Gospels is not entirely free from it.
From the metaphysical point of view it must be said that
hell exists only in time and indicates the impossibility of
issuing out of time. It cannot be transferred to eternity,
the only eternity which exists is divine eternity. Evil is
merely a testing but it is a terrible testing. The life of
man, the life of the world, ought to be understood not as
a legal process but as a tragedy. But the combination of
fate and freedom is what characterizes real tragedy. The
ancient slavery of man is reflected in the legalistic way of
understanding Christianity and the forensic interpretation
of evil. Freedom of the will is asserted in order that the
sentence should appear just. In the tragic way of under
standing Christianity slavery is entirely overcome, for it
involves freedom and it is freedom which gives rise to
tragic conflict. There is virtually no tragic element at all
in the idea of an eternal hell, it is the conception of a just
legal sentence, even if it is understood as a sentence
passed not from without so much as from within. Taken
in that way the legal sentence is accepted in an optimistic
sense. The peoples, and especially the peoples of the
West, are much attached to capital punishment and derive
satisfaction from the contemplation of it. This is a repul
sive fact but it shows that hell is accepted entirely without
any sense of tragedy but rather with satisfaction.
The idea of the transmigration of souls is offered as a
contrast to the devilish notion of eternal suffering, which
is an exoteric idea concocted in the interests of the or
ganization of religious society-organization which pre
sents a crude objectivization of existential society. From
the ethical point of view it is an improvement upon the
idea of eternal hell, but it is by no means free from the
legalistic way of conceiving human life. Successive reincar
nation is the necessary result of the virtues and sins which
belong to the preceding reincarnation. The moral law is
objectified in cosmic law, and there is no way to be seen
out of time into eternity; reincarnation still goes on under
the sway of cosmic time. Karma is law and is unaware of
grace, of such a gracious rebirth in a single flash of exis
tential time as took place in the case of the penitent thief.
The ancient wisdom of India regarded reincarnation as a
misfortune from which escape must be made and fusion
with Brahma attained. The attitude of Buddhism also is
the same. Theosophists of the present time, who have
been men of the West, have given an optimistic turn to
the idea of reincarnation.
Rebirth within one single scheme of things, that is to
say in this earthly life and its history, clashes with the
idea of the person, of a man's unrepeatable unique per
sonality, in which the human body also has its place.
Reincarnation in a number of spheres, rebirth in various
spiritual worlds, is another matter. In my opinion we are
bound to accept it, since the notion that the eternal des
tiny of man is finally determined by the short period of
his life between birth and death in this earthly scheme
of things, and that man, so to speak, is caught in a trap
set for him, is wholly unacceptable. There is such a thing
as recollection of previous reincarnations, as an existen
tial experience, but it is rendered vague and obscure by
the confusion of the various spheres of existence which
cannot be kept entirely separate or be rooted one in
another. It is possible for me to feel a special link with
some particular period of time in the past and with cer
tain people who lived in the past, but it is not necessary
to interpret this in a crudely empirical way. In a certain
sense my past is the past of the world and I belonged to
such-and-such a section of time more than I did to others.
This is a most mysterious side of life. But the popular
idea of reincarnation which has its roots in the ancient

beliefs of mankind is one of the forms of objectification
and a rationalization of the eschatological idea.
What is needed is the purging of Christian thought from
the utilitarianism which overwhelms it and which even
forces its way into the expounding of dogma, although
dogmas are fundamentally only mystical facts. The dis
pute between Fenelon and Bossuet about disinterested
love towards God was one of the forms of the struggle
to overcome religious utilitarianism. Bossuet was an ex
treme representative of this utilitarianism, as indeed the
majority of theologians are. Jansenism was another form
of the legalistic way of understanding things. The idea of
the eternal pains of hell is the final expression of the
legalistic and utilitarian state of mind in religious people.
The true mystics rose above this exoteric idea, which
owes its existence to the interests of sociological organiza
tion. Spiritual recovery from the idea of hell is one of the
great moments in the new and purified Christian thought,
the Christianity of the spirit. This will be the substitute
for the old idea of retribution with its apportionment of
rewards and punishments. The conception of the influence
of clarifying light, of transfiguration, of the attainment of
completeness and likeness to God, all which involves the
path of suffering, will take the place of the idea of hell.
Chapter 9
The Revelation of the Spirit and of the age of the Spirit,

Transcendental Man and the New Man.
THE LIFE OF THE Spirit is mysterious . In its original pri

mordial nature the life of the Spirit is outside the sphere
of objectification, outside the antithesis of subject and
object, it is in the dimension of depth. It is only in a rela
tive way that we can speak of the objectification of spirit
in history and culture. This is indeed objectivization and
not embodiment, not a revealing of spirit without diminu
tion or defectiveness. Diminution and defectiveness of
spirit are just what do occur and then it frequently hap
pens that it is impossible to recognize it. One must not
place the reality of the Spirit side by side with the realities
of the "objective" world of nature and history as though
they were comparable. The reality of the Spirit and spiritu
ality cannot be put on the same level as natural realities
in their hierarchical scale. The scholastic and in particular
the Thomist distinction between the natural and the super
natural keeps entirely within the limits of naturalistic
metaphysics. In this line of thought the supernatural ap
pears as the highest hierarchical degree of the same kind
of realities as those in which the natural also is found.
But the distinction between spirit and nature is something
143
deeper, and thus realities of an entirely different order are

established, not various degrees of one and the same re
ality. The idea of the "supernatural" is the objectification
of Spirit, it is to bring it into the hierarchical scale of the
world.
The fact must be finally and definitely acknowledged
that there is a divine element in man, and this is in full
agreement with the traditional story of the creation of man
as found in the Bible. The Creator breathes a spiritual
principle into man at the creation, and this spiritual prin
ciple is not a reality like the realities of the natural world.
Bulgakov who is most anxious to remain orthodox says
that man is spirit although not only spirit, and that means
that personality in man is of divine origin. Vladimir Solov
iev thought the same. Transcendental man is created in
eternity or, to put it better, he abides in God from all
eternity. This is the heavenly man but not the man who
belongs to paradise, in whom conscience had not yet
awakened. Man is an idea of God, he is a task which God
has set himself. In the Kingdom of God man will be dif
ferent from what he was in the story of Adam in paradise.
The divine element in man is not a special act of grace
communicated to him, neither is it a natural element. It
is the spiritual element in him, a reality of a special kind.
There is a difference between Spirit and the Holy Spirit,
but they are one and the same reality in different degrees.
It not infrequently happens that things are said of the
Holy Spirit which indicate an even greater degree of ob
jectification than what is said simply of Spirit, although it
is the reverse that should be the case. Grace which is the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit bas been objectified to the
very maximum and it often indicates a means of exercis
ing mastery, especially in Roman Catholicism. Grace,
without which no spiritual life bas been considered pos
sible, has been in the hands of an organized hierarchy. In
regard to the Holy Spirit there is a startling contradiction
in the ecclesiastical mind. There is in the Church no de-
veloped doctrine of the Holy Spirit and there is little to
be found on the subject in the doctors of the Church.
Yet at the same time it is acknowledged that the Holy
Spirit is the source of revelation, that it is through him
that everything is revealed. The Gospels are full of this.
People of the most orthodox kind take fright when too
much is thought or said about the Holy Spirit, and espe
cially if the talk is about the expectation of a new out
pouring of the Spirit, of a new age of the Spirit. The fear
is easily understood, for that would mean spiritual libera
tion, that is to say the weakening of hierarchical authority.
In the Holy Spirit, in the age of the Spirit, the Father
and the Son must be revealed in another way since that
will mean the revelation of the Holy Trinity, which has
not really happened as yet. The light will be thrown back
wards. According to the divine plan and according to the
divine idea man is a spiritual being. The spirituality in
him must be disclosed, the spirituality which may hitherto
have been in an unawakened and merely potential state.
The realization of personality is the realization of the
spiritual nature of man and this realization means a
divine-human process within him. But the awakening of
the spiritual nature takes place in secret ways. It is not
subject to an objectified and external hierarchical prin
ciple. Let it be admitted that the awakening of spirituality
takes place within the Church, yet within the Church it is
understood in a spiritually mystical sense, and it has noth
ing in common with individualism. On the contrary the
era of the Spirit will be an era of the sense of community,
an era of social and cosmic transfiguration, of real and
not merely symbolic sobornost. That era will have no
knowledge of master and slave and the degrading relations
in which they stand to one another. It will recognize only
the free man and the free relations which hold among
free men.
Man is not only a being who is revealed in the phe
nomenal world. Behind empirical and phenomenal man
stands transcendental man. He tends to alienate this tran
scendental and spiritual nature of his into the external,
to eject it into the object world and even to call this ab
jectness spiritual ( "objective spirit" ) . There is a divine
element in man and it is crushed not only by man's lower
nature to which he falls a slave; it is crushed also by
religious thought which reflects the slavery of man, by
religious sanction of this slavery. This is evident from the
extreme importance which authoritarian Christian thought
has attached to obedience to authority. According to the
traditional doctrine of Providence, God is present in au
thority, not royal authority only but in the authority of
the State in general. And ecclesiastical authority itself, in
spite of the wording of the Gospel, has been built up after
the pattern of the State. All this is that same sociomor
phism which we meet with everywhere. It is taken for
granted that God rules the world and society in the way
that Caesar rules it. Certain favourite quotations from
Holy Scripture, and especially from the Apostle Paul, pro
vide the foundation for such an attitude to the power
of this world, although these quotations are clearly his
torical and sociological in character rather than religious.
It might be said that the Holy Spirit is never present in
authority; he is present in freedom, he is present in men
of genius, men who are outstanding for spiritual reasons.
It is, on the other hand, an objectified God, God inter
preted in a sociomorphic manner, a God of power rather
than a God of truth and right, who is present in authority.
Authority exercises an earthly function, but it has no re
ligious significance whatever; it does not belong to the
Kingdom of the Spirit.
Spirit is revealed by degrees, in stages; it is not dis
closed all at once nor does man at once find a place for
it in himself. It is only given partially and it is obscured
by the process of objectification. In actual fact there can
not be and there never has been any other revelation ex
cept a spiritual revelation. When an antithesis is set up
between historical revelation and spiritual revelation, the

implications of such thought have not been followed
through to the end. What is called historical revelation
upon which so much store is set is the symbolization of
spiritual revelation by means of signs which belong to
this phenomenal world. Otherwise it is devoid of any re
ligious meaning. A naive realism in the way revelation is
understood, that is to think of it as something which
comes from without, is good only for those who are
unwilling or unable to think on the subject, and for them
perhaps it is even necessary. But at the moment we are
concerned with the philosophy of revelation.
A belief which lays claim to absolute significance can
not depend upon this or that way of expounding the facts
of the objectified world. Revelation is always an irruption
through this world and not a determined historical process
within it. This break-through actually is what is called
the embodiment, in which light from the other world
makes its appearance, but it is muffled up in historical
objectivization. It is fire which is cooling down in this
objectivization. It is the metahistorical appearing in the
historical, but not in its Truth dependent upon the his
torical. The events take place in the spiritual world but
the image of them is formed in the world of nature and
history. The spiritual interpretation of revelation ought
not to imply an iconoclastic tendency. The symbolic em
bodiment has an enormous significance in religious life,
but these embodiments may tum into a quenching of the
Spirit, they may be a means by which the Spirit is be
numbed and fossilized, if they are understood realistically,
in the bad sense of the word.
The iconographic theology of Sergius Bulgakov, which
would see in the Mother of God a human hypostatic
image of the Holy Spirit, is a matter of dispute as is all
his sophiology, but it does not actually conflict with the
spiritual interpretation of revelation. It is entirely untrue
and superficial to set up an opposition between spirit and
the cosmos, between spiritual revelation and cosmic. The

whole cosmos, the whole of creation, is included in Spirit
and it is only within the Spirit that there is any cosmos.
It does not exist in the natural and phenomenal world,
it is there that the processes which disintegrate the cosmos
take place. Spiritual revelation must be cosmic revelation
also, a revelation of the mystery of creation which has
not yet been made in historical Christianity. God and the
divine are revealed in Spirit and in Truth. Spirit actually
is the Truth in man. It is Meaning and Light. But there
may be something lacking in the Spirit in man, it may be
subjected to diminution in the process of objectification
which chills and diminishes it. There are degrees of be
lief, of belief in the Truth, of belief in Spirit, of belief in
God, of belief in God-manhood, and of belief in the
Church-understood as a spiritual organism and not
merely a social institution.
The era of the Spirit or the third revelation must not
be taken in an entirely chronological sense. There have
always been people of the Spirit, there have always been
those who prepare the way for the era of the Spirit, there
have always been men of prophetic spirit. In the history
of Christianity there have always been men and women
in whom there was a fire which has not cooled down.
There have always been men of great wisdom who have
received the light. There were such in the world before
Christianity. Mystics, the significance of whom is uni
versal, have always existed. But it is another type of
mind which has predominated, one which has been asso
ciated with authoritarian organization formed after the
pattern of the kingdom of Caesar in spite of the words
of the Gospel. This does not mean that we have to follow
the ancient gnostics and recognize the existence of dif
ferent classes of men, men of the spirit, and men of the
soul, and that the fate of each class must be worked out
within the limits of that class. That would be to contradict
universal Truth and the freedom of man.
But the most important thing is to grasp that in the

process of objectification to which the historical and social
life of man is liable, Spirit is symbolized and not realized.
The source of the symbolization is to be found in the fact
that only prefigurations of the coming realization, signs of
the other world, are given. But symbolization loads men
with chains when it is regarded as being already realiza
tion. In a deep sense of the word both worship and cul
ture are symbolical, but in them a way towards realiza
tion is provided if that symbolism is not regarded as static,
as though it were a final consummation. But the true era
of the Spirit will not be symbolic, it will be the reality,
and people of the Spirit have always forced a way through
towards it.
It is very important to understand the difference be
tween symbolization and objectification. Symbolization
always provides signs of another world. It does not re
main within the closed circle of this world. But sym
bolization is not actual realization and it is of the utmost
importance to grasp the truth that it is not realization,
though there are in it reflections of another world and it
foreshows the transfiguration of this world. There is noth
ing of this kind in objectification. There are no signs of an
other world in that. Objectification is a force which drags
men into the burden and necessity of this phenomenal
world, which is itself a product of objectification. Objec
tification is adaptation to the condition of this world. It
is a concession made by freedom of spirit to the neces
sity of the world. It is an alienation and a cooling down.
It happens in religious life in general and not only in
Christianity. The symbolism of the spiritual life is much
the best although even that is not the attainment of true
reality.
A long while ago now I wrote that the fall of man is
expressed by the fact that the Sun has fallen away from
within him into the external. He is left in darkness and
gets his light from a Sun which is external to him. Man
ought to have been the Sun of the World, radiating light,
but he spreads his darkness abroad upon the whole of
cosmic life which has ceased to be subject to him. Adam
gave names to things, such was his power. Now he re
ceives light and warmth from a Sun outside him, but he
is always struggling in darkness and cold. This too indi
cates the objectification of the spiritual life of man. It
extends even to the very way he has of thinking of God
as a power and authority which stands over him. True
spirituality is a process which is the reverse of estrange
ment and objectification. The new spiritual man can only
be a sun-man who radiates light on the world from within.
Spirit in the religious sense is not in the least a denial
of the world and the cosmos, as those who take an abstract
spiritual view of life have been inclined to think. Spirit is
not the turning of one's back upon the world and its suf
fering, it is rather that which changes, enlightens and
transforms the world. I t begins as symbolization and
ought to come to its conclusion in realization. All cul
ture-and religion itself as a part of culture-lies in the
domain of symbolization. But the prophetic spirit, which
is disclosed in the elect creators of culture, demands
realization, it requires the transfiguration of life as a
whole. Nature and civilization are different degrees of the
objectivization of spirit, but there is symbolization in them
too. The symbolics of the really divine cosmos have a
place too in the human attitude to nature, which is per
ceived externally as in chains and subject to necessity. In
our attitude towards animals and plants and minerals,
fields, forests, seas and mountains, we can break through
to what lies behind this realm of bondage and necessity,
of strife and hostility. We can enter into communion with
cosmic beauty and the spirit of community. Civilization
is also chained to necessity. It belongs to the sphere of
law. It bows down before the earth in the bad sense and
breaks away from the earth in the good sense.
From time to time rebellion breaks out against the
civilization which has a stifling effect and which is more

and more withdrawn from the sources of hfe, and the
revolt is made in the name of a return to the truth and
rightness of nature. Such was the revolt of Rousseau and
Tolstoy, but in this connection a fatal mistake in termi
nology has been made. Neither Rousseau nor Tolstoy, nor
many of the Romantics, had any desire at all to return to
that nature which is shackled to necessity and in which a
harsh struggle for existence takes place. They had no wish
to return to a state of barbarism. The natural state they
had in mind was quite certainly not that fallen objectified
nature which surrounds us. It was the divine nature of the
Garden of Eden. From time to time man recalls memories
of paradise and indulges in his dreams of it. The sounds of
paradise at times break through into poetry. We live in a
world in which the symbolic culture of the past, which was
not yet wholly divorced from the soil, is dying. But it is
n(l)t only symbolic culture which is dying. Technical indus
trial civilization, shaken to its very base, is perishing at the
hands of the forces which it has itself created.1 Man is
overwhelmed by his own discoveries and inventions to
which his nature, which was shaped in a wholly different
era is but little adapted. A romantic return to the state
which precedes technical skill, the machine and the indus
trialization of human life is impossible.
But this raises the problem of the development and dis
closure in man of spiritual forces which the demonic
powers, not of nature but of technics and machinery, now
given a free hand, have seized and brought into subjection
to themselves. It is not, as in the past, the barbarism of
the jungle, but the barbarism of civilization itself which
now lords it over contemporary man. Human life is ob
jectified and depersonalized to a degree which involves the
loss of the very image of man. We are witnesses of the
1 I use the words "culture" and "civilization" in a sense which

is closely akin to the meaning that Spengler attaches to them.
ruin of the whole of a civilization which was founded upon

false principles, and salvation can come only from a
revelation which issues out of the depth of Spirit. The
telluric era, which was attached closely to the earth, is
drawing to its close, and man is cast into the cosmic
spaces. Man has imposed himself too much upon that
cosmic order which was opened up to the ancient and to
the mediaeval mind. Behind the optimism of nineteenth
century science was concealed the long acquaintance with
the old conceptions of religious cosmology. Now the atom
bomb arrives out of those cosmic spaces with the threat
that the cosmos itself may perish. The relation in which
man stands to nature has to be defined afresh. Man is
entering into a new sort of natural reality and spiritually
he is not prepared for such an experience. He has im
agined that all problems can be solved within the small
closed circle of this social world. But the matter in ques
tion concerns something much greater than a new society.
What is involved is a new cosmos.
The era of the Spirit can be nothing but a revelation of
a sense of community which is not merely social but also
cosmic, not only a brotherhood of man, but a brotherhood
of men with all cosmic life, with the whole creation. But
this will also mean emancipation from the sociomorphism
which has distorted the human idea of God. Again it will
mean liberation from a false notion of sovereignty which
has always indicated some form or other of servitude.
There will be no sovereignty of God, for that shows a
sociomorphic way of thinking about God which is formed
after the pattern of the kingdom of Caesar. There will be
no sovereignty of the monarch, nor of this or that class,
nor any sovereignty of the people in the way that Rous
seau and the theoreticians of pure democracy thought.
The State has nothing but a relative and transient func
tional significance in the objectified world where every
thing is transferred to the external and everything dis
integrates. It has no sovereign and substantial significance
whatever. The higher spiritual world ought never to be

thought of on the analogy of the State, that is of power
and authority, in other words, of its false pretensions to
sovereignty. In the life of the Church there are functions
which are necessary for its existence in objectified history,
but nowhere is there any sovereignty-not in the Pope,
not in an assembly of bishops, nor yet in the people. The
most exalted of ideas which can be applied to God cannot
be called sovereignty. It must be given some other name.
The people of our day, corroded as they are with
scepticism and rationalism, will say with a smile that all
this is a religious Utopia in the sphere of social politics,
something perhaps which recalls the Utopia of Fourrier.
And they will be right so far as this limited world is
concerned, this world in which they have grown up and
from which they see no way out. I am by no means an
optimist, indeed I am rather inclined to think that we are
entering upon an era of darkness and great destruction.
It is even possible that the whole of this illusory cosmic
order before our eyes will burst asunder. I am not assum
ing a religious social Utopia which can be conceived as
happening within the confines of our aeon. I am speaking
of something entirely different, of a new aeon and of a
new revelation within it. But the coming of a new aeon
presupposes a change in the human mind and the libera
tion of that mind from the power of "objectness." This
change in the way men think will not come to pass in a
moment. It presupposes a complex process of preparation.
This is above all what is needed, a revolution in thought,
a revolution in spirit, which gets rid of the desire to be
alienated and ejected into the object world.
The revelation which belongs to the new aeon can be
none other than a divine-human revelation. It cannot be
thought of or expected without creative human activity.
A process which makes ready for the era of the Spirit is
taking place in man and it will be the fulfilment and
realization of Christianity. This raises the question of the
relations between transcendental man and the social man

of the natural world, historical man. The truly ordained
revelation to which man is heir is not one in which any
thing is lacking, nor one which is distorted by natural and
social determinism. It is a revelation in Spirit and in Truth
and in it the link between the human and the divine is
realized; in other words, God-manhood will be made
manifest. This will not mean the disappearance of man
into God which rationalized pantheism has supposed. The
appearance of the new man which we look for in hope is
the revelation of transcendental man, the eternal man, the
concretely integral, the freely creative man who actively
takes his part in the creation of the world and of his own
self. This indeed is a most profound mystery of Chris
tianity, and it has been concealed by the fact of ob
jectification.
When we begin to think about the coming of the new
man we come into collision with an insurmountable and
tragic contradiction. We picture to ourselves that the
askesis of the desert dwellers, war and revolution, and
everything which presupposes human heroism and the
spirit of sacrifice will finally disappear from the e arth, and
that all acts of violence will disappear. But resistance to
acts of violence will also disappear. Since it is no longer
required, everything which is due to the warlike and com
bative instincts of man will disappear, there will be none
of the cruelty which is the outcome of those instincts. But
there will also be no uplifting impulse. Every form of
being rapt out of oneself, the state of possession which
seizes upon the masses, the idolatrous deification of the
leader or the king, all will disappear, but so will also the
dream of another and better life since it will have been
realized. People will rest content with the realization of
good already achieved and there will be none of the enthu
siasm which belongs to the struggle against evil. There is
something in this which is intolerable. It will be the satis
fied bourgeois realm of the placidly average.
The danger of becoming bourgeois dogs the steps of

every revolution. The enervation, the weakening of coura
geous manhood in the human type brought suffering to
Nietzsche as it did to Georges Sorel after him, to the
fascist-minded and many others. As Marxists foresee, the
tragic element in life is disappearing and will finally dis
appear, and this absence of the tragic may be and will be
itself tragic. Within the confines of this world we are fated
to think of light in connection with darkness, and of good
in connection with evil. On this subject there is much
which is very remarkable to be found in Jacob Boehme.
How are men to achieve the transition to creative ecstasy,
to the highest uplifting impulse in life, to that state in
which there will be no venom, no violence, no evil and no
occasion for strife? It is a question of the clarifying of
deep-rooted instincts in man rather than of their dis
appearance. The mystery lies in the fact that we cannot
think of the existence of paradise kataphatically, we can
only conceive of it in apophatic terms. Paradise and per
fection within the confines of our aeon would be intoler
able. Dostoyevsky understood that very well.
But in the new aeon everything will be changed, our
categories and our distinctions between good and evil will
not be applicable to it. But the new aeon does not simply
belong to the other world, to the other side of the grave,
it is not something entirely different. It is also our world
enlightened and transfigured and which has become crea
tively free. Besides, we can think of a great many worlds
into which our own world enters and in which the spiritual
journey of man is continued. The necessary thing is to
break free from the frozen torpor of the dogmatic systems
of the schools and the benumbing effect of their rigidity.
It is an astounding thing that the human and the divine
human image of Christ should disappear in idolatrous
dogmatics, just as the human image of the saints dis
appears in the icon-painter's attitude to them. The ideal
relation between the human and the divine is shown in
Jesus Christ. This ought to have been taken not dogmati
cally but existentially, that is to say in a way which was
free from all idolatry. But that will be to receive it in
Spirit and in Truth.
Appendix
Principal Works by Nicolas Berdyaev
Dates given are those of the original publication in Russian

or French. The symbols E., F., G., signify respectively the
existence of English, French or German translations and,
where the titles differ from the Russian, these are given.
1 900 F. A. Lange and the Critical Philosophy.

1 90 1 Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy.
1 907 Sub Specie A eternitatis.
The New Religious Consciousness and Society.
191 1 Philosophy of Freedom.
1912 A . S. Khomiakov.
1915 The Soul of Russia.
1916 The Meaning of the Creative Act. (G. Der Sinn des
Schafjen. )
The Fate of Russia.
1 923 The Meaning of History. (E.)
Philosophy of Inequality.
The World-Outlook of Dostoevsky. (E. Dostoevsky. )
1 924 The Russian Religious Idea in Problems of Russian
Religious Consciousness, 1 924. (F. L'idee religieuse
russe in Cahiers de la Nouvelle Journee, No. 8.)
The New Middle Ages. ( E . The End o f Our Time,
which includes four other essays . )
157
1926 K. Leontiev. (E. )
Philosophy of the Free Spirit. (E. Freedom and the
Spirit. )
1931 The Destiny of Man. (E.)
On Suicide.
Russian Religious Psychology and Communist
A theism. (E. The Russian Revolution.)
Christianity and Class War. (E.)
1 932 Christianity and Human Action.
1 933 Man and the Machine. (E., including other essays, in
The Bourgeois Mind.)
1934 "I" and the World of Objects. (E. Solitude and
Society.)
The Fate of Man in the Modern World.
1 937 Spirit and Reality. (E.)
The Origin of Russian Communism. Only in French
and English.
1940 Slavery and Freedom. ( Of Man.) (E.)
1946 The Russian Idea. (E. )
1947 The Existential Dialectics of the Divine and Human.
French. (E. The Divine and the Human.)
1949 Towards a New Epoch. (E.)
Posthumous
1 950 Dream and Reality. (E. )

1 952 The Beginning and the End. (E.)
1953 Truth and Revelation. (E.)

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What are some of the main ideas discussed regarding God?

What are some of the main ideas discussed regarding God?

What is discussed regarding truth and revelation?

What is discussed regarding truth and revelation?

God is not power which displays itself in the

world; he is in the world incognito. He both gives

Collier Books is a division of The Crowell-Collier Publishing

First Collier Books Edition 1962

Copyright, 1953, by YMCA-Press

1 Existential Philosophy and Spiritual Experience.

2 Truth is not an objective Reality in the sphere

3 Revelation. The Spirituality 'and Universality of

4 Freedom, Being and Spirit. Essence and Exist-

5 Man and History. Freedom and Necessity in

6 New forms of Godlessness. Optimistic and Pessi­

THIS BOOK PUTS FORWARD a reconsideration of the funda­

A "Critique of Revelation" ought to be a critique made

Existential Philosophy and Spiritual Experience.

I REGARD EVERY CLASSIFICATION of knowledge into dif­

tianity have rested. It has always been linked with some

Transcendental man is the inner man whose existence lies

Truth is not an objective Reality in the sphere of things.

Truth is a value that can be created by man. Only the

is reflected in the mind which knows it and enters into

1 Polin in his book on the creative power of values denies that

2 I discuss this subject in The Destiny of Man.

In the twentieth century, the conception of truth is

life and the function of life. It is just in this respect that

by no means "useful." Man is called upon to liberate

the world, and it judges the world. It judges revelation

are brought to birth by a society in which class exploita­

based upon this totalitarian integral doctrine, fall to the

spect a contrast to him. Nietzsche was concerned only

pedestrian masses of man, just as his ethics are different

rigidity, ossified as it were, and benumbed. It is not the

Truth is not only capable of passing judgment upon

s Baader was well aware of this.

Truth is not to be regarded as that which has been

when attention is directed to spiritual experience and to

Revelation. The Spirituality and Universality of Revela·

IF THERE IS A Goo, he must reveal himself and provide

is indeed a very great mystery. It is that which marks the

Theology is always expressed in the derivative rather

of history in which "double truth" was necessary for self­

which could be accepted as a criterion of truth. The cri­

The very conception of the creation of the world by

the limits of possible human knowledge. But, so that the

probable that God loves those who struggle against him.

and with all the limitations of his rationalism he embarked

Freedom, Being and Spirit. Essence and Existence.

THE FUNDAMENTAL difference which distinguishes the

it. Tragedy in the Christian world is the tragedy of free­

different meaning would have been given to everything.

freedom, and to its impotence. Freedom is unbreakably

various differentiated spheres of human life-the auton­

found sense, it may be said that the transcendent comes

Man and History. Freedom and Necessity in History.

IT IS DIFFICULT to express mystical experience in rational

ality and it always wounds it very deeply. To a notable

from this contradiction. By nature and destiny man is a

6 New forms of Godlessness. Optimistic and Pessi

THIS BOOK PUTS FORWARD a reconsideration of the funda

I REGARD EVERY CLASSIFICATION of knowledge into dif

are brought to birth by a society in which class exploita

of history in which "double truth" was necessary for self

which could be accepted as a criterion of truth. The cri

it. Tragedy in the Christian world is the tragedy of free

various differentiated spheres of human life-the auton

distinct from cosmic time, presupposes freedom, but free

The latest new form of godlessness has made its ap

from this doctrine inspiration which has made them capa

THE LIFE OF THE Spirit is mysterious . In its original pri