#nicholas berdyaev

[entheognosis]

Every creative act strives towards the transcendent, towards passing beyond the borders of the given world. The creative act is always liberation and conquest. It is an experience of power. In essence, creativity is a way out, an exodus; it is victory.

Nicholas Berdyaev

[wearetimeblog]

A woman's jealousy is doubly tyrannical and repulsive. Women are, therefore, particularly prone to demonism. There are demonic women— a most unpleasant and terrifying phenomenon. There is something distinctly unequal between the love of woman and that of man. A man's love is partial, that is to say, it does not engulf his whole being. The love of woman, on the other hand is more whole-hearted: she is, therefore, liable to be lost in and possessed by love. Her love can be envenomed, perilous and deadly; it is full of magic power; it is relentless, obdurate, pitiless, and despotic. It becomes particularly unbearable in view of the tragic disparity between the concrete woman and her ideal image conjured up by man's imagination. A woman's beauty is, more often than not, deceptive: she is inclined to lie more than man—in her appearance, in her behaviour and in her words. Her lying, however, is largely a form of self-defence, due, in a measure, to having been deprived of some of the most elementary rights ever since the patriarchal system prevailed over the matriarchal. Yet a woman's love may rise to remarkable heights. Such is the love of Ibsen's Solveg or of Marcel Jouhandeau's Veronique. This is love redeemed by and redeeming others in eternal purity and

N. Berdyaev - Dream and Reality 

[wearetimeblog]

Civilization is by its nature "bourgeois" in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. "Bourgeois" is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world and the civilized will to organized power and enjoyment of life. The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes, it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things, and it fears eternity. To be a bourgeois is therefore to be a slave of matter and an enemy of eternity. The perfected European and American civilizations gave rise to the industrial-capitalist system, which represents not only a mighty economic development but the spiritual phenomenon of the annihilation of spirituality. The industrial Capitalism of civilization proved to be the destroyer of the eternal spirit and the sacred traditions. Modern capitalist civilization is essentially atheistic and hostile to the idea of God. The crime of killing God must be laid at its door rather than at that of revolutionary Socialism, which merely adapted itself to the civilized "bourgeois" spirit and accepted its negative heritage.

Nicholas Berdyaev, The Bourgeois Mind

[fairest]

There is something morally repulsive about modern activistic theories which deny contemplation and recognize nothing but struggle. For them not a single moment has value in itself, but is only a means for what follows.

Nicholas Berdyaev