Salvation and Creativity (Two Understandings of Christianity)

Nikolai Berdyaev

Translated from
Бердяев, Н. А. «Спасение и творчество (Два понимания христианства).» Путь, no. 2 (1926): 26–46.

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Dedicated to the memory of Vladimir Solovyov

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.
(1 Peter 4:10)

I.

The relationship between the paths of human salvation and the paths of human creativity is the most central, the most painful, and the most acute problem of our era. Humanity is perishing, and there is a thirst for salvation.  But humanity is also, by nature, a creator, a builder, a constructor of life, and the thirst for creativity cannot be extinguished.  Can a person be saved while at the same time creating?  Can a person create while at the same time being saved?  And how should Christianity be understood: is Christianity exclusively a religion of saving the soul for eternal life, or is the creation of a higher life also justified by Christian consciousness?  

All these questions trouble the modern soul, although their full depth is not always recognized. Christians, desiring to justify their life’s vocation, their creative life’s work, do not always realize that the very understanding of Christianity is at stake, the appropriation of its fullness.  The painfulness of the problem of salvation and creativity reflects the divisions between the Church and the world, the spiritual and the secular, the sacred and the profane.  The Church is concerned with salvation, while creativity occupies the secular world.  The creative works that engage the secular world are not justified, not sanctified by the Church.  There is a deep disregard, almost contempt, in the Church world for those creative works in the life of culture, in the life of society, which drive the movements happening in the world.  At best, creativity is tolerated, allowed, looked at with indifference, without giving it deep justification.  Salvation is the primary concern, the one thing needful, while creativity is considered secondary or tertiary, an appendage to life, but not its essence.

We live under the sign of the deepest religious dualism.  Hierocratism, clericalism in the understanding of the Church, is the expression and justification of this dualism. The Church hierarchy, in its essence, is an angelic hierarchy, not a human one.  In the human world, it merely symbolizes the heavenly, angelic hierarchy.  The system of hierocratism, the exclusive dominion of the priesthood in the life of the Church, and through the Church in the life of the world, is the suppression of the human element by the angelic element, the subjugation of the human element to the angelic, as the one called to guide life.  It is always the dominion of conditional symbolism.  

But the suppression of the human element, the denial of its unique creative expression, is a diminishment of Christianity as a religion of the God-man.  Christ was the God-man, not the God-angel; in Him, the Divine nature was perfectly united with human nature in one person, and by this, human nature was raised to the divine life.  And Christ, the God-man, was the founder of a new spiritual kind of humanity, the life of God-manhood, not of God-angelhood.  

The Church of Christ is God-manhood.  The angelic element is the intermediary element between God and humanity, a passive-mediating element, transmitting God’s energy, a conduit of God’s grace, but not an actively creative element.  The actively creative element is assigned to humanity.  But the sinful limitation of humanity cannot contain the fullness of Christian truth.  And the dominant rule of the angelic-hierocratic element is an indicator of sinful humanity’s inability to express its creative nature, to understand Christianity in its fullness and wholeness.  The path of salvation for sinful humanity requires, above all, the angelic-hierocratic element.  The path of creativity, however, remains a self-willed human path, unsanctified and unjustified, in which humanity is left to its own devices.

The unexpressed religious nature of humanity as an organic part of the life of God-manhood, the lack of religious development of humanity’s free calling, creates the dualism of Church and world, Church and culture — the sharp dualism of the sacred and the secular.  For the believing Christian, this results in two lives, one of primary importance and one of secondary importance.  And this dualism, this duality of life, becomes particularly acute in modern Christianity.  

In medieval Christianity, there was a theocratic, hierocratic culture in which all creative life was subordinated to the religious principle, understood as the dominion of the angelic hierarchy over humanity.  In the Middle Ages, culture and society were sacred, but their religious justification was conditional and symbolic.  Culture was conceived as angelic, not human.  The dominion of the angelic principle always leads to symbolism, to the conditional, symbolic representation of heavenly life in the human world without its real attainment, without the real transformation of human life.  

The modern era has overthrown symbolism and created a rupture.  Humanity rose up in the name of its freedom and went its own self-willed way.  For religion, a corner of the soul was left. The Church began to be understood in a differentiated way.  The modern Christian lives in two alternating rhythms — within the Church and in the world, on the paths of salvation and on the paths of creativity.  

In theocratic societies, in theocratic cultures, the human principle was suppressed; human freedom had not yet given its consent to the realization of the Kingdom of God.  In the humanistic societies and cultures of the modern era, the human principle has become detached from God and from the action of God’s grace.  The union of the divine and the human has not been achieved.  The paths of creativity in the humanistic world have been without God and against God.  The drama of modern humanistic history is the drama of the deep detachment of the paths of creative life from the paths of salvation, from God and God’s grace.  

The dualism of Church and world reaches forms of expression that were unknown to the sacred organic epochs of the past.  A great creative movement has occurred in the world — in science, philosophy, art, political and social life, technological conquests, moral relations between people, and even in religious thought and mystical sentiments.  All of us, not only non-believers but also believing Christians, participate in this movement of the world, this movement of culture, devoting a significant portion of our time and energy to it.  

On Sundays, we go to church.  Six days a week, we give ourselves to our creative, constructive work.  And our creative relationship to life remains unjustified, unsanctified, not subordinated to the religious principle of life.  The old medieval theocratic-hierocratic justification and sanctification of the entire process of life no longer holds power over us; it has died.  Even the most devout, the most Orthodox people participate in an unjustified and unsanctified life in the world, submitting themselves to secular, not sacred, science; secular, not sacred, economics; secular, not sacred law; and to everyday life, which long ago lost its sacred character.  

Believers, Orthodox people, live a church life in the Church, go to the temple on Sundays and feast days, observe the Great Fast, and pray to God morning and evening, but they do not live a church life in the world, in culture, in society.  Their creativity, in state and economic life, in sciences and arts, in inventions and discoveries, in everyday morality, remains outside the Church, outside religion; secular, worldly.  It is a completely different rhythm of life.  

A stormy creative movement occurred in the world, in culture.  Meanwhile, in the Church, for a long time, there has been a comparative immobility, a kind of petrification and rigidity.  The Church began to live exclusively by preservation, by its connection to the past, i.e., it expressed only one side of Church life.  The Church hierarchy became hostile to creativity, suspicious of spiritual culture, belittling humanity and fearing its freedom, opposing the paths of creativity to the paths of salvation.  We are saved on one plane of existence, and create life on a completely different plane of existence.

And there is always the fear that on the plane where we create, we perish rather than are saved; there is no hope that the unbearable dualism can be overcome by subordinating our entire life and all our creative impulses to the hierocratic principle, by returning to theocracy in the old sense of the word.  

There is no return to the conditional symbolism of hierocratic societies and cultures.  Such a return could only be a temporary reaction, rejecting creativity.  The religious problem of humanity, of its freedom and creative calling, is thus posed in all its acuteness.  And this is not only a problem of the world, a problem borne and agonized over in modern culture; it is also a problem of the Church, a problem of Christianity as the religion of God-manhood.

The Church ceased to be understood integrally, as a universal spiritual organism, as an ontological reality, as a Christ-infused cosmos.  A different understanding of the Church prevailed, seeing it as an institution, as a society of believers, as a hierarchy and a temple.  The Church turned into a healing institution where individual souls come for treatment.  Thus, Christian individualism is affirmed, indifferent to the fate of human society and the world.  The Church exists for the salvation of individual souls, but is not concerned with the creativity of life, with the transformation of social and cosmic life.  

This type of exclusively monastic-ascetic Orthodoxy in Russia was only possible because the Church entrusted all the construction of life to the state.  It was only the existence of a Church-sanctified autocratic monarchy that made such Orthodox individualism and such separation of Christianity from the life of the world possible. The world was held and guarded by the Orthodox monarchy, and the Church order was upheld by it as well.  The Church was indifferent not only to the construction of cultural and social life but also to the construction of church life itself, to the life of parishes, to the organization of independent church authority.  

The existence of the Orthodox autocratic monarchy is the reverse side of monastic-ascetic Orthodoxy, which understands Orthodoxy exclusively as a religion of personal salvation.  Therefore, the fall of the autocratic monarchy, the Russian Orthodox kingdom, brings significant changes to the church consciousness.  

Orthodoxy can no longer remain predominantly monastic-ascetic.  Christianity cannot be reduced to the individual salvation of separate souls.  The Church is inevitably turning to the life of society and the world, inevitably must participate in the construction of life.  In the autocratic monarchy, as a type of Orthodox theocracy, the angelic principle dominated, not the human.  According to this concept, the Tsar is essentially an angelic, not a human rank.  The fall of Orthodox theocracy must lead to the awakening of the creative activity of the Christian people themselves, of human activity, to the construction of a Christian society.  

This shift begins primarily with Orthodox people becoming responsible for the fate of the Church in the world, in historical reality, and they are forced to take upon themselves the construction of the Church, parish life, concerns for the temple, the organization of Church life, brotherhoods, and so on.  But this change in the Orthodox mindset cannot be limited to the construction of Church life; it extends to all aspects of life.  

All life can be understood as Church life.  All aspects of life enter the Church.  A turn toward an integral understanding of the Church is inevitable, meaning the overcoming of ecclesiastical nominalism and individualism.  Understanding Christianity exclusively as a religion of personal salvation, narrowing the scope of the Church to something existing alongside everything else, while in reality the Church is the positive fullness of being, has been the source of the greatest disorders and catastrophes in the Christian world.  

The belittling of humanity, of its freedom and its creative calling, engendered by such an understanding of Christianity, caused humanity to rise in revolt in the name of its freedom and creativity.  On the empty ground left by Christianity in the world, the Antichrist began to build his Tower of Babel and has advanced far in his construction. The alluring freedom of the human spirit, the freedom of human creativity, is ultimately perishing on this path.  The Church had to guard itself against the evil elements of the world and the evil movements within it. But the true preservation of holiness is only possible with the allowance of Christian creativity.

II.

On what spiritual foundation is Orthodox individualism based, and how is the understanding of Christianity as a religion of personal salvation, indifferent to the fate of society and the world, justified?  Christianity in the past was extraordinarily rich, diverse, and multifaceted.  In the Gospels, the apostolic letters, the patristic literature, and church tradition, one can find the foundation for various understandings of Christianity.  The understanding of Christianity as a religion of personal salvation, suspicious of any creativity, relies exclusively on the ascetic patristic literature, which is neither the entirety of Christianity nor the entirety of patristic literature.  The Philokalia has, in a sense, overshadowed everything else. Asceticism expresses an eternal truth, which becomes an inevitable moment in the inner spiritual path.  But it is not the fullness of Christian truth.  The heroic struggle with the nature of the old Adam, with sinful passions, emphasized a particular aspect of Christian truth and exaggerated it to all-encompassing proportions.  The truths revealed in the Gospels and the apostolic letters were pushed into the background and suppressed.  Humility was made the foundation of all Christianity, the foundation of the entire spiritual path of a person, the path of salvation for eternal life.  A person must humble himself, and everything else will be added by itself.  Humility overshadows and suppresses love, which is revealed in the Gospel and is the foundation of the New Covenant between God and man.  The ontological meaning of humility lies in the real victory over the self-asserting human ego, over the sinful tendency of a person to place the center of gravity and source of life within himself -- in overcoming pride.  The meaning of humility is in the real transformation and transfiguration of human nature, in the dominance of the spiritual person over the soul and fleshly person.  But humility should not suppress or extinguish the spirit. Humility is not external obedience, submission, and subjugation. A  person can be very disciplined, very obedient and submissive, and yet have no humility at all.  We see this, for example, in the Communist Party.  Humility is a real change in spiritual nature, not external subjugation that leaves nature unchanged; it is inner work on oneself, the liberation from the power of passions, from the lower nature that a person takes as their true “self.”  In humility, the true hierarchy of being is affirmed, and the spiritual person gains ascendancy over the soul person.  God gains ascendancy over the world.  Humility is the path of self-purification and self-determination.  Humility is not the destruction of human will but the enlightenment of human will, its free submission to Truth.  Christianity cannot deny humility as an essential part of the inner spiritual path.  But humility is not the goal of spiritual life.  Humility is a subordinate means.  And humility is not the only means, nor is it the only path of spiritual life.  Inner spiritual life is immeasurably more complex and multifaceted. One cannot respond to all the demands of the spirit with the preaching of humility. Humility can also be understood falsely and too externally.  The inner spiritual life and the inner path hold absolute primacy; they are primary, deeper, and more fundamental than all our relations to society and the world.  In the spiritual world, from the depths of the spiritual world, all our relations to life are determined.  This is the axiom of religion, the axiom of mysticism.  But it is possible to understand humility in a way that distorts our entire spiritual life, failing to encompass the Divine truth of Christianity, the Divine fullness.  And this is where the whole complexity of the issue lies.

Building life on the spirit of humility alone creates an external authoritarian-hierocratic system.  All questions of social order and cultural creation are resolved in relation to humility.  The best societal structure is considered to be the one in which people are most humble and most obedient.  Any form of life that gives expression to the creative instincts of a person is condemned.  In this way, no issue is addressed in essence but only in relation to whether it promotes human humility.  The degeneration of humility leads to its misunderstanding as something external and superficial, rather than as a mystical act, as an aspect of the inner spiritual life.  In its mystical essence, humility is not at all opposed to freedom; it is an act of freedom and presupposes freedom.  Only free humility, the free submission of the soul to the spiritual person, has religious significance and value.  Forced humility, imposed and determined by an external system of life, has no meaning for spiritual life.  Slavery and humility are different spiritual states.  I humble myself in my own inner spiritual journey, in a free act, placing the source of life in God, not in my own ego.  A phenomenological analysis reveals that my freedom precedes my humility.  Humility is an inner, hidden spiritual state.  But degenerated, degraded humility, decadent humility, turns into an externally imposed, forced system of life that denies human freedom and diminishes the person.  On the basis of humility, hypocrisy and sanctimony easily arise.  While the ontological meaning of humility lies in the liberation of the spiritual person, decadent humility keeps a person in a state of suppression and oppression, stifling his creative powers.  The great ascetics and saints performed the heroic act of spiritual liberation of a person, resisting the lower nature and the power of passions.  The decline of humility denies the heroic act of spiritual liberation of a person and keeps the individual in subjugation to an authoritarian system of life.  When I humble myself before the will of God, when I overcome the rebellious slavery of the ego within me, I move from freedom and toward freedom.  My ego enslaves me, and I seek to be freed from it.  Humility is one of the methods of transitioning from the state where the lower nature dominates to the state where the higher nature prevails, that is, it signifies the growth of a person, their spiritual ascent.  Decadent humility, on the other hand, seeks a system of life where there is never any liberation, no spiritual ascent, and no manifestation of the higher nature.  The liberation of the spirit, spiritual ascent, and the revelation of the higher nature are declared to be states of insufficient humility, a lack of humility. Humility, which should be a means and a path, turns into an end in itself.

Humility is being set in opposition to love.  The path of love is deemed not humble, but audacious.  The Gospel is ultimately replaced by the Philokalia.  How could I, a sinful and unworthy person, dare to claim love for my neighbor or brotherhood?  My love would be tainted by sin.  First, I must humble myself, and love will then appear as the fruit of humility.  But I must humble myself for my entire life, and I will never achieve a sinless state.  Therefore, love will never appear.  How could I, a sinner, dare to strive for spiritual perfection, for courage and the heights of the spirit, for the attainment of a higher spiritual life?  First, I must overcome sin with humility.  This will take my whole life, and there will be neither time nor strength left for a creative spiritual life.  Such a life is only possible in the next world, and even then, perhaps not; in this world, only humility is possible.  Decadent humility creates a system of life in which ordinary, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois existence is considered more humble, more Christian, more moral than the pursuit of a higher spiritual life, love, contemplation, knowledge, or creativity -- activities that are always suspected of lacking humility and being proud.  To run a shop, live the most selfish family life, serve as a bureaucrat in the police or excise department -- this is humble, unpretentious, and not audacious.  But to strive for Christian brotherhood among people, to realize Christ’s truth in life, or to be a philosopher and poet -- a Christian philosopher and Christian poet -- this is not humble, but proud, pretentious, and audacious.  A shopkeeper, even if greedy and dishonest, is at less risk of eternal damnation than someone who spends their life seeking truth and justice, yearning for beauty in life -- like Vladimir Solovyov, for example.  A gnostic (1), a poet of life, a seeker of the truth of life and human brotherhood, is at risk of eternal damnation because he is insufficiently humble, proud.  This creates a hopeless, vicious cycle. The pursuit of God’s truth, of the Kingdom of God, of spiritual heights and spiritual perfection is declared to be spiritual imperfection, a lack of humility.  What, then, is the fundamental flaw of decadent humility and its system of life?  The fundamental flaw lies in a false understanding of the relationship between sin and the paths to liberation from sin or the attainment of a higher spiritual life.  I cannot reason in this way: “the world lies in evil, I am a sinful person, and therefore my striving to realize Christ’s truth and brotherly love among people is a proud claim, a lack of humility,” because every genuine movement toward the realization of love and truth is a victory over evil, a liberation from sin.  I cannot say: “I am a sinful person, and my boldness in seeking to know the mysteries of existence and create beauty is a lack of humility, pride,” because genuine knowledge and genuine creation of beauty is already a victory over sin, a transformation of life.  It cannot be said: “sin distorts and corrupts love, spiritual perfection, knowledge, and everything, and therefore there is no victory over sin on these paths.”  For one can equally say: the path of humility is distorted and corrupted by human sin and selfishness, and it is decadent, distorted humility -- humility that has turned into slavery, selfishness, and cowardice.  Humility is no more guaranteed against distortion and degeneration than love or knowledge.

Sin is overcome with great difficulty, and it is only defeated by the power of grace. But the paths to this victory, the ways of acquiring grace, are diverse and encompass the fullness of being.  Our love for our neighbor, our knowledge, and our creativity are, of course, distorted by sin and bear the mark of imperfection, but the paths of humility are also distorted by sin and bear the mark of imperfection.  Christ commanded us, above all, to love God and love our neighbor, to seek first the Kingdom of God, and to strive for perfection like that of our Heavenly Father.  The Philokalia, which does not include the most remarkable mystical works of St Maximus the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian, and others, is primarily a collection of moral-ascetic teachings for monks and not an expression of the fullness of Christianity and its paths.  Not only the spirit of the Gospels and the apostolic letters, but also the spirit of Greek patristics in its deepest currents, is different, for example, from the one-sided spirit of the Orthodoxy of [St] Theophan the Recluse. Certainly, [St] Theophan the Recluse has much that is true and eternal, especially in his best book, The Path to Salvation, but his attitude toward the life of the world is one of decadent fear, and his Christianity is diminished and impoverished.  The central idea of Eastern patristics was the idea of theosis, the deification of creation, the transformation of the world and the cosmos, not the idea of personal salvation.  It is no coincidence that the greatest Eastern teachers of the Church were inclined to the idea of apokatastasis, not only St Clement of Alexandria and Origen, but also St Gregory of Nyssa, St Gregory of Nazianzus, and St Maximus the Confessor.  The juridical understanding of the world process, the juridical understanding of redemption, the creation of hell, the salvation of the elect, and the eternal damnation of the rest of humanity is mainly expressed in Western patristics, in Blessed Augustine, and later in Western scholasticism.  For classical Greek patristics, Christianity was not merely a religion of personal salvation.  It was directed toward a cosmic understanding of Christianity, advancing the idea of the enlightenment and transformation of the world, the deification of creation.  Only later did Christian consciousness begin to value the idea of Hell more than the idea of the transformation and deification of the world.  Perhaps this was the result of the predominance of barbarian peoples with their cruel instincts.  These peoples had to be subjected to strict discipline and fear, as their flesh and blood, their passions, threatened the destruction of Christianity and all order in the world.  Christianity, understood as a religion of personal salvation from eternal damnation through humility, led to panic and terror.  Humanity lived under the terrible pressure of the fear of eternal damnation and would agree to anything just to avoid it.  An authoritarian system of obedience and submission was created by the effect of the terror of damnation, the panic of eternal hellish torments.  In such a spiritual mindset, in such a state of consciousness, a creative approach to life is very difficult.  There is no time for creativity when damnation threatens.  All of life is placed under the sign of terror and fear.  When the plague rages and death threatens every moment, a person has no time for creativity; he is exclusively occupied with measures to escape the plague.  Sometimes Christianity is understood as salvation from a raging plague. Creativity and the construction of life became possible only thanks to a system of dualism, which provided moments of forgetfulness about salvation from damnation. People dedicated themselves to the sciences and arts or to social construction, forgetting for a time about the impending damnation and discovering for themselves another sphere of being, distinct from the sphere in which damnation and salvation occur, without linking these two spheres in any way.  The understanding of Christianity as a religion of personal salvation from damnation is a system of transcendental egoism, or transcendental utilitarianism and eudaimonism.  K. Leontiev, with his usual boldness, confessed such a religion of transcendental egoism. But precisely for this reason, his attitude toward the life of the world was entirely pagan, and he dualistically combined within himself the man of Athos and Optina’s ascetic-monastic Orthodoxy with the man of the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century.  In a transcendental-egoistic consciousness, a person is not consumed with attaining a higher, perfect life, but is preoccupied with the salvation of their soul, with concern for their eternal well-being.  Transcendental egoism and eudaimonism naturally reject the path of love and cannot be true to the Gospel commandment, which asks us to lose our soul in order to gain it, to give it up for our neighbor, and teaches love above all -- selfless love for God and neighbor.  But to present Christianity as a religion of transcendental egoism, which knows nothing of selfless love for divine perfection, is to slander Christianity.  This is either a barbaric Christianity that subdues the wild passions and is distorted by these very passions, or a decadent Christianity, diminished and impoverished.  Christianity has always been, is, and will be not only a religion of personal salvation and fear of damnation but also a religion of the transformation of the world, the deification of creation, a cosmic and social religion, a religion of selfless love, love for God and man, the promise of the Kingdom of God.  In the individualistic ascetic understanding of Christianity as a religion of personal salvation, concerned only with one’s own soul, the revelation of the Resurrection of all creation becomes incomprehensible and unnecessary.  For the religion of personal salvation, there is no eschatological perspective for the world, no connection between the individual soul and the world, the cosmos, and all creation. This denies the hierarchical structure of being, in which everything is connected to everything, where individual destiny cannot be isolated.  The individualistic understanding of salvation is more characteristic of Protestant pietism than of ecclesial Christianity.  I cannot be saved alone; I can only be saved together with my brothers, together with all of God’s creation, and I cannot think only of my own salvation; I must think of the salvation of others, of the salvation of the whole world.  Moreover, salvation is merely the exoteric expression for the attainment of spiritual heights, perfection, and godlikeness as the ultimate goal of worldly life.

III.

The greatest Christian mystics of all denominations placed love for God and union with God above personal salvation.  External Christianity often accused mystics of not focusing the center of spiritual life on the paths of personal salvation, claiming that they walk dangerous paths of mystical love.  Mysticism is a completely different level of spiritual life from asceticism.  The uniqueness of mysticism can be studied by reading the Hymns of St Symeon the New Theologian.  Christian mysticism understands salvation as enlightenment and transformation, the deification of creation, as the overcoming of the closed nature of creation, that is, its separation from God.  The idea of deification dominates the idea of salvation.  This is beautifully expressed by St Symeon the New Theologian: “I am filled with His love and beauty, and I am filled with divine delight and sweetness.  I partake in light and glory: my face, like that of my Beloved, shines, and all my limbs become radiant.  Then I become more beautiful than the beautiful, richer than the rich, stronger than all the strong, greater than kings, and much more honorable than anything visible, not only on earth and everything on it, but also in heaven and everything in heaven.”  I quote the greatest mystic of the Orthodox East.  Countless passages could be quoted from Western mysticism -- Catholic Latin or German mysticism -- that confirm the idea that mystics never centered their efforts on the pursuit of salvation.  Catholic mysticism overcame the juridical nature of Catholic theology, the judicial understanding of the relationship between God and man.  The dispute between Bossuet and Fénelon was precisely the dispute between a theologian and a mystic.  In the mystical path, there was always selflessness, detachment, forgetting oneself, and the discovery of boundless love for God.  But love for God is a creative state of the spirit, in it is the overcoming of all oppression, liberation, the positive revelation of the spiritual person.  Humility is only a means; it is still negative.  Love for God is the goal, and it is already positive.  Love for God is already the creative transformation of human nature.  But love for God is also love for spiritual heights, for the divine in life. The eros of the divine is a spiritual ascent, spiritual growth, the victory of the creative state of the spirit over the state of oppression, the growing of the soul’s wings, as Plato speaks of it in the Phaedrus.  The positive content of being is love -- creative, transforming love.  Love is not some special, separate side of life; love is all life, the fullness of life.  Knowledge is also a discovery of love, the love of knowledge, the cognitive union of the lover with his subject, with being, with God.  The creation of beauty is also the discovery of the harmony of love in being.  Love is the affirmation of the image of the beloved in eternity and in God, that is, the affirmation of being.  But love for God is inseparable from love for one’s neighbor, love for God’s creation. Christianity is the revelation of divine-human love.  It is love for God and love for man that saves me, that transforms my nature.  Love for neighbors, for brothers: the works of love are part of the path of my salvation, my transformation.  The path of my salvation includes love for animals and plants, for every blade of grass, for stones, rivers, and seas, for mountains and fields.  In this way, I am saved, and the whole world is saved; enlightenment is achieved.  Dead indifference to humanity and nature, to all living things, in the name of the path of self-salvation, is a disgusting manifestation of religious egoism, the drying up of human nature, the preparation of “cold-hearted eunuchs.”  Christian love must not be “glassy love” (a term by V. V. Rozanov): brittle, cold, lifeless.  Abstract-spiritual love is “glass love.”  Only spiritually ensouled love, in which the soul is transformed in the spirit, is living, divine-human love.  The monastic-ascetic ill will toward people and the world, the cooling of the heart, the deadness toward all that is living and creative is the degeneration of Christianity, the decline of Christianity.  Replacing the commandment of love for God and neighbor, given by Christ Himself, with the commandment of external humility and obedience, which cools all love, is the degeneration of Christianity, the inability to embrace the divine truth of Christianity.  It is important to note that the idea of cosmic transformation and enlightenment is closest to the Orthodox East.  Western Christianity is closer to the juridical idea of justification.  Hence, in the West, disputes about freedom and grace, about faith and good works, take on special significance.  This is where the search for authority and external criteria of religious truth comes from.  (4)  Only mystics transcended the overwhelming idea of God’s judgment and God’s demand for justification from man, understanding that God does not need the justification of man, but rather man’s love and the transformation of his nature.  This is the central problem of Christian consciousness.  Is the essence of Christianity in justification and judgment, in God’s inexorable justice, or in real transformation and enlightenment, in God’s infinite love?  The juridical understanding of Christianity, which creates real spiritual terror, is a severe method by which Christianity disciplined peoples filled with bloodthirsty instincts, cruel and barbaric.  But this understanding is opposed by a deeper understanding of Christianity as a revelation of love and freedom.  Man is called to be a creator and a co-participant in the work of God’s creation.  There is a divine call addressed to man, to which man must respond freely.  God does not need obedient and submissive slaves, eternally trembling and selfishly preoccupied with themselves. God needs sons -- free, creative, loving, and daring.  Man has terribly distorted the image of God and attributed to Him his own distorted and sinful psychology.  And we must always remember the truth of apophatic theology.  If one can attribute emotional life to God, it should not be imagined after the pattern of the worst human emotions.  Spiritual terror and spiritual panic, born of the juridical understanding of the relationship between God and man, and the placing of justification and salvation at the center of Christian faith, come from a view of the emotional life of God as entirely similar to the worst emotional life of man.  (2)  But God revealed Himself in the Son as Father, as infinite love.  (3)  And with this, the understanding of God as a cruel Master and Lord, angry and vengeful, is forever overcome.  “For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”  “And this is the will of Him that sent Me, that of all which He hath given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.”  Man is called to a perfection like that of the Heavenly Father.  The Christian revelation is above all the good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God, which we are commanded to seek first of all.  But the pursuit of the Kingdom of God is not merely the pursuit of personal salvation.  The Kingdom of God is the transformation of the world, the universal resurrection, the new heaven and the new earth.

IV.

The Christian worldview not only does not oblige us, but indeed does not even permit us, to think that only individual human souls are real, or that only they constitute God’s creation.  Society and nature are also realities and are created by God.  Society is not a human invention.  It is just as original and has ontological roots.  A human personality cannot be torn from society, just as society cannot be separated from human personalities.  Personality and society exist in a living interaction, belonging to a single, concrete whole.  The spiritual life of individuals reflects on the life of society.  And society is a kind of spiritual organism that feeds on the life of individuals and nourishes them.  The Church is a spiritual society, and this society possesses ontological reality; it cannot be reduced merely to the interaction of individual souls seeking salvation.  In Church society, the Kingdom of God is realized, not just the salvation of individual souls.  When I say that salvation is only possible in the Church, I affirm the communal nature of salvation -- salvation in and through a spiritual society, salvation with my brothers in Christ and with all of God’s creation.  I deny the individualistic understanding of salvation -- salvation alone (as one Orthodox person said, “save yourself if you can, struggle into the Kingdom of Heaven”).  I reject the egoism of salvation.  Many believe that the interpretation of Christianity as a religion of personal salvation is primarily a Church interpretation.  But in reality, it contradicts the very idea of the Church.  If certain opinions outwardly dominate in the Orthodox world and are revered by some hierarchs as particularly “Churchly,” that does not mean they are the most churchly in the deep, ontological sense of the word; at one time, Arianism prevailed among the Eastern hierarchy.  It is possible that these opinions reflect the decline of Christianity, its ossification.  There would not have been such terrible catastrophes and upheavals in the world, nor such godlessness and spiritual diminishment, if Christianity had not become wingless, dull, and uncreative -- if it had not ceased to inspire and guide the life of human societies and cultures, if it had not been relegated to a small corner of the human soul, if conditional and external dogmatism and ritualism had not replaced the real fulfillment of Christianity in life. The future of human societies and cultures depends on whether Christianity will regain a creative, life-transforming significance, whether the spiritual energy in Christianity will be revealed again -- energy capable of generating enthusiasm and leading us from decline to ascent.

The official figures of the Church, the professionals of religion, tell us that personal salvation is the one thing needful, and that creativity is unnecessary and even harmful for this purpose.  Why do we need knowledge, science, and art, inventions and discoveries, social truth, or the creation of a new and better life, when eternal damnation threatens me, and my only concern should be eternal salvation?  Such a suppressed and outright panic-stricken religious consciousness and mindset cannot justify creativity.  Nothing is necessary for the personal salvation of the soul. Knowledge is as unnecessary as art, economics, the state, and even the existence of nature or God’s world.  Occasionally, someone might tell you that the existence of the state is necessary, specifically in the form of an autocratic monarchy, since this entire religious system of life was only possible due to the existence of the Orthodox monarchy, on which the construction of life was laid.  But, thinking logically, we must admit that not only is the state unnecessary for my salvation, but it is likely harmful.  Such a religious consciousness cannot justify any endeavor in the world, or it does so only inconsistently and permissively.  This is a Buddhist tendency within Christianity. The only option is to go to a monastery.  But the very existence of monasteries presupposes their protection by the state order.  This kind of consciousness tends to justify a petty bourgeois lifestyle as humble and safe, and to combine it into one system with the monastic feats of a few, but it can never justify creativity.  The question must be posed differently, and Christianity not only allows but also requires us to pose it differently.  They tell us that a simple woman will achieve salvation better than a philosopher, and that for her salvation, knowledge and culture are unnecessary. But it is reasonable to doubt that God needs only simple women, that this exhausts God’s plan for the world -- God’s idea for the world.  Even the simple woman is now a myth; she has become a nihilist and an atheist.  It is the philosopher and the cultured person who has become a believer.  Ignorant people, fools, and even idiots may indeed be saved in their own way, but it is reasonable to doubt that God’s idea for the world, the plan for the Kingdom of God, involves its population being composed solely of the ignorant, the foolish, and the idiotic.  It is permissible to think, without violating the humility that is proper to us, that it includes the positive fullness of being, ontological perfection.  The Apostle advises us to be infants in heart, but not in mind.  Thus, human creativity -- knowledge, art, invention, social improvement, and so on -- is necessary not for personal salvation, but for the fulfillment of God’s plan for the world and humanity, for the transformation of the cosmos, for the Kingdom of God, which includes the fullness of being.  Man is called to be a creator, a co-participant in God’s work of creation and world-ordering, not just to save himself.  And at times, man may, in the name of the creativity to which he is called by God, in the name of fulfilling God’s work in the world, forget about himself and his soul.  God has given people different gifts, and no one has the right to bury them in the ground; everyone must use these gifts creatively, which point to humanity’s objective calling.  The Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 12:28) and the Apostle Peter (1 Peter 4:10) speak powerfully about this. Such is God’s plan for man -- that the nature of the human personality is creative.  It is the personality that is saved.  But in order for the personality to be saved, it must be affirmed in its true nature.  The true nature of the personality is that it is the center of creative energy.  Without creativity, there is no personality. The personality that is saved for eternity is a creative personality. To affirm salvation against creativity is to affirm the salvation of the void of non-being.  Positive existence for man is inseparable from a creative psychology.  This can be suppressed and hidden, or it can be revealed, but it is ontologically inherent in man.  The creative instinct in man is a selfless instinct, in which a person forgets himself and steps out of himself.  A scientific discovery, a technical invention, artistic creation, social creativity -- these may be needed by others and used for utilitarian purposes, but the creator himself is selfless and detached from himself.  This is the essence of creative psychology.  The psychology of creativity is very different from the psychology of humility and cannot be built upon it.  Humility is an inner spiritual work in which a person is concerned with his soul, self-overcoming, self-improvement, and self-salvation.  Creativity is a spiritual work in which a person forgets about himself, detaches from himself in the creative act, and is absorbed in his object.  In creativity, a person experiences a state of extraordinary elevation of his whole being.  Creativity is always a shock, in which the ordinary egoism of human life is overcome.  And a person agrees to lose his soul in the name of creative action.  It is impossible to make scientific discoveries, philosophically contemplate the mysteries of being, create works of art, or bring about social reforms solely in a state of humility.  Creativity presupposes another spiritual state, not opposed to humility but qualitatively different from it -- another moment in spiritual life.  The truth of homoousios (consubstantiality) was revealed to St. Athanasius the Great not in a state of humility, but in a state of creative uplift and inspiration, although humility did precede it.  Creativity presupposes a kind of spiritual asceticism; creativity is not an indulgence in one’s passions.  Creativity requires self-denial and sacrifice, a victory over the power of the “world.”  Creativity is an expression of love for God and the divine, not for this world.  Therefore, the path of creativity is also a path of overcoming the “world.”  But creativity is a different quality of spiritual life than humility and asceticism; it is the manifestation of the godlike nature of man.  Sometimes people reason as follows: first, a person must save himself, overcome sin, and only then begin to create.  But this understanding of the chronological relationship between salvation and creativity contradicts the laws of life.  This has never been the case and never will be.  I must strive for salvation throughout my life, and until the end of my life, I will not be able to completely overcome sin.  Therefore, the time will never come when I can begin to create life. But just as a person must seek salvation throughout his life, he must also create throughout his life, participating in the creative process according to his gifts and calling.  The relationship between salvation and creativity is an ideal and internal relationship, not a relationship of real chronological sequence.  Creativity helps, rather than hinders, salvation, because creativity is the fulfillment of God’s will, obedience to God’s call, participation in God’s work in the world.  Whether I am a carpenter or a philosopher, I am called by God to creative construction.  My creativity may be distorted by sin, but the complete absence of creativity is an expression of the final suppression of man by original sin.  It is incorrect to say that ascetics and saints only sought salvation -- they also created; they were artists of human souls.  The Apostle Paul, by his spiritual type, was more a religious genius-creator than a saint.

V.

Not all creativity is good.  There can be evil creativity.  One can create not only in the name of God but also in the name of the devil.  But precisely for this reason, we must not concede creativity to the devil, to the Antichrist.  The Antichrist reveals his false creativity with greater energy.  And if there is no Christian creativity and no Christian construction of life, no Christian construction of society, then anti-Christian and Antichrist creativity and construction will take over more and more areas, triumphing in all spheres of life.  For the work of Christ in the world, we need to reclaim as many areas of being as possible, and concede as little as possible to the Antichrist and his work in the world.  By withdrawing from the world, by denying creativity in the world, you are leaving the fate of the world to the Antichrist.  If we Christians do not create life in true freedom and in brotherhood of people and nations, then the Antichrist will falsely do so.  The dualistic divide between personal spiritual attitude and morality, for which Christianity requires asceticism, detachment, sacrifice, and love, and social attitudes and morality, which build the state, economy, etc., for which Christianity tolerates attachment to material things, the cult of property, the thirst for wealth, competition, the will to power, and so on, can no longer exist.  Christian consciousness cannot allow society to rest on traits that it recognizes as sinful and corrupt.  Christian revival presupposes new spiritual-social creativity, the creation of a real Christian society, not a conditional-symbolic Christian state.  The conditional lie in Christianity can no longer be tolerated.  Anti-Christian socialism is triumphant because Christianity does not resolve the social question.  Anti-Christian Gnosticism is triumphant because Christianity does not reveal its Christian gnosis.  And so it is in all things.  We are approaching the final limit.  Secular, humanistic, neutral culture is becoming less and less possible.  No one believes anymore in an abstract culture. Everywhere, people are faced with a choice.  The world is dividing into opposing principles.  Things cannot continue as they have in modern history.  And yet a return to the old Middle Ages is impossible.  The problem of creativity, the problem of Christian culture and society, cannot be solved by ecclesiastical-hierocratic means.  It is a problem of the religious sanctification of the human principle, not the restoration of the dominion of the angelic principle.  Creativity is the sphere of human freedom, filled with boundless love for God, the world, and humanity.  Neither the principles of modern history nor the principles of the old Middle Ages can bring the world and Christianity out of crisis, only the principles of a new Middle Ages can.  Christian creativity will be the work of monasticism in the world. (5) The religious crisis of our age is related to the fact that ecclesial consciousness is diminished, not grasping its fullness.  Sooner or later, this fullness must be achieved, and it must be revealed that the positive creative movement in the world, in culture, was the manifestation of human freedom within the Church, the discovery of the life of humanity within the Church, that is, it was unconsciously ecclesial.  Human creativity in the world was the very life of the Church as the God-manhood.  This does not mean that all human creativity and construction in modern history was unconsciously ecclesial.  This process was dual: the kingdom of this world, the kingdom of the Antichrist, was also being prepared.  There was great falsehood in humanism, a rebellion against God, the preparation for the destruction of man and the extinguishing of being.  But there was also a positive search for human freedom, a discovery of man’s creative powers. Henceforth, the creative process in humanity cannot remain neutral; it must become positively ecclesial, become conscious of itself, or become definitively anti-ecclesial, anti-Christian, satanic.  In the world and in culture, there must be a real ontological division -- not a formal and externally ecclesial one, but an internal spiritual and ontologically ecclesial one.  This is the meaning of our time.  Divine energies are at work everywhere in the world, in diverse and often invisible ways.  And we should not scandalize the “small forces” of our time, the prodigal sons returning to the Church, by denying any positive religious meaning in the creative processes that have taken place in the world.

In modern times, all spiritually significant people were spiritually lonely.  The genius, the creative pioneer, was terribly and tragically alone.  There was no religious consciousness that recognized the genius as a messenger from heaven.  This loneliness of genius was caused by the dualism we have been discussing.  Only a Christian revival, which will be creative, can overcome it.  But a creative ecclesial revival cannot be conceived in hierarchical categories; it cannot be squeezed into the framework of ecclesiastical professionalism, nor can it be thought of as exclusively a “sacred” process, in opposition to “profane” processes.  The creative ecclesial revival will also come from movements in the world, in culture, from the accumulated creative religious energies in the world.  We must more fully believe that Christ works within His spiritual human race, that He does not abandon it, even if this work is invisible to us.  Christians are faced with the task of bringing the entirety of life into the Church.  But this does not necessarily mean subordinating all aspects of life to the Church, understood in a differentiated way -- that is, it does not mean the dominance of theocracy and hierarchy.  Bringing life into the Church inevitably involves recognizing as ecclesial the spiritual creativity that was previously seen as outside the Church by hierarchical and differentiated ecclesiastical consciousness.  The Church, in the deepest sense of the word, also lived in the world, and there were unconscious ecclesial processes happening in the world.  The fulfillment of the Church as the life of the God-man, the unfolding of integral ecclesial consciousness, signifies enrichment through the new spiritual experience of humanity.  This spiritual experience cannot be left unjustified or unsanctified.  Humanity longs deeply and endlessly for the sanctification of its creative pursuits.  The Church is life, and life is movement and creativity.  It is no longer possible to tolerate the fact that the creative movement remains outside and against the Church, while the Church remains motionless and devoid of creative life.  Certain forms of ecclesiastical consciousness were willing to recognize theophany in the fixed forms of existence, in static historical bodies (for example, monarchical statehood).  But the time is coming when ecclesiastical consciousness will have to recognize theophany in creativity.  Secular, humanistic creativity has been exhausted, everywhere it is hitting a dead end.  Culture has become trivialized.  The best people are tormented by a thirst for eternity.  This means that an era of ecclesial, Christian, divine-human creativity must come.  The Church cannot remain a mere corner of life, a corner of the soul.  In a godless civilization, the image of man and the freedom of the spirit will perish, creativity will dry up, and barbarization will begin.  The Church will once again have to save spiritual culture, the spiritual freedom of humanity.  This is what I call the advent of a new Middle Ages.  A will to real transformation of life is awakening -- not only personal life but also social and global life.  And this good will cannot be stopped by the idea that the Kingdom of God on earth is impossible.  The Kingdom of God is realized in eternity and in every moment of life, regardless of how much the power of evil may triumph externally.  Our task is to give all our will and all our life to the victory of the power of good, to Christ’s truth, in everything and everywhere.

Human life is split and crushed by two tragedies: the tragedy of the Church and the tragedy of culture.  These tragedies are born of the dualistic impoverishment of the Church, reduced to its differential, hierarchical understanding, always setting the Church in opposition to the world.  As Christians, we should not love the “world” and what comes from the “world”; we must overcome the “world.”  But this “world,” according to the patristic definition, refers to passions, to sin and evil, not to God’s creation, not to the cosmos.  The Church is opposed to this “world,” but it is not opposed to the cosmos, God’s creation, the positive fullness of being.  The resolution of these two tragedies lies in a living, not merely theoretical, understanding of Christianity as a religion not only of salvation but also of creativity -- a religion of the transformation of the world, of the universal resurrection, of love for God and man, in other words, in the holistic embracing of the Christian truth about the God-manhood and the Kingdom of God.  And the positive resolution lies beyond the old opposition of heteronomy and autonomy.  Creativity is neither heteronomous nor autonomous; it is not “nomous” at all, but divine-human, the manifestation of humanity’s boundless love for God, humanity’s response to God’s call, to God’s expectation.  We believe that Christianity contains inexhaustible creative powers.  The revelation of these powers will save the world from decline and withering.  In our time, the question is not about the struggle between ecclesial and non-ecclesial Christianity but about the spiritual struggle within the Church -- between the purely protective current and the creative current.  An ecclesial monopoly cannot belong exclusively to the protective currents hostile to creativity.  The future of the Church on earth, the future of the world and humanity, depends on this.  In the Church, there is an eternal conservative principle; holiness and tradition must be unwaveringly preserved.  But in the Church, there must also be an eternal creative principle, a transformative principle, directed toward the Second Coming of Christ, toward the triumphant Kingdom of God.  The foundation of Christian faith lies not only in the priesthood but also in prophecy. Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith (Romans 12:6).  Creativity, the creative manifestation of human genius, is, for a time, secularized prophecy, which must be returned to its sacred significance.

Notes:

(1) I use the word “gnostic” here not in the sense of the heretical gnosis of Valentinus or Basilides, but in the sense of religious knowledge, in the sense of free theosophy, as in St Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Franz Baader, and Vladimir Solovyov.

(2) A vivid example of panic-stricken religiosity is Alphonsus de Liguori, who elevated scrupulosity to a principle, lived in constant fear of sin, asked his confessor for permission to drink a glass of water, and could not find within himself the strength to grant absolution for sins. See the excellent characterization of him in Geiler’s book Der Katolicizmus, pp. 153-157.

(3) In the charming book The Way of a Pilgrim, it is said: “The fear of punishment is the way of a slave, and the desire for a reward in the Kingdom is the way of a hired servant. But God desires that we come to Him by the way of sonship.”

(4) In a certain sense, the dogma of papal infallibility and Kant’s epistemology rest on the same principle of an external, juridically justified criterion of Truth.

(5) By this, I certainly do not deny the eternal and fundamental importance of monasticism in the strict sense of the word.