Short answer — non-Omni God and pluralism.
I arrived at this conclusion after rereading the introduction to Berdyaev’s seminal work, The Meaning of the Creative Act, in which Berdyaev outlines the following:
I know that I may be accused of a basic contradiction that tears apart all my sense of the world, all my world outlook. I shall be accused of the contradiction of combining an extreme religious dualism with an extreme religious monism. I accept such attacks in advance.
The basic contradiction Berdyaev mentions is the demarcation line of virtually all Christian thinking. Is everything of God or are only some parts of God? However, this supposed line of demarcation is illusory. The Trinity tempers extreme religious monism in Christianity — an extreme sense of the oneness of reality. Nevertheless, Trinitarianism is still a form of monism, and it inevitably incorporates some aspects of dualism — a division of reality into two distinct parts — into its framework. In this sense, Berdyaev’s basic contradiction essentially serves as the foundation of most Christian thinking.
I confess an almost Manichean dualism. So be it. “The world” is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, and overcome it completely: the world must be consumed; it is the nature Ahriman. Freedom from the world is the pathos of this book. There is an objective source of evil against which we must wage a heroic war. The necessity of the given world and the given world are of Ahriman.
Berdyaev addresses the weakness of all Christian monism in the passage above. If God has indeed created everything and everything is essentially of God, then God is also the source of evil. Dualism solves this problem by separating light from darkness, which, on the surface, appears a useful approach to dealing with everything that cannot, by its very nature, be of God. If evil is not of God, then it has its own existence and must be overcome.
Over and against this stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love life in the Pleroma. And I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine by its very nature. Man is, by his nature, divine. The world process is self-revelation of Divinity, it is taking place within Divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. There is no dualism of divine and extra-divine nature, of God’s absolute transcendence of the world and man.
I am entirely conscious of this antinomy of dualism and monism, and I accept it as insurmountable in consciousness and inevitable in religious life. Religious consciousness is essentially antinomic. In our consciousness, there is no escape from the eternal antinomy of transcendent and immanent, of dualism and monism.
Constructing one’s metaphysical assumptions — one’s deepest beliefs about the nature of reality — upon two contradictory principles or conclusions while accepting both as true hardly seems like a sound foundation upon which to base one’s religious thinking, yet this is exactly what Berdyaev admits to doing, primarily because he cannot conceive of any other option.
He is hardly alone. Virtually all Christian thinking though the ages has amounted to little more than perpetual ping-pong between the antinomy of dualism and monism, with the underlying understanding that religious consciousness must accept the antimony for the simple reason that monism and dualism can both be obtained by correct reasoning. Since both can be reasoned correctly, neither is necessarily false. Since neither is necessarily false, both are true — even though they blatantly contradict in every imaginable way.
This antinomy cannot be abolished, neither in conscience nor in reason, but in religious life, in the depth of religious experience itself.
I agree with Berdyaev here. Only religious experience can abolish the antinomy of monism and dualism, and this religious experience is pluralism and the existence of a non-Omni God. Some of Berdyaev’s radical assumptions pointed in that direction, but for reasons I cannot understand, Berdyaev just could not take the pluralist plunge.
I find this odd because pluralism would have provided a more than adequate “home” for nearly all of Berdyaev’s radical ideas, including:
and so forth.
I note the above because I sense that the antimony of monism and dualism within Christian thinking has been stretched to its limits and is coming to an end.
Christians who can find no escape from the eternal antinomy of transcendent and immanent, of dualism and monism in their religious experience will find it increasingly more difficult to remain Christian.
I arrived at this conclusion after rereading the introduction to Berdyaev’s seminal work, The Meaning of the Creative Act, in which Berdyaev outlines the following:
I know that I may be accused of a basic contradiction that tears apart all my sense of the world, all my world outlook. I shall be accused of the contradiction of combining an extreme religious dualism with an extreme religious monism. I accept such attacks in advance.
The basic contradiction Berdyaev mentions is the demarcation line of virtually all Christian thinking. Is everything of God or are only some parts of God? However, this supposed line of demarcation is illusory. The Trinity tempers extreme religious monism in Christianity — an extreme sense of the oneness of reality. Nevertheless, Trinitarianism is still a form of monism, and it inevitably incorporates some aspects of dualism — a division of reality into two distinct parts — into its framework. In this sense, Berdyaev’s basic contradiction essentially serves as the foundation of most Christian thinking.
I confess an almost Manichean dualism. So be it. “The world” is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, and overcome it completely: the world must be consumed; it is the nature Ahriman. Freedom from the world is the pathos of this book. There is an objective source of evil against which we must wage a heroic war. The necessity of the given world and the given world are of Ahriman.
Berdyaev addresses the weakness of all Christian monism in the passage above. If God has indeed created everything and everything is essentially of God, then God is also the source of evil. Dualism solves this problem by separating light from darkness, which, on the surface, appears a useful approach to dealing with everything that cannot, by its very nature, be of God. If evil is not of God, then it has its own existence and must be overcome.
Over and against this stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love life in the Pleroma. And I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine by its very nature. Man is, by his nature, divine. The world process is self-revelation of Divinity, it is taking place within Divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. There is no dualism of divine and extra-divine nature, of God’s absolute transcendence of the world and man.
I am entirely conscious of this antinomy of dualism and monism, and I accept it as insurmountable in consciousness and inevitable in religious life. Religious consciousness is essentially antinomic. In our consciousness, there is no escape from the eternal antinomy of transcendent and immanent, of dualism and monism.
Constructing one’s metaphysical assumptions — one’s deepest beliefs about the nature of reality — upon two contradictory principles or conclusions while accepting both as true hardly seems like a sound foundation upon which to base one’s religious thinking, yet this is exactly what Berdyaev admits to doing, primarily because he cannot conceive of any other option.
He is hardly alone. Virtually all Christian thinking though the ages has amounted to little more than perpetual ping-pong between the antinomy of dualism and monism, with the underlying understanding that religious consciousness must accept the antimony for the simple reason that monism and dualism can both be obtained by correct reasoning. Since both can be reasoned correctly, neither is necessarily false. Since neither is necessarily false, both are true — even though they blatantly contradict in every imaginable way.
This antinomy cannot be abolished, neither in conscience nor in reason, but in religious life, in the depth of religious experience itself.
I agree with Berdyaev here. Only religious experience can abolish the antinomy of monism and dualism, and this religious experience is pluralism and the existence of a non-Omni God. Some of Berdyaev’s radical assumptions pointed in that direction, but for reasons I cannot understand, Berdyaev just could not take the pluralist plunge.
I find this odd because pluralism would have provided a more than adequate “home” for nearly all of Berdyaev’s radical ideas, including:
- his heterodox idea of expanding Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund to absolve God of evil, thereby limiting God’s omnipotence,
- his vehement declarations of the primacy of uncreated freedom
- his insistence that man is called to co-create with God
- his announcements that the ultimate purpose of Divine Creation was to “create” more God-like creators
- his beliefs in the development of human consciousness
and so forth.
I note the above because I sense that the antimony of monism and dualism within Christian thinking has been stretched to its limits and is coming to an end.
Christians who can find no escape from the eternal antinomy of transcendent and immanent, of dualism and monism in their religious experience will find it increasingly more difficult to remain Christian.
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