The letters between Nikolai Berdiaev and Jacques Maritain chronicle an important moment in the intellectual exchange between French Catholics and the Russian emigration to Paris. The emigration included such important Orthodox theologians as Sergius Bulgakov, Vladimir Losskii, Pavel Florovskii, and Semion Liudvigovich Frank. But also some of founders of Existentialism like Lev Shestov, whose Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy was important to the “Kierkegaard Craze” of the 1930s. And, of course, the heterodox philosopher of religion, Nikolai Berdiaev.
An Exceptional Dialogue has three parts. Part One is an excellent introductory essay by Ana Siljak explaining the basic philosophical positions of Berdiaev and Maritain. This is very helpful for anyone unfamiliar with both thinkers. Siljak outlines their fundamental agreements in political thought, and the fundamental metaphysical disagreement between the two friends. Part Two is a fine historical essay by Bernard Hubert chronicling the friendship, the ecumenical meetings set up by the two friends, the founding of the personalist movement with Emmanuel Mounier and the establishment of Esprit. And, Part Three the letters showing the metaphysical abyss between the basic thought of the two friends.
Hubert divides the correspondence into eight parts: 1) First contact between the writers; 2) The interfaith Franco-Russian meetings in Paris and then in Clarmart; 3) The debate over René Descartes and Cartesianism; 4) Disagreements about Fedor Dostoevskii; 5) The founding of Esprit and agreements on communism and disagreements about Freedom; 6) Raissa Maritain in the relation between Maritain and Berdiaev; 7) Maritain’s Integral Humanism vs. Berdiaev’s Solitude and Society; 8) Their common combat against antisemitism.
Maritain was attracted to Berdiaev’s political and social thought. Berdiaev published The End of Our Time in 1923 in Berlin after emigrating from the Soviet Union. It became popular among German and French intellectuals. The premise of the book was that European civilization had reached the end of humanism. The legacy of the Enlightenment had released anti-human forces, and culture was being destroyed by scientism, market capitalism, and technological mechanization. For Berdiaev, twentieth century Europeans were isolated in a capitalist society that makes them atomistic individuals in the system of market forces, or they are lost in the collective of socialist autocracy. Berdiaev’s distinction between Personalism and Individualism made his political thought attractive to Catholic Personalists. Both Mounier and Maritain agreed with Berdiaev’s critique of market capitalism, mechanization, and socialism. They all sought new forms of social justice that applied Christian morality to the working class.
Berdiaev and Maritain held profoundly different metaphysical positions that went far beyond being Orthodox and Catholic. The French Personalists considered Berdiaev a gnostic and, surprisingly, Berdiaev accepted the label. F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel, important in twentieth-century French thought, were also considered gnostics, although there is no line of influence between Schelling, Hegel, Vladimir Solovʹev, and Berdiaev, and the label of ancient Gnosticism has stuck.
Several exchanges of letters between Berdiaev and Maritain are important in this regard. Hubert describes the discussion of mysticism at one of the “Intimate Meetings” at Berdiaev’s home on May 13, 1930. Berdiaev spoke about Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund as groundless freedom beyond being at the basis of God and reality. The idea is fundamental to Berdiaev’s metaphysics. A professor at the Institut Catholique commented: “This is how heresies are born (60).” Berdiaev wrote in his autobiography he feared his ideas were “… irritating to Maritain” and “a challenge to our friendship (60).” In his letter of May 14, Maritain wrote that Boehme’s Ungrund: “… seeks in God something deeper that what God has revealed about Himself. What Pride (177)!” Berdiaev responded on May 23: “Gnosis for me is not pride of knowledge, but the only possibility of not contending with God, and its source is in moral and spiritual experience (178).” Another exchange came after publication of Berdiaev’s Freedom and the Spirit and Maritain’s On the Temporal Regime and Freedom. Berdiaev wrote that reading Maritain’s book convinced him Thomist philosophy is not a philosophy of freedom. Berdiaev argued for the primacy of freedom over being, Maritain claimed the primacy of being over freedom. Berdiaev claims his anti-ontological stance is tragic because emphasizing freedom over being points to the irrationality of the world (189). Maritain responded God is love and will ultimately triumph in the end, but being is always primordial.
One thing that is striking both in the story Hubert tells about the relationship and the tone of the letters themselves, even when the two philosophers stridently disagree on questions of metaphysics that were profoundly important for both is the obvious affection that the two share for one other.
