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<font size="4">Nicholas
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</B><FONT face="Times New Roman" size="4"><B>Berdyaev :</B></FONT><B><font size="4"><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"> </FONT>God Made Human</font></B></p>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>NICHOLAS
Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to
be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a
Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world
truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more
limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the
value of human person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to
it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to
have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even
more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the
true person is a spiritual being, that is to say, it is quite other
than the empirical ego that man normally is-&quot;not this that one
worships&quot; as the Upanishads too declare. Further, in his
spiritual being man, the individual, is not simply a portion or a
fraction; he is, on the contrary, an integer, a complete whole, a
creative focus; the true individual is a microcosm yet holding in it
and imaging the macrocosm. Only perhaps greater stress is laid upon
the aspect of creativity or activism. An Eastern sage, a Vedantin,
would look for the true spiritual reality behind the flux of forces:
Prakriti or Energy is only the executive will of the Purusha, the
Conscious .Being. The personality in Nature is a formulation and
emanation of the transcendent impersonality.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>There is another aspect of personality as viewed by
Berdyaev which involves a bias of the more orthodox Christian faith:
the Christ is inseparable from the Cross. So he says: &quot;There is
no such thing as personality if there is no capacity for suffering.
Suffering is inherent in God too, if he is a personality, and not</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 129</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>merely
an abstract idea. God shares in the sufferings of men. He yearns for
responsive love. There are divine as well as human passions and
therefore divine or creative personality must always suffer to the
end of time. A condition of anguish and distress is inherent in it.&quot;
The view is logically enforced upon the Christian, it is said, if he
is to accept incarnation, God becoming flesh. Flesh cannot but be
weak. This very weakness, so human, is and must be specially
characteristic of God also, if he is one with man and his lover and
saviour.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Eastern spirituality does not view sorrow and suffering
– evil – as an integral part of the Divine Consciousness. It is
born out of the Divine, no doubt, as nothing can be outside the
Divine, but it is a local and temporal formation; it is a disposition
consequent upon certain conditions and with the absence or
elimination of those conditions, this disposition too disappears. God
and the Divine Consciousness can only be purity, light, immortality
and delight. The compassion that a Buddha feels for the suffering
humanity is not at all a feeling of suffering; pain or any such
normal human reaction does not enter into its composition; it is the
movement of a transcendent consciousness which is beyond and purified
of the normal reactions, yet overarching them and entering into them
as a soothing and illumining and vivifying presence. The healer knows
and understands the pain and suffering of his patient but is not
touched by them; he need not contract the illness of his patient in
order to be in sympathy with him. The Divine -the Soul-can be in
flesh and yet not smirched with its mire; the flesh is not
essentially or irrevocably the ooze it is under certain given
conditions. The divine physical body is composed of radiant matter
and one can speak of it even as of the soul that weapons cannot
pierce it nor can fire burn it.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 130</FONT></P>
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