Versions of Freedom: Nicolas Berdyaev and John Cowper Powys

Introduced by Professor John Hooker, Bath Spa University College, on 16 February 1999

The Russian religious thinker, Nicolas Berdyaev (1874-1948), was from an aristocratic background. After early involvement with Marxism he returned to Orthodox Christianity, and was expelled from Russia in 1922, settling eventually near Paris.

The keywords of his thought are personality, freedom, and creativeness. Berdyaev was a prolific writer, and he developed his philosophy in numerous books, including (in English translation) Freedom and the Spirit (1935), Slavery and Freedom (1943), The Meaning of the Creative Act (1955), and his autobiography Dream and Reality (1950). Berdyaev sees the human person's reflection of the divine image and likeness as "its sole claim to existence". Freedom is a human duty, not a right. By his creativeness, man (Berdyaev employs the male pronoun) responds to God, who is freedom, not power: "God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God".

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) , the English novelist, poet and philosopher, best known for Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933) and Autobiography (1934), responded keenly to Berdyaev's thought in books which Powys published in the 1940s, Mortal Strife, Dostoievsky and Rabelais. Powys, too, had a philosophy of the freedom of the personality, and in this respect he evidently felt an affinity with Berdyaev. Powys praised Berdyaev warmly, finding his Slavery and Freedom, for example, "very noble and very moving". But Powys had rejected the idea of God presiding over the universe as a tyrannical system, and espoused the idea of a multiverse of free personalities - not only human ones, for Powys sees consciousness as present throughout the natural world - all with their own power of creation and destruction. To Powys, "the wholesome element of anarchy in our western world" is "that Freedom of the Spirit, which Berdyaev praises only to betray".

Berdyaev remained for Powys the modern theologian to whom he was most sympathetic, but represented for him, nevertheless, the theological opposition to his own idea of freedom in a godless multiverse. In his post-war fiction, especially his major novel Porius (1951), Powys's hostility to orthodox Christianity strengthened, as he came to associate it with totalitarianism. As he wrote: "Our superstitious cringing before the All-powerful.... makes the whole cosmos a concentration camp".
Powys's encounter with Berdyaev's thought can be seen to have helped him develop his radically different ideas of the meaning of the keywords they held in common.

John Hooker