Berdyaev Nikolai, The Destiny of Humans in the Modern World, transl. Eytychia V. Youltsi, P. Pournaras Publ., Thessaloniki, 1980, pp. 143.
The present book of the Russian religious philosopher completes his trilogy on the philosophy of history. The preceding books of the trilogy were The Meaning of History and The New Middle Age. Written during the interwar period, it is permeated by an intense agony in the face of various visible and invisible threats to human societies and it constitutes a prophetic and critical approach to the historic destiny of humans and civilization.
The author’s main concern is in the human person, which he considers under threat, particularly in the period that he writes, by ante-personal objectifications leading to inhumanity. He sees the failure of history in the tragedy which emanates from the discordance between what actually exists – the human and the personal – and objectification, the subjugation of the dissimilar and unrepeatable human persons to illiberal and oppressive collectivities and various –isms.
The author describes his era as civilized barbarism. War, the praise of violence, capitalism, biological racism, rapid urbanisation, individualism, proletarisation, the elevation of states and collectivities to God-like status, mass phenomena, idolisation etc. constitute some of the threats to human destiny. According to Berdyaev, they tend to dominate, control and prevail completely on the spiritual order of the human person.
However, the book refrains from pessimistic and hopeless conclusions. It sources its prophetic optimism from the dynamics of Christianity. This is not historical Christianity, burdened with a plethora of failures, misses and compromises but the authentic Christianity, which is the hope and ultimate abode of humanity. The conclusion comes from a social point of view, that only a person-centred state socialism which combines community and the human person can correspond to the authentic Christianity. The renaissance of this authentic Christianity will lead to the transcendence of human and social problems and constitute a revelation of the Holy Spirit.