Panel: POLITICAL MYSTICISM: DIALOGUE AND THE DIVINE IN DARK TIMES



927.7 - MYSTICISM AND ANARCHISM IN NIKOLAI BERDYAEV

AUTHORS:
Vitali Rosati F. (Università degli studi di Torino ~ Turin ~ Italy)
Text:
This paper explores the political theology of Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), arguing that it offers a distinctive attempt to rethink the ethical and social implications of mysticism within the crisis of modernity. Since his early work on the Russian "new religious consciousness" (1907), mysticism is broadly understood as the possibility for every subject to enter into direct communion with the divine, thereby bypassing the historical forms of symbolic and institutional mediation that structure religious and political life. From this perspective, mysticism becomes the basis for a radical critique of political authority and social domination. As a central category of Berdyaev's philosophy, mystical knowledge is not primarily a religious experience but rather an ethical "mode of being" in the world: a form of life grounded in an apophatic practice of detachment and oriented toward the liberation of the human being from the regime of objectification (objectivatsiia), which Berdyaev interprets as an enslaving condition shaped by domination and necessity. The paper examines key moments in Berdyaev's intellectual production in which the relationship between mysticism and the social sphere is articulated most clearly. Particular attention is devoted to Berdyaev's original reworking of heterogeneous theological sources, including the Tolstoyan pacifist tradition, the speculative mysticism of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme, and the eschatological horizon of Jewish thought (as highlighted, for example, by Jacob Taubes). Through this analysis, the paper situates Berdyaev's thought within broader debates on anarchism, freedom, and anti-authoritarian political theology in twentieth-century Europe.