Berdyaev's “new middle ages” concept

The purpose of this article is to analyze N.A. Berdyaev's “New middle Ages” conception through the methodology of interdisciplinary synthesis developed by the Tomsk historiographic school led by B.G. Mogilnitsky. This makes N.A. Berdyaev's works a historiographic fact, reflecting the historical context, author's ideological, political and academic preferences, his belonging to a certain course of intellectual history. The main author's objective was to study evolution of Berdyaev's “New Middle Ages” concept, reflecting his thoughts on the world history and European culture fates in the twentieth century. In result, the author made the following conclusions: The religious historiosophy was the foundation of N.A. Berdyaev's worldview and historiographic attitudes, determined his assessment of world history's key events, characters and processes. Berdyaev's ideas about Christianity as a “revolutionary religion of freedom” formed his understanding of world history as the co-creation of God and man in the process of transforming the world. Thus, the Russian thinker created a new interpretation of Christianity as a messianic-eschatological and at the same time humanistic religion, embodying the great truth of history and the personal destiny of man, designed to free humanity from all bonds of natural and social slavery. The concept of the “New Middle Ages” reflected the existential nature of the historical and political discourse of the Russian thinker, whose personal experience contained the perceptions of two world wars, revolutions in Russia, Europe and Asia, totalitarianism, globalization. The symbolism of the “New Middle Ages” contained the basic sociocultural and political intentions of the Russian religious Renaissance: Christian humanism, personalism, liberal socialism. This N.A. Berdyaev's concept also combined two basic Slavophile's and Westernism historiographic doctrines: liberal modernism, Christian universalism and messianism, characteristics of Russian Europeanism as a whole. The synthesis of Christian universalism and liberal socialism has given the “New Middle Ages” concept features of a perspective utopia. The “New Middle Ages” concept reflected such original N.A. Berdyaev's historiographical constructs as “the end of Europe”, “awakening of the East”, “the old world of the New Age”, “the failure of history”, “the era of uncertainty”, “new barbarism”, “new creative era”. The author believes that Berdyaev's “New Middle Ages” concept was a continuation and creative development of Russian religious Renaissance intellectual tradition with its desire to search a new language of historical narrative towards synthesis of historical comparative studies, historiosophy, psychohistory and cultural anthropology.

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