Abstract
This article proposes to look at the concept of freedom formulated by Nicholas Berdyaev in his early work, Philosophy of Freedom, through the prism of kenotic Christology. The kenotic nature of the Incarnation of the Son of God, as it was described in the St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians and developed later by the Christian tradition, was connected with His renunciation of his own infinitude—adopting the “form of a servant” and embracing the limits of the human body. It was an absolutely free act of the divine Person, who revealed to man his own divine model and opened up for him the possibility of its implementation, i.e., the way to becoming a person. For Berdyaev, this possibility is conditioned by the ability to engage in a free act of kenosis, involving the renunciation of the compulsions of reason that have entangled us in natural forms of necessity and that reduce us to mere cogs in the machinery of nature. According to Berdyaev, this way of human kenosis is faith. The act of faith, understood as a rejection of the tendency to seek security through compelling evidence, constitutes a person in his/her uniqueness, and performatively realizes the similarity to God potentially present in every human.
Highlights
A is article proposes to look at the concept of freedom formulated by Nicholas Berdyaev in his early work, Philosophy of Freedom, through the prism of kenotic Christology. e kenotic nature of the Incarnation of the Son of God, as it was described in the St
Russian thought is full of ideas that can sound surprising, even strange, to the ears of someone who has grown up in Western culture, and who is accustomed to drawing fairly strict distinctions and lines of demarcation between different areas—such as religion and philosophy. e title of this text may strike the reader this way, associating as it does the notion of freedom with the theological term kenosis. is, reflects its object, which is an idea that demands to placed at the level of
E very idea of interpreting the concept of freedom—as it is present in the deliberations of Russian thinkers—in terms of kenosis was expressed explicitly in Tomáš Špidlík’s book, L’idée russe
Summary
A is article proposes to look at the concept of freedom formulated by Nicholas Berdyaev in his early work, Philosophy of Freedom, through the prism of kenotic Christology. e kenotic nature of the Incarnation of the Son of God, as it was described in the St. K enslavement; freedom; Incarnation; kenosis; kenotic Christology; Nicholas Berdyaev; person; rationalism
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