THEOLOGICAL ETHICS
The Destiny of Man. By Nicolas Berdyaev. Translated by Natalie Duddington. (Bles. t6s.)
CHRISTIAN ethics is one of the live subjects of the day. The problems of war and divorce have raised questions concerning the Christian moral ideal in the minds of many who had never before conceived that ethics was a subject for rational enquiry, while the failure of the rationalists to produce any ethical system which commands general assent has driven others to consider once more the possibility that Christianity may after all have the decisive w )rd to say on this subject. We may observe too a change in the method of expounding the Christian moral ideal. In England and America until recently the prevailing fashion was to isolate the moral teaching of the Gospel from the theology of the Church and to suggest that the good life as exemplified by Jesus was independent of the dogmas which have been promulgated about Him. The decay of liberal protestantism on the Continent has brought with it a return to theological ethics. Dr. Brunner's book, The Divine Imperative, recently reviewed in these columns, was an example of this tendency coming from the school of the " dialectic theology " of the Reformed Church. This new book by Berdyaev is another instance, this time from within- the tradition of the Orthodox Church.
Berdyaev has nothing but contempt for the idea that we can discuss the question of the good for man apart from the questions, what kind of being man is, what kind of universe he inhabits and what place he occupies in it. It may well happen that Berdyaev's somewhat peremptory manner and his insistence on the doctrines of creation and original sin as prolegomena to ethics will deter philosophers from taking his moral theory seriously. If so, they will miss a great deal .which is suggestive and even profound.
Berdyaev treats the moral consciousness under three heads : the morality of Law, that of Redemption and that of " Crea- tiveness." Under each head he has something important to say, but his most original contribution is concerned with creativeness. The sentence from Gogol, " It is sad not to see any good in goodness," which stands on the title page of the book, is a clue to the deepest insight of the author. Virtue is dull unless it is creative. It may be suspected that Berdyaev has brought to light more paradoxes than he has been able to solve, but it is a merit to have seen them clearly. Not many moralists have faced the fact that genius and goodness are sometimes apparently incompatible with each other. " There is a tragic conflict," he writes, " between creativeness and personal perfettion.. . - Cre,ative genius is bestowed on man for nothing and is not connected with his moral or religious efforts to attain perfection and become a new creature. It stands as it were outside the ethics of law and the ethics of redemption and presupposes a different kind of morality." But this creativeness is not outside the scope of Christian ethics—the New Testament when it speaks of vocation and of the Holy Spirit takes us beyond the " mystery of redemption " into a sphere of duty where freedom assumes a new and positive meaning, that of " the possibility of building up new realities."
Though Berdyaev protests violently against individualism both in ethics and religion, his theory is essentially personal. The one imperative is to be oneself, that is to be as God intended one to be. The fundamental defect, he believes, of modem life is that it has no ideal of human personality,
nothing to compare with " the sage, the saint and the knight," and in the " comrade !' the ideal of Man is finally extinguished. The bourgeois is a man who has no personality- and the " comrade " is the bourgeois made perfect, the type of man who has lost his spiritual liberty. Berdyaev's book with its bold speculation and its frank employment of mythological conceptions is often bewildering and sometimes exasperating but always alive and challenging. It is the work of a philosopher
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