The Radical Dialectical Opposition Between War and Spirituality in the Christian Thinker Nikolai Berdyaev

In this paper we will present some approaches to the radical opposition between war and spirituality in N. Berdyaev's essay "War", which is included in his book The Divine and the Human.The Russian thinker, proceeding to a thorough reading of the historical path of man, is led to the assessment that war is one of its main characteristics and that it is due to social, political, economic, psychological, ethnic, or even ecclesiastical factors, which compose the mentality of expansionism and domination.He stresses that the opposing parties see this mentality as a source of self-fulfillment.Thus, war receives a value dimension, in terms actually of totalitarianism.In order to overcome this extreme antagonistic atmosphere, N. Berdyaev opposes the spiritual essence of truth, while he also refers to Jesus Christ, about whom he says that he was in radical opposition to individuals or groups who possessed power and evangelized the mystery of the church community and, by extension, the Kingdom of God.In such an environment of creative subversion, he estimates that humanism, spirituality, beauty and immortality would be pervasive.It is that historical reality in which the kingdom of the Spirit will have replaced the kingdom of Caesar, that is, the transition from the dominance of power to the loving realization of communicative relationships will have taken place.