Freedom Before Being: Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, and the Ontology of the Ungrund. Reconsidering Divine Antinomy and Uncreated Freedom in Russian Religious Thought

This essay examines Nikolai Berdyaev’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s metaphysical vision through the prism of the Ungrund, the “uncreated freedom” first articulated by Jacob Böhme. Berdyaev’s claim that freedom precedes being – and even precedes God’s self-determination – marks a decisive break with the classical theistic conception of actus purus, the pure act, connoting God’s absolute perfection and immutability. By situating Dostoevsky within a dialectical lineage stretching from Heraclitus to Böhme and Hegel, this study argues that the drama of freedom in Dostoevsky’s characters expresses a latent ontology of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites – the term introduced by the 15th-century philosopher Nicolas of Cusa –, in which contradiction becomes the very principle of life. Yet, while Dostoevsky intuits freedom as ontological rather than merely volitional, his theology remains bound to the monolithic image of God inherited from patristic thought. The essay concludes that Berdyaev’s metaphysics of uncreated freedom offers a corrective to this tension, opening a path toward a dynamic ontology in which divine and human creativity coexist within the same abyssal ground of being – the Ungrund. Keywords: Berdyaev; Dostoevsky; ontology; actus purus; uncreated freedom; antinomy; Russian philosophy.