CHAPTER 11 - Creativity and Morals: The New Ethic of Creativity
The creative New Testament morals of evangelic love have not been revealed in the Christian world—they have only been rarely glimpsed, like lighting flashes, in the lives of such chosen spirits as St. Francis. Christianity was oriented towards the world as a religion of obedience rather than a religion of love.
Christianity, as the revelation of grace, freedom and love, is something other than a set of morals under the law.
Traditional Christian morals are hostile to all heroism, to all heroic upswing of life, to heroic impulse, to heroic sacrifice. Traditional morals of the Christian world are bourgeois in the profoundest sense of the word.
In the patristic, traditionally Christian consciousness, negative virtues—humility, self-denial, abstinence—eclipsed the positive virtues of courage, nobility and honor.
(Christian morality) is impregnated with the pathos of small acts and modest situations; it is afraid of great, heroic, broad-winged action. And the lack of wings has been raised almost to the rank of religious heroism.
This type of morality has no love for the heights; it is hostile to any aristocratic spirit.
Everything which evaluates a man not by his innate qualities but rather by his situation or the milieu in which he lives is bourgeois.
The Christian conquest of “this world” is a conquest of all bourgeoisity; it is the sacrifice of worldly profit and well-being to nobility and beauty as a way of life.
Man cannot live in this world and create new life using only the morality of submission, only the morality of conflict with his own sins. One who lives in constant terror at his own sins is powerless to accomplish anything in the world.
Every man must pass through the redemption and commune with its mystery. The moment of redemption from sin in the life of a man is inevitably connected with obedience and humility, with renunciation of self-assertion, with the sacrifice of spiritual pride.
But it is impossible to construct a whole life-ethic on humility and submission. If they are recognized as the only guides of life, the great moments of humility and submissiveness can easily be turned into slavery, hypocrisy and spiritual death. Spiritual efforts of humility and submission are only movements on the way—the goal is the creation of new life in love.
The moral ideal of the Church Fathers was that of “starchestvo”—the tradition of certain holy elders in the monasteries. It decries youth, it denies the creative impulse and upsurge; it is afraid of youth.
Through the redemption the world will come to a new creative morality of youth in the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Absolute Man, is eternally young.
The morality of the Gospels is carefree and does not permit of worrying. The care-burdened morality, the morality of worry, is the bourgeois morality of this world. The morals of the elders easily turn into the morals of old age, the morals of constant fear, constant anxiety, constant concern about the troubles of tomorrow, perpetual denial of the divinely care-free birds of the heaven and the lilies of the field.
Creative morality cannot be based upon separating and placing opposite each other the human and the divine. Creative morality will always reveal the seraphic nature of man.
There is a morality of the aristocratic nobility of the spirit and a morality of the serf-like plebeian spirit. Christian morality is not slavishly-plebeian but rather aristocratically-noble, the morality of the sons of God, with their primogeniture, their high birth and their high calling. Christianity is the religion of the strong in spirit, not the weak. The Christian ethic is an ethic of spiritual victory rather than spiritual defeat.
True Christian morality lays on man, who has become a son of God, free responsibility for his own fate and for the fate of the world.
The whole worth of man is in his participation in God and in divine life, in his striving upward.
When man is aided by the God-man Redeemer, this is not some external help, alien to man’s nature, but an inward aid which reveals his own natural likeness to God, his own participation in divine life. Christ is not outside us but within us. He is the Absolute Man in us. He is our communion with the Holy Trinity.
The religion of Christ is the religion of man’s highest powers—it is the very opposite of all weakness or depression in man. Christianity is a way of the revelation in every man of the Man Absolute.
The way of Christian morality leads through sacrifice to creativeness, through renunciation of this world to the creation of a new world and a new life.
Christianity does not permit a lowering of quality for the sake of quantity—it is wholly in quality, i.e. in aristocratic value.
Christian morality is always something of the heights, something which uplifts, rather than a thing of the valley, something which flattens out.
In the world-crisis of morals the longing for moral creativeness is struggling forth, the longing for morals as creativeness rather than obedience. The crisis of moralism, the protest against the law of moral submission, is also a foretaste of a new world-epoch, an epoch of creativeness.
Never yet, in any epoch, has there been born out of canonic morality a new community of men. Like every other law, morality has done more to denounce evil than to create higher truth in life.
Average morality, which has held off the beginning of the end, which hides the ultimate limits of being, must itself sooner or later come to an end and be overcome by the creative effort of the human spirit.
What, then, is the essence of the moral crisis? The essence is above all a revolutionary movement from a consciousness for which morality means submission to a general-average law, over to a consciousness for which morality is a creative problem of individuality.
Creative morality is not the fulfillment of law; it is the revelation of man in moral creativeness. The sinful side of human nature remains oriented towards the law, but its creative side surpasses the law.
In our bourgeois epoch, the task of creating a spiritual chivalry, a chivalry of the spirit, stands before the elect of mankind with new compulsive power. That every value is aristocratic—this is the revelation of the spirit of chivalry.
Aristocratic morals (in the metaphysical rather than the social sense of the word) are morals of value, of quality, of individuality, of creativeness. And every degradation of value, of quality, of individuality or creativeness is a sin against God and against the divine in Man.
CHAPTER 11 - Creativity and Morals: The New Ethic of Creativity
The creative New Testament morals of evangelic love have not been revealed in the Christian world—they have only been rarely glimpsed, like lighting flashes, in the lives of such chosen spirits as St. Francis. Christianity was oriented towards the world as a religion of obedience rather than a religion of love.
Christianity, as the revelation of grace, freedom and love, is something other than a set of morals under the law.
Traditional Christian morals are hostile to all heroism, to all heroic upswing of life, to heroic impulse, to heroic sacrifice. Traditional morals of the Christian world are bourgeois in the profoundest sense of the word.
In the patristic, traditionally Christian consciousness, negative virtues—humility, self-denial, abstinence—eclipsed the positive virtues of courage, nobility and honor.
(Christian morality) is impregnated with the pathos of small acts and modest situations; it is afraid of great, heroic, broad-winged action. And the lack of wings has been raised almost to the rank of religious heroism.
This type of morality has no love for the heights; it is hostile to any aristocratic spirit.
Everything which evaluates a man not by his innate qualities but rather by his situation or the milieu in which he lives is bourgeois.
The Christian conquest of “this world” is a conquest of all bourgeoisity; it is the sacrifice of worldly profit and well-being to nobility and beauty as a way of life.
Man cannot live in this world and create new life using only the morality of submission, only the morality of conflict with his own sins. One who lives in constant terror at his own sins is powerless to accomplish anything in the world.
Every man must pass through the redemption and commune with its mystery. The moment of redemption from sin in the life of a man is inevitably connected with obedience and humility, with renunciation of self-assertion, with the sacrifice of spiritual pride.
But it is impossible to construct a whole life-ethic on humility and submission. If they are recognized as the only guides of life, the great moments of humility and submissiveness can easily be turned into slavery, hypocrisy and spiritual death. Spiritual efforts of humility and submission are only movements on the way—the goal is the creation of new life in love.
The moral ideal of the Church Fathers was that of “starchestvo”—the tradition of certain holy elders in the monasteries. It decries youth, it denies the creative impulse and upsurge; it is afraid of youth.
Through the redemption the world will come to a new creative morality of youth in the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Absolute Man, is eternally young.
The morality of the Gospels is carefree and does not permit of worrying. The care-burdened morality, the morality of worry, is the bourgeois morality of this world. The morals of the elders easily turn into the morals of old age, the morals of constant fear, constant anxiety, constant concern about the troubles of tomorrow, perpetual denial of the divinely care-free birds of the heaven and the lilies of the field.
Creative morality cannot be based upon separating and placing opposite each other the human and the divine. Creative morality will always reveal the seraphic nature of man.
There is a morality of the aristocratic nobility of the spirit and a morality of the serf-like plebeian spirit. Christian morality is not slavishly-plebeian but rather aristocratically-noble, the morality of the sons of God, with their primogeniture, their high birth and their high calling. Christianity is the religion of the strong in spirit, not the weak. The Christian ethic is an ethic of spiritual victory rather than spiritual defeat.
True Christian morality lays on man, who has become a son of God, free responsibility for his own fate and for the fate of the world.
The whole worth of man is in his participation in God and in divine life, in his striving upward.
When man is aided by the God-man Redeemer, this is not some external help, alien to man’s nature, but an inward aid which reveals his own natural likeness to God, his own participation in divine life. Christ is not outside us but within us. He is the Absolute Man in us. He is our communion with the Holy Trinity.
The religion of Christ is the religion of man’s highest powers—it is the very opposite of all weakness or depression in man. Christianity is a way of the revelation in every man of the Man Absolute.
The way of Christian morality leads through sacrifice to creativeness, through renunciation of this world to the creation of a new world and a new life.
Christianity does not permit a lowering of quality for the sake of quantity—it is wholly in quality, i.e. in aristocratic value.
Christian morality is always something of the heights, something which uplifts, rather than a thing of the valley, something which flattens out.
In the world-crisis of morals the longing for moral creativeness is struggling forth, the longing for morals as creativeness rather than obedience. The crisis of moralism, the protest against the law of moral submission, is also a foretaste of a new world-epoch, an epoch of creativeness.
Never yet, in any epoch, has there been born out of canonic morality a new community of men. Like every other law, morality has done more to denounce evil than to create higher truth in life.
Average morality, which has held off the beginning of the end, which hides the ultimate limits of being, must itself sooner or later come to an end and be overcome by the creative effort of the human spirit.
What, then, is the essence of the moral crisis? The essence is above all a revolutionary movement from a consciousness for which morality means submission to a general-average law, over to a consciousness for which morality is a creative problem of individuality.
Creative morality is not the fulfillment of law; it is the revelation of man in moral creativeness. The sinful side of human nature remains oriented towards the law, but its creative side surpasses the law.
In our bourgeois epoch, the task of creating a spiritual chivalry, a chivalry of the spirit, stands before the elect of mankind with new compulsive power. That every value is aristocratic—this is the revelation of the spirit of chivalry.
Aristocratic morals (in the metaphysical rather than the social sense of the word) are morals of value, of quality, of individuality, of creativeness. And every degradation of value, of quality, of individuality or creativeness is a sin against God and against the divine in Man.
The Meaning of the Creative Act
Nicolas Berdyaev
CHAPTER 6 - Creativity and Freedom: Individualism and Universalism
Creativity is inseparable from freedom. Only he who is free creates. Out of necessity can be born only evolution. Creativity is born of liberty. When we speak in our imperfect human language about creativity out of nothing, we are really speaking of creativity out of freedom.
Viewed from the standpoint of determinism, freedom is “nothing,” it surpasses all fixed or determined orders, it is conditioned by nothing else; and what is born of freedom does not derive from previously existing causes, from “something.” Human creativity out of “nothing” does not mean the absence of resistant material, but only an absolute increment or gain which is not determined by anything else. Only evolution is determined: creativity derives from nothing which precedes it. Creativity is inexplicable: creativity is the mystery of freedom.
The mystery of freedom is immeasurably deep and inexplicable. Just as deep and inexplicable is the mystery of creativity. In creative freedom there is an inexplicable and mysterious power to create out of nothing, undetermined, adding energy to the existing circulation of energy in the world. As regards the data of the world and the closed circle of the world’s energy, the act of creative freedom breaks out of the determined chain of the world’s energy.
Creativity is something which proceeds from within, out of immeasurable and inexplicable depths, not from without, not from the world’s necessity. The very desire to make the creative act understandable, to find a basis for it, is failure to comprehend it.
To comprehend the creative act means to recognize that it is inexplicable and without foundation.
Freedom is the ultimate: it cannot be derived from anything: it cannot be made the equivalent of anything. Freedom is the baseless foundation of being: it is deeper than all being. We cannot penetrate to a rationally-perceived base for freedom. Freedom is a well of immeasurable depth—its bottom is the final mystery.
Freedom is positive and full of meaning. Freedom is not only a denial of necessity and determinism. Freedom is not a realm of chance and willfulness, as distinguished from the realm of law-abiding and of necessity.
Man’s spirit is free only in so far as it is supernatural, transcending and going beyond the order of nature. Freedom and creativity tell us that man is not only a natural, but a supernatural being. And this means that man is not only a physical being and not only a psychic being, in the natural meaning of the word. Man is a free, supernatural spirit, a microcosm.
Freedom is positive creative power rather than negative arbitrariness. The negative consciousness of one’s freedom as arbitrary free will is a falling into sin. Negative freedom, freedom as arbitrary free will, is freedom without content and void. To desire freedom for its own sake, freedom without purpose or content, is to desire emptiness, to turn away towards non-being. Freedom, conceived only formally, without purpose or content, is nothing, emptiness, non-being. Freedom in the Fall was this kind of negative, formal freedom and emptiness and non-being—it was freedom for freedom, i.e. freedom from rather than freedom for.
Freedom in the Fall was not freedom for creativeness, not creative freedom. The falling away from God deprives freedom of its content and its purpose, impoverishes it, deprives it of power. The positive, creative purpose and content of freedom could not yet be conceived at that stage of creation, the seven-day stage, since in creation there had not yet been revealed the Absolute Man, the Son of God, the revelation of the Eighth Day. In the seven-day creation there was possible only a trial of freedom.
This freedom is born of the union of the human nature of Jesus with the divine nature of Christ. The cosmic mystery of the redemption overcomes formal and empty freedom and the necessity which is born of it.
Human nature, become son of God, rises to the consciousness of material freedom full of creative purpose. Freedom is penetrated by universal love. Freedom is henceforth inseparable from its universal content. Freedom from is in sin: freedom for is in creativeness. Adam’s freedom in the seven-day creation is different from his freedom in the creation of the eighth day. The freedom of the new Adam, joined with the Absolute Man, is creative freedom, freedom which continues the work of God’s creativity, freedom which does not revolt against God in negative arbitrary willfulness.
Adam’s freedom was the first stamp of man’s likeness to the Creator. And even in paralyzing sin there was still a sign of man’s power.
Love is the content of freedom—love is the freedom of the new Adam, the freedom of the eighth day of creation.
Love is creativeness.
The all-vivifying and spiritualizing rise of fallen man is possible only through the advent of the Absolute Man, bringing man’s nature into communion with divine nature. The Redeemer and Savior of the world exorcizes the spell and casts off the fetters of necessity. He is the Liberator.
Individualism is a devastation of individuality, its impoverishment, a diminution of its universal content, i.e. a tendency towards non-being. Individuality and individualism are opposites. Individualism is the enemy of individuality. Man is an organic member of the universal cosmic hierarchy, and the richness of his content is in direct proportion to his union with the cosmos. Man’s individuality finds complete expression only in universal, cosmic life.
Man is infinitely poor and empty if there is nothing higher than himself, if there is no God; and man is infinitely rich and meaningful if there is something higher, if God does exist.
To know the creative activity of the person means being a creatively active person. Like knows like. The inner relationship between the subject of knowing and the object of knowing is a necessary condition of true knowing. Only the free man knows freedom; only the creating man knows creativity. Only the spirit knows the spiritual. Only the microcosm knows the macrocosm. To know anything in the world is to have this in oneself.
Every creative act has universal, cosmic significance. The creative act of the personality enters the cosmic hierarchy, gives it deliverance from the power of lower materialized hierarchies, unfetters being. In its freedom and its creativeness the personality cannot be separated from the cosmos, cannot be divorced from universal being.
In its mystic essence the Church is universality, a cosmic organism, a universal, cosmic hierarchy with Christ in the heart of being.
Solitude is not necessarily individualism. Solitude, a man’s being alone, is not alienation from the cosmos. It may be only a symptom of the fact that a personality has outgrown certain conditions under which others live, and its universal content is not yet recognized by the others. The supreme solitude is divine. God, Himself, knows great and anguished solitude. He has the experience of being deserted by the world and by men. Christ was solitary and not understood during His life. Men accepted and understood Christ only after His death on the Cross. Solitude is quite compatible with universality: there may be more of the universal spirit in solitude than in a herded society. Every act of courage, every creative initiative, gives a sense of solitude, of being unrecognized—transcends every given community.
We must never forget that the religious way moves from the personality to society, from the inward to the outer, toward the cosmos by way of individuality.
God expects from man the highest freedom, the freedom of the eighth day of creation. This, God’s expectation, lays on man a great responsibility. The final, ultimate freedom, the daring of freedom and the burden of freedom, is the virtue of religious maturity.
To arrive at religious maturity means to know final freedom. The immaturity of Christian consciousness has hitherto made impossible a knowledge of man’s ultimate freedom. Christianity has always been a training, a guardianship of the immature. And hence Christianity has not yet revealed itself in fullness, as an experience of freedom.
The religion of freedom is a religion of apocalyptic times. Only the final time will know the final freedom. Christianity, as a religion of training and guardianship of the immature, as a religion of the fear of temptation for the immature, is being deformed and is becoming torpid. But only a religion of freedom, a religion of daring and not of fear, can answer to man’s present age, to the times and seasons of today.
We can no longer refuse the time of freedom: Christian men are now too old, not only ripe but over-ripe for that. At the end of the Christian path there dawns the consciousness that God expects from man such a revelation of freedom as will contain even what God Himself has not foreseen.
God justifies the mystery of freedom, having by His might and power set a limit to His own foreseeing. Those not free are not needed by God, they do not belong in the divine cosmos. Hence freedom is not a right: it is an obligation. Freedom is a religious virtue. He who is not free, the slave, cannot enter the kingdom of God: he is not a son of God; he is subject to lower spheres.
CHAPTER 7 - Creativity and Asceticism: The Genius and the Saint >>