International Journal of Orthodox Theology 3:4 (2012) 141

urn:nbn:de:0276-2012-4079

Gaelan Gilbert

A New Middle Ages?

A Reappraisal   of   Nicholas   Berdyaev’s  
Prophetic Imagination1

Abstract

With the intention of recuperating the

work of a prolific thinker as a
resource for Orthodox social practice
and public policy, this essay considers
the significance of Nicholas Berdy-
aev’s  1933  book  The End of our Time,
alternatively titled The New Middle
Ages, as an Orthodox critique of the Gaelan Gilbert is doctoral
cultural, political and economic candidate in medieval
systems of modern society. My study literature and Vanderkerk-
hove Research Fellow at
indicates  not  only  Berdyaev’s  seeming  
the Centre for Studies in
prescience in offering important Religion and Society at the
evaluations of distinct social forms University of Victoria, BC.
and their negative consequences, but He has studied in Greece
also in proposing creative suggestions and taught in California,
for the adaptation of those forms by France, and Canada.

1 This paper was presented in a condensed form at the George

Florovsky   Society’s   2011   Pilgrims and Pioneers conference at
Princeton Theological Seminary.
142 Gaelan Gilbert

modern Orthodox Christians to facilitate new Orthodox modes

of public social existence.

Keywords

Berdyaev, society, capitalism, asceticism, medieval, modern,

nationalism, Orthodox, imagination

In this essay, I shall consider the significance of Nicholas

Berdyaev’s  1933  book  The End of our Time, alternatively titled,
The New Middle Ages2 as an Orthodox response to the cultural,
political and economic systems of modern society. My study
will indicate his seeming prescience in offering both important
critiques of distinct social forms and creative suggestions for
the responsible adaptation of those forms by modern Orthodox
Christians.

I.
As the title of this paper suggests, Berdyaev turns to premodern
models as a lens through which to analyze modern social
existence. Such an interpretation is not reducible to escapism,
nor should it be seen as irrelevant or outdated, particularly for
Orthodoxy,   which,   in   a   way   still   inconceivable   to   ‘the   West,’  
consistently draws from premodern (patristic) sources for
ethical and social wisdom. Intriguingly, much recent
scholarship from a range of disciplines has also turned to the
Middle Ages for analogues in characterizing emergent political
and economic institutions, whether domestic or international.3

2 Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, (London: Sheed &

Ward, 1933).
3 John   Rapley,   “The   New   Middle   Ages,”   Foreign Affairs, 85.3
(May-Jun. 2006), 95-103.
 A New Middle Ages? … 143

A school of International Relations (IR) theory known as

neomedievalism, for instance, sees in the versatile structures
and tactics of Middle Eastern sub-national polities some
persuasive evidence for what the Strategic Studies Institute
calls  “the  decline  of  the  state,”  which  is  a  distinctively  modern  
governmental form.4
Echoing   Berdyaev’s   concerns,   Oxford political theorist Jorg
Friedrichs (following Hedley Bull) has argued for the
importance   of   premodern   civic   space   as   “a   system   of  
overlapping   authority   and   multiple   loyalty”   for   understanding  
public governance in the twenty-first century.5 Even Ramsey-
prize winning Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has
recently argued that American forms of religious organization
like the so-called  ‘mega-church’  are  indicators  of  the  “immense  
institutional transformations that may lie ahead for American
Christianity.” Hart suggests that mega-churches are a type of
sub-national polity that could conceivably mediate between
individuals  and  the  State,  and  thus  “might  be  taken  as  […]  a  kind  
of new mediaevalism, an attempt to gather small cities into the
precincts of the church and to retreat into them from a world
increasingly  inimical  to  spiritual  longing.”6

4 See Phil Williams, From the New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The
Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy. (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies
Institute,  2008),  ix.  For  more  on  IR  theory’s  neomedievalism,  see  also;  
Philip   G.   Cerny,   “Neomedievalism,   Civil   War   and   the   New   Security  
Dilemma: Globalisation As Durable Disorder,”   Civil Wars, 1.1 (1998):
36-64;   and   Stephen   J.   Kobrin,   “Back   to   the   Future:   Neomedievalism  
and  the  Postmodern  Digital  Economy,”  Journal of International Affairs,
51.2 (Spring 1998): 361-86; and of course Hedley Bull, The Anarchical
Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 3rd edition.
5 Jorg Friedrichs, European Approaches to International Relations Theory,
(London:  Routledge,  2007),  133.  See  especially  ch.  7,  “The  meaning  of  
new medievalism: An exercise in  theoretical  reconstruction,”  127-45.
6 David Bentley Hart, In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 53. From an
144 Gaelan Gilbert

As the above examples suggest, the premodern European past

can provide versatile models for assessing emergent forms of
twenty-first century social organization. Yet at this point
perhaps we should ask whether we are among those who, as
Berdyaev  puts   it,   “cannot   bear  any  suggestion  of  a   return  to  the  
ideas of the middle ages and zealously oppose any tendencies
which   they   consider   mediaeval.”7 Surely we are! As cultural
historian Nicholas Watson astutely notes,
Considered as an ideology, modernity is a dogma at whose
core is a set of beliefs about time (that time is uni-
directional, progressive, and so on) in which the postmodern
moment has also been quietly invested and which tend
strongly to validate the as-yet-nonexistent future at the
expense   of   the   past.   Hence   The   New   York   Times’s  
assumption that any irruption of irrationality into the
present   is   ‘‘medieval,’’   for,   speaking   dogmatically,   the  
medieval is the discarded past: the decayed, gothic edifice on
whose ruins were built the state, economic progress,
secularism, and civil society. All this is, perhaps, obvious. But
how did this dogma arise? What are its implications for
Western  culture’s  relationship  with  its  history?8
Berdyaev’s   New Middle Ages seeks to respond to these
questions,  arguing  in  a  similar  vein  that  “it  is  time  that  people  
stopped  talking  of  the  ‘darkness  of  the  middle  ages’  in  contrast  
with   the   ‘light’   of   modern   history;   such   talk   represents   views  

Orthodox point of view monasteries would perhaps better embody this

aim, although types   of   what   Berdyaev   would   call   “co-operative
association”  organized  by  laity  may  be  closer.  While  mega-churches as
they now exist in America function mainly as combinations of
spectacular entertainment and pious consumerism, a locally-oriented,
diocese-based, homegrown Orthodox rendition is not inconceivable.
7 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 101.
8 See   Nicholas   Watson,   “The   Phantasmal   Past:   Time,   History,   and   the  
Recombinative  Imagination,”   Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010):
3.
 A New Middle Ages? … 145

which   are   too   thin   […]   to   be   worthy   of   the   level   of  

contemporary  historical  scholarship.”9 Rather, the medieval era
has  much  to  offer:  “[f]or  long  it  was  believed  that  this  complex  
and rich period had been a great void in the intellectual history
of mankind and of its philosophical thought, when as a matter
of fact these centuries had so many excellent thinkers and such
diversity in the realm of their thought that nothing like it can be
found   at   any   other   epoch.”10 Yet what Berdyaev is proposing
when he speaks about a new middle ages is not a return to an
outdated   past,   for   “[w]hen   we   speak   of   passing   from   modern  
history to the middle ages it is a figure of speech; such passage
can  take  place  only  to  a  new  middle  age,  not  to  the  old  one.”11
Yet neither for Berdyaev does the more recent past offer a
viable option:
The old worn-out world to which we can never go back is
precisely the world of modern history: a world of
rationalist prophets, of individualism and Humanism,
Liberalism and democratic theories, of imposing national
monarchies and imperialist politics, of a monstrous
economic system compounded of Industrialism and
Capitalism, of vast technical apparatus, of exterior
conquests and practical achievements; a world of
unbridled and endless covetousness in its public life, of
atheism and supreme disdain for the soul.12
And so, if we are not to go back, either to an old middle ages or
to   a  worn   out  modernity,   we  must  go  forward:  “without   fear   or  
discouragement, we must leave this day of modern history and
enter a mediaeval night. May God dispel all false and deceptive
light.”13 As apophatic as he is realistic, Berdyaev combines

9 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 101-02.

10 Ibid, 103.
11 Ibid, 101.
12 Ibid, 78.
13 Ibid, 63.
146 Gaelan Gilbert

fearlessness  with  hope:  “[n]ight  is  not  less  wonderful  than  day,  
it is equally the work of God; it is lit by the splendour of the
stars and it  reveals  to  us  things  that  the  day  does  not  know.”14
My contribution in this essay is to explore how one innovative
and outspoken Orthodox thinker succeeds in rendering
intelligible certain problematic aspects of modern social
existence. Putting forward his writings as an imaginative and
exemplary Christian response to contemporary socio-economic
issues,  I  shall  inquire  how  Berdyaev’s  critical  perspectives  can  
inform Orthodox social existence today. The answer, I suspect,
derives from his acute analysis of modern society and
subsequent description of a robust counter-praxis grounded in
the active public role of the laity of the Church. Recuperating
Berdyaev’s  vision  today  is  more  imperative  than  ever  because,  
in the face of unprecedented economic corruption, moral decay,
and political violence, a uniquely Orthodox stance on the
Church’s   visible   role   within   modern   society   is   sorely  needed.   In  
all its greed, fear, lust and anger, the world unknowingly longs
for redemption and union with its maker and Lord, Jesus Christ,
as proclaimed by the Church. Given the exigencies of its
transhistorical mission, in seeking to share the Gospel message
publicly the Orthodox Church can benefit from an awareness of
the   ‘neomedieval’   forms   of   social   organization   that   are  
emerging on a global scale. The reappraisal offered here of
Nicholas   Berdyaev’s   prophetic   imagination   (in   Brueggeman’s  
sense),   as   a   “voice   crying   in   the   wilderness”   of   twentieth-
century society, is intended in some small measure to facilitate
such an awareness.

II.

14 Ibid, 70-71.
 A New Middle Ages? … 147

When  Berdyaev  suggests  that  “in  the  name  of  the  Christian  idea  
of man we must burn away the idolatry and superstitions of a
lying  and   destructive  Humanism,”   our  first  response  is  likely  to  
be a hesitant one.15 How could anything named humanism be
destructive, let alone superstitious? Needless to say, Berdyaev
here strategically inverts the long held opposition between
superstition, conceived as a naïve medieval attitude, and
humanism, conceived as that awakening from the authoritative
oppression of the Middle Ages.16 Like his contemporary Owen
Barfield, Berdyaev sees in the legacy of such humanism,
however, nothing less than the individualistic sacrifice of true
personhood:
Human identity, like every authentic reality, is only
conferred in that spiritual concretion which puts the seal
of divine unity on the whole of human multiplicity. In
abstraction and isolation it is lost. The process of modern
Humanism is the passage from man in this spiritualized
concretion, where everything is organically bound
together, to a sundering abstraction, wherein man is
changed into an isolated unit.17
Berdyaev’s   argument   here   has   various   parallels   in  
contemporary historiography that links the modernization and
secularization of the West to late-medieval intellectual and
institutional changes. The writings of historians and economists
such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Fernand Braudel, Hans
Blumenberg, Eamon Duffy, Charles Taylor, Avner Greif, and
Anthony Giddens, like Berdyaev, all locate the influential origins
of modernity in those shifts of political and economic structure
that are characteristic of the later European middle ages. As
Giddens notes, almost echoing Berdyaev, “the more tradition

15 Ibid, 65.
16 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
17 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 37.
148 Gaelan Gilbert

loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of
the dialectical interplay of the local and the global, the more
individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a
diversity of options. Of course, there are standardizing
influences too – most notably, in the form of commodification,
since capitalistic production and distribution form core
components  of  modernity’s  institutions.”18
Like   the   work   of   Duffy   and   Taylor,   Berdyaev’s   ecumenical  
affinity with Catholic thought likely played a part in sensitizing
his perspective to premodern modes of thought and social
organization, even while this affinity is ultimately undergirded
by a Weberian critique of Protestantism. Accordingly, Berdyaev
sees individualist humanism as closely linked with capitalism:
Individualism,   the   ‘atomization’   of   society,   the   inordinate  
acquisitiveness of the world, indefinite over-population
and   the  endlessness  of  people’s   needs,  the   lack   of  faith,  the  
weakening of spiritual life, these and other are the causes
which have contributed to build up that industrial
capitalist system which has changed the face of human life
and broken its rhythm with nature.19
For  Berdyaev,  capitalism  can  “hold  sway  only  in  a  society  that  
has deliberately renounced the Christian asceticism and turned
away from Heaven to give itself over exclusively to earthly
gratifications.”20 He   diagnoses   capitalism’s   privileging   of  
individual interests as inimical to genuine spiritual existence:
The whole economic system of Capitalism is an offshoot of
a devouring and overwhelming lust, of a kind that can hold
sway only in a society that has deliberately renounced the
Christian asceticism and turned away from Heaven to give
itself over exclusively to earthly gratifications. It is quite

18 See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, UK:

Polity Press, 1991), 5.
19 Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 91.
20 Ibid, 92.
 A New Middle Ages? … 149

obvious   that   Capitalism   is   unthinkable   as   a   ‘sacred’  

economy. It is the result of a secularization of economic
life, and by it the hierarchical subordination of the material
to the spiritual is inverted. The autonomy of economics has
ended in their dominating the whole life of human
societies: the worship of Mammon has become the
determining force of the age. And the worst of it is that this
undisguised   ‘mammonism’   is   regarded   as   a   very   good  
thing, an attainment to the knowledge of truth and a
release from illusions. Economic materialism formulates
this to perfection when it brands the whole spiritual life of
man as a deception and a dream.21
Under   capitalism,   “man   has   become   an   economic   category.”22
Berdyaev’s  opposition  to  the  prioritization   of  economic  criteria  
over spiritual, moral, and even political concerns resonates
powerfully with the writings of his friend Orthodox philosopher
Sergei Bulgakov, whose Philosophy of Economy so vividly argues
for the sacredness of all human affairs, with a similarly
“mystical”   emphasis.23 But   Berdyaev’s   critique   of   capitalism  
also finds analogues in recent responses from certain
prominent Christians like Cornel West and Chris Hedges to the
widespread corruption underlying the global economic crisis.
What   is   more,   Berdyaev’s   claims   anticipate   in   their   acute  
diagnosis of socio-political developments the aforementioned

21 Ibid.
22 Ibid, 51.
23 As  Evgueny  Lampert  writes,  Berdyaev  “approaches  the  social   problem  
from   the   point   of   view   of   ‘mysticism’,   rather   than   ‘politics’   – which,
however, does not at all mean that he denies the value of politics or
economics,   of   the   state   or   the   nation,   etc.   His   ‘mysticism’   denotes   a  
particular evaluation of man and his place in society and he judges the
process of social life above all from the point of view of the Christian
value  of  human  personality.”  See  Evgueny  Lampert,  Nicholas Berdyaev
and the New Middle Ages (London: James Clarke and Co., Ltd., 1945),
77.
150 Gaelan Gilbert

school of International Relations theory known as

neomedievalism, treating the currently existing global order as
the   result   of   modern   history’s   economic   impetus   and   boldly  
claiming   that   “the   end   of   Capitalism   is   the   end   of   modern  
history and the beginning  of  the  new  middle  ages.”24
Berdyaev extends this critique by targeting mechanization and
its negative effects on work as evidence of the damage caused
by accelerating the flow of capital beyond healthy limits.
Contrary to both capitalism and socialism,   in   Berdyaev’s  
political economy labor is considered to be an intrinsic rather
than an extrinsic good, and most definitely not a mere
prerequisite for leisure:
The question of the discipline of work is vital for
contemporary societies; the old underlying reasons for
work have gone and new ones have not been found: but
again it is a question of the hallowing and the justifying of
work, and is therefore ignored by both Capitalism and
Socialism, neither of which is interested in work as such.25
The principle of work, spiritual and material, will be found
at the root of future societies: not, as in Socialism, of work
of which the goodness or badness does not matter, but of
work considered qualitatively. That was always the
Christian idea. The excessive leisure and laziness of the
privileged   classes   of   modern   history   will   vanish   […]   The  
problem will present itself as a religious one, the
sanctification of work, a problem which has no interest for
modern history because it has tried frenziedly to free all
men from   the   ‘burden’   of   work:   both   Capitalism   and  
Socialism  have  ‘solved’  it  by  mechanization.26
For Berdyaev, the division and mechanization of labor divorces
man from his surroundings, and the history of industrialization

24 Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 95.

25 Ibid, 94.
26 Ibid, 115-16.
 A New Middle Ages? … 151

is one of increasing alienation of the worker from the work.

Socialism   and   capitalism   alike   mistake   work   for   a   “burden,”  
when really it is the activity which enables humankind to fulfill
their creative vocations. What we do, after all, shapes who we
are. Given his expanded understanding of labor as involving
more than capital or leisure, it comes as no surprise that
Berdyaev   rejects   the   modern   myth   of   ‘Progress,’   the   notion   of  
history that motivates and justifies colonial expansion. Instead,
he contends provocatively that the notion of Progress
“camouflag[es]   the   true   ends   of   life,”27 and that Christians
should  do  everything  in  their  power  to  “decrease  the  speed  of  
that ever-moving current which is bearing us on to nothingness,
and acquire a taste for eternity.”28 Berdyaev calls here for a
reorientation of human desire toward that which exceeds the
cycle of production and consumption, suggesting that human
beings were not meant to live as fast or accumulate as much as
a capitalist economy demands. We will see below that he means
in this regard to call into question the neoliberal notion of
freedom upon which modern political and economic
frameworks depend, proposing the right direction of human
desire toward God as true freedom. In contemporary terms,
however, Berdyaev was nonetheless also proposing in the early
twentieth century his own model of what is only now being
called  a  “post-growth  economy.”29 In  his  words,  “we  shall  have  
to have a much more simple and elementary material culture
and a spiritual culture that  is  far  more  complex.”30
Alongside economic issues, Berdyaev offers a critique of
modern political forms. Central to his political critique is the

27 Ibid, 116.
28 Ibid, 116-17.
29 See   Richard   Heinberg,   “Life   after   the   end   of   economic   growth,”   The
Guardian (November 30, 2011), accessed January 11, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/30/end-of-
growth?source=patrick.net; and, postgrowth.org.
30 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 95.
152 Gaelan Gilbert

idea   that   “[m]odern   nationalism   springs   from   individualism,”  

and  he   speaks  of   “self-sufficient national monads (in the same
way that human individualities have become self-sufficient
monads).”31 Berdyaev proceeds to expose the contradictory
notion of a political democracy without equal opportunity by
first recognizing the necessarily hierarchical nature of political
representation and, secondly, foregrounding the fact that
economic equality is impossible within a capitalist system.
Likewise - and this is nothing new to Orthodox ears –
nationalism   fragments   ecclesial   communion:   “[r]eligion   itself  
has taken the form of a national enclosure; there is no unity or
response  to  the  cosmic  unity  in  Christianity  […]  and  men  have  
made   for   themselves   a   false   god,   the   nation.”32 Berdyaev’s  
analysis finds parallels in the work of Catholic scholar William
Cavanaugh on the importance   of   a   Christian   “theopolitical  
imagination.”  Cavanaugh  argues  that  “[t]he  history  of  the  state  
is the creation of an increasingly direct relationship between
state   and   individual   by   the   state’s   absorption   of   powers   from  
the groups that comprise what has come   to   be   called   ‘civil  
society.’”33 This process of absorption is intrinsic to the notion
of a State, which from its modern origins has defined itself in
terms of sovereignty:   “[t]he   conceptual   leap   which   accompanies  
the advent of the state in the sixteenth century is the invention
of sovereignty. The doctrine of sovereignty asserts the
incontestable right of the central power to make and enforce
laws for those people who fall within recognized territorial
borders.”34 For some, national sovereignty may be viewed as a
necessary recourse for maintaining a state of law. As an

31 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 96.

32 Ibid, 96-97.
33 See  William  Cavanaugh,  “Killing  for  the  Telephone  Company:  Why  the  
Nation-State  is  Not  the  Keeper  of  the  Common  Good,”   Modern Theology
20.2 (April 2004), 256.
34 Ibid, 250-51.
 A New Middle Ages? … 153

Orthodox  Russian  in  exile  from  Stalin’s  atheistic  totalitarianism,  

however, Berdyaev felt the crushing force of political
sovereignty exercised violently beyond its proper limits.
The question of those limits is being asked with renewed fervor
in the political contexts in which Orthodoxy now finds itself,
from the post-9/11  US  and  Putin’s  Russia  to  Turkey  and  Syria.  
One negative effect of the nationalist ethos that can result from
political sovereignty is ethnophyletism, the privileging of
national or at least linguistic-cultural boundaries over catholic,
ecclesial unity. The problem of ethnophyletism is nothing new,
of course, but it is also not showing signs of disappearing any
time soon. Critiques   of   nationalism   like   Berdyaev’s   can   assist   in  
articulating what is at stake for contemporary Orthodox
Christians in matters of institutional allegiance and, ultimately,
ecclesial   life.   And   yet   while   Berdyaev’s   ecumenical   call   for   a  
return   to   “the cosmic   unity   in   Christianity”   resonates   strongly  
with Orthodox-Catholic and Orthodox-Anglican dialogues, the
twentieth  century  has  also  seen  what  Berdyaev  calls  “a  kind  of  
internationalism,”  which  in  his  eyes  represents  a  “caricature  of  
universalism”  by  offering a transnational unity that functions as
an abiding rival to both ecumenical unity and regional fiscal
autonomy.35 Berdyaev correctly locates the source of this
internationalism in the expansive tendencies and colonialist
history of capitalism, noting  that   “a  kind  of  internationalism  is  
native  to  Capitalism.”36Berdyaev notes the dependency of each

35 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 100. The notion of globalization as a

false catholicity has recently been taken up and critiqued in terms
similar  to  Berdyaev’s  by  other  prominent  theologians.  For  an  Orthodox  
discussion, see Emmanuel Clapsis, Orthodoxy in Conversation: Orthodox
Ecumenical Engagements (Boston, MA: Holy Cross Press, 2000). For a
Catholic treatment, see William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination:
Christian Practices of Space and Time (London: Continuum Press,
2002); Migrations of the Holy, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans,
2011).
36 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 99.
154 Gaelan Gilbert

local   economy   on   larger   market   forces,:   “[t]he   supremacy   of  

Capitalism has brought about an economic world-system and
made the economic life of each country dependent on the
economic   situation   in   general.”37 As we are only now coming to
learn in light of the global economic crisis, we are all in it
together!

III.
So   what   do   Berdyaev’s   new   Middle   Ages   look   like?   Certain  
aspects of its social dimensions can be glimpsed primarily in
Berdyaev’s  attempts  to  conjure  an  evocative  vision  of  the  future  
that leaves behind what is decaying in the present.38 What I
want   to   call   Berdyaev’s   “prophetic   imagination”   can   be  
discerned in the elevated style and future-oriented perspective
from which the latter half of End of Our Time proceeds.
Berdyaev sketches an image of modern society renewed by a
return to the wisdom of the past. Such looking back for the sake
of moving forward is the essential trajectory of the Christian
tradition, for the Word who was revealed can and does speak to
anyone in the present, as a means for renewal and growth.
Charges against Berdyaev of idealism or utopianism are beside
the point, for rather than foretelling dates of future events,
Berdyaev is drawing analogies and imaginative constructions of
what possible collective futures could look like, with the hope of
rekindling the embers of social action and public witness that,
especially among Orthodox, seemed – for Berdyaev at least – to
have grown cold.   Yet   Berdyaev’s   friendship   with   individuals  

37 Ibid.
38 As   Berdyaev   writes,   “The   approach   to   the   new   middle   age,   like   the  
approach to the old one, is marked by a visible rotting of old societies
and   an   invisible   formation   of   new   ones”   (83). And   again:   “Decay  
precedes a middle age, and it is needful to mark the course of those
elements  that  are  dying  and  those  that  are  coming  to  birth”  (91).
 A New Middle Ages? … 155

like Maria Skobstova indicates that at least some of the

influences of his new Middle Ages may have been grounded in
contemporary examples of Orthodox social justice and radical
sacrifice whose potential, if put into practice on a wider scale,
he hoped to emphasize.
Anticipating   Orthodox   theologian   David   Bentley   Hart’s  
discussion   of   American   religious   culture   as   a   “new   antiquity”  
(not   to   mention   his   and   others’   critiques   of   American   neo-
imperialism), Berdyaev begins by likening modern society with
the cultural syncretism that predominated in the latter days of
the Roman Empire:
Our age resembles that of the fall of the Roman empire, the
failure and drying-up of Graeco-Roman culture, forever the
head-water of all European culture. Modernist art recalls
the loss of the old forms of perfection under the barbarian
invasions; our social and political activities resemble those
under the emperor Diocletian, when man was no longer his
own master; religious and philosophico-mystical
researches to-day are not unlike the curious examining of
the mysteries at the end of Greek philosophy – betraying a
hunger for the Incarnation, for the coming of a God-Man.
Spiritually, our time is like the Hellenistic age with its
universalism and syncretism.39
When  Berdyaev  launches  into  a  description  of  the  “new  Middle  
Ages,”   shifting   from   analytical   derision   to   hopeful   speculation,  
the picture is a comprehensive one:
The stock-exchange and the press will no longer be
masters of the world. Social life will be simplified; making
an honest living will require a lower standard and less
artificiality. It is likely that men will form themselves into
unified groups, not under political emblems, which are
always secondary and generally counterfeit, but under

39 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 58.

156 Gaelan Gilbert

economic tokens of immediate importance, according to

professional categories of trade, art, and other work,
spiritual and material; these will take the place of the
present castes and classes. There is a great future before
professional unions, co-operative gilds, corporations in
general, and they are a clear indication of the middle ages
on  a  new  basis.  Instead  of  political  ‘talking-shops’  we  shall  
have assemblies of professionals representing real bodies,
not intriguing for political power but bent upon dealing
with vital matters – for themselves and not in the interests
of parties. Future society will be of the syndicalist type, but
understood in a very different sense than that of
revolutionary syndicalism. The only polity that has any
worth is that wherein a very decided radicalism observes
the hierarchical principles of power.40
Syndicalism and hierarchy? Berdyaev enunciates a peculiar
position here, and yet it is one that bears affinities with the
Catholic school of political economy known as Distributism,
especially in its advocacy for unions and craft guilds as the
primary social units, rather than individuals.41 Felix   Guattari’s  
echoes   Berdyaev   here   in   his   notion   of   the   “group-subject,”  
which for Guattari stresses the importance of granting political
agency to collectives, especially those other than multinational
corporations!
Berdyaev’s   call   for   a   radical new political economy imports
fundamental Orthodox practices as well. Quite closely echoing
former   Metropolitan   Jonah’s   2011   address   at   the   Acton  

40 Ibid, 112-13.
41 A notable distributist, H. J. Massingham, cites Berdyaev in his 1943
text, The Tree of Life, which likewise draws upon premodern economic
theory, particularly for negative evaluations of usury. See H. J.
Massingham, The Tree of Life, (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1943),
26, 40, 129.
 A New Middle Ages? … 157

Institute   entitled,   “Asceticism   and   the   Consumer   Society,”42

Berdyaev argues that the Christian task of resisting the idols of
consumerist capitalism requires an embrace of austerity, what
he   calls   a   “new   asceticism.”   If   undertaken   as   a   form   of  
repentance for the harm that human social and economic
practices have inflicted (as suggested by Ecumenical Patriarch
Bartholomew in his encyclical on this topic issued for the new
church year in September 2012), this new asceticism would
effectively  be  “the  negation  of  industrial-capitalist  principles”43
such as self-gratification and waste. For Berdyaev,
Bartholomew, and Jonah alike, repentance is the stance that
Orthodox Christians should take in light of the current financial
and environmental crises. Yet Berdyaev also considers the new
asceticism to be a creative, quasi-monastic lay endeavor, what
he  calls   “a  particular sort of monastic life in the world, a kind of
new   religious   order.”44 This   “monastic   life   in   the   world”   is   a  
properly Orthodox response to and also a mode for outflanking
the unethical and creation-harming consumerism upon which
the current capitalist system depends. For instance, a public
response based in Christian doctrine to the harmful side-effects
of that system can open the way for a wholesale reevaluation of
work:
Work must be understood as a participation in creation,
and great occupational activity combined with a cutting-
down   of   ‘wants’   will   characterize   the   whole   of   society   in  

42 See former Metropolitan   Jonah’s   “Asceticism   and   Consumer   Society,”  

delivered at the Acton Institute on June 20, 2011, accessed on January
11, 2012, http://www.acton.org/global/article/asceticism-consumer-
society. A follow-up interview with former Metropolitan Jonah on the
subject   of   his   speech   can   be   found   here   in   Acton   Institute’s   journal,  
Religion and Liberty, 21.3 (Summer 2011),
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-21-number-
3/asceticism-consumer-society-interview-metropolitan.
43 N. Berdyaev, End of Our Time, 94.
44 Ibid, 116.
158 Gaelan Gilbert

this new period of history. It is only thus that

impoverished mankind can continue to exist. The centre of
gravity will have to be moved from the means of living, in
which men to-day are absorbed exclusively, to the last
ends of life.45
Treating work as participation in creation allows space for
human creativity in the ergonomic and economic realms,
effectively sanctifying it as a freely chosen vocation or task into
which we can pour our God-given gifts and educated skills. As
Berdyaev   famously   asserts   elsewhere,   “God   awaits   from   us   a  
creative   act.”   Moreover,   taking   this   maxim   seriously   can  
facilitate longer-term reorganizations of economic structures
and practices, first on local, interparochial and eventually
regional (diocesan and archdiocesan) levels, especially as new
generations gain additional skills for implementing alternative
means of production, and becomes accustomed to more
conscientious habits of consumption. There are even
possibilities for inter-parochial micro-financing so that zero-
interest loans can be made for purposes of churchplanting, with
an already well-established parish providing the capital for a
budding mission, with the interest paid going to the creation of
another loan. This financial network has proven to work well
for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in developing
countries, including missionaries – why not domestically also?
This is no communist vision. Even in idealistically suggesting
that   “competition  [will]   be  replaced   by   co-operation,”  Berdyaev  
emphasizes  that  “[t]he  principle  of  private  property  will  be  kept  
as   an  eternal   foundation,”  however  “limited   and   spiritualized   in  
application.”46
This mention of property and limitation leads Berdyaev to the
question of authority. Authority is always a question of power,
but   “[m]odern   times   look   on   power   as   a   right   and   are   much  

45 Ibid.
46 Ibid, 95.
 A New Middle Ages? … 159

concerned   with   fixing   the   bounds   of   that   right.”47 In contrast,

the  “new  middle  ages  will  look  on  power  as  a  duty,  and  political
life founded on a scramble for the right to power will be
stigmatized as unreal and parasitical, without ontological
significance.”48 What allows the power of political authority to
be  conceived  as  a  duty,  rather  than  a  right?  Berdyaev’s  answer  
constitutes nothing less than an ordering principle of his
neomedievalism,  what  he  calls  “organic  hierarchy.”49 As he says,
the new middle age, like the old, is hierarchical in structure,
whereas modern history everywhere repudiates such an
organization. Man is not a unit in the universe, forming part of
an unrational machine, but a living member of an organic
hierarchy, belonging to a real and living whole.50
The key to organic hierarchy is ontological interdependence,
according to which each level depends upon the others to fulfill
their duties if social peace and civic order is to be achieved. The
premodern   notion   of   the   “body   politic”   clearly   informs  
Berdyaev’s   perspective   here,   and   it   is   important   to   remember  
that the medieval lineage of the body politic ultimately derives
from the Pauline notion of the Body of Christ. In modern
society,   however,   “each   rung   claims   to   be   independent   of   the  
ladder.”51
What Berdyaev means by independence is not so much
freedom as irresponsibility, the wrongful abdication of one’s  
social contribution to the common good for the sake of
individualistic preferences, interests and goals. By relying on
secular   humanism’s   atomization   of   social   life,   capitalism   and  
political liberalism promote the independence of competing
individuals at the expense of denying interdependence.

47 Ibid, 111.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid, 42.
50 Ibid, 109.
51 Ibid, 96.
160 Gaelan Gilbert

Berdyaev considers the exploitation of the poor in nominally

democratic   states   to   be   the   natural   ‘equalitarian’   result   of   a  
shallow model of political freedom rendered inconsequential by
the economic inequality it aims to conceal. For Berdyaev, the
modern notion of freedom lacks any substantive ontological
foundation for sustaining a robust account of human equality.
Without reference to being created in the image of God, the
modern notions of civic liberty and even human rights are weak
and philosophically untenable, only meagerly supported by an
understanding  of  human  freedom  as  defined  by  “choice.”  Since  
no vision of the good as the end and purpose of freedom is held
publicly in common, for Berdyaev the neoliberal understanding
of freedom is a category without content, emptied of its potency
in being reified as an end unto itself. Hence modern appeals to
democratic equality as the highest of all goods in the face of
economic inequality are an ambivalent factor which Orthodoxy,
with its commitment to organic hierarchy and its deep tradition
of   ontological   interdependence   (“on   behalf   of   all,   and   for   all”),  
not to mention the imperative to neighbor love, must publicly
engage.
Berdyaev’s   perspective   on   this   point   can   help   facilitate   an  
Orthodox rethinking of what we - as first of all citizens of the
Kingdom - mean by democracy with regard to rights and
responsibilities, freedom and interdependence, and their
indissoluble connection. For Berdyaev, as for the Church
Fathers, the value of freedom comes in its being used to seek
the good, since it can also be the very vehicle for our turning
away from communion with others in God. And the new middle
ages provide the opportunity for learning to use our freedom
again,   in   a   way   that   evokes   the   dawn   of   modernity   itself:   “the  
new middle age will give a place to that experiment in liberty
made by the modern world, with all the real benefits that we
owe to it in the order of consciousness and the increased
 A New Middle Ages? … 161

refining   of   spirit   that   it   has   brought   about.”52 Berdyaev’s  

description of a new middle ages thus aims to inspire the
human imagination for constructing a collectively realized and
equitable public sphere in which true freedom means seeking
the good as that which in different ways guides both public
policy and spiritual practice.
And as that which shows Christian ethics to ultimately derive
from   God’s   own   loving   nature,   the   Church   for   Berdyaev   is  
central to the new middle ages, even if – or perhaps precisely
because - its boundaries are not always clearly discernible:
The spiritual centre in the near future will be, as in the old
middle ages, the Church alone. Her life is developing
unseen, outside official lines, for her boundaries are not
clearly marked and cannot be pointed out as if they were a
material object. The life of the Church is a mystery and her
ways cannot be understood by reason alone: the Spirit
breatheth where he will, and creative movements appear
which, from the external, official, simply rationalist point of
view, seem strange and foreign to the Church.53
Berdyaev’s   understanding   of   the   Church   as   a   living   and  
developing entity treads on controversial ground by suggesting
the fact that further manifestations of the truths proclaimed by
Christianity – and indeed, Christ the Truth Himself – are still at
work in shaping the fruits of human endeavor and thought. Yet
is this not, perhaps, a versatile definition of tradition itself?
Berdyaev’s  vision  is  here,  as  elsewhere,  expansive:
The Christianity of the oecumenical councils and the great
doctors has not yet sufficiently expounded the truths about
man and the universe. The Church is cosmic by her nature
and contains within herself the fullness of Being; she is the
universe baptized.54

52 Ibid, 79.
53 Ibid, 108.
54 Ibid.
162 Gaelan Gilbert

IV.
We would do well to remember in all this that Berdyaev is
writing as a self-proclaimed   “rebellious   prophet”   whose  
descrying of the future (our present) must be considered not as
some utopian blueprint for erecting the perfect State, but rather
a positive vision which in the very appeal of its imaginative
vividness exposes what is lacking and off-kilter in current states
of   affairs.   As   Berdyaev   himself   admits,   ““I   want   only   to   try   to  
point out the characteristics and tendencies which the renewed
aspect  of  society  and  culture  is  likely  to  have.”55 How startling
that   a   “new   middle   ages”   could   seem   more   appealing,   more  
equitable, more Christian than modern society! It is with an eye
to   historical   developments   since   Berdyaev’s   day   that   the  
contemporary value of his prophetic imagination emerges, an
expression of public human flourishing in harmony with
Orthodox anthropology and ecclesiology grounded in the
freedom of the human person as made in the image of God.
Already two generations ago, Berdyaev was articulating the
social, ethical and environmental ramifications of the material
realities underlying our political and economic systems,
ramifications that are only now becoming disastrously clear in
ways impossible to ignore. In response, Berdyaev takes up
Orthodox tradition in innovative ways. He proposes syndicalist
organic hierarchy as the ordering principle behind the creative
participation of the laity in ecclesial life. He challenges the false
catholicity of nationalism and ethnophyletism in the name of
the   “cosmic   unity”   of   Christianity,   recalling   that   the   Church   is  
also an invisible, eternal reality. He reimagines work as a form
of participation in creation that is obscured by mechanization
and   greed.   He   invokes   the   possibility   of   a   “new   asceticism”
which would integrate anti-consumerism and material

55 Ibid, 70.
 A New Middle Ages? … 163

simplicity into the very fabric of Orthodox spiritual discipline

and social life.
Can   Berdyaev’s   suggestions   help   inaugurate   alternative   public  
modes of Christian praxis in response to the widespread
exigencies of global, crisis-driven capital? As Emmanuel Clapsis
maintains,   “[t]he   credibility   of   the   Church’s   message   in   the  
political arena depends less on what it proclaims itself to be,
and more on what it actually does. Its praxis authenticates its
message,   not   vice   versa.”56 How can we begin to adopt a new
lay asceticism? What creative act does God demand of each of
us, at home, in the workplace, as acts of worship? Dare we go
further,   and   say   that   to   be   true   to   Christ’s   commandment   to  
love our neighbor and our enemies demands a new concerted
public response of Orthodox Christians to the deeply embedded
injustices in the current functioning of our political and
economic systems? As the source for productive and
provocative   questions   like   these,   Berdyaev’s   prophetic
imagination is a challenging stimulus for Orthodox public
theology and witness in twenty-first century social contexts.

---
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---. Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and
Time (London: Continuum Press, 2002).

56 E. Clapsis, Orthodoxy in Conversation, 224.

164 Gaelan Gilbert

---. Migrations of the Holy (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans,

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 A New Middle Ages? … 165

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