According to Berdiaev, no domination, force, or violence is entailed by sobornost’ (he, like Khomiakov, conveniently disregards dominance of, or violence against the self). To experience sobornost’ is to retain the sense of one’s own person while at the same time experiencing union with other persons in the collective, or with the collective as a whole. Sobornost’ is, moreover, a divine experience, for God mediates in the union of individual and collective: “the sobornost’ of the church is not some sort of authority, be it authority of a council of bishops or even of ecumenical councils, but is an immersion in interaction and in love of the church folk and of the Holy Spirit.”80 There are no external signs of this process, there are only internal, spiritual vicissitudes: “communitarianism is the unmediated relationship of a person with another person through God, who is the internal foundation of life.”81 Thus only God can erase boundaries between individuals. If God is absent, sobornost’ or communitarianism degenerates into mere communism, or fascism, that is, authoritarian domination of the collective over the individual.82
God (the Father, Christ, or the Holy Spirit) is important to Berdiaev as an eraser of boundaries. For example, God and the human being (or to translate more traditionally, God and Man) are “inseparably connected to one another.”83 “Humanity is the basic attribute of God. The human being is rooted in God, as God is rooted in the human being.”84
Berdiaev’s favorite person of the Holy Trinity is of course Christ, the one who most blends with humankind. Berdiaev’s designation “Christ the God-man” (“Khrist Bogochelovek”) itself questions boundaries between persons.85 Christ is the one person of the Trinity to become human (“stal chelovekom”) as well as to be God. Christ is also precisely the person who suffers, or rather, the one who welcomes suffering. Christ is the masochistic person of God:
One can believe in God only if there exists God the Son, the Redeemer and Liberator, the God of sacrifice and love. The redeeming sufferings of the Son of God do not constitute a reconciliation of God with the human being, but rather a reconciliation of the human being with God. Only a suffering God can reconcile [one] with the sufferings of creation.86
Note that the word “reconciliation” here is applied both to the relationship of God and the human person (“primirenie cheloveka s Bogom”) and to the relationship of the human person with suffering (“primiriaet so stradaniiami tvoreniia”). To welcome suffering is really the same thing as to blur the boundary between persons. Berdiaev can believe in God the Son because, in suffering, God the Son erases the boundary between God and humans.
Berdiaev admits that he is an admirer of The Imitation of Christ87 To imitate Christ is to accept suffering freely. No Christianity worthy of that designation can ever be forced upon anyone. Indeed, to believe in God is to be free: “God is my freedom.”88 But to be free is to be free to suffer. As I already observed in connection with the discussion of Khomiakov earlier in this book, this is a rather masochistic notion of freedom.
Berdiaev welcomes the communitarianism of sobornost’ because it brings one closer to God. That is, immersion in the collective (which was very difficult for Berdiaev, personally) can bring one to the very feet of Christ on the cross. But neither the collective nor the suffering Christ is a particularly maternal icon (whereas Losev’s motherland is starkly, almost parodistically maternal). But this does not mean that Berdiaev’s ideal is not maternal nonetheless. Because Berdiaev is trapped in genderless imagery of the collective, or in the traditionally sexist imagery of God and the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost), there can by definition be little hint of the maternal in his discourse on these matters.
However, it is clear from his personal religious-philosophical development that Berdiaev originally conceived of the collective as a maternal icon. The early Berdiaev, in his characterization of the “inadequate development of the personal factor in Russian life,” says, “The Russian people has always loved to live in the warmth of the collective, in a kind of dissolution in the earthy element, in the bosom of the mother [v kakoi-to rastvorennosti v stikhii zemli, v lone materi].”89 Russian religion is an example of this, according to young Berdiaev:
The universal spirit of Christ, the masculine universal logos is imprisoned by the feminine national element, by the Russian earth in her pagan primevalness. Thus was formed the religion of dissolution in mother-earth, in the collective national element, in animal warmth.90
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the maternal imagery here is striking. Berdiaev attributes not merely feminine, but specifically maternal qualities to the enslaving (“plenen”) Russian collective. Religion in Russia is “…not so much a religion of Christ as a religion of the Mother of God, a religion of mother-earth, of a feminine deity illuminating fleshly being.”91 Here Berdiaev is being historically accurate as well as self-revealing.
Even Berdiaev’s later writings will sometimes characterize union with God in maternal terms. Describing the creative potential of the God-human, Berdiaev says:
God’s idea of the human being is infinitely higher than traditional, orthodox notions of the human being born [porozhdennykh] of a depressed and narrowed consciousness. The idea of God is the greatest human idea. The idea of the human being is the greatest divine idea. The human being awaits the birth of God within. God awaits the birth of the human being within [Chelovek zhdet rozhdeniia v nem Boga. Bog zhdet rozhdeniia v Nem cheloveka].92
With so much birthing going on, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that God is a mother after all—or that God-man is really God-woman.
One wonders whether Berdiaev thought about his mother in those ecstatic moments when he himself was thrown into prison. Certainly he experienced a sense of merger or fusion with his social-democratic collective (“oneness with the communauté”), as we have seen. But in the context he does not define that collective as maternal. Yet, the only thing he remembers an important official saying to him and his fellow prisoners the time he was arrested in Kiev does bear a strikingly maternal image: “Your error is that you do not see that the social process is organic rather than logical, and that a child cannot be born any earlier than in the ninth month.”93
A Blok Poem: Suffering Begins at the Breast
The poet Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921), moved by the sufferings of his fellow Russians during the First World War, produced a poem which very explicitly depicts a mother’s inculcation of masochism in her child: