Wednesday 6 July 2022

Man and Superman

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“There was a great difference between him (Nietzsche) and Dostoevsky, who, before him, had shown that the loss of man by the way of self-deification was the inevitable goal of Humanism. Dostoevsky recognized that this deification is illusory, he explored the vagaries of self-will in every direction, and he had another source of knowledge - he saw the light of Christ: he was a prophet of the Spirit. Nietzsche, on the contrary, was dominated by his idea of superman and it killed the idea of real man in him. Only Christianity has cherished and protected the idea of mankind and fixed the human image for ever and ever. The human essence presupposes the divine essence; kill God, and at the same time you kill man, an on the grave of these two supreme ideas of God and man there is set up a monstrous image - the image of the man who wants to be God, of the superman in action, of Antichrist. For Nietzsche there was neither God nor man but only this unknown man-god. For Dostoevsky there was both God and man: the God who does not devour man and the man who is not dissolved in God... It is there that Dostoevsky shows himself to be a Christian in the deepest sense of the word.”
- Nikolay Berdyaev: The worldview of Dostoevsky, 1923

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