SOURCE: "Nicholas Berdyaev, Captive of Freedom," in Twentieth-Century Thinkers: Studies in the Work of Seventeen Modern Philosophers, edited by John K. Ryan, Alba House, 1965, pp. 205-12.

In the following essay, Mohan provides an overview of Berdyaev's life and thought.

Reinhold Niebuhr once referred to Nicholas Berdyaev as the outstanding religious personality of our time. Evelyn Underhill and the late Goeffrey Francis Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, echoed this sentiment. He has also been called the "supreme Russian philosopher," passionately interested in the moods and ideas of his time. The London Times said that in a lifetime he had accepted and denied with equal vehemence more ideas than most men even fleetingly dream of. The New York Times called him the most exciting writer on contemporary religious themes. He was a man as pugnacious as Léon Bloy in his search for the Absolute, but agonizingly aware of freedom and...