The article is devoted to the Renaissance concept of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev,
presented by him in the book “The Meaning of Creativity. The experience of justifying
a man”, which was written in the winter of 1911–1912. following the impressions of Rome
and especially Florence. In Florence and its surroundings, Berdyaev discovered different
periods of the Renaissance: the Proto — Renaissance of the Ducento, the early Christian
Renaissance of the Trecento and the core of the era — the Quattrocento. It is in the Florentine
Quattrocento that the philosopher finds an attempt to reveal the Christological dimension of
man. The ceremonial Rome of the high Renaissance caused his rejection, the Cinquecento
period Berdyaev considered the decline and degeneration of the Renaissance spirit, the second
biggest “failure” of the Italian Renaissance after the first, which consisted in the split of the
quattrocento people between the immanent and the transcendent, pagan and Christian.
Berdyaev’s attention to the Italian Renaissance is connected with his expectation of the
advent of a new creative era, the era of the Spirit, with an attempt to penetrate the mystery of
anthropological revelation. The early Italian Renaissance and the Quattrocento era presented
the philosopher with the opportunity to feel the threshold of a possible, but tragically failed
exit from the era of redemption into a new era of creativity.
Keywords
N. Berdyaev, Italian Renaissance, Philosophy of Creativity, Russian philosophy,
Renaissance studies
Literature
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Исследование выполнено за счет гранта Российского научного фонда № 24–28–
00748, https://rscf.ru/project/24–28–00748/; Русская христианская гуманитарная академия
им. Ф. М. Достоевского