Nikolai Berdyaev Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Douglas K. Wood

Critical Essay by Douglas K. Wood

SOURCE: "The Twentieth-Century Revolt against Time: Belief and Becoming in the Thought of Berdyaev, Eliot, Huxley, and Jung," in The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe, edited by W. Warren Wagar, Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982, pp. 197-219.

In the following essay, Wood considers Berdyaev along with T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and C. G. Jung as representative of modern thinkers whose works express a "revolt against time. "

Time the leech; time the destroyer; time the bloody tyrant; portrayed in a thousand forms, hypostatized in a thousand metaphors, described in a thousand symbols. From the dawn of civilization to the present, the same lament continues: time is a devious slayer, a traitorous provider who gives only to take away; a patron of life who wears the black cowl of death beneath a disguise of light and laughter. As an Elizabethan poet has said:

Even such is...
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