To the Problem of the Features of Existential Philosophy of N. A. Berdyaev

In the article, the problem of the religious nature of the existential philosophy of N. A. Berdyaev is considered. It is shown that his understanding of his own philosophy as the existence of the spirit affected the way he understood the issue of freedom. For a philosopher, freedom is a state of mind, and therefore, the problem analyzed is not political and not legal, but exclusively religious. While dealing with this task, the philosopher makes an attempt to replace the usual philosophical terminology with a religious-existential one for a more complete reflection of freedom. The correspondence of Berdyaev's philosophical approaches and positions to freedom of doctrinal positions of Russian theology and Christian theology in general. While elucidating this issue, the author discovers a divergence of the analysed positions with Christian religious positions. So in the opinion of the Russian religious philosopher, freedom is not the gift of the Creator to people, but is an autonomous act to the existence of chaos from the essence of which the birth of boundless freedom takes place, and God has nothing to do with this freedom, so in the speculative picture of the philosopher the doctrine theodicy is created. In this respect, Berdyaev's interpretation of the primacy of freedom before God, the characterization of the personality of freedom, the perception of the world around us or the world of objective reality as an illusion and the radical position of the philosopher in the theodicy provisions are questionable.