Introduction.

In Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew, His All Holiness writes that “Orthodox Christianity is a way of life in which there is a profound and direct relationship between dogma and praxis, faith and life. This unity of faith and life means that the reality of the eternal lies in their experiential power, rather than in their codification into a set of ideological constructs.” (CG, p207, his italics).

In this essay I will disclose how religion is conceived in Heidegger’s path of thinking, with a view to exploring the phenomenology of Christianity and how it is enacted as a way of life. 
 
Philosophy with a Percussion Hammer: Destruction and the Awakening of Factical Life.

For Heidegger, phenomenology is the superior procedure in disclosing the lived reality of religious experience. In The Phenomenology of Religious Life, he explains how the phenomenological method permits a penetration beyond the “neutral, faded content” (PRL, p246) of metaphysical conceptual frameworks and return to a more “primordial meaning and structure” (Ibid), where life is enacted within a temporal and historical setting. That is, not from the sanitized conceit of an armchair.

A crucial component of human activity is the species’ ability to enact different ways of being and bring various meanings (Sinn) into the world. Sinn is a socially and historically constituted conceptual scheme functioning in the background of all understanding that can never be fully objectified. Instead, it is disclosed gradually and incompletely through circular hermeneutic inquiry. Here Heidegger has much in common with William James and his skepticism towards the conceptual reconstruction of reality as it emerges from the flow of pure experience. No doubt, the Messkirch thinker would agree with James’ statement in A Pluralistic Universe that:

I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly and squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, expedience, concreteness, immediacy, use what words you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it. (PU, LV)

As he writes in Being and Time: “Meaning, structured by fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception, is the upon which of the project in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something” (BT, p147 (his italics). In Phenomenology as Intuition and Expression Heidegger refers to the removal this of the metaphysical straitjacket on religious experience as “not mere shattering but a ‘directed’ deconstruction (Abbau)” (PIE, P1–5b). This is philosophy with a percussion hammer, not a sledgehammer as Nietzsche once proposed.

Returning to The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger asserts that despite its “important preliminary work” the “methodical-scientific apparatus can still “miss the genuine object” of investigation (PRL, p54). Only when religion is “subjected to phenomenological destruction (Destrucktion)…can the history of religion be considered for phenomenology” (Ibid). This is because “all motives for historical understanding are always awakened through factical life experience” (PRL, p53). 
 
A Real and Original Relationship: Primordial Christianity and the Historical.

As far back as his habilitation on Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Meaning, Heidegger deemed the primary concern of philosophy to be “the value of life (Lebenswert)” (BCH, p24). As such, the hyper-rationality of Scholasticism must be tempered by the phenomenological exploration of religious experience. Indeed, after his turn (die Kehre), Heidegger would strive to balance thinking (denken) with poetry (dichtung). Philosophy divorced from lived experience leads to grave distortions.

In The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger is concerned not with “dogmatic, casuistic pseudo-philosophies, which pass themselves off as such philosophies of a particular system of religion” (PRL, p237), but religiosity and the religious attitude (PRL, p91), and how it grows into a “‘factical life-world’ and a ‘language that belongs to it” (Ibid). Crucial for Heidegger, is finding a “phenomenological relation of access…that is not left to philosophical flirtations” (PRL, p92). Instead, he seeks an approach where “(Christian religiosity-Christian life-Christian religion) is grasped, in its basic sense-direction” (PRL, p93, his italics). Religious life possesses its own “entirely originary intentionality with an entirely originary character of demands. Likewise originary are its own specific worldliness and valuableness” (PRL, p244).

Religious faiths possess their own existentiale categories that must not be imposed upon by philosophical agnosticism from outside, for, as Heidegger states:

Real philosophy of religion arises not from preconceived concepts of philosophy and religion. Rather, the possibility of its philosophical understanding arises out of a certain religiosity–for us the Christian religiosity…The task is to gain a real and original relationship to history, which is to be explicated from out of our own historical situation and facticity. (PRL, p89)

In Heidegger’s judgement, no real religion “allows itself to be captured philosophically (Erphilosophiceren)” (PRL, p244), because, as he writes in Ontology-The Hermeneutics of Facticity:

A ‘concept’ is not a schema but rather a possibility of being, of how matters look in the moment (des Augenblick), i.e., is constitutive of the moment-a meaning drawn out of something- points to a fore-having, i.e., transports us into a fundamental experience-points to a fore-conception, i.e., calls for a how of addressing and interrogating-i.e., transports us into the being-there of our Dasein in accord with its tendency to interpretation and its worry. (OHF, p12–13, his italics). 
 
 Religious life is always already living out its existentiale categories, and as such, must be understood internally using such modes of comprehension. Therefore, it should not be “burdened” by “‘ideas of content’ and ‘concepts’ at all” (PRL, p95). Instead, full justice must be given to the lived difference of a pluralistic universe where these “‘expressions’ are always to be taken as a ‘cluster’ of relations, of sense-complexes” (Ibid). Religion be understood as beyond the Scholastic dichotomy of rational and irrational. That is, as a phenomenon possessing its own kinds of norms, meanings, and values for comprehending the lived environment.

The key to understanding religion generally, for Heidegger, and Christianity specifically, is the historical. The “core phenomenon” (PRL, p22, his italics), or “most meaningful, founding elements of religious experience is the historical” (PRL, p244, his italics). This is because “Factical life emerges out of a genesis and becomes in entirely special way historical (enacted)” (PRL, p101).

Religious being is a form of historical consciousness; something that cannot be studied, only lived. Therefore “History hits us, and we are history itself” (PRL, p123). Factical life and the historical are tantamount to the same temporal concerns and preoccupations of lived life. Heidegger was acutely aware that the historical in religion differs greatly from the historical development of dogma. Eschatology is integral to Christian experience and cannot be comprehended in manner of ordinary temporal and historical experience. The existential experience of religion must therefore be parsed from religious dogma. Thus, “The dogma as detached content of doctrine in an objective, epistemological emphasis could never have been guiding for Christian religiosity. On the contrary the genesis of dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of Christian life experience” (PRL, p79).

More than dogma, the real conundrum for religion is the historical. Linking religion and history together, Heidegger states that “History in its most authentic sense is the highest object of religion, religion begins and ends with it” (PRL, p244). From a historical perspective, religion, and specifically Christianity, provides a particular manner of experiencing or living time. Heidegger applies the term lives (lebt) as a transitive verb (verbum transitivum) possessing an object, maintaining that what is experienced in “Christian religiosity is temporality as such” (PRL, p57&80). Christian life endures time and suffers through it.

To discover how the existentialia of authentic Christian life were formed and experienced, Heidegger performs the hermeneutic task of investigating the primordial Christian experience as it is disclosed in its earliest texts. This is because “following the penetration of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy into Christianity…Already at the end of the first century the eschatological was covered up in Christianity. In later times one misjudged all original Christian concepts” (PRL, p73). For primordial Christianity, “The meaning of temporality determines itself out of the fundamental relation of God-however, in such a way that only those who live temporality in the manner of enactment understand eternity” (PRL, p83–84).

Heidegger was perturbed by Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, who measured time against eternity and instead sought to explain the relation between Dasein and temporality, as well as, comprehending time in its lived everydayness. Despite Christianity’s claim about the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4), Heidegger instead focuses on the manner through which the self becomes lost in everydayness and absconds from confrontation with the future.

In Phenomenology and Theology, contained in Pathmarks, Heidegger emphasised that Christianness and a life dedicated to faith consist of a particular stance towards existence within history while reconstituting that historical existence through the acceptance of Christ. As such:

(F)aith is an appropriation of revelation that co-constitutes the Christian occurrence, that is, the mode of existence that specifies a factical Dasein’s Christianness as a particular form of destiny. Faith is believing-understanding mode of existing in the history of the revealed, i.e., occurring with the Crucified. (P, p45)

Rather than the acceptance of dogma, Heidegger sees a Christianity as a way of living. Although he follows in the footsteps of Augustine and Kierkegaard with their emphasis on the historical reality of the Crucifixion as the axial point of Christian faith, he also portrays Christianity as an existential assumption of time and history through the expectation of salvation. Dogma aside, Heidegger recognizes the phenomenological core of Christianity to be a certain way of experiencing life (Leben) and existence (Dasein). In particular, a life experienced as insecurity, for “There is no security for Christian life; the constant insecurity is also characteristic of what is fundamentally significant in factical life” (PRL, p73). As Heidegger declares in The Concept of Time: “theology is concerned with human existence as being before God” (CT, 1E). Religious life is therefore predicated upon the commitment to live by a particular decision. In his Letter on Humanism Heidegger declared that in a “Christianity too is a humanism, in that according to its teaching everything depends on human salvation (salus aeterna)” (BW, p153, his italics). 
 
No Cakewalk: The Enactment of Life.

By stating that “Christian religiosity lives temporality” (PRL, p57/73), Heidegger is alluding to towards a life stance unfolding in time that emphasizes a future Parousia, or Second Coming of Christ. Heidegger interprets Parousia as meaning arrival (presence) (PRL, p71). He also notes the change from its initial definition in Judaism as the arrival of a Messiah as a representative of God, to the return of an already revealed savior.

Rather than hopeful fatalistic waiting, Christianity is concerned with “the enactment of life” (PRL, p73). That is, how a person relates to their own life. A differential is opened within the temporal structure of the present. Thus, the “’When,’ of the time in which the Christian lives, has entirely special character…It is a time without its own order and demarcations…The when is in no way objectively graspable” (Ibid). Likewise, Pistis, or Truth, is not a “taking-to-be-true” (PRL, p76). But rather a “complex of enactment that is capable of increase. Faith is “not empty as state and as yielding a final bliss, rather and enactmental relation of the concerned entry to the future” (PRL, p91). Such an increase is demonstrative of both consciousness and authenticity.

Hope then, in the Christian understanding is, for Heidegger, is “not simply faith in immortality, but a faithful resilience grounded in Christian factical life” (PRL, p107). Hope is coping, endurance and oppression (Ibid). Christian life in its facticity, for Heidegger, has a “tendency toward that which has the character of enactment” (PRL, p86). Thus, rather than being fatalistic, the Christian must be “awake and sober” (Ibid) to a life that is “no cakewalk (spaziergang)” (PRL, p151), but a treacherous journey of ‘constant temptation…a trial without intermission” (PRL, p151–152). 
 
 Citing 2 Corinthians 12:2–10, Heidegger explains that in the “self-world of Paul…The extraordinary in life plays no role for him. Only when he is weak , when he withstands the anguish of life, can he enter into close connection with God” (PRL, p70). In Heidegger’s view, Christian mysticism is “Not mystical absorption and special exertion; rather withstanding the weakness of life is decisive” (PRL, p70). Mysticism is less a question of transcending life and more a commitment and dedication to coping and enduring it. In this way Christianity has a sensitivity toward factical life, as zoe, as vita, and acts responsively to it. Indeed, as Heidegger notes in his Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation; “the term zoe, vita, means a basic phenomenon, upon which the Greek, the Old Testament, the New Testament-Christian, and the Greek-Christian interpretations of human Dasein are centred” (PIRA, p169). 
 
All Weight on Content: The Relation of the Self to the World.

In his introduction to The Phenomenology of Religious Experience, Heidegger states:

I experience myself in factical life neither as a complex of lived experiences nor as a conglomeration of acts and processes, not even as some ego-object in a demarcated sense, but rather in that which I perform, suffer, what I encounter, in my conditions of depression, elation, and the like. I myself experience not even my ego in separateness, but I am as such always attached to the surrounding world. (PRL, p10)

In other words, experience has significance for human consciousness, though not necessarily as an ego.

For Heidegger, “Life experience is more than a mere experience that takes cognizance of. It designates the whole active and passive pose of the human being toward the world” (PRL, p8). This world as a lived environment shared with others and characterized by “being-among (Dabeisein)” (PRL, 173). A unique feature of our being-in-the-world is that “‘how I stand with regard to things,’ the manner of experiencing, is not co-experienced” (PRL, p9, his italics). Instead:

Factical life experience puts all weight on its content.; the how of factical life experience at most merges into its content…factical life experience manifests an indifference with regard to the manner of experiencing. (Ibid, his italics)

This is to say that life is experienced as distributed in time and absorbed in the capriciousness of various human dispositions which are dispersed among the different regions of lived experience. For, as Heidegger writes in his Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: “Self-dispersed life encounters its world as ‘dispersion,’ as dispersing, manifold, absorbing, engaging, unfulfilling, boring” (PIA, p88–89/RF, p77). Thus, as Heidegger concludes:

We could say that life is in itself world-related; ‘life’ and ‘world’ are not two separate self-subsistent Objects, such as a table and the chair which stand before it in a spacial related…The nexus of sense joining ‘life’ and ‘world’ is precisely expressed in the fact that, in characteristic contexts of expression in speech, the one word can stand in for the other: e.g., ‘to go out into life,’ ‘out into the world’; ‘to live totally in one’s world,’ ‘totally in one’s life.’ World is the basic category of the basic category of the content sense in the phenomenon, life. (PIA, p65)

Furthermore, “Living, in its verbal meaning, is to be interpreted according to its sense of caring: to care for and about something; to live from (on the basis of) something, caring for it” (PIA, p68). Heidegger articulates such caring in The Phenomenology of Religious Life as concern and worry (PRL, p52). Caring is to experience the objects of the world as symbolic encounters, not merely as a given. This is because “What we care for and about, what caring adheres to, is equivalent to what is meaningful…The basic characteristic the object is always this: it stands, and is met with, on the path; it is experienced as meaningful” (PIA, p68).

Heidegger’s assertion that “the relational sense of ‘life’ is governed by care” (PIA, p73) is motivated by his phenomenological project of that strives to transcend the high altitude thinking (pensée du servol) denigrated by Merleau-Ponty. Instead, he aims for a descriptive philosophy embedded within a life-world (lebenswelt). However, the way the human embraces and describes their life is subject to the complication of being authentic or inauthentic. Much of life is lived a distance from the self, buried in otherness, “the kind of being of everydayness” (BT, p123). Such “Self-sure Objectivity is a flight from facticity” (PIA, p68), but factical life possesses a “movedness (Bewegtheit)” that “can be provisionally interpreted and described as unrest” (PIA, p70).

In The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger states that ‘’Factical life experience is the ‘attitudinal, falling, relationally indifferent, self-sufficient concern for significance’’ (PRL, P11). Concern for significance is inexorably directed at the world. Like a trampolinist, Dasein will constantly rebound from the world with meanings valid for itself.

The indifference spoken of by Heidegger references the deficient concern for the manner in which human dispositions and temperaments affect their interpretations and access to the phenomena of their experience, for “In the falling tendency of life experience, a connectedness of objects increasingly forms and increasingly stabilizes itself” (PRL, p12). The human subject is always and forever embedded within a life-world it cannot be extricated from. This is why Heidegger sought to move beyond the term Human, and instead, identified Dasein as:

(T)hat entity which is characterized as being-in-the-world. Human life is not some subject that has to perform some trick in order to enter the world. Dasein as being-in-the-world means: being in the world in such a way that this Being means: dealing with the world; tarrying alongside it in the manner of performing, effecting and completing, but also contemplating, interrogating, and determining by way of contemplation and comparison. being-in-the-world is characterized as concern. (CT, p7)
 
The Plunge: Temptation and Fallenness.

Examination of religious life provided Heidegger with access to human experience more generally. It was from such analysis that Heidegger derived his concepts such as everydayness (Alltaglichtheit) and falleness (Verfallen). The former speaks of the idle chatter, nosiness, and ambivalence of quotidian existence. While the latter the latter denotes enchantment with such worldliness. In his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger makes it abundantly clear that falleness isn’t a theological category, but an ontological one. As he writes: “This word does not signify the Fall of Man understood in a ‘moral philosophical’ and at the same time secularized way; rather, it designates an essential relationship of humans to being within being’s relation to the essence of the human being” (BW, p160).

In the second introduction of Being and Time, Heidegger states that “Dasein not only has the inclination to be entangled in the world in which it is and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light; at the same time Dasein is also entangled in a tradition which it more or less explicitly grasps” (BT, p20). Furthermore, “Falling prey is an existential determination of Dasein itself” (BT, p169). However, such falling prey or entanglement “does not express any negative value judgement,” or “a ‘fall’ from a purer or higher ‘primordial condition’’ (Ibid). Rather, “Dasein is initially and for the most part together with the ‘world’ that it takes care of” (Ibid, his italics).

As an unavoidable consequence of being-in-the-world, falling prey is not a corruption of human nature, but an essential aspect of existence. However, this does not prevent Heidegger proclaiming that “Dasein prepares for itself the constant temptation of falling prey. Being-in-the-world is in itself temping (versucherisch)” (BT, p170). This reiterates Heidegger’s earlier assertion in The Phenomenology of Religious Life that “Temptation lurks precisely in what belongs to my facticity, what is with me and in which I am” (PRL, p189).

Returning to Being and Time, such “tempting itself, is at the same time tranquillizing (beruhigend)…This tranquillization…does not seduce one into stagnation and inactivity, but drives one to uninhibited “busyness…Tempting tranquillization increases entanglement’’ (BT, P171, his italics). Temptation then, is a seduction of the spirit that leads one away from quietude into clamor and distraction of daily life. However, falling prey is “not only tempting and tranquillizing; it is at the same time alienating…it drives Dasein into…the most exaggerated ‘self-dissection’ which tries out all kinds of possibilities of interpretation…The phenomena pointed out of temptation, tranquillizing, alienation, and self-entangling…We call this kind of ‘movement’ of Dasein in its own being the plunge (Absturz)” (Ibid). Alienated from itself, the self plunges into “the groundlessness and nothingness of inauthentic everydayness” (BT, p171–172).

The Blink of an Eye: Authenticity, Resoluteness, and the Moment.

As Heidegger notes in Being and Time: “authentic existence is nothing which hovers over entangled everydayness, but is existentially only a modified grasp of everydayness” (BT, p172, his italics). Given that “Being-in-the-world is always already entangled” (BT, 175), this is how Dasein expresses itself as being-in-the-world as a self or ego (BT, p307). This is to say that when a subject speaks, they do so in the language of the they, of the other. Authentic Dasein is engendered by a resoluteness against the inauthenticity of existence which permits the self “to be all the more authentically ‘there’ for the disclosed situation in the ‘Moment’ (Aguenblick)” (BT, 313). This Moment, as a blink of the eye, “can in principle not be clarified in terms of now”, but instead lets one “encounter for the first time what can be ‘in time’ as something at or objectively present” (BT, p323, his italics). This notion echoes Paul’s twinkling of an eye from 1Thessalonians 15:52, which Heidegger credits Kierkegaard with observing. Indeed, as he writes in a footnote, Kierkegaard interpreted “the existentiell phenomenon of the Moment in the most penetrating way” (BT, p323, his italics). This despite him getting “stuck in the vulgar concept of time and defines the Moment with the help of now and eternity” (Ibid).

Resoluteness then, as anticipation, is a reclamation of, and returning to, one’s own self and forms the basis for repetition, which is Dasein’s return from the they. Repetition both reclaims the past and opens the possibility for the future. As Heidegger writes” “The authentic coming-towards-itself of anticipatory resoluteness is at the same time a coming back to the ownmost self, thrown into its individualization… In anticipating, Dasein brings itself forth again…to its ownmost potentiality-of-being. We call authentic having-been repetition (Wiederholung)” (BT, p324). However, as Heidegger states in The History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena: “The assumption of the tradition is not necessarily traditionalism and the adoption of prejudices. The genuine repetition of a traditional question lets its external character as a tradition fade away and pulls back from the prejudices” (HCT:P, p138). That is, whatever resolution one adopts, it is in some way inherited from the past and repeated. 
 
 What is repeated for Heidegger, more often than not, is everydayness, for “Everydayness determines Dasein even when it has not chosen the they as its ‘hero’” (BT, p353). However, there is also the possibility of choosing a hero:

The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been — the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero — is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness; for it is in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle over what is to follow (kampfende Nachfolge) and fidelity (Treue) to what can be repeated’ (BT, p367).

Nachfolge here, can be interpreted as a form of imitation, as in an imitation of Christ (Nachfolge Christi), as the translator notes (BT, p367, TR note). For Heidegger, a life of enactment is that which confronts historicity and transforms it, always orientated towards the future. This resoluteness to face destiny is also an authentic way to belong to one’s own time, to belong to history by making it. As Heidegger states: “The fateful destiny of Dasein in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Dasein” (BT, p366). 
 
 History has a deep meaning for the Christian. As Kierkegaard observes in The Concept of Anxiety, in Ancient Greek philosophy:

(T)he concept of temporality was lacking…Greek culture did not understand the moment…the Greeks did not have the concept of the eternal; so neither did they have a concept of the future. Therefore, Greek life cannot be reproached for being lost in the moment. (ES, p151–152/IV357–359)

The Ancient Greeks then, for Kierkegaard, do not understand time. They do not see the moment in terms of futurity or charged by the eternal, but simply the passing away of time. It is Christianity that provides an authentic understanding of time. As Kierkegaard writes: “The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past” (ES, p153/IV360). In The Meaning of History, Nicholas Berdyaev makes a similar observation when he writes that in “the Hellenic culture, world and consciousness were lacking in historical sense. They had no conception of history as fulfilling itself. Even the greatest Greek philosophers were unaware of the ‘historical’ and the possibility of a philosophy of history” (MH, p27). But, for Berydaev, the “Christian consciousness, on the other hand, held that events were immediate, non-recurrent and unique, and it imposed this conception historical reality” (MH, p33).

Rather than circular, time, for the Christian is linear. Therefore, it is imperative upon the Christian ascertain the meaning of history and transform into an authentic life as, according to Heidegger:

(H)istory is the specific occurrence of existing Dasein happening in time, in such a way that the occurrence — which in being-with-one-another is ‘past’ and, at the same time, ‘handed down’ (uberlieferte) and still having and effect — is taken to be history. (BT, 361)

Christianity is attentive to the fullness of time within the uncertainty of factical life and simultaneously assertive of the need to seize that time. It is resolute in the face of everydayness to enact a Christian existence in imitation of Christ.

Sources.

~(GBNV) George Bell and Nikolai Velimirovich: The Story of a Friendship by Muriel Heppell (Lazarica 2001).

~(CG) Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew edited by John Chryssavgis (Grand Rapids 2003).

~(PRL) The Phenomenology of Religious Life by Martin Heidegger (IUP 2010).

~(PU) A Pluralistic Universe (CreateSpace 2015) by William James.

~(BT) Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (SUNY 2010).

~(PIE) Phenomenology as Intuition and Expression by Martin Heidegger (Continuum 2010).

~(BCH) The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger by Francois Raffuel (Bloomsbury 2013).

~(OHF) Ontology-The Hermeneutics of Facticity by Martin Heidegger (IUP 1999).

~(P) Pathmarks by Martin Heidegger (CUP 1998).

~(CT) The Concept of Time by Martin Heidegger (John Wiley and Sons 1992).

~(BW) Heidegger: Basic Writings (Routledge 2008).

~(PIRA) Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation by Martin Heidegger (available at philarchive.org).

~(PIA) Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle by Martin Heidegger (IUP 2001).

~(RF) Rethinking Facticity edited by Francois Raffuel and Eric Sean Nelson (SUNY 2008).

~(HCT:P) The History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena by Martin Heidegger (IUP 2009).

~(ES) The Essential Kierkegaard edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (PUP 2000).

~(MH) The Meaning of History by Nicolas Berdyaev (Semantron 2009).