The Christmas Gospel
Chapter 23
Artistic masterpieces are "caresses"
In the major museums, libraries and other intellectual centres accessible to the public, however, one obtains access to seeing some of the world's greatest and most beautiful intellectual creations with which one can enrich one's spirit, become stimulated, become ensouled with inner longing for reaching such perfection in creation as the one that radiates from the walls, shelves and displays of the galleries.
Are not all these ingenious artistic productions, be they in books, pictures or sculpture, one giant single collection of "caresses"?
Is it not simply intended that they should enliven, beautify and glorify the walls, the halls, the galleries and other surroundings they happen to be situated in?
They are not after all produced in order to make their surroundings ugly, dark and sad.
However, when they are thus to enliven, beautify the life and surroundings of the viewer, they are to the greatest extent a "caress" of this viewer.
And since the referred-to artistic productions, namely what concerns the pictorial or sculptural works, have long since ceased to be a means by which one can turn the living hours of other beings into "slavery" and thus are only one hundred per cent "caresses", they are indeed the absolute one hundred per cent "neighbourly love" whose warming and life-giving rays here greet us from the museum's great atriums.
Here, we see products that are created by their authors out of the sheer joy of creating something that can warm and brighten up the human mind, regardless of what it ends up costing in terms of hunger or crucifixion, and without any particular regard for economic gain.
Who has a greater love than the one who sacrifices his life solely to help make the lives of others happy?
When the genius or master thus thwarts hunger, distress and misery, scorn and mockery and without prospect of any economic gain simply because it means life for him to make his creations as perfect as can be, and this creation is a phenomenon that will continue to "caress" the viewer, fill his mentality with admiration, inspiration and longing for reaching perfection, there is no getting away from the fact that the creator of the artwork or masterpiece has thus loved or done more for this viewer than he has done for himself.
He himself defied all the difficulties in creating his manifestation so that it could become precisely a permanent "caress" of the viewer.
In truth, is it not "neighbourly love"?