What is culture?

"Culture", "cultural relations", "cultural values"...

What is culture? The shortest definition of this word is love for a person.

When we say about a person: "he is cultured," we want to express the integrity and harmony of his spiritual image.

Of course, we sometimes make mistakes, we apply the word "culture" to life, to this or that person, quite incorrectly; We take only its likeness or even illusion for harmony. Our assessments and criteria are not always deep. But the world is designed as love, and harmony is achieved only through love. And every person is given the opportunity to express love in the world. Its realization is the goal of life and history...

Each of us is given a talent of love, and from the many of our individual lives the general image of this or that people and all mankind is formed. Each person is primarily responsible for his or her own life. He must cultivate himself, his soul, like a garden.

An engineer, a doctor, a farmer, a scientist, a politician, a public figure, a worker laying bricks, a gardener grafting a fruit tree, a poet consoling a person, a musician looking for a new harmony — all these are bees working in one huge hive-world; they fly in different colors, but the sweetness of their achievements goes to the common home. We, people, are called to fill the world with a fragrant garden of good creative thoughts and feelings, sweet for everyone, and not with the corrosive smoke of selfishness, hatred and evil. In this lies the highest realization of the purpose of life for all of us, the Kingdom of God...

Culture is human labor moved by love. Not forced labor, which is a curse, but free labor, which is a blessing. Attempts to build a life only on materialistic ideas and interests are senseless and fruitless. And no idea can be materialistic: it will always be spiritual, only its direction can be towards truth or falsehood.

A man dressed in the clothes of only one external technical civilization, a man without spiritual values and demands, looks like a dead man. It lacks the most important thing: the spirit of life. Denying the Living God and hissing with hatred for a person other than ourselves, the materialistic pseudo-culture wants to cover the blossoming earth like lava.

And life petrifies where it is covered with this black lava of a utilitarian, materialistic worldview. It is gray, stuffy, and poor in a world where there is only a play of material human interests, but there is no culture of spirit and no culture of love. In the struggle for material value, a person knows how to obtain "his right", but does not always find in this "right" his real, joyful life.

There is a biblical image full of deep, universal meaning: people build a tower to the heavens... They are sure that they will "reach heaven", that is, their human happiness, "making a name for themselves", through the construction of a material tower... "Let's build a tower and be happy," these people think. A pathetic thought!

Can any number of bricks or cars make people better, wiser, kinder and closer to each other, more able to understand and find their happiness? Obsessed with material construction, seeing only in it the goal of their life, people build and build... Generations change, the human tower is still being built, and the earth is more and more flooded with the blood of brothers...

No number of floors of material civilization can pass into the moral quality of life without the inner feat and effort of the human soul and without the blessing of God... Only that on which God's blessing rests has life and existence.

The inner division of people united only by matter and materialism is menacingly revealed in the world.