NOTES for Luk 18:15

We understand and feel well the whole range of our tender feelings for children, and it does not surprise us that the Lord also loves them and wants them to be brought to Him. But besides this purely vital aspect, today's text has a deeply philosophical aspect. To understand it, let us turn to a fragment from Joseph Brodsky's Nobel lecture. "Every new aesthetic reality refines ethical reality for a person. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; the concepts of 'good' and 'bad' are primarily aesthetic concepts, preceding the concepts of 'good' and 'evil.' In ethics, 'not everything is permitted' because in aesthetics 'not everything is permitted,' because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. An uncomprehending infant who with tears rejects a stranger or, on the contrary, reaches out to him instinctively makes an aesthetic choice, not a moral one. Aesthetic choice is individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience. [...] The point is not so much that virtue is no guarantee of a masterpiece, but that evil [...] is always a bad stylist. The richer an individual's aesthetic experience, the firmer his taste, the clearer his sovereign choice, the freer he is, though perhaps not happier."

It is very important for us to note two things in these words: an infant makes an aesthetic choice because he does not know ethics, and in a certain sense ethics depends on aesthetics. This is why "to such belongs the Kingdom of God." This is much harder for us to understand than tender feelings for children, ours and Jesus'. The mastering of Christianity's ethical norms comes so hard to us, yet children have not yet walked this thorny path, so why do they turn out to be ahead of us? Here is Joseph Brodsky's answer. Indeed, on some deep level aesthetics comes before ethics. In essence, only the lack of genuine aesthetics in this earthly life determined the necessity of ethics. Ethics is inevitably connected with our suffering, because it forbids us what we sometimes greatly want, and this already testifies to its earthly "etiology." Genuine aesthetics carries no suffering in itself and is an echo of the Heavenly. And precisely children, who do not yet know ethics, who simply have not yet been taught ethics, up to a certain point still have a sense of genuine aesthetics.

Let us note one more thought of Brodsky: "Aesthetic choice is individual, and aesthetic experience is always a private experience." This also brings us to the level of childlikeness. Because ethics is, in essence, the norms of intra-social existence, the existence of adults, while children, until we send them to kindergarten and for some time after that, are beings individual in the highest degree simply because they have not dealt with society. But how much wealth there is in this individuality, if only our prayer to God were like that. And then they bring you from kindergarten or school what other children or the caregiver, teacher, and so on say. Then they are already afraid of not being like everyone else. There is something like this in our life in God too, some kind of schoolboy spirit; and if it is said when and how to read, then we read then and that way, and think that we are praying. But in reality prayer is the hardest labor of seeking the true Face of God, yes, many remember this, but also one's own true face. We must not forget this. And very often it turns out that it must be sought in one's early childhood.