‘Creativity has nothing at all to do with holiness. Creativity is connected with sin. It is, like Plato’s Eros, the child of two parents — poverty and wealth; deficiency, lack, restlessness, longing and — excess of strength, generosity, sacrificial giving of oneself’.

Berdiaev

Besides the Ten Commandments, there is an eleventh. There is another duty, which was not known in earlier times and has only recently begun to be realised. It is the creative duty. ‘If you can create, create’, is how this new commandment can be expressed. — ‘Bring more complexity, more value, more light into the world than has hitherto been in it’.

This commandment is not in the sacred books of Christians, but it has arisen out of all worlds — only in the Christian world, and its source is the Gospel ’be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’. In what is divine perfection? Of course, in creation; He is the Creator with a capital letter, the first creator.

There can be only two opinions about creativity. Either it is an incidental human ability, unnecessary or even harmful to the soul; or the creative gift is a virtue among other virtues, partly still known to the pagans, but a special virtue, often in conflict with her sisters. However, it is not so special: the virtues of the warrior are also not compatible with the virtues of the peacemaker… We cannot have everything at once. If we look at it this way, the creative gift ceases to be a rebel among other, seemingly peaceful gifts. Only accept it without conditions, do not demand service to the Light at once: this is the goal of all creativity, and it should come to this goal by itself, because, as Berdiaev shrewdly said, ’man needs to pass through freedom’. (We should not, of course, confuse eternally fruitful freedom with the barren, murderous ’liberation’ of our time. Liberation leads nowhere and has no other goal than liberation from the human form).

It is wrong to think that creativity is necessarily connected with ’public’, success and rewards. This is the case in happy epochs for creators, but it is the exception, not the rule. The rule is that creativity is a duty for everyone who has heard the call to it, for everyone who has been called.

So, creativity is not a ’path to success’, but only a duty, which should be fulfilled simply for the sake of our own soul and its good, for nothing else, no matter how sorrowful it may be for us the absence of any response to our voice, the absence of any light around the fire lit in us. Not everyone to be Pushkin, but not every Pushkin knows the writer’s happiness, ‘with labour, — that is, with grief, in the words of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, — mixed’. In epochs of sadness, in epochs of morning or sunset, the gift remains unnoticed and its fruits unnecessary.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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