Calling culture a “Beautiful Garden,” Roerich puts Beauty, as an energetic law of the harmony of the spirit, in the primary position. “The Awareness of Beauty will save the world,” he repeated Dostoyevsky’s words with a slight modification. This formula actually contains the whole essence of the Cosmic evolution which moves from chaos to order, from the simple to the complicated, from an elementary system to Beauty. Beauty, as a category of the spirit, refines the matter of life and the energetics of man. The contemplation of beauty forms in man the philosophic and subtle contemplation of the world. Culture as such does not exist without creation, for creation is that energetic core, without which a self-organizing system of the spirit cannot advance from the simple to the complicated, from a solid to a subtle state. Creation makes an earthly man akin to the God-Creator and thus shows him the evolutionary way in the starry spaces of the Cosmos. It is creation as a phenomenon of culture in the broadest sense that secures the possibility of collaboration with the high cosmic Hierarchy. Energetically amplified by the “language of the heart” it gives to man-creator the opportunity to break through into the unknown, into the Infinity. “The language of creation is that universal human language which is understood through the heart. And what can be more luciferous, more mutually understandable, than the language of the heart, in comparison with which, all sounding dialects are scarce and primitive? Only creation in all its versatility injects a peaceful uniting current into all life structures. And the one who, despite surrounding difficulties, strives along this way of Light, fulfills an necessary task of evolution.”[8, p.153]

Such high energetic manifestations of the human spirit as heartiness and love are an integral part of Culture as such. Without these qualities, Roerich justly argued, there is no cultural man. In Roerich’s rich and multicolored palette of Culture, there is no place for the spiritless, stiff “educated bigots,” those who know which fork they should use to eat fish, but who have no knowledge of those higher powers contained in themselves. Culture cannot exist without natural links with the Higher. Its self-organizing system is formed under the direct influence of contacts with worlds of a higher state of matter, higher dimensions. As Berdiayev wrote, culture “contains knowledge and a different kind of spiritual reality.” Energies, which, in the result of the most complicated energetic exchange processes taking place in the Cosmos, approach the Earth, can fulfill their positive role only having passed the field of Culture, where the high spiritual potential necessary for receiving these kinds of energies is concentrated. Energies that approached the earth but did not meet in their way softening spiritual-energetic structures capable of lowering their intensity can acquire a destructive character.

Civilization, as was already mentioned, is an arrangement of life, an organization of its solid matter. Various types of civilizations have appeared and have been formed in the history of mankind. Their character has been determined by, first of all, their degree of interaction with Culture, for civilization appears in the energetic field of Culture. It can only be said that in many cases, early civilizations were created and developed together with Culture and actively interacted with it. At the initial stages, civilization was a kind of a frame for the precious stone of Culture, and the correspondence of this frame to the stone itself, the degree of their harmony, determined the quality of this or that period in human history, its spirituality and cultural extent. Sometimes the frame wore out, fell apart due to various circumstances, and then the stone itself was surrendered to the power of the elements, often destructive. Sometimes civilization receded from Culture, or approached it, but never, throughout the last two millenniums, and earlier, too, did it exist separately from Culture. The complete deviation of civilization from Culture is a specific feature of the 20th century, the century standing on the threshold of new evolutionary changes in the life of the planet. Representing, unlike Culture, the perishable, transient matter of human life, civilizations came and passed, appeared and were destroyed, while the eternal spirit of Culture, the carrier of which has always been humanity as a whole, remained, passed the cycles of its development through many generations, strengthening the spirit and expanding the energetic possibilities for their further evolution.

Roerich draws our attention to the fact that, in the interaction of Culture and civilization, the priority must be given to Culture, which will save civilization from many deformations characteristic of the same. “Let us remember the behest of Light,” he wrote, “that, first of all, the most important thing for us will be the spirit and creation, then comes the health, and only in the third place – wealth.”[9, p.93]

In the energetically integral structure governed by the Great Laws of the Cosmos, spirit and matter pulse and strive for the synthesis destined to them by evolution, now approaching, and now receding from it. That is why now epochs of the prime of Culture appear – and then civilization becomes cultural, then again material civilizations prevail – and then Culture recedes to the background, sometimes incapable at all of influencing civilization.

N. Roerich. Human deeds

Bourgeois revolutions, having pragmatic and materialistic character, stabilized and developed the gap formed in the integral phenomenon “Culture – civilization.” The epoch of the Great Alienation of Culture from civilization had started. Spirit receded from matter. Matter started to make claims for power over spiritual values. Separated from Culture, civilization started forming a one-sided materialistic mentality where pure pragmatism prevailed, which destroyed the last remainders of the idealism of the 19th century. Man himself, his soul, feelings, his complicated internal life were alienated from society, its new values and new materialistic tasks. Matter, as never before, assumed dominating positions, aggressively and unscrupulously pushed away the spirit, and deprived human society of the collective energy it needed. It broke links with the Higher, doubted existence of cosmic collaboration, and appropriated the functions of God-Creator, assured of a possibility to create everything by hand and intellect. “In civilization,” N. Berdiayev wrote, “spiritual energy exhausts, spirit – the source of culture – fades. Then starts the domination over human souls not of natural powers, barbarian powers in the noble sense of this word, but of the magic kingdom of machinery and mechanics substituting itself for the true being.”[10, p.172]

This machine, the technogenic civilization of the 20th century, does not need any more philosophy, true art, religion in the real sense of this word. It substitutes the entertainment industry for Culture and forms on it the basis for “mass culture,” which serves the matter of society, but by no means its spirit. It indulges the base feelings and instincts of the human body, kills its energetics, interferes with the development of the harmony of the spirit and matter, making more difficult the further evolutionary ascent of man.

When we say that mankind is at a dead end, having flooded the planet with machines, subdued man to these machines, having caused irreparable damage to the nature of the Earth, and, correspondingly, to man himself, we must understand the reason for it. This reason is the discrepancy between Culture and civilization, the belittlement of Culture and extolment of material civilization. Once, for a number of concrete reasons, the balance which was holding the planet like two wings was destroyed. A shift took place, and everything went wrong. Not within the tide of the evolution regulated by the Great Laws of Cosmos, but along a potholed and dusty road leading to a dead end, threatening energetic catastrophes.

The distortions in the interaction of culture and civilization that we are observing now have caused another negative phenomenon. Probably, for the first time in the history of mankind, at the juncture of the 20th and 21st centuries, the technogenic civilization started to influence culture, diminishing, and often bringing to nothing, the role assigned to it by cosmic evolution and the history of humanity. It is the influence of the technogenic civilization on art that resulted in the neglect of beauty in some areas, loss of the sense of beauty, and formation of all kinds of ugly objects. And of course, the most terrible thing is when such creations become fashionable, acquiring wide popularity. Machines’ forms have entered the arts, and music has started to repeat the primitive rhythms of working equipment. We now are observing a new process when the expanded civilization that got hold of human souls, in the full sense of this word, starts to destroy beauty, the subtle energetics of creativity, and for knowledge substitutes an ignorance based on the unrestricted consumerism of modern society.

Each phenomenon, Roerich stated, has its cycles of development, its upsurges and declines. In the 20th century, Culture and civilization reached a crucial point in differentiation, in separation. And only synthesis can bring the system “Culture – civilization” to the state that will correspond to the main trend of Cosmic evolution. In the long run, the purpose of evolution in our physical world is to bring closer the spirit and matter, the achievement of harmony between them at a certain stage, and finally, their synthesis which will result in the creation of spiritual matter and will raise its energetic level. This synthesis, as Roerich asserted, will change the essence of civilization, will make it spiritual, will turn Culture and civilization into an integral phenomenon, acting already at a higher qualitative level than in its initial version. “The beneficial Synthesis,” Roerich wrote, “will help to introduce into everyday life sanative high notions and will teach us to embrace all those multiple things that only yesterday seemed either empty abstractness, or inapplicable clumsiness, or just funny, from the point of view of conventional habits, prejudices, and superstitions.”[11, p.31]

Nicholas Roerich was characterized by one remarkable feature. His thought, philosophically profound, was always implemented into action. When he comprehended the evolutionary significance of Culture as the bearer of evolution, he understood that Culture should be not only developed as a foundation of the Cosmic evolution of mankind, but must be protected as well. In the 20th century, the situation with Culture was not the best. World War I, all kinds of military encounters, revolutions, the neglect of Culture in peacetime – all this resulted in devastating processes in space, which, beyond all doubt, slowed down its development, and, at the same time, in a most negative way affected the evolution of mankind as a whole. During military conflicts, temples, libraries, galleries, and other priceless objects of Culture were ruined. Human ignorance destroyed cultural values that had been accumulated for many centuries, burned original manuscripts, destroyed the thought contained in writings, annihilated pieces of art – storages of precious energetics. In other words, it eradicated landmarks of the evolutionary path of mankind, which affected, of course, all spheres of its life. The 20th century passed through the phenomena of acute crises, at the basis of which, in one way or another, lay the crisis of spiritual culture on the planet earth. The 21st century is witnessing global crises that mankind cannot yet cope with. Ignorance and a low level of mentality undermine the foundations of Culture. Knowledge and beauty, however, often negated and destroyed, belong to the space of Culture and are, according to Helena Roerich’s definition, the “crown of cosmic evolution.”