Humanity, or Childhood Forever

The article deals with the problem of metaphysics of childhood, which is considered in the context of the search for human identity, through the identification of its proportionality to the world. Childhood is considered not so much as a stage of growing up, but as an essential characteristic of man, integral to him throughout the existence of both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Children feel organically in the "era of equipment", staying in the Universal House. Since Modern times, people live in the "era of homelessness." He destroys the House, considering himself an Adult, able to do without a House. Adequate Parent-Child relationships with the world are destroyed. Abandoning the Child, man did not become an Adult but faced infinity of loneliness and insignificance. Man overthrew the walls of the House, feeling a big, strong, and independent Adult. Facing the absurd immensity of helplessness, he suddenly woke up a Baby again. "Adulthood" (more precisely, "teenage revolt") was manifested only in the ability to destroy the old House; ignorance, immaturity was manifested as a lack of understanding of the need and inability to build a new Home. A person can found a new House (scientific picture of the world), but cannot live in it. The modern man is a lost Child on the ruins of a destroyed and unfinished House. The largest gap between the eternal childishness (its essence) and the illusion of its own super-adulthood (its quasi-existence) is amplified by the fact that the "historical pendulum", at present, "froze" on Childishness. The eternal (essential) and specific historical Childishness of man is opposed to the simulacrum his super-adulthood (which appears as a crisis of identification). The theme of "the return of the Prodigal Son", which is widely included in the world culture, appears to denote the way of resolving the identity crisis. An adequate the end of this path is expressed in the image of Madonna and Child. The centuries-old involvement of man in this image lies in the fact that he identifies himself with the eternal Divine Child in the native hands of the eternal Mother of God. These Divine Faces embody the metaphysical ideal of building a harmonious Child-Parent relationship between man and the world.