Our culture suffers from image excess. We are oversatiated with images. Every day we are flooded with AI-generated images of everything, including the most sacred things such as images of Christ: hyper-realistic, infinitely reproducible, available within a second in any style and any format. The digital stream of images is a form of anaesthesia. It numbs the faculty required to see anything at all.

The same applies to music. Spotify alone contains more than one hundred million musical pieces, and the algorithm delivers the next one uninterruptedly, tailored to your mood, your tempo and your day, yet for that very reason nothing properly sinks in. One hears a song and swipes onwards. Total availability has not made us richer in music; it has degraded our capacity to listen.

The news is a third example. An earthquake disaster in Asia, a civil war in Sudan, a flood in Bangladesh – within seconds they are in the palm of our hand, intrusive and invasive, and within minutes they are replaced by the next global news items.

What is distant comes close without becoming present. It strikes us without moving us. The sociologist :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} calls it alienation: The world has ceased to speak to us, and we have ceased to listen. We reach out, and there is nothing that reaches back.

The philosopher :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1} described in 1935 how the work of art loses its aura in the age of reproduction. But what has happened since then is more radical than he foresaw: We have not merely reproduced what is distant – we have abolished distance itself.

Streaming services, social media and smartphones have made everything immediately accessible, and the paradox is that when nothing is distant in an authentic sense, proximity also disappears. Proximity presupposes distance; what is near is only near in relation to something distant.

When everything is immediately accessible, the very coordinate system is suspended: There is no longer a “here”, because there is no “there”. One is close to everything and yet near to nothing. Our age suffers not from distance, but from its absence.

What remains is a strange intermediate zone where everything is accessible, yet nothing is present. It is experienced as emptiness, but paradoxically as an overcrowded emptiness, a feed that never pauses.

Perhaps that is why the encounter with something truly auratic feels like something extraordinary: It withdraws itself, it does not permit itself to be reproduced, it requires that one oneself be present.

I myself recall such an encounter. I was sitting in a library where I worked at the time. Next to it stood a beautiful old church. One day the church bells rang. It was a funeral, as I could see from my window. Later that afternoon I entered the church.

The October darkness crept in like a rising tidal wave that cast long shadows before it. But inside the church there was light.

There hung an admirable little crucifix with a figure of Christ. It dated from the thirteenth century and was made from a tusk of a mammoth. Something so rare must have been immensely costly.

There was a stillness surrounding the figure in the empty church as I leaned forward to look more closely at it.

The surface of the figure had a creamy glow. It possessed shades of colour ranging from white to warmer, yellowish tones and fine veining with darker streaks that created a living texture. The richness of detail in the facial features, hands and contours of the body testified to masterly craftsmanship.

But what was truly so extraordinary about this figure of Christ was its aura.

It was at one and the same time something near and something distant. It was physically near and tangible. It was before me here and now. Yet at the same time it seemed inaccessible, as though it belonged to an entirely different sphere. Why?

Thanks to the material from which it was made, the figure represented an immense span of time. The mammoth became extinct 10,000 years ago.

Also significant was the figure’s cultic value; the incarnate mystery of faith. That God became man and died for our sake lies infinitely far beyond our normal powers of comprehension.

Not least, the figure of Christ preserved its aura through its wholly unique character: It cannot be reproduced.

How uplifting it is to encounter such things in our age!