Death is swallowed up in victory

Death is consumed. The subject of the verb "absorb" can be only one word – water. It is this river, the river of time, to use the well-known words of Derzhavin, that carries away all the affairs of people and drowns them in the abyss of oblivion, that is, in the end it swallows everything. Both in ancient mythology (NB: the rivers of the underworld – Lethe, Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon and Styx), so in the Old Testament, water symbolizes the kingdom of death. The Greeks liken death to crossing underground waters on Charon's boat, in the Bible – dying, a person seems to drown in these waters. "As it was in the days of Noah... until the day that Noah entered into the ark... until the flood came and destroyed them all" (cf. Matthew 24:37-39), and in other Old Testament texts, water is almost always a sign of death. In the Psalms, where water is mentioned, death is actually spoken, and immersion in water during baptism, according to the Apostle Paul, means that we die together with Christ and are buried together with Him, so that, united with Him in the likeness of His death, we may be together with Him and in the likeness of the resurrection (Romans 6:3-5). What happens when death is swallowed up by victory? It (death!) dies by itself. Exactly what she used to plunge all people indiscriminately into is happening to her. In the twentieth century, we do not quite understand what the apostle means when he joyfully announces that death is dead, but it was clear to his addressees. This was also clear to John of Damascus, who in the 7th ode of the canon of St. Pascha rendered this formula of the Apostle Paul in different words, but absolutely accurately: "We celebrate the mortification of death." What is the matter here?

Historical Context

It was during the years when Jesus preached and then died on the cross that the poems of Quintus Horace Flaccus (died 8 BC) spread around the world. The leitmotif of Horace's poetry is the fear of death and ways to overcome it. From book to book, from ode to ode in different, really beautiful from any point of view and extremely elegant poems (it is a pity that Horace is not read now!), the poet varies the same idea: whoever you are, a poor peasant or a descendant of ancient kings, you will die anyway, everyone will have to get into a boat and see the dark waters of Cocytus up close, everyone is destined to ride this wave, each of us is waiting for this hour, Pluto is implacable and no sacrifices can persuade him to spare you. Your most worthy, exclaims the poet with infinitely sad irony, the heir will get to your goods and will spill on the stone floor the wines that you have stored behind a hundred locks. Sooner or later, everyone will die, etc. That's all, Horace can't even think of anything else. The meadows are dressed with grasses, leaves appear on the trees, and snow has already fled from the mountains (hence the Pleshcheyev's "The snow is melting, the streams are running..."), the nymphs and graces are already dancing, and we are getting closer and closer to the places where the ancient Roman kings are now, for we are dust and shadow. Everything that you have accumulated during your life will fall into the greedy hands of the heir when you get to the court of Minos, where neither eloquence, nor piety, nor the nobility of the family will help you. Fear of death seems to be the main feeling that possesses both the poet and his readers. Moreover, Horace is far from the first, but rather, on the contrary, one of the last authors, Greek and Latin, who speaks of the fear of death.

For an entire historical epoch, starting from the fourth century B.C., the entire ancient world was engulfed in this fear as if by fire. Philosophers (Epicurus and his entire school and the Stoics, one of the last of whom was Marcus Aurelius, who lived already in the second century A.D.) painfully searched for remedies for this fear, pharmacists sadly reported that there was no cure for death among the healing herbs, and poets invited people to forget, at least for a minute, to escape from the fear of death into the world. where wine flows like a river, where the smell of various dishes delights the smell, where flutists, harpists, etc., delight the ear with their wonderful play, in general, live according to the principle: "Eat, drink, be merry" (Luke 12:19) or "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (Isaiah 22:13 = 1 Corinthians 15:32). It is quite easy to forget while following this path, but the effect of such a drug quickly ends. You have to turn to him again, and each time increasing the dose, and then again melancholy, and again despondency, and as a result, there is only one way out - suicide. Horace, as a truly subtle person who deeply feels how our heart beats, and moreover, in many ways very similar to the intellectuals of our twentieth century, offers another remedy for this fear – immersion in the world of artistic images, withdrawal into art and contemplation of beauty, but this does not help either.

Fear of death and disgust for life, as Blessed Augustine would later say, are the two feelings that almost without exception live by people in the last centuries of the history of the ancient world. This world is already almost paralyzed. At this very time, Jesus begins his preaching. A new era begins. He dies, and we, being present in the person of John the Theologian at His cross and seeing His death, are healed of the fear of death.

Where does this fear come from?

The Greeks were not always afraid of death. Herodotus (5th century BC) in his "History" tells about the Athenian Tellus, whom one of the seven sages called the happiest of all people, because he "lived in the flourishing time of his native city, he had beautiful and noble sons, and he happened to see how all of them also had children and survived. In addition, he was destined for a glorious death. During the war... he put his enemies to flight, and he himself died a valiant death. The Athenians arranged for him to be buried at the expense of the state... by doing so, showing great honor." The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus had exclaimed even earlier:

An enviable fate in the front ranks of the militia, Protecting the Motherland from enemies in battle.

The polis Greek valued his city-state to such an extent that he considered it a living organism, like Nestor in Homer's Iliad, who compares people to leaves on the branches of a mighty oak, some leaves fall, others, on the contrary, appear, and the tree continues to grow and only grows bigger. The personal uniqueness and personality of the polis Greek in general were, as it were, dissolved in the collective, in society, in the mass, which is always quite typical for the archaic world. That is why the red-cheeked Athenian boys cackled over Euripides, as N. Gumilev wrote in one of his poems, and Socrates was forced to drink a cup of hemlock, that both of them were not like the rest of their fellow citizens, stood out from the mass, were not like everyone else.

A.F. Losev was very fond of saying that the ancient Greek did not have his own "I", always emphasizing that in the Greek language there was not even a word for such a concept as personality. And until a person has singled himself out from the mass and has not opposed himself to this mass, he is really not afraid of death, since he simply does not know what it is.