In answer to this question, we can first of all assert with complete certainty that the mysterious convergence of death and sleep undoubtedly arose independently of the cultural influence of Christian ideas, because this convergence also exists among peoples of completely different races and cultures, and even among completely savage peoples. Thus, for example, the African tribe of Bushmen, for all the poverty of their naïve worldview, has, however, in its language a profound proverb of an undoubted philosophical character: "Death is only a dream"; and the same view of death is held by the savage Australian tribe of the Tasmanians; and, finally, the same view of death is found among the savage Indian tribes of North America.

In fact, only the first man on earth, and only in the first case of death, could through ignorance confuse it with a deep, prolonged sleep. Any further possibility of this confusion, even in the first man, although he had not yet been taught by the bitter experience of life, was bound to disappear before the ominous fact of the posthumous decomposition of the body. but the final interpretation of the meaning of this fact. That is, this definition, in fact, does not mean that death can sometimes be mistaken for sleep, but that there was a time when people, well aware of the posthumous destruction of man, nevertheless were unshakably convinced that this destruction was only temporary, and that the dead man would return again to his interrupted life, just as a man who has now fallen asleep awakens from sleep to his interrupted activity.

There really was such a time. From the monuments of Ancient Egypt we know about the touching care with which the ancient Egyptians treated the mortal remains of their dead.

This tender solicitude for the posthumous preservation of the body was determined by the Egyptians' religious belief in the future resurrection of men. They saw the mortal destruction of man, but because of their faith in salvation, they did not see in this destruction his final destruction, and they thought that the dead man, although he had ceased to live for the time being, would nevertheless return to life later on and would again be the same living man. And in order to give their dead the opportunity of this return, they took special care to preserve their mortal remains, since, in the event of the destruction of their bodies, there would be nothing to revive afterwards, and therefore the dead would not return to life.

In the course of time, this ancient faith of the Egyptians was obscured in a mass of various eschatological and cosmological fabrications, and finally it was even completely lost. But it was certainly not the product of the independent religious creativity of the Egyptians, because we find it as a fundamental religious dogma among peoples who, by reason of geography and racial characteristics, stood outside the cultural influences of our Old World. With the discovery of America, it became known that the belief in the future resurrection of people was widespread among the inhabitants of the New World and that it was expressed here not only in a certain cycle of special funeral customs, but also in a fully developed circle of theological and eschatological ideas. For example, the Mexicans were sure that the dead would have to rise again, and therefore, "when the bones of their dead were dry enough, they put them in a special basket and hung this basket from the branch of some tree, so that the dead would not have to look for their bones later on the next day of resurrection." In the spirit of the same faith, the Peruvians, explaining some of the naïve customs of their everyday life, naively said to their Spanish interlocutors: "In order that we may not have to search everywhere for our nails and hair at a time when there will be no fuss and turmoil, we put them in one place beforehand, so that they can be collected without trouble, in the most convenient way; For the same purpose, we even try to spit in one place whenever it turns out to be possible"[297].

And into this same unknown depth of centuries the thought of resurrection goes within the boundaries of the Old World. After all, in fact, in the history of Ancient Egypt we can approximate only the time of the distortion of this thought, and not the time of its appearance. We can only say that the idea of resurrection is undoubtedly older than the well-known speculative teachings of the Egyptians about the mysteries of the afterlife and about the circular revolution of world life in the transmigrations of souls, but when and how this idea appeared in them is unknown to us. However, bearing in mind its undoubted antiquity and taking into account the universal human elements in various teachings about death and the posthumous fate of man, we can attribute the time of the appearance of the idea of resurrection to the very beginning of primitive mankind without much risk of error; – to that prehistoric epoch when, contrary to the fatal law of death, all mankind was convinced that "death is only a dream."

In this case, the idea of the resurrection is obviously not only the oldest but also the very first expression of man's faith in the truth of the biblical message of God's promise of salvation. For if men really knew the fatal truth about death, that is, they knew that the dead man did not sleep in his grave at all, and yet they were convinced to assert the contrary to what they knew for certain, then it goes without saying that the logical possibility of such an assertion could not rest with them on any knowledge, but only on their deep faith. that death would probably be destroyed, and that the dead would return to life again; And yet, within the natural boundaries of human thought, there are in reality no grounds for the formation of this deep faith, and there cannot be. If, therefore, in spite of their knowledge of the fatal truth about death, people nevertheless believed that it was only a dream, then in this case they undoubtedly stood in the very factual conditions reported by the Biblical news, i.e. in this case they could rely not on any happy conjectures of even highly respected authorities, but only on their unconditional trust in the miraculous report of the first people about the promise of God they had received; for without such assurance of divine authority, it would never have occurred to them to consider death as a dream.

This means that the idea of resurrection really once served as the first and universal interpretation of God's promise of salvation for people. But the continuous domination of death and the unfulfilled hope of its destruction gradually obscured and eliminated this primitive interpretation, and, in place of the idea of the resurrection, religious thought, exhausted in doubt, created for man an entirely different idea, namely, the idea of his posthumous salvation in the kingdom of the world beyond the grave. In reality, however, this new idea has only very slowly taken hold of the religious consciousness of mankind, and has not completely taken possession of it even to the present day. We know, for example, that just before the advent of Christianity, when philosophical thought was energetically working out the grandiose idea of apocatastasis, every pious Roman, believing in the life of the world beyond the grave, with deep trepidation, however, saw in it only the fierce Orcus, who imperiously holds "pale souls, sparing neither good nor evil."

For example, we can point here to the Indian tribe of the Hurons, who believe that "the underworld, with its hunting and fishing, with its excellent tomahawks, clothes and necklaces, is like the earthly, but souls moan and weep there day and night." We can also point to the belief of the Negro tribe of the Basuts, according to whom in the kingdom of the afterlife "shadows wander calmly and silently, feeling neither joy nor sorrow."

Thus, from the primitive sensible conviction of all mankind that "death is only a dream," only this flowing proverb has remained universal to mankind, which, of course, has been preserved in all human languages only because it was received by all peoples from one and the same source, namely, inherited by them from the first people. Therefore, although many nations no longer thought of death as a temporary cessation of human life, they nevertheless continued to repeat the familiar parable about it, since in this parable they undoubtedly had the expression of an ancient wisdom that they had forgotten and completely unknown to them, but nevertheless undoubtedly native to them. In fact, the unswerving preachers of this wisdom, within the boundaries of the ancient world, remained only the sacred writers of the Jewish people, who knew the sorrow of existence after death and affirmed the life-giving hope of a future resurrection from the dead. But for a world that had lost that hope, they were only the unknown heralds of an unlikely dream. For in order that man may really live in the hope of future salvation from death, he must have some positive guarantee of the truth of that hope. Meanwhile, knowing the universal and necessary law of death, the people of the ancient world did not and could not know the law of resurrection from the dead. And so it was quite natural for them to be confused by the involuntary question of sorrowful perplexity: when a man dies, will he live again (Job 14:14)? After all, death, as a natural and necessary consequence of sin, can be considered a senseless negation of life only in relation to a person who is truly holy, truly worthy of God. In fact, all people without exception are guilty of sin (Psalm 52:3-4), and there has not yet been such a person on earth who could say of himself: "I have cleansed my heart, I am clean from my sin" (Proverbs 20:9). Consequently, the desire of people that death should be abolished is in essence quite equivalent to their desire that an order of life be introduced into the world of crime, which in fact is absolutely impossible in it, and impossible precisely through the fault of people themselves. In order to destroy death, people must make it meaningless, and in order to make it meaningless, they must necessarily defeat evil and justify the eternal meaning of their lives. Until this condition was fulfilled, all "wrongly thinking" people could reason quite correctly: "Our life is short and sorrowful, and there is no salvation for man from death, and they do not know that anyone has freed him from hell. By chance we are born, and afterwards we will be as if we had never been: the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and the word is a spark in the movement of our heart. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to dust and the spirit will dissipate like liquid air; and our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our deeds; and our life will pass away like the trail of a cloud, and will dissipate like a mist, dispersed by the rays of the sun and weighed down by its warmth. For our life is the passage of a shadow, and we have no return from death: for a seal is laid, and no one returns" (Wisdom 2:1-5).

5.

The knowledge of the impossibility of natural liberation from evil and, determined by this knowledge, the path of the apostolic faith in the truth of Christian revelation.

In the harsh truth of this reasoning, the Apostles found for themselves an immutable basis for understanding the mystery of Christ, unknown to them. They understood that man does not and cannot have any justification before God (Rom. 3:20), because the religious-moral law of rites and commandments, the fulfillment of which could boast of to an unreasonable person, in reality exists not so that man could seek some excuse for not committing the crimes specified in the law, but only in order to condemn man for every transgression of moral commandments (Rom. 4:11). 15).