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).

If, for example, we imagine such an ideal man who, throughout his life, with a great multitude of all kinds of good deeds and holy thoughts, had behind him only one and only evil thought, then in this ideal conception we will have before us not the image of a perfect man, but, on the contrary, the image of a guilty condemning of an unfortunate sinner; for "whoever keeps the whole law, and sins in one thing, becomes guilty of all" (James 2:10; Galatians 3:10). For the only evil thought of a man cannot be made good by the fact that all the other thoughts of that man were good, and if it cannot turn from bad into good and remain bad, then the man is guilty of it, and if he is guilty of it, then he is subject to condemnation for it. The unconditional law of good does not weigh a person's good and evil deeds and does not judge by the needle of the scales what is more in a person – good or evil; He simply points out to man, whether everything that was and is in man was and is in him according to the law of good, or not everything? If it turns out that, despite the great multitude of all kinds of good deeds and holy thoughts, man nevertheless had one and only evil thought, then the law notes the simple existence of this fact and thereby indicates that not everything in man was in accordance with the law of good, that in man's life, therefore, this law was not fulfilled. Therefore, if a man were judged according to the law, it goes without saying that he could not find justification for himself in the very law which he did not fulfill, since at the trial he would not be asked at all how many good and how many evil deeds he has done, but only why his whole life does not serve only as a realization of the law of goodness, – and in relation to this question man would necessarily be unanswerable. All the good deeds that he did, he had to do, and, consequently, he has no merit in these deeds, and the only evil thought that he had in himself, he should not have had, and, consequently, he cannot justify himself in the fact that he had this evil thought in himself.

The impossibility of such justification before God clearly showed the Apostles that people do not really need a wise teacher of the true life, but their Savior from the untrue life – from the very life that they actually lead and which does not at all deserve to be really worth leading for a person. If man could of his own accord cease this untrue life, then, of course, only a simple revelation of the true law of life would be required for him, and then, by the free fulfillment of this law of life, he would be able to realize his true purpose in the world and thereby be able to justify his present life on earth as a free-rational moral personality. Then, of course, people would not need any saviour: if justification is by the law, then Christ died in vain (Gal. 2:21), But the knowledge of the true law of life in reality serves only to decisively condemn man, because this knowledge makes him a conscious transgressor of the truth (Rom. 7:9-13), and by virtue of this he not only turns out to be unworthy of life, but also becomes guilty of a direct denial of that very life. for the sake of which alone he is called to being. Therefore, in the knowledge of the true law of life, in addition to the duty to justify his life, man necessarily imposes upon himself another impossible duty, namely, to free himself from all guilt against the truth of life, if in fact he lives contrary to the law. Yet this liberation from guilt in sin is in reality absolutely impossible for man. Even God Himself can only forgive man, i.e. He can only free man from the punishment for his guilt against the truth of life, and make it so that the guilty man is innocent, even God Himself cannot do this, because for this it would be necessary to turn unrighteousness into truth and to consider evil as good, i.e. for this it would be necessary, so that God himself would be the same champion of falsehood as man is. Therefore, although in the knowledge of the true law of life people undoubtedly acquire for themselves the surest means for justifying their lives, this means, in essence, turns out to be completely invalid for them, because even with a clear knowledge of the true law of life they are still unable to fulfill their purpose in the world. And if they are not able to become worthy of life, then it goes without saying that no God's mercy is able to grant them this non-existent dignity.

It is clear that only man himself can justify his life, and it is clear that he can justify it only by the unswerving fulfillment of the religious and moral law of life. If, however, this justification of life is in reality impossible for man, and yet it is not desirable for him to think of himself as if he had been born and lived on earth with a living human consciousness in vain, then he has only to perform an incredible miracle and an impossible deed over himself: if he must absolutely destroy in himself all his guilt against the truth of life, then he has no other means to destroy this guilt in himself than to destroy himself along with his guilt, but to destroy him in such a way that after his destruction he still remains alive, only worthy of life. For as long as a man lives, all his guilt remains in him and on him, and if during his whole life a man commits only one and only sin, then this one sin is still his eternal sin; for no high righteousness can ever turn sin into virtue, and even God Himself can only forgive a person, and even God Himself cannot make a forgiven sinner a holy man. But as soon as a person dies, then all his guilt naturally dies with him, for he who died was freed from sin (Romans 6:7); because sin exists in man, and man ceases to exist from the moment of his death. Hence, if only he could appear alive again, then he would obviously come into life from non-existence, and therefore, if only he really died in order to destroy his guilt in himself, then he would really come into life as a new man. His old guilt would have remained on the man who lived unrighteously and did not want to be a sinner, and died, and no longer exists. But, unfortunately for man, if he dies, he will die forever and cannot come into life again, and therefore, having destroyed his guilt in the destruction of himself, he would obviously not thereby put an end to the blatant senselessness of life, but would only end his senseless life with the meaninglessness of death.

In view of this senselessness of death, man can only say to himself: What good is it to me if the dead do not rise! Let us eat and drink: for tomorrow we will die (I Corinthians 15:32). But although man undoubtedly has a natural right to live as he wants to live and as he can live according to the given conditions of life, he at the same time carries within himself the ideal consciousness of himself as a moral person, and this consciousness imposes on him the duty to live as he ought to live precisely as a moral person. This ideal consciousness lives in man, and it lives in him not according to some selfish calculation of his – not to create, for example, the ideal beauty of his life in the interests of his self-gratification, but only by virtue of his living conviction that it expresses the real truth of his life.

It is truly worshipped and truly realized only by men who are firmly convinced that the ideal of the moral person is not some creation of the human dream of the possible greatness of man, but the true expression of the eternal truth about man; so that the realization of this ideal becomes for man not only desirable in the interests of attaining the dreamy beauty of life, but must necessarily be attained by man for the sake of its unconditional truth, i.e., precisely for the sake that every man who has an undoubted right to live on earth on the occasion of his birth becomes worthy of life only in the realization of the moral ideal of the human personality. But man is subject to the conditional shadows of physical life and involuntarily creates an illusory life for himself according to the physical determinations of the external conditions of life. Therefore, the perfect ideal of the moral person in reality does not express the image of man's present existence, but only the unconditional norm of the perfect life that man must lead, regardless of all the conditions of his existing existence, and therefore man actually carries within himself the mysterious consciousness of the unconditional ideal of conditional life only for the purpose of condemning himself. By virtue of the moral necessity of this self-condemnation, he must naturally ask himself: why, in fact, does he carry within himself the ideal consciousness of the eternal truth of life, when in fact he is unable to realize this truth? And if only no other answer can be given to this question than a simple reference to real life: see to it and judge for yourself frankly why you live on earth and why you carry within yourself the ideal image of moral perfection –

And by virtue of his awareness of this meaninglessness of life, he cannot fail to understand the depth of the apostolic question and cannot help but pose it: I am a poor man! who will deliver me from this body of death (Romans 7:24)?

The urgent necessity of this deliverance and the decisive impossibility of it clearly revealed to the human thought of the apostles the miraculous mystery of Christ's work in the world. They understood their Teacher as the true Saviour of the world, Who, in the present conditions of human nature and life, suffered the suffering of all people who are clearly aware of the great falsehood of their lives and experience in themselves the deep torment of this consciousness, and Who died the death of all people who sincerely desire to destroy in themselves every crime against the truth of life and have no other means for this destruction. except for the destruction of themselves in the senselessness of death, and Who finally rose from the dead and by His resurrection brought about in the world the saving law of the universal resurrection.