One could multiply these testimonies to show that the religious consciousness of mankind did not arise from a savage fear of the phenomena of nature, but from man's knowledge of a reality that surpasses human consciousness in our day. This reality enters the world and reveals its real origin.

The world is truly created by God. And it has a goal: to ascend to God through the podvig of the Son of God and the man adopted by God. The world could not have appeared by chance, senselessly, as a result of some blind play of matter; This amazing, harmonious world has its beginning, its meaning and its great purpose. Its goal is not the struggle of people, nations, classes or races among themselves for the sake of material booty, but the harmonization of mankind on the basis of the laws of the spirit...

Those who believe in matter as the source of their origin cannot comprehend these higher laws of the human spirit embedded in the world.

Gateway to Life

Religion explains not only the mystery of life, but also the mystery of death... People have different attitudes to the exodus from this world. There is petrification in the face of death, there is a cynical attitude towards it; there is a desire for death — from despondency or despair, when a person calls for death, feeling the terrible burden of life; In this state, he sometimes lays hands on himself or wants to be killed.

There is a state of indifference, when a person thoughtlessly accepts both life and death. There is a fear of death, an animal fear, which sometimes reaches such intensity that, even being outside of any visible danger to life, a person painfully awaits death, thinks of it as his own destruction; a different attitude is the resignation of death: a full awareness of the importance, responsibility, and even greatness of its moment as a transition to a higher realm of being; and, finally, the last attitude is angelic joy in the face of death. A person who knows the Kingdom of God already from the experience of earthly life awaits with great hope this Kingdom of God, the blessed repose of his spirit in God after the death of the body. He does not strive for the other world against the will of God, he realizes the value of earthly life, but joyfully awaits the moment when the will of God will take him to the higher world.

The Apostle Paul, who experienced this lofty feeling, says: "I have a desire to depart and be with Christ," for "my life is Christ, and my death is gain..."

In humanity, the fear of death prevails, turning into a thoughtless and submissive acceptance of its inevitability.

But there is often a petrified insensibility and not only a fear of death, but also a fear even of thinking about it. Those who drive away the thought of death cannot, of course, religiously prepare themselves for the inevitable outcome. The memory of death is considered by the holy teachers and ascetics of Christianity to be as necessary for a person as prayer for spiritual life. They say that prayer is the "right wing" of the soul of a believer, and the "left wing" is the memory of the exodus from this world.

The wrong idea is often expressed in the world that the memory of death hinders the passage of earthly life, as if it "inhibits" the activity of man in the world. This can only be attributed to the worldly hypochondriacal attitude to death, which makes a person really incapable of any work. The Christian memory of death is a clairvoyant state of the human soul, and makes it more conscious and wise, giving man's activity in the world a special strength and responsibility.

The ancient pagan society at first suspected Christians of wrong feelings in relation to the life of this world, but when they looked closely, they saw their mistake. Christians could give to the land everything that was intended for the land, in the order of state service and public service. But only to God and eternity did Christians give their souls.

Christianity has never contradicted life, but only sin. The memory of death – of which the teachers of the Church speak – does not contradict the activity of life, but the activity of sin. The sinful feeling really hates the memory of death because it is also the memory of the retribution for sin, of the end of all illusions, the mirages of evil, its illusory joys, with which evil seduces the human soul on earth, distracting it from God and His truth.

What is "death"? Is it evil or good? Some will say, "evil," others, "good." The truth is that death as man's departure from one reality, earthly, into another, heavenly, being a consequence of evil, is in itself neither good nor evil; for some people, good, believers, it is "good" and beneficence, and for others, who have not repented before God, it is "evil", sorrow. The quality of the soul of a dying person determines the meaning of death for it.

The Word of God understands death not only in the sense of man's parting with his earthly body, but also in the sense of man's loss of God's grace. This last, absolutely horrible death is the death of the soul, or, as the Apocalypse says, "the second death" – death to righteousness, to purity, to bliss, to goodness – eternal life in God. But this death has no power where souls are saved and transfigured by the power of Christ. "Death and hell have given up the dead" (Rev. 20:13).