Like many other essential truths of the Orthodox faith, death
has a “mystery” character itself, because the man can’t know it from
within, but from the outside of the factual life. The Orthodox spirituality,
based on revelation and on the spiritual thousands testimonies,
ensures the man that death is not a fiasco, a failure, beyond
which is only nothingness, but it is the very entry into eternal life.
The spiritual writings of the Eastern Christian Church confer great
importance to meditation on the mode where the last moment of
our life will find us and the future judgment. The meditation on
death – memento mori, meletios thanathou – becomes the source of
the repentance and of the return to the true life, the virtuous life.