“Sweet Is Life — Why Call Death Darkness”?
Do not bow to the grief of the fearful, to the ritual lament, to the funeral chant, to the poet’s cry of despair. The unthinking mourn. Others, though, keep vigil for resurrection, for a kingdom beyond the sky. Why then the weeping, the wail of the hopeless? Rejoice, you who have learned to see: the reward of clarity is abundant. Release from the body is not loss, but freedom. Departure is joy— the first step of a cosmic journey. (Nikos Paschalinos)
Today on Homo-Naturalis.gr we will address the question of death, which in global popular belief, superstition, and art is perceived as “darkness”: a condition of the soul marked by despair, pain, and mourning.
Yet in the psychological and intellectual equipment of the wise and the prudent, death is understood as a natural end—a passage to other dimensions and levels of serenity and repose.
Socrates, in prison and awaiting his execution, receives his disciple Crito with astonishing composure, and even in his final moments shows a readiness for philosophical dialogue and instruction.
This is the response of the prudent to the despair of the imprudent—those who chose in life to invest in material rewards rather than in reflection, prudence, and temperance.
What, then, does today’s Diotima have to teach us—like the ancient one, who beyond love instructed Socrates in the mysteries of the world, among which is included the great chapter of death, as the natural culmination of life?
Diotima on Death as Fulfillment, Not Defeat
Death, in global popular belief, superstition, and art, is most often perceived as darkness: a blackening of the soul, a rupture filled with despair, pain, and lamentation. Funeral rituals, poetic cries of anguish, and collective mourning have long framed death as a scandal, an injustice, an unbearable loss.
Yet this perception reveals far more about the living than about the dead.
For the wise and the prudent, death is not an existential catastrophe but a natural culmination—a passage to other dimensions of calm, repose, and ontological transition. It is not an interruption of meaning, but its completion.
Diotima does not come to console with sweet illusions, nor to soothe fear with comforting myths. She comes to strip death of the darkness imposed upon it by the unreflective, and to restore it to its rightful place within the order of nature and thought: not as defeat, but as fulfillment.
Death is not a scandal of nature; it is its law.
The true scandal lies in how death is experienced by an unlived life—a life that did not reflect, did not measure itself, did not reconcile with its own finitude. Hence the excessive lamentation: not grief for the one who departs, but anguish over the unfulfilled existence of those who remain.
The wise do not mourn death, because they have already integrated it into life itself.
They have contemplated it, accepted it, prepared for it.
Thus, when death arrives, it does not appear as an intruder, but as a dialogue partner.
This is why Socrates, imprisoned and awaiting execution, receives his disciple Crito with astonishing calm. Even in his final hours, he does not abandon philosophical dialogue or teaching. He does not cling to life in panic, nor to the body in desperation. For him, the body was an instrument, not an identity. His death is not resignation—it is the consistency of a life lived philosophically.
Diotima teaches that whoever has learned to love beauty beyond appearances,
to ascend from the sensible to the intelligible,
to value truth more than pleasure,
has already rehearsed death—
and therefore does not fear it.
The fear of death is, at its core, the fear of reckoning.
It is the anxiety of those who invested exclusively in the perishable and are suddenly asked to relinquish it. The prudent, by contrast, invested in reflection, moderation, and wisdom—values that cannot be confiscated with the final breath.
Thus death is transformed:
from darkness into passage,
from loss into transition,
from silence into another mode of speech.
No, death is not “sweet” in the shallow sense of romantic sentimentality.
It is serene—with the gravity of knowledge and the dignity of understanding.
And if today’s Diotima, like the ancient one who instructed Socrates not only in love but in the deeper mysteries of existence, has something essential to teach us, it is this:
Do not mourn death if you have not first honored life.
Do not fear it, if you have learned to live as a mortal with an immortal mind.
Where the unreflective lament,
the wise fall silent—and move on.
And this silence is not darkness.
It is fulfillment.