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The history of ideas offers many testimonies to how spiritual experience is born out of the rich imagination of sages, prophets, philosophers, theologians, religious reformers, or mystics. The rich imagination created a broad ground for the development of different kinds of religious or spiritual life. But at the same time, certain religious phenomena that at first sight appear identical show themselves in their differences when they are embedded in their own contexts. The paper traces such cases (especially through the topic of motherhood as an attribute of God or the original nature of human being) against the background of early Christian thought, the spirituality of man in the Carolingian period, and the theological-mystical attitudes in Middle Ages. At the same time, however, it also reflects on how these phenomena are projected into the experiences of contemporary man, which are often secular and non-theological, yet seek to retain an aspect of spirituality that is partially derived from past religious-anthropological experiences, but also supplemented with new elements.

The Greek term hamartia means guilt, and sin, mistake or error as well. The origin of the word is a verb hamartanein—missing the mark. In his Poetics Aristotle describes it as an important constituent of tragedy. Guilt must be punished, even if it is not personal. A hero can be punished without his personal participation on any guilt. Father’s sin is sufficient reason for son’s punishment—that is a problem of “ancestral sin.” Two examples of Greek dramas, of Aeschylus and Euripides, point out to the use of the word in different contexts. Guilt (or sin) and punishment of tragic hero lead beholders to the catharsis of two emotions: of pity and fear.

There are two moments referred in this essay: (1) A human being, which desires for immortality, desires for to be alive in his child or in an artwork. (2) Full human being’s desire is related for beauty. Is a beauty the same thing as immortality? How looks the relation between them? Shakespeare’s Sonnets begin with the challenge to his friend to procreate the offspring, because this is a way for immortality of the friend’s beauty. And if it is not a child, than verse refused him before the death or the Lethe. Similarly, Plato’s Socrates says in Symposium about his meeting with Diotima of Mantineia. She told him the oration on real Beauty without accidents. To see real Beauty means to be immortal, likewise the gods. Thus, could be a human being immortal?

The author in this paper investigates ancient understanding of death. There are three interesting problems in ancient thinking. First one, that Greek word sema means a sign but a tombstone, too. It is related to problem of a human memory (a Greek anamnesis). Second one that death is primarily darkening for ancient people. Thanatos – god of death – appears only as a fragment of goddess Night, his mother. Third one, that a fire (or light) is import for life of human being. But a fire has symbolical function and it is related to an eternity. There is a light nearby intelligence in ancient world. Desire of philosophers to immortality refers to desire to an eternal intellectual thinking.