"AN UNFLATTERING EXTORTIONIST OF THE HUMAN RACE"

A question that shakes a person

In human life, there are two most important, mysterious and awe-inspiring events – birth and death, and death causes stronger experiences and more complex problems. We face death at every step of our lives. Death is always near us, as is life. Death is the shadow of every earthly creature, its inevitable and inevitable end. Since we were born, we must also die.

At the same time, of all earthly creatures, only people think about death. The animal spends its days not even suspecting death, and therefore cares only about what is needed at the moment. It does not question why the world exists, does not reflect on why the world is the way it is, and what happens to those creatures that disappear from the face of the earth. The situation is different with people. Man, thanks to the reason with which God has endowed him, is vividly aware that he is mortal. Pascal likens man to a reed, brittle but thinking, and adds: "But even if he is destroyed by the universe, man is still more exalted than it, for he is aware that he is parting with life [...], and it [p. 6] (the universe) is not conscious of anything" [1]. Thus, man is the only earthly creature endowed with the ability to cognize and comprehend the phenomenon of life. For a person, death becomes a truly purely individual, purely personal event of existence. And since he knows that sooner or later he will meet death, this circumstance becomes the most difficult and painful phenomenon of his life.

But our tragedy and sorrow in the face of death are compounded if we are unwilling to acknowledge the event! We don't want to accept death! Therefore, some of us do everything to distance it as much as possible, while others just try... don't think about it! Nevertheless, we fully understand that no effort can postpone our departure from the prison of earthly life indefinitely. The Spanish abstract artist Pablo Picasso, when he was over ninety, rebelled against science, since it cannot prolong human life... up to 150 years! But if science had achieved this, the eccentric Spaniard would have lamented that life has not been extended to 200 years! Even if we manage to "prolong our life by two or three centuries with the help of science, death will not be defeated, because the structure of our body makes it necessary" [2]. Therefore, no one is able to avert the aspiration of our life to the grave, despite all the humane attempts of gerontology, this new branch of medicine, which has been rapidly developing in recent years. Gerontologists prescribe hormones and vitamins, recommend diet, and so on, and our civilization, which "denies death," places all its hopes on these modern elixirs. In the Divine Comedy, Dante, beginning to describe the descent into hell with the guide Virgil, remarked that thirty-five years is half the way of life. Our contemporaries, when they reach the age of thirty-five or forty, turn their eyes to the philosopher's stone... in gerontology, hoping to live to the age of one hundred!

But how and where can anyone escape death, this last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26), who threatens us in various ways, sentences us to physical infirmity, can suddenly appear before us uninvited, break the thread of our life with his terrible scythe, lower the curtain and lead us far away from the theater of earthly existence? Therefore, it would be more sensible, without ceasing to think about life extension, to try to investigate, explain and comprehend death. Why, after all, should we wait for it with anxiety and fear? Will it take us by surprise or, after long preparations, why meet it with despair and horror? Since we cannot invent a remedy that saves us from death, is it not wiser and more useful to reconcile ourselves to it? Absolutely! Moreover, this great event poses extremely serious problems for us. When we view life through the lens of death, we can clearly see that our purpose in life reaches vast dimensions—dimensions that lead into eternity. Through the prism of death, many painful life problems reveal a special depth. Death confronts us with the temporality of our life and its tragedy. It forces us, whether we like it or not, to see the shortness of this life, to realize that we have a small and insignificant period of time in the boundless ocean of eternity. Death, "that unflattering executioner," as St. John Chrysostom calls it, calls us constantly to remember that earthly life, no matter how long, is transient, temporary, and fleeting. And, despite our rejection of death, it calls us to a conversation! Or rather, to reflect on the question why man, "rises like a storm, and is destroyed like dust; it is kindled like a fire, and like smoke it is dispersed; like a flower, it is adorned and, like grass, it dries up" [3].

Moreover, death, this "impartial extortionist of our race," as the divine Chrysostom calls it elsewhere, confronts us (and demands an immediate answer) with the problem of existence. God's and our destiny. It requires us to solve the following riddles: Where do we go after death? What kind of world or kind of existence awaits us after earthly life? In a word, death confronts us with questions of the greatest and vital importance. Death excites us incomparably more than life. As far as life can be understood in general, death is shrouded in the impenetrable darkness of mystery. It can be said that there is a strange conspiracy of silence around the very fact of a person's death. "By the time of burial, he (i.e., his corpse) looks alive, and for this purpose tinted, embellished, 'dissected'" [4].

From this point of view, life without death is very impoverished. Without the problem of death, our life is reduced to the life of animals or plants that do not know that they will die. Death, our inseparable companion, enriches the life of a rational person with the expectation of eternity and a sense of duty and responsibility. For without a sense of eternity, a sense of duty towards God and a sense of responsibility towards our neighbor will not be born in the depths of our soul.

For these reasons, people of all times and peoples have thought intensely about death and fearfully searched for its meaning in order to pacify their troubled lives. The problem of death is so essential to man that there is no religion, from the most primitive to the Christian, which does not recognize the importance and significance of death. It is possible to make a list of the religions of mankind and determine the position of each of them in relation to the problem of death.

Innate fear of death