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

People are concerned about different problems in accordance with their education, social status, and interests. As for the problem of death, it confronts every person, regardless of his education, social status, inclinations, the most cold-blooded and phlegmatic, the egocentric, closed in their suffocating individualism, those who strive for self-assertion at any cost, the most important and famous people of their time. The writer Bernard Shaw, a subtle humorist who had the ability to laugh and ironize on every occasion, in the last years of his life stopped making jokes and became melancholic! And even those Stoics who seemed to remain completely calm faced this horrible phenomenon with fear and suffering.

A person sees how the body – young or old, healthy or sick – loses its vivid colors, deprives itself of energy, how it sinks into the ground and remains in the cold hands of death. A person sees that he who is rich today is dead tomorrow, who is adorned with jewels tomorrow is in the grave, who today possesses treasures is in graves tomorrow, who is surrounded by flatterers today, tomorrow becomes food for worms [5]. And he faces many questions. What is death? {p. 10} The End or the Beginning? Dead end or transition to another life? Destruction and disappearance or the beginning of a new creation? And St. John of Damascus, who himself saw the Divine mysteries, asks: "What is this mystery about us? How shall we give ourselves over to corruption? How shall we be bound together with death?" [6] These questions, like so many others, shake us to the core. Pascal said that the immortality of the soul, a problem directly related to death, is a subject that interests us so much and touches us so deeply that we have to lose all sensitivity not to be interested in it. In fact, one must be insensible not to be agitated by the questions posed here.

It is characteristic that the history of the human race, as it is recounted in the inspired Book of Genesis, in essence begins with the death of the righteous Abel. Until then, death had not yet abducted a single person. Now, as the first sacrifice, it takes away the righteous and martyr Abel (Gen. 4:8) [7]. The beginning of the tragic vicissitudes of human existence immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve is intertwined with terrible remorse and the expulsion of the fratricide Cain. The Prophet of God Moses wrote that the murderer could no longer remain before the face of God, so "Cain departed from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden" (Gen. 4:16).

Lord Byron, in his dramatic poem Cain, in his picture of fratricide, depicts how the murderer gazes intently at the dead Abel, sees his pale, lifeless face, tries to lift up his brother's cold hands, which fall down like lead, and exclaims: "Death has come into the world.. Thus Adam and Eve in horror witnessed the fulfillment of the word of God, when their firstborn son, Cain, whom Eve received with the humble words: "I have gained a man from the Lord" (Gen. 4:1), begins his journey in the wilderness of life as an exile and a wanderer on earth (Gen. 4:12). But, most importantly, death was his slow companion in this exile..

Since then, the indispensable condition for human existence is not life, but death. Every man knows, even before death, that it has already been given to him, or rather that man has been given to it.

And it is quite natural that this event, closely intertwined with our entire existence, became a source of innate fear in human nature. Therefore, art, which has always reflected what deeply affects a person, could not remain indifferent to death. All its forms – poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture – were from the very beginning an expression of this innate awe. Poetry created elegies full of lyricism, lamentation, ecstasy and fear. Music in the most mournful tones conveys the deep inner feelings that death evokes in us. Painting, drawing inspiration from the Holy Scriptures and other sources, in the free flight of its imagination depicts death either as a huge angel, or as a skeleton with a scythe, or as a mysterious ghost shrouded in darkness, plunging the soul into fear, horror and trembling. Sometimes death is depicted as an insatiable monster with an open ugly mouth, ready to devour a person, sometimes as a hunter who sets nets and lays traps to trap his victims for all eternity.