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.

The "Revelation" of the Evangelist John, the most poetic book of Holy Scripture with its deep and mysterious content, the book which in the most sublime way proclaims the comforting and joyful news of the victory of the Lamb of Christ over the Antichrist, represents death in the form of a rider on a "pale" horse, indicating the color of death. And this horseman, that is, death, with the sword, famine, and pestilence, takes away people's lives and sends them into the all-devouring jaws of hell, which follows the horseman to immediately receive the dead (Rev. 6:8) [8]. Sculpture and architecture with beautiful monuments, imposing mausoleums, huge pyramids – the tombs of the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt and other tombstones – in turn convey the feeling of this natural human fear when facing death.

The Greatest Mystery of the Wisdom of God

"If life is truly a continuously flowing river, then it has two natural limits. Man, on the other hand, inevitably following the course of the river called life, knows from experience one limit. He tries not to know about the other end and not even think about it." This makes the mystery of death even more mysterious and dark, since we all stand on the same edge of the grave. And the world that is on this side of the grave, that is, this world, is "the perishable world, the place of dying" [9]. The place of the truly living is the world beyond the grave, where there is neither night nor sleep – "the image of death" [10].

God is the creator of life. Therefore, the existence of death in creation by Divine will "fulfills the mystery of Divine wisdom. The eternal mind cannot be wholly immersed in this mystery, perceive it, and comprehend it. Therefore, "death is terrible and full of great terror" and is "the greatest mystery of God's wisdom" [12]. The Lord, with incomprehensible and incomprehensible wisdom for us, defines the boundaries of this life and transports us to another life, as the hymnographer of our Church exclaims St. Theophan the Inscribed († 843): "O Lord... by the depth of Thy ineffable wisdom, Thou didst determine life and foresaw death, and Thou didst bring man to another life" [13].

The mystery of death is all the more profound because no man is able to convey and describe the experience of his death. This very experience, an indispensable element in the study of any phenomenon, we acquire when... Die! But then it doesn't do us any good! No one can experience his own death as an event of his earthly existence. When a person experiences this event (and he experiences it only once, first and last), he immediately ceases to exist in this world. So death is, in fact, the realization of the impossibility of our existence in this world!