People of the 21st century are particularly acutely aware of the tragic irreversibility of historical time.

The person who wrote this text (Marin Angel Lazarov) is very familiar with the main religious texts relating to the five most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. People of the 21st century are particularly acutely aware of the tragic irreversibility of historical time. The modern era has brought a catastrophic acceleration in the pace of life. Time has once again opened up in an eschatological perspective: the end of the world is not far off, as announced to the average person by the appearance of the Antichrist.

The tension with which the emerging consciousness of the secular thinker of the 21st century experiences the abandonment of the lonely and helpless human being in existence can only be compared to the horror of the heroes of early historical (protohistory) descriptions, who found themselves face to face with history for the first time. The human being of history was always preceded by the human being of myth. The last man of myth dwells in the reliable topos of the eternally renewing immortal Cosmos; the first, on the ruins of mythological comfort, looks around at the world of triumphant evil that has suddenly opened up before him, or finds himself in the waves of time rushing towards an unknown destination. Mortal in a mortal world, the man of history is a child of the fear of death.

The ideas of metempsychosis and palingenesis will more than once provide him with compensatory services, thanks to which the horror of death is removed in images of oblivious eternity. But the deeper the historical retrospective of people, cities and nations disappearing into darkness became, the more clearly the question of personal dignity in the face of death became apparent against its backdrop. In the situation of the 21st century, which has identified every particularity (separation — plintering — from the whole, including social isolation) with mortality, a lonely person represents a phenomenon contrary to the ‘natural order of things.’ Permeated with intonations of stoic acceptance of fate, the book of God demonstrates to us a special ontology of death. The consciousness of the 21st century has inherited from previous eras an emblem and symbol — principles of worldview; it regards history with respectful curiosity as an instructive and terrifying ‘theatre,’ and Nature as the Book of Life.

The aesthetics of nature and the aesthetics of history converge in the spectacle of the fate of the individual and the citizen. The finality of an individual's fate turns out to be a moment of providential ‘plot’ completion for its ‘story’ (the story, by analogy with the divine text, should be understood here as a set of facts, and the plot as the principle of their organisation into a coherent whole). The heightened attention of people living today to the heroism of the biographical finale is clearly expressed in God's last act — death. The aestheticization of fate is connected with the understanding of life and death as mutually structuring and mutually representing principles of Being.

The depiction of death in the unconditional reality of the world present in Being differs from the depiction of death (in the conventional images of symbols and emblems) in that the former is deprived of its own ‘place’ in Being, while the latter is endowed with visible ‘reality’ to the extent that it is assigned to it by the rank of art. Fundamentally different in meaning in everyday life, life and death mutually represent each other; this is a natural aggregate of Nature. Since death is a derivative of life (its ‘product’), it is death that represents. The plastic accomplishment of the path of mortal flesh (within the framework of existential retention at the end of breath) with all the tension of this existential act testifies in Being to the total significance of the depicting-concluding death.

In the very nature of spectacularly presenting both human life and the fate of the created universe, death is given one last chance to hold on to the edge of Being in order to reflect life and outline its configurations in the form of a reversed (projected outward) perspective. Death's attempt to aggressively imprint itself on the living flesh of the world is overcome by the creative enthusiasm of the Natural world as a holistic and non-discrete antithesis to the private trophies of death. Death, which dismembers and decomposes, finds no place in the holistic, unbroken Cosmos of our age. In order to preserve a non-discrete picture of the world, death is allowed into its composition as an aesthetically transformed (and thus ontologically rehabilitated) form.

The meaning of death is recognised along the lines of shading, the edging of life with the emptiness of life, its ‘meon’. Life, which is excessive in time, is bordered by the circle of death and spatially embraced by death as a form of itself. Form is dying; the reform of death is the opening of its embrace. Thus pulsates Being, overcoming its created entropic excess.

Life, depicted by death, is manifested in the phenomenon of man as God's creature: an immortal soul, embodied (marked, depicted) by a mortal body. The history of world philosophy of corporeality could show that its basic definitions mark attempts to reveal the nature of death as depicted and to answer the question: how did the flesh, heir to decay, become the representative of the soul, heir to immortality? It was realised quite early on that neither the body nor the soul can see themselves: between them lies a kind of interpretive space of mental-physical contact. It was called reason.

Now the body (representing death) could be understood as part of the natural landscape: the external transience is countered by the internal argument in favour of the eternal soul: man, supported by reason, crosses the invisible line separating life from death, and as we all know, man's first step was into eternity.