The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life

Boros, Teilhard, and The Mystery of Death

AN INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY BY CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT

Somewhere in the mid-1970s, a copy of the book The Mystery of Death by Ladislaus Boros came into my possession. I can’t recall the circumstances, but a $1 price sticker on the inside dust jacket suggests it may have been a yard sale special. However it arrived in my hands, it was certainly one of the great spiritual bargains of my life, for its bold and mystically luminous Christology dazzled my young theological brain and carved itself deeply into my heart. For nearly forty years, it has been one of the cornerstones of my own spiritual understanding.

In these same forty years, however, Boros managed to fall almost entirely through the theological cracks. When Herder and Herder, the American publisher of The Mystery of Death, melded into Seabury Press and then vanished altogether in the late 1980s, Boros’s chef d’oeuvre seemed unfortunately consigned to a similar demise. Nowadays, when I mention the name Ladislaus Boros to my Jesuit colleagues, I find to my surprise that most have never heard of him; nor does a current web search for Jesuit scholars/death produce his name. While a few of Boros’s Swiss confreres still remember him personally and have offered their helpful comments and clarifications for this commentary, I would venture to say that beyond his immediate circle of European colleagues, his work has now been largely forgotten. Its most serious devotees at this point seem to be my own Wisdom students, who resolutely wade through the dense scholastic metaphysics in order to unearth the treasure buried in the field.

An obvious explanation for Boros’s relative obscurity in contemporary Jesuit circles is that he did not end his days as a Jesuit. After a brilliant beginning that saw him widely acclaimed as one of the brightest rising stars in the postwar Jesuit theological firmament, his life gradually trended in a different direction. In 1973, he renounced his orders, married, and was laicized. He died in Switzerland in 1981, barely fifty-four years old.

My reasons for bringing forward once again this forgotten Jesuit son are twofold. The first is on his own merits, because his now obscure masterpiece deserves to be much better known. It remains an authentic example of visionary theology at its most sublime, with a message that is at once challenging, timeless, and deeply hopeful. Augmenting his scholastic methodology with insights gleaned from philosophy, psychology, literature, and his own considerable mystical acuity, Boros offers a profound and multifaceted exploration of the meaning of death, set against the greater backdrop of the meaning of life itself as it gradually reveals itself in a deepening openness to the total surrender that is love (MD, p. 46). His exploration reaches its stunning climax when these same general principles are applied to lead us through the eye of the needle of Christ’s own death. The Mystery of Death is an intense jewel of Christian mystical insight and deserves to remain accessible to a new generation of spiritual seekers—many of whom, I trust, will find themselves just as riveted by it as I was.

My second reason for bringing this work forward again is, frankly, because of the interpretive window it opens up with another, considerably more famous Jesuit forgotten son, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Beneath Boros’s brief, appreciative reference to Teilhard toward the end of The Mystery of Death, it is not difficult to detect a deep mystical kinship that may in fact comprise one of the more remarkable lineage transmissions of our time.

Contemporary literary criticism recognizes the principle of intertextuality, defined as the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, irrespective of direct linear causality. It’s about listening to how two texts talk to one another, how they unfold and amplify each other’s meaning. Later in this introduction I will be drawing on the methods of intertextuality to explore the dynamic cross-pollination between The Mystery of Death and Teilhard’s early spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu. We will ride the curve of this dynamism as it breaks into some significantly new theological ground.

This intertextual conversation is particularly timely in our own era as the contemporary Teilhardian renewal continues to gain momentum and scholars look for wider interpretive lenses through which to make his teaching more generally accessible. Spearheaded by first-rate scholars such as Ilia Delio, Ursula King, and John Haught, the Teilhardian groundswell has already generated significant renewed interest in his writings and has substantially narrowed the gap between his former odd duck status and Thomas Berry’s startling prophecy, cited in the foreword to the 2003 Sarah Appleton-Weber translation of The Human Phenomenon: I fully expect that in the next millennium Teilhard will be generally regarded as the fourth major thinker of the Western Christian tradition. These would be St. Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Teilhard.

Teilhard remains a tough slog, however. While many of his contemporary Jesuit confreres are now more than willing to welcome him back with open arms, I often hear the comment, whispered as an aside, But I don’t really understand what he’s saying. Nor does Teilhard make it easy on his readers. Because of his long years of exile in China, he was denied the intellectual give-and-take with a jury of peers who would have impelled him to nuance his thinking and further develop his ideas. The towering strength of his work is also its towering weakness: its monological quality, which makes it difficult for anyone not already on his same wavelength to gain easy access, and which tends to reify theological weak spots, making the canon appear less intellectually tractable than it actually is.

It is just here that Boros enters the picture, as a powerful potential bridgebuilder. Standing firmly on the shoulders of his celebrated Jesuit mentor Karl Rahner, and highly skilled in the scholastic discourse that Teilhard himself eschewed, he is able to mediate an illuminating dialogue between Teilhard and the greater Christian theological tradition—not, as is so often the case in so much of contemporary Teilhardian scholarship, by secularizing Teilhard’s thought or draping it in current evolutionary jargon, but by piercing to the very marrow of Teilhard’s Christic mysticism and carrying it to an even more brilliant degree of spiritual luminosity. Like a modern-day Elijah and Elisha, Teilhard and Boros are joined at the hip, I believe, in a single, continuous spiritual transmission. And the harmonizing light that Boros’s own mystical acuity is able to shine on Teilhard’s poignant theological singularity is reason in and of itself to restore The Mystery of Death to active duty in the Teilhardian interpretive canon.

A FAILED VOCATION?

While it might be overstating the case to call it a meteoric rise, certainly Boros’s early years as a Jesuit showed all the signs of outstanding promise. Hungarian born, he fled the communist revolution in 1949 at the age of twenty-two. He entered the Jesuit order in Germany and almost immediately began his theological studies, completing his doctoral dissertation (on Augustine) at the University of Munich in 1957, and was ordained a priest in that same year. Further theological studies took him to Belgium, France, and England, where he was soon recognized as one of the most promising younger theologians following in the footsteps of the magisterial Karl Rahner, undoubtedly the greatest Jesuit theologian of the twentieth century. In 1958, Boros was posted to Zurich to join the editorial staff of the prestigious Jesuit journal Orientierung, and five years later he was appointed to a lectureship in religious studies at the University of Innsbruck. Both of these posts ended with his laicization in 1973.

Somewhere in the late 1950s, Boros encountered the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, which by then were beginning to appear regularly in French (and, shortly thereafter, in English) translations after Teilhard’s death in 1955 ended the publication ban imposed by his religious superiors. Le Milieu divin (the divine milieu) was the fourth in the Éditions du Seuil series, published in 1957, and it was most likely this French edition that originally attracted Boros’s attention. Judging by his numerous articles and reviews posted in Orientierung, by the end of the decade he was clearly fully engaged in Teilhard as a research topic.

At almost exactly this same time—most likely early 1959—Boros apparently experienced what can only be described as a powerful mystical revelation concerning the final disposition of the soul in the moment of death. I use the word revelation with some trepidation, but clearly whatever caught fire in Boros’s soul has far more of the elements of an authentic spiritual revelation—boldness, surprise, compelling inner authority—than of an idea theologically derived or long chewed over. The gist of his vision is as follows: at the moment of death, there is indeed a final decision rendered as to our eternal destiny, but it is we who choose, not God—and if we are blessed in our choice, we respond with a yes that has slowly been forming in us through all the changes and passages of our human life.

The impact of this remarkable seeing must have washed over Boros like a tidal wave, for he describes writing it down currente calamo (at breakneck speed) over a period of about six weeks. Later he went back and added to his essay a methodological foreword and a lengthy theological analysis. The original version was published in Orientierung in 1959 under the title Sacramentum Mortis: Ein Versuch über den Sinn des Todes (The Sacrament of Death: An Attempt on the Meaning of Death). An expanded German edition was published in 1965, together with an English language edition published by Burns & Oates Ltd. in the United Kingdom (under the title The Moment of Truth), and by Herder and Herder in the United States.

Did Boros experience his vision before reading The Divine Milieu or after it? Had he already completed his first, mystically impassioned draft of the work when The Divine Milieu crossed his desk, a latecomer to his research? It is possible, but I think not likely. From a thematic standpoint, The Mystery of Death is so quintessentially a response to Teilhard’s perplexing question—God can be grasped in and through every life. But can God also be found in and through every death? (The Divine Milieu, p. 46)—that it seems almost inconceivable this question was not, on some level, already working in Boros’s mind. Moreover, Boros’s powerfully integrated and pivotal use of key Teilhardian images and phraseology lead me to believe that The Divine Milieu was already well planted within the deeper recesses of his subconscious before his momentous visionary download. It may well have been the catalyst.¹

PART I: THE MYSTERY OF DEATH

Before venturing into the thicket of Boros’s densely interwoven prose, let me try to pave the way with a synopsis of the overall structure of his argument. The Mystery of Death begins with a short, lyrical preface, cutting right to the chase of his original mystical revelation:

In death the individual existence takes its place on the confines of all being, suddenly awake, in full knowledge and liberty. The hidden dynamism of existence by which a man has lived until then—though without his ever having been able to exploit it in its fullest measure—is now brought to completion, freely and consciously. Man’s deepest being comes rushing towards him. With it comes all at once and all together the universe he has always borne hidden within himself, the universe with which he was already most intimately united, and which, in one way or another, was always being produced from within him. Humanity, too, everywhere driven by a like force, a humanity that bears within itself, all unsuspecting, a splendour he could never have imagined, also comes rushing towards him. Being flows towards him like a boundless stream of things, meanings, persons and happenings, ready to convey him right into the Godhead. Yes; God himself stretches out his hand for him; God who, in every stirring of his existence, had been in him as his deepest mystery, from the stuff of which he had always been forming himself; God who had ever been driving him on towards an eternal destiny. There now man stands, free to accept or reject this splendour. In a last, final decision he either allows this flood of realities to flow past him while he stands there eternally turned to stone, like a rock past which the life-giving stream flows on, noble enough in himself no doubt, but abandoned and eternally alone; or he allows himself to be carried along by this flood, becomes part of it and flows on into eternal fulfilment (pp. xlviii–xlix).

And the thesis:

Death gives man the opportunity of posing his first completely personal act; death is, therefore, by reason of its very being, the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny (p. xlix; italics by author).

The rest of the book consists of a detailed elaboration of this thesis in two main sections. In the first section, his philosophical discussion, Boros lays out seven successive bearing lines to build his case that the moment of death represents the consummatum est of a life’s journey, toward which all the currents of life inexorably set and in which they at last reach their plenitude of meaning. These bearing lines are, respectively: (1) The Presence of Death in the Will; (2) Death as a Fulfilment of Knowing; (3) Integral Perception and Remembrance in Death; (4) Love as a Projection of our Existence into Death; (5) Meeting-Point of the Historical Dialectic of Existence; (6) The Previous Sampling of Death Found in Poetic Experience; and (7) Accomplishment and Perfection of the Kenotic Actualization of Existence. In these smaller sections, he ranges widely, drawing his insights from poetry and the arts as well as from metaphysics, philosophy, and developmental psychology.

THE FOUR CONSENTS

While all of these sections are, in their own way, gems, Section 5 (Meeting-Point of the Historical Dialectic of Existence) deserves a special mention not only because it is by far the most extensively developed of Boros’s philosophical arguments, but because it relies so heavily on the now iconic work of theologian Romano Guardini (who would have overlapped with Boros at the University of Munich during the 1950s). It was Guardini who first popularized the notion of life as a series of passages—"crises," as he calls them—to be duly navigated in the journey toward human maturation. According to Guardini there are five of these: birth, puberty, experience (i.e., coming fully into one’s power), climacteric (the beginning of physical decline), and dissolution. This schematic would later be reworked by the American Jesuit John S. Dunne, reappearing in his 1975 classic Time and Myth as The four consents—which, in turn, directly imported from Dunne, has now become a mainstay of Thomas Keating’s enormously influential teaching on Centering Prayer.² Boros’s early use of this material thus furnishes an important but little known link in the transmission chain of a psychological model that today enjoys considerable spiritual currency.

For his immediate purposes in The Mystery of Death, however, Boros uses this schematic to illuminate a more fundamental dialectic, which he calls the two curves of existence (p. 47). The first curve, consisting entirely of physical energy, follows a gradual but irreversible trajectory toward exhaustion. At the beginning of every human life, the sheer force of being seems virtually inexhaustible. But at some point, the explosive centripetal life force that propels a young person through birth and puberty and out into the world of external achievement begins to recede, never to be replenished. The first curve proves ultimately to be a falling curve. As the English poet Thomas Grey so famously observed, The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

At the same time, however, claims Boros, another curve can begin to be detected, this time an inner and rising curve. It comes into being as a fruit of our consciously integrated experience—or in other words, through our relationship with our own life. As Boros sees it:

From the facts of existence and the surrounding world an inner sphere of being a human being is built up. This inner man is brought about by a never-ending daily application, on the treadmill of duties, annoyances, joys and difficulties. From these insignificant actions freely performed, the great decisive freedom is built up—freedom from oneself, freedom to view one’s own existence from outside. …From the crowded days and years of joy and sorrow something has crystallized out, the rudimentary forms of which were already present in all his experiences, his struggles, his creative work, his patience and love—namely, the inner self, the individual, supremely individual creation of a man. He has given his own shape to the determinisms of life by a daily conquest of them; he has become the master of the multiple relations that go to make him up, by accepting them as the raw material of his self. Now he begins to be (pp. 59).

Note that this never ending daily application on the treadmill is not duty in the usual Victorian sense of the term. The key feature here is that it is freely—i.e., consciously—offered and consists not only in being faithful to the outer post but in doing the inner work as well. Freedom from oneself, in Boros’s admittedly experimental terminology,³ is clearly not the traditional self-emptying or subjugation of the personal will expressed as moral categories; it corresponds far more closely with what contemporary spiritual nomenclature would identify as witnessing presence, a deepening inner capaciousness that grounds and tempers the busy external self, while progressively vesting it with that elusive quality, being.

Properly speaking, according to Boros, this process gets fully underway at the climacteric; that is, when the first curve of life has definitively entered its falling phase and the intimation of one’s personal mortality begins to dawn. This notion of growing into age or second half of life agendas is now a popular model in contemporary spirituality, but it is important to realize that Boros was already onto it a quarter of a century before the appearance of Helen Luke’s iconic book Old Age in 1987. This rising curve, consisting of our conscious interiority and integrated life experience, at some point crosses the path of the falling curve—and keeps on rising! When this inner ascent reaches its natural fullness in old age, what emerges is the authentic elder, exuding a radiance and plenitude of being that is no longer confined to this world alone, but in fact opens into the infinite:

Over time … there emerges the old man, the wise man, the elder, whose whole strength is spirit, deriving from a composure we can really call saintly. Perhaps such men say little, or at any rate little of importance, but by their simple presence they transform the complex of existence and make it transparent. Their act of essential being is [in] the spiritual transparency of the realized meaning of existence. … These men have transformed all the energy of life into person (p. 53).

This quiet luminosity, or incandescence of being, visible as a light within the diminishing human form, is essentially for Boros a body, a body of an entirely different substantiality—or as the case may be, dimensionality. It is a new kind of corporeity, through which the person so transformed can call into existence, out of the bases of his own being, a body (no less)…his own corporeal state (pp. 59–60). While this idea may sound jarring to traditional theological notions, it is well attested in the Western Inner Tradition, where it is sometimes called second body, the resurrection body, or the wedding garment.⁴ It is indeed a subtle form of embodiment whose building blocks are no longer material flesh and blood, but what some of the early mystics called tincture or virtue: the quality of our innermost aliveness, transformed and revealed in the medium of our life itself.

Boros affirms unequivocally that the supreme work of a human life—our magnum opus, as it were—is to bring forth this transfigured version of oneself, the supremely individual creation of a man (p. 59). In fact, in one brief and cryptic allusion he intimates that it is precisely the gathering inner momentum of this supremely individual creation that bursts upon us in (and as) the climacteric, inaugurating the dissolution of the outer man so that the inner man can attain its full expression. As he sees it, The ‘inner man’, that is, man as plenitude of significance, power of illumination, wisdom, genuineness, transcendent transparency, breadth of heart…gnaws away at the strength of the ‘outer man’ (p. 50). In other words—if his thinking here can be so construed—our aging is not entirely or even primarily the consequence of purely physical factors, but the outward and visible sign that the work of spiritual transfiguration has already begun. Just think how that up-ends our usual perception of aging!

TOWARD PERSONHOOD

Like Teilhard, Boros equates this more fully developed interiority with the emergence of what he calls the person. While he largely retains the traditional theological term soul to refer to the individual human being, his person—in a manner, for all intents and purposes, identical to Teilhard’s—specifically designates the fruit of this conscious interiority, this inner work of self-differentiation and individuation within a relational field.⁵ No longer simply a human doing, he has become a human being in the fullest sense of the word by transforming all the energy of life into person (p. 53). Personhood for Boros is thus far more than simply a synonym for the individual or even the soul; it is the mature fruit of a conscious relation with one’s life. This will be an important point to keep in mind when we move on shortly to Boros’s presentation of ontological indigence. His version of the inner man or true self is not featureless, like an onionskin peeled full back, but is rather the very essence of this integrated personhood fully able to hold its shape and manifest itself when transposed to a more subtle corporeity.

It should be noted as well that the trajectory of this second curve of existence, the one guiding the emergence of our realized journey toward personhood, is at the same time a journey toward freedom. While the trajectory of the first (outer) curve leads, after that initial expansiveness of youth, toward greater and greater physical limitation and confinement, the trajectory of the second curve, when given full rein, rises irreversibly toward ever-greater interior freedom, expressed in those qualities of self-knowledge, personal agency, and the capacity to live imaginatively and richly within one’s interiority.

The essence of a graceful passage through the climacteric, Boros feels, lies in the acknowledgement that the pathway to our ultimate freedom and fullness lies along that inner curve, along with the willingness to give ourselves to the process, rather than clinging frantically to the now-falling outer curve. As the poet T.S. Eliot appropriately observed in The Four Quartets:

Old men ought to be explorers.

Here and there does not matter.

We must be still and still moving

Into another