The Mystery of Death. Ladislaus Boros

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.

      This is the meaning of the hypothesis which we shall try to justify in two successive essays, the first philosophical, the second theological. It may be stated thus: 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. This way of viewing the subject transforms the expression of futility we quoted at the beginning into an exhortation to confidence. In the course of the following discussion this idea will—rather in the form of a dissertation (for which we ask the reader’s indulgence)—be described as the “hypothesis of a final decision”.

      In its original form—the structure of which has for the most part been retained—the following essay was written in quite a short time and composed currente calamo without a break.² Since I want to avoid anything that might disturb the unity of treatment of this problem as a whole, I have thought it advisable to clear the ground by discussing at the outset all the methodological points necessary for the understanding of the whole work.

      ^* The notes will be found grouped at the end of the work.

      I

      The Methodological Postulates For an Analysis of Death

1. DEATH AS A METAPHYSICAL PROCESS

      Any attemp to clarify the various questions connected with human death brings the philosopher up against a series of methodological difficulties—and this present one is perhaps, for the moment, going to tax the reader’s patience! Let me at once state the most important and fundamental of these difficulties: no man has a direct experience of death. What we go through as we watch at someone’s deathbed is assuredly not death in its inner reality; it is only the outward aspect of death. We cannot expect to receive a decisive, revealing answer from people who have been near death, or have been given up for dead by those about them. The philosopher will get no assistance from those who are professionally concerned with the dying. Though it is true that many of them have gained deep insights into the death-struggle, none ever saw the actual passing-over. This statement requires further explanation.

      Death cannot be gone through from outside, reproduced, as it were, in vitro. Each one of us must accept it absolutely alone; we must and can meet death only once. The outsider, for example a doctor, can assist the dying person, can accompany him on the way of his agony, but cannot enter with him into his actual death. The doctor and the philosopher mean different processes when they speak of death. For this reason the philosophical investigation we are undertaking requires us to direct our thinking along radically different lines from those followed by doctors. The doctor observes how in the dying man the flame of life burns slowly lower and lower, growing feebler every moment until it is hardly perceptible. With the help of powerful drugs or other exceptional means the doctor can still revive the sinking flame of life, but the physiological spontaneity of life continues to get weaker and weaker. The essential bodily functions come to a stop. The body begins to decompose, and when that happens, the most elementary co-ordination of the various individual functions is ended. Particular tissues or whole organs can indeed be preserved intact artificially, but life as a whole has become impossible; the person has “died”. But does that mean that he is “dead”? The question points to a distinction between dying and death which is of fundamental importance to our analysis.

      Medical science studies those aspects of life that Aristotle calls “physics”: that is, things that are palpable, observable, experimentally demonstrable. But underlying this is the whole complex of what lies beyond, of “metaphysics”. When a philosopher speaks of death he is speaking of a metaphysical process, which he generally describes as the “separation of the soul from the body”.³ Except in cases of instantaneous destruction of the whole organism this separation does not apparently coincide with the cessation of the vital functions. Recent experiments in resuscitation show that life “withdraws” very slowly and can remain for a long time in a body that to all appearances has become “incapable of living”. Intra-arterial and intracardiac injections (adrenalin and atropin) combined with an artificial supply of oxygen and—where necessary—heart-massage, can set some kind of life on its spasmodic course again, even if only for a short time in most cases. There comes a moment, however, when all these efforts fail. This indicates that the “separation of the soul from the body” has possibly already taken place. This metaphysical moment, which it is not possible to determine by simple observation, is what we call “death”. The hypothesis of a final decision is concerned exclusively with the “moment of death” as understood in this sense.

      Stated thus, the question of death is one of urgent theological significance. Philosophical reflexions on death in the thirties brought about a great change in theological perspectives.⁴ Until then the interest of theologians (if we leave out of account their discussions of the preliminaries to death, the condition of man before death) was concentrated on an evaluation of the conditions of the soul separated from the body after death. The classic answers are well known: with the separation of the soul from the body man’s pilgrimage comes to a definite end; immediately after the particular judgement the soul passes into one of three—or, if we include limbo, which so many adopt as a theological hypothesis, of four—“places for departed souls”, heaven, hell or purgatory, where it awaits the final resurrection at the end of time. The great turning point in theological reflexion came when death itself began to be examined by the theologians.⁵ What really happens to the whole man at the moment of death?

      The final decision which we have assumed as an hypothesis occurs neither before nor after death, but in death. But immediately the objection will be raised: “Surely you cannot assume that anyone really makes the first completely personal act of his life when he is in the state of bodily and spiritual torment we call the throes of death, or, it may be, the state of insensibility no less proper to the process of dying?” From what has been said, it is clear that this objection is like forcing an already open door. Bringing the final decision forward into the agony, into the state before death, would, indeed, betoken great naïveté of thought. It would deprive our arguments of all their power of conviction. On the other hand, the final decision does not take place after death either. Apart from the fact that such an assumption misconceives the metaphysical constitution of the completely personal act, it would also be contrary to the Church’s teaching on the inalterability of the state a man reaches through his death.

2. A TEMPORAL PROCESS IN A NON-TEMPORAL TRANSITION

      Our task is to state as clearly as possible the meaning of the expression: “the moment of death”. Accordingly we shall examine two further objections which attack precisely this point.

      Firstly: “For the taking of a decision a certain interval of time is required. But, between ‘before death’ and ‘after death’ there is no intervening space of time. The transition must be thought of as a break that has nothing to do with time. But if death is something instantaneous and indivisible, it affords no possibility for a decision, for a decision is always an act extended over a period of time.”⁶ This argument is verbally very seductive, but logically it is open to question. It must of course be admitted that death as an instantaneous transformation can only occur in a non-temporal transition, and that death is thus not one moment in a temporal succession, but, as it were, a mere line of demarcation between two moments without any temporal extension of its own. But this only means that the last moment before the break and the first after it merge into one another. A line of demarcation without extension of its own does not, in metaphysical terms, bring about a separation within a succession conditioned by time and quantity. The moments of the soul’s “separating” and “being separated” thus coincide. Therefore, the moment of death, the transition itself, is—when looked at from the subsequent condition—the last moment of the preceding condition, and—when viewed from the preceding condition—the