The Mystery of Death. Ladislaus Boros

the eye of the needle of death and makes his final decision.

      And in that moment of total exposure, when God-wholly-man meets God-wholly-God and in full freedom makes his choice, that “yes” meeting “yes” heals a jagged fault line that has run through creation from its very foundation, perhaps the fault line of finitude itself. Boros celebrates this cosmic reconciliation in a passage of surpassing lyrical splendor:

      At the moment of Christ’s death the veil of the temple was rent in two … the veil, that is, that hung before the Holy of Holies. For Jewish mysticism and subsequently in the Christian interpretation of this mysterious happening, the veil of the temple represented the whole universe as it stands between God and man. This veil was torn in two at Christ’s death to show us that, at the moment when Christ’s act of redemption [was] consummated, the whole cosmos opens itself to the Godhead, bursts open for God like a flower bud. In his triumphant descent into the innermost fastnesses of the world the Son of God tore open the whole world and made it transparent to God’s light; nay, he made of it a vehicle of sanctification (p. 145).

      Second, with regard to “pancosmic”: At the moment when Christ’s human reality, through death, is “given access to a more really essential proximity to matter,” it becomes immediately accessible to all human beings everywhere as the bodily instrument of salvation and the means of their continuing communion with him. “Free of all the ‘fleshly’ constraints of time and place,” Boros elaborates, “Christ is able to reach the men of all times and places and make them members of his transfigured body, i.e. enable them to participate in his ‘pneumatic’ corporeity” (p. 151–2)—that is to say, a corporeity no longer tied to a localized physical body, but to that lighter, more subtle, and interpenetrating dimensionality we have discussed earlier in this paper.

      “Perhaps this might help us to explain better,” he reflects, “why our world is so deeply and mysteriously filled with the reality of Christ, and why man in his spiritual and personal life, when all is said and done and whether he knows it or not, is always concerned with Christ” (p. 145).

      The genius of The Mystery of Death, in my opinion, lies in the way Boros so powerfully juxtaposes his “philosophical” and “theological” discussions to leverage and illuminate one another. Against the portrait of death laid out in Boros’s philosophical discussion, Jesus’s own death gains an even deeper and more wrenching humanity; his solidarity with the human condition and his presence in each of our individual human deaths becomes yet more accessible and compelling. Meanwhile, through his skillful situating of Jesus’s death within those constitutive elements of “ontological indigence” and “pancosmic” immediacy, he is able to gain powerful theological leverage to confirm that this death is indeed a sacramental event of decisive and cosmic proportions.

      BOROS AND TEILHARD

      Toward the end of his long scholarly career, in a short article on “Christology Today,” Karl Rahner remarked: “It would do no harm for a present-day Christology to take up the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin and to elaborate them with more precision and clarity.” Now, it seems to me that this is precisely what Boros is up to in The Mystery of Death. In this final section of my commentary, I would like to follow this thread a bit more closely, approaching The Mystery of Death as a fascinating and fruitful prototype of what one might call “Rahnhardian” metaphysics: the old scholastic order seamlessly transposed to a Teilhardian evolutionary cosmology.

      It is clear that The Mystery of Death is powerfully indebted to Rahner, whose own The Theology of Death was essentially crisscrossing the path of The Mystery of Death between 1960 and 1965 as both texts went through multiple revisions and translations to arrive at their final form. Those familiar with The Theology of Death will have no difficulty picking out the Rahnerian elements in Boros’s argument. The idea that death is an act one consciously performs (not merely passively endures) had already been planted by Rahner in this work (pp. 30–32). The extensive development of the idea of death as a “pancosmic” state—“some deeper, more comprehensive openness to the universe” (TD, p. 19)—also originates with Rahner (as does the term itself), and the application of this principle to Christ has already been foreshadowed in On the Theology of Death in a passage of unparalleled beauty and force on page 66: “When the vessel of his body was shattered in death, Christ was poured out over all the cosmos; he became actually, in his very humanity, what he had always been by his dignity: the heart of the universe and the innermost center of creation.” Finally, Boros’s understanding of Christ’s descent into hell as a descent into a kind of deepest substratum, or root unity, of the world—“the intrinsic, radically unified, ultimate, and deepest level of the reality of the world” (TD, p. 64)—also owes its formal inspiration, and much of its languaging, to Rahner.

      But if it is from Rahner that Boros receives the primary intellectual structure of his argument, it is from Teilhard that he catches the heart-fire, the direct experience of the universe energetically suffused in Christ, which brings the whole picture together. In his one explicit mention of The Divine Milieu (in the course of a lengthy discussion of the cosmic implications of Christ’s three-day sojourn in hell), the page still literally vibrates with the energy of that initial impact on Boros’s own mystically attuned heart:

      One of the most important results we owe to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s efforts in the world of thought is the opening up for Christian spirituality of the Christological dimensions of our essential belonging to the world. The basic intuition both of his proposed world-system and of the spiritual teaching which can be built up on the basis of his Milieu divin and the indications scattered here and there in his various books and letters, consists in the assertion that we can meet Christ everywhere because throughout the whole universe an essential Christ dimension, an élément christique is to be found. The experience of the immersion of the whole cosmic fieri in Christ’s human reality is the key to the thought of Teilhard de Chardin…The whole evolving cosmos is a transparency of Christ, which is why we can discover Christ at the heart of all things…[in] a world which is constantly growing into God’s dimensions, and which is, indeed, in a hidden and mysterious way, already the dimension of the divine (p. 149–50).

      It is perhaps impossible to prove that The Divine Milieu was the direct catalyst for The Mystery of Death. In my mind’s eye I can see it only too clearly: the thirty-two-year-old Boros, obviously taken with the vision being laid before him in The Divine Milieu, was ruminating on Teilhard’s question, “Can God be found in and through every death?” when suddenly—as so often happens with those deep existential questions asked with one’s entire heart—the heavens opened and the response spoke itself in tongues of fire.

      What is beyond dispute, I believe, is that Boros meets Teilhard not as a scholar or a scribe, but as a fellow mystic standing in his own ground, drinking from that same wellspring. And because of his own independent initiation into the mystical terrain, he is able to break this ground open in some powerful and persuasive new ways. In particular, I would like to comment here on two places where Boros brings his own powerful contribution to the Teilhardian vision: in his much fuller reflection on how God can be seen to be present “in and through death” and his brilliant stabilization of Teilhard’s evolutionary Christology by tying it more firmly to the paschal mystery.

      “THE TOTAL SURRENDER THAT IS LOVE”

      The Divine Milieu was written during perhaps the darkest hour in Teilhard’s life: in early 1927, aboard the ship carrying him into exile in China, his academic career lying in ruins behind him. The book itself is a triumph of faith, but it is a costly triumph, betrayed in its dramatic swings between passages suffused in sublime affirmation and passages starkly open to the ravages of despair and doubt. It is this full embrace of the journey of faith, from its luminous heights to its terrifying depths that makes this work such an enduring spiritual masterpiece.

      Nowhere is this ambiguity more neck-and-neck than in Teilhard’s portrayal of death, located primarily in Part II of his work under the heading “The Passivities of Diminishment.” While this section contains one of his most moving kenotic prayers, it also betrays a fierce hesitation bordering on outright reluctance to concede that death is really intrinsically