The Mystery of Death. Ladislaus Boros

I have been driven ceaselessly to search for you and to set you in the heart of the universe of matter, I shall have the joy, when death comes, of closing my eyes amidst the splendor of a universal transparency aglow with fire…”⁶ In The Divine Milieu, he was already well underway toward this final consummatum est. But he was not fully there yet.

      “It is easy to understand that God can be grasped in and through every life. But can God also be found in and through every death?” So writes Teilhard in the course of his reflection on “The Passivities of Diminishment” (p. 46). He adds, in his original French, “Voilà qui nous déconcerte”—“This is what perplexes us deeply.” An activist by temperament and an evolutionist by training, Teilhard does not take easily to diminishment, and he most certainly does not take easily to death. One might say that the categories he is using to process the question are stacked against him from the start, overwhelmingly Jesuit, cataphatic, activist, and skewed by a still common but flawed understanding of spiritual resignation as giving up.⁷ For him, death remains “le mal”—“evil itself”—inherently an enemy to be opposed. His innate distaste, exacerbated by the fact that the French language does not distinguish between “mal” as misfortune and “mal” as outright evil, allows his thinking to slide easily into advocating a resistance to death in the name of the Christian imperative to “struggle with God against evil.” When all is said and done, death remains for Teilhard indelibly associated in his mind with multiplicity, disintegration, entropy, and passivity—“the waste-matter of our existence,” as he puts it (p. 49). His somewhat uneasy resolution to this conundrum is to recommend struggling against death for as long as possible; then, only when defeat is imminent, to cast one’s hope on the transfiguration thereby to be revealed.

      DEATH AS A SACRAMENTAL SITUATION

      Boros’s analysis begins from a fundamentally different premise. For him, death is not the final rung in a descending ladder of diminishments; it is the sacramental apex of that rising “inner” curve of human freedom and individuation. While it is certainly true that everything concerning the “outer man” (i.e., the purely physical and psychological aspects of existence) is fated to diminishment and finally disintegration—

      …Yet at the same time there opens up the possibility of an inner ascent. The “inner man”, that is, man as plenitude of significance, power of illumination, wisdom, genuineness, transcendent transparency, breadth of heart, purified, refined human understanding, and withal, as completely integrated experience—in a word, the man who can become the interpreter of spiritual meaning, gnaws away at the strength of the “outer man.” The more the “outer man” disintegrates, the purer is seen to be the possibility of an ascent to interiority (p. 50).

      In this critical passage, which we have already partially explored earlier in this study, Boros clarifies a point often left elusive in Teilhard: that the rising tide of consciousness which will carry the evolutionary momentum to its Omega Point is not simply an extension of self-reflexive consciousness, but a transformation of self-reflexive consciousness. It is not simply the outer applications of human conscious agency—“achievement, success, self-assertion, the mastery over and disposal of things and men” (p. 49–50)—but the inner alchemy through which these qualities are transformed into something more subtle and refined, something more resembling the “fruits of the spirit,” that will ultimately transform our universe into the divine milieu, fully realized.

      Boros builds his case by a skillful application of the theological principle of kenosis—“self-emptying”—a concept of which, as we have just seen, Teilhard seems to make curiously little use. Three of Boros’s seven lines of argument in his philosophical discussion draw directly on this principle, yielding a composite portrait of death as the ultimate extension of the kenotic line, its final perfection. As in its Pauline prototype (Philippians 2: 5–11), for Boros, kenosis is quintessentially linked to “putting on the mind of Christ.” Far from passivity or capitulation, it implies a voluntary self-donation, itself expressive of a higher order of spiritual freedom and individuation.

      In fact, it would not be amiss to suggest that kenosis for Boros is arguably the evolutionary principle, that which allows individual consciousness to escape its own self-centeredness (and I am speaking here not only morally but perceptually as well) and give itself fully: to another human being, to the greater human collectivity, and ultimately to the building up of the mystical body of Christ. Kenosis is the agency of love, the power by which love is itself purified and made fully efficacious. In the eloquent climax to his discussion of “Love as a Projection of our Existence into Death,” Boros writes:

      Love and death have, therefore, a common root. The best love stories end in death, and this is no accident. Love is, of course, and remains the triumph over death, but that is not because it abolishes death, but because it is itself death. Only in death is the total surrender which is love’s possible, for only in death can we be exposed completely and without reserve. This is why lovers go so simply and unconcernedly to their death, for they are not entering a strange country; they are going into the inner chamber of love (p. 46).

      As long as one’s personhood is attached to a specific and localized corporeity, the capacity to give oneself fully in love is always to some degree contaminated by the need to cling, to hide, or to possess. Only in that moment of death can the kenotic essence of love be seen for what it is and reach its purest expression in the final self-donation of one’s life—a self-donation which always implicitly bears within it a holographic participation in Christ’s own ultimate self-donation on the cross. This is why, Boros affirms, death is not only the moment for the complete revelation of all one has become and inwardly transformed in the fieri of life, it is also the moment for the supreme encounter with Christ. Since “Christ’s human reality, the instrumental cause of our redemption, reaches the perfection of its instrumentality only in [his] death” (p. 162), so too, the moment of our own passing is suffused with his sacramental presence and incorporates our life indissolubly into his own. Far from “evil itself,” death instead marks our sacramental initiation into the mystical body of Christ.

      THE HEART OF THE EARTH

      By far the most profound contribution Boros makes to Teilhardian metaphysics is to vastly expand and develop the crucial role of the paschal mystery in catalyzing the metamorphosis by which “cosmogenesis becomes christogenesis,” in Teilhard’s celebrated phrase—or, in other words, by which Christ actively assumes the reins of cosmic evolution.

      Teilhard’s evolutionary Christology hinges mostly on the incarnation, through which, as he once famously remarked, Christ is “inoculated into matter”⁸ and can begin to direct the course of evolution from within his own marrow, “by making himself an element” (HP, p. 211). But Teilhardian metaphysics, in which evolution is swept forward on an inexorably rising tide of consciousness, does not adequately provide for a turning point, a cosmic watershed crossed irreversibly in the life and death of the human Jesus. Boros moves forcefully to reaffirm this cosmic watershed and to tie it explicitly to the paschal mystery. In so doing, he deepens the theological underpinnings of Teilhard’s argument while at the same time brilliantly using Teilhardian reference points to portray the actual mechanism by which this metamorphosis might occur.

      In our earlier discussion we have already had an initial look at Boros’s strategy. Through a strategic application of Rahner’s hypothesis that in death, the soul becomes “pancosmic”—i.e., “is given a really more essential proximity to matter”—Boros is able to demonstrate that in Christ’s death (which would necessarily have followed this same pancosmic trajectory), “his sacred humanity became present to the whole universe as the innermost and deepest part of all that is the world” (p. 157).

      The linchpin of Boros’s argument, however, lies in his mystically incandescent understanding of Jesus’s three-day sojourn in “the heart of the earth,” traditionally known as his “descent into hell.” Following Rahner’s lead, Boros insists that it is not simply through Jesus’s death that the cosmic metamorphosis is engaged, but rather and specifically through his passage through this particular cosmological stratum, which Rahner has described as “Sheol, the lower world” (TD, p. 64). But almost immediately