activated.
2. The soul becomes “pan-cosmic.” Rather than losing all contact with materiality (becoming “a-cosmic,” as Boros puts it), “thanks to the process of death the soul is given access to a more really essential proximity to matter” (p. 74). It enters into a “meta-empirical relationship with materiality and becomes in a sense it is difficult to define but which is no less real, ‘pan-cosmic’… The soul takes hold of itself through the pancosmos, and by doing so—since it produces its relation to the world freely and creatively—it reshapes this whole cosmos for itself, essentially” (p. 74, 76).
Both of these assertions are admittedly challenging, perhaps for different reasons. Let me see if I can clarify with a few observations of my own.
First, with regard to ontological indigence:
This whole notion may at first appear off-putting—even a trigger—if you too quickly assume that Boros is talking here about that “peeling the onionskin” model of selfhood so fashionable in the monastic mysticism of a generation ago, where the true self or “inner man” was assumed to be featureless, to have no specific individuating characteristics. What then is taken away at death? The characteristics that made up our essential humanness? Certainly, and for good reasons, this model seems to be on a collision course with the basic incarnational thrust of Christian orthodoxy.
But as is evident from our earlier exploration of the two curves of existence, this is not at all what Boros has in mind. For him, the “inner man” does indeed possess unique characteristics, aptitudes, qualities, and experience; his personhood is not an absence of features but the transfiguration of the raw materials of his experience through the conscious work of individuation and differentiation—“self-positing,” as Boros calls it. And not only does this transfigured personhood survive the moment of death, but in that moment, it comes fully into its own.
What causes the ontological indigence, according to Boros’s scenario, is the disruption of our sense of selfhood caused by the dropping away of the physical body, so that it is no longer there to furnish the habitual atmosphere—or as I like to think of it, the camouflage—in which all our sense of selfhood has heretofore transpired.
Boros treads carefully here. Following standard Thomistic protocols, he affirms that the body is not simply an accidental vehicle that the soul occupies for the duration of its earthly existence. The body participates fully in the creation of a single human wholeness which in the moment of death is then wholly transformed. In fact, taking the argument even further than St. Thomas (and in a direction quite congruent with my own way of thinking), he proposes that this unity of body and soul are so complete that “Out of the two there comes a third which is neither of the two” (p. 72). This I would take to mean the person—that “supremely individual creation of a man”—who has come into being as the fruit of that symbiotic unity of soul and body realized and made fully expressive over a lifetime’s journey. Death, then, is no simple sundering of two existent entities (soul and body); it is the complete overturning of that dynamic unity which is personhood.
But while the body is a full player in this business of “soul-making” (or “person-making, if it were), it inevitably contributes its own gravitational drag to the process. By its very concreteness it brings its own “Planck’s constant” of self-referentiality and self-protectiveness. This need not be attributed (exclusively, anyway) to any theologically imputed “sinful self will”; it is part of the body’s legitimate mission, insofar as it comprises what scientists now call a “self-specifying system,” to maintain itself in life, providing for its basic needs and protecting its boundaries against encroachment. Nothing is wrong with this; it’s all part of the job description of embodiment. But, as Boros and others have rightly noted, this propensity does set up a fundamental tension with that other core propensity of human soul, toward total self-giving and self-disclosure, which is the essence of the kenotic principle and certainly the essence of love. Moreover, this intrinsic self-referentiality tends to confine our sense of selfhood to a single, localized vehicle (our body), which we regard as our absolute possession.
Throughout the whole of our earthly life we live within the terms of this tension, our body providing a familiar home and gentle camouflage against the force of sheer unmediated being that tugs against our heartstrings like the wind against a kite. “We make the transition to being,” writes Boros, “only when our absolute possession, our body, takes leave of us” (p. 45).
And that leave-taking is essentially what Boros means by “ontological indigence.” The camouflage is gone. The gravitational weight of embodiment is no more. There is no more fixed local point of reference. What has been forged in the course of our life as our personhood, the realized meaning of our existence, is there in all its naked glory, neither configured nor filtered. It is a moment of total self-exposure—and therefore, of total self-encounter.
The indigence is not about a poverty of personal being, but rather about a complete transparency of personal being where the old habits are gone forever and one must step forward to claim and inhabit what one has become.
Second, with regard to pancosmic:
The notion (or is it a fond hope?) that a person does lose contact with this world in death but is somehow carried forward in the elements of nature itself is a popular motif in contemporary spiritual culture. Out there on the worldwide web, the most popular rendition of this theme—dating from the 1930s by poet Mary Elizabeth Frye—is in virtually constant circulation:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn’s rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at the grave and cry;
I am not there, I did not die.
While this perennial piece of soul wisdom may not sit easily with those of a more traditional Christian theological formation, Boros’s argument here—which again draws heavily on Karl Rahner, but from his own angle of approach—opens a fascinating new window on this whole idea of our continued “pancosmic” participation in the world beyond death. Boros builds his case on the same basic argument we met in the preceding section: the essential (not merely “accidental”) union of soul and body during the course of one’s earthly life arises not from simple expediency, but from some inner necessity of the soul itself which is in fact constitutive of its very soulhood. “In strict Thomist theory there is a transcendental demand for a relationship with matter,” Boros surmises, adding that transcendental means “immediately ‘given’ in the very essence of the soul.” He asks: “What, then, happens to this transcendental demand in death?” (p. 73). Building on the lead handed him by Rahner, but working his scholastic terrain brilliantly to further nuance Rahner’s insight, Boros proposes that when the body dies, this primordial desire to be in relationship with materiality does not break up; it merely transfers itself to a far broader field, the pancosmos itself. Rather than being severed from matter, “We may, on the contrary, suppose
