is not, however, simply a matter of becoming one with the snowflakes, the autumn rains, the winds, as in the sentimental version of this idea. Rather, free from the localized corporeity of the body, “The soul reaches the place where the whole world has its source, where it is brought together and grasped as one whole, as it were centrally connected and fastened, the place where from the beginning we always had our roots of being and our essence” (p. 75).
What sort of a place might that be? What dimension is Boros talking in here: geospatial, mythological, cosmogonic? All of the above, I believe: overlaid and interwoven with that signature density that is so typical of visionary experience. He names this place “the heart of the earth” and states—returning to the main thread of his argument—that it is here where the soul will have to make its “complete and final decision” (p. 75). Hold that thought; we will be returning to it for a more extensive appraisal of its significance in Part II of his exposition.
CHRIST IN DEATH
While some of these insights, particularly regarding this pancosmic, are more than a little mind-bending and could well merit a more detailed commentary, let me stay with the main thrust of the argument. The real fruit of Boros’s insight here awaits us in Part II of his work—his “Theological Discussion”—where he applies this identical schematic in order to break open the meaning of Christ’s passage through death. Suddenly and decisively, the other penny drops. Taking as his point of departure the notoriously challenging traditional dogmatic stipulation that it is through Christ’s death (rather than his resurrection) that our human redemption is accomplished (p. 136–7), he is able to utilize his hypothesis to demonstrate how the moment of Christ’s death literally establishes “a new universal scheme of salvation embracing the whole human race” (p. 144).
First, with regard to “ontological indigence”: Like all human beings, Jesus’s life unfolds under the sway of that “double curve” of existence. His initial life force bursts forth, rises to a peak in early adulthood, then slowly recedes. At the same time, the increasing depth and richness of his human experience, consciously integrated and purified in the refiner’s fire of life itself, glows increasingly brightly as the radiance of his fully articulated personhood. At the moment of his death, these two curves separate, and like all human beings he is thrust forward into a moment of total exposure, which is also, through that very transparency, a moment of total self-encounter. All that he has seen, understood, integrated, accepted, and transformed in the marrow of human life will be called forth as he, too, steps into 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
