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 a force for good. Not until nearly three decades later would he finally be able to proclaim with complete unanimity, “Because, Lord, by every innate impulse and through all the hazards of my life, 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
