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 Boros begins to depart from a strictly Rahnerian interpretation as he points out that the actual scriptural reference (in Matthew 12:40) is to “the heart of the earth”—not to hell, not to a symbolic or interior state of being (which is how Rahner develops the idea), but to an actual place implicitly enfolded within the geological layers of this planet.
I have already called attention to this striking idea, noting how it depends on that dense layering of meaning that is so characteristic of visionary and poetic discourse. In a paragraph rich with paradox and mystery, Boros reflects on how such a place might be construed:
This earthy, empirical world of ours is, as it were, nothing more than a corner of that essential cosmos from which the force for existence flows into our world… Seen in this way, death appears as a descent into the centre of our mother earth, to the root unity of the world—there where all the connexions end in one knot, where all spatio-temporal things join together, burgeoning on one root—down to the furthest and deepest of all that is visible. Perhaps one might express this reality with the word “heart”. In the metaphysical process of death the soul reaches “the heart of the universe,” the “heart of the earth.” This is the place where it will have to make its complete and final decision (p. 75).
The germ of this idea clearly belongs to Rahner, whose description of journey into hell as an imaginative descent into “the deepest stratum of the world’s reality, the stratum that unites all things at root bottom” clearly made a powerful impression on Boros; he quotes this phrase directly in his discussion (pp. 146). But if for Rahner this descent to a place of root unity remains primarily a philosophical construction (a slightly more spatial way of picturing ontological causality), for Boros it becomes an utterly concrete spatio-temporal reality. His “heart of the earth” is no mere ontological metaphor; it is more like a wormhole at the center of creation—“here where the soul is most deep and matter is most dense” (DM, p. 87)—from which the divine will-to-form flows into this realm here below and emerges as the primordial force of life itself. In a manner far more Teilhardian than Rahnerian, his description pulsates with vibrant materiality and a sense of actual physical “hereness” reminiscent of those powerful Teilhardian odes and reflections on “The Spiritual Power of Matter” scattered throughout his work.9 This heart of the earth is at once “the interiority of the whole cosmos” and “the center of the terrestrial globe,” both root unity and geosphere. It is where the world as we know it has its causal matrix, where the primordial laws governing this plane of existence have their foundation—or as Boros puts it, “where the forms which give causality to the dynamism of being as it presses out from the world centre into the spatio-temporal sphere, work towards their entelechy” (p. 74–75).
When Christ enters this place…
…When, in the way we have just explained, Christ’s human reality was planted, in death, right at the heart of the world, within the deepest stratum of the universe, the stratum that unites at root bottom all that the world is, at that moment in his bodily humanity he became the real ontological ground of a new universal scheme of salvation embracing the whole human race (p. 144).
Not only does Christ reach this place, he repossesses it, saturating it with his being and in so doing altering its fundamental nature. It is not simply that the human Jesus has, through his death, become pancosmic; he has become pancosmic at the evolutionary mainspring. And it is for precisely this reason that the world has been set on a new cosmic footing.
Boros himself modestly adds, “Perhaps the interpretation of Christ’s descent into the ‘heart of the universe’ which this essay is proposing may serve to provide a theological foundation for the exciting and inspiring discovery made in Teilhard’s spirituality of the ‘cosmic Christ’ in whom we and, with us, all things are and exist” (pp. 150). It does this, but it does far more. It draws powerfully on the Teilhardian vision—particularly on Teilhard’s sense of the world as animated from within by the élément christique—to bring impressive new leverage to the traditional theological understanding of Christ’s descent into hell. Boros brilliantly elucidates both the principles and the physical basis for that core Christian conviction that a humble and inconspicuous death on a cross is actually the fundamental turning point in the evolution of the universe.
“Unless [Christianity] is seen to be the most realistic and cosmic of faiths and hopes, nothing has been understood of its ‘mysteries,’” writes Teilhard in his epilogue to The Human Phenomenon (HP, p. 211). On exactly this same wavelength, Boros reunites the cosmic and the mystical to bring significant new theological leverage to our literal understanding of Christ at the heart of the earth, as the heart of the earth.
DEEP CALLING TO DEEP
While the foregoing comments have been offered more in the spirit of opening a conversation than of closing an argument, I hope they will offer yet another intriguing window of opportunity now opened up in this timely republication of The Mystery of Death.
