around his work, it seems fitting to call attention once again to Boros’s now much more readily available spiritual masterpiece as both a prototype and a benchmark in the continuing effort to bring Teilhard’s singular cosmic vision into fruitful dialogue with the best of the classical tradition. It stands as a testimony to the profound spiritual generativity that can emerge when “deep calls to deep” (in the words of Psalm 42), and Teilhard’s extraordinary insights are seeded within a theologically prepared and deeply attuned mystical heart.
EPILOGUE: CATCHING THE MANTLE
If I might be permitted one final observation, this time on a more personal note, I would add that what continues to draw me to this Teilhard/Boros connection is not simply the rich intellectual insights to be found here, but the more touching story of a profound lineage transmission between a spiritual father and son he never met in the flesh.
In his final essay, “The Christic,” composed less than two weeks before his death, Teilhard hovers momentarily on the edge of despair. “How is it, then, that as I look around me still dazzled by what I have seen, I find that I am almost the only person of my kind, the only one to have seen? … Is there, in fact, a Universal Christ, is there a Divine Milieu? Or am I, after all, simply the dupe of a mirage in my own mind?” (The Heart of Matter, p. 100). But digging deeper into his seemingly bottomless well of inner resilience, he comes up with a final, hope-against-hope affirmation:
Everywhere on earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world…In me it happens by pure chance (temperature, upbringing, background) that the proportion of the one to the other is correct, and the fusion of the two has been effected spontaneously—not as yet with sufficient force to spread explosively—but strong enough nevertheless to make it clear that the process is possible—and that sooner or later there will be a chain reaction.
This is one more proof that Truth has to appear only once, in one single mind, for it to be impossible for anything to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze (HM, p. 102).
A few years later, that fire does indeed ignite again, this time in the heart of a another young Jesuit priest, Ladislaus Boros, who providentially stumbles upon the unclaimed mantle of the departed prophet, slips it onto his shoulders, and suddenly and devastatingly sees—and his life is indeed set ablaze, transfigured, and perhaps ultimately consumed in the power of that seeing.
While this is certainly no ordinary transmission story, it is, I believe an authentic and a moving one. The torch is passed, the fire blazes up once again, and the vision of the earth suffused in Christ again bursts forth in all its spiritual generativity and power. This touching final encounter between a towering lone prophet and his all-too-soon-to-be-forgotten spiritual son may not figure large in the overall annals of Jesuit intellectual history, but it is nonetheless an authentic part of the Teilhard story, whose rich spiritual significance deserves a wider appreciation.
WORKS CITED
MD Boros, Ladislaus, The Mystery of Death. New York: Herder and Herder, 1965. Republished by Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2019.
Dunne, John S. Time and Myth. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
HM Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Heart of Matter. Translated by René Hague. New York: William Collins & Sons and Co., Ltd., and Harcourt, Inc., 1978.
HP —. The Human Phenomenon. Translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber. Eastbourne, United Kingdom, and Chicago: Sussex Academic Press, 2003, 2015.
—. “My Universe,” in Science and Christ. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
DM —. The Divine Milieu. New York: HarperCollins, 1960.
TD Rahner, Karl. On the Theology of Death. New York: Herder & Herder, 1965.
NOTES
1 In confirmation of my intuition on this point, P. Nicklaus Klein, a younger confrere of Boros during his years as a Swiss Jesuit, remembers attending, as a twelve-year-old, a lecture on Mysterium Mortis given by Boros himself, which began with an acknowledgement of The Divine Milieu. The impact of Teilhard’s work on Boros was still evidently quite vivid. (Personal correspondence via Richard Brueschel, SJ, and Ursula King, December 2016.)
2 Keating first used this material as part of his video teaching series, “The Human Condition,” developed during the late 1980s and still in active use at Centering Prayer immersion retreats. A written version can be found in Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love (Rockport, MA: Element Books, 1992).
3 There is no evidence to suggest that Boros ever came across the teachings of the Christian esoteric tradition, particularly as developed in the writings of P.D. Ouspensky and Maurice Nicoll (both of them roughly contemporaries of Boros), where this idea of conscious interior freedom was already being actively developed during the 1930s and 1940s. Today the concept has become widely known through the Eastern notion of “Witnessing Presence,” and stabilizing such a presence is at the heart of most contemporary models of mindfulness training. Traditional Christian theological terminology still lags significantly behind in developing a language for the phenomenology of consciousness, so Boros was reaching a bit to find language to describe a state of interior freedom he clearly knew well at the experiential level.
4 For more on second body and “the wedding garment,” see my own Love Is Stronger than Death (New York: Belltower Books, 1999; reprinted by Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2014).
5 Teilhard develops his notion of the person and the personal extensively in the final section of The Human Phenomenon, pp. 183–208. The book’s last sentence, in fact, rings this bell yet a final time: “Capable of containing the human person, the universe must be irreversibly personalizing” (p. 208).
6 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, translated by René Hague (New York: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1978), p. 55.
7 Teilhard is also clearly reacting here against a kind of pseudo-spirituality pervasive in his times (and lingering even into our own) that advocates, in the name of “resignation” or “submission to the will of God,” a too easy renunciation our own human responsibility to resist evil and struggle against affliction—an attitude which, he argues vehemently and with characteristic flair, “is in danger of weakening and softening the fine steel of the human will, brandished against the forces of darkness and diminishment” (Divine Milieu, p. 60).
8 Teilhard de Chardin, “My Universe,” in Science and Christ (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 54.
9 Most notably, in the final section of Part II of The Divine Milieu (pp. 75–81), and in The Heart of Matter, pp. 67–76, culminating with the well-known “Hymn to Matter” on pp. 75–76.
It is worth noting as well Teilhard’s own description of his inner journey to this “cosmic wormhole “ in The Divine Milieu, p. 42:
And so, for the first time in my life perhaps (although I am supposed to meditate every day!) I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from my conventional
