My reasons for bringing forward once again this forgotten Jesuit son are twofold. The first is on his own merits, because his now obscure masterpiece deserves to be much better known. It remains an authentic example of visionary theology at its most sublime, with a message that is at once challenging, timeless, and deeply hopeful. Augmenting his scholastic methodology with insights gleaned from philosophy, psychology, literature, and his own considerable mystical acuity, Boros offers a profound and multifaceted exploration of the meaning of death, set against the greater backdrop of the meaning of life itself as it gradually reveals itself in a deepening openness to “the total surrender” that is love (MD, p. 46). His exploration reaches its stunning climax when these same general principles are applied to lead us through the eye of the needle of Christ’s own death. The Mystery of Death is an intense jewel of Christian mystical insight and deserves to remain accessible to a new generation of spiritual seekers—many of whom, I trust, will find themselves just as riveted by it as I was.
My second reason for bringing this work forward again is, frankly, because of the interpretive window it opens up with another, considerably more famous Jesuit forgotten son, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Beneath Boros’s brief, appreciative reference to Teilhard toward the end of The Mystery of Death, it is not difficult to detect a deep mystical kinship that may in fact comprise one of the more remarkable lineage transmissions of our time.
Contemporary literary criticism recognizes the principle of intertextuality, defined as “the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text,” irrespective of direct linear causality. It’s about listening to how two texts talk to one another, how they unfold and amplify each other’s meaning. Later in this introduction I will be drawing on the methods of intertextuality to explore the dynamic cross-pollination between The Mystery of Death and Teilhard’s early spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu. We will ride the curve of this dynamism as it breaks into some significantly new theological ground.
This intertextual conversation is particularly timely in our own era as the contemporary Teilhardian renewal continues to gain momentum and scholars look for wider interpretive lenses through which to make his teaching more generally accessible. Spearheaded by first-rate scholars such as Ilia Delio, Ursula King, and John Haught, the Teilhardian groundswell has already generated significant renewed interest in his writings and has substantially narrowed the gap between his former “odd duck” status and Thomas Berry’s startling prophecy, cited in the foreword to the 2003 Sarah Appleton-Weber translation of The Human Phenomenon: “I fully expect that in the next millennium Teilhard will be generally regarded as the fourth major thinker of the Western Christian tradition. These would be St. Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Teilhard.”
Teilhard remains a tough slog, however. While many of his contemporary Jesuit confreres are now more than willing to welcome him back with open arms, I often hear the comment, whispered as an aside, “But I don’t really understand what he’s saying.” Nor does Teilhard make it easy on his readers. Because of his long years of exile in China, he was denied the intellectual give-and-take with a jury of peers who would have impelled him to nuance his thinking and further develop his ideas. The towering strength of his work is also its towering weakness: its monological quality, which makes it difficult for anyone not already on his same wavelength to gain easy access, and which tends to reify theological weak spots, making the canon appear less intellectually tractable than it actually is.
It is just here that Boros enters the picture, as a powerful potential bridgebuilder. Standing firmly on the shoulders of his celebrated Jesuit mentor Karl Rahner, and highly skilled in the scholastic discourse that Teilhard himself eschewed, he is able to mediate an illuminating dialogue between Teilhard and the greater Christian theological tradition—not, as is so often the case in so much of contemporary Teilhardian scholarship, by secularizing Teilhard’s thought or draping it in current evolutionary jargon, but by piercing to the very marrow of Teilhard’s Christic mysticism and carrying it to an even more brilliant degree of spiritual luminosity. Like a modern-day Elijah and Elisha, Teilhard and Boros are joined at the hip, I believe, in a single, continuous spiritual transmission. And the harmonizing light that Boros’s own mystical acuity is able to shine on Teilhard’s poignant theological singularity is reason in and of itself to restore The Mystery of Death to active duty in the Teilhardian interpretive canon.
A FAILED VOCATION?
While it might be overstating the case to call it a “meteoric rise,” certainly Boros’s early years as a Jesuit showed all the signs of outstanding promise. Hungarian born, he fled the communist revolution in 1949 at the age of twenty-two. He entered the Jesuit order in Germany and almost immediately began his theological studies, completing his doctoral dissertation (on Augustine) at the University of Munich in 1957, and was ordained a priest in that same year. Further theological studies took him to Belgium, France, and England, where he was soon recognized as one of the most promising younger theologians following in the footsteps of the magisterial Karl Rahner, undoubtedly the greatest Jesuit theologian of the twentieth century. In 1958, Boros was posted to Zurich to join the editorial staff of the prestigious Jesuit journal Orientierung, and five years later he was appointed to a lectureship in religious studies at the University of Innsbruck. Both of these posts ended with his laicization in 1973.
Somewhere in the late 1950s, Boros encountered the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, which by then were beginning to appear regularly in French (and, shortly thereafter, in English) translations after Teilhard’s death in 1955 ended the publication ban imposed by his religious superiors. Le Milieu divin (“the divine milieu”) was the fourth in the Éditions du Seuil series, published in 1957, and it was most likely this French edition that originally attracted Boros’s attention. Judging by his numerous articles and reviews posted in Orientierung, by the end of the decade he was clearly fully engaged in Teilhard as a research topic.
At almost exactly this same time—most likely early 1959—Boros apparently experienced what can only be described as a powerful mystical revelation concerning the final disposition of the soul in the moment of death. I use the word “revelation” with some trepidation, but clearly whatever caught fire in Boros’s soul has far more of the elements of an authentic spiritual revelation—boldness, surprise, compelling inner authority—than of an idea theologically derived or long chewed over. The gist of his vision is as follows: at the moment of death, there is indeed a final decision rendered as to our eternal destiny, but it is we who choose, not God—and if we are blessed in our choice, we respond with a “yes” that has slowly been forming in us through all the changes and passages of our human life.
The impact of this remarkable seeing must have washed over Boros like a tidal wave, for he describes writing it down currente calamo (“at breakneck speed”) over a period of about six weeks. Later he went back and added to his essay a methodological foreword and a lengthy theological analysis. The original version was published in Orientierung in 1959 under the title “Sacramentum Mortis: Ein Versuch über den Sinn des Todes” (“The Sacrament of Death: An Attempt on the Meaning of Death”). An expanded German edition was published in 1965, together with an English language edition published by Burns & Oates Ltd. in the United Kingdom (under the title The Moment of Truth), and by Herder and Herder in the United States.
Did Boros experience his vision before reading The Divine Milieu or after it? Had he already completed his first, mystically impassioned draft of the work when The Divine Milieu crossed his desk, a latecomer to his research? It is possible, but I think not likely. From a thematic standpoint, The Mystery of Death is so quintessentially a response to Teilhard’s “perplexing” question—“God can be grasped in and through every life. But can God also be found in and through every death?” (The Divine Milieu, p. 46)—that it seems almost inconceivable this question was not, on some level, already working in Boros’s mind. Moreover, Boros’s powerfully integrated and pivotal use of key Teilhardian images and