PART I: THE MYSTERY OF DEATH
Before venturing into the thicket of Boros’s densely interwoven prose, let me try to pave the way with a synopsis of the overall structure of his argument. The Mystery of Death begins with a short, lyrical preface, cutting right to the chase of his original mystical revelation:
In death the individual existence takes its place on the confines of all being, suddenly awake, in full knowledge and liberty. The hidden dynamism of existence by which a man has lived until then—though without his ever having been able to exploit it in its fullest measure—is now brought to completion, freely and consciously. Man’s deepest being comes rushing towards him. With it comes all at once and all together the universe he has always borne hidden within himself, the universe with which he was already most intimately united, and which, in one way or another, was always being produced from within him. Humanity, too, everywhere driven by a like force, a humanity that bears within itself, all unsuspecting, a splendour he could never have imagined, also comes rushing towards him. Being flows towards him like a boundless stream of things, meanings, persons and happenings, ready to convey him right into the Godhead. Yes; God himself stretches out his hand for him; God who, in every stirring of his existence, had been in him as his deepest mystery, from the stuff of which he had always been forming himself; God who had ever been driving him on towards an eternal destiny. There now man stands, free to accept or reject this splendour. In a last, final decision he either allows this flood of realities to flow past him while he stands there eternally turned to stone, like a rock past which the life-giving stream flows on, noble enough in himself no doubt, but abandoned and eternally alone; or he allows himself to be carried along by this flood, becomes part of it and flows on into eternal fulfilment (pp. xlviii–xlix).
And the thesis:
Death gives man the opportunity of posing his first completely personal act; death is, therefore, by reason of its very being, the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny (p. xlix; italics by author).
The rest of the book consists of a detailed elaboration of this thesis in two main sections. In the first section, his “philosophical discussion,” Boros lays out seven successive bearing lines to build his case that the moment of death represents the consummatum est of a life’s journey, toward which all the currents of life inexorably set and in which they at last reach their plenitude of meaning. These bearing lines are, respectively: (1) “The Presence of Death in the Will”; (2) “Death as a Fulfilment of Knowing”; (3) “Integral Perception and Remembrance in Death”; (4) “Love as a Projection of our Existence into Death”; (5) “Meeting-Point of the Historical Dialectic of Existence”; (6) “The Previous Sampling of Death Found in Poetic Experience”; and (7) “Accomplishment and Perfection of the Kenotic Actualization of Existence.” In these smaller sections, he ranges widely, drawing his insights from poetry and the arts as well as from metaphysics, philosophy, and developmental psychology.
THE FOUR CONSENTS
While all of these sections are, in their own way, gems, Section 5 (“Meeting-Point of the Historical Dialectic of Existence”) deserves a special mention not only because it is by far the most extensively developed of Boros’s “philosophical” arguments, but because it relies so heavily on the now iconic work of theologian Romano Guardini (who would have overlapped with Boros at the University of Munich during the 1950s). It was Guardini who first popularized the notion of life as a series of passages—“crises,” as he calls them—to be duly navigated in the journey toward human maturation. According to Guardini there are five of these: birth, puberty, experience (i.e., coming fully into one’s power), climacteric (the beginning of physical decline), and dissolution. This schematic would later be reworked by the American Jesuit John S. Dunne, reappearing in his 1975 classic Time and Myth as “The four consents”—which, in turn, directly imported from Dunne, has now become a mainstay of Thomas Keating’s enormously influential teaching on Centering Prayer.2 Boros’s early use of this material thus furnishes an important but little known link in the transmission chain of a psychological model that today enjoys considerable spiritual currency.
For his immediate purposes in The Mystery of Death, however, Boros uses this schematic to illuminate a more fundamental dialectic, which he calls the “two curves of existence” (p. 47). The first curve, consisting entirely of physical energy, follows a gradual but irreversible trajectory toward exhaustion. At the beginning of every human life, the sheer force of being seems virtually inexhaustible. But at some point, the explosive centripetal life force that propels a young person through birth and puberty and out into the world of external achievement begins to recede, never to be replenished. The first curve proves ultimately to be a falling curve. As the English poet Thomas Grey so famously observed, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
At the same time, however, claims Boros, another curve can begin to be detected, this time an inner and rising curve. It comes into being as a fruit of our consciously integrated experience—or in other words, through our relationship with our own life. As Boros sees it:
From the facts of existence and the surrounding world an inner sphere of being a human being is built up. This inner man is brought about by a never-ending daily application, on the treadmill of duties, annoyances, joys and difficulties. From these insignificant actions freely performed, the great decisive freedom is built up—freedom from oneself, freedom to view one’s own existence from outside. …From the crowded days and years of joy and sorrow something has crystallized out, the rudimentary forms of which were already present in all his experiences, his struggles, his creative work, his patience and love—namely, the inner self, the individual, supremely individual creation of a man. He has given his own shape to the determinisms of life by a daily conquest of them; he has become the master of the multiple relations that go to make him up, by accepting them as the raw material of his self. Now he begins to “be” (pp. 59).
Note that this “never ending daily application on the treadmill” is not “duty” in the usual Victorian sense of the term. The key feature here is that it is freely—i.e., consciously—offered and consists not only in being faithful to the outer post but in doing the inner work as well. “Freedom from oneself,” in Boros’s admittedly experimental terminology,3 is clearly not the traditional “self-emptying” or subjugation of the personal will expressed as moral categories; it corresponds far more closely with what contemporary spiritual nomenclature would identify as “witnessing presence,” a deepening inner capaciousness that grounds and tempers the busy external self, while progressively vesting it with that elusive quality, “being.”
Properly speaking, according to Boros, this process gets fully underway at the climacteric; that is, when the first curve of life has definitively entered its falling phase and the intimation of one’s personal mortality begins to dawn. This notion of “growing into age” or “second half of life agendas” is now a popular model in contemporary spirituality, but it is important to realize that Boros was already onto it a quarter of a century before the appearance of Helen Luke’s iconic book Old Age in 1987. This rising curve, consisting of our conscious interiority and integrated life experience, at some point crosses the path of the falling curve—and keeps on rising! When this inner ascent reaches its natural fullness in old age, what emerges is the authentic elder, exuding a radiance and plenitude of being that is no longer confined to this world alone, but in fact opens into the infinite:
Over time … there emerges the old man, the wise man, the elder, whose whole strength is spirit, deriving from a composure we can really call saintly. Perhaps such men say little, or at any rate little of importance, but by their simple presence they transform the complex of existence and make it transparent. Their “act” of essential being is [in] the spiritual transparency of the realized meaning of existence. … These men have transformed all the energy of life into person (p. 53).
This quiet luminosity, or incandescence of being, visible as a light within the diminishing human form, is essentially for Boros a “body,” a body of an entirely different substantiality—or as