Boros affirms unequivocally that the supreme work of a human life—our magnum opus, as it were—is to bring forth this transfigured version of oneself, the “supremely individual creation of a man” (p. 59). In fact, in one brief and cryptic allusion he intimates that it is precisely the gathering inner momentum of this “supremely individual creation” that bursts upon us in (and as) the climacteric, inaugurating the dissolution of the “outer man” so that the “inner man” can attain its full expression. As he sees it, “The ‘inner man’, that is, man as plenitude of significance, power of illumination, wisdom, genuineness, transcendent transparency, breadth of heart…gnaws away at the strength of the ‘outer man’” (p. 50). In other words—if his thinking here can be so construed—our aging is not entirely or even primarily the consequence of purely physical factors, but the outward and visible sign that the work of spiritual transfiguration has already begun. Just think how that up-ends our usual perception of aging!
TOWARD PERSONHOOD
Like Teilhard, Boros equates this more fully developed interiority with the emergence of what he calls “the person.” While he largely retains the traditional theological term “soul” to refer to the individual human being, his “person”—in a manner, for all intents and purposes, identical to Teilhard’s—specifically designates the fruit of this conscious interiority, this inner work of self-differentiation and individuation within a relational field.5 No longer simply a “human doing,” he has become a human being in the fullest sense of the word by transforming “all the energy of life into person” (p. 53). Personhood for Boros is thus far more than simply a synonym for the “individual” or even the “soul”; it is the mature fruit of a conscious relation with one’s life. This will be an important point to keep in mind when we move on shortly to Boros’s presentation of “ontological indigence.” His version of the “inner man” or true self is not featureless, like an onionskin peeled full back, but is rather the very essence of this integrated personhood fully able to hold its shape and manifest itself when transposed to a more subtle corporeity.
It should be noted as well that the trajectory of this second curve of existence, the one guiding the emergence of our realized journey toward personhood, is at the same time a journey toward freedom. While the trajectory of the first (outer) curve leads, after that initial expansiveness of youth, toward greater and greater physical limitation and confinement, the trajectory of the second curve, when given full rein, rises irreversibly toward ever-greater interior freedom, expressed in those qualities of self-knowledge, personal agency, and the capacity to live imaginatively and richly within one’s interiority.
The essence of a graceful passage through the climacteric, Boros feels, lies in the acknowledgement that the pathway to our ultimate freedom and fullness lies along that inner curve, along with the willingness to give ourselves to the process, rather than clinging frantically to the now-falling outer curve. As the poet T.S. Eliot appropriately observed in The Four Quartets:
Old men ought to be explorers.
Here and there does not matter.
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion.
Boros argues convincingly throughout this entire first section of his work that the conscious articulation of our latent personhood is the fundamental purpose of the entire human journey, despite or even because of the inevitable decline and dissolution of the physical body. “With every diminution of his vital forces,” Boros summarizes, “a man kept discovering in himself a new potentiality for being, more completely, a person; and, at the same time, in the wake of all the crises already overcome, an independent centre inside existence itself was slowly coming into being” (p. 53). That in itself is a strong message of hope for those working their way through those latter stages of life, or for those serving as caregivers or spiritual guides during this process. But the place where Boros is ultimately taking this argument will be stronger still:
If we prolong the two curves of existence as far as death, we observe the following result: the personal element in its fullness—in other words, the inner man—can only emerge in death, when the energies of the outer man disappear. The whole dynamic force of existence is then transformed into person and the man can arise in the completely untrammeled statement of himself as man (p. 53–54).
THE MOMENT OF DEATH
Boros’s most extensive discussion of the moment of death itself comes in the next-to-the-last section of his philosophical discussion (Section 8), which draws together the lines of inquiry from all seven of the preceding sections. If death does indeed, pose “the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about one’s eternal destiny,” as he has claimed, of what does this freedom consist? How is the moment of death qualitatively different from any other moment? Building on Rahnerian reference points but in synthesis uniquely his own, he creates a vivid overview of the death process itself, highlighting those two defining features which both precipitate and form the matrix for this moment of final decision.
As Boros sees it, death thrusts the person suddenly into two unprecedented changes of state, effected in and through the moment of death itself:
1. The soul experiences what he calls “ontological indigence” (p. 76). No longer able to hide behind the various forms of “having” or “being” afforded by corporeity, it must instead “produces the corporeity out of itself” (p. 73) in a moment of “total self-encounter” (p. 76). This state of ultimate exposure is also, therefore, the moment in which pure freedom and uncompromised action can for the first time be fully activated.
2. The soul becomes “pan-cosmic.” Rather than losing all contact with materiality (becoming “a-cosmic,” as Boros puts it), “thanks to the process of death the soul is given access to a more really essential proximity to matter” (p. 74). It enters into a “meta-empirical relationship with materiality and becomes in a sense it is difficult to define but which is no less real, ‘pan-cosmic’… The soul takes hold of itself through the pancosmos, and by doing so—since it produces its relation to the world freely and creatively—it reshapes this whole cosmos for itself, essentially” (p. 74, 76).
Both of these assertions are admittedly challenging, perhaps for different reasons. Let me see if I can clarify with a few observations of my own.
First, with regard to ontological indigence:
This whole notion may at first appear off-putting—even a trigger—if you too quickly assume that Boros is talking here about that “peeling the onionskin” model of selfhood so fashionable in the monastic mysticism of a generation ago, where the true self or “inner man” was assumed to be featureless, to have no specific individuating characteristics. What then is taken away at death? The characteristics that made up our essential humanness? Certainly, and for good reasons, this model seems to be on a collision course with the basic incarnational thrust of Christian orthodoxy.
But as is evident from our earlier exploration of the two curves of existence, this is not at all what Boros has in mind. For him, the “inner man” does indeed possess unique characteristics, aptitudes, qualities, and experience; his personhood is not an absence of features but the transfiguration of the raw materials of his experience through the conscious work of individuation and differentiation—“self-positing,” as Boros calls it. And not only does this transfigured personhood survive the moment of death, but in that moment, it comes fully