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. As the Teilhardian reclamation continues to gain ground and a growing body of scholarship accumulates 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