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 certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure and who no longer obeyed me. [!] And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came—arising I know not where from—the current which I dare call my life.
Introduction
“You know what they say: ‘It takes nine months to create a man, and only a single day to destroy him.’ We both of us have known the truth of this as well as anyone could ever know it…. Listen, May: it does not take nine months to make a man, it takes fifty years—fifty years of sacrifice, of determination, of—so many things! And when that man has been achieved, when there is no childishness left in him, nor any adolescence, when he is truly, utterly, a man—the only thing he is good for is to die.”
This bitter remark, taken from the last page of André Malraux’s Man’s Estate,1* was intended by the author of the novel to be an expression of the futility of life. For, if human death has no meaning, then the whole of life is nothing but emptiness. If, on the other hand, there is in death a fullness of being which life does not possess, then life itself must be subjected to a thoroughgoing reinterpretation and revaluation. It is a strange thing that the search for some content in life and some continuity in human existence should have to start off as an enquiry into the meaning of death!
It is not easy for us to do this nowadays. The violent, primitive process of death is becoming so obscured by our general forgetfulness of the meaning of all natural processes that we are no longer disturbed by it. There are few happenings to which we have grown so blind as we are to death. But to be forgetful of death is to be forgetful of life, whereas thinking of one’s death is an act in which life begins once more to appear as a source of light. A man who knows death, also knows life. The converse is true, too: the man who is forgetful of death, is forgetful of life also.
When considered from a biological and medical point of view, death is apprehended in that aspect of its being that is accessible to experimental science, that is, as a dissolution, an occurrence to be endured, a deprivation of consciousness, a destruction. Metaphysical anthropology, on the other hand, asks the question whether this complete removal from self which we undergo in death does not conceal a much more fundamental process which could be described, not in terms of a dissolution and an endurance of suffering, but rather in terms of the progressive achievement of selfhood, of actively initiating the self to life. As an approach to a consideration of this metaphysical problem, let me give, in outline, a picture of death as I see it—a picture the accuracy of which I propose to establish in the course of the following investigation. But first of all a brief sketch, without going into more precise detail.
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 other, 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