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DEATH AND THEOLOGY

by

Robert K. Moriarty, B.A., B.S. in Ed.

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Re­ quirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

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Milwaukee, Wisconsin December, 1973

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

PrtEFACE. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 1 PART I -- THE CONTEMPORARY PROBLEM OF DEATH • • • 4

PART II -- THE THEOLOGY OF DEATH • • • • • 31 Introduction • • • • • • • • • • 31 Palemon Glorieux • • • • • • • • • • 36 Ladislaus Boros • • • • • • • • • • 71 Kar 1 Rahner • • • • • • • • • • 129 Conclusion • • • • • • • • • • • • 171 FOO'fNOTES • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 175 BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 180 l

PREFACE

Since the seventeenth century, with the rise of natural science and the development of secularization, we may observe an increasing denial and displacement of death from western society, and this coupled with a growing breakdown of religi­ ous beliefs about life after death. The phenomenon of secular­ ization has brought the interpretive role of the Church and the life-giving, salvific capacities of religion under a seri­ ous challenge. Burgeoning human resourcefulness gave birth to the anthropocentric age in which for many the affirmation of God meant the denial of man. And so arose a new faith, a faith in science, a faith in man. This faith found its ex­ pression in the myth of progress. But the secularization of life has also meant the secularization of death. Faith in the immortality of humanity came to replace faith in the im­ mortality of the individual. In the process, the individual has been left more and more to face death alone. But during the course of these two and a half centuries, not only has religious belief eroded, but now man in the lat­ ter half of the twentieth century finds also his faith in science challenged. The threat of technological annihilation challenges the salvific capacities of science and the credi­ bility of the myth of progress. The foundations of the mod­ ern world do not seem to be as firmly laid as man was wont 2 to believe. And now the fist of death threatens to shove I itself up through the floor. Death which for so long has been in the background, out of the public sphere, pushed to the side as a private and individual concern, is again sur­ facing as a crit1cal question.

Modern man is almost totally bewildered by death. It evokes in his imagination the spectre of total alienation and loss of self, total isolation and abandonment, total meaninglessness. For all the attraction and power of the great myth of progress, it seems to many a secular man to have brought him nowhere; it has brought his world to the brink of annihilation and it leads him~ it seems;only to a black hole in the ground. Is it any wonder then, that people in contem­ porary western and American society have been loathe to face death and have been largely unable to cope with it and unwill­ ing to reflect deeply on it?

Death, however, is bubbling up from the unconscious, and is washing on to the shores of contemporary awareness. What does this portend? The taboo on death is being trifled with;

I more and more people are looking for opportunities to test out their thoughts and feelings on death. But where is there any death-wisdom to be found? Can any sense be made of death? Is it even possible to speak of death? Does the Christian have anything to say?

How speak of death in a world threatening to go mad in the face of meaninglessness? To speak of death and meaning 3 today we must begin by relating death to life. And this is / as true for the theologian as for the philosopher or the psy- chologist. The theologian in particular must take particular cognizance of the dimensions of the contemporary problem of death. For it is precisely the breakdown of classical theol­ ogy which has played a significant role in the development of the contemporary cultural crisis.

We will attempt to examine our contemporary situation vis-a -vis death, noting especially the challenge we are sus­ taining today to our longstanding repression of death. At­ tempting to come to some understanding of the broad cultural problem of death, we will note in particular those cues to be heeded in attempting to build a contemporary theology of death. We will then examine the recent developments in theology of death in light of the difficulties to be seen in the tra­ ditional theological treatment of death with a particular at­ tention to the importance of focusing on the confrontation of death and on the appropriation of it as a task of life. /

PAnT I THE CONTEMPORARY PROBLEM OF DEATH

"Death 1s the most important question of our t1me. tt "The problem of death is what is at the heart of much of our contemporary psychic disorder." "Death is an imposition on the human race and no longer acceptable." "Death is a. nor­ mal and natural part of life and no man fully enters life until he takes up a. conscious attitude to death." This is but a small sampling of the kinds of reflections being sug­ gested today about our special modern inability to cope with death. How make sense of life in the face of death is indeed a universal question, one with which every age has been faced. But in our age it has taken on new complexity and se­ riousness. A large part of the contemporary world has lost hope in the possibility of transcending death. We have in some significant degree lost the capacity to believe in the religious context in which the meaningfulness of death has been traditionally grounded. Death has come to be seen as total threat and understood as the end, as annihilation and as the consummation of meaninglessness. And, after all, death is destructive and in our wars and famines it is so pa­ tently meaningless. The secular world has attempted to re­ place belief in the immortality of the individual \~th belief 4 5

in the immortality of humanity, and so in some way maintain j the connectedness of life and death. But a world faced with the possibility of total, collective destruction can no long­ er avoid facing the consequences of meaningless death.

Our increasing modern response has been to deny the reality of death as much as possible and to soften its image where denial is not possible. Thus we have the funeral di­ rector's cosmetic efforts to paint over the face of death in

order to create "a beautiful memory picture.·t The American funeral has become a well-orchestrated ritual in which the concept of death is meant to play no part. We have been fur­ ther alienated from death as a natural process and part of the life cycle as the necessities of modern medicine have more and more removed sickness and dying from the home and family setting. There has been, so to speak, a displacement of death from society. The old are rejected and abandoned and the dying are removed to hospitals. So much of American life, e.g., our cult of youth and health, 1s organized around this pattern of denial of death. The myth of progress, for instance, represents an expansion of time, a supression of the acknowledgment that it is in fact fast running out for us. It is a kind of secret belief that our possibilities are unlimited, that we will never die.

While the reaction to contemporary funeral practices in some quarters can be seen as a move to simplicity and hon­ esty, the abolition of all ritualization of death can also be 6 understood as another attempt at denial, denial by triviali- . / zation. Such efforts make death out to be just another prob- lem of waste disposal, as if the simple disposal of the dead solves the problem of death. They rest on that "toilet assump­ tion" spoken of by Philip Slater in The Pursuit of Loneliness, which suggests that anything unpleasant in American life can be simply flushed away. But.. as we are discovering, this type of behavior is not without consequences. Just as phosphates, for instance, do not disappear when they go down the drain, so neither does the simple disposal of the dead make death go away. Phosphates go down the drain to pollute our streams and waterways, and death goes into the background of the soul to pollute life.

Like any repression, it requires compensation. Geof­ frey Gorer, the British sociologist, in a now famous afterword to pea£ha Grief and Mourning,l a sociological analysis of British response to these questions, speaks of the pornography which results from repression. Just as the repression of nat­ ural sex gives rise to pornographic sex, so too, he notes, the repression of natural death gives rise to a pornography of death. And the pornographic compensation for the repression of natural death is an obsession with violent death. And vi­ olence; it has been observed, is a's American as apple pie. Aside from what the substantial violence in contemporary Ameri­ can society might indicate in this regard, the contemporary film, the picture book of the modern imagination, with its 7 exploration of ever more sensational violence and with its • j camera preoccupation with lingering and slow motion shots of all manner of gruesome death and dying would, it seems, be more than a little sugeestive of this pornographic compensa­ tion operating in the American psyche.

Rollo May sees a close relationship between contempo­ rary eroticism and our problem with death. Our obsession with sex, he suggests, serves to cover up contemporary mants fear of death.

We in the twentieth century have fewer defen­ ses against this universal fear, such as the belief in immortality which armored our an­ cestors, and we also lack any widely agreed­ upon purpose of life. Consequently, the awareness of death is widely repressed in our day. But none of u.s can fail to be aware at the same time of the tremendous preoccupation with sex: in our humor, our drama, and our economic life, even down to the commercials on television. An obsession drains off an­ xiety from some other area and prevents the person from having to confront something dis­ tasteful. What would we see if we could cut through our obsession about sex? That we must die. The clamor or sex all about us drowns out the ever-waiting presence of death. When I strive to prove my potency in or­ der to cover up and silence my inner fears of impotence, I am engaging in a pattern as an­ cient as man himself. Death is the symbol of ultimate impotence and finiteness, and an­ xiety arising from this struggle to make our­ selves infinite by way of sex. Sexual activ­ ity is the most ready way to silence the inner dread of death and, through the symbol of pro­ creation to triumph over it.2 The drive to repress falls ...rith particular weight on western man because of his reliance on the "myth of' potency.1t e

It has played a central role in western man's struggle for I identity since the Renaissance and has been crucial in forming his psychological and spiritual character. It stems from wes­ tern man's preoccupation ~dth manipulating nature and has led to the astonishing successes we see in the physical sciences. It is a particularly strong myth in the United States and re­ quires a particularly strong effort to repress death. Arnold Toynbee, noting the peculiar American penchant for the denial of death, observes that death 1s regarded as tlunAmerican." It is an assault on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ft ••• if the fact of death were once admitted to be a reality even in the United States, then it would have to be admitted that the United States is not the earthly paradise that it is presumed to be (and this is one of the crucial articles of faith in 'the American way of life').")

In this country the myth of potency idealizes the mas­ culine virtues of potency carried over from the frontier, physical strength, hunting, sexual prowess. The life and leg­ end of Ernest Hemingway epitomize the pursuit of such a way of life and the crisis with which the fact of death confronts it. As long as you can hold onto the myth of potency you can laugh in the face of death, but once you lose this advantage, your choice is to accept death and its gradual and often ig­ nominious defeat, or in a final assertion of potency rush headlong to meet it as he did. 9

And it is precisely this type of challenge which we / arc faced with today. The myth of potency is being challenged on the collective level. ~~ether it be from our involvement in war, the possibility of ecological disaster, or the dimin­ ishment of the world's resources, behind these mounting ex­ periences of destructiveness, limits, and of diminishment we are coming more and more to sense t.he attending figure of death. The cultural upheaval of recent years has brought us the sense that we are living at the end of an age, perhaps at the end of the ages. And we suspect it will not be the con­ summating end of a triumphing lord of history, but a self­ destructive defeat brought about by man's own hand. As our cultural institutions begin to break down, the experience of mortality comes in through the cracks. For culture is after all man's collective "notl to death, his organized effort to create order, restrain the forces of chaos and affirm life.

America is at a crucial point in her psychohistory, says Robert Jay Lifton, where the whole conduct of life is being altered by a harrowing anticipation of death. Our whole perception of life is being altered; the boundaries of life and death are being blurred. The fact of the bomb is pivotal to this process. Lifton's long interest in reflection on death began with a study of the impact of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had for the immediate our­ vivors the effect of an overwhelming psychological immersion 10 in death, and it initiated for all of us "a permanent en­ I counter with death." The bomb brought to an end our sense of limits with respect to our self-destructive potential.

"You can not think seriously about Hiroshima," he notes, "without raising questions about nuclear weapons in general and their influence on that ultimate boundary between life and death. It Lifton approaches the significance of these weapons not in terms of their specific physical destructive power, but in terms of their effect on the psyche, in other words, in terms of our psychological response to them. r1an does not simply record facts and events in a purely passive way, but inwardly shapes and re-creates them; It ••• with weap­ ons whose capacity to kill is so great as to approach infin­ ity, only the naive and deluded could claim that this imprint does not in some important way, alter the general boundaries of life and death.,,4

Death, he affirms, does indeed bring about absolute biological and psychic annihilation to the individual, but life nevertheless requires a perception of the connection ex­ tending beyond that annihilation. While this "sense" of im­ mortality can be construed as denial and while man is prone to such denial, it also represents a compelling need to main­ tain a sense of continuity in space and time with all the ele­ ments of life, with community and with all of human history. This need has been part of the organism's quest for mastery and apparently has been in man's mind from the beginning. 11

As ~mbol-forming organisms, he declares, we require a lang­ I uage to express this sense of biohistorical continuity.

Men have always pursued immortalizing vi­ sions, and religion is one way to pursue them. Such is the richness of human cul­ ture that symbolic immortality bas been expressed in many other ways, though all belong to one of five modest there is the bio-social mode, the theological, the cre­ ative and the cultural (mOdes) and the more oceanic mode that c~n be called experien­ tial transcendence.~

The biological mode involves living on through one's sons and daughters and their sons, living on "in" them by im- agining an endless chain of biological attachment. He calls this the bio-social mode because it also radiates into social dimensions, into the sense of surviving through onets tribe, organization, religious body, people or nation. The theolog­ ical mode provides a transcendence of death based on the re­ ligiously grounded idea of life after death, not only as a form of survival, but as a release from profane life burdens into a higher plane of existence. The third mode by which man achieves a sense of immortality is through his creative works. his writings, art, thought, inventions or lasting in­ fluence of any kind upon human beings. The fourth mode of symbolic immortality is achieved by some sense of survival in the elements of nature, as if limitless in space and time. The fifth mode is called experiential transcendence and de­ pends entirely upon a psychic state of ecstasy or rapture to break the ordinary bounds of existence, of the senses, and of 12 mortality itself. It is encountered in mysticism, in the I ecstatic experiences of song, dance, childbirth, sexual love, athletic effort, mechanical flight, contemplation of the past, and in artistic and intellectual creation--sometimes with the aid of drugs, starvation and other ordeals. In many ways this mode is the key to all the others.

These modes, he maintains, are not merely problems one considers only when dying, but are rather constantly per­ ceived inner standards "though often indirect and out of awareness, by which we evaluate our lives, by which we main­ tain feelings of connectedness, significance and movement so necessary to our everyday psychological existence." And 60, nue'lear weapons pose a threat to our psychological existence quite independently of their actually being used. Their very existence is enough. For if we anticipate the possibility of their being used, then we face the prospect of being severed from all our paths to symbolic immortality.

In a post-nuclear world, it is not difficult, for in­ stance, to imagine little or nothing surviving in the biolog­ ical, creative or natural modes. And while "the entire mod­ ern secular historical experience," he notes, had thrown the theological mode into "great confusion" way before the appear­ ance of nuclear woapons, the bomb intensifies the theological crisis. uIn Hiroshima, for instance, people were unable to find an adequate explanation or formulation for their atom bomb experience in the Buddhism, Shintoism or in some cases 13

Christianity, they had known. I As for the rest of us and our nuclear weap­ ons, it is quite possible that belief in a spiritual existence beyond death cannot be effectively maintained in association with an imagined world in which there are none or virtually none among the biologically living. That is, one may require an assur­ ance of the continuation of an ordinary kind of natural life, in order to be able to be­ lieve in a supernatural kind.6 It is in light of this all-pervading threat, he sug­ gests, that the mode of experiential transcendence takes on special significance. For in this mode, by means of drugs and other intense experiences, man attempts to transcend his­ tory to find some timeless, deathless dimension.

In his essay, "Death in the Nuclear Age," Hans Mor­ genthau offers a similar Q$seesment of the contemporary threat of death. "If our age had not replaced the belief of the immortality of the individual with the immortality of hu­ manity and its civilization, we could take the prospect of nuclear death in our stride." We might even look forward to the fateful holocaust as an end to this vain life and the be- ginning of eternal life in a better world. Yet a secular age, which has lost faith in individual immortality in another world and is aware of the impending doom of the world through which it tries to perpetuate itself here and now, is left without a remedy. Once it has become aware of its condition it must despair.7 A great deal seems to have changed. however, in the eleven years since he wrote in the concluding sentence to the 14 above paragraph; "It is the saving grace of our age that it . / has not yet become aware of its condition_tIS Psychohistor- ian Lifton, along with other more recent observers, are not so optimistic. Lifton notes a strong undercurrent of imagery of death and technologica.l annihilation in contemporary life which results in people's increasing difficulty to give sig­ nificant form to their ideas, their actions and themselves. No longer sure where anything begins or ends, our sense of the continuity of life is profoundly threatened. Death, he suggests, is the most important question of our time and "the controlling image in psychology should be and already is that of death and the continuity of life."

He finds that the study of death has been radicalizing in terms of ultimate issues and of the need to combine work with deepened social action. But I end up with no definite conclusions, no permanent mythologies, only with what I see as a series of specters, di­ rections and possibilities.9

While Lifton pursues his "specters, directions and possibilities,·' Alan HarringtonlO would propose a dramatic and immediate plan of action. And it must be a token of the acuteness of the problem that he can seriously suggest that we proceed openly and forthrightly with a full-fledged effort to find a technological solution to the problem of death. "Death is a.n imposition on the human race and no longer ac­ ceptable." Modern man has all but lost his ability to accom­ modate himself to personal extinction; he must now proceed to physically overcome it. Noting the apocalyptic spirit in the 15

contemporary world, the pervading sense of the end of the ,/ age, he suggests that life as it used to be lived seems in the process of slo\'Ily exploding. What is going on among large masses of people, is a revolt against meaninglessness. At the heart of this distress, the illness may be defined simply and without sham, as the fear of aging and death. It is the gut realization that t he void is waiting and that each of us is going to vanish into it. In a world without faith, where it is no longer even possible, it is time that we recognized our hidden designs. It is time to face up to our secret de­ termination to defeat death. In recent years all the religi­ ous creeds and secular orthodoxies have exhausted the excuses for: the running away of life like water. People are frantic. Time is short. It is incumbent upon us to realize that re­ ligion has been man's device to keep from killing himself. Too weak before to defeat death, he secretly resolved to do so, but invented gods to worship and so assure his survival until he was strong enough to turn himself into God. These gods have served to reign in his ambition so he would not re­

alize his plan prematurely. Religion has been ~~ctional in an evolutionary context, but modern experience has destroyed its foundations. We are coming up against a realization of what we have been after. Religion 1s merely a holding oper­ ation, obsolete for all that it may be consoling. To con­

"' tinue to bow down to all sorts of gods who provide surrogate immortality (e.g. the modern effort to achieve immortality 16 by "publicity," planting one's image allover creation) is / self-defeating. For allover the world the great masses of people, the comfortable and af:fluent, are signalling, tlChange this situation or we will." 1'lith faith no longer possible, we must face up to our secret designs and turn into gods or perish;not deserving to survive.

'fhe immortalist thesis, says Harrington, is that the time has come for man to get rid of the intimidating gods in his own head, to bring his disguised desire out into the open and to go a.fter wha.t he \-iants, the only state of being he will settle for, which is divinity. Thus a ne\'1 act of faith is called for, a new faith which accepts as gospel that salva-

, . tion belongs to medical engineering and nothing else; that man's fate depends first on the proper management of his tech­ nical proficiency; that we can engineer our freedom from death, not pray for it; that our messiahs will indeed be dressed in white, in white coats, and not in asylums, but in biological and chemical laboratories.

Harrington cries out against the meaninglessness of personal extinction. It is someth1ng which shouldn't be; it is something to which modern man Can no longer accommodate himself. "The species must solve the problem of death very soon, blow itself up or blow its mind." He is correct, we might suspect, for psychic epidemic is not inconceivable. Collective suicide would represent one last desperate attempt to affirm the myth of potency and be man's last attempt to 17 spite death, or spite life with death at the end of it. The / tragedy of Harrington's proposal is that given his orienta- tion, · it is the only solution imaginable to the "no" to death lodged in man's breast, and one which by his own admis­ sion is finally incapable of being fulfilled. ~tlhile he seeks to put an end to death as a certain consequence of be­ ing born, he points out that in the final analYSis his pro­ posal could not eliminate death entirely nor could it guaran­ tee avoidance of death to any single individual.

V/hat underlies his immortalist proposal, and what underlies so much of the difficulty in coping with the tasks of contemporary life is precisely that technological bias which comes to expression in his dictwn: "Salvation belongs to medical engineering." He cries out against the extinction of the personal but this is just what his proposal reduces to--the technological reduction of death to a mere biological problem and with it a falsification of human life. What is at stake here, first and foremost, in terms of coping with death is the whole orientation of modern man.

The consequences of radical secularization are taking their toll. We find ourselves in a world where there is no \iidely-agreed upon purpose of life or sense of ultimate di­ rection. We have depended for too long on technology to solve all the problems of life. We know now that it can not. We find ourselves today thrown back on ourselves, alone in a world without God, responsible for our o~m salvation in what- 18

ever terms that is conceived. While man is indeed respon­ I sible for his life, the whole self-salvific thrust of the modern experiment is being challenged to its root. Awareness of our essential mortality is growing more and more acute. The myth of progress has been discredited and our "potencylt is under threat. We are faced with having to accept the re­ ality of death, and with the need to find it meaningful again, or with being condemned to rush headlong in despair to meet it.

It is a situation which has been in the making since the seventeenth century, since the da~n of the modern age, and one which has been gathering comPound interest as it has been more and more steadfastly avoided throughout the modern period. Silence about death is no longer acceptable for the risks of denial are too great. It has done nothing but con­ tribute to confirming the suspicion that death is what man has deep in his heart always feared it might be, the ultimate experience of contradiction. While life seems to hold to­ gether on one level; while it seems to be headed somewhere, might that somewhere be nowhere after all? Might not life be a joke, a cruel hoax? These are not simply questions toyed with by ivory tower thinkers vdth nothing better to do, but gut questions felt by the maSses in modern life.

Technological man has no answer to the problem of death nor, he haG discovered, has he an adequate solution to all the problems of life. But where then is "man alone" to turn? This is precisely the question. 'l'his is precisely the 19 task. Indeed it is a question of "turning," a question of / re-orientatlon, a question of conversion. And it is this to which the images of death are summoning us.

There is no doubt, says depth psychologist Edgar Herzog: that whenever man has en­ countered and become aware of death he has been horrified in the depths of his being: "mather it is his Olm impendine; death or the death of others which presents itself to his consciousness. How can he endure this horror? How respond to it? He is confronted by something wholly incomprehen­ sible, something monstrous in its all­ conquering, dark power-and he is helpless before it. Should he banish this incom­ prehensible horror, forget all about it in order to grasp the reality of life with its appearance of intelligibility? How can he, when death remains a fact which cannot be denied? Death cannot be eliminated I Should man, then, deny the reality of life, and try to understand and organize it in rela­ tion to death? Man can only find a way of uniting death and life, of bringine them in­ to harmony, if he is prepared to transcend the limits of his existence. This task is only possible if man can see that part of himself reaches into the unknown, and that it is from the unknown thailorder and mean­ ing are given to his life.

And such a discovery on the part of contemporary man that part of himself reaches into the unknown must necessar­ ily entail a relativization of such modern prejudices which take for granted that death is meaningless, that death re­ sults in the annihilation of the individual and that reli­ gion is simply man' S l."ish-fulfilling invention to cope with

his fear of death. Establishing the meaningfulness of deathj howeve~ must begin with relating dying to living, with show­ ing that coping with death is a task of a full life. Death 20 is a normal and natural part of life, says the depth psychol­ / ogist, and no man enters fully into life until he takes up a conscious attitude to death.

Carl Jung suggests that the whole task of the second half of life is precisely that of dying with life and only he who is willing to die with life is really living.12 We are so convinced, he complains, that death is simply the end of a process that it does not ordinarily occur to us to conceive of death as a goal and a fulfillment, as we do without hesi­ tation about the aims and purposes of youthful life in its ascendence. Life, however, he argues, is a teleology par ex­ cellence, the intrinsic striving towards a goal and with the attainment of maturity and at the zenith of biological exis­ tence, life's drive towards a goal in no wise halts. \'lith the same drive with which it strove upwards before middle age, life now descends. Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul and anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in mid-air. "From the middle of life onwards, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola of life is reversed; death is born."l) Like a pro­ jectile flying to its goal, life descends in death. We grant goal and purpose to the ascent of life, why not to the descent? The birth of a human being is pregnant with meaning. Why not death?

It is at this point, notes Jung, that someone might 21 expect him to pull a belief out of his pocket. But I shall / certainly not assert now, he replies, that one must believe death to be a second birth leading to survival beyond the grave. Nevertheless, he continues, in the broad history of human experience, the consensus gentium, has decided views on death and these are expressed in the great religions. The great religions, he points out, are in fact complicated sys­ tems of preparation for death. And this accords. says Jung, with his own paradoxical formula that life has no signifi­ cance except as preparation for the ultimate goal of death.

However, since the Enlightenment, the rationalist misconceptions would have it, that all religions are like philosophical systems, concocted out of the bead, that at one time someone invented a God and sundry dogmas which have led humanity around by the nose, like some wish-fulfilling fan­ tasy. This bit of rationalism, retorts Jung, is contradicted by the psycholog.ical fact that the head is a particularly in­ adequate organ when it comes to thinking up religious sym­ bols. They come as a matter of fact from somewhere else, perhaps from the heart "from a deep psychic layer very little resembling consciousness l'lhich is always only the top layer." This is why religious symbols have a distinctly revelatory character; they are usually spontaneous products of uncon­ scious psychic activity. They have developed plant-like through the millenia, as natural manifestations of the psyche. And even today, he asserts, we see in individuals the spon- 22

taneous rise of genuine and valid religious symbols. Th~y • rise, he suggests, like a strange species of flower, while consciousness stands perplexed not knowing what to make of the great religions of mankind. "Thus," he maintains, "ex­ perience shows that religions are in no sense conscious con­ structions, but arise from the natural life of the unconscious psyche and somehow give adequate expression to it. 1t This ex­ plains the universal distribution of these symbols and their enormous influence on humanity throughout history, an influ­ ence which would be incomprehensible if religious symbols were not, at the very least, truths of man's psychological na­ ture.l4

With the consensus gentium expressing itself in sym­ pathy with his paradoxical formula, it would seem, Jung con­ cludes, more in accord with the colleotive psyche of human­ ity to regard death as the fulfillment of life's meaning and as its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaning­ less cessation. Any rationalistic opinion in this regard, he warns, is opposed to basic human nature.

Enlightenment or no enlightenment. says Jung, con­ scious or no consciousness, nature prepares for death. While fantasies of youth are directed to the future, those of the old, even with their looking to the past because of a great­ er number of memory images, also contain a surprising number of anticipatory 1mages, including those of death. And while objectively it is a matter of indifference what the individual 23

consciousness may think of death, subjectively it makes enor- / mous difference whether the consciousness keeps step with the psyche. Dying has its onset long before actual death, argues Jung, giving accounts from dream material of his pa­ tients. And approaching death, he notes, in retrospect, is manifested in symbols which in normal life proclaim changes of psychological condition, re-birth symbols such as journey, changes of locality, etc. On the whole, however, he notes, it is astonishing to see how little ado the unconscious psyche makes of death. But, it seems the unconscious is all the more interested in how one does, whether the attitude of con­ sciousness is adjusted to dying or not. 15

How his experimental material is to be interpreted ultimately, he points out, is beyond the scope of empirical science. Nevertheless, about the possible significance of that ultimate experience, he offers several suggestive re­ marks. In view of those spatial and temporal telepathic phenomena which he suggests are easier to ignore than to ex­ plain, the unconscious psyche appears to possess qualities which throw a most peculiar light on ita relation to space and time.

The limitation of consciousness in space and time is such an overwhelming reality that every occasion when this fundamental truth breaks through must rank as an event of the highest theoretical significance for it would prove that the space-time limitation can be annulled. The annulling factor would be the psyche, since space-time would attach to it at ~ost as a relative and conditioned quality. 1

h,. 24

Now anyone who has the least knowledge of the para­ I psychological material which already exists, he asserts, and has been thoroughly verified, will know that so-called tele­ pathic phenomena are undeniable facts. And anyone who does justice to the facts cannot but admit that their apparent space-timelessness is their most essential quality. Thus, it is not only permissible to doubt the absolute validity of the space-time perception, it is, in view of the available facts, even imperative to do so. The fact that we are un­ able to imagine a form of existence without space-time by no means proves that such an existence is in itself impossible.

The nature of the psyche reaches into ob­ scurities far beyond the scope of our under­ standing. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, be­ fore whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination is unable to ad­ mit its own insufficiency. This extreme un­ certainty of human comprehension makes the intellectualistic hubub not only ridiculous, but al~o deplorably dull. If, therefore, from the needs of his own heart, or out of respect for psychological fact that tele­ pathic perceptions occur, anyone should draw the conclusion that the psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond space and time, and thus partakes of what is inadequately and sym­ bolically described as 'eternity'--then critical reason could counter with no other argument than the non liguet of science. Furthermore, he would have the inestimable advantage of agreeing with a trend of the human psyche which has existed from time immemorial and is universal in incidence. Anyone who doas not draw this conclusion, whether from skepticism or rebellion against tradition, from lack of courage or inadequate psychological experience or thoughtless igno­ rance, stands very little chance, statisti- 25

cally, of becoming a pioneer of the mind, but has instead the indubitable certainty of com­ I ing iniQ conflict with the truths of the blood. "(

The problem of death, we are attempting to say, does not exist in a vacuum. It is a function of the larger prob­ lem of meaning in contemporary life and this problem of mean­ ing is not simply an intellectual problem. It is a spiritual problem of the whole man. It is basically this which is com­ ing to a head with the problem of death serving as a cata­ lyst. And solving the problem of death is not first a matter of attempting to prove that there is an after-life but in re­ lating dying to living.

These matters of death and meaning are inextricably intertwined. You can not long take up the question of our sensitivity to death without encountering the crisis of sig­ nificance; you can not address the crisis of significance without touching the raw nerve of our widespread sensitivity to death. The anticipation of death heightens the crisis of significance and the crisis of significance brings out in bold relief the threat of death. Like a vicious circle these two themes blend together exacerbating and re-inforc­ ing one another. Death is with us to stay, and is to be ig- nored at great risk. We are becoming a more and more un­ avoidable question to ourselves in the face of anticipated death, a question which modern thought steadfastly side­ stepped for the greater part of the modern period. From the 26 seventeenth to the twentieth century there is little consi- I deration of death. Spinoza went 50 far as to counsel: "A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wis­ dom is not a meditation upon death but upon life."

Though Spinoza and Spinozism met with great opposition in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this particular proposition seems to have enjoyed nearly uni­ versal assent among thinkers. For the ques­ tion of death has occupied modern thought as­ tonishingly little. The ground swell of the Enlightenment with its hope for human improvement, its anti-historical bias, and its trust in math­ ematical science may have contributed some­ thing toward eclipsing the concern with hu­ man mortality. Other problems claimed atten­ tion. Though death, as an unpleasant occur­ rence, could not be denied, it did not lend itself easily to scientific analysis. Moral­ ly it harmonized ill with faith in progress, perfectibility, and thel§oncept of rational­ ity of the world order.

In the twentieth century, however, death has been rediscovered as a philosophical problem. World war and the mechanization of life that accompanied industrialization gave rise to disillusionment wi'th modern experience, with man's capacity to shape and build a humanizing life. All of this comes to expression in the existentialist themes of alienation, meaninglessness and gives rise to death as the symbol of the absurd.

With the contemporary German existentialists Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger the reality of death is near the center of their interpretation of reality and of human 27

existence. / Through Heidegger an acute awareness of man's essen­ tial mortality begins to come to consciousness. For Heideg­ ger death is lodged in the very structure of human existence. Mortality is man's very definition. Death is constitutive of his being; it is his capital possibility. f4an is being­ towards-death. Heidegger's perspective on man and death is sometimes construed as basically pessimistic. However, in Deing, Man and Death, his comprehensive examination of Hei­ degger's work, Joseph Demske argues that such a judgment is inaccurate and stems from an incomplete reading of Heidegger. Such a judgment stems from a reading taken only on his earli- er 'work, he maintains, and that between the earlier and later Heidegger there is a discernible difference. His earlier work shows death to be the open wound in man, the one as­ pect of man's existence which cannot be fully understood in anthropocentric terms. Thus death makes the turning to be­ ing as a force beyond man not only possible, but necessary. Death emerges not only as key to Heidegger's treatment of man and being, but also as the key to his shift of focus from man to being. The phenomenon of death itself receives little attention from Heidegger. It 1s the ontological side of death, according to Heidegger's central insight and prime intention, which receives extensive treatment, not the ontic aspect. This is dictated by his methodology, for his entire analysis takes place within the context of his questioning 28

of the meaning of being~ and ontic death, says Demske, is / not an intrinsic element of this questioning. "It is not death as an event which is not yet real for Dasein, but death as an ever-present structure of existence, which is of interest and value for the existential analysis.,,19 This does not mean that Heidegger's philosophy is deficient, but it does mean that there is no such thing as a fully developed philosophy of death in Heidegger, for such a philosophy would consider death from both sides, the ontic and the ontological.

In sum, Demske's treatment argues that throughout what may seem like a discontinuous thought pattern, Heidegger is faithful to the pursuit of his initial question--and that Heidegger's attitude finally becomes one of respectful, even reverent openness to being. Demske's study concludes then that for Heidegger death makes man supremely aware that his ultimate wisdom is universal, open to the mystery of being and of his own existence as the guardian and servant of being.

Wherever modern man has taken up the question of death, he does so with an ontological seriousness. The over­ coming of anthropological dualism in modern thought brings home to modern man the realization that death is something which engages the whole man totally. Everything is at stake. Modern thought inquires about death in relation to the signif­ icance of person. For death to be fully human, it must some­ how be free. Yet death appears as a radical imposition on man. How then dispose over oneself in the face of death? 29

How dispose over one's death? What does death mean for the / significance of person? These are the poignant questions of modern man.

They are all the more pressing in a world which sees it as a struggle to assert the priority of the personal in a mechanized, transistorized, computerized world, and in a world which has an acute sense of its own capacity for self­ destruction.

Coping with the problem of death today is a question of re-evaluation of the whole of modern experience. It re­ quires that man see that part of himself reaches into the unkpown and that he realize that it is from hence that order and meaning are given to life. The confrontation of death is a pressing task and indeed summons up the experience of the uncanny from which, if man learns to dwell with it, may lead him to the threshold of the world within and the re- covery of his soul.

Interpretation of death must not be so much first the attempt to prove the possibility of after-life, but a demonstration of the intimate relationship of dying to liv­ ing. It must focus on the personal dimension of death, but on the experience of dying in relation to personal becoming throughout the whole of life. In ·all this the ambiguity of human experience must be fully respected. Interpretation of death must preserve and respect, yet relate and reconcile the opposing tensions of human existence. It must acknowl- )0 edge the radical limitation in death if a hearing is to be j secured for its radical r ossibilities. /

PART II

THE THEOLOGY OF DEATH

Introduction

While the traditional Catholic theological treat- ment of death is problematic in several respects, it should first be pointed out that there does not appear in classi­ cal theology any really substantial reflection on the sub- ject of death as such. "It can not be said," notes Jahner, "that the theology of death usually receives in scholastic the'ology the attention which the theme deserves. People think that they know from everyday experience what death is, and quickly turn to the question of what comes after death, as though the theology of death only began there.,,20

Thus, what might pass at first glance as the tradi­ tional theology of death is more accurately to be understood as the theology of the after-life. The concern which under­ lies the traditional presentation of "the last things," death, judgment, heaven, hell had to do specifically with the destiny of the individual and with the fate of the indi­ vidual separated soul in the interim between death and the resurrection from the dead.

Concern about the individual separated soul has a 31 32 long history in Christian theology which extends from the . I early church down to the twentieth century. While the roots of this special concern trace to the early church, it emer­ ges full - blown~ however, only in the ~tlddle Ages and then en­ dures without further substantial development to this cen- tury. When the broader eschatological perspectives became blurred, the eschatological expecta­ tions of the individual took on greater sig­ nificance; under the influence of hellenis­ tic thought, an extremely individualistic fo­ cus took over. The fate of the individual soul became the center of attention, and men pondered the soul's life after death, bliss­ ful immortality, personal judgment, the vari­ ous states of the soul after death, and hap­ piness in paradise. Early Christian art on tombstones testifies to the profound influ­ ence of platonic thought on the Christian outlook. This shift to an individualistic empha­ sis was reinforced by the fact that individu­ al eschatology abetted the growing stress on moralism. In the East, under the influence of gnosticism, stress was placed on the soul's progressive assent through purifica­ tion training and sanctification. In the West, under the influence of JUdaic and Stoic thought, the notion of retribution took the foreground. The eschata were wholly pro­ jected into the future as rewar~lor punish­ ment for behavior in this life.

This development emerges full blown in the Middle Ages which concerned itself particularly in elaborating a complex theology of the states after death. In this, says dobert Gleason, the theologians of the period followed the lead of St. Thomas in his Commentary on the Sentences and preserved the general order he indicated there. 33

From Thomas to Suarez the theologians gen- erally adopted the Thomistic schema for I treating of these questions concerning the last things, though at times they devoted an excessive attention to questions more curious than decisive. The theme of the particular judgment received at times an emphasis it does not have in the sources of the tradition. It was natural also that at the period of the Reform the tract on the last things also should take on the polemic and apologetic ~one common to the theology of the period. 2

Without further substantial development this ap­ proach to the last things persists down to the twentieth century. It can be seen in such "modern" treatments as Gar- riBou Lagrange's Life Everlasting or in the Pohle-Preuss treatise, Eschatology.

It is beyond our scope here to enter into criticism of this individualistic eschatology or to redress the imba.l­ ance by consideration of more recent developments. It con­ cerns us only in that it is the setting for the little re­ flection on death there was.

The difficulties of the traditional treatment of death stems from the anthropological dualism which seems to underlie the traditional presentation of the doctrine of the immorta.lity of the soul. The body dies, it suggests; the soul lives on forever. Death in this perspective appears as something which affects the body, but the soul, the essential man somehow escapes unscathed. Such a presentation does not seem to take death with full seriousness and as such seems to do more to foster denial of death than confrontation with it. 34

Death in the traditional perspective is understqod. as "the separation of the soul from the body." As such it looks at death from the natural aspect. It sees death only as a passive happening, something which is sustained by man; something which overtakes him, rather than as something which he does.

In addition the traditional treatment of death sees it mainly under the category of punishment for sin. The theme of death as redemption, or as the culmination of re­ demption is not developed.

The adequacy of a theology of death today will de­ pend in special measure on the anthropology off which it works. It must rest on a unitary understanding of man. It must address the question of the personal dimension of death. It must show that the Christian dies as a free man, not merely as a slave.

The contemporary Christian lives and breathes much the same atmosphere of secular man. Many of his values, per­ spectives and prejudices are the same. The tendency to deny death is common to both. Fidelity to the Christian vocation requires confrontation with and appropriation of death. How authentic can faith be if it has not taken up the question of death? How enter in adult manner the mystery of Jesus Christ in a stance of denial of death?

Theology of death is a fairly recent development in 35 the history of theology. It seeks to address some of theoa j questions. It focuses specifically on the personal dimen- sion of death, on death as personal act. But death emerges only gradually as an object of theological reflection in its own right and then only gradually is the question refined and focused.

We will examine here first the work of Palemon Glor- ieux who gives us the first attempt of significance to devel­ op the possibilities of death as a personal act. The work of Ladislaus Boros will follow. He develops what wa s begun by Glorieux, but with a particular concern to work in dia­ logue with modern thought. Finally the work of Karl Rahner will occupy our attention. It is from him, I suspect, that we have the most advanced theological statement on death to date.

We will examine the work of these men with particu­ lar concern for the anthropology which underlies their pre­ sentations, looking for a presentation which fully respects the essential unity of man. We will look to see if in the picture of death which emerges, the full humanity of man is preserved, the full ambiguity of human experience. For we need a theology of death which holds together and preserves the opposing tensions of our existence and which sees death both as an act of personal freedom and as sustained obliga­ tion. We will look too for the most thoroughgoing relation of death to all of life and to determine the degree to which 36 the presentation f osters attention to and appropri ation of ~/ death a s a task of lif e.

Palemon G10rieux

We look first at the work of Palemon Glorieux. It is from him that we have the first major effort to explore and articulate the personal dimension of death. He develops his thought in several major articles, two of which we will consider here. The first, "Endurcissement final et graces dernieres," was published in 1932; the second, "In Hora i'lortis," in 1949_

It was more to vindicate divine justice vis-a -vis the question of final damnation which led him to take up the question, rather than specific focus on the relationship of death and person after the fashion of modern thought. But even while his frame of reference is scholastic thought, the need for theologizing in dialogue with modern philosophy is recognized. And in the second of the two articles he begins to speak in terms of modern concerns bringing in as support for his theory the Marcel-derived reflections of Roger Troisfontaines.

Glorieux·s is not the first glimpse of the possibil­ ity of death as personal act. The possibility of final op­ tion had been entertained fairly widely in the last century, particularly in connection with concern for the fate of un­ baptized infants. Nevertheless, his treatment is the first 37 major effort to articulate it, give it respectibility by I elaborating its compatibility with philosophy and with the rest of Christian thought.

Glorieux. proposes in the first article, "Endurcisse- ment final et graces1\ dernieres,"'- to explore the question of final obstinacy and final grace. He proposes to do this ac­ cording to the school of St. Thomas, that 1s to say, under the inspiration of his teachings and according to the appli­ cable Thomistic principles. For while Thomas has not treated in any explicit fashion these questions of final impenitence and final graces, he has, in several places, furnished the necessary elements for the solution of these problems.

Et il ne semble pas impossible, si l'on veut bien s'en tenir a son enseignment et suivre de pres, ses ra1sonnements, d f etablirI sur css questions intimement jointes l'une a l'autre, de l'andurcissemant final at de graces dern~;res, una doctrine tad mentem D. Thomae'.

While Thomas does not dwell especially on the de­ parture of the soul, he has formulated the principles which would apply in his study of the fall of the devil. God pun­ ishes because justice exacts a corresponding punishment for a perpetual fault. Now the devil not only does not repent, he can not repent. And of this God is not tho cause, or if so, he is so only indirectly, in so far as he is the author of nature, or in that, the time of testing being over, he no longer intervenes with grace.

• 38

It is the natural condition of the devil by virtue I of which it is impossible for him to return from a decision which he has taken which accounts for the permanency of his state. And it is this, Glorieux points out, that requires special focus.

Repentance or any changes in the will suppose some change in the knowledge or in the dispositions of the sub­ ject. In the case of man, when it is a question of sin which necessarily implies an error of appreciation, thus proving the power of the passions or the inclination of hab­ its or of general ignorance, repentance requires that man modify his appreciation, disavow his sin. His dispositions must change; the habits must be broken; the ignorance must dissipate; so that some object which under the influence of passion draws him, oeases to do so, or so that some object which entraps him because of inveterate habits is no longer attractive because these habits are fought against and so recede.

But with the angel none of these causes or errors pertain, and thus none of the possibilities of sudden change. For a pure spirit is not drawn in opposite directions by mul­ tiple appetites. There are no faults which proceed from ig­ norance or from error in reasoning. Its appetitive power is simple and carries itself totally over its object. It sees clearly and decides coldly, so to speak. By its very na­ ture it is impossible for it to change its orientation and 39 it is this which fixes its departure, for the decision which / it takes pertains precisely to its last end.

"Hoc enim est hominibus mors quod est angelis casus." It is in Thomas' use of this expression from St. John Damas­ cene that Gloriewc sees the transition made from the angel to man and the parity of the two cases proclaimed. For in either case, the spirit chooses its destiny and determines its fate, at which point, the time of testing having come to a close, the spirit can no longer expect new help from God. The spirit immobilizes itself in its decision and becomes incapable of changing it. No reason exists which could make it change its choice.

The situation is thus for the angel and also for the soul at death. For at death all cause of revision, all er­ rors of judgment, all influence of the passions and all ig­ norance are gone. At death the state of the soul becomes similar to that of the angel. The ascendency of the pas­ sions, the heavy influence of the body, the slowness of the reason--all these are lifted, and the soul is now endowed with a mode of knowing similar to that of the angel.

Thomistic teaching would seem to establish not only equivalence between the departure of the soul and the fall of the angel, but also between the reasons for the eternal obstinacy of each. The only difference would be that this immutability takes place at different times: with the angel 40 at the beginning of his existence;. with man after some t).me-. "datur autem homini longior via quam angelo quia erit magis a Deo distans. tI

Closer examination, however, is required of this position, says Glorieux. Is not that which at first sight allows identity of explanation tor the eternal Wlhappiness of both precisely that which differentiates their situations? In the case of the obstinacy of the devil no change in judg­ ment or decision is possible because no new element presents itself attracting a change. The judgment carried by the an­ gel had all the elements of information and appreciation which it could ever have by reason of the deirorm character of its intelligence. It pronounces itself in full self­ possession and it is precisely its last end which it has in view. Thus it is not an arbitrary decree on the part of God which prevents its return, but its very nature. For it to be otherwise God would have to destroy its nature or violate it. Now, for the obstinacy of the soul to be explained in the same way, it is necessary that the soul is not susceptible of a return after its decision, that after the final elec­ tion to which it has carried itself no new element is capable of leading it to a revision of its ehoice. This line of reasoning, however, has no value if this judgment is made by the soul when it finds itself already established in a state like that of the angel, for already established in a state like that of the angel, no new element can intervene in its 41 regard, anymore than it can for the angel. But if this i judgment is made while the soul is still united to its body, led astray by multiple appetites, or detours of rea­ soning then the whole line of reasoning carries completely to falsehood. And this is what must be examined further.

Whether one wishes it to be so or not, the very fact of death introduces a total revolution in the psycho­ logical experience of the soul, and such a revolution, ar­ gues Glorieux, is capable of leading to a revision of previ­ ous judgments. For this to be so it is not necessary to make appeal to an extraordinary intervention of God. For between the soul united to a body and the separated soul, there is such a gulf, in the mode and in the object of knowl­ edge. How is it possible that such a total change in its psychological life would not already be a sufficient element permitting a revision of previous judgments'?

With the angel, however, there is no alteration in mode of being; it pronounces itself free from any distrac­ tion of sensible appetites and passions and free from the de­ tours of discursive reasoning. Its judgment was lucid and free and so it will remain. But between the soul united to the body and the separated soul is there not complete dis­ parity? How hold that all cause, every possibility even of change disappears for it, by virtue of its nature, when to the contrary death realizes for it the most formidable psy­ chological revolution that can be imagined? 42

All the logic of the reaooning of the "Thomistic / thesis," however, supposes that the decisive choice of the soul is made when its state as a separated soul is inaugu­ rated. It istpen that the soul pronounces on its final end, by virtue of its deiform knowledge and its simplicity of appetite and why subsequently no future modification can interfere. Indeed, acknowledges Glorieux, this conclusion is full of consequences and is capable of shedding new light on the difficult problems of final impenitence, con­ version in extremis and final graoes.

Is it not, however, to go against the whole of tra­ dition to place, as this thesis seems to require, at the first moment of the after-life, the act which determines the eternal outcome of man? Is this not to prolong unduly, if even for an instant, the status viae and to place the drama of salvation where the status termini has already begun? For you all the tradition states that the time of testing ends at a man's death, by his death, and not after it.

The Thomistic framework would not accept this objec­ tion, says Glorieux, for it rests on an insufficient compre­ hension or, rather, on a faulty representation of the nature of the instant. What is involved here is a problem of the imagination transporting to the realm of time what we im­ agine in the realm of space and movement. Thus the last in­ stant of life, the last instant of the union of the soul and body would be seen as a complete phenomenon which terminates 43 at a definite and neatly marked point. And following in / another poriod, and according to another plan another life would begin, that of the separated soul, the point of its beginning also as definitely and sharply marked, it being then the first moment of the after-life. Thus death would appear to be like a neutral space which separates these two instants.

Glorieux draws on analogous problems where the suc­ cession of instants or the very notion ot the instant is treated by Thomas. These would include: creation,transub­ stantiation, pardon ot sin and infusion of grace, the hypo­ static union and the sanctification of the soul of Jesus, and the question o.r the angels and their orientation towards God, and by contrast the devil and his obstinacy in sin.

••• dans tous ces passages de l'etre/I a" la privation~ qe l'affirmation a la negation, ou plus generalement dans toutes les muta­ tions naturelles qui ne sont pas susceptibles de p~us et de moins, il n'est point loisible de determiner un dernier instant ou l'etat precedent existerait, puis Ie premier au corn­ mencerait Ie nouvel etat; mais simplement Ie premier instant de l'etat nouveau terminant lui-meme Ie temps qui precedait et ~ui a cesse. ,Tous les changements ,qui s'operent instantement ne se peuvent decomposer ainsi. La mort sera done Russi exactement le premier moment ou l'ame se trouve separee que le dernier ou elle est unie; plus exactement ,. /I i II ' .t. meme; encore que etre une et etre separ~e no se con£ondent pas et ne puissent s t affirmer en meme temps du meme etre, le passage de l'un a l'autre, lui, est /instantane; et c'est pour lui ~u'on ne pe~t determiner de moyen terme, d'etat intermediaire.26 44

This instant now, which terminates the state of , union and inaugurates the state of the separated soul, can be extremely rich in activity. At the same instant when the soul separates from the body, it can be illuminated by God to know its end, judge and decide. And for this no mul­ tiplicity of instants nor any duration is required. We must note here the possibility of the angel to fix itself in the good definitively and freely from the first instant of its creation for the angel knows the truth without discourse or research. Nothing prevents it from being able to choose at the very instant when it comprehends the truth. Nothing prevents such a determination from being an act of the free will. The same is true of man in that he fixes his choice on what he is going to do at the precise moment when his counsel gives him certitude. The end of human life, death, and the beginning of the life of the separated soul form one complex reality. In the first instant which inaugurates the new state and closes the previous state the soul is able to see, to judge, to choose after the manner of the angels. And while in human parlance we represent all this in sequen­ tial terms, it all takes place in a single instant. And this does not contradict the teaching of the church by ex­ tending the status viae beyond its limits.

And taking such a position does not subvert the warnings of Scripture about vigilance, nor does it contra­ dict what is said in Christian tradition about the sinner 45 dying as he lived. For it is precisely that the whole pre- ./ vious life conditions the final judgment. The habits con- tracted lie with all their weight on the soul. If the de- cision is not taken until the separation is achieved, how­ ever, how does the danger of the influence of one's past subsist ? While it is true that separated from the body even the soul destined to hell receives from God all the lights, gifts, and infused elements proper to it by nature, as with the angel, it is not the case that the rupture with the pre­ vious life is total. "Habitus autem permanentiores sunt; unde firmium perseverat in his quae ex habitu prosequuntur,,,27 he quotes from Thomas. Habits subsist.

Tout co qui ne s.inscrit pas simplement dans l'organisme mais touche au domaine spirituel, tout ee qui est appreciation, inclination du jugement ou de 109. vOlonte, tout ee qui atteint l'clement superieur de l'homme dans son activite, tout cela demeure et influe sur les decisiQns que prendra It~me, meme separee du corps.28

The anterior life is not abolished. The soul does not become a tabula rasa. It does not begin over a new life; it continues its present life in new conditions.

Thus the soul come to the end of a long life, and the angel placed from the first instant of its creation be­ fore its definitive self-orientation are not absolutely in the same situation. For the soul carries with it its past; the angel was "new."

Now if the whole life of a man inclined him to evil, 46 this inclination remains. The soul is faced not simply "rlth ( orientating itself, but with re-directing itself. The hab-" its of the past will lie with full weight on that task. The fact that the judgment deciding the eternal outcome of the soul would now no longer take pla.ce in physical agony, weakness of body or in the surprise of a. sudden catastrophe in no \"fay lifts the dangers or the burden of the past which the soul always carries with it.

Death can not be seen then in this perspective as an ambush which an indignant God can set up to catch the sinner before he can repent. Rather it seems more worthy of man and of God. It is a last call to the soul in full possession of all its resources, and accompanied by its past in all its weight, "mais cependant plus completement ame, raisonnable, que jamais."

And thus whatever decision is taken there it anchors the soul forever, with no possibility of revision, for there could never be any new element to prompt a change of heart. The soul can never reproach the creator with having been less well treated than the fallen angel.

The soul is not abandoned in the face of this last decision. Besides those girts proper to its nature, those already mentioned, another element can intervene, the infin­ itely varied resources and riches of actual graces. In what measure these are available it can not be said. Infinite 47

perspectives of mercy are possible, but nothing can be as- j sumed except the offer of sufficient grace. Added to this

perspective, however, should be a W01~ about the doctrine of merits. While no man can strictly merit the grace of fi­ nal perseverance, one can merit de condigno efficacious gra­ ces in this moment. And indeed the meritorious acts accu- mulated during life will not be deprived of their efficacy.

Ce n'est point d 'aille~ s decreter par avance Ie salut de tous les pecheurs et fermer I'enfer devant eux, que de reporter (comme Is. th~se de saint Tho~s semble nous y engager) Ie choix dernier do l'ame dans les conditions que lIon a dites. • • .Elle se borne uniquement a mettre en meilleure lumiere Ie probleme de dernier moment et a expliquer un peu mieux celui de l'obstination du damna parallelement a l'obsti­ nation du demon.30

Thus concludes Glorieux: "Cette similitude parfaite saint Thomas I's.ffirme a Is. suite de saint Joan Damascene; Is. mort est au pecheurI ce que la chute est au demon."I 31

Glorieux returns to the question of death some years later in an article in the "Melanges de science religieuse" entitled, "In Hora Mortis." He attempts to advance the credibility of the }lypothesis of final decision by asking whether death, the moment of death, as defined by the phil­ osopher, whose task it is to answer tha.t question, pertains to the status viae or to the status termini. If it pertains to the status viae, as he suggests, then the hypothesis of a final decision renders possible satisfying solutions to the related problems of the obstinacy of the da.mned, the 4$ elimination of venial sin at death and the destruction of / faith in the damned.

He begins by separating the respective tasks of the physician, the philosopher and the theologian.

For the doctor death is the end of organic activity. To him it belongs to describe the phenomena which precede, accompany and follow death. It is he who gives us the clas­ sical distinction between apparent death, relative death and absolute death. The profound reason of death escapes his scalpel, however, as does the analysis of the soul, the principle of life.

It is the place of the philosopher to examine this more abstract problem. The question of the body and soul, intimately associated for a common task, in one nature and one unique person, elements almost totally opposed to each other in their peculiarities and their properties, yet made for one another, calling, completing and reacting upon each other; the question of matter and form, of which the union is mysterious and the separation of which raises the great­ est questions--these are the matters which hold the inter­ est of the philosopher.

The theologian touches on death from yet another angle, that of its eternal repercussions. Death for theol­ ogy, is the end of one state and the point of departure for another in which man will be either eternally happy or un- happy. 49

La foi no us enseigne en effet, et la theologie se borne a rappeler et souligner ces donnees ,/ reveI / 1ees,' que 1·a v~e sur terre est un temns d'epreuve la1sse a l'homme pour se preparer a son aternite; qu'elle est suivie d'une autre ~ie, d'un autre etat definitif, immuable, eternel. La mort est Ie terme du premier, la fin de notre marche vers la patrie. AUBSi se d~finit-elle, tres simplement, pour Ie theolo­ gien; 1a fin de l'etat d'epreuve, du status viae.32

Several things worth recalling underlie the appar­ ent simplicity of this affirmation. First, life is the time of merit. The present life is given to us to prepare for the future life. God has willed for us the intuitive and beatifying vision of the divine essence. And even after the fall God wills this for us. His son by his redemptive sacrifice has made it possible again. In union with him, by virtue of divine grace, we are able to merit our eternal happiness by correspondence with that grace or be respon­ sible for our eternal suffering. It is to this end that life is given us.

But secondly, the duration of this time is limited. We are able to prepare ourselves more or less generously however, more or less continually. And even if we fail along the way, we can count on divine grace to excite and sustain us anew. But the period assigned to us for our pil­ grimage is limited. It will end. And beyond it no new mer­ its or divine advances will take place. The soul decides its outcome by the use of the time alloted to it. The day of the Lord, however, will come like a thief in the night. 50

And on that day the eternal outcome of the soul is fixed i forever. Then the status viae eives way to the status ter-

~. To these two points the teaching of the Church adds a third: that the term assigned to the state of testing is none other than death. God has tied our eternal outcome to our death. And if this is so, says Glorieux, it is not by right, but because God has freely decided it so. For not every death in effect implies the end of the status viae.

The classical problem of Lazarus of those genuinely raised from the dead indicates this. The idea of the term of meritorious works does not necessarily imply death. For in the state of original justice there was a status viae, which would have prepared and given way to a terminal state without passing through death. Thus, if as a general rule the two formulas coincide it is according to a free decree of God. Since this is ordinarily the case one can under­ stand how in theological language death is equivalent to the end of our time of testing.

Thus we have several definitions of death: end of organic activity, "fin de l'unit~ substantialle du compos~ humain," end of the time of testing. Each of these mean­ ings is accurate according to the sphere in which they op­ erate. Now to relate them to one another.

Is the death after which all merit ceases, as well as all progress, and all change, real death or apparent 51 death, absolute death or relative death? It is not for the / theologian to solve the medical problem. It is up to the doctor to determine under what conditions and at what mo- ment organic activity is rendered impossible.

The same is true in regard to the philosophical problem. It is up to the specialist to stipulate in these matters.

Problema de l'ame et du corps, de la nature et des proprietes de chacun de ces deux elements constitutifs; probleme de l'activite spirituelle de lt~me ou de l'unit~ substan­ tielle du corps aux cellules innombrables; de l t unit~ ou de la pluralite des formes qui sty peuvent succe'd er; probleme\ de l'union myster-I ieuse de ces el~ments si totalement differents et cependant faits pour se completer, se soutenir et ben6ficier de leur union; probleme de l'infusion de l'~me au corps, at de tout ce que comporte cette idee de forme, subsistante d'ailleurs, c reee pour et dans son union au corps; probleme contraire de la dissociation de ces deux elements, c'est-~-dire de la mort.33

It is up to the philosopher to determine in what consists the separation of the body and the soul, how it is defined and how produced. The theologian will have no dif­ ficulty accepting conclusions thus obtained. He will under­ stand by death, that to which he places the end of the time of merit, that which the philosopher teaches him. Thus he will understand death as the separation of the soul from the body, as the instant where the soul ceases to inform the body, to vivify it and at which the human composition dissolves. 52

While death can be understood in terms of the last / preparation for this moment, or the state which results thereafter until the resurrection, it is the passage from one state to the other which strictly speaking constitutes for the philosopher the fact of dying. Death will be de­ fined for him in terms of separation.

Two things must be noted in consequence of the in­ stantaneous character of the separation, and the activity which takes place or which can take place at that point. Here again Glorieux depends on Thomas' explanation of the nature of the instant. That death, separation of the soul from the body is something instantaneous is not, Glorieux argues, something difficult for the philosopher to accept.

As for everything which takes place in a single in­ stant, without succession it is one and the same thing to do it and for it to be done; fieri est factum esse; to sep­ arate is to be separated. As long as the soul stays united to the body, no matter how weak the bonds, one can not speak of separation.

Cette separation est 1a negation de l'union substantiel1e. Negation et affirmation ne peuvent coexister. 11 n'y a done vraiment separation que par 1e reniement, la d~nonei­ ation de l' union. 1-1ais par le fait meme se separerI et etre~ separeI L devront coin cider puisqu'on se trouy~ en prtSsence d'une muta­ tion instantanee. J4

The question now arises whether at this precise moment the soul which leaves its body, which separates, 53 possenaes and exercises a certain activity proper to the ,/ activity of the separated intelligence, and which will mark henceforward its proper activity. If to separate is to be separated then at that moment the soul can no longer be affected in the same way by that to which it ceases pre­ cisely to be united. Its mode of knowing can no longer be dependent on the senses; it must become similar to that of the angel. ~fuat will be true of the whole survival of the soul between death and the resurrection, vis-a.-vis its in­ tellectual and volitional activity, must be true from the very instant of the separation, at that very moment.

In examining the question of what kind of activity can be produced in a being in a single instant one must be­ ware of speaking of spiritual beings as if they were mater­ ial beings and of gathering their activity under categories which only directly encompass corporeal being, subject on that account to the laws of movement, time and space.

Glorieux adduces a number of applications from Thomas where multiple interventions are involved in a single instant. This includes the problem of grace in the first man, the question of merit and beatitude of the angel, and the question of sin and the punishment of the devil. And lastly, the question of the grace and vision of Christ:

D'apres la doctrine tr~5 nette de saint Thomas a ce sUjet, on aurait en un seul et meme instant, le premier de la vie de Notre-Seigneur: formation parfaite de son 54

corps; creation de son arne; infusion de celle-ci dans le corps, puisqu'elle n'a pas I ete creee isolernent; union hypostatiqu8; infusion de la grace sanctifiante; connaissance de Dieu et usage du libre arbitre; connais~ance de vision at jouissance de la beatitude.J~

All of this leads to the conclusion that according to Thomas the instantaneousness of an act (e.g. of creation, mutation, etc.) is not at all an obstacle to the exercise and unfolding of extreme activity.

Thus in summary: death implies separation of the soul from the body which it previously informed. There is no death as long as the soul remains united to it. The separation is instantaneous, and by this very fact to sepa­ rate and to be separated run together. In the instant when this separation is realized there is no obstacle to a rich activity of the spiritual order. And finally in this pre­ cise instant of separation, the soul exercises an activity proper to the operation of a separated intelligence. And this, adds Glorieux, is as far as the philosopher need and indeed can go.

These conclusions then are available to the theo- logian who has at his disposal other lights and certitudes furnished by revelation and thus is in a position to ex­ plore a little more the mysterious beyond. And it is spe­ cifically this activity which is susceptible of being de­ ployed at death that the theologian is interested in explor­ ing. This activity must be reckoned under one of the two 55 st ates applicabl e t o all men : stiatus vi ae or st atus t ermini. J If one considers this activity as pertaining still to the status viae, then new perspectives are opened up on the problems of final impenitence or conversion, of salva­ t ion or damnation. For then it is the last decision able to be taken, in different conditions from those ordinarily envisioned, which on account of the play of new elements of appreciation are capable of modifying previous judgments .

If on the contrary we consider it already pertain­ ing to the status termini, then it follows that the state of testing stops not at death, but before it, since the separation which, properly speaking, is death, is thrown to the other side. This is a matter which calls for exam- ination, Glorieux argues, because of what revelation af­ firms on the possibility of merit, the existence of the status viae where the eternal outcome is prepared, the ir­ revocability of the final state, and the immediate character of reward or punishment.

The problem, however, must be correctly posed. One thing is certain from the philosophical examination: The death of which he speaks is not the "after-death." The terms indicate that. And it is no longer life either. It is the point of separation, t he very separation itself.

II ne peut done etre quest ion de se demander, comme certains le voudraient parfois, si elle appartient a 1& vie presente ou a l'autre vie, 56

et sous quelle categorie on la doit ranger. Car l'~utre vie, telle qU'on l'entend j communement, est en realite l'aprez, mort. Ainsi pose Ie probleme serait fausee des Ie principe. La seul point en suspens est de savoir ei la mort est encore sure Ie versant du m~rite ou de l'autre coteJ si g11e appartient ou non au status viaeJ

If the activity which could take place pertains to the time of testing it counts towards salvation. If not it carries no salvific value.

Glorieux cautions that the solution which he would propose can only be accepted under the title of an hypothe­ sis and one which must be defended by argument and reason and not be impression and by preference.

In favor then of attaching the moment of death to the status viae, he ...1ould propose a threefold argument. Such a hypothesis, he maintains, makes better sense than any other of the obstinacy of the damned, the elimination of venial sin at death and of the destruction of faith in the damned. Further, it obviates certain difficulties to be encountered if the opposite solution were to be adopted.

The obstinacy of the damned. The punishment of the damned is perpetual because the aversion is perpetual. And this opposition to God is not something in which the damned soul is fixed, but stems from a will which is always actual. How may this bo explained? Is the damnation of the soul explained in the same fashion as that of the devil and for the same reasons or by others? 57

He argues here, as he does previously, that the / obstinacy of the damned could be effectively explained in the Game manner as that of the devil. Again he point $. to his dependence on Thomas concerning the parity between the situation of the devil and that of the damned. ~fuile in the present life the obstinacy of the soul can not be ab­ solute, but once separated from the body, the soul becomes conformed to the angel and so are fulfilled the conditions by which a single reason can explain the obstinacy of the one and the other.

The outcome of the damned, however, will only be similar if one supposes that his decision is taken at the moment of the separation, for then all the reasons, in ef- fect , which explain the obstinacy of the devil can apply in all rigor to the damned.

If, on the contrary, one supposes the decision of man to be taken before the separation, thus placing death in the status termini, none of the reasons invoked for the angel will apply to man.

It is true, of course, that the irrevocable char­ acter of the decision taken by man can come before death which by supervening in the soul determines in it an actual volition conforming to its habitual state.

Thus, asks Glorieux, why not maintain that as it is in the nature of the devil to sympathize eternally with 58

its fir~5t act, so it is "!rlith the nature of the separated / soul to sympathize "lith its habitual decisions. The obstin- acy of the damned in evil explains itself in a more satisfy­ ine way and more conforming to that of the devil irone sup­ poses that the judgment deciding the eternal outcome is made at the very moment or death, the very instant of the separa­ tion. Death would belong thus to the status viae of which it would be the very last act .

The elimination of venial sin at death. Venial sin like mortal sin admits of punishment and of guilt, but for venial sin to be remitted new infusion of grace is not re­ quired, rather greater charity. How will this guilt be re­ mitted for those who die without mortal sin, but ~~th venial sins for which they have not sufficiently expiated, and for those of which they have not repented?

It can not be by purgatory, says Glorieux, again fol­ lowing Thomas , because while the suffering endured satisfies the punishment, it in no way removes guilt. This can only be by detesting in a positive act the venial sin committed. When and where is this act placed?

It seems, says Glorieux, that in admitting that the soul decides at death, that the solution to this problem presents itself in a fully satisfactory manner. If the soul at this moment consciously takes a stand in view of her last end, for something other than God, then this is eternal ob- 59 stinacy. If, rather, she carries herself towarda God as ,her supreme good, sho disavows in that act all which would hold her buck and produces thereby the positive act of charity

~nlich destroys venial guilt; the purgation which follows ex­ piatine whatever punishment is due.

The destruction of faith in the damned. Frequently, no doubt, the grave fault responsible for damnation is not a sin against faith, but disobedience in some other matter. Now the virtue of faith can survive the loss of charity and grace. It can only be destroyed by the contrary sin. Since no one holds that faith persist~ in hell, how explain its destruction? By God? By a new sin of the damned?

Again a more satisfactory solution can be arrived at by admitting, in the context of the proposed hypothesis, that the final decision of man places his whole orientation, with its supernatural foundations in question. At stake, then, is a decision not with respect to a natural end of man, not with respect to a God of first cause, but ,iith respect to God, the true end of man, the one of whom revelation and faith brings us to know. In such a decision not only charity, but also faith could be engaged, so that one \1ho turns away from God, rejects his goodness and voracity, and so loses faith along with grace and charity.

These three points, concludes Glorieux, come together in such a way that for all three we find a harmonious and sat­ isfying solution in the context of the proposed hypothesis. 60

Turning now to possible objections, Gloricux argues, / as he did earlier, that there are no creat philosophical difficulties to be encountered in the proposed hypothesis. From the theological point of vie\"l, hO\,lever, he notes two possible objections.

First. Since the time of merit is equal to the du- ration of life, the status viae can not comprise acts done after death. Indeed, responds Glorieux, but this goes be­ yond the premises and eludes the problem. The question is whether the status viae ends at death exclusively or inclu­ sively. If one is in accord with his explanation of the ob­ stinacy of the damned and with his other arguments, then there is no difficulty. If not, one will conclude that the status viae ends at death exclusively.

Secondly. Admission of the proposed hypothesiS puts a premium on sin. For knowing that he can count on this last moment , this last act, the sinner will be tempted even more to put off his conversion. Scripture and the teachine of the Church support the caution raised in this objection by summoning man to vigilance, for one knows not the day nor the hour when the Lord will come.

This objection has both a technical and a pastoral dimension to it. It is important to underline first of all that the work of salvation, of conversion, is essentially a work of grace. Psychological elements indeed intervene and 61 playa great role, but nothing salutary will ever be done / except under the influence of grace. The teaching of the Church is clear in this regard. No one can merit the grace of final perseverance. It is only on the promise of suffi­ cient grace that we can rely. Thus, while one may glimpse the possibility of a final revision of judgments, the last word always remains with grace. The hypothesis, insists Glorieux, does not presume on grace. Is it not possible though to see in it, humanly speaking, conditions much more favorable to fixing one's choice free from surprise, agony, weakness, passion or distraction? Does this give a premium to sin?

What is entailed here is knowing in what measure and to what degree the mode of knowing and appetition of the sep­ arated soul will allow it to oppose its previous psychologi­ cal life. That a change in the soul, indeed a revolution is implied, is incontestable. But it is a change which stands in continuity with the previous life. Intellectual memory and the full weight of one's habits remain. The infused elements will not be so dazzling as to entrap the soul into a revision of its previous positions. The influence of one's past has full play.

Glorieux joins at this point with Roger Troisfon­ taines to assert that life is in reality a conquest of lib­ erty and that death is indispensable for the freedom of man to bloom. It is only gradually, progressively that one dis- 62 engages himself from the determinism of hereditary, famil- j ial and social forces, to accept or reject elements there- of, and determine one's personal orientation. And whatever has been achieved always remains a precarious liberty.

'Il n'y a presque pas de commune mesure entre l'initiation progressive de la vie et la revelation soudaine qui la couronne a. la mort ••• Au cours du devenir terrestre, nous noua exercons A poser l'acte definitif •••• L'acte capital de notre existence terrestre, c'est bien celui qui la termine~ celui ou le devenir cesse pour faire place a l'Stre, c'est l'acte de mourir.J7

This is not, however, a creation ex nihilo by an isolated being. The act of liberty is a response to an in­ vitation. I create myself as a free person only in meeting others and in responding to God. And this "me" who gives himself or refuses himself in the last act is the fruit of a long work of conquest of liberation or of servitude. At the moment of death, the being takes its measure and chooses intimacy with others-God, society, spirits, the entire uni­ verse, or he falls back on himself as preferable,

'La materialit& des actes ou les merites "acquis" (comme un tresor) ne compteront guere en ce moment. Importera seule l'orientation fonciere de l'ame vers la communion ou vers l'isolement. Cette orientation, tout homme, J quels que soient son atat-civil, son heredite ou les conditions de son existence, lea peu a peu adopt~e par lUi-meme. Le fait que tout est remis en question a la mort et que 1a revelation soudaine ne prolonge pas de fa90n homogene l'initiation progressive, ne destitue donc nullement de leur valeur les acts ou tout au moins ~es attitudes de notre vie terrestre •• •• 13 63

The intrusion of the absolute into human life, / Glorieux says with Troisfontaines, consecrates and fixes the orientation generally accepted; it does not overturn it. The thought of death alone is a catalyst and obliges us to take a position. Death provokes liberty and reveals the depths of hearts.

Death is not merely a moment like any other which comes on a line, in a series. "Il (the moment of death) a une raison de totalite,/ parcequ'il boucle, si l'on peut dire, toute la vie.,,39 This totality indeed exists from the be­ ginning but its development and fulfillment is infinitely virtual up to the moment that death terminates it. Death is the profound act among all others which synthesizes the whole life, which is only completely liberated by access to complete spirituality.

Thus it is wrong to think of the problem of death in terms of opposition to what has gone before. In spite of the unique experience which it constitutes for each man it stands in continuity with all of the preceding life.

As for the pastoral concern, says Glorieux, stemming from the possible exploitation of these suggestions two re­ marks should be made. First, the fact that a doctrine is in danger of being abused does not necessarily mean that it is false , but rather that it may be difficult to understand, and so should not be indiscriminately thrown into the market 64 place. Preparation is needed and in any case some problems I ought not to be treated except among technicians. Second- ly, the inconvenience warned against can be mitigated pro­ vided that the solution be presented as the hypothesis which it is in fact, and not as a certitude. Further, the most elementary wisdom shows that it would be totally insen­ sitive to allow a simple problematic possibility to be the ground for putting off one's conversion. Every sinner must consider each appeal of grace as perhaps the last. He con­ tinues to have the most pressing motives to convert.

"Ainsi en est-il effectivement; car le mystere demeure. Et tel do it etre le dernier mot de cette etude.~O

Evaluation

While it is not our central concern here it ought at least be noted, first of all, that it is controverted as to whether and to what extent Glorieux adequately and au­ thentically represents Thomistic thought in this matter of the parallel to be drawn between the finality of the state achieved by the angel at the fall and the finality of the state of man achieved at death. Whether the theory of the final option can be argued as implicitly present in Thomis­ tic doctrine because of Thomas' use of the expression from St. John Damascene: "Hoc enim est hominibus mors quod an- gelis casus" has not gone unchallenged.

Matthew O·Connell takes particular exception to 65

Glorieux in this regard" When Glorieux draws the parallel I which he sees in Thomas, argues O'Connell, he is concluding that Thomas must implicitly be envisaging an act of choice made by man under the conditions proper to the separated soul.

But such a conclusion is incompatible with Thomas' explicit statements on several points: 1) that there can be men who die in original sin without ever having made a free personal decision for or against adhesion to God and who therefore have neither the vision of God nor the penalities proper to hell; 2) that man receives a longer probation period than an an­ gel, because his knowledge and consequently his choice is less perfect; 3) that the soul ad­ heres immovably to the end ~~osen in this life, that is, while in the body.

O'Connell goes on to argue that in discussing the obstinacy of the damned Thomas is really dealing with a way of explaining why the obstinacy of the damned is antecedent to and not consequent on God's denial of grace, and not with the conditions in which man's choice, fixed by the separation of the soul from the body is made in this life. Glorieux's conclusion does not seem to be implicit in Thomistic doctrine and in fact, suggests O'Connell, it seems rather like the smuggling into Thomas of an idea of freedom needed by man if he is justly to be damned, an idea which is not shared by Thomas. Thomas is important in this, however, only in that it is to him that appeal is made to bolster the credibility of the theory and for a basis for determining the moment of death. Aside from the degree to which this theory can be 66 seen as implicit in the mind of Thomas, what may be said I about Glorieux's presentation and argumentation of it? And what may be said about its contribution to the development of the theology of death?

While Glorieux notes that there might be some theo­ logical questions raised with respect to his hypothesis, and he goes into these, he suggests in passing that there are no philosophical difficulties to be encountered. Yet it is precisely in this realm that some of the most serious objec­ tions can be raised. What is his image of man? What is his underlying anthropology? Glorieux has no difficulty in say­ ing quite directly that death is the dissolving of the human composition, the sundering of the substantial union. Death is "fin de l'unite substantielle du compose humain. n42 And in another place, speaking of "l'instant ou l'ame cessant d'informer Ie corps, de Ie vivifier," he suggests that, tile compose humain se dissout.,,43 His treatment does not seem to regard the substantial unity of man with the full serious­ ness which modern thought requires. Nor does it seem to re­ flect the understanding of the substantial unity of man which, according to Imhner, the strict Thomistic doctrine seems to envision.

Glorieux's treatment attempts to focus on the possi­ bility of death as personal act, but it seems more an angelic act than a human act. And this must be the case for the type 67 of act that the hypothesis requires. His definition of the j moment of death must place man in the angelic order, for only in this way can he argue the parallel which he envi­ sions between the finality of the state of the angel at the fall and the finality of man achieved at death. The angel is damned by its own single, totally free exhaustive act with respect to its final end. Such an act is possible be­ cause of its simplicity of appetite and its deiform mode of knowing. For man to make a similar act in death requires that he be situated in angelic conditions of existence and action. The full seriousness of human life and mants essen- tial historicity seems thereby to be undermined. Glorieux presents a picture of a being which survives death, but which is hardly recognizable as human. Such an understand­ ing of man and the situation arrived at in death is distinct­ ly unpalatable to modern man. It can only appear as a depre­ ciation of the human and a destruction of man.

From the theological perspective the Glorieux pre­ sentation must be questioned with respect to its fidelity to the Scriptural injunction that man's final outcome is de­ termined by what is done in the body, as man, e.g., by feed­ ing the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, etc. Glorieux argues that he gives this full weight; that a man's whole life weighs with its full influence on the final decision. Yet the decisive act he envisions in the hypothesis is done in angel-like conditions of existence and action and must 68 allow the possibility of the total reversal of a man's life. I For it is in that instant alone when minus the influence of the passions and freed from dependence on the senses and when having taken on simplicity of appetite and a deiform mode of knowing that the soul can posit a comprehensive, to­ tally free, exhaustive act with respect to its final end. Allowing for the possibility of a total reversal of man's past, such an act would seem to relativize the seriousness of human life, the import of the deed of a man's life in the body. This being the case it would obviate the decisive im­ port of human life for determining a man's final outcome and so stand in conflict with the Scripture and the teaching of the ,Church.

The fact that all is thrown into question at death, he says with Troisfontaines, does not at all destroy the value or the weight of the acts and attitudes of our earthly existence. The intrusion of the absolute into human life rather consecrates, and fixes the orientation generally ac­ cepted; it does not overturn it. He says this at the same time that he argues that all is thrown into question. How is it possible to reconcile these two lines of a:rgument? If all is put in doubt then how maintain that this moment of death consecrates and fixes the orientation generally accep­ ted and does not overturn it? If all is in question then how maintain that the past genuinely lies with its full weight on the final decision? If all is thrown in question, 69 then the whole of one's life is open to the possibility of j total revision in the last moment and the seriousness with which the whole of one's life is taken is jeopardized.

If, however. this intrusion of the absolute conse­ crates and fixes and does not overturn the orientation gen­ erally accepted, then what purpose does the hypothesis serve? If the whole influence of one's past lays with its full weight on the final decision, then it would seem that the type of exhaustive and totally free act envisioned in the hypothesis is not genuinely possible.

It is clear that Glorieux intends to take man's es- sential coming to be in history with full seriousness and he argues that he does. The critical question is whether or not he has done this successfully. It 1s not clear, it would seem, that he has and that in the final analysis his presen­ tation of the theory of a final decision must be reckoned as problematic.

The Glorieux presentation, then, is vulnerable phil­ osophically and theologically in that it is open both to the charge of anthropological dualism and to that of betraying the injunction of Scripture and the teaching of the church concerning the decisive import of human life, in the body, for the determining of a man's final outcome. Further, while the hypothesis envisions a personal dimension to death, such a focus on the last moment tends to see death as 70

something merely at the end of life. It seems to detract j from relating death to the whole of life and from under- standing death as the act of one's life. While it may not foster denial as such, it does not seem to make a positive contribution to focusing the underlying import of the ap­ propriation of death as a task of life.

Glorieux's treatment is in no sense a comprehensive theology of death. And it is vulnerable to that same cri­ ticism of anthropological dualism which is laid against the traditional presentation of teaching on death. And yet, while his work does not emerge as an attempt to come to terms specifically with the modern concern with death as it affects the significance of person, it is nevertheless the first theological exploration of any consequence to explore and articulate the personal dimension of death, the possi­ bility of death as a personal act. And it ought to be noted that in drawing on the work of Troisfontaines, in however limited a way, at the end of the second article, he does ac­ knowledge the need to speak of death in dialogue with modern thought and to relate the question of death to that of the liberty of man, in the sense of life's being a process of becoming) s conquest of freedom.

The idea of a final option has had a great appeal. It has been taken up again and again. It has been a char­ acteristic theme of theology of death. Indeed, in the minds of some, theology of death and the theology of final option 71 are interchangeable terms. And Glorieux's work in particu- / lar provides a basis off which others will continue to work. It will provide, as we will see, a jumping off point for a more comprehensive discussion of death, firmly set in dia­ logue with the concerns of modern thought and specifically concerned with the significance of person and how this is affected by death. We are speaking of the Glorieux influ­ ence to be seen in the work of Ladislaus Boros, to whom we now turn.

Ladislaus Boros

The Mystery of Death begins with a clear sense of the : plight of modern man in face of the problem of meaning and of the cynicism felt by many in what appears to be meaningless death. "If human death has no meaning," Boros acknowledged, "then the whole of life is nothing but empti­ ness. 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 re-interpretation and re­ valuation.,,44 He proposes to confront head-on the question of the significance of personal being in the face of death. When considered from the outside, from the biological point of view, death indeed is apprehended as a dissolution, an occurrence to be endured, a deprivation of consciousness, a destruction. But is this all? Metaphysical anthropology, on the other hand, asks whether this complete removal from 72 self which we undergo in death does not conceal a more fan­ I damental process of achievement of selfhood, a process of initiating the self to life. This is what Boros will be suggesting. Death does not mean the destruction of the person. Just the opposite. Life is a process of becoming and death is precisely the achievement of personhood.

If Glorieux was out to gain a foothold for the fi­ nal option theory and to secure its respectability, Boros will now exploit it to the full. If for Glorieux death was a last decision for or against God, for Boros death will now become the place where man can first make an act of full , self-disposal vis-a-vis God.

Stated specifically, Boros' hypothesis is expressed as follows:

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 en­ counter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny.45

I. The Methodological Postulates for an Analysis of Death

Death as a metaphysical orocess. No one of us has had a direct experience of death. It cannot be gone through from the outside, reproduced, as it were, in vitro. Each of us meets it alone and only once. The stages preparatory to death must not be confused with it. When the philosopher 73

speaks of death he has in mind a metaphysical process, o~e • generally described as the separation of the soul from the body_ This metaphysical moment which it is not possible to determine by simple observation is what we call death. And the hypothesis of a final decision is concerned exclusively with the "moment of death" as understood in this sense. The final decision which we have assumed occurs neither before death, nor after death, but in death.

A temporal process in a non-temporal transition. To establish clearly the meaning of the expression "moment of death, " t.wo possible objections must be considered. First, for the making of a decision a certain interval of time is required. But between "before death" and "after death" there is no intervening space of time. But if death is something instantaneous and indivisible, it affords no possibility for a decision, for a decision is always an act extended over a period of time.

It must be admitted, responds Boros, that death as an instantaneous transformation can only occur in a non­ temporal transition. As such, death is not one moment in a temporal succession, but a mere line of demarcation be­ tween the two moments without any temporal extension of its own. The last moment before the break and the first after it merge into one another. The moments of the soul "sep­ arating" and "being separated" coincide. Although the transition in death must be regarded as something non- 74 temporal, the passing and what occurs in the passing are / temporal. Thus the moment of death does offer an opportun- ity for decision.

It might further be objected, continues Boros, that to pose all the acts implied in this hypothesis of final de­ cision, the mind requires some length of time. The diffi­ culty here, he responds, arises from a confusion of levels of temporality. We must distinguish between the sub-person­ al time level, regular. uniform succession and personal time, inner personal time, at which successive mocents do not pass uniformly. While, strictly speaking, progression of personal reality ought to be measured in terms of this second level, practical necessity requires us to direct our movement in accord with a uniform and sub-personal (i.e., extensive) progression which is independent of us. But in death the spiritual movement of being is liberated from the alien element of non-personal temporality and the spirit's succession now wholly interior is determined by the succes­ sion inherent in its exercise of its own being. Thus it can realize the whole continuity of its being in one and the same act. We grasp the completeness of this act, however, only by describing it as a concentration of several spiri- tunl acts succeeding one another in time.

Death as a fundamental modality of living concrete existence. How is it even possible, one might inquire, to make any statement at all about this moment of which we have 75 no direct experience? Following Heidegger, however, we may I say that death is a fundamental modality of living concrete existence. Our existence carries death within it. Any giv­ en existence may be defined as a dedication to, an immersion in death, not only because it may in reality die at any mo­ ment, but essentially because it constantly realizes itself in the "situation" of death. Death 1s present from the be­ ginning. Its own end belongs of right to every existent being as a perfectio debita, a completion proper to its be­ ing, but which it does not yet possess.

Death has been introduced into the struc­ ture of living concrete existence, and a path leading to philosophy has in prin­ ciple been opened up. For, when the figure of death makes its appearance in living existence. the philosopher i s able to lay hold of death itself as the place where the various pointers to death, with Wh!ch ex­ istence furnishes him, intersect.4

The Transcendental Method. How obtain t hese point­ ers? How can death be discerned in our existence? If death is a fundamental modality of living concrete existence, it must always and everywhere be present; but what is always and everywhere present is not perceived. What is closest to us is often the farthest away.

That is why we are never consciously and ex­ plicitlyaware of death as a basic cause of the movements that occur in our mental ac­ tivity. Death is the unreflexive, uncoor­ dinated factor in our existence, one ofthoee primitive metaphysical data that precede im­ mediate experience. Human existence is lived out on different levels. It builds up from 76

within, from an inner nucleus which ever eludes our grasp. It is, however, possible / for philosophy to isolate and lay bare this thing in us which is constantly rising to the surface but is never actually grasped. This can be done by the transcendental method, that is to say, oy an Investiga- tIon of the acts of consciousness to fipd out just what implications they convey.47

We need the method if we are to get beyond the merely superficial interrelationships of our conscious activ­ ities, and discover, at their roots, the fact of our dedica­ tion to death, their condition and reason. Discovering this dedication we shall also grasp the essential nature of man's death.

Starting point for the philosophical analysis of death. Boros chooses the experience of wonder, the basic act of the philosopher, as especially suited to be the start­ ing point of the philosophical analysis of death. In it our existence is transplanted from its everyday experience and snatched away to the exalted realm of being.

The structure of this basic act of philosophy is re­ vealed in a dialectic. "In every philosophical act of know­ ing the mind is catapulted out of its familiar world to the 'unfamiliar' horizon of being. In the same moment, however, the knowing subject is directed back to the things of sense, but these meanwhile have become 'unfamiliar,' precisely be­ cause of the return of thought from its adventure with be­ ing. " The tension between being drawn away {i.e. the ecsta- 7'7

sis of thought ~owards the infinite) and the being thrown r back (i.e. the conversion to the contingent) lies at the ' root of all philosophical experience.

The first point at which we experience this wonder is undoubtedly the shock with which we realize the uncer- tainty and mysteriousness of existence. An event strikes us in such a way that we become unhooked from the secure and familiar. We've suddenly lost our bearings. We feel our own existence to be a mere plaything of inscrutable events, a solitary, aimless and isolated thing. We find ourselves in­ capable of fully overtaking, entering into our own deeds. Our own self constantly eludes us. Our situation is worth questioning.

In us there lives an unknown, in face of which we feel powerless; it is therefore something superior to us and seems to make our actions 'a priori' of no account. As such, then, this unknown appears to us to be what we have al­ ways been aiming at in all our questionings.48

Having lost this security in the familiar, we find ourselves up against a limit. We can go no further. We must move to a new level. A new if uncertain world calls. Having been stripped of our "superficial air of security in a self-made and forcibly maintained world-structure of prac­ tical utility," we become aware of an uncertainty deeper than any of the everyday threats to our existence. We dis­ cover at work a groping after something that lies far beyond the concrete forms of our search. We live in a constant ex- 78

pectation of infinite encounter and ineffable security. / We discover that our anxieties conceal a mysterious feeling of not belonging. We throw ourselves into our ac­ tivities but outrun them before they are completed. We are always looking for "more." This restlessness marks a fun­ damental direction to something transcendent, something al­ ways present in that it is always escaping us. It is this which gives us the impression of being strangers; the feel­ ing of homelessness.

We make immense demands on existence, but do not feel strong enough to turn them into reality. Excessive preten­ sions born for ever-renewed disappointments, such is man. We can not keep pace with our longings. We have not the strength to be what, fundamentally, we already are. At heart of this experience is a longing for someone to pro- teet, care for, console and guide us.

Thus the breakdown of wonder into the four points at which we experience it: the shock with which we realize the uncertainty and mysteriousness of existence; a feeling of uncertainty in the realm of the familiar; the realization of the fact that our existence has no real home; our con- sciousness of our own powerlessness.

The essential pattern we grasp is that man is made up of contradictory elements. The two poles we find main­ tain a reciprocal, and opposed tension, a dualism. Our fate 79

1s to be Something, yet we live in a state of opposed ten- I sion to this something. In the experience of wonder we find ourselves at one and the same time hemmed in by the provi­ sional and temporary and yet as rising into the free realm of the final and definite.

Applying the transcendental method to examination of this dualism now Boros hopes to discover that dedication to death which is a constitutive element of living concrete existence.

II. The Philosophical Basis for the Hypothesis of Final Decision

Boros now proposes to examine this dualism in the thought of four major philosophers, hoping to carry their thought to what he sees as their logical consequences and by so doing outline the philosophical basis for his hypothe­ sis. In addition. he will also explore the historical dia­ lectic of existence. the experience of poetry, and the ken­ otic dimension of human actualization in the same fashion, all of which culminate in a revised definition of the whole conc&pt of the process of death.

The presence of death in the l'dll. Human volition always aims at infinitely more than is really willed in any concrete act of the will. This absence of restraint is not only because in the human condition the possibility of reali­ zation is secured olay at the price of compromise with the 80

absoluteness of the demand, but fundamentally because at / the heart of the volition there is this "more, more" of the driving urge. Every time a man wishes to establish his lasting home in one spot the thrust of his being bears him on to fresh spaces. This does not stem merely from person­ al inadequacy. Rather, the more man knows, has and is, the more conscious he becomes that he neither has nor is what he wants to have and to be. The actual achievement never corresponds to the desire from which it issued. The will has never willed itself completely to the full. A mysteri­ ous unknown continues to elude us and makes it impossible for us to stop and find contentment •

• • • every act of volition is really press­ ing on in an unordered manner towards a de­ cision in which, when he has at last become one with his whole volition, he may be able to take his stand face to face with God.49

God is the inseparable factor in every human action. And in every volitional activity a secret bond of marriage is made between the human will and God. Only at the point of catching up with God, our constant aim never attained, can we catch up with ourselves and so really become human beings. And it is only in death that this can be realized. Until then our volition remains in its divided state. There is no respite. Whatever we have is merely provisional, a means of going further. The two movements of existence, the unconscious drive towards God, and the conscious realiza­ tion, urge each other on. In this mutual pursuit is con- 81 tained an ontological exigency: sometime, somewhere, they I must meet and coincide. Only at that point can our exis- tence attain a total identity of its original volition with the successive partial realizations of this volition. While this identity is anticipated, presupposed in every single act of existence, man is quite incapable of positing ~ act of his life in his lifetime, although he always bears this act within himself. Yet everything in his existence strives towards a climax of free decision attracted by an ontologically pre-planned indication of the direction along which the decision to be taken must move. The concentration of a person to a climax can never occur without the simul­ taneous concentration of freedom to a climax. Only in death can this take place. Before death volition is never more than embryonic. Death is its birth. Death is thus the act of the will simpliciter.

Death as the fulfillment of knowing. FollOwing the suggestions of Joseph Marechal,I Boros now explores the fun- damental dualism in human knowledge. There is present in man an unbounded curiosity, a striving toward the absolute. Our reason knows more than it actually perceives and lives in a constant ecstasis of thought towards God. The drive of knowledge, however, is blind. God is "given," but never imagined. Rather, he is implicitly affirmed in a vague, un­ considered way as the condition for the possibility of an objective knowledge of what is. $2

When we know we take into ourselves something not j ourself and give it new being, the being known and illumined. This new being is essentially determined by this outside thing, but it is also our own creation. Through the crea­ tive activity of our knowledge it receives an extension of being. Taking a place in our consciousness it attains the truest form of being: in it being and knowing coincide.

There is present in our power of knowledge a light which is not limited to this or that, but is pre-ordained to being as a whole. And it is in each judgment that we make that we relate the whole of being to the individual object of our apprehension by the simple fact of saying that it "is." Thus, our thought stakes out a claim to the abso­ lute expanse of being and to that upon which the world's being is founded, the being of God; and all this in embrac­ ing some inconsidered part of reality.

Corollary to this is the mind's drive towards a re­ turn into itself, possible only if the mind could represent to itself reflexively its own dynamism that carries it out towards God. The way of complete self-reflection, however, is obstructed by our material state. Our knowledge is es­ sentially a return from the world of sense and so we never achieve that complete self-presence. And in every act of knowing is a longing for an integral return to self.

Following through these suggestions he concludes 83

that the first integral act of knowing will be possible I only at the moment of death, when the mind is freed from the material principle. .t ...and since freedom also de­ rives from the actual, fully realized expanse of the mind, this latter becomes completely free only when it grasps its infinite expanse--a reality always there as given--that 1s to say, in death."SO Death is then the day of birth for our mind, our first fully personal act.

Integral perception and remembrance in death. Fol­ lOwing Bergson now he turns his attention to the dualism to be seen in perception and in remembrance. There is in us a basically unlimited faculty of perception which can func­ tion. however, only as constricted perception. This arises from the fact that the practical requirements of' everyday action reduce the field of perceptive activity to manage­ able, small pieces of the whole. There is an inhibiting function of the mind at work picking and choosing only vi­ tal elements from a ceaselessly in-pouring stream of stim­ uli. If this were not the case we would be so taken up with the abundance of perceptions that it could no longer be possible to pursue our everyday course in the world. Occasionally, however, the tension is relaxed, and we be­ gin to be dimly aware of deeper things. And this is the way, when we turn from the practical, to what is of no "use" at all, that a wholehearted conversion to reality is achieved. 84

A similar dualism can be seen in our remembrance. I On the one hand our existence is completely open to its own past, on the other we are constantly warding off the past. The past lives on, survives in its integrity, without any cooperation on our part. But we accept into our present existence only those experiences which are useful and re­ ject those of no use. At work is the "de-realizing" func­ tion of memory, whose task it is not to preserve such and such of the past, but to exclude from consciousness whatever in the past is of no use to us. The reason we do not live our past is that we are basically turned towards action and self-interest. We are directed forwards.

The 'now,' the moment in which we are, turns round upon itself and often does not perceive itself. As an immediately existent reality it is, as far as it is itself concerned, shrouded in darkness. Only when a now is waited for, is it not only lived through, but also lived in. The need to break out of the emptiness orthe moment is forever dis­ placing the whole centre of gravity of our being, pushing it out ahead. We feel as though life could only acquire content and meaning from our future. However, could a man be sufficiently liberated from this ex­ pectation, he would be able to embrace the whole history Of his existence in one undi­ vided present.'

It is not in our power to live fully in the pleni­ tude of the moment. Only in death do we achieve the moment of relaxation. Thoroughgoing abandonment of our orienta­ tion towards a day~ to - day future to be conquered through action, and our surrender to the present, these can only be events in death. $5

Only in that relaxation have we reality, the full- / ness of reality (death as the place of integral perception) and only in that relaxation have we reached a state of in­ dwelling in our o~;n existence (death as the place of identi­ fication with the past). These spread out a mighty vision of reality, now grasped in unimpaired contemplation. This is the birth of the mind to its full possession of the world and to its own totality. Thus, in the act of death, out of his essential nature, now posited in its integrality, can man now, and only now, make his integral decision.

Love as a prOjection of our existence into death. Our attention is now turned to the essential involvement in death of human love, by following out the thought of Gabriel Marcel. It is only through love that the individual becomes truly an "I." Being is "being-with." Our being is rela­ tionship, and the realization of our being is directed to­ wards its complete identification with this relationship. To love means to renounce any exercise of power and desire to dominate, to manage or to "possess" any other person. The 'Soul must be ready to surrender itself and be at another's disposal. And it is this disponibilite/ that creates the pos- sibility of love and~ therefore, of being. This calls for the transformation of the whole of existence, for everything in our human existence is dominated by an urge to possess. It is wrapped in itself; it lives in a sinister circle of self-seeking. Wherever good in its purest form arises from $6 within, it is immediately forced down again. The roots of / self-seeking spread even to the most selfless action. "The dualism of love stands in a concrete relation to ourselves, 'the good that is good for me. 'It

What happens though in those rare moments when the force of love goes out to another in such a way that he is affirmed and with all the fullness of his life is simply that in the ecstasy of love no self-enrichment is sought or indeed experienced. The surrender is complete. Such mo­ ments are fleeting and unstable, however, and existence falls back at once into itself, and begins to fail in its self-giving.

\~at hinders the unfolding, the blossoming and the lasting of this fleeting love? Marcel looks to corporeity as the explanation for this low content in being. Existence is inseparable from its embodiment. Things exist for it as extension of its bodily form. My body is not "I.tt I "have" a body; it is my absolute possession. Each act of existence must climb a steep slope from "having-possessing" to "sur­ render-being." Through his corporeity man is immersed in the sphere of having and does not possess the strength to reshape this situation by the power of the spirit.

Going further, then, we conclude that the first pos­ sibility for changing the condition of having into a condi­ tion of being is presented at the moment of death. With the $7

10s6 of this absolute possession, though our deliverance ( from it is not the sole basis for the disappearance of the" condition of having, the soul is completely exposed and the roots of having perish in the soul and the soul itself some­ how dies in this exposure. Thus the soul may open to new possibilities of being, no longer menaced by the provision­ al nature of having.

If the soul now accepts and affirms and acts out existentially its condition of ontologi­ cal exposure, it never returns to itself again, but in its affirmation of death, pos­ its what it had in the loftiest moments of love already practiced more or less--complete forgetfulness and surrender of self.52

Only in death is the total surrender that is love's possible, for only in death can we be exposed without re- serve. Meeting point of the historical dialectic of exis- tence. Boros now proceeds to explore the dualism inherent in history by reflecting on the double curve of our life's graph which runs through our whole individual development right up to death. The first curve of existence reveals an irreversible exhaustion of vital reserves. At the beginning man's organism is the !:)cene of an explosive bursting forth of forces and this carries through childhood and youth. But eventually this vigorous drive begins to slacken. The consciousness of the limits of one's strength dawns. One must husband one's energy and resources. But then this too finally gives way to exhaustion. Psychic structures also 88 grow more inflexible. An old man loses elasticity not only i of body, but usually of mind too. And the aging man is en- compassed by a host of still-born possibilities. And full of anxiety he becomes aware of the fact that the fullness of life has escaped him. Like a miser he holds fast to what he .. can still call his possessions. Yet a fundamental principle of our life dictates that we maintain existential possession of things only when we use them and dispose of them with our mind, when we transform them from within.

As life's energies ebb, all that concerns the "outer man"- success, achievement, etc. , follow this downward curve. But at the same time, there opens the possibility of an inner ascent to the plenitude of significance, wisdom, transcendent transparency, the ascent to interiority. The "outer man's" supply of energy need not disappear unused. It can be transformed into an energy of another kind, capable of following its curve of existence opposed to t he first.

The laws governing this second development are interior ones, a duty laid upon our liberty. They can be a total failure o~ again, they can be realized to varying degrees of perfection. In any case, they bring the necessity of our being into touch with our freedom. When a man takes this direction determined from within, the energies of the ' outer man ' are transformed into a new state of being, turned into spirit. All through the different stages of life the possibility is opened up of becoming one's self, of widening one's ephere of existence, of positing one's freedom. 5J

Our author points now to three possible determina- S9 tions of the rising curve of existence. The first is the i achievement of an independent center of being. The curve of the flouter man" imposes on our being a certain rhythm. Through the various stages: birth, puberty, experience, cli­ macteric and dissolution man meets increasingly with new crises and trials. On each occasion the Uinner man" is faced with the need to make a decision. He must be able to move on.

At birth the whole organism has to re-adapt itself to save itself from immediate death. On successfully mount­ ing the crisis of puberty a man awakes to the experience of the absolute, an experience that will enable him to make the venture of establishing human contacts. The crisis of ex­ perience then challenges the absolutist attitudes. In this process the solid cohesion of the personality develops. Then the crisis of the climacteric. Life loses its freshness. The poverty of existence is revealed. Conforming himself to disorder, suffering and frustration the man is yet able to achieve something of lasting value. Finally, the crisis of dissolution makes itself felt with elemental violence. Yet here is possible the most decisive renewal of the "inner man, tt the deepest spiritualization of life. Confronting this dissolution the wise man emerges, he who has transformed all of the energy of life into person. Finally, at the end there is another crisis, the crisis of life, death. Does not the general trend of the dialectic of inner and outer man indicate that with every diminution, man discovers a new 90

potentiality for being. Prolonging the curve as far as ( death, we may observe that the personal element in its full- ness, the inner man, can only emerge in death.

Secondly, the widening of the existential environ­ ment. The first widening of milieu occurred at birth. Grad­ ually the child discovers its body. and the liOrld around it-­ the cradle, the nursery, the house, the street, the neigh­ borhood ••• all the while constructing a world for itself. The privileges of being protected recede gradually. Among its fellows it is no more than an equal. So the young per­ son learns to recognize what a person is in its uniqueness. He extends himself in love, but finds there is always a res­ idue. A longing remains. The intoxication of love passes and the lovers face the task of overcoming their egoism and helping each other to attain to a complete humanity. And in his professional work, he becomes increasingly aware of his power to transform things. He disciplines himself in his great task of facing a world yet to be created. But slowly he realizes he is not equal to his task, that his dream al­ ways exceeds his achievement. And it is at this point where he experiences that he is not equal to the world~ that it be­ gins to grow into a metaphysical thing. By the end, though, his environment has shrunk--even to his room, even to his bed. But if he has been faithful to these experiences "the old man holds a world of spirit in his trembling hands, though these are powerless to grasp the outward physical cosmos. "54 91

In death we may suspect that physical space shrinks ( until nothing is left and the spiritually perceived world' expands into the infinite and man stands before a perfected world now seen in its essential depth which now becomes his final path to God.

The third determination on this curve has to do with the positing of freedom. From birth man finds l1imself "de­ termined" by many influences not only hereditary, but also, familial, educational, social. It is thus that the material accumulates from which to construct a world. As the person­ ality begins to assert its independence it discovers that one is faced ~dth the constant task of putting oneself in or­ der. Man works on himself and gradually a freely achieved individuality begins to emerge. Man rises to a triple free­ dom; to examine the world, to classify it, to dispose of it at will. In the process certain features of his person he accepts without question, others he consciously develops, others he rejects, slowly excluding them from the pattern of his personality. With time the external freedom of action diminishes . At last he appears in the fullness of his days the product of his own self-creation. We may observe here a tendency in man: the urge to posit himself and by this means, to become completely free. He cannot do this, however, for he has never anything but the "material" at hand, with all its limits, to work on. He can only posit himself fully when he can call into existence, out of the basis of his own being, 92

a body and a relationship to his surroundings and nei~hbo~s. I To do this he must lay aside his old relationship with the body and the world. The condition for complete freedom is a farewell to the outer man in death which would thus be the place of total freedom.

The previous sampling of death found in poetic ex­ perience. In the personal experience and act of "poetic cre­ ation" existence enters into the dimension of death, says Boros. And so we explore now the dualism inherent in poetry to discover its inner dynamism. On the one hand poetry is the creation of a new relationship to the world, a new prox­ imity to the world. Poetic creation is the conservation and fitting together of a whole life' s scattered pieces and ex­ periences of meaning and lucidity. Out of the helter-skel­ ter of confusion poetry rescues the significant moments, creating a warm center of things, a home made of lucidity, openness and honest reality. In an act of total positing of self and of the world, poetry' s aim is to create out of the material of unreality something that will be definitive and truly real.

On the other hand, poetic creation thrives in exis­ tential isolation, supposing a withdrawal from the world as fundamental as it is unique, a separ ation nowhere else at­ tained. The nearness of things is made really near only through their remoteness. Only in this dialectic of the proximity that is realized in remoteness can the phenomenon 93 of poetry occur. j To this description a third attribute of poetry must now be added. Poetry is a crying out for the presence of God. The poet's words are words of longing. What is aimed at is something which surpasses our existence of confusion. It is the Other, the transcendent and in the final analysis the one and only effective word, the word of God. Now if the proximity aimed at in the poetic experience is to be really complete, the isolation must be complete; but the absolutely complete realization of isolation is death. Its isolation is at the same time that remoteness in which the total prox­ imitv to the world is also given to us. This establishes a transformation of existence and it must be realized in a to- tal presence of God. Thus "death" is that process whereby the integral creation of the world is achieved starting from the presence of God.

Accomplishment and perfection of the kenotic actual­ ization of human existence. Finally some reflections on the kenotic dimension of human actualization lead Boros again to death. The basic functions of existence are accomplished in kenosis, the dialectic of destruction, the successive stages of which are being, non-being, and then being again. Only by surrendering ourselves can we be filled. The kenotic movement can be seen on the level of human consciousness. We know ourselves only when we leave ourselves behind. By acceptine into our interiority of what is exterior, we are 94 enabled to experience our interiorit y. .I " he kenotic attitude is even clearer in the case of love. 'rhe nature of love is to be a su,t'render of one's very being) a removing of self out of the center of one's affir­ mation of existence, a transferring into the other's being of the center of gravity of one's existence. Only in so do- ing do "I" become.

Knowing is also subject to a kenotic dialectic. While t he acquisition of knowledge appears to be the taking of possession, the emptying of another, it is in fact in its completion an emptying of oneself.

The characteristic thing about knowledge in its taking possession of its object is its subjectivity, the fact that it can set it­ self up over against the objective world as an independent, unifying cognitive center that accomplishes its act at a distance which is a fact of being. Knowledge means confrontation, and it is only this that cre­ ates the objectivity of the object. It would be a mistake to think that this subjectivity could be assured by the knower's drawing away from his object, and increasing the distance so much that he becomes completely immured in himself. The necessary condition for the growth of subjectivity is, on the contrary, a renunciation of all self-centeredness and an opening up of the subject to the objective world. The grp.ater this openness, the keener will be the view on reality and the more POW'­ erful the knowing subject. 55

Finally, while liberty is the highest form of self- possession, to be free is to be one's own destiny. And to be one's own destiny means to be extraneous to oneself, to be at another's disposal. Our freedom, our complete self- 95 possession comes i nt o bei ng as the very point where we no i l on&er bel ong t o ourselves.

It follows from the general logic of kenosis that if death is total destruction, it must also be the possibil­ ity for perfection. The kenotically determined acts of our existence point to the fact that in them man places himself in death by anticipation. Thus death is our total self ­ perfection in our total destruction.

Revised definition of the whole concept of the pro- cess of death. Concluding that the philosophical side of the hypothesis is now sufficiently argued and established, Boros turns to what seem to be the results of this investi- gat ion. He notes that he indicated at the beginning that the classical definition of the process of death as "sepa­ ration of the soul from the body" was unsatisfactory. For it immediately gives the impression that the destruction involved pertains to the body while the soul flies off al- most unaffected. But, he answers, it is clear from what we have seen thus far that the soul is indeed aff ected. "De­ struction is an interior fact of the soul itself, in death. ,,56 In death, the soul is ontologically exposed to real and ef­ fective annihilation. But spirit by its very natur e can not fall back into nothingness. This would be the destruc­ t ion of the indestructible.

It is to Thomistic metaphysics that Boros turns for 96 a solution to the seeming contradiction involved here. rlfan consists of one single essence in which matter and splri~ are the substantially united principles of one single whole. The soul is the form of the body down to its finest fiber and the corporeal principle so penetrates the soul that it belongs to its inner perfection. Body and soul are so completely one their duality disappears. The corporeal principle is not at­ tached to the soul by some accidental relation, as is some­ times supposed. It is posited by an act which is not dis­ tinct in reality from the soul. "Relation to corporeity is part and parcel of the essential constitution of the soul, so that the body is included in the actuality of the soul as the 'form of the body.n57 This relation does not arise only after they have been fully constituted in their individual essences. It is a transcendental, basic relation permeating all levels of the soul. All that appears in corporeity is the development of what is contained in the soul. The soul produces the corporeity out of itself with an inner necessity which is precisely what makes it a soul. Thus death can not be the simple sundering of two existent beings.

Death is rather the total destruction of one of them and, therefore, an event of immediate, inner import to the soul itself. It is not possible for the body to be separated from the soul without the §~ul 's being thereby ex­ posed to destruction.)

Through death the soul finds itself in a state of ontological indigence. Its state of separation from corpor- 97

eity is in the richest meaninG of the term "unnatural. tt ,/ '0 resolve the dilemma involved here he depends on Karl Jahner and his thoughts concerning the transcendental relationship of the soul to matter. To follow ooros' line of thought we will treat ~ahner's thought here, but suc­ cinctly, because we will look more closely at his work shortly.

In strict Thomistic theory there is contained in the soul a transcendental relation with matter (l.e., tran­ scendental meaning here immediately given in the essence of the soul). Since this is 50, it needs to endure and we may assum~ rather than imagining a special intervention of God, that in death the soul attains to a more really essential proximity to matter. Thus the soul, far from becoming a­ cosmic, becomes pan-cosmic, though this is not to imply a substantial informing of the world by the soul. Thus the soul reaches the place wvhere the world has its source, the place where it is centrally connected, the place where from the beginning we had the roots of our being. Descent to the root unity of the world is then the place of final decision. And like a birth it is a being violently thrust forth, an exposure to destruction and the opening of a new world.

Destruction is a fact for the soul in that it does disappear in the sense of undergoing an annihilation, a vio­ lent removal from its body-and-worldliness as hitherto known 98

and it does ;~o to the root of the world and in GO doing re- ceives a cosmic relation to existence. .(

Itelating this then to what has preceded Boros con­ cludes then that death is at the same time total self-en- counter and total presence to the world. And thus death be­ comes total encounter with God . For God stands, as we have ceen, as the prolongation of the soul's dynamism and the original basis of the world is by nature open to the God­ head. While this encounter is not the vision of God, it is essentially more than all the encounters with God in life. Here man is brought face to face with all he can aspire to at the place where the whole of creation awaits God. And at this metaphysical center he makes his final decision.

Now. • . act becomes being, decision becomes state, time becomes eternity. Death as com­ plete self-encounter, as descent into the depths of the world, as ascent into the presence of God and as the entry-at last become possible-into a fully personal re­ lationship ~~th God by means of a complete­ ly free decision-these are the essential elements that constitute our hypothesis. 59

III. Theological Discussion

Boros now proposes to transpose the preceding phil­ osophical analysis right into the center of a theological complex of relations to see if it enables us to form a more unified thought-pattern affecting them all and perhaps there­ by pointing to some truth already present, if latent in the content of faith. 99

1. The Endine of our State of Pilgrimage ,/ We begin first with the doctrine of the inalterabil­ ity of the state we reach through death. Death makes human decision irrevocable. Out of it there grows a fundamental­ ly new dimension of existence--the finality as of the closed file, the definitively irrevocably settled matter. How ac­ count for this finality? \~lat transfers our human liberty into the dimension of completion? Indeed it is by the de­ cree of God, but this is nothing but a statement of what happens, not of why it happens. How does God effect this? For the soul loses nothing of its spirituality and there­ fore nothing of its freedom.

If this comes about by special divine intervention, transposing human liberty into the state of lasting final­ ity by putting it in cold storage, so to speak, then this final stateJ be it bliss or damnation, is nothing but a me­ chanical superstructure lacking all personal depth and not penetrating beneath the surface of man's reality. Besides, the principle of scientific economy forbids our having re­ course to a fresh intervention from outside, until we have exhausted every possibility of solution within the problem itself.

Further, when God wills to obtain some end with any of his creatures, he does so in such a way that the end comes forth naturally, out of the resources immanent in the 100 creature itself. If God's transcendent causality is to b,e j preserved, we must look for come inner factor in our crea- tureliness itself which can give r i se to the constituti~~ of our human being in its ultimate finality_

When God wills a thing his will always has an im- manent terminus in its object. What, we may ask, is this immanent ground of the f inal determination of our existence?

The most important speculative schema examining this question consists in the demonstration of the immanent ape­ tite for being of the human will. In volition we have a natural inclination towards value. Freedom can repose in one thing: a cleavage in the experience of value. Where a goal of limited value is presented, man is able to be free to act in one way or the other. But where the will can see nothing but value, it must adhere to that object. This is not a lack of freedom, but rather a freeing of the spirit from enslavement to all non-value.

This explanation, however, is incapable, notes Boros, of explaining the impenitence of the damned. For they do adhere to a mixed value and, this is their torment. Indeed it must be maintained that absolute value once fully real­ ized makes impossible any further change, precisely because of the will's appetite for being. But how can an absolute value be realized in human volition at all. Does the ces­ sation of the possibility of change occur in some automatic 101 way throush encounter with the absolute value, or in a per­ I sonal wa in an act of human liberty?

l\hlays and cveryvihere itle see that freedom is im- plicitly face to face with absolute value. Jut why can our absolute opening up to the infinite value not become en­ counter \~th it? Our existence in its stage of multiple distraction is not in a position to throw the whole extent of its being into a single act of realization. Our exis­ tence 1s in waiting for the infinite. Encounter 1'lith the infinite presupposes the opening up of the concrete exis­ tence in a decision implemented through an act of absolute freedom.

After the encounter with infinite value has been realized, no further change of direc­ tion takes place in our freedom, but the en­ counter itself must take place in a free de­ cision. Infinite value does not become ab­ solute for us until the moment when we take up and make ab~olute our position in its re­ gard •••• The final determinin~ of its state has its ground, therefore, in freedom itself and is in the nature of a decision. The ac­ tual final determination of its state, its inalterable adhesion to the embodiment of absolute value embraced in a total decision is, on the other hand, dependent on the will's immanent appetite for being. Voli­ tion encounters the absolute for the first time in its absolute act, in a total deci­ sion. For this reason the transition to finality can be understgod only as a total, all-embracing decision. 0

Now if we assume that in death the soul makes its final decision for or against God, we will be able to con­ ceive the final determining of the state after death as 102

havinG the character of a decision. In the context of the

hypothesis, death is precisely a situation where in one l single act one's existence is brought face to face with the full d')rnamism of its being, and thus is able to posit some­ thing absolute by t"ay of decision. And since the possibili­ ties of decision in regard to its last end are here exhaust- ed-this is the domain of ultimate finality_

In support of this Boros noteD here the Thomistic structure of final determination in the decision of the an- gels and the parallelism that can be argued, via St. John Damascene, between the fall of the aneels and the death of man. This theory leads us to a better understanding of the nature of hell. For it is clear that the damned soul hates God not because it has been eternally rejected by God , but because by its own full and lucid decision, the soul has rejected God.

He concludes his treatment of the first theological point arguing, following Glorieux, that this hypothesis in no way represents a devaluation of the decisions durine

life. !~ther , "rehearaal for the final decision is the ab­ solutely essential note of existence as being for death.,,6l

2. The Place of our Fully Personal Encounter with Christ

Our second point of contact is with the doctrine of salvation as personal fellowship with Jesus Christ. The 1'.)3 personal reality of the Lord is the only means by lHhich we are saved. Thomas recognized this by requiring explicit! belief in the Incarnate Son of God and the Trinity, count­ in~ on a special revelation for anyone who had spent his life "in silvis et inter bruta animalia." In face of real- ity theologians have gradually retreated from this position, but in this the importance of the role of Christ is in dan­ ger of being lost. When theologians realized there were hundreds of millions since the birth of Christ who had not heard of him the required minimum of explicit faith was re­ duced to a belief in the existence of a personal God and an eternal retribution. When in the course of time it was clear that vast numbers of pagans and paganized Christians could not fulfill this a distinction was worked out between "real belief" and the "formulation of this belief." A man might project the appetite for the absolute that is inherent in his existence on totally alien ideas. In such an attitude inner belief in a personal God and retribution would be no less real for not being consciously formulated.

Theology' s third retreat before the facts was its talk of the unconscious longing for God that can give pat­ tern and moral purpose to a life without any explicit knowl­ edge on the part of the person that this is in fact so. This can be actualized in an act of love for ,a fellow man, in the sacrifice of personal interests, etc. Such acts might well contain implicitly a formal act of belief in a 104 personal Cod. \\1e might even find this in a man who con- I sciously rejects God, seeing in him a means of "capitalis- tic exploitation," but whose unconscious longing for Cod manaees somewhere to become a donation of his entire per­ sonality.

Cod wills all men to be saved. And it is a fine thing to want to work out assurances for the salvation of as many as possible. But men can not be saved by a logical­ ly impeccable minimalism. The Christian life is a life of grace, a life of divinization affecting on that account the person in its spirituality. It takes place in the domain of lucidity, deciSion, love. One is not divinized without knowing about it explicitly. Divinization occurs only through a personal relation with the God-~~n Jesus Christ. Two demand3 are at work here: the need to show how every­ thing can be the expression of this will for universal sal­ vation and the need to underline the role of the person of Christ, the need to see salvation consisting in establish­ ing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and adoptinD an explicit position towards him.

The hypothesis of a final decision eives us a pos­ sibility of satisfying both demands. Death as the final decision concentrates our whole existence into one act for or af~ainst and it is prepared growing out of the most tri­ vial decisions. So it is possible to say that salvation is achieved only in a formal and explicit movement towards 105

Christ and that it is prepared by pagans and Christians / through the ordinary acts of existence in the direction of death.

J. The Univercalitf of the ledemption

The third point of contact is in the doctrine of the universality of the Redemption. That all men, including the imbecile and the mentally defective, have the possibility of making in death a fully personal choice for or against God corresponds perfectly with the demands contained im­ plicitly in God's will for the salvation of all men. This must also pertain to unbaptized infants. There is no h8.1f­ ,.;ay house in the scheme of redemption. The limbo hypothe­ sis is far from satisfactory in that it excludes forever from the vision of God unbaptized infants who die before reaching the use of reason (and so were unable to elicit the mental act of desire for baptism). This hypothesis, however, does express the unwillingness of the Church to see these souls consigned to hell, and the preference for a more lenient solution.

Substituting the hypothesis of a final decision for the limbo hypothesis the whole problem is solved immediate­ ly. Infants who die before coming to the use of their fac­ ulties are nevertheless creatures endowed with spirit, and they, like all other human beings, awake in death to their full liberty and knowledge. They too come face to face with the dynamism of their spirit, and the basis of the world lOG

and in this confrontation meet their ~edeemer. The result ( is that while some may leave us in infancy, no one dies an infant. And this, says Boros, ought to be seen not so much as a disqualifying of the idea of limbo as a developing of it further along the lines of its original intuition.

4. Problems of Original Sin

The fourth pOint in our confrontation with tho hy­ pothesis of a final decision is the doctrine of original sin. The collective state of mankind arising out of the Fall has a double significance in the scheme of salvation. On the one hand, it is a force weighing heavily on mankind.

It entails a guilt of a special kind, an interior truly sinful constitution proper to every man. On the other hand, following Irenaeus, it is a first sign of God ' s re­ demptive loving-kindness . "God removed man far away from the tree of life ••• for fear he might remain a sinner •• • • So he set a stop to transgression by interposing death and putting an end to sin by causing the flesh to decay in the earth, so that man might in the end cease to live for sin and in dying might begin to live for God • .,62

vie will attempt, therefore, sa.ys Boros, to look for evidence of Godts loving kindness in the fact of the decom­ position of the flesh. And this will bring us again to confrontation of the hypothesis of a final decision.

Original sin and death are closely linked. The Bib- 107 lieal injunction that denth ... ,ould be the result of eatint; / of the tree of knowledge of cood and evil did not mean in- stant death, but ultimate subjection to death and to a death of return to dust, Ct death of separation, disintegra- tion. This ",lQuld not exclude, however, in the preternatur­ al state death of every kind, but only death of disintegra­ tion. F'ollo... "ing ~w.hner he suggest s that while there would have been an end to this life for the first man had he not sinned, it would have been accomplished Rk~intaining the in­ tegrity of the bodily constitution. He would have conduc­ ted this life immanently to its perfect and full maturity. And his perishable corporeity would have refashioned itself int0 a spiritualized bodily form.

Now if our death is to be not only a punishment f or sin but also a si gn of God ' s gracious mercy, then this two­ fold character must be present and visible in s ome fashion or other in the separation of death.

\llith the help of our hypothesis of a final decision we obtain tho following answer:

The separation in death is the very thing that gives all men a possibility of escap­ ing from the existential environment of original sin and pushing through into the sphere of being where the state of orig­ inal sin can be laid aside in a total de­ cision for God. 6J

This must be clarified by inquiring into the onto­ logical constitution of the existential environment of l Ou original sin and how the separation of death makes it pos- sible to step out of this environment. /

Original sin has the following ontological struc­ ture, compounded of three elements:

through the fact of his belonging to the se­ ries of human generations, a man finds him­ self living in an existential environment of sin antecedent to any individual decision on his part. Though this environment is exter­ ior to him, it yet becomes the inner deter­ mination of his existence and excludes him ~rom the jg~tifYing possession of sanctify­ ~ng grace.

To elucidate these elements metaphysically it is necessary to turn to the world of concepts elaborated by reoent philosophy in its rediscovered interest in every­ thing concerning the person. "Only among men does man be­ come a man," he quoteD from Fichte. 65 The concept of be­ ing-with is the "existential" one: the involvement of man with one another which has its origin in the free creation of relationships. It is only in encounter that our exis- tence grovlS into a real person. The second meaning of being-with is the "existentiary" one: human existence is and exists from the other, from what it is not. From the start we are made out of the stuff of the other'S being. \'lhat is outside ourselves belongs to the innermost consti­ tution of our existence with a double note: it is antece- dent to any decision and it furnishes the basis for the possibility of the decision. 109

From the beginning a mental and spiritual atmos- / phere surrounds the individual, an atmosphere in which he move s naturally and without question. Hegel called this the "objective spirit." It can be opposed only with the great­ est difficulty. This spirit is not only the life-promoting atmosphere of each individual, it is also his great calami­ ty. Often it succeeds in seducing the personal spirit. It is one of the essential components of the complex of exis­ tence we call existentiary being-with.

If we ask now how the sin of Adam is propagated, a possible answer would be: through the intermediary of a sin­ ful existentiary being-with.

Born into a community in which personal sin is rife as a dominant power, man assumes into his interiority these personal sins in their totality. They become a constitutive content of his existence. This state of belonging to a world of sinfulness breaks in from the outside and remains as being on the level of being-with antecedent to any de­ cision. In this way Adam's sin is transformed into indivi­ dual original, i.e., hereditary sin.

We must now ask: How does the character of death as separation make it possible to escape from this existential environment of original sin? The answer isc Through the to­ tal personalization of existence and through the possibility of a completely personal decision this contains. t4an lives in a state of disunion. His destiny works itself out on two 110

planes; on the level of what is already there, given, ante- j cedent to all that is personal and secondly on the level of what is personal. But man is incapable of totally trans­ forming what is antecedent in a single free act of self­ determination.

What happens now to this state of disunion in death? In the context of our hypothesis man in the act of death achieves complete identification with himself \rlth nothing left over.

In death existence reaches that total inten­ sity and centrality of the fact of being per­ son that makes possible the complete concen­ trating of all the man's forces without ex­ ception into his decision. This then sepa­ rates him at one stroke from6~11 that had been antecedent to this decision.

Thus man's metaphysical dissipation is done away with and consequently any trace of existentiary being-with is fi­ nally extruded from his existence.

In either case the state of original sin is abolish­ ed. If this last decision is negative the rebellion exacer­ bates his state of original sin by an actual sinfulness per­ sonally accepted and fully exercised. If the decision is positive man turns with the same concentrated fullness of his person towards God and leaves once for all the sphere of sinful existentiary being-with, the sphere of original sin.

Thus death can be seen not only as punishment, ex­ pression and manifestation of sin, but also as the sign of 111

God's loving-kindness. l 5. The State of Purification

Boros now turns his attention to the doctrine of the state of purification. He inquires after the fashion of Glorieux into the problem of the man who dies in venial sin. Not only must the debt of punishment be paid, but the guilt itself must be paid before entering heaven. This removal of guilt is bound up with the subjective initiative of C'onver­ sion. Now in purgatory this is impossible for the time of merit has come to a close. Accordingly, remission of sin can only take place while man is still in the status viae.

The hypothesis of a final decision, however, gives us the possibility of thinking of death as a complete open­ ing up to God of our existence. Such a total act would off­ set all man's sins, opening him to forgiveness. The only thing remaining would be the debt of temporal punishment. Boros cautions against the tendency of the reification of the Christian,mysteries, by which processes become things and states become places. Following Augustine's dictum, "After this life God himself is our place," Boros calls for a two­ fold reduction of the idea of purgatory, the place to be re­ duced to a process; the process to be reduced to an encount­ er. All of which is to say, that in our meeting with him, God himself is our purgatorial fire. In this regard the hy­ pothesis of a final decision gives us the possibility of lifting up the whole process of purification into the dimen- 112

sion of an encounter. / Like the fire of a volcano, an unceasing attraction towards God is at the bottom of all we do. It is damped down, however, by layers and rock-formations of self-seeking. But in our act of final decision. our whole capacity for love flames up and, painfully, indeed, all these deposits cannot but be broken through.

And so the final decision, the highest act of our love for God is capable of effecting the forgiveness of guilt and bound up as it is with suffering can be included under the concept of satispassio and represent a means of paying the debt of temporal punishment.. Thus we may see that the hypothesis of final decision opens up horizons with­ in the limits of which a deep theologioal interiorization of the doctrine of purgatory can be achieved.

6. Christological Basis for Hypothesis of a Final Decision

We conclude now, says Boros, by an examination of the Christological basis for the concept of death here pro­ pounded. Christ saved us by his death. And not in any oth­ er way. Primarily it is true, we were justified through Christ's obedience, but through his obedience even unto death. It was in death that there occurred that transfer­ ence of Christ's whole creaturely being which is the sublime expression of his obedience. Why death, however. when any moral act on the part of Christ would suffice? Our hypothe- 113 sis of final decision seems extraordinarily adapted for ( bringing to light an intrinsic reason in this troublesome • question.

First: Christ's human nature is the instrumental cause of our redemption. So, then, the more perfect the hu­ man nature of Christ, the more apt it is for effecting the redemption of which it is the instrumental cause. Christ possessed a real human nature. And to this reality belongs of necessity a capacity for knowledge open to real progress. In Christ there is alongsiqe the divine will, a true human will. And as such its exercise and development assumes a field of experience gained through experience and spreading ever more widely, in dependence on the increase of acquired knowledge.

Thus, if as our hypothesis emphasizes, man reaches the climax of his adulthood only in death then we can under­ stand why it is in death that Christ's humanity became the perfect instrumental cause of our redemption. His death ef­ fects our salvation because in it is summed up all the full­ ness of the human expression of Christ ' s obedience. Thus the hypothesis provides the possibility of finding an in­ trinsic reason for the fact that Christ's obedience should be given in death.

Secondly: The next step is a prolongation of the meaning of the instrumental causality of Christ's humanity. "If Christ ' s bodily reality is the physical instrumental 114

cause of grace, and if every grace is cbristological then I in the production of every grace, we must include its phy- sical communication through Christ's body."67

How then explain how Christ's bodily reality can enter into physical contact with the men of all ages and places. Indeed the contact with Christ must of absolute necessity be a spiritual one, but this does not do away with the requirement of the "bodily contact."

In the philosophical part of the study one of the themes developed was the aspect of the hypothesis according to which man in his death enters upon a real ontological re­ lationship with the universe. The soul's freeing from the body in death does not just mean a withdrawal from matter, but rather the entering into a closer proximity with matter, into a relation with the world extended to cosmic propor­ tions.

If we apply this insight about the entry of the soul into a pan-cosmic relationship with the world to Christ's descent into hell, we may see why and how the bodily human reality of Christ became in death rather than in any other way the instrumental cause of all grace. In the context of our hypothesis Christ's human soul in death would have en­ tered into an open, concrete ontological relationship with the universe. Indeed it would be a re-fashioning of world's evolution beginning at its deepest base. Thus, the cosmos in its totality would have become the bodily instrument of 115

Christ's humanity and the instrumental cause of the divine I efficacy, for every creature that belongs corporeally to this cosmos. Planted in death in the heart of the world, Christ became in his bodily humanity the real ontological ground of a new universal scheme of salvation embracing the whole human race. The universe is no longer what it was be­ fore. This transformation of the world is even now an al­ ready existent reality. And we await now the final revela­ tion of what has already been done in the depths of the world's being.

Thirdly: It would seem, in context of the hypothe­ sis, indispensable that we situate in and with the events of Christ's death, the two further processes essentially connected therewith.

In his descent into the innermost parts of the world Christ created a new situation in the scheme of salvation for all those spirits who by their corporeity are establish­ ed in a reference to the universe. And in the dogma of the resurrection and ascension it seems to Boros that we may see an explicit laying bare of two strands present in the reali­ ty already accomplished in principle by Christ in his de­ scent into hell.

First, concerning the resurrection and what happened in it. Before his death Christ existed in "the flesh," in the domain of weakness and frailty. In the process of his death Christ laid this domain aside and entered into the 116 universe in its wholeness with its openness of being. And / so the whole world was introduced to the pneumatic dimen­ sion. This transfiguration of being though is still hidden awaiting its revelation at the end of time. The great sign that this working of the spirit has taken place is given us in Christ's risen body. It is the archetype of the universe. It is the ontological expression of Christ's descent and what happened in this descent. It is also the essence of our bodily contact with Christ. The glorification realized in resurrection is therefore an event in the scheme of sal- vat ion.

Descent into the interior of all visible cre­ ation, and resurrection as an entry into the pneumatic openness of the corporeal, are, therefore, two reciprocally interpenetrating aspects Qf the one passage through death of Christ. 68

Something similar can be attempted in endeavoring to explain the ascension and what happened in it. Johannine theology of exaltation suggests that the act of ascension and the events of death and resurrection are to be regarded as factors in one and the same event seen as a whole. The most obvious meaning of Christ's going up into heaven would be his entry at the resurrection into that divine world which for our imagination is the world of heaven beyond earth. Ascension can be seen as the immediate consequence of resurrection. They are two aspects of one and the same glorious triumphal progress of Christ. The going up is a 117 return to the Father, a progress terminating in the sitting . I in glory at the r1ght hand of the Father, and a leaving be- hind of life in the flesh. Thus we have a single process in all of this of the various elements which make it up: death, descent, resurrection and ascension each emphasizes one aspect of a single web of happening.

In this process of Christ's exaltation there occur­ red Christ's integral act of transcending and breaking through all the barriers of "fleshly" corporeity filling the universe with his royal presence. Christ ' s ascension is the final accomplishment of that presence.

The hypothesis of a final decision has thus enabled us to work our way through to a unifying general view of the basic process of our redemption.

Joining this last train of thought with the conclu­ sions of our philosophical analysis, and thus trying to ex­ press the result of our whole investigation into the mystery of death we may in summary say: Man ' s death is a sacramental situation.

At the close of our philosophical reflections we came to see that in death the soul is confronted with the totality of its subjective dynamism of being, by entering completely into the pan-cosmic world-relationship, into the basis of the world. In these two "aspects" of death is re- alized a single situation of being: the plenitude of being 118 lights up brightly before the human existence. I In death the soul reaches the place where the whole complex of being, that of the individu­ al f s own dynamism of existence as well as that of the whole cosmos, jOins up with t.he Godhead. 69

Fulfillment, however, can only come from a decision taken in t.he situation of being.

The situation of death is, therefore, only a "last but one" that bears in itself an essen­ tial indication pointing to the real "last" that makes total fulfillment possible, and is, therefsre, the sign as being of this ful­ fillment.?

The reasonings of our theological investigation have led us to see that this essential situation of being that is death's is the place of total encounter with Christ. Christ's fourfold and single act: death, descent, resurrection and ascension has reshaped the cosmos christologically and made of it an instrument of the Godhead.

In his death Christ became present to the whole uni­ verse as the innermost part of all that is world. Thus the material element of the human death situation has become a vehicle for Christ. And by reason of the transcendental relativity of the soul to the world this presence of Christ in the cosmos penetrates into the innermost fibres of man's spiritual dynamism. The formal element of the human death situation is a christologically re-shaped reality.

When, therefore, the soul is planted, in death., in the basis of the world and also awakens to the totality of its spiritual- 119

ity, it seizes--in both elements of its death-situation, the material (complete pres- / ence to the world) and the formal (total self­ encounter)--Christ himself as the one who is essentially present in its totally realized relationship with the world and with itself. So the death situation of the concrete human existence is a sign of its encounter ~nth Christ. • • .Death, therefore, is an en- counter with Christ realized in the essential sign of the basIs 01' the world and of the spi­ ritual dynamism of man.?!

And since the sacraments themselves are encounters with Christ realized in signs of being that are human, i.e., composed of personal (formal) and worldly (material) ele­ ments we can conclude that death is an eminently sacramental situation. While not to be taken as a new individual sacra- ment death should rather be seen as a "basic sacrament" present in the others, inwardly supporting them while at the same time transcending them. As the supreme encounter with Christ of a man's whole life, death summarizes all others facing him once more with a decision. The sacraments are ef­ fective in so far as they communicate a physical contact with Christ's human reality, the fundamental sacrament. This physical contact with His humanity reaches its final inten­ sity in death, since the whole spiritual dynamism of man and the cosmos experienced as a whole becomes transparent when seen against the light of Christ.

"This," he concludes, "is the deepest meaning of the hypothesis!

Death is man's first completely personal act. and is, therefore, by reason of its 120

very being, the centre above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for free- / dom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about one's eternal destiny.72

Evaluation

The work of Ladislaus Boros represents a major at­ tempt of a Catholic theologian to re-interpret the religious conception of death in light of cultural, philosophical and theological developments in recent years. Joseph Collins, in his review of The Mystery of Death, suggests that Boros strikes exactly the right note from the outset when he char­ acterizes his investigation as an effort to test the hypothe­ sis regarding death as final decision and to carry out the testing with the aid of both philosophical and theological resources.

This is the right note to strike because it acknowledges the severe straits in which be­ lievers with a responsibility of communica­ tion to the rest of the human community now find themselves on the subject of death, and because the effort at reconstruction is not drawn narrowly from philosophy or of theology alone. 73

He notes also Boros' cognizance of the difficulty which the analytic mind would have in entertaining any con­ sideration of such an hypothesis, arguing that since we have no direct experience of dying we can not discuss the reality of death and verify the hypothesis. Thus Boros is on the right track in following Heidegger and in trying to eluci­ date the presence of death in the structure of concrete liv- 121 ing existence. In such a way we may come to a de-objectifi- / cation of death. For our ordination to death is not an ex- ternal relationship, but an essential way of grasping the active nature of man in his telic striving.

Death, in the intensive sense of the act of dying, is not a senseless accident: it is the fulfillment of man's search for self-under­ standing and for his relationship to the world. Hence we can gain some reflective comprehension of the meaning of death by re­ flecting on man's own striving mode of being in this world. Heidegger's theme of being­ toward-death is not a piece of dramaturgic pessimism but rather a means of stating how man can realize his being in its own self­ hood, without denying his commitment to the world and its tasks.74

What results in Boros' analysis of the dualism in man which he uncovers in his examination of the basic phil­ osophical act, the act of wonder, is indeed a compelling sense of the dynamism of being and of man's thrust to full, permanent and enduring self-possession. But does his an­ alysis accord unambiguously with our experience of the hu­ man condition? Does it do justice to the whole of human experience? What of the emptying of life and what of the radical limitation and destruction to be found in death? Death is no respecter of persons. It seems to interrupt the process of personal becoming often well before it seems to have established any firm roots. The decline witnessed in dying seems more to wrest man from himself and to high­ light the essentially fragile hold he has on his self­ possession than to testify to death as the consummation of 122

personal self-achievement. The disintegrative dimension in / human life and death must be reckoned at least as real as the perfecting and integrating thrust of being which Boros shows coming to consummation in death. And this is all the more true and important in an age where man's attention is being increasingly polarized by his immersion in destruc­ tiveness and his need to come to grips with it.

Matthew O'Connel175 notes this same difficulty in Boros' treatment. The problem of explaining death as per­ sonal, he points out, is in part a problem of balancing off death as passivity, as violence thrust upon man. It is a problem of understanding death as a "becoming separated," as well as a "separating."

It is instructive to note that along with his re­ view of Boros' The Mystery of Death Collins also examines by way of counterpoint the philosopher Jose Ferrater Mora 's Being and Death. Following Boros' analysis, death emerges not as a hopeless intrusion, but as a realization of the full dynamism of our search for understanding and love. His work presents basically a perfective view of death. \ihile Mora is familiar with the same sources as Boros, he adds to them the more tragic and terrestrial sort of existential thinking found in Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset.

Mora interprets human death as an interplay between interiority and exteriority. By the interiority of death, he means its inten­ tional function as constituting the goal and 123

significance of human existence from within its own dynamic tendency. And by the ex- / teriority of death, he means its harsh dis­ solving of living relationships and hence its aspect of being outside the aims of life. Both views of death can be verified: its phenomenological interiorizing aspect and its naturalistic exteriorizing aspect. But just as there are gradations in the kinds of organisms and their relations with death, so in man there is a tendency for the intgriorizing view of death to predom- inate. 7

But, notes Collins, Mora is careful to retain some qualifications, so that this interiorizing aspect is never in sole possession of its meaning. Thus, "my death" as the personal act of the intensest freedom and self-donation to God, never does come within the scope of my perfect self­ control. '~e cannot totally assimilate the act of dying to our realizational intention, 50 that some feature of shat­ tering and defeat is bound to pernist in any human death."77

We dwell on this here not because we are directly concerned with the work of Mora, but to highlight the sugges­ tion that Boros· does not seem to adequately account for this dimension. His perfective view highlights the personal pos­ sibilities and this is needed; he presents a compelling sense of the dynamism of life, but it is onesided. His ex­ amination of the historical dialectic reveals a ~~se man at the end of his days holding a world of spirit in his tremb­ ling hands, even though these hands are powerless to reach out and touch the physical cosmos. How many men witness to us such a quality of life? They are rare. The ordinary 124

human condition is much more humble. And nowhere does th¢ poverty of the human condition seem to show up today than in old people, the refuse of modern society. There is a di­ alectic to be maintained: a perfecting as well as a limiting dimension. It is not a question of opting for one or the other, but of preserving both and with that the full ambi­ guity of the human condition. In this regard Boros seems to come out short.

Collins addresses himself further to the importance of maintaining the limiting dimension in death in clear po­ lar tension to the perfecting aspect. 14aintaining the un­ doing and dismaying aspects of death entails more than un­ derlining the importance of trust in God; in addition there are important theoretical and moral consequences.

In the theoretical order these aspects are the means whereby our reflecting upon death can have a reciprocal influence upon the theory of human nature. Recent research among both analytic and phenomenological thinkers indicates that the problem of the complexity of human nature is scarcely set­ tled by ruling out the so-called Cartesian dualism. The harrowing features of death are a pointed reminder that we do not achieve perfect self-lucidity and compre­ hension of man's nature. Some type of dis­ tinction between spirit and flesh in the unitary reality of man is realistically re­ quired. And in the moral order, the reten­ tion of the aspect of defeat of life's pur­ poses is a condition for moral protests over the human carnage which does occur in our day. The lack of utter self-understanding and the role of moral judgment in the loss of human lives are correlative with the re- ligious man t S .sense of death as a last and 8 awful battle, wherein we must ask God's help.? 125

From the beginning, in the presentation of his first two methodological postulates Boros confesses his explici{ dependence on Palemon Glorieux, whose work he describes as a veritable milestone in the elaboration of the hypothesis of final decision.

Glorieux set himself the task which he accom­ plishes in a masterly way--of collecting the indications scattered about the various works of Aquinas and of establishing on this basis the main lines of the Thomist conception of death. He notes that in important passages St. Thomas quotes a phrase of St. John Dam­ ascene's: ' oc enim est hominibus mors uod est angelia casus, esta s ng a parae between death and the situation of the angels in their moment of decision. This made it obvious that this parallelism can reside only in the fact that in death man has to make an 'angelic' decision. With the help of this knowledge Awuinas' scattered statements on d.eath can be seen in a new perspective. The Angelic Doctor had already formed the con­ cept of the hypothesis of a final decision. Therefore, it would appear that our 'new' theological approach can be found in Aquinas. Glorieux's is a model of inspired research in this field of the history of theology.79

Besides the objection of Matthew O' Connell which we noted earlier concerning the authenticity of Glorieux's rep­ resentation of Thomas, it ought to be noted now that Glor­ ieux says clearly that Thomas in no way treated the ques­ tions which he was taking up and that he is building up his hypothesis based on the inspiration of his teaching and ac­ cording to the applicable principles. It is thus that Glorieux wishes to suggest a doctrine according to the mind of Thomas. We must note here, however, that Boros attempts 126 to push this further by saying: "The Angelic Doctor had al­ ready formed the concept of the hypothesis of a final deci! sion."

Glorieux's definition of the moment of death as the instant of the separation of the soul from the body is es­ sential to Boros' treatment an is the G10rieux treatment of the nature of the instant by virtue of which he argues to the attachment 0·£ the moment of death to the status viae. Boros says unequivocally that "in death man has to make an angelic decision." Beginning as he does in dependence on Glorieux the whole question of the decisive import of human life for determining a man's final outcome must again be broached. The scriptural kerygma and the teaching of the church maintain that we are judged by what we do in the body, as men, whereas for Glorieux and now for Boros the de­ cisive act of a man, and indeed for Boros, the first fully personal act, is described as an angelic decision. The se­ riousness with which life is taken in the context of this hypothesis must be challenged in view of the scriptural in­ sistence on the decisive importance of man's time on earth. Both Glorieux and Boros explicitly intend to maintain this seriousness of human life, but do they actually manage to do so? Glorieux thinks he has accomplished this by giving a man's past a heavy influence on the final choice, but as O'Connell argues, "he has to allow that the whole course of a man's life may be reversed in this final choice, and that 127 a man's life on earth is thus not necessarily decisive for j his eternal fate. n80

O'Connell goes on to express the further doubt that the problem of freedom is solved even within the terms of the theory itself... 'fheoreticallYt the final act alone has the requisite clarity and freedom for a total commitment to or rejection of God. This after all is the argument in fa­ vor of such a final choice. But, argues O'Connell, there is a dilemma.

If on the one hand, a man's previous choices during life are not fully free, yet for Glorieux and Boros they truly weigh upon his freedom in the moment of final choice, and thus this freedom would itself seem to be limited: the final option would therefore seem to have to be either an angelic choice (with no history behind it) or else a choice upon which a previous history truly weighs and which thus becomes a limited freedom, not , really parallel to the angels. If on the other hand, a man's previous choices were gen- uinely personal chOices, able to engage an eternal destiny, even if not all these choi­ ces had the same depth and intensity, then the final option would seem to differ only in deeree'snot in kind, and thus to be un­ necessary. 1

Noting that Boros takes a more immediately philo­ sophical approach to the problem of death, he suggests that his work could be legitimately said to be a book on the ques­ tion of what it means for man to be a person. But, dis­ turbed by Boros' treatment. he asks, Is man to act in a fully personal way only when he is released from the mortal body? Are temporality and historicity a sort of 'fall'? 128

Does it not seem in the final analysis that Boros' model for ) human personal action is taken from the angelic sphere, from the idea of a disincarnate spirit as alone fully free?

Boros' inclusion of &ahner's arguments concerning the strict teaching of Thomistic doctrine with respect to the substantial unity of body and soul, the consequent trans­ cendental relation of the soul to matter and the possible pan-cosmic relation of the soul to the world might obviate some of the difficulties in the Glorieux treatment. But the ultimate objection to these presentations of the theory of the final option (Glorieux and Boros) stems from the ser­ iousness of human life being undermined and with the signi­ ficance of human freedom being placed in jeopardy?

Boros does indeed confront the question of the sig­ nificance of the person in face of death. He addresses the question of the personal dimension of death head-on and pre­ sents a compelling picture of the dynamism of life and of the possibilities of death as the pre-eminent situation of personal realization. What is lacking, however, is the full acknowledgment of the limiting and destructive dimension of death. What is missing is the sense of death as defeat.

Further, the presentation of the final option the­ ory which we have seen here, stemming from Glorieux, seems inescapably caught up with undermining the full significance of a man's whole life in determining his final outcome. 129

And, finally, it must be suggested again that iden- tifying death so exclusively in terms of the last moment ~­ tracts from relating death to the whole of life and from foousing on the importance of the appropriation of death as the task of life. Theology of death must be more than the­ ology of final option. We must look for a theology of death which more thoroughly relates death to the whole of life, and for this we turn now to examine the work of Karl Rahner.

Karl Rahner

Death, acknowledges Rahner, is one of the most shat­ tering events in human life, and our experience of history throws its shadow only too darkly over us. As a result, some may regard as revolting the attempt to describe death in an apparently existentially unconcerned manner, with an elaborate apparatus of metaphysical concepts and theologi­ cal formulae, as though it were the slightest of things, a commonplace object in regard to which philosophical and the­ ological logic chopping can be indulged without restraint.

Nevertheless, if we do not wish to suffer death, around us and in ourselves, merely passively and in dull resignation; if, as men, as spiritual beings, we must, and pre­ fer to, face death with alert hearts and open eyes; and if, as Christians, we should know ••• that 'it is beautiful for me to die in Christ Jesus,· then a theology of death, which does not shrink from sober conceptual elaboration, is both important and desirable, even though it seems to 130

transform the experience and shock of real death into a Hhantom web of concepts and i theologumena. 2

His method here will be to state pOint by point the clearly determined propositions of the Church's doctrine on death, attempting to advance a little way further into the theological problems and speculations which are suggested by each statementoI' can be developed from it. This method, however, will not permit a systematic presentation of the theory of death. It will not result in a clearly rounded, well-balanced, comprehensive theology of death. We can on­ ly make short separate excursions, he says, into a little­ known territory, rather than undertake an exhaustive geo­ graphical survey of the whole region.

We must consider first those existentially neutral statements on death, which describe it as an event common to all men. We shall then consider death under its aspect as the deoisive event for sinful man, in which man's sinful perdition finds its complete expres- sion and retribution. Finally, we shall con­ sider death as the supreme act of appropria- g tion of salvation based on the death of Christ. 3

Death as an Event Concerning Man as a Whole

Death is an event which strikes man in his totality. Man is a union of nature and person, a being who possesses, on the one hand, antecedent to his own personal and free de­ cision and independent of it, a specific kind of existence with definite laws proper to it and, consequently, a neces­ sary mode of development; on the other hand, he disposes 131 freely of himself, and is in the last analysis, what he him- j self, through the exercise of his liberty, wills himself to be. Death must consequently possess for him a personal and a natural aspect. We will consider his treatment of both of those aspects under the rubrics of death as the separa­ tion of the soul and the body; death as the definitive end of the state of pilgrimage, the former expressing the nat­ ural aspect of death and the latter the personal. We will take note first of all of his consideration of the univer- sal character of death.

The universality of death. While the universality of death seems to be knowable by empirical induction, it possesses by reason of its position in revelation, a wholly unique character, in terms of man's self-understanding. And this will always remain. Without prejudice to any further biological discussion of the cause of death, the death of man, occurring as it does through natural causes, in actual human history, nevertheless possesses an ultimate special cause. We do not know why all living beings die; the rea­ son offered by faith that of "the moral catastrophe of man­ kind in its first parents" is the only available interpre­ tation of its universal necessity.84

Death as the separation of body and soul. While the dogma of the universality of death describes death from the outside, i.e., specifying the extent of its occurrence, the formula of death-as-the-separation-of-body-and-soul 132

comes somewhat closer to the essence of death, though it I still considers human death from the point of view of man's character as an organic being rather than from his specific­ ally human character as person.

While the description of death as the separation of body and soul can not be found in scripture, says Rahner, it must nevertheless be acknowledged, in view of its consis­ tent use throughout the history of Christian theology, as the classical theological description of death.

This description of death, however, Rahner points out, does tell us something essential concerning death;

"tha~ the spiritual life principle of man, the soul, assumes in death, to put the matter vaguely but cautiously, a new and different relation to what we usually call the body.,,85 The soul no longer holds the structure of the body together as a distinct reality, delimited from the rest of the uni­ verse. The body lives no more. And so in this sense we say that the soul separates from the body. Further, since it is a truth of the faith that the personal spiritual soul does not perish when the structure of the body is dissolved, this too finds clear concrete expression in the description of death as the separation of body and soul, for the term separation implies the continued existence of the separated elements. While these two points, he concludes, provide an essential justification of this and by no means a tradition­ al description of death, it is, nevertheless, a description 133 and nothing more, and by no means a definition of death in its very essence. /

Rahner scores the traditional description for the total silence about the characteristic feature of death, that it is an event for man as a whole and as a spiritual person in terms of his definitively achieved, free, self­ affirmation and self-realization. And it also leaves un- answer~d the question as to whether the soul separates it­ self from the body or whether it is rather separated from it. Is th1s separation a result of the soul's own deeper dynamism towards its own fulfillment or is it something that supervenes upon the soul in opposition to its own in- nate ·tendency?

The obscurity of the concept of separation raises for Rahner the crucial question concerning the soul's rela­ tion to the world and allows him to introduce his theory concerning the pan-cosmic relationship of the soul to the world. Since the soul is united to the body, it clearly must also have some relationship to that whole of which the body is a part, that is, to the totality which constitutes the unity of the material universe. The question thus arises whether the separation of the body and the soul in death definitively severs the soul's relation to the world so that it becomes a-cosmic, totally out of the world, or whether the termination of its relation to the body rather signifies that it enters into some deeper, more comprehen- 134 sive openness to the world, a more intimate relationship to / the ground of the unity of the universe. This ground of unity of the universe, Rahner concedes, is hard to conceive yet is real and is that in which all things in the world are interrelated and communicate anteriorly to any mutual influence upon each other.

While Hahner acknowledges that the question may seem unusual, this is due to the persistent influence of Neoplatonism, in the context of which it is usually taken for granted that at death the soul becomes a-cosmic, as though laok of relation to matter and nearness to God in­ creases in direct ratio.

Rahner now suggests reasons both ontological and theological to support his theory that in death the soul becomes not a-cosmic, but pan-cosmic. The older scholastic doctrine concerning the relation of the body and soul, he argues, did not conceive the informing of the body by the soul as an act distinct from the soul itself, but as a substantial "act" of the soul, the very reality of the soul itself. In other words, the soul is the very life of the body and the body is the very self-expression of the soul. Such an act, therefore, could absolutely cease only if the soul itself ceased to exist. His view, then, he argues, concerning the transcendental relationship of the soul to matter is implicit in the strictly Thomistic doctrine. 135

The doctrine of "life entelechies" and their rela- j tion to matter is also briefly considered.

The entelechies of sub-human living beings do not appear merely as organizing prin­ ciples, superimposed on an inorganic matter already formed chemically and mechanically; the at least partially supra-individual character of the sub-human entel~chies must also be taken into account. b

Death in the subhuman realm is not the simple cessa­ tion of the entelechy, but the surrender of the entelechial relation at a certain space-time point while the entelechial powers persist as constituents of the universe. Since the spiritual soul is a real life-entelechy, though that is not all there is to be said about the soul, something analogous r~y be conjectured concerning the soul ' s relation to the world. This pan-cosmic relation, however, does not imply that the soul substantially informs the world as it does the body, nor that it is omnipresent in the whole cosmos. But, it must be remembered, even in its lifetime the soul­ animated body is an open system in relation to the world, for the soul through its embodiment is in principle open to the world and always in communication with it. Thus if not exaggerated into a repetition of its earlier relation to its own body, the pan-cosmic relation might imply that the soul in surrendering its limited bodily structure, is now open to the universe and in some sense becomes a "co­ determining factor of the universe precisely in the latter's character as the ground of the personal life of other spir- 136 itual corporeal beings." The moral quality of each indivi- I dual life, when consummated before God, becomes co-respon- sible for his attitude towards the world and towards all other individuals; so in a similar sense the individual per­ son once rendered pan-cosmic in death might come to have a direct influence within the world.

For theological support for this theory &ahner turns first to affirm that the natural pan-cosmic relation between angels and the world (the~r status as principles of the world, and as related permanently to the world even prior to any individual decision on their part) makes it impos­ sible to exclude a priori the possibility of some such re­ lation in the case of the spiritual principle in man; or to preclude the possibility that in death it is not abolished, but is rather for the first time, perfected.

The doctrine of purgatory is rendered more intelle­ gible by the theory of the pan-cosmic relationship. This doctrine implies a further maturing of man, even after death, though in accord with his final decision during life, through temporal punishment, that is, the endurance of the repercussions of the world on the never perfectly right moral attitude of man. Such a doctrine is clearer if it is assumed that when the soul freed from the body it is not wholly removed from the world, but that, rather, after its surrender of the body and through it, it experiences in its morally free self-determination, more clearly and acutely 137 than ever before its harmony of disharmony with the objec- I tively right order of the world and conversely itself con- tributes to the determining of the latter.

His final theological argument stems from the doc­ trine of the resurrection of the body. If death were only a complete release from the body, and a total departure from the world, then it would be difficult to see how the resurrection of the body could still be a component of man's perfection desired by the soul itself, and of the perfection of the personal spiritual principle. Conversely from the idea that such a new acquisition of bodily form is not to be conceived as a surrender of openness on the part of the soul to the whole cosmos, we might secure a better understanding of the qualities of the glorified body, i.e., a perfect plasticity in relation to the spirit of man as supernatural­ ly perfected and divinized by grace, and, a corporeality that does not necessarily coincide with the exclusion of localization in any other place.

Death as concluding man's state of pilgrimage. vfuile death brings man a kind of finality which renders his decision for or against God unalterable, this does not ex­ clude further development after death, nor does it presup­ pose a life-less concept of man's future life with God. In fact , the doctrines of purgatory, resurrection of the body and the consummation of the world indicate further develop­ ment and deeper and deeper involvement in eternal life, Ita 13 8

never-ending movement of the finite spirit into the life of God. "g7 This doctrine, says :lahner, t akes man's life \"it~' radical seriousness. It is truly historical, that is, unique, unrepeatable, of inalienable and irrevocable signi­ ficance. It has a genuine beginning and a genuine end. There is no eternal return of all things; there is only a history, happening once for all.

Time is a unique process, the mode of becoming of finite freedom, posited by God's creative act. It is a process which moves in a definite though hidden waf to its final and irrevocable end. Insofar as it is not the con- eluded, but t he conclusive, which comes about with time, time is the positive means by which creatures participate in God's eternity, which is not the nightmare succession of fragmentary parts, but the participation in the plenitude gg of reality.

It is in this context that man and the world move toward immanent consummation and it is through death that man , in principle, attains his final constitution. This immanent maturing is for the world as it is for man, a mys­ terious dialectical unity, a rupture, and ending from with­ out, by God's unpredictable coming in judgment.

The critical question arising from this proposition asks whether the definitive character of the freely pro- duced expression of man's personal existence is an intrin­ sic constituent element of death of rather merely linked 139 with death by God's arbitrary decree. j .~hner's answer which he says can be traced to John Damascene and has the support of Thomas is that "the final­ ity of the personal life-decision is an intrinsic constitu­ ent of death itself as a spiritual and personal act of man. ,,89 He suggests that this thesis finds justification on theolog­ ical grounds even if a metaphysical analysis of the end of an incarnate spiritual person could not establish its valid­ ity. If death is of tts very nature a personal self-fulfill- ment, however, then death can not be merely a happening, something only passively undergone; it must also be under­ stood as an act which man interiorly performs. And it must be death itself which is the act, and not simply man's atti­ tude towards death.

Since he is both spirit and matter, liberty and ne- cessity, person and nature, man's death too must exhibit this ontological dialectic intrinsic to him. If death is the end for the whole man, the soul included, though not in the sense that it ceases to exist, then death must be under- stood as an active consummation from within, man's defini- tive disposal over and statement of himself, the achievement of total self-possession. Yet, at the same time, death, as the end of biological life, is a most radical irruption from without, a destruction of man, the most radical spoliation of man, the height of activity and passivity at once. And if the SUbstantial unity of man is to be respected, it will 140 not do simply to assign these aspects one to the body and I the other to the soul. Death is an event of the whole man.

What this means for actual man is to be taken up in the remaining investigations of death as the consequence of sin and death as dying with Ghrist.

Death as the Consequence of Sin

Having concluded that man, that strange yet inti­ mate union of personal, free spirit and matter, experiences death both as an end and a fulfillment, Hahner proceeds to examine the doctrine of death as the consequence of sin, the immediate background of which is the doctrine of original sin.

Death, as it is in fact suffered, stands in causal relation to sin, above all to the sin of Adam in his role as head of the race. While the original human being was cre­ ated with the possibility of not dying, man in the concrete order dies because he lost original justice in the sin of the first man. "Consequently, actual death is the visible expression of the disharmony between God and man in man's very being which supervened at tbe beginning of his spiritu­ al and moral history.,,90

This does not mean that the first man, had he not sinned, would have lived endlessly, but rather would have brought his life to pure, apparent, active consummation from within, without "death" in its proper sense, that is, with- 141

out suffering from without a violent dissolution of the / bodily constitution.

When we realize that man before the fall would have still consummated his life, and that a consummation still takes place after the fall, then we see that death can not be merely a consequence of man's guilt. And it is in fact a doctrine of the faith that death is also a natural event, as an immediate consequence of man's constitution as body and spirit and so must bear some positive intrinsic meaning.

Positing this natural element in death does not mean, however, that the actual death which each of us will die may be looked upon as a natw'al process, irrelevant to man's supernatural existence in the order of grace. The ac­ tual death of the individual is always either the manifesta­ tion of his own sin or his participation by faith in the des­ tiny of the Lord. Thus, even for man in sin, death ought not to be, for even the sinner retains his ontological ori­ entation to grace. "Death, therefore, is in contradiction to the total constitution of man, unless death itself is changed. through participation in the death of Christ into an assimilation of the transfiguring grace of Christ. "

What is it, then, in the natural essence of death which enables it to be an event of either damnation or sal-

vation? l~hner 's answer is that it is "the obscure, hidden character of death which allows this to be.,,9l 142

End, he notes , is a varying and highly analogous i concept and while it is not possible for Rahner in this context to present an ontology of this concept, he draws these conclusions about the special character of the human end: The end of man, considered only from man's point of view, presents an inseparable and irreducible unity, an on- tologically dialectical ooposition of opposites. The end of man as a spiritual person is an active self-fulfillment from vTithin, yet at the same time inseparably and in a way which affects the whole human being, the death of man as the end of a biological being is a blow of fate, a thief in the night, an emptying and a reducing of man to powerlessness, in fact, the end.

It is here that we reach that irreducible dialecti- cal unity of death which Rahner calls its obscure, hidden character. Death appears both as act/fate, end/fulfillment, willed/suffered, plenitude/emptiness.

It is not possible to say whether the full term of life reached in death is not in fact the emptiness and futility which till then was concealed, or, conversely, whether the emptiness apparent in death is only the out­ ward aspect of a true plenitude, deceptive only to us who are not in death.92

And since this obscure character of death is a consequence of the ontological, dialectical unity of spirit and matter in the very constitution of man, it belongs to the natural essence of death. And it is by virtue of this natural ba­ sis that death can be either salvation or damnation. 143

The "death It of Adam in Paradise would have been an / end of perfect self-realization undisguisedly achieved from ''fithin. The fact that man since Adam brings to accom­ plishment the death which is his act, in the empty finality of the death which he under­ goes, so that death as a human act is obscured by death as suffering, visibly manifests the absence of divine grace.93 Thus, death is the penalty of sin.

Death can also be the culmination of mortal sin in the life of a man, but this means that death can not be mere­ ly an isolated point at the end of life, but rather axiolog­ ically present throughout all of life. Man enacts his death through the deed of his life, in each of the free acts by which he disposes of his person.

Man faces death rightly when he surrenders himself unconditionally to the incomprehensible decision of God. Mortal sin, on the other hand, consists in man's will to die autonomously. Sinful death can manifest itself in the man who despairs of unveiling death's mystery and refuses to seek help from another source or in the man who simply denies the problematic nature of death as a final liberation of the spirit freed from matter continuing in some individual mode or being absorbed into a universal spirit. Or he interprets it biologically as a return to the universal store of life in nature.

Wishing to clarify this relationship between death 144 and original sin, ..: tahner a sks if death is a punishment be- . . . ,/ cause ~t ~s a consequence and manifestation of sin itself or is it rather an expression and manifestation of sin be­ cause it is sin's punishment? He responds, following Thom­ as, that the gift of immortality belonged as a connatural consequence of the divinization of man by grace in the para­ disal state and therefore death is primarily an expression of the fact that man is no longer or not yet fully permeated by grace, of the fact that grace must begin again so radical­ ly as it were that it can not at once completely eliminate death by a purely transfiguring fulfillment of man. Death is guilt made visible.

Rahner also pOints out that these reflections illus­ trate the relationship between death and concupiscence. Con­ cupiscence as consequence of original sin is nothing else but the antagonism between nature and person endowed with grace or at least with a supernatural destiny. This implies that the divine life is somehow impeded from complete trans­ formation of man. Death is the culmination of concupiscence and concupiscence is the manifestation of the continuous presence of death throughout man ' s always incompletely ful­ filled life.

Hahner explores the relationship of sinful death and the devil in terms of the pan-cosmic relation of the angel with the world. In view of this permanent and transcendental relation, the angel wills the perfection of the world as a 145 reflection and expression of his own. The world comes to / - i consummation only through death and so the angel wills this death. If all the an~els had persevered in grace, l ~ahner notes, then the world would have remained above death. The fallen angel as a graceless lord of the world wills his own perfection without God and so that of the world. While this expression of the angel ' s will to autonomous self-disposal can only become a reality for man by his o\~ free decision the situation of the fallen an~el endures as a temptation to man to will his own autonomous self-fulfillment.

Rahner sums up his treatment of death as a conse- quence of sin by noting that while man acknowledges the uni­ versality of death, there is a secret protest lodged in the breast of everyman against death. I,1etaphysical anthropology can not account for this. For if it acknowledges immortal­ ity as the end of an incarnate spiritual being, then why does man fear death? Yet it is right that we fear death, for man still possessing his supernatural orientation should not die, should not be oven',helmed from ,dthout. That this is his situation in fact is the consequence of ori~inal sin and of all man's personal sins by which he makes original sin his own. Because man ultimately belongs to God, he shrinks back in horror from this last mystery of emptiness, the mystery of iniquity. Yet, if men attempt to hide from this horror and explain it away, then they make of death what in fact terrifies them most in it, the beginning of eternal death. 146

Deat h is not to be aboli shed, but transformed and onl, in

Jesus Christ. i n his penetration of t he world in the dark i night of the Cross to gi ve life t o the world.

Death as a Dying with Christ

The Death of Christ. All of what Rahner has said up to this point about human death and its complexity now goes into his treatment of the death of the Christian as a dying with Christ. The neutral core provides that basis on which death can not only be the penalty and expression of sin, but also the revelation of our dying with Christ, the culmination of our appropriation of his redemptive death.

By virtue of the Incarnation, Christ has taken on human nature and so our death. While this does not mean that his death was like ours in every respect, it can not be similar only in externals. We know that Christ redeemed us by his death, but it is not clear on which of the many dimensions of death the redemption rests. 'rhus we must al­ low at least the possibility ~hat it was Christ's death as a whole which redeems.

While Hahner is prepared to accept the positive con­ tent of the satisfaction theory of redemption, he regards it as questionable whether this concept of satisfaction does justice to and expresses the full reality of Christ's redemp­ tive death.

The satis faction theory held that in consequence of I J,.?

his dignity as Q divine person the rnoral acts of Christ are i or inrinite value even though a s acts of his human nature they are ontoloeically finite. Since the eravity of the offense is determined by the dignity of the person offended and the value of the satisfaction by the dien1ty of the per­ son offering the satisfaction, only the Incarnate Word of God, in his human nature, is capable of offering due satis- faction for man's sin. However, since the mission of Christ precedes the satisfaction he offers, and is not dependent on it, the redeeming will of God is a pure work of divine fa­ vor. The moral work God wills as the price of redemption

"laS the free acceptance of death by Christ, but could have been any other act that God might have chosen to accept.

This concept, however, Rahner notes, does not ~~ke clear just why it is through Christ's death rather than by some other act that we are redeemed. Yet Scripture makes it very clear that it is precisely by his death that we are saved. So it is precisely in its character as death and not simply by its quality as a moral act that the redemption is accomplished. The satisfaction theory leaves unanswered just why this is so. It falls short, further, Rahner argues, in that it takes for granted that death is an event passively undergone and on this assumption Christ ' s redemptive act would not have been his death as such but rather in his sub- mission to the suffering which brought about death.

Having assumed lithe flesh of sin," Christ entered 14C that hwnan life "lhich reaches its fulfillment only by pass- / ing through death in all its obscurity. Tho~gh not in a state of belief, he experienced the full weight of death in all its darkness and emptiness and in that death not only of­ fered satisfaction for sin, but enacted and suffered pre­ cisely the death which is the experience and manifestation of sin. And this he did, in absolute liberty, as the act and revelation of that divine grace which divinized the life of his humanity and which, by reason of his own divine per­ son, belonged to him of natural necessity. Thus death be­ came for him something different than for one who did not possess in his own right the life of grace or that absolute freedom which was properly Christ's. His death becomes the free transference of his entire created existence to God.

And his life redeems inasmuch as his death is axi- ologically present, as in the case of every man, throughout his entire life. And since it is only in death that man's disposal over self reaches its total and definitive charac­ ter, by virtue of the fact that Christ became true man, it is only in and through his death that he could have redeemed us. Thus his obedience is redemption because it is death; and his death effects redemption because it is obedience.

Considering now Christ·s death in itself and asking why it is redemption, Hahner returns to his theory of the pan-cosmic relationship of the soul with the world, achieved in death and by which man opens up to an unrestricted rela- 1L? tionship to the world by virtue of which he i ntroduces t he j contri bution of his l i fe int o the real ~ro und of unity of t ho world. 1ahner sees i n Christ' s descent into hell, not only a soteriologi cal act on behalf of those who died before him, but also an i mpli ed entrance into the radically unified and deepest level of t he r eality of the world.

• • .his death i s built into this unity of t he cosmos, thus becoming a feature and an intrin­ sic principl e of it, and a prior framework and factor of all personal life in the world,--that means that t he world as a whole and as the scene of personal human actions has become different from what it would have been had Christ not died. And so possibilities of a real ontolog­ ical nature were opened up for the personal ac­ tion of all other men which would not have ex­ isted without the death of the Lord.94

When the vessel of his body was shattered in death, Christ wa s poured out over all the cosmos. Thus he became fully translated in his humanity what he had always been by his dignity, the heart of the world, the innermost center of creation. Thus man always and everywhere, whether he ac­ ceptn it or denies it permanently caught up with this ulti­ mate depth of the world occupied by Christ when in death he descended into the lower world.

The Death of the Christian as a Dying with Christ.

By virtue of the death of Christ the death of man can be something more than the death of the sinner. \fuile this is not emphasized in the history of theology, Rahner indicates that Scripture is clear in the affirmation that the actual death of the man in grace, and not just its final outcome 1 50 is difi'ercnt from t he death of t he sinner. l Traditional scholastic theology seems at least aware of the need to establish a difference between the death of the sinner and the death of the Christian, but was vague in actually trying to interpret it. The distinction offered between poenalitas and poena, Hahner objects, seems merely legal. Scripture, on the other hand, points out that there is a real "dying in the Lord, " a dying which is li1'e­ giving (2 Tim. 2:11, Rom. 6:8) and which begins in princi­ ple through baptism and faith and secretly dominates life here on earth (10m. 6:6, Ilf; 7:4-6; 8:2, 6-12).

These statements, Hahner argues, imply that physi­ cal death must be conceived as an axiological factor which dominates the whole of life and also as an action, that is, the death itself of man in grace is a saving event, a cul­ mination both of the reception and the effecting of salva­ tion since death is precisely that event that gathers up the whole personal act of a human life into one fulfillment . "What occurs 'sacramentally,· in these moments of culmina- tion, happens 'really' in our death: the partaking in the death of our Lord.,,95

How does this appropriation of Christ·s death, this dying with Christ take place, asks Rahner. The character­ istic feature of Christ's death was not that he approached death in some general attitude of loving, self-sacrificing and obedience, but that his actual death, his actual dying, 151

what in man could only be the manifestation and expression j of sin became by virtue of his act which occurred in grace, though still suffered by him as abandonment by God in the darkness of eternal night the visible advent of God's plen­ itude.

Thus we may understand what the Christian in death achieves through the grace of Christ. Faith, hope and love in the Christian are not mere feelings accompanying the bru­ tal reality of death, lasting only until it really comes, but are rather fundamental acts of the man in grace, consti­ tuents of death as an act of man through which is trans­ formed that dreadful falling into the hands of the living God, the manifestation of sin, so that it becomes in real­ ity; UInto thy hands I commend my spirit."

The Sacramentally Visible Union between the Death of Christ and the Death of the Christian. While encounters be- tween man and Christ take place whenever and wherever man in graoe, freely accepts God's grace, these encounters can have official, social, visible, embodiment in the Church, in sac­ raments, the visible form of the basic acts by which the re­ demption is appropriated.

The appropriation of Christ's death, which transforms the character of our own, is one of these basic acts; not, however, coming like a single point in time at the end of life, but rather a~6a process permeating its entire course.~

Baptism initiates us into the death of Christ, says 152

Paul, and Hahner argues that Paults baptismal theology sees j an intrinsic relationship between the mystical death in bap- tism and the actual death of the Christian, and not merely between baptism and the dying to sin during life. By his life in grace the Christian dies throughout life into his death as a dying with Christ. "Baptism is the sacramental­ ly visible beginning of that death which is not the culmin­ ation of sin but of the appropriation of salvation which overcomes sin. Baptism is the beginning of Christian death, because it is the initiation of the life of grace, by vir­ tue of which alone death can be Christian."97 Companionship with the Lord in his death means companionship in his suffer­ ing • . And companionship in his suffering, says Hahner, is that prolixitas mortis, spoken of by Gregory the Great, the realistic accomplishment of companionship in death during life. Both have their root in baptism.

Secondly, eucharist is the continuously renewed cel­ ebration of the death of the Lord, making that death pres­ ent here and now in our lives. If the sacraments are effec- tive signs then this sacramental announcement of the death of the Lord must effect his death in us.

Finally, sickness, notes Rahner, 1s not only a bio­ logical process, but as a way to death and a. danger of death it is the visible manifestation of the power of sin and of that weakness of man which is an expression of sin and a danger of sin. The effect of the sacramental anoint- 153 ment of the sick, practiced since the early Church, is the j Christian endurance of this decisive situation in life ei- ther because health is restored or because he endures en- suing death as a Christian. It is a consecration to death and the visible manifestation, of enduring the last act, one's death, in companionship with the Lord.

Thus, the beginning, the middle and the end of Christian life, as the appropriation of Christ's death, are signified and consecrated by these three sacraments.

So, concludes Rahner, we have spoken much about death, but said very little. Yet man must give thought to death, not only because his is a life moving towards death, but even more because death is a mystery of Christ the Lord. In his death we have eternal life, the grace and the voca­ tion to die with him.

In order to understand this mystery and to perform it worthily in the liturgy of our life, we only need contemplate the death of the Crucified, attend to and repeat the words which he uttered, so expressive of the low­ est and highest aspects of death: 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me; Fa~her, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.,9

Evaluation

We have in the work of Karl Hahner the most substan­ tial theological treatment of death to date. He addresses the key concerns necessary to build an effective contempor­ ary theology of death. His whole presentation stems from 154

an anthropology which takes full cognizance of the substan- j tinl unity of man. His articulation of death as personal act respects at the same time the full ambiguity of human experience. And his focus is pre-eminently that of relating death to the whole of a man's life and on the importance of the appropriation of death as a task of life.

Death is an event which strikes man in his total i- ty, for man is a union of person and nature. aahner's an­ thropology is key to his understanding of death. As a union of person and nature man is a being who possesses on the one hand, antecedent to his own personal and free decision and independent of it, a specific kind of existence with defin­ ite laws proper to it and therefore a necessary mode of de­ velopment; on the other hand, he freely disposes of himself and is in the last analysis, what he himself, through the exercise of his liberty, wills himself to be. "Person," then, is man as he disposes over himself; "nature" is man insofar as he is at his own disposal. Including, therefore, the law of his development, his past, his body, his world, all this not being separate from him, nature is man as given to himself to make something of himself in freedom. This is not merely a distinction in words, but corresponds to a real dualism in man which is never really overcome.

Since man is both spirit and matter, liberty and necessity, person and nature, man's death too must exhibit this ontological dialectic intrinsic to him. If death is 155 the end for the whole man, the soul included, but not in / the sense that it ceases to exist, then death must be under- stood as an active consummation from within, man's defini­ tive disposal over self, the achievement of total self­ possession. Yet at the same time as the end of biological life death is a most radical irruption from without, a de­ struction of man. It is the height of activity and passi­ vity at once. And, argues Rahner, if the substantial unity of man is to be respected, then it will not do to simply as­ sign these aspects one to the soul and the other to the body.

Man is an historical being. He holds his life be­ tween a genuine beginning and a genuine end. Time is a unique process; it is the mode of becoming of finite free­ dom. It is in this context that man moves to immanent con- summation. It is in and through death that man in pr.inciple attains his final constitution. Considered from man's point of view, death presents in inseparable and irreducible unity an ontologically dialectical opposition of elements. This dialectical unity terminates in calling death the unity of complete act and complete passivity or complete act in the midst of complete passivity.

Hahner's initial understanding of death then stems from his understanding of man. It is by virtue of his con­ stitution as union. of nature and person that death, man's death, must ey~ibit both a natural and a personal aspect. In the doctrine of the Church this natural aspect is ex- 156 pressed by saying that death is the separation of soul and body; its personal aspect is expressed by saying that it / means the definitive end to man's state of pilgrimage.

Hahner's treatment underlines the inadequacy of the death as separation of the body and soul formula as a com­ plete definition of death. He acknowledges, though, that by virtue of its consistent use throughout the history of Chris­ tian theology, it must be recognized as the classical theo­ logical description of death. It is precisely that, a de­ scription and by no means a definition of death in its very essence. It is completely silent, for instance, on the characteristic feature of death, that it is an event for man as a whole and as a spiritual person, in terms of his defin­ itively achieved self-realization.

He notes also the obscurity of the concept of sepa­ ration with respect to the relation of the soul to the world after death. If the soul is united with the body, then it obviously stands in relation to that totality of which the body is part, that totality which he identifies as the uni­ ty of the material world.

Since the soul's substantial union with the body as its substantial form also relates it to this radical unity of the world, the separation of the body and soul in death cannot simply abolish this relation to the world, leaving the soul "a-cosmic." In strict Thomistic doctrine, says Hahner, the informing of the body by the soul is not simply an activity 157

of the soul, but its inseparable reality. The soul's rela- j tion to matter is transcendental, metacategorical and must persist after death, belonging as it does to the inner per­ fection of the soul. Rahner suggests, therefore, that the fact that the soul ceases to maintain the body's separate identity only serves to open the soul the more widely to the world, becoming a contributary cause of the whole world.

f~hner's theory of the pan-cosmic relation of the soul to the world while received with respect as a specula­ tive insight of some merit is not considered totally unprob­ lematic. The difficulty has to do with understanding just what he means. The critical question concerns this unity of the material world, a transempirical unity of an ontologioal kind, says Rahner. What sort of radical unity of the mater­ ial world has he in mind, his interlocutors99would ask. How explain this further? Rahner himself acknowledges that this ground of the unity of the universe is hard to conceive, yet real. That his approach see.ms unusual or difficult to ac­ cept, he suggests, is due to a persistent influence of Neo­ platonism which takes for granted that the soul becomes a­ cosmic at death. If Rahner's theory of the pan-cosmic rela­ tion can stand it brings theology of death a long way from Glorieux' s description of death as "le fin de l'unite sub­ stantielle du compose humain."

Focusing on death as the consequence of sin, Rahner pOints out the natural dimension of death. While death 158 stands in causal relation to sin, as visible expression of, the disharmony between God and man, this does not mean that man would have lived endlessly had he not sinned, but rath­ er that he would have brought his life to pure active con­ summation from within. Not merely a consequence of man's guilt death is also a natural event, an immediate conse­ quence of his constitution as body and spirit. Actual death, however, is always either an event of salvation or damnation. The common element in the natural essence of death by virtue of which all men die the "same" death and yet by which it is either salvation or damnation is the "ob­ scure, hidden character of death." The end of man, as we have ·seen, considered from his point of view, presents an inseparable and irreducible unity, an ontologically dialec­ tical opposition of opposites. As the end of man as spiri­ tual person, death is an active self-fulfillment from with­ in; as a biological being death means a radical emptying of man, a destruction, an accident which strikes him from with­ out. And on the basis of human experience it is never pos­ sible to say whether death is really the true perfection or the true end of the man who has died.

That man since Adam brings to accomplishment the death which is his act visibly manifests the absence of grace and so it stands as the penalty of sin. That death can be the culmination of mortal sin shows, says Rahner, that death is not merely an isolated point at the end, but axio­ logically present throughout all of life. 159

While man faces death rightly only when he surrendJrs himself unconditionally to the decision of God and while mor­ t al sin consists in the will to die autonomously, still, man rightly shrinks back in horror from death, for death is some- thing which should not be. However, if man tries to explain it away . he makes of death what he most fears in it, the be­ ginning of eternal death. Death is not to be abolished. but transformed, and only in Jesus Christ.

Hahner's treatment of death as personal act requires some further explication. For while he sees the finality of death as an inner factor in death itself. and not as some­ thing arbitrarily connected with it by God--as do Glorieux and Boros; while he argues that if this be so then death must not be just a free act but a special kind of free act, the free act, final and definitive by its very nature--as do Glorieux and Boros; Rahner stands, nevertheless, at some dis­ tance from these others . He does not speak of death as a mo­ ment of special illumination. The exprecsion "final option" is nowhere to be found in his The Theology of Death. How, then, does he understand death as personal act? dobert Ochs offers some further reflection concerning what Rahner does and does not mean in speaking of death as personal act. IOO We present here a summary of his thought.

That death is a personal act is not a question of the style that one sees in the case of some heroes. It does not mean that a person is lucid or illuminated at death. It does 160 not imply that man will be given a final chance to opt for / or against God at the end of his life. It in no way intends to valorize man's last moments above the rest of his life. This would cheapen life, taking the existential pressure off the present moment, where the real decisions have to be made. That death is personal fulfillment does not mean, either, that life goes on maturing despite the appearance of decline, senility and so on, as if people necessarily became wiser or more serene with age.

As the end of the time of pilgrimage, death brings man as a moral and spiritual person a finality which renders his life decision for or against God final and unalterable. This doctrine takes life with radical seriousness. Life has a genuine beginning and a genuine end.

The end of man as a spiritual person is an ac­ tive consummation from within, a bringing of himself to completion, a growth that preserves the issue of his life; it is a total entry in­ to possession of himself, the state of having 'produced' himself, the fullness of1B~e being he has become by all his free acts.

If the life decision becomes definitive in death be­ cause of what death is, and not because of arbitrary divine decree, then death must not be just a free act, but the free act and definitive by its very nature. An act that has such a hold on itself, notes Ochs, is not easy to imagine for we have no direct experience of such an act. It is only present as a dynamism, an ideal, a desire which is implicit in our im­ portant choices and which makes them possible. 161

Despite our desire to commit ourselves completely and I for the ~ood, all the free commitments of life are reversible. They are made in time; they do not give birth to eternity. This is also true of our option for God . It is ripening throughout life, but is still immature our whole life long. It becomes final only at the end.

The final act by which we are j~dged is not just the last of a series which weighs more heavily, but an act which sums up all the others. It is the resume of a lifetime, the authentic expression of ourselves. It is not an act done when we are not at our best; it is supremely representative of ourselves, of what we really are. We are speaking ulti­ mately of one deed, good or bad, of which our good and bad deeds are more or less completely integrated elements. At bottom life is a unity. Our final act of integrity is pre­ cisely an act of integration, by which we finally manage to give a consistent meaning to our lives, so that all of our life makes sense, one sense.

Judgment is an unveiling of what we really are, of our basic option, that which lies inaccessible, but maturing, beneath a veil of ambiguity all o~ lives. Judgment is ir­ reversible; its outcome is decided in this life; it is a de­ cision of this life. This is judgment put passively. Put actively this whole complex means that the Christian person adheres to God wholeheartedly in fulfillment of the command to love God with the whole mind, whole heart and whole 162

strength. Man is a free, adult partner in loving God. This / means life must make him capable of this. Either man choos- es God wholeheartedly in his lifetime, or he never does.

Besides this formal approach to death as act, we may note in iUlhner's essay "On Martyrdom" an existential approach to the voluntary character of death. That death is an act has more to do with the presence of death throughout life than with the final moment Which is really the killing of death, the death of death, either as second death, or the killing of death and the victory of life.

Because death is continuously present throughout the whole of human life, biologically and in the concrete experi­ ence of each individual person, death is also an act of free­ dom. But the mere presence of death throughout life does not make death a free act. Man has to die his death in freedom. He can not avoid the death imposed on him as the task of his freedom. His freedom lies not in the whether but in the how. Do we accept death, then, grudingly or heartily?

There is a real dialectic here, a dialectic of the chosen and the imposed. What is imposed is not just death, nor the necessity of accepting it just anyhow, but the neces­ sity of ac.cepting it freely. Man is a tension of person and nature and by the tension he is obliged, 1. e., forced, to

come to terms ~/ith death freely, to face it freely. fJIan is mortal and free, and he is both of these unasked. But in be­ ing obliged to die freely, he is asked how he wills to do 163 this. It is a question of interpretation, of how man under- / stands the death he must die. Is death extinction or is it fulfillment? What from the Christian point of view is the right interpretation of the act of life which is death?

Men do not usually answer this in abstract state­ ments, but rather live and tacitly carry out their free con­ viction through the actions of their life and the deeds of daily existence even when they do not know explicitly that by their life they are interpreting their death. The working out of this basic conviction which gradually comes to expres­ sion involves among other elements an interpretation of one's own death.

The basic underlying choice is an act of understand­ ing, of interpretation. It is first existential self-under­ standing. Secondly, it is a reading of something essential­ ly ambiguous. It is an act of understanding and at the same time an eminently free act. We are here on the deep unreflec­ tive personal level where freedom and understanding dwell side by side. Such a conception is central in existential philos­ ophy, pOints out Ochs, which sees the fundamental human ques­ tions as unapproachable by an uncommitted, pre-supposition­ less spectator.

Death is interpretation in the sense of reading a sort of symbol whose meaning is not immediately or unambiguously clear. Does one view his end as extinction or fulfillment? It can be viewed in both ways. Death itself does not sal 164 toward which end we a.re moving. That death is a fulfillment ,( is not obvious; in fact, it suggests the opposite.

Hahner's approach here to death as act comes from the conviction that everything in a person's existence should ultimately be act, should be freely affirmed. Birth, like death, is a free act in the sense that one must freely assim­ ilate one's de facto origin. Even one's freedom, which is discovered as a fact, must be freely assumed. This does not mean , however, accepting what is imposed as a brute fact. This would be the opposite of freedom, a surrender of freedom to what is beneath it. Free acceptance of what is imposed means giving it a meaningful interpretation. That dying freely is a question of ~ we die the death we must die, has to be understood ~dth this in mind. We see here, again, the convergence of freedom and understanding where radical in­ volvement of the person is concerned. The how of our accep­ tance is then a question of how we accept what we have to ac- cept.

What death as act means here, then, can be seen bet­ ter by considering the objection: Must one accept or reject death at all? Must we adopt this existential attitude to­ wards it? Isn't the attitude of wait and see more modest? Is there, perhaps, an attitude prior to that of hope or de­ spair? How can ordinary people be expected to settle exal­ ted questions about the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of lifo? Shouldn't we postpone such interpretation until all the evidence is in? 165

Such an objection, Ochs points out, given a good i17 lustration of what is meant by death as passive, It is an objection against death as act, for it denies that we need adopt a personal attitude of acceptance or rejection vis-a­ vis death. It suggests that death is something that will happen to us sooner or later, but need not concern us now. This objection makes sense insofar as it succeeds in regard­ ing death as a moment at the end of life and manages to dis­ regard death as the outcome of life. It misunderstands death as the validation or invalidation of life. Only where this teleological view of death 1s grasped, does death cast the two contrasting lights on life: that of life running to fulfillment or life as ever more manifest futility, ever more belied promise.

Death is the goal of time as continually gathering or draining. But in either case it is the final evaluation of life. The wait and see attitude pretends a certain indif- ference about the outcome, making the person a spectator at his own destiny rather than someone committed to a certain issue. The wait and see attitude is not completely indiffer­ ent. Complete indifference is really a form of despair, or at least an attitude that has ceased to hope. ~lhat is the difference, asks Oehs, between the two attitudes: "I desire fulfillment and fear ultimate frustration:" and "I hope for fulfillment and do not despair of it." In the first there is a modest wait and see attitude accompanying mere desire and 166 fear. But hope and despair, though they still have to wai1 yet decide the outcome already_ Must they? And if so, what is the type of comndtment that means this is so?

What of the attitude that regards death genuinely as the upshot of life? Can an attitude that has already raised itself to the level of hope or despair postpone pronouncement about the outcome? Can it wait till all the evidence is in before it commits itself?

All the evidence will never be in. Life will always remain inconclusive and ambiguous. Life as it appears will never clearly warrant either hope or despair on the basis of the evidence. And this type of evidence is anything but ob­ jective. It will be judged positive or negative depending on the judge's prior disposition. In the meantime life must be lived. If such questions concerning meaningfulness can not receive some answer in this meantime, they must be put off until after life when they are of no more use. But in deal­ ing with questions of hope and despair we are in the realm of what we do in the meantime. We are in the realm of the basic underlying co~~itments which govern our interpretation of the evidence. The question, says Ochs, comes down to this: does living in the meantime involve any commitment to life, so that if one refuses such commitment one really belongs to the living dead?

The realm of such commitments is what Hahner refers to as the realm of the flheart,tt that center of personal and 16'1 spiritual disposition over oneself, a center never completely / accessible to us, which can only be approached more and more without ever bein~ reall y grasped. It i s from this dynamic ground that man must look f or his basic authentic self-under­ standing, though it is a self-understanding he will never completely possess. In this center of person understanding and will are one. It is from this center that man's basic act s prings. Whether considered as basically religious, or in its other characteristics as an act of love, or as an act of dying, this basic act will have all the peculiarities proper to this deeper realm of the heart.

Ochs concludes, then, by combining the results of the two approaches (the formal and the existential) to death as act af, follo\'.Js:

1. The line between time and eternity is the difference between the effort toward self­ appropriation and definitively achieved self­ appropriation. 2. Though this appropriation of oneself roughly coincides with one' s life­ time, because it is the deed of one's life­ time, the line of demarcation does not neces­ sarily coincide with the biological moment of death. 3. In fact, we do not know at what moment our underlying option becomes final. We know only that we are never to consider ourselves confirmed in grace or lost in de­ spair. Concern about the moment is idle (le­ gitimate speculation, perhaps. for a very on­ tically oriented curiosity); only concern about hope or despair is existential. 4. For all this lack of concern about moments, the connection between our basic decision and death is by no means arbitrary. One's life is toward death, and the personal appropriation of this life involves coming to terms with death. 102 168

It should be clear, then, from the preceding that j Rahner is more concerned with death as the culmination of the lifelong articulation of one's basic option, than with death merely as some final moment, some last chance, or first chance. Death is indeed a personal act, the personal act of one's whole life and is the consummation of that life in the last hour as the genuine expression of who one really is, 0.1' what one has genuinely become as the fully, freely and defin­ itively produced statement of oneself.

The distinct merit of l~ahner ' s treatment of death as personal act is precisely in relating it to the whole of life, in speaking of death as axiologically present throw~h­ out all of life. He makes no contribution whatever to the attitude that death is something that will simply happen to us at some point in the future and which need not concern us now. Appropriation of life, as &ahner sees it, clearly re­ quires confrontation with death and appropriation of death is the task of one's life.

While seeing the end of man as a spiritual person as an active consmrunation from within, a bringing of self to completion, Rahner's treatment is not simply a perfective view of death. The negativity of death, the limiting dimen­ sion is fully respected. Death as the end of biological life is simultaneously and in a way which affects the whole man , an irruption from without, a destruction, the intervention of the Fates, an external event that turns up unexpectedly, 169 an accident which strikes him from without with no assurance / that it will strike him at the moment in which interiorll he has completed his life. It io a blow of fate, a thief in the night, an emptying and a reducing of man to powerlessness, in fact, the end.

lUlhner's treatment preserves the full ambiguity of death, noting it is precisely by virtue of this obscure char­ acter of death that it can be an event of salvation or damna­ tion. Death appears as act and fate, as end and fulfillment, as willed and suffered, as plenitude and emptiness.

The crowning merit of Hahner's analysis of death is the unified way in which he can then speak of the death of Christ as redemptive precisely as death and the death of the Christian as a dying with Christ, sacramentally appropriated throughout all of life.

The death of Christ is a consequence of his incarna­ tion. He entered into human life which reaches its comple­ tion only by passing through death, a death that is equivocal and obscure. He took death upon himself which in the con­ crete order expresses and manifests the creation which fell in the angels and men. He not only made satisfaction for sin but what he suffered and enacted was death, the manifestation and expression of sin in the world. He did this in total freedom as an act and manifestation of the divine grace which is his by right . In Christ, then. death is changed; it be­ comes something different from what it would otherwise be. IlJ

The very obscurity of Christ's death expresses and embodies i his lovin~ obedience to the Father. Death, which was mani- fer.tation of sin, becomes the manifestation of the oblitera­ tion of sin bv Christ's obedience to the Father's will.

'l'hrough Christ's death the spiritual being which was his from the beginning, and which he gave active expression to in the life that was completed by his death, became open to the whole world, has been inserted into the totality of the world and has be­ come a permanent, ontological modifir8tion of the world in its root and ground. J

Thus the world as a whole and as the scene of human activity is a new place. Ontological possibilities now ex­ ist for the personal acts of all other men which would not exist except for the death of Christ. When the vessel of his body broke in death, he was poured out over the world and be­ came even in his humanity what of right he always was--the heart of the world, the inmost center of all created being.

Physical death is an axiological factor which domin­ ates the whole of life and it is an action. The death of the Christian is different from the death of the sinner. It is a saving event. Those who have died in faith are not dead in Christ only because they lived in Christ, but also because their dying was in Christ. Death, as the event which gathers up the whole personal act of a human life into one fulfill­ ment, is the culmination both of the reception and of the effecting of salvation. The dreadful falling into the hands of the living God, in which death must appear as a manifesta- 171 tion of sin, becomes in reality: "Into thy hands I commend l my spirit."

rhe sacramento represent the visible form of the

a~ic acts by which redemption is appropriated. Baptism is initiation into the death of Christ. Eucharist is the con- tinuously renewed celebration of the death of the Lord until he cornes again. The anointment of the sick is a consecra­ tion to death in companionship with the Lord. What occurs "sacramentally" in these moments of culmination, happens "really" in our death: the partaking in the death of the Lord.

Finally, if the confrontation with death is key to cultural renewal and essential to the appropriation of per­ sonal life, it is at the heart of the Christian vocation. "Faith that has not come to grips with death, " says Robert· Ochs, "is not a deep faith, not a tested faith, because death is ill temptation of faith. ,,104 Karl ..{ahner gives us a theology of death which far from transforming the experi­ ence and shock of real death into a phantom web of concepts, lays upon us as men and as Christians the full exigence of coming to terms with death in its deepest reality.

Conclusion

At this point in our history the problem of death is not merely a theological problem or a matter of religious concern "narrowly," "ecclesiastically, " interpreted. It is more . It is a spiritual problem, a cultural problem in its

..... 172 own right, and a symptom of the larger problem of culture, ,a j problem of creating order out of the chaos of contemporary life, of giving shape and meaning to our life in the human community_

In this regard, however, an intellectually respect­ able theology of death makes it far more difficult to dismiss the question of death, and the role of religion in interpret­ ing it. The Christian concern with death today, however, ought to go beyond attempting to solve specific problems of theological interpretation. The whole question of the rela­ tionship between death and religious experience is what re­ quires our particular attention today.

Freud maintained that the origin of religion stems fro·m man's attempt to cope with death. \'ihether or not this is historically accurate, it is certainly the case that the fact and experience of death has been intimately tied up with man's religious experience. And if, historically speaking, man's initiation to encounter with the sacred was somehow connected to man's encounter with death, then might it be said that the denial of death serves in some sense to block access to religion? And might confrontation with death serve again today, as it did with his forebears, to lead contempor­ ary man to encounter with the numinous? Might not this be to some extent the deeper significance of death bubbling up from the unconscious, of the problem of death coming to a head today?

"- 173

We are experiencing more and more concern today about j the "quality of life." Coping with the challenges before us, the problem of survival, the problem of meaning, will require some significant change in our modern technological orienta­ tion. It will require "convellsion."

To open oneself to death is to accept the as­ pect of 'becoming,' that is, of transformation, which is the stuff of life, says depth psychol­ ogist Herzog, and so at length, to realize that the human condition transcends itself. On the other hand, it is also true that the 'excess of death' has produced a tendency in men and women to shut themselves off from this aspect of life by putting aside all thought of death. This leads to the inhibition of ~ becoming, and creates in its place an appearance of security which is, in fact, continually threatened by 105 unconscious anxieties giving rise to neuroses.

Neurosis, however, not only brings with it the threat of breakdown, but if heeded also the promise of healing. Neu­ rosis is an attempt of the psyche, whether individually or collectively understood, to heal itself. The psyche is a self-regulating system. Conscious and unconscious stand in compensatory relationship to one another. Neurosis is the attempt of the unconscious to secure the integration of some split off, unintegrated part of basic reality. The emergence of the problem of death as a matter of special importance may well be ground for hope and not only despair. It may well bring with it not only threat, but promise. It is an oppor­ tunity for modern man to find his ways to activate his capa­ city for radical transformation and to recover the realiza­ tion that the human condition transcends itself. It is 174 these possibilities latent in our contemporary problem with / death which should summon our best attentions.

The problem of death is not only a critical human and Christian concern; it may yet serve not merely as a point of divergence, but as a possibility of convergence for Christian and secular man and a point of contact between the Church and the modern world. Says Helmut Thielicke: "Church and world alike gaze spellbound on this third party (death), this common ground where willy-nilly their glances meet." The authentic confrontation with death may be a sitUation in which modern man may yet encounter the sacred, and in hearing a word from beyond. be open to confronting the mystery of Jesus Christ. /

FOOTNOTES

1. Gorer, p. 192ff. 2. May, pp. 105-109. 3. Toynbee, p. 131. 4. Lifton, Boundaries, p. 121. 5. Lifton, "The Politics of Immortality," p. 70.

6. ~., p. 24. 7. F40rgenthau, "Death in the Nuclear Age," The 1-1odern Vi­ sion of Death, p. 76. S. -Ibid. 9. Lifton, "The Politics of Immortality, n p. 110. 10. Harrington, pp. 11-29. 11. Herzog, p. 17. 12. Jung, liThe Soul and Death," The Meaning of Death, pp. 3-15.

13. ~., p. 6. 14. -Ibid., p. S. 15. -Ibid., p. 10. 16. ~., p. 12. 17. -Ibid., p. 14. 18. J. Glenn Gray, "The Problem of Death in Modern Philoso­ phy," The lJIodern Vision of Death, p. 45. 19. Demske, p. 193. 20. Hahner, Sacramentum Mundi, vol. 2, p. 58.

175 176

21. Muller-Goldkuhle, "Post Biblical Developments in Escha~ tological Thought, II Conciliwn, vol. 41, pp. 27-28. / 22. Gleason, "Toward a Theology of Death," p. 60. 23. Glorieux, "Endurcissement final et graces dernieres," p. 866. 24. "Hoc enim est hominibus mors quod est angelis casus," John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa, 2, 4 (PG 94, 877C). See also: Aquinas, II Sent., b. 7, Qu. 1, Art. 2; IV Sent., D. 46, Qu. 1, Art. 3; De Veritate, 24, 10, Sed contra 4; S. Th., I, 64, 2. 25. Glorieux, "Endurcissement final et graces dernieres," p. 874 . See also: Aquinas, II Sent ., D. 7, Quo 1, Art. 2. 26. Glorieux, "Endurcissement final et graces dernieres," p. 882. 27. Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, c. 174.

28. ~., p. 885.

29. ~., p. 887. 30. -Ibid., p. 889. 31- .!!?!2,., p. 892. 32. Glorieux, "In Hora Mortis," p. 186. 33. llist., p. 190. 34. -Ibid., p. 194. 35. -Ibid., p. 199. 36. !olli., p. 201.

37. ~., p. 213. 38. l2!S!. 39. l2!S!., p. 214. 40. Ibid., p. 216. 41. Matthew O'Connell, "The Mystery of Death: A Recent Con­ tribution," pp. 437-8. 42. Glorieux, "In Hora I>1ortis ," p. 189. 177

43. .!l2!s!., p. 191. I 44. Boros, The Mystery of Death, p. vii. 45. -Ibid., p. ix. 46. ~., p. 10. 47. -Ibid., pp. 10-11. 48. !E!!!., p. 17. 49. !E!!!., p. 28. 50. .!lli., p. 35. 51. -Ibid., p. 40. 52 • .!lli., p. 47 • 53. .!l2!s!., p. 51- 54. .!lli., p. 58.

55. ~., p. 70.

56. ~., p. 74 • 57. .!lli., p. 75. 58. -Ibid., p. 76. 59. Ibid., p. 80. 60. ill!!., p. 93. 61. -Ibid., p. 98. 62. Ibid., p. 112. See also: Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, ~3, 6 (PG 7, 964, AS) . 63. Boros, The Mysterr of Death, p. 116.

64. ~., p. 118. 65. ill.!!. 66. .!lli., p. 127. 67. -Ibid., p. 147. 68. -Ibid., p. 157. 178

69. ~., p. 162. ! 70. Ibid., p. 163. 7l. -Ibid., p. 164. 72. -Ibid., p. 165. 73. Joseph Collins, n ••• ~fuo's There?" p. 60. 74. -Ibid. 75. 14.atthew O'Connell, Ope cit., p. 44l. 76. Joseph Collins, Ope cit., p. 61. 77. Ibid.

78. ~. 79. Boros, The Mystery of Death, p. 173. 80. 14atthew O'Connell, Ope cit., p. 440. 8l. 1lli. 82. Rahner, On the Theology of Death, p. 10.

83. ~., p. 12. 84. -Ibid., p. 15. 85 • .!!?!!!., p. 17.

86. ~., p. 21. 87. -Ibid., p. 27. 88. Rahner, Theological Dictionary, p. 461. 89. Rahner, On the Theology of Death, p. 30.

90. ~., pp. 33-34. 91...... Ibid., p. 38 • 92. -Ibid., p. 41. 93. -Ibid., p. 43. 94. ~., p. 65. 179

95. ill£.. , p. 69. j 96. -Ibid., p. 73. 97. Ibid., p. 75. 9$. -Ibid., p. 79. 99. Ernst, "The Theology of Death," p. 591; Matthew O'Con- nell, "On the Theology of Death," p. 139. 100. Robert Oohs, pp. 55-77. 10l. Rahner, Theological DictionarI, p. 117. 102. Ochs , p. 77 . 103. &ahner, Theological DictionarI, p. 118. 104. Oells , p. 15 .

105. Herzog , Ope cit., p. 10. /

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