“You know what they say: ‘It takes nine months to create a man, and only a single day to destroy him. We both of us have known the truth of this as well as any one could ever know it.. It does not take nine months to make a man, it takes fifty years – fifty year of sacrifice, of determination, of – so many things! And when that man has been achieved, when there is no childishness left in him, nor any adolescence, when he is truly, utterly, a man – the only thing he is good for is to die”. Andre Malraux thus expressed the sense of futility, bitterness and bleak misery that so many feel when faced with the prospect of death – their own or another’s.
“It is not enough to counter this view with pious platitudes, nor can we indefinitely avoid the inevitable. What we need is a view of death that does not outrage our reason or confound our faith. Fr Boros, in this profound and brilliantly original study, shows how death is indeed not an end but a beginning, starting from ‘a moment of truth’ on which the whole of one’s life and experience is brought to bear”.
“Death gives man the opportunity of posing his first completely personal act: death is, for therefore, the moment above all others for the awakening of consciousness, for freedom, for the encounter with God, for the final decision about his eternal destiny”.
This view is masterfully explained, first, philosophically, in the light of reason, and then theologically, in the light of religion. To mature minds, prepared to face ultimate realities, this book will be immensely rewarding.