THE DESCENT INTO HELL Eastern and Western views of the time between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection
Ryan, Jerry
THE DESCENT INTO HELL Abandonment or a victory over death? Jerry Ryan The first time I assisted at the Russian Orthodox Easter Vigil at Saint Mary's in Chelsea, I was disoriented and somewhat...
...Jerry Ryan The first time I assisted at the Russian Orthodox Easter Vigil at Saint Mary's in Chelsea, I was disoriented and somewhat disappointed...
...And because he is without sin, he experiences the second death in all its horror...
...It was an intuition that, in celebrating the Descent into Hell, the Eastern church was tapping into something on another level altogether...
...And thus, in their mutual complementary testimony, Orthodoxy and Catholicism proclaim the riches of the Paschal mystery and the wonders of the love with which we are loved...
...This difference might account for the diverse manners in which the mystery of the Descent is contemplated in the two traditions...
...Von Balthasar relied heavily on the mystical experiences of Adrienne von as, quite frankly, misleading...
...His most recent article in Commonweal was "Twice on Sundays," January 12,1996...
...The hymnology struck me as extremely naive: Adam and Eve kept popping up, Death was always complaining about being deceived, there were constant references to the tomb and the custom of visiting the graveyards during Easter week...
...1 Cor...
...He who is without sin enters, through obedience, into the absurd...
...For nothing is more absurd or contradictory than the entry of Life into death...
...According to von Balthasar, in this state of utter dereliction and abandonment during the triduum mortis, the knowledge and hope of the Resurrection have lost all meaning, all sense of time has evaporated...
...The "preaching" of Christ to the righteous would be the revelation of the redemptive incarnation to them and their subsequent introduction into the beatific vision...
...There was an emphasis on death, personified as a protagonist of the Paschal drama, as though the liturgy were looking back over its shoulder instead of rejoicing in the Resurrection...
...Hell is the place where God is absent, where there is neither faith nor hope nor love...
...For through Jesus, life enters into the kingdom of death and overcomes its terrible darkness...
...Other aspects of Jesus' redemptive incarnation-the sacrificial and the propitiatory aspects, and the Resurrection itself-now come into sharper focus, for the physical resurrection of Christ is the effective sign of his triumph over death, and is accomplished during his three days in the tomb, a time that itself now becomes lifegiving...
...The Descent into Hell is the image of our present age...
...There is absolutely nothing to fear anymore: Death and sin have been vanquished...
...In an article in the New York Times on Holy Saturday last year (April 6,1996), Peter Steinfels opposed the insights of the late Hans Urs von Balthasar to these elaborate scenarios about Christ's descent to the underworld...
...For twenty years, von Speyr relived the Passion during Holy Week...
...The Latin tradition contemplates with tenderness and awe an event that took place in our history...
...He who died on the Cross and entered into death is one of the Holy Trinity, the source of all life...
...Even though this mystery is an article of the Apostles' Creed, the Latin tradition has relegated it to the background-almost as an embarrassment...
...Speyr for his "Holy Saturday theology...
...But perhaps not...
...I have touched here briefly on the fundamental differences of perspective between the mysticisms of Orient and Occident...
...In such a context, the Eastern imagery depicting the "activity" of Christ in the netherworld appears not only as archaic and infantile but Jerry Ryan is a free-lance writer who lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts...
...As the Easter antiphon repeats, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life...
...The Eastern churches focus on the effects of this mystery, what it means for our life, and for our death...
...These "spirits" are generally understood as the righteous who died before the coming of Christ and who resided in the "heaven of the patriarchs," a sort of limbo of anticipation...
...This is not just an historical event of the past but an activity taking place among us now...
...It is seldom commented upon...
...The disembodied soul of Jesus is in a state of total passivity and solitude, psychologically cut off from others and cut off from God...
...This might also explain why in the Byzantine liturgy the Resurrection is inseparable from the Descent into Hell...
...It was the constant references to the Descent into Hell during the Byzantine Paschal liturgy that left me most uncomfortable...
...The Resurrection of Christ is the sign and guarantee of the final victory...
...So powerful and all-embracing is this concept of the triumph over Hades that Origen was led to believe that nothing was excluded, that Hades itself was transformed into a paradise and that even the demons were saved...
...In the Roman liturgy, where the symbolism is much clearer and more logical, we accompany Christ in his Passion and rejoice in his Resurrection as his personal triumph over death...
...It is as though the Resurrection of Christ were incomplete until it culminates in the resurrection of all in the new heaven and the new earth...
...In Western mysticism, the tendency is to envisage God and his Christ as an objective presence, exterior to us and transcending us...
...If we consider what happened to God during the triduum mortis, the perspective of von Balthasar makes us focus on the death of the Word in all its brutal realism and seriousness...
...That is why death is truly vanquished and the gates of hell are shattered...
...God is life, and what happens in his life happens to life itself, to the lives of all...
...The Resurrection will come as an abrupt surprise, as a "bolt of lightning...
...On the afternoon of Good Friday she would fall into a trance until early Easter Sunday morning and, in this trance-like state, she would experience the descent into hell with Jesus...
...How much would each be enriched by listening to the other...
...When it is, the commentary is usually limited to 1 Peter 3:19 which refers to the preaching of Christ to the spirits in prison...
...As the Eastern liturgy proclaims, "Adam exults and Eve rejoices" as the bonds of hell are broken...
...The descensus ad inferos represents the act of the victory of life over death by the entrance of Life into death, destroying death from within: Where Life has entered, death can no longer exist...
...Everything was "strange," to say the least...
...He has been glorified, his integrity restored and magnified, and we, in our turn, hope to share in this victory...
...The Western church marvels that Life truly died, truly suffered death in all its bitterness and disarray...
...This is not what I am used to...
...This is, of course, a question of dominating insights, of emphasis, and not a strict dichotomy...
...15:54-55...
...It is the experience of sin in its essence, of the "second death," the experience of the absence of God and thus of a meaninglessness without light...
...We thus strive to arrive at an intimacy with him...
...We touch here on the very essence of the redemption: "Death is swallowed up in victory....O Death where is thy sting...
...Even when we enter into the realm of death, we will find Jesus there...
...We venerate the Blessed Sacrament as an objective presence of Jesus in his glorified state...
...We try to imitate the Christ of the Gospels...
...For me, the imagery of Christ breaking the gates of hell, leading forth the multitude of the righteous, and trampling death underfoot was related to this very "materialist" conception of the activity of the disembodied soul of Christ among the dead and/or demons...
...Von Balthasar criticizes it as such...
...The emphasis here is on the ontological effects of the Paschal mystery, which knows no limits of time or space...
...Yet this is precisely what our faith proposes...
...This Eastern understanding is concerned not so much with the activity or passivity or psychology of Jesus during the three days his body lay in the tomb, but with the theological implications of the triduum mortis...
...This is what it means, in its starkest reality, to assume the sin of the world...
...The church of the East rejoices that death is thereby destroyed...
...My own "bolt of lightning" came during my second Holy Week at Saint Mary's...
...What von Speyr described and what von Balthasar elaborated on would appear at first glance to be the contrary of what the Byzantine liturgy celebrates...
...Adam and Eve, representing humanity sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, witness death losing its power over us...
...For the Eastern church, God's presence is experienced as interior: Our relationship with Jesus is that of a shared life, of an indwelling, a diviniza-tion, in the Spirit, of our own lives...
Vol. 124 • April 1997 • No. 7
