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Christ's Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of Love: A Spirituality of Holy Saturday

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/scs.2023.a899760

1535-3117

Belden C. Lane,

Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

Christ's Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of Love:A Spirituality of Holy Saturday Belden C. Lane (bio) Hieronymous Bosch was thirteen years old when a raging fire swept through the Dutch town where he lived in fifteenth-century Brabant. It destroyed 4,000 houses, including his childhood home. The memory of the trauma must have lingered as a nightmare, appearing often in his later paintings of hell. In one of these compositions, "Christ's Descent into Hell," Jesus appears as a tiny figure casting a scant light in a surreal landscape of fiery shadows and macabre images. I think of the young Bosch wrestling with God's absence in his early experience of unfathomable loss, wondering what angst kept flowing from the tip of his brush through the rest of his life.1 Click for larger view View full resolution Hieronymous Bosch, "Christ's Descent into Hell" (Metropolitan Museum of Art) "Where in the Hell is God?" This is a question frequently heard by chaplains, pastors, and theologians—asked more often by people desperately wanting to believe than by those inclined to scoff. I've asked it again myself, as the result of a recent tragedy in my life and my reading of Douglas Christie's new book, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life.2 Christie draws his title from Hadewijch of Antwerp, the thirteenth-century mystic who lived two hundred years earlier than Hieronymous Bosch, in the [End Page 146] same Dutch province of Brabant. She, too, had been gripped by the ferocity of hell, but in a very different way. Her most intimate encounter with the divine involved her descent into the deepest abyss of God's abandonment. Hell, she claimed, is "the highest form of God's love."3 This remarkable poet and contemplative wasn't a cloistered nun. She lived in a Beguine house, caring for the sick and poor—at a time when famine stalked the land, and the bubonic plague was on its way. Influenced by courtly love poetry and other women mystics of her time, she knew that the heights of God's love required a fiery and ruthless self-emptying.4 She could be "wholly God's" only to the extent that she relinquished everything—trusting nothing in herself, abandoning any assurance of God's care. Only then could she identify with those around her who had themselves lost everything. Sometimes a shared darkness is all we have. For Hadewijch, mystical experience meant throwing herself into the wild improbability of God's love: "To founder unceasingly in heat and cold, in the depths of love, its high darkness. This outdoes the work of hell," she cried.5 I'm drawn to her poetry by my own experience of losing a son to acute myeloid leukemia, one of the deadliest forms of cancer. He died two years ago at the age of forty, leaving his wife and a four-year-old daughter who—like me—have struggled to understand his death. How do you pray when prayer feels like falling into an abyss? How do you imagine the hell of God's absence as constituting the highest form of love? You're tempted to retreat into a solitary hell of your own. Withdrawing to lick your wounds. C. S. Lewis observed that the doors of hell are locked from the inside. People there want to be left alone. In The Great Divorce, he pictures hell as a sprawling, unkempt town where people are continually moving their houses farther away from each other.6 I'm not thinking here of hell as simply a destination of the damned on the other side of death. Hell is also the chosen "escape" of those on this side, who in their paralyzing grief, guilt, and fear descend into lonely despair. They find it impossible to leap over the vast chasm between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The price of a cruel death is too much to pay for a cheap and quick resurrection. Their sense of loss is too overwhelming to allow for easy answers. In apocalyptic times like these, they're stunned already by too many stories of...