…may well be the strangest day in the entire Christian calendar. On Good Friday, Christ suffered and died on the cross. He was then buried, to rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday. So what did He do on Holy Saturday?
He harrowed hell.
You don’t hear much about the Harrowing of Hell anymore. The creeds say that “He descended into hell” but nothing about what He did there. I get reminded from time to time that “hell” once meant “the grave.” True enough. They laid Christ in a tomb. He wasn’t exactly buried as we understand the term today, though if a tomb is a burrow into a hillside as often pictured, it’s still a burial in the earth.
Later Catholic tradition holds that in harrowing hell, Christ released all the people from hell who had been there after their death, since there was not yet redemption or baptism. The tradition does not say that they were all being tortured. I’ve read of those who call this release from “the limbo of the fathers” the Harrowing of Hell. Limbo as it was later understood is something I won’t be discussing in detail here, as I’ve not heard it mentioned in a Catholic context in a good many years and am not sure of its current status. Later Catholic tradition morphed limbo into the eternal home of unbaptized infants who die, without torment but also without the Beatific Vision.
There are problems with hell generally. I’m no big fan of Bertrand Russell, but he made a salient point in asking how infinite punishment for finite transgression can be just. When I was a college freshman at a Catholic college in Chicago, the (old) priest teaching a lesson on Christ’s redemption emphasized that against an infinitely perfect God, all imperfection is infinitely evil and thus deserving of eternal torture.
Huh? What the, er, hell?
Naively assuming that college allowed for interesting discussions in class, I raised my hand and asked whether, compared to God’s infinite perfection and goodness, wouldn’t our imperfections seem so small as to vanish into the noise? In an obvious state of agitation, the priest said that made no sense. After that session, he threatened to eject me from the course for saying such things. I kept my mouth shut in later class sessions, having learned a few lessons that were not in our textbooks.
To this day, believing that God always wins, I can’t figure how I could be more merciful than God, nor that an all-powerful and all-loving God could eternally lose and torture countless people that He loved, even for dumb things like eating meat on Friday.
Anyway. Holy Saturday is clearly the day when Jesus descended into hell, preached a little (according to some traditions) and then let everybody out. Did He close the gates? Lotta arguments about that, which I won’t go into here. Tomorrow is the Big Day, in whose shadow Holy Saturday will always remain. I feel sorry for it now and then. Harrowing hell was no small victory, for God and everybody else. I raise a glass of good red wine in today’s favor. God wins, today and always!
I had not heard of the Hallowing of Hell story, so thank you for the post. Although not Catholic, I have an interest in Catholic history, traditions, and beliefs.
It’s really “the Harrowing of Hell.” I’ve never seen the word “hallowing” used in the context of hell.
Thanks for catching that! I did mean “Harrowing of Hell”. There are certain letter (and number) combinations that my brain doesn’t always process correctly.
The Harrowing was part of the background of Dante’s Inferno. IIRC, there were bridges between the circles of Hell, many of which had been broken during the Harrowing.
I also STR that Adam was released from Hell at that time – Jesus having atoned for Adam’s “original sin”.
But in Dante’s vision, the souls in Limbo remained. Also, Dante envisioned a sort of pagan paradise in Limbo (meadows, groves, babbling brooks) where the likes of Plato and Aristotle got to hang out,
Also, in Paradiso (the last part of the Divine Comedy, Dante placed the souls of unbaptised children in the Sempiternal Rose, next to the throne of God.
I’m not Catholic and I’ve actually stopped saying the “He descended into hell” part of the creed when its recited in my church, because I can’t find that happening anywhere in the Bible. Is it mentioned in the Catholic Bible?
My (seeing through a glass dimly) understanding of eternal punishment is that the people in eternal torment aren’t there (solely) because of their sins, but because they chose not to accept Christ’s atonement for their sins.
As usual, you raise some thought-provoking points. Keep wrestling with them.
“He descended into hell” comes mostly from The Apostles’ Creed, which evolved over several centuries after Christ, and didn’t take up the phrase until the 600’s. There was still argument over what the phrase meant, and some theologians simply stated that “hell” meant “the grave” and did not involve the Hell of punishment as we understand it today.
The notion of the Harrowing of Hell is a loose reading of 1 Peter 3:19:
“18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, 19 in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, 20 because they formerly did not obey…”
But mostly from the Apostles’ Creed. The phrase is not present in the Nicene Creed, so its inclusion in sacred tradition is subject to argument. Until very recently the parishes I belonged to used the Nicene Creed.
There’s some good discussion of the issue and its meaning here:
https://www.logos.com/grow/the-apostles-creed-its-history-and-origins/