the Harrowing of Hell<\/a> anymore. The creeds say that \u201cHe descended into hell\u201d but nothing about what He did there. I get reminded from time to time that \u201chell\u201d once meant \u201cthe grave.\u201d True enough. They laid Christ in a tomb. He wasn\u2019t exactly buried as we understand the term today, though if a tomb is a burrow into a hillside as often pictured, it\u2019s still a burial in the earth.<\/p>\nLater 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\u2019ve read of those who call this release from \u201cthe limbo of the fathers\u201d the Harrowing of Hell. Limbo as it was later understood is something I won\u2019t be discussing in detail here, as I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
There are problems with hell generally. I\u2019m 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\u2019s redemption emphasized that against an infinitely perfect God, all imperfection is infinitely evil and thus deserving of eternal torture.<\/p>\n
Huh? What the, er, hell?<\/em><\/p>\nNaively assuming that college allowed for interesting discussions in class, I raised my hand and asked whether, compared to God\u2019s infinite perfection and goodness, wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
To this day, believing that God always wins, I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s favor. God wins, today and always!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2026may 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\u2019t hear much about the Harrowing of Hell anymore. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5601"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5605,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5601\/revisions\/5605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}