THE HARROWING OF HELL
What Jesus did on Holy Saturday - or, Why Panti Bliss is going to Heaven and David Quinn is going to Hell.
The Harrowing of Hell, by Peter Huys, circa 1570
Did you know that Christ went to Hell on Holy Saturday? And that he did so to rescue the souls of pagans and escort them to heaven instead? Christ’s underworld adventure, while he supposedly lay dead and dormant between Friday’s Crucifixion & Sunday’s Resurrection, is known as The Harrowing of Hell. Christ descended into Hell, where all the dead pre-christian and pre-baptism humans since the beginning of time had been consigned to fire and wailing. Once he got there, he divided them into the damned and the saved, into those who had led good lives despite their non-christian status, and those who were truly evil. Then he led the Righteous he had chosen in procession forth to Heaven.
The Harrowing is one of the more esoteric & suggestive episodes in The Easter Liturgy, and has given rise over the centuries to a lot of great Christian Art and rich exegetical ponderings. However, it does not have a very strong or secure basis in The Gospel &, like every other aspect of Christianity, is the subject of much doctrinal and factional controversy.
In fact, most of the lore of The Harrowing is an invention of theologians and artists who lived long after Jesus, from early christians such as St Melito of Sardis (died c. 180) right down to the Medieval period. Yet in its status as a post-Christ human invention it is in the same category as almost every Christian institution and doctrine. There is little or nothing to be found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John to back up the idea of sainthood, nor the institution of the priesthood - not to mind bishops, cardinals, the papacy or papal infallibility, nor the proscriptions on divorce or abortion, nor so much more of Christian canon and institution. The vast majority of what Christian Churches and Christians do and have done has nothing at all to do with Christ. To paraphrase a famous quote of Marx when he was expressing his dislike of the bulk of his ‘Marxist’ followers - whatever Christ may be, he is certainly not a Christian.
During the Medieval The Harrowing became incorporated into the popular mystery play cycles which were widely and annually performed by locals as well as by nomadic acting troupes. It would have been common knowledge among the European laity that Christ’s death on the cross dissolved the boundaries between all three domains; Earth, Hell, and Heaven. It is clear in The Gospel of Matthew, written down about 80AD, is that the death of Christ on the cross caused a rupture in the ordinary inter-realm relations.
Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;
And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,
And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many."
That’s right, zombies in the bible! Hell had opened and the traffic was not only one way.
Legends narrating a hero’s descent into the underworld precede Christianity and play an important role in the mythology of the ancient world and in much of later art and literature influenced by its pagan genius. Such episodes, for example, occur in The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, & in the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. We can imagine that most ordinary people, & all of those who were scribes, storytellers, or holders of religious office were aware of such tales. They answered two crucial questions posed by the mystery of death as it confronts us individually and as a society.
The first question is Where has my loved one gone? The answer, for many in the ancient world, was various versions of The Underworld. This was not divided by Greeks or Romans, for example, into Heaven & Hell but was the one place where all the dead, whether they were just or unjust, whether they were good or evil or middling fair like the most of us, are held captive.
This has some troubling implications. It means that the murderer and the murdered suffer the same destiny, that from the point of view of eternity there is no difference, moral or otherwise, between the murderer and the murdered. It raises the prospect that the persecuted will continue to be hounded by their persecutors beyond death and into infinity.
There is not much comfort, and much to dread, in this conception. Imagine the babies of Tuam having to share a room in eternity with the nuns who drowned them in sewage! Imagine the teenager who has been bullied to suicide being thrown forever in among all the bullies that have ever existed! You hardly want to meet the people who committed the gravest evils against you and your loved ones in the land of the living over and over and over in the land of the dead, do you? The indivisibility of dead souls is a very unsatisfactory idea which must have troubled many and encouraged numerous storytellers to come up with an alternative.
The second question, the urgency of which is multiplied greatly by this troublingly undifferentiated destiny of the dead, is Can I rescue my loved one from the Underworld? Mythology answers with an extremely qualified affirmative - yes you can, but it only occurs on extremely rare occasions and only to noble families benefiting from divine assistance. Rescue/retrieval then is a matter of who you know, a rare & entirely nepotistic affair - a bit like politics has always been.
Those who cross the boundaries of life and death in pre-christian mythology do so as elite citizens on personal quests which have no element of a general salvation. Christ’s harrowing is completely different. He enters the underworld, where the pre-christian dead have been stored in anticipation since the beginning of time, wielding the sword of Justice and in order to divide The Just from The Unjust.
By such actions Christ ensures that the Just of past days - the just amongst the gentiles & the pagans - may escape Hell and Gain heaven by virtue of good works done while alive, same as any Christian can.
Those whom Christ rescues from Hell as he leads them upwards in a Procession of The Righteous include, as one might expect, the Patriarchs and Prophets of The Old Testament (i.e the leaders of the Jewish faith) - everyone from Adam & Eve through Abraham, Noah, Solomon, David & so on. But according to other accounts & depictions the procession also includes the righteous and the just from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, but whose works were nevertheless holy in the eyes of God.
This means Plato, Socrates, perhaps even the cranky mendicant Diogenes, the lesbian Sappho, & the author of the pagan equivalents to the Bible, Homer….to name just a few pagan Greeks. All of these, and one presumes many many more from all over the Earth and all throughout the 300000 years of Homo Sapiens time on Earth, get to enter the Christian heaven and enjoy the fruits of the Christian redemption, even though the atheists and pagans among them may very well continue to argue that the Heaven they have entered does not exist.
Not only the borders between death and life have been dissolved by The Crucificion, but also the border between Christian and non-christian. Heaven after the Harrowing is a meritocracy entire. The conventional criteria - a kind of random selection based on the chance event of being born into a Christian family after the coming of Christ and living according to Christian Dogmas alone - the narrow path to heaven proclaimed by Christian Churches - is simply nonsense in the eyes of Christ as he appears in The Harrowing.
Now the implications of this are clear, and explain perhaps why the Tale of The Harrowing is not mentioned very much by contemporary Christan Clergy or even by theologians and the wider engaged laity. You don’t have be baptised to enter heaven. You don’t have to profess Christian beliefs or even be a member of a Christian Church or to have ever even heard of Christianity to enter heaven. But much further than this too - Christian Churches and all the other human institutions of Christianity are irrelevant to the salvation of the individual, which is solely a matter for God to decide upon. You will be judged solely by your works, by what you do, and especially by that portion of what you do which you do for the benefit of others, for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
It does not matter one jot whether you took the sacraments twice over or said the rosary ten million times per annum - such things win you no advantage in the measurings of God’s Judgement. You are damned all the same, despite your apparent piety, if your mindless and indeed soulless adherence to institutional Dogmas prevented you from doing good for others, or worse again, excused you doing evil to others.
Translated into contemporary Irish terms, this means that Panti Bliss is very likely is going to Heaven, and David Quinn and all the other far-right ‘Christians’ out there forever pouring scorn on the marginal and afflicted are heading for the lake of fire, eternally.