Descensus ad inferos, Dawn of Hope

Introduction

In a time characterized by orphanhood and meaninglessness, Pope John Paul II was an authentic and tireless witness of the infinite love of God the Father who is “rich in mercy.” This is the Father who gives himself in his “two hands” (Irenaeus): the Son, the Redemptor Hominis, whom the Father hands over for the life of the world (Jn 3:16) in the original act of traditio; and the Holy Spirit, the Dominus et Vivificans, the Lord and Giver of Life. In the midst of a climate of nihilism, sometimes “bestial”Cf. John Paul II, Memoria e identità, 26. and sometimes indifferent (as in the “gay nihilism” spoken of by Augusto Del Noce), John Paul II believed in, and bore witness to, the omnipotent mercy of the Holy Trinity. This mercy was, in fact, the first and the last word of his pontificate.It is significant that the last writing John Paul bequeathed to us, Memory and Identity, focuses on the same mystery of the Trinity to which he dedicated the first trilogy of encyclicals that opened his pontificate. In this joining of beginning and end, the mercy of God—a theme that embraces the whole of John Paul’s ministry as Pope—plays a particularly important role. It seems to be no accident that he died on the vigil of Mercy Sunday, a feast that he himself had instituted.

Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr were also called to bear witness to the Father’s mercy in the face of the fragmented world in which we live. An essential part of their theological task was to shed light on the mystery of faith known as the descensus ad inferos—an article of the Creed that is often forgotten, feared, or reduced to insignificance. The theological interpretation of Holy Saturday that the two authors propose underscores how Christ’s descent into hell is a mystery of the Father’s infinitely patient mercy. Holy Saturday, suspended between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, is a day of silence, on which the Lord remains in the tomb, dead with the dead. On this holy day, the Father so to say finishes the act of tradition by which he hands over his Son (“tradition,” in Latin, literally means “handing over”). He does this by introducing the Son into communion with all who have died “so that, by the grace of God [the Father], he might taste death in place of all” [pro omnibus] (Heb 2:9b).

Holy Saturday, in nuce, is the collision between two things: the super-luminous mystery of the Father’s fontal liberty, which gives freedom to creatures and tolerates the consequences of their fall; and of the darkness of the sinful world that rebels against this paternal mystery. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not mastered it” (Jn 1:5). The light of love penetrates into, and collides with, the darkness of sin and death. Because, however, the light is that of infinite Love, this collision serves to increase Love, to glorify it, and to save man in the final moment of his destiny: “the point of hell is not to kill love. The point of hell is to establish the kingdom of love.”Adrienne von Speyr, Kreuz und Hölle. II: Auftragshöllen (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1972), 197. As a mystery of extreme mercy, Holy Saturday is also the mystery of the humility of divine love, which lowers itself not only into the good humus of creation, but also into the mire of sin. As C. S. Lewis puts it in The Great Divorce, “[o]nly the greatest can make himself small enough to enter hell. Because the higher a being is, the lower it can descend—a man can sympathize with a horse, but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into hell.”C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 121. And it is precisely in the folly of his abasement that God most brightly reveals his glory: “Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est” [not to be constrained by the greatest, and yet to be contained by the least, that is divine].

Holy Saturday, the middle day of the Triduum, is a mystery of God’s love encountering human sin; it is a mystery of unfathomable depth and darkness, a mystery from which light pours forth onto Holy Friday and Easter Sunday, onto the Lord’s earthly life and the life of the world to come. Holy Saturday, then, is the sealed center of Revelation. This is why it plays such a central role in Balthasar’s Trilogy, which may be read as an attempt to display the form—the Gestalt—of revelation from an aesthetic, dramatic, and logical point of view (with all three viewpoints recapitulated in unity in the Epilogue). Our main task, then, will be to show the centrality of Holy Saturday in the achievement of the aesthetic, dramatic, and logical form as Balthasar conceives it in the Trilogy. This discussion, in turn, will lay the foundation for some concluding remarks on the relationship between Holy Saturday and the universality of theological hope.

I. Holy Saturday in the Trilogy

1. Glory

Everything begins with the originality par excellence, with what Balthasar, following Goethe, calls the Urphänomen: the “original phenomenon.” Corresponding to, and awakened by, the Urphänomen is an equally original decision—an Urentscheidung—to let the original phenomenon appear by and from itself. The original phenomenon, corresponded to in this way, is the beauty of being or, to put it in theological terms, the glory of God. Beauty–glory has to do with a radiant, intact form whose luminous and attractive wholeness promises to restore form to a fragmented theology. By the same token, beauty-glory also offers a valid response to the nihilistic erasure of being and its transcendentals, an erasure that is the outcome of the logic of modernity.

The origin of Christianity, too, is rooted in the perception of a unique form and in the experience of being enraptured by it. The name of this unique form is, of course, Jesus Christ. He is the center, the “medium tenens in omnibus,” the one who holds the center in all things, as Bonaventure felicitously puts it. This claim should be understood radically: Christ really and truly occupies the center of all things: not only of the Trinity (as the middle person between Father and Spirit), not only of the economy of salvation (as the Head of the Church), but also of the transcendentals themselves. The incarnate Son upholds the world’s being from the inside, from its deepest center and source, even as he never abandons the Father’s “bosom,” but is always present in it, his gaze ever turned towards the paternal origin (eis ton kolpon tou patros: Jn 1:18). Christ, to put it another way, is the “concrete measure” between God and the creature,Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Merkmale des Christlichen,” in id., Verbum Caro. Skizzen zur Theologie I (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1960), 174. For an English translation, see Explorations in Theology, vol. 1: The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989). the “marvelous accord of man [and of all creation] and of God” in person.This is the title of Georges de Schrijver’s dissertation on Balthasar, Le merveilleux accord de l’homme et de Dieu: Étude de l’analogie de l’être chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Louvain: University Press, 1983).

The form or figure of Christ is the universal center of things because he is simultaneously at the center of the Trinity, at the center of creation, and at the center of the redemption that saves creation. By the same token, the form of Christ is not just one more intra-worldly form among others. Rather, it embodies the divine freedom itself and therefore does something no merely intra-worldly form can do by itself: overcome the opposition, the anti-form of sin, which threatens to undo the fabric of the world’s being:

The One, whose name is Jesus Christ, has to descend into the absolute contra-diction against the Lord’s sovereign majesty, into the night of Godforsakenness and the amorphous chaos of sin. He must do this in order to set up and to be, beyond what man can imagine as form, the form that overcomes all futility, the intact and indivisible form that unites and reunites God and the world in the New and Eternal Covenant.Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit, III,2/2 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1969), 12. For an English translation, see The Glory of the Lord, vol. 7: Theology: The New Covenant (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989).

It is important to underscore that, according to the Glory of the Lord, the maior dissimilitudo of the Christ-Gestalt recapitulates all form as such, albeit on a higher level. Form-in-general thus finds its concrete mid-point in the mystery of the union of God and man in the new and eternal covenant. At the same time, the perception of the form unites two other things: vision with “simple eyes” (Mt 6:22), with “the eyes of one’s heart enlightened” (Eph 1:18)—and life, where “life” is understood as loving, docile, even child-like obedience to Jesus Christ. The maior dissimilitudo does not rupture analogy, but founds it from above and from below/within—in a descending movement characteristic of the God who is Non-aliud.

The first part of the Trilogy presents Christ’s descent into hell as the last, culminating step in the downward movement of the Incarnation: the Verbum caro sinks into the caro peccati (Rom 8:3). In his contemplation of this last stage in the Incarnation, Balthasar discerns three phases or dimensions, which he designates with the following terms: Anprall, roughly “impact”: Kenose, “kenosis,” a clear reference to Phil 2:6-11, and Hölle, “hell.” These three aspects form a unity, inasmuch as they co-constitute what Balthasar calls the Wucht des Kreuzes, which might be translated as the “weighty impact of the Cross.”

Wucht is itself an aesthetic category corresponding to the kabod of the Old Testament. It is the “weight of glory” that accompanies and underscores the imposing presence of the self-revealing God. Now, faced with man’s sinful breaking of the covenant, this imposing presence takes the form—as it must in justice—of wrath: Anprall. In the New Covenant, the incarnate Son of God himself bears this weighty impact of God’s righteous anger within the even greater weight, the greater kabod-glory, of the Trinitarian love. It is this love that first devises the Cross as a way of condemning the world’s sin once and for all, while at the same time saving the world with an embrace so to speak from “underneath” (in an act Balthasar calls “Unterfassen”).

The whole weight of the world’s sin falls upon Christ, who made himself available to bear this weight in the attitude of kenotic obedience that prolongs in time his pre-temporal filial “Yes” to the trinitarian decision to save the world in just this way. Here we come to the second of our terms, Kenose, which, to repeat, Balthasar draws from the Letter to the Philippians. Following Paul, Balthasar interprets kenosis as the distinctive characteristic of the Son’s love, inasmuch as the Son’s property is to let himself be generated by the Father and, again, to let this generation be translated into the expressive form of free human obedience. (Balthasar, who pioneered the revival of scholarship on Maximus the Confessor in the twentieth century, held firmly to Maximian dyothelitism throughout his life.) The goal of the Son’s economic obedience is to carry and bear the world’s sin and the Father’s judgment on this sin. By bearing both things in obedience, he expresses his real, ever-greater love as Son. His double act of bearing, then, occurs within the interchange of love between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. It is, in fact, the execution of a decision of love on the part of the triune God—a decision of which the Son is a free (super)passive/(super)active subject, just as the Father is a free (super)active/(super)passive subject.This account avoids two extremes. On the one hand, the Father does not damn or punish Jesus as if the beloved Son were a sinner. On the other hand, the Cross is not a mere symbol of divine love, but expresses love precisely by including a real act of divine justice on sin, an act that objectively changes the situation of the sinner before God. Jesus shoulders and bears the whole weight of the world’s sin before the Father. In some sense, he makes himself responsible for that sin, “as head of the whole body . . . appropriating my insubordination” (Greogry of Nazianzus, Oration 30.5). Nevertheless, because he assumes this responsibility in loving obedience, and because he does so within the interchange between the divine persons, he is the personal “place” in which the whole Trinity swallows up sin in the victory of its ever-greater love.

Now, the moment when the soldier pierces Jesus’ side and blood and water begin to flow from his wound represents the consummation of Jesus’ kenosis on the Cross. Everything has been given: the Spirit and, together with the Spirit, Jesus’ inmost substance, out of which the same Spirit will form the sacraments of the Church. From this moment, Jesus remains in the state of having given everything. The state of being dead. With this, we arrive at the third and last aspect: Hölle, hell, which Jesus undergoes on Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday, as Adrienne von Speyr explains, is not an extra mystery added to the Cross, but rather the latter’s “obverse.” It is the “underside” of the Cross, when Jesus’ experience of giving everything, which is distinctive of Good Friday, reaches its intrinsic fulfillment in the state of having given everything. This is a state in which Christ’s act of dying is over. Having died, he now finds himself in the situation every man finds himself in at the end of his earthly pilgrimage. In this sense, Holy Saturday completes the descending, “incarnatory” movement of the Word into the caro peccati. The Son has obeyed the Father’s saving will to the end, and his obedience now takes the form of being dead with the dead. This being dead entails for the Son a real experience of separation from God, the “loss of glory” that without Christ would have been without exception the fate of the dead.Thanks to the loving obedience of the Son, who remains as the hypostatic subject of this experience, we must say that Jesus does not suffer damnation, as if he were being rejected by God for personal sins, something impossible for the sinless Son. Rather, he overcomes our damnation from within, bearing up under the experience of loss reserved for sinful man out of love. This he does as a form of filial gift to the Father—one reason why the descensus is a victory over death and hell. The obedience of love is what expresses here the permanence of the hypostatic union in the midst of the Son’s economically enacted separation from the Father and under the crushing blow and incomprehensible weight of the world’s sin. By doing this in absolute purity—and neither looking back nor looking ahead (there is no “before” and “after” here, just surrender to the moment)—the obedience of love overcomes the concentrated hatred of sin.

The originality of the contemplation of Holy Saturday in The Glory of the Lord See Herrlichkeit III,2/2, 211-217. lies in Balthasar’s presentation of Jesus’ experience in the realm of the dead—to the extent that this experience can be put into words and images—using the two central aesthetic categories developed in the first volume of the Glory of the Lord: perception or vision (Wahr-nehmung) and rapture (Ent-rückung; as the root “ruck” suggests, one who undergoes this “rapture” is ecstatically pulled, struck, shaken out of himself). Balthasar also relies here on Nicholas of Cusa (who speaks of a visio mortis by means of a via cognoscentiae: a vision of [the second] death through immediate experience of it), as well as on Adrienne von Speyr’s theological experience of Holy Saturday, which, in the introduction to Kreuz und Hölle, Balthasar identifies as one of the two central themes of her work.

Balthasar contemplates how Christ in his descent “sees” the whole sin of the world as separated from the sinner, beholding it rejected and condemned once for all. This vision is the fruit of the suffering of the Cross and therefore belongs uniquely to the Lord. Borrowing categories from both Irenaeus and Thomas, Balthasar interprets this perception as an act of apprehending the amorphous mass of sin, and so of assuming it, taking possession of it, and conquering it. This perceiving is, at the same time, a being enraptured (a supremely stark and dramatic experience corresponding to the nature of the perception it is conjoined with): Christ, seeing the fruit of his passion, is “enrapt” by the terrible vision of hell, by the total, chaotic, and incomprehensible abandonment it represents. The agent here is the Father, who draws the Son through this chaos towards himself. This is how the Father gives the incarnate Lord the keys of death and of hades.

Basing himself on the second aesthetic aspect, namely, rapture, Balthasar always accentuates the passivity of this experience. He interprets the active verb “he went to preach to (adveniens praedicavit) the spirits that were in prison” (1 Pt 3:19) as a passive, but no less real, preaching. It is a preaching Jesus performs with his being, by means of his remaining dead with the dead. Balthasar finds support for this reading in 1 Peter 4:6, which employs a passive verb: “the Gospel was proclaimed to the dead” (mortuis evangelizatum est). Christ’s lacerating (subjectively: the horror of the experience; objectively: the tearing apart of the kingdom of death) passage through hell is his being placed in, and drawn through, it by the will of the Father, into whose hands he had entrusted himself without reserve. It’s that trust that makes him the vanquisher of hell rather than a victim of it.

Now, the principle that underlies the two above-mentioned categories of theological aesthetics and unites them in mutual interpenetration is the (Ignatian) obedience of (Johannine) love. In the unique “space-time” of the descent, in which “vision” and “rapture” coincide in the Son’s loving obedience, the majestic splendor of the Father’s love shines forth in its opposite, in the loveless night of the anti-divine. Here, in this simultaneity, the Son becomes the “author and finisher” of every creaturely aesthetic form and experience. The Son’s obedience of love offers the splendor of the Father’s love a right and adequate form, a form from the heart of which this love can irradiate precisely in and through the amorphous horror of hell—and so conquer it in and by the glory of the mutual love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit. And because this entire paternal-filial event redounds to the glory of their mutual love, because it glorifies this love as a circumincession of form and light in the midst of man’s second death and sin, the obscure limit that remained in the Old Testament and prevented its consummation falls away from within. There opens, once and for all (ephapax), the New and Eternal Covenant between heaven and earth, God and the world.

This covenant, founded and achieved in the person of the Son, is, as we saw at the beginning of this section, the aesthetic form par excellence. Thanks to his obedience of love in the amorphous chaos of the world’s sin, the Son is and becomes the center of the analogy of the transcendentals that obtains between God (glory) and the creation (pulchrum): the middle that harmonizes and illumines all things, the medium tenens in omnibus. This victory, which takes all thought by surprise, sheds light back onto created aesthetic form. This light falls, in the first place, on the metaphysical form par excellence: the distinctio realis between essentia et esse, which can now be perceived and respected as a holy “space” and “time,” where the grace of the act of being in its fullness lights up and pours itself out on all of reality. Man, as an artist of being (who is both its son and its father) can perceive and be enrapt by all things, because in them being “recreates” itself as an image of the Trinity in its luminous form. Created reality—in spite of the horror that often threatens existence—is worthy of being loved, welcomed with honor, and glorified in God: pulchrum et esse convertuntur [being and the beautiful are convertible].

2. Theo-Drama

In our discussion of the Glory of the Lord, we saw that Christ, by his obedience of love, embodies the aesthetic form par excellence that holds together the analogy of the beautiful within the embrace of the New and Eternal Covenant. The same connection between obedience and love, the transcendentals and the covenant, is central in the Theo-Drama. Here, the same convergence founds the dramatic form, which animates the transcendental bonum understood as “self-gift.”

Christ is the covenant, the circumincession of infinite and finite freedom, in person. He is this covenant, however, not for himself, but pro nobis et pro omnibus. For the same reason, he continues to personify the covenant in the clash, the dramatic conflict, between his obedience of love and the “No” that fallen man sets in opposition to the reciprocity of divine and creaturely freedom in the covenant. In order to realize the covenant in his person, Christ must overcome this “No” without overwhelming, overburdening, or ignoring human freedom. According to Balthasar and Adrienne, Christ does this by means of an act they call “Unterfassung,” in which he bears and embraces so to say “from below” the world’s “No.” Christ brings his obedience of love into the “No” of man’s fallen freedom. Better, in obedience to the Father, he lets himself be sent underneath and within this “No” in order to open it from within and give man a way to a renewed assent. This “Unterfassung” reaches its climax on Holy Saturday, in the Son’s state of having been sacrificed:

Here it becomes evident that the New Covenant is a movement, a dramatic process, in which the light penetrates the darkness and, step by step, conquers a path inside of the night of death. This happens in the Passion, especially in the mysterious third state of suffering in which the Lord, having completed his sacrifice, is entirely the one who has been sacrificed [der Geopferte].Adrienne von Speyr, Johannes. I: Das Wort wird Fleisch (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1949), 66. Eng. tr., The Word Becomes Flesh: Meditations on John 1—5 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).

Created out of nothing, we are subject to limits, limits imposed on us without any choice on our part. The limit of limits is death. Balthasar speaks of a “Sterbenmüssen,” a having to, or being forced to, die; this is man’s lot.Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik (=TD) IV: Das Endspiel (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1983), 296. Eng. tr., Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 5: The Last Act (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983). The Old Testament, seen as a whole, considers this “inevitable necessity of dying” to be a mysterious limit placed on man’s communion with God. The Psalms tell us that, when man descends into the underworld, he can no longer glorify God. In death, man is incapable of communing with God. But the Son comes into the world in order to “trans-value” death. And he does so precisely by his act of “Unterfassung.” “Snatching and appropriating to himself all the deaths of sinners in his self-gift unto death, he transmutes into his one death all these deaths, and with them, every life that runs to this death.”Ibid., 297. In this way, Jesus brings about in himself the covenant of divine and human love at the heart of the theo-drama.

Man, as he concretely exists, cannot experience his death as the prolongation or expression of his communion with God. He cannot suppress or overcome this impotence, because, whether he will or no, he is “thrown” into an existence that is subject to it. The Son, on the other hand, is not thrown into earthly existence, but rather allows himself to be sent into it by the Father from the platform of eternity. This is the root of the Son’s “Unterfassung.”

The Son is his act of receiving himself from the Father in love. This act contains an infinite letting be and letting be done that makes it possible for the Son both to be sent and, within this sending, to assume the total passivity of human existence from conception to death. By the same token, Christ’s incarnatory mission transforms the experience of the passivity of the human condition into an act of filial love, which he performs pro nobis. Because the Son, coming down from heaven, penetrates and remains within our death with his filial letting be, he can meet us in our death, and so enable us to do what we could not do on our own: live our death as a gift of self, as a communion with the God who gives himself away:

But in Jesus’ case, the event ... of the hour [the final and decisive hour of death] is not a function of his “being thrown” from nothingness into existence, but of something mysterious that takes the places of this “thrownness”: his self-dispossession of his divinity [kenosis], which, as such, is an act of obedience to his eternal Father (Phil 2:6). Here, obviously, the power of the cast, of the throw into the mission, is more powerful than nothingness. This throw throws—beyond all thrownness—into an end (telos: Jn 13:1) that is beyond all ends that are simply “thrown.” While the end of those who are thrown is a withdrawal of movement, the end of the One Sent to this end is, as always, an act within his being sent: the act of having abandoned himself. This is possible because in his (filial) self-donation there is a correspondence with the [paternal] act of the Sender, who in that action was, and always has been, the one who gives away his own innermost life. This double self-donation is the expression of absolute love.Ibid., 297.

This text suggests two aspects that are necessary to complete our sketch of Holy Saturday in the theo-drama. The first is this: man’s incapacity to live death as communion with God is not due solely to his being “thrown” into being from nothingness, but also to his sin, which is woven into the concreteness of his historical existence. The necessity of dying, as we experience it, is a punishment that falls upon man who, having refused to hand himself over to communion with God, finds himself thrown back upon his naked finitude and so doomed to an inevitable death. And yet, as Adrienne explains in her book on death, this punishment also includes an aspect of mercy. By imposing death on us, God gives us the opportunity to surrender, haltingly, to him. But in order for this aspect of mercy to become a reality, the Son himself has to redeem death “from underneath” in an act of “Unterfassung.” This embrace of our being from underneath (interior intimo meo-superior summo meo), must embrace more than our death; it must also embrace the refusal, the “No,” which concretely conditions and shapes our death. Even more, Christ, embracing death from below, must also take upon himself the solitude of the sinner, his self-separation from God that is the result and essence of his “No.” Christ must experience what Balthasar calls Gottverlassenheit, forsakenness by God in both the objective and subjective sense. This experience culminates in turn on Holy Saturday, when Christ is definitively dead together with the dead:

[T]his death is the substitution for all the deaths of sin. Consequently, the dying Christ gives himself over into Godforsakenness, hence, into a powerlessness that embraces from below every possible Godforsakenness and powerlessness on the part of sinners.Ibid., 297.

This passage already contains a second aspect. The Son not only dies on Holy Saturday. On Holy Saturday, he completes his entrance into the flesh by being in the state of having died. This is not a mere physical fact. It is an event of substitution in which the Son assumes death as it is concretely burdened by sin: a death saturated with the sinner’s “No”; a death, then, that means final separation from God, beyond any ability of ours to overcome. Now, because it is the Son who bears our concrete death as an extreme act of love, he can be dead with the dead and, at that very moment, “transmute” death “from below.” And because he takes upon himself the burden of our Godforsakenness in an act of loving obedience, he accomplishes this transmutation by placing his filial love at the very point where our “No” has made us completely incapable of any vital movement towards God. In this way, he breaks open our “No” from within, but without imposing on us any heteronomy. His entrance into the immobility of death on Holy Saturday is the seal of his objective victory over sin, a victory that has already occurred subjectively on the Cross. Rising from death, he makes it fully transparent to the absoluteness of trinitarian love:

This is the first aspect, which made such an impression on Paul. But this action of God likewise contains the second aspect: the doctrine that this action is the proclamation of an absolute love, which reveals itself as such in God’s trinitarian essence.Ibid., 297.

Balthasar, following Adrienne von Speyr, conceives of the Redemption as the consummated “separation of sin from the sinner.” This separation depends on the fact that “only One has descended into hell,” to cite C. S. Lewis again. In other words, Christ on the Cross has taken all human sin upon himself, but without the guilt of having committed it. Why? In order that our sin might receive its due condemnation, but without our having to go to hell to pay for it. And because Christ shoulders our guilt by his hard obedience of love (this no insipid play of love with itself of the sort Hegel criticized), hence, in perfect innocence, he is not damned (in the sense of Luther’s merely formal interchange between justus and peccator). Rather than being damned himself, he unterfasst our damnation; he assumes from below, from an even deeper filial obedience, the perdition that we have inflicted on ourselves. He makes it in all truth his perdition, but this assumption is itself an obedience to his mission. For that very reason, it is also an act that overcomes our perdition from within, an act that therefore becomes the source from which righteousness flows into us. In this sense, Christ’s obedience of love radically converts our “No” into a “Yes”; it fulfills the justice owed to the Father, transforming it into an expression of ever-greater mercy.

“Do not be afraid! I am the first and the last (eschatos), and the living one, and I was dead, and behold I am alive for the ages of the ages, and I hold the keys of death and hell” (Rev 1:17—18). “For the suffering of death, we see Jesus crowned with honor and glory, so that, by the grace of God, he might taste death on behalf of all” (Heb 2:9). These passages of Scripture suggest a final topic. By his obedience of love, the Son can experience our lostness, and yet, in the midst of this experience, continue to love, letting himself be generated by the Father even here. In this way, he makes a reality what, humanly speaking, is impossible: the definitive consummation of the covenant from both sides. He is therefore the “ultimate” in his own person: “Christ, the Judge, is the ‘eschatos.’”Joseph Ratzinger, cited in TD IV, 329. He, and not the destiny of sinful man or Hades, is the last thing.

Christ, then, is the eschatological reality in person. This is why, at the moment of death, every man encounters Christ as his only and final judge. And because Christ’s own death has “transmuted” death and separated sin at its root from the sinner, this judgment is both the severest possible condemnation of sin and the offer of an infinite mercy to the sinner. Thanks to the grace that flows from the action of the Holy Trinity in the Son’s descensus ad inferos, our appearance before our judge can become the culmination of our sequela Christi:

And in this way, the judgment gathers together in concentrated form everything pertaining to man’s redemption, since the judgment is the encounter of the Father’s justice with the Son’s Cross in the love of the Spirit, an encounter that is at the same time the reunion or reunification of the Father and the Son.Adrienne von Speyr, Apokalypse. Betrachtungen über die geheime Offenbarung (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1950), 681.

In his descent, Christ founds Purgatory and hell in their specifically Christian sense. Purgatory is an aspect of the eschatological encounter with Christ, the only judge. Thanks to Christ, the state of death, which without him would have been an eternal prison for everyone, no longer has to be such for anyone:

Purgatory comes into being, in the strict sense, on Holy Saturday, when the Son, by means of his passage through “hell,” introduces the aspect of mercy into the state of those who had been justly condemned. . . “Purgatory arises or is ignited under the Lord’s footsteps in his descent. He brings consolation to this place of [pure] desolation, he brings warmth to this place of infernal cold.”TD IV, 331; the citation is from Adrienne von Speyr, Johannes IV, 173. Eng. tr., John, vol. 4: The Birth of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).

On the Cross, Christ becomes a holocaust, a burnt offering totally consumed. Burnt, because he himself offers himself in our place to the consuming fire of God, whose sanctity cannot tolerate the slightest evil: “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29; cf. Dt 4:24). At the same time, because he has experienced the full impact of this fire—its Anprall, to put it in aesthetic terms—he becomes the Lord of the eschatological fire of judgment. He thus has the right to apply the fire to us, not to destroy us, but to purify us instead. The fire that burns Christ as our holocaust is transformed into the purifying fire of Purgatory as our hope.

The beginning of the process of purification in Purgatory is rooted in a mysterious “abandonment of my vision into his vision.”TD IV, 333. Balthasar and Adrienne conceive of judgment and Purgatory in terms of an analogy (and not a dialectical relation or a univocal identity) with confession. As in all analogies, there is a fundamental dissimilarity: in Purgatory, man does not actively confess to Christ; his life is already finished, there is no longer room for the kind of decision he knew on earth: particular choice for the sake of a still absent end. Rather, it is his whole life, already lived, that now comes to light. Better, man finds himself passively before the eyes of the judge, which are like “fire,” and so is confessed by Christ himself. What man “does” is to let be, to allow this divine fire to burn up everything that does not reflect its love. This process “lasts” until the sinner—“preferring nothing to the love of Christ” in this final encounter, this particular judgment—recognizes his total lovelessness, acknowledges that he deserves an even greater punishment than the one he is receiving, and becomes ready to pay any price for it ... until he finally cries out for this “more.”Ibid, 336. At this moment, the fire of God’s holiness begins to burn in us in a different sense. The center of our attention shifts—once and for all—from ourselves, from our own suffering, from our own anguish, towards the Lord’s suffering and anguish, which is not the anguish of the sinner, but of the Good Shepherd in search of his lost sheep. The cry for “more” now becomes an expression of an offering that forgets itself and mysteriously remains with the Lord in expiation for everything that causes him anguish. This “everything” is not only his, the sinner’s, personal sin, but also the sin of the world, every offense that arises from the world.Ibid, 336. With this request for “more,” God himself begins to shine ever more in the sinner’s eschatological confession. And because it is only in this moment that love begins to burn in the heart of the sinner, it is also at this moment that the gates of heaven open for him.

The role of Holy Saturday and its connection with judgment and Purgatory in the Theo-Drama bring us to the same point where our reading of the Glory of the Lord culminated: Jesus’ obedience of love makes him the form of Revelation. Transforming our death into the economic enactment of his eternal generation, this obedience transmutes the limit of mortality into an act of love within the limitless mutual self-gift of God and man.

In this way, Christ realizes, and is in his own person, the dramatic form par excellence, the form that now becomes and is (in the convertuntur of esse and agere) the new and eternal covenant on which all creaturely form is founded. Christ can be and do this because he is the Father’s self-gift in the midst of its opposite: the mortal contradiction against him and against everything that “gathers with him.” At the same time, this self-gift is held together and fostered by the spiration of the Spirit, which continues even at the nadir of death.

This divine drama is the ultimate reality that radically cures and transforms the world’s tragedy, changing it into a theo-drama. The Father’s creation is fundamentally good, and its goodness is justified by, and grounded in, the Son’s action. Thus, just as Holy Saturday illumines for us the unity of love and justice that is consummated between Father and Son (not without anguish—see the Garden of Olives), it also embraces and heals the whole of creation and every human drama along with it.

The light of this consummation “in-fluences” us from within, from the root of non-subsistent being as the image of the divine goodness. It thus “con-vinces” us to realize the convertibility of being, love, and goodness: esse et bonum convertuntur. The Eschatos of Love suffers and communicates himself in every created love. By the same token, the self-gift of non-subsistent being, recapitulated in man’s free action, becomes a fruitful and positive dramatic form:

The Son has taken their sin away, precisely in order to make out of their distance from the Father the highest proof of his love for the Father. Everything that was, is, and will be thus comes together in the Son hanging on the Cross now in the present. He is the whole history of humanity, but also the whole history of God with humanity. And so it is only from the earthly point of view that suffering and death are an end. For God it is a midpoint, which goes right through the middle of the Father. After all, even in his dying, the Son does not stop being generated by him and rendering him thanksgiving, in a love that, precisely at this very moment, is expressing its uttermost. The death of the Son is the display of the highest vitality of trinitarian love.Adrienne von Speyr, Das Angesicht des Vaters (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1981), 64. Eng. tr., The Countenance of the Father, trans. David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997).

3. Theo-Logic

The third wing of the triptych, the Theo-logic, considers the same event as the first two, but from a new, distinctive point of view. The Theo-logic attempts to show and understand how Christ’s gift of self “to the very end” is the “Auslegung,” the “exegesis” or exposition, of the Father’s love in and for the world, and in this (Johannine) sense is the “truth.” Christ is the truth as fullness, and for the same reason as covenant: in him, the Father’s whole love is unfolded in the whole incarnate Son in and for the world thanks to the mediation of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the exegete of the Son, who is himself the exegesis of the Father. Having given his whole being to the point of death, Christ is raised from the dead and, at that moment, the Spirit seals the Son’s exposition of the Father’s love, an exposition whose wealth he, the “Spiritus Creator,” begins to unfold with creative fidelity. It’s just then that the Spirit is “released” to explicate Christ’s exegesis of the Father in our hearts; just then that the plenitude of truth is accomplished and the New Covenant sealed.

Christ is the Logos, the “middle person” (Bonaventure) of the Trinity. As such, he never speaks in the first instance of himself, but of the Father. And, in speaking of the Father, he does not emphasize his own authority as the Father’s exegete, but leaves his exegesis (which he performs in being and action) in the hands of the Holy Spirit. He allows the Spirit to do with it as he wills (and the Spirit wishes only to act in perfect creative fidelity; he wishes to “blow” only in and towards the love of the Father and the Son).

Because the Logos is the “central person,” he is constituted by a double relationality—backwards towards the Father and forwards (with the Father) towards the Holy Spirit. This double relationality, in turn, shapes his Logos-character. Insofar as the Logos is the middle person, he has a structure, a logical form, and this form is inseparably an exegesis of the living God:

It is not until Jesus Christ that we arrive at the identity of unity and difference that was described just now, an identity that, for Christian faith, points unambiguously straight into the mystery of the Trinity. Jesus simultaneously posits essential divine unity and opposition [therein], to which he bears witness by speaking about a relational vis-à-vis [within God]. By doing so, Jesus gives us the key to the mystery of the living God, which never more fully reveals its mysteriousness than just when access to it opens up for us.Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik (=TL) II: Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), 119. For an English translation, see Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 2: Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004).

According to Balthasar, then, “[c]reaturely logic can be rightly seen for what it is only as an analogous participation in an absolute Logos, which points back towards its (paternal) origin and forwards to the Spirit of free love who flows from it and its origin.”Balthasar, TD IV, 57. In the ana-logical part of the second volume of Theo-logic, Balthasar explains this reflection of the Logos in and by creaturely logic. Part of his explanation is negative: Balthasar critiques a conceptualist logic that closes being in the abstract self-identity of A=A, and so equates the other—B—with the absolute negation of A, as if the existence of B had no other purpose than to erase and cancel the existence of A. This is a logic of envious competition. Balthasar insists that it cannot capture the structure of reality, in which otherness is not a threat to identity, and to be oneself is to be in communion with what one is not. Or, as Balthasar puts, it, rather than B cancelling A, it’s the case that B, C and so on are concretely A’s “co-constituents, insofar as their otherness positively co-determines A, which has a double presupposition: being-with-others in a finitude (common to all) that in turn is different from, and related to, its origin.”TL II, 35. Only such a logic expresses the real being of the world: “one and the other in a constitutive, differentiated unity.”Ibid.. italics added. This logical expression can be described as the logical form of created being: the self-expression of finite being that at one and the same time captures, structures, and illumines it. Balthasar’s conclusion:

Neither “identity” nor mere “difference,” Blondel has shown us, can express the structure of real worldly being. ... In the real, difference, what is “other than myself,” is always already overtaken by a third, within which I can notice this otherness in the first place. The antitheses are not mutually indifferent, but each is always for the other—differently.Ibid., 33.

Returning to our topic in the light of the foregoing, we can say that the Logos, descending into the flesh, assures catalogically the analogy between worldly “logic” and trinitarian love. Concretely, this catalogical guarantee requires a redemptive action from above, because the creature has rejected the logic of love inscribed in being; with its “No,” it has contra-dicted the other, itself, and the love of the Trinity that is its Original Source. The question of how Christ is the logical form of Revelation thus becomes, concretissime, the question of how the Logos, the exegete of trinitarian love, can include and tame the “No” pronounced by the creaturely image. How can the Logos, who is a pure “Yes” to the Father, take on himself and overcome (tollere) the creature’s “No”? As in the other panels of the Trilogy, Balthasar will base his answer on the Son’s obedience of love to the extreme of Godforsakenness.

Holy Saturday is the last step in the descent of the Logos into the flesh, which is concretely a caro peccati. On Holy Saturday, the Logos that was in the beginning (Jn 1:1) enters into the darkness that can neither comprehend nor receive him—the darkness that refuses him welcome. The Logos, who is the Father’s Word (judgment, decision, “diction”) enters into the creature’s contra-diction, its “No” to what this filial “diction” expresses: the Father’s love. Because he is the truth par excellence, to contradict him is to cooperate with an untruth, with an anti-truth, with pure falsehood. What is at stake is not a failure to understand the truth, but an open hatred of it.

This contra-diction, then, cannot be integrated into the truth. But since it is not simply nothing, where can this hate-filled untruth “end up” if not in hell? Hell is the dark kingdom of naked untruth, shut up in false shadows. But in order for the un- or anti-truth of the creature’s contra-diction to end up in hell, it has to be uprooted and carried there. This is the main task of the incarnate Word:

At this point, it finally becomes clear what “negative theology” is in a Christian sense. No longer the sublime experience that God’s majesty transcends all human experience and conceptuality, but [the fact] that in the cross the contra-diction of sin, its falsehood and unlogic, is taken into the logic of the triune love, not, however, in order to find a place in it, but in all truth to be “damned in the flesh” (of the Son) (katakrinein; Rom 8:3). The flesh, “God’s enemy” (Rom 8:7), insofar as it is against God, is cast out of the cosmos, which is God’s, “into the outermost darkness.”Ibid, 297.

“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” According to the exegesis of Theologik II, Christ, as Lamb of God, literally “takes” and “takes away,” not only the punishment for sin, but also sin itself, while at the same time making this action an exegesis of the Father’s love. In other words, the redemptive act is an act of substitution in which Christ puts himself in the sinner’s place.

This poses a theological problem. How is it that the incarnate Logos, who is the truth, can carry and bear the contradiction of sin within his always veridical exposition of the Father? How can he do so without blessing this contradiction in the slightest, or treating it as if it were part of the total truth itself? How can he unite the creature’s “No,” its deep-rooted aggressive negativity, with his simple, pure “Yes,” but without turning that “Yes” into a “No”?

Put another way, how can Christ take sin upon himself yet avoid putting himself at odds with love? Note that what is at stake here is nothing less than the identity of the Logos as an expression of the Father’s fontal love. How can the Logos take on himself what contradicts him without ceasing to be the central Logos of the theo-logic? Balthasar’s answer, once again, lies ultimately in the obedience of love that goes to—and remains in—the extreme of Holy Saturday.

Does the Logos contradict himself in uniting our “No” with his unreserved “Yes”? The contrary is the case: far from contradicting his Logos-character, he triumphantly displays it, vindicating the logic of filial obedience thanks to which he is the Logos in the first place. The union in question here, after all, is not a physical blending of our “No” and his “Yes.” Nor does it imply any complicity on Christ’s part, as if he made himself guilty of our contradiction. We’re dealing, rather, with the “admirabile commercium,” in which Jesus takes what is ours and gives us what is his. Acting as our representative, he assumes responsibility for our “No,” not in order to make himself guilty of it, but in order—by the loving obedience of that assumption—to turn it into his “Yes.”

The principle thanks to which the Logos assumes our sin is thus not itself sinfulness, but obedience. The Son, “bearing up” patiently (Aushalten) under the action and consequence of sin, cancels and overcomes sin on its own ground. Because the uttermost consequence of his mission is to let the Father load him with the whole weight of the world’s sin, he can make our “No” his, as if he were responsible for it, yet without actually pronouncing or confirming it himself. His obedience allows him to experience our “No” in its naked contradiction, in its hellish meaninglessness, and so to cross it and get underneath it with the pure, almighty fire of his love. At this point the Son accomplishes the exegesis or explication of the Father’s love in the midst of the contradiction of sin without for an instant violating his identity as the Logos of absolute love:

The obedience of the Son even in his being dead, even in hell, is his perfect identity in all contradiction and so the overcoming also of the last contra-diction through this identity, which infiltrates everything from below [unterlaufende Identität]. An obedience that, christologically speaking, is nothing other than the expression of the Son’s trinitarian love, which precisely here, in the absolutely excessive demand, in ‘impossible obedience’ (Adrienne), proves itself to be the Son’s hypostatic obedience.Ibid., 323.

“Father, why have you abandoned me?” This “why” receives (at the moment) no answer but . . . silence. Such silence means that the incarnate Logos bears the experience of meaninglessness that sin entails in its a-logical contra-diction. On the other hand, by remaining under sin’s a-logical “No,” the Logos embodies the answer to the “why?” that he himself utters on the Cross. And the answer is the love that has no “point” or “motive” or “why” beyond itself, the love that exegetes itself as love precisely when the Logos dies under the absurdity of the Cross. The incarnate Logos, remaining in the midst of the illogic of sin, embraces from below (unterfasst) its “gratuity” (its futility, its perverse folly) with the ever-greater “gratuity” (the whylessness, the “foolish” super-positive creativity) of the Father’s love. The Logos, verifying in his missional being the absolute trustworthiness (emeth) of the One who sends and in this sending gives himself away (Jn 3:16), is the exegesis, the un-veiling, the illumination of the unoriginate origin (grundloser Grund) of the Father’s love. By reason of this very fact, he proves himself to be the logical form par excellence. The Son’s obedience of Love makes him the logical form of all forms.

“Life’s absurd wound” has been cured at the roots of its being. It has found its healing in the wound, gratuitously assumed, of the incarnate Logos, who is at the center of the Trinity and its logic. The irruption, the expressive bursting forth, of worldly being in its self-unveiling “truth” (aletheia) thus receives a new illumination. This truth, we now see, can be conceived, acknowledged, and said (legein) to be a light of love—despite all the falsehood and all the anti-metaphysical speculation that would rob it of its evidence and reliability (emeth). The “whylessness” of love, fully unveiled in the Paschal Mystery, is thus the foundation that carries truth and gives it its sense, its meaning and direction. Hence the Christian’s theo-logical task, which is to affirm and promote the convertibility, the mutual growth of being, love, and truth: esse et verum convertuntur.

The interpretation of Holy Saturday offered in tandem by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr is often wrongly criticized for rupturing the unity of the Logos and so for leading to a hopeless irrationalism. In reality, Holy Saturday, as the qualitative center of the triduum, is the concrete foundation of the truth of the world within the truth of the Trinity, of worldly logic within the logic of God. The silence of Holy Saturday is at the center of the transcendental verum.

Looked at in these terms, the truth reveals itself as the coming to light and articulation of a foundation that, confirming itself by means of its plenary presence, convinces us with all desirable evidence that it is always greater. The truth, then, is neither rationalist nor irrationalist. It is mystery: a form in which the groundless ground makes itself known as such—gratuitously judging, saving, and giving meaning to all that it grounds.

The principle that guarantees the coherence of this form is not the abstract identity of A=A, but the trinitarian identity of love, which is itself in the fecundity of mutual exchange and mutual gift. This identity can do the impossible: use what is meaningless as an occasion, a means (a middle term), for the manifestation and consolidation of its groundless, because gratuitous, meaning. To affirm this is not to absorb being into the frantic hostility of contradiction, nor again into the false peace of identity without difference. No, it is to do justice to the identity of triune love, the simplicity of its obedience to itself alone that freely overflows into humble service of the creature:

This folly [of the Cross] is not revealed in the divine essence . . . but in the One who was able to unite the absolutely divine and the absolutely anti-divine in a single act marked, not by the insanity of some super-human titanism, but by the simplicity of his obedience. This obedience alone exegetes God as trinitarian love; in it, the Father delivers his Son to the contra-diction of the anti-divine out of love. Cross and Trinity prove each other mutually, so long as the Cross is taken in all its above-mentioned dimensions (which are difficult for human logic to understand). This reciprocity (of Jn 1:1 and Jn 1:5 and 14) makes present for us the Logos that will not pass away, even if heaven and earth pass away. These die, but in the embrace of the one who also calls himself “the life.” A life that has held fast through every death and possesses the keys of death and hell, but which, being the life tout court, also bestows life and light, grace and truth on men.Ibid, 331.

II. The Dawn of Hope

The enemy is conquered by the Lord: “I hold the keys of death and of hell” (Rev 1:18b). The state of death, once cut off from hope of return, becomes the sealed center of the economic form in which God’s immanent form glorifies itself and concentrates its grace with ultimate intensity. Here, the reciprocity of gratuitous donation in God consummates the reciprocity of gratuitous donation in the Covenant. The reciprocity that awakened the nostalgia of ancient man and the covenant that nourished the faith of the Jews both find their superabundant fulfillment in the Son’s descent.

But what the Father’s two hands fulfill in the first instance is the desire of the Father’s heart: the creation of the real possibility (real because resting on the foundation of being and of grace) that “all men [and in and through them all creation] be saved and attain the full knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). The Son’s descent into sin as contra-diction against the Father’s love, which he accomplishes thanks to the Spirit’s silent and discreet work of unification, brings an absolute novelty: the death overshadowed by sin is transformed into a gratuitous gift in which the love of God and the love of man give themselves to each other and illumine each other in an ever-greater reciprocity. Love, then, is worthy of faith, because it is, has become, and has illumined itself as the absolute—all by overcoming the final bond that imprisoned creation. And that is why Péguy can say “la foi que j’aime le mieux, dit Dieu, c’est l’espérance” [the faith I like best, says God, is hope].

Love hopes all things. In love’s faith, there is room for all hope. . . . Love has experienced in God that sin has been overcome by means of the death of the Son, and this experience—and every experience—of the fulfillment God has accomplished has given love infinity of action, for all eternity. Love cannot be placed before any fact and any sin and any alienation without keeping its hope. A hope that is much more alive, much greater, and much truer than what men can invent in order to destroy it.Adrienne Von Speyr, Korinther I (Einsiedeln: Johanes Verlag, 1956), 411f.

Holy Saturday, as we have seen, is far from being a rupture of the objective meaning of being or of the creative passion of human subjectivity. On the contrary, it is the absolute triumph of the redemption. By the same token, it is the central point from which shines forth the glory, the goodness, and the truth of the triune God—and, in him, of creation. The trinitarian exegesis that Adrienne and Balthasar offer of the descent into hell helps us see how this article of faith contains a mysterious source of light that shines forth to reveal the full catholicity of the faith. The Son’s death out of love, his real solidarity with sinners in their state of being dead, is the origin of the new creation. It is the momentous day when the Father holds in his hands the Spirit of his dead Son: “Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum” (Lk 23:46). These are the fatherly hands that created man from the primordial humus; the hands that sent his own substance, subsisting in the person of the Son, into Mary’s womb. On this day, the holy God, and not un homme révolté ou dépressif, achieves the decisive integration between the original goodness of creation (“and God saw that it was all very good”: Gn 1:31) and the body of his Son lacerated by the aggression of the sin of the world that it has borne:

Through this body of the Son, the Father’s hope shines . . . and the Spirit unites the Spirit of the Son’s passion and the light of the Father so that the Father’s hope might shine in the world, in the Church, and in the Mother Mary.Adrienne von Speyr, Das Wort und die Mystik. I: Subjektive Mystik, 259f.

Being does not subsist in itself, but in what is other than itself; in this way, being gives that other to exist in itself.As Thomas Aquinas puts in a text that is canonical for Catholic metaphysics: “being [esse] signifies something complete and simple, but not subsistent” (De Potentia, 1,1 ad 1). Creatures’ be-ing, their esse, is the quintessence of their actuality; this is why we can call it “complete and simple.” Yet it does not exist in its own right as a substance—which is why Thomas says it is “non-subsistent.” Created esse is not formally identical with created substances, and yet it never “exists” except as their act of be-ing. By the same token, at the moment in which esse creatum gives substances to be (acting here as their supra-formal cause), it also “depends” on those substances. This dependence in the act-fullness of created esse is, according to Balthasar, intrinsic to its character as a “similitude of the divine goodness” (Thomas, De veritate, 22,2 ad 2): the vehicle, that is, of a liberality so generous that it can depend on what it creates—in the sense of giving it a real freedom before the Creator himself.What, in the last analysis, does this non-subsistence point to: God’s gratuitous goodness or towards an abyss of nothingness?“Being [das Sein] does not squeeze entities [Seiendes] tightly to itself, but lets them be. In the same way, entities, in the serene confidence of being let be, let being be in their turn, so that being’s light might rise like the sun to shine over all things. ... In the space of the difference that opens for being to let us be and for us to reciprocate, two things can happen. On the one hand, being’s lofty elevation over us can make it look alien, indifferent, even terrifying to us, so that we can be assailed by the temptation to perceive it as neutral, as worth-less, as sense-less, and so to prefer non-being. The shadows that darken our own existence because of guilt, sickness, and death; the horror of the world’s being as a whole—all this seems to warrant a curse on existence. . . . And yet: in the same distance of letting be, being can also dawn on us in its glory ... in a glory that sublimely and mysteriously transcends all the beauty and order of the real world, even though the latter are an irradiation and an index of this glory. The worth of this glory is in principle so unsurpassable . . . that all glorious ‘power’ (in its victory over the impotence of the merely possible), all ‘light’ (in its victory over the darkness of nothingness), and all ‘grace’ (in it is endless self-impartation) are gathered up in it. The Western metaphysics of light is ultimately a decision for the second possibility: an homage of being as a whole in the act of letting it be” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit III,1/2 [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965], 952-953). The light of theological hope streams down catalogically to illumine this, the metaphysical question and decision par excellence. Christ’s overcoming of death, otherwise an automatic entryway to lostness in Hades, is the ultimate, eschatological foundation of the decision for the first possibility.

The mortal wound of created being (the death of sin) has been borne and overcome in the Father’s heart, inasmuch as the Son has died and descended into hell in the ever-greater unity of the Spirit. For this reason, death—together with all the suffering that evil inflicts on the world—can no longer be interpreted simply as irrevocable corruption. It has become, instead, a mid-point, a source, that reveals the Father’s heart in his eternal generation of the Incarnate Son and, therefore, in his re-creation of us as his sons. For this reason—and for this reason alone—the oscillation of non-subsistent being, together with all of its differences (expropriation into the other; the polarity and potentiality of created being; the finitization of being that constitutes the essence of created things), is not the yawning of a dark abyss of nothingness, but the reflection of the gratuity of divine Being, the image of the divine goodness.Gustav Siewerth, Schicksal der Metaphysik (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, 2003), 390-391. The theological light that springs up from the mystery of Holy Saturday enables us to read every difference, every otherness, every night—especially the rupture of death—as the expression and concretion of a super-positive meaning, of a power, light, and grace emanating from super-essential being as love. Being and love, in other words, convertuntur in each of being’s transcendentals. The light of being-as-love transforms the night of nothingness that anguishes man—transforms it into the “womb” in which “being bathes” (Péguy). This super-luminous ground of being—which is light in its being-given to entities—itself comes to light as the pure image and presence of the Father’s abyssal bosom, from whose “fountain of the water of light” the Son will give us to drink without cost (Rev 21:6b). The night of being and of its gratuity grow one in the other as an image of the unfathomable gratuity of the Foundation:

The ultimate decision governing the metaphysics of being as love is to affirm, to let be, the non-subsistence of being; to allow it to be the gratuity of being-for-the-other, and so to collaborate in the intensification of the beauty, goodness, and truth of reality. In the light of the just-cited passages from Péguy, we can say that this decision rests on an ultimate decision for hope. For hope means self-gift in the night, at once temporal and eternal, for the salvation, at once temporal and eternal, of all of the Father’s human creatures. To hope is to give oneself for the salvation (salvus), sanctity (sanctus), and integrity (sanus) of all in body and spirit, in time and eternity, that they might all be “sanctos esse sanos”:

Hope leads us to abandonment, letting be, poverty, the night that covers man’s dream and his creation. The night, the most beautiful of the Father’s creatures. Its infinite starry veil covers and cradles the misery and the grandeur of every life. The night of hope pursues the sinner into his darkest hideouts. It is the motor that transforms the nihilism lurking in every human heart (and the heart is the center of creation where the being of the world either lights up or is extinguished) into the gratuity of love, into the light of the transcendentals. It does this by letting the other be in God. Hope, the little sister of the poor who is not afraid to handle the sick and the indigent, has a special relation to God’s merciful heart. She enables us to perceive, to receive, and to unveil within the vain gratuity (vanitas) of fallen existence the fontal gratuity (gratuitas) of the Father, which changes the old creation into the new:

“Longer than a poor man’s hope,” says a Spanish proverb. Hope knows how to relate to the “poor in Spirit.” The poor in Spirit, in fact, are those who do not keep for themselves the gift of being or the gift of grace. They let the gift flow, and, having received it as a free don-ation, they par-don in order to be par-doned themselves. They let the gift of being reach the other and, in him, the Non-other who is God. They thus become agents of reciprocity—among men and between man and God. They allow the Son, the poorest of the poor, to drink their bitter waters, to cleanse them of this bitterness, and to take their sin into the black depths of hell. They let him open all that is closed to the paternal Font. They allow the Spirit to create a reciprocity of hope between them and the Father, so that God’s thoughts become theirs:

This is why the world’s hope lies with the poor: “The world will be saved by the poor. . . . And they will save it without trying . . . without asking for payment in return, because they have no idea of the price of the service they have performed”. . . . “To build is always a work of love. . . “Hans Urs von Balthasar, Gelebte Kirche: Bernanos, 3^rd ed. (Trier: Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, 1988), 533. Balthasar is citing from Bernanos, Les enfants humiliés (Paris: Gallimard), 248-249; 253-254.

To enter into the Father’s hope; to live in the reciprocity between our hope for the accomplishment of all things (body and soul; earth and heaven) and the Hope that the Son’s salvation will reach all through the Spirit—such is the task of the Christian in the world, the integration par excellence, the eschatological fulfillment. And this eschatological plenitude is not a future utopia, but the serene presence we feel in the pages of John’s Gospel:

The true Christian, who is genuinely “poor in Spirit,” obeys the command of grace to enter into the divine “sentiments” Péguy speaks of. He does this on behalf of all, giving himself over into God’s own bold hope for the world. The success of this final integration of hope depends, however, on the Christian’s willingness to pass through the eschatological fire of Love. The Christian does not purify himself for himself. Rather, he lets the Fountain of life cleanse, nourish, and transform him into a source of love, given gratis, for others. The Christian willingly allows Christ’s descent to take place again in his despairing heart, giving himself over completely so that this descent might also take place again in each one of the desperata corda (Gregory the Great)Cited in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologie der drei Tage (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, 1990), 169. For an English translation, see Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). of his brethren. Following the Son in his descent, letting himself be placed at this “intersection” of abandonment and anguish, the Christian begins to be poor, chaste, and pure like “sister” water, “who,” says Saint Francis, “is very useful and humble and precious and chaste”:

This last point entails a final step into the center where the Christian’s task lies: the tender, poor, omnipotent heart of the Father. Hope bears us to its own origin. The night, the most beautiful of God’s daughters, bears us to that same origin, as does the Son’s descent into hell. And that origin is the mystery of the Father’s omnipotent heart displayed in creation and redemption. It is the mystery of the Father himself—the unoriginate origin of the deity, of creation, of redemption; the depth where hope for salvation is anchored.

The mystery of hope protects us, keeping our worship focused on the heart of God, which is full of tenderness, hope, and patient omnipotence. It is just here that Péguy brings us back to our two authors. Hell, we said at the beginning, is the encounter between two things: the liberality of the Father who both creates human freedom and bears its consequences and the darkness of sin, the second, perverse chaos caused by human wickedness. Hell is, as it were, the Father’s “preserve.” It is as if he had reserved it for himself as a final gift to the incarnate Son, so that Jesus, in his humanity, can participate to the full in the mystery of the Father’s capacity to re-create freedom from the very “material” of its own sinful self-destruction.

The two things—the original chaos that the Father orders and the second chaos that the Son orders—are reflected each in the other. “The chaos of hell, which is a chaos of sin, is like a mirror reflecting the chaos that existed at the beginning of creation.”Adrienne von Speyr, Kreuz und Hölle I, 175, cited by Balthasar in Theologik II, 321. On Holy Saturday, the Father puts this mystery of sin in the Son’s hands so that he, the Son, might order it, judge it, and transform it into a straight path to the paternal heart that is rich in mercy. The Father hands over to the Son in the economy of salvation his ultimate “reserve” so that the Son, victim and eschatological judge, might administer it for his greater glory.

Finally, then, the Son, after taking everything down with him into hell, brought up again with him the ultimate mystery of the Father’s gratuitous love, accompanied only by “little hope” as his accomplice (cf. Péguy’s “quand tout descend seule elle remonte”). This is the ultimate mystery that generates and covers, veils and unveils, earth and heaven, time and eternity. For “it is only the ‘chaos’ of love (that is, in its unfathomable depth) that makes the chaos [the gift of freedom, which can be misused] of sin”Ibid., 107, cited by Balthasar in Theologik II, 322. possible. And it is this same “chaos” of love—another name for its gratuitous “whylessness”— that alone holds the power to overcome the chaos of sin in its ever-greater gift and mercy.