Christ's Descent Research Articles

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Book Review: Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic doctrine of Christ's descent into hell

Book Review: <b>Light in Darkness:</b> Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic doctrine of Christ's descent into hell

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent Into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent Into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell. By ALYSSA LYRA PITSTICK.

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell. By ALYSSA LYRA PITSTICK.

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell. By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007. xvi + 458 pages. $55.00 ($36.00 paper).

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell. By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007. xvi + 458 pages. 36.00 paper). - Volume 35 Issue 2

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell. By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell. By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell – By Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Light in Darkness, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent Into Hell by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007, xvi+458 + 9 colour plates, $55.00 hdk., $36.00 pbk.

Light in Darkness, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent Into Hell by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007, xvi+458 + 9 colour plates, $55.00 hdk., $36.00 pbk.

The Internal Logic of Holy Saturday in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Abstract: While consensus reigns that Balthasar's theology of Christ's descent into hell on Holy Saturday constitutes both the center of his theology and his most significant innovation on the tradition, the question remains open whether that innovation marks a true development on this theologoumenon or a radical departure from it. This article argues for the former alternative by drawing on all those elements in the history of theology, both Catholic and Protestant, that point to an increasing – indeed inevitable – radicalization of this doctrine. Then, using the norms set forth by Cardinal Newman's Essay on Development, it shows how Balthasar's ‘innovations’ meet Newman's criteria for authentic development.

Claudel and Dante: Salvation on the Seventh Day

t Le Repos du septidme jow (The Resr on the Seqtenth Doy), written in 1896, first published in 1901 in a collective volume of Ii Arbre, illustrates the search for the cross, the passage from the centre of the world of the living, to the spiritual centre of God's realm. In the beginning, the Chinese Emperorr occupies centre et le milieu (727) of his Empire du Milieu (725)., and governs his world according to the universal rules of music. His role is to maintain the harmony between the visible and the invisible, to model the melody of the terrestrial world on the celestial one on Dante's music of the spheres, 6coutant d'une oreille et de I'autre afin qu'aucune note ne se fausse (787). However, the musical rules and the precepts of Antiquity are not enough to keep him connected to divinity, so he retires in solitude and contemplation in order to find the ultimate revelation. ln k Repos the dead create havoc when they invade the world of the living, and the empire collapses as soon as the Emperor leaves the sacred center. The intrusion of the dead is the result of an unknown sin. In order to restore harmony, the Emperor has to travel to the Underworld to find the cause and the remedy. His voyage, like Dante's, is also willed from above. The main three moments of the first act leading to the Emperor's crossing into the other world echo the three episodes of Christ's descent to Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemas and the analogous scenes from Dante's Infento 8 and 9. The Emperor wears his body like a cross, and fulfills a Christ-like function. He aims at bringing the knowledge of salvation to his people and the revelation of the ttcentrgtt.2

Descensus Christi ad Inferos: Christ's Descent to the Dead

The narrative of Christ's descent was nearly omnipresent in the early Church. Yet a change of Latin vocabulary from «descensus ad inferos» (Christ's descent to the dead) to «descensus ad inferna» (Christ's descent into hell) prompted a change in what was proclaimed. The earlier stratum portrayed Christ preaching to those who, while on earth, did not hear the word of God, while the latter described the reconciliation of sinners. The author here considers the vitality of this creedal statement and what is lost when the descent is absent from Christian experience.

Preface

Preface As Mary Magdalen stood weeping outside the empty tomb, he called her by name—and suddenly she recognized him. She went and told the disciples: "I have seen the Lord." Mary Magdalen's faith in the resurrected Christ was grounded in direct contact with the Son of God.We may imagine that once she heard Jesus call her name she no more needed to reason about whether Christ rose from the dead than we need to reason about whether light radiates from the sun. None of us can claim the immediate, transforming religious experience of Mary Magdalen—or of Peter, or Paul, or other disciples and apostles of Christ. And few believers purport to have had the less immediate, but perhaps no less convincing mystical experiences of, say, Teresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart. Many believers experience God in less dramatic ways, as they look at the lilies of die field, the starry skies above, and are flooded with gratitude and joy—but they are well aware that others look at the same lilies, the same skies, and feel no consciousness of the divine. LOGOS 3:2 SPRING 2000 LOGOS Despite a relative paucity of immediate religious experience, however, people believe. And people move from nonbelief to belief, as Mary Magdalen herself did so long ago. How do conversions occur?What role does miracle play in the process? How do time and affection and imagination and reason and will and service and grace figure into the picture—or pictures, since paths to God are multiple? These questions are among those addressed by articles in this issue of Logos. In "Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited" Douglas Lane Patey traces the conversion of Charles Ryder and shows us how events inWaugh's own life, his ownjourney toward God, anchor the fictional masterpiece. Love is the major theme of allWaugh's works, Patey argues; in Brideshead Revisited love finds its proper object as Ryder's affections move from Sebastian, to Julia, to God. "The White Nun in Rattlebone," by George Bellis, offers a reading of a story set in a black Kansas City ghetto in 1 947, in which a renegade nun determined to win converts for Catholicism enthralls a group of children with magic and miracle. Though Sister Joan loses the battle in the short run, the children's encounter with the idea ofmiracle lodges in their imaginations long after the white nun is gone. How is Augustine's conversion story to be read? Khaled Anatolios provides an answer in "Quest, Questions, and Christ in Augustine's Confessions."Augustine's drama develops through questioning , and through attention to the role and meaning questions play in the search for God. The long process of questioning through whichAugustine ascends to God is made possible by Christ's descent. Robert Pasnau gives us a very different (though not inconsistent ) reading ofAugustine's autobiography in "PlottingAugustine's Confessions." Pasnau explores the philosophical dimensions of the work, offering a careful analysis ofAugustine's conception of weakness of will and an account of the role this conception plays in Augustine's understanding of his conversion. PREFACE In "Aquinas and the Credibility of God" Michael Torre suggests that though Aquinas is famous for his "Five Ways" of demonstrating God's existence, this doctor of the Church held that most who believe in God do so because God works miracles. Belief in God is based primarily—and quite rationally—on the saints and martyrs, men and women whose lives witness to divine truth. "The Theocentric Foundation of John Henry Newman's Philosophy of Education," by Jane Rupert, comments on Newman's early conversion to a sense of the invisible, and on the development of this sense into a conviction that God is the ultimate ground of an objective, intelligibly unified universe.This conviction of Newman's shapes his understanding of liberal education and the idea of the university. Thomas F. Dailey, O.S.F.S., shows us how some of Newman's ideas about the unity of knowledge and the function of the university find expression in John Paul II's encyclicals. In "Toward a Culture of Truth: Higher Education and the Thought of Pope John Paul II" Dailey...

Prince Arthur and Christ's Descent into Hell: The Faerie Queene, I.viii and II.viii

Prince Arthur and Christ's Descent into Hell: The Faerie Queene, I.viii and II.viii

Lancelot's skin: A foundation for typological interpretation

In the Lancelot of the Old French Vulgate Cycle and the Prosa-Lancelot of the Middle High German Lancelot-Gral-Zyklus, the here stands in a typological triangle between Virgil's Aeneas and Christ. Aeneas, founder of Rome, foreshadows Lancelot, protector of King Arthur's realm, who foreshadows Christ, the Savior. Aeneas's descent into Hades compared with Lancelot's journey into the Dolorous Garde and that in turn to Christ's descent into hell illustrates this point. Comparing the portrait of Lancelot to a period portrait of Christ and to a description of Aeneas's lion skin further strengthens this contention. “Good” characters normally are described as having white skin and “evil” characters with black skin, but extremely rarely do characters have brown skin. The color of Aeneas's lion skin is light brown to reddish, Lancelot's skin is a little more intense than the color of the lion skin with an admixture of black in the German, while the skin of Christ is light brown mixed with red and deepened with black, darker still and more intense than the lion skin of Aeneas and the brown skin of Lancelot. The lion as a symbol of Christ and the unusual brown skin link the triad Aeneas-Lancelot-Christ typologically.

THEOLOGY IN ASYLUM. THE FAILURE OF SALVIFIC STORY IN MALCOLM LOWRY'SLUNAR CAUSTIC

Lunar Caustic tells a story of a failed jazz player who stays briefly in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Like Under the Volcano, the novella partakes of the quality of Lowry's madly revolving world. The asylum experience of W. Plantagenet, the protagonist of Lunar Caustic, is based on an episode from Lowry's own life.1 During his stay in New York in 1935 his alcoholism became too difficult a problem for his friends who decided to commit Lowry to a psychiatric ward. Later Lowry presented the fact in a different light, claiming that he had made a deliberate pilgrimage to Bellevue in order to gather material for his story.2 Initially, the story was to evolve into a novel which would become the Purgatorio part of the author's drunken Divine Comedy.3 William Plantagenet is shown in the text as the one who makes a pilgrimage to the place of his ordeal. The perspective of a Dantean visitor is blended with that of the Christ-like figure that Plantagenet attempts to be. What seems striking is the fact that Lunar Caustic abounds in remarks and images that yield to theological interpretation. They are signs that seem to have been emptied of their original meaning. The asylum provides a suitable frame for all the strategies of displacement that dissociate the signs from their Judaeo Christian framework and set them afloat. Accordingly, I would like to demonstrate that the theological elements of Lunar Caustic are diffuse traces of a religious system that is no longer available to or salvific for the characters. In my analysis, I will use a midrashic fragment from First Epistle of Peter to interpret the novella. The fragment weaves together two questions that surface as the main motifs in Lunar Caustic. They are: Christ's descent into the abyss and the deliverance of Noah.

England and the Crusades 1095-1588 (review)

Reviews 179 T y e r m a n , Christopher, England and the Crusades 1095-1588, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988; cloth; pp. xvi, 492; 5 maps, 2 genealogies, chronology, list of Popes 1068-1590; R. R. P. UK£31.95, US$45.95. Remarkably, the same year saw two deceptively similar monographs produced: Simon Lloyd's English Society and the Crusade 1216-1307 and the book under review here. While the generaltopicsof the two are indeed the same, the focus and emphasis differ gready. Both works are based on exhaustive reviews of primary sources. Both are invaluable to any Crusade historian. Tyerman's work covers a much longer time span and is written in a much more personal style. He does not hesitate to criticise many notable historians for the occasions on which their assertions are not based on sufficient evidence and he adds his own opinion on events which cannot be documented but for which the preponderance of facts suggests a solution; for example, the matter of Henry II's 30,000 mark treasure adegedly sent to Jerusalem. The first nine chapters cover the background to the First Crusade and the period up to 1337, thus aU the major Crusades prior to the fall of Acre. Chapter 10 covers 1337-1410, chapter 11 the fifteenth century, chapter 12 investigates national Crusades, and the final chapter the sixteenth century, after which the Reformation and its new priorities put an end to traditional Crusading. As Tyerman explains in the introduction, this is not another history of the Crusades from an English point of view. It examines instead the effects the Crusading movement had on medieval England and Wales. It is not a history of Crusader batdes nor of English and Welsh activities in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. It is not intended to replace other recent books which concentrate on the more general aspects of Crusading. It is then a wide-ranging book examining such rarely-treated matters as anti-semitism, military uniforms, civil disobedience, and the rise of nationalism. This work is refreshing for its brilliant piecing together of figures and data from a wide array of primary sources. Together with intelUgent speculation, these provide solid information which revises or complements incorrect or incomplete data to be found elsewhere. The continuing emphasis is naturally on the importance of the Holy Land to England and on Crusades in which the English took part. One of the most successful areas is the linking of the idea of Crusade to national contemporary issues. It examines Crusading within a specific framework of contemporary English ideology and politics. The impeccable and exhaustive research demonstrated throughout make this a valuable source to those who are not able to consult the sources themselves. There is no doubt that this work complements that of Lloyd. N o Crusade historian can afford to be without both of them. It would seem ungenerous perhaps to mention the rare spelling errors and the lack of a glossary of 180 Reviews unfamdiar terms which would have made some portions more understandable to the general reader. Nevertheless, it is both innovative in its point of view and immensely readable. Anne Gdmour-Bryson Department of History University of Melbourne Vitto, Cindy L., The virtuous pagan in Middle English literature (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 79, part 5) Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1989; paper; pp. ii, 100; R. R. P. US$15.00. This monograph is concerned with the theme of possible salvation for those outside the Church. It oudines: the succession of perceptions on solutions to the problem of the virtuous pagans evolved from the first to the fourteenth centuries; views on Christ's descent into Hell to convert the souls H e found there; the concept of Limbo as an intermediate state between bliss and punishment, an idea sanctioned by Aquinas; and Dante's elaborate and schematized cosmological framework in which most of the classical pagans resided. The prerequisites for salvation were deemed by many to be concerned with reason (this allowing salvation for the classical philosophers), or held by others to be concerned with faith alone (so effectively excluding non-Christians). The author stresses the fact that to...

Ovid's Semele and Dante's Metamorphosis: Paradiso XXI-XXIII

In the seventh Heaven of Paradiso, that of Saturn and of the Contemplatives, Dante is elaborately and systematically presented as a corrected, Christian Semele. The culmination of this presentation takes place just after the Pilgrim's arrival in the eighth Heavenin the context of Christ's descent and reascent in Par. XXIII. The present article seeks to investigate both how this Semele program functions and what it means in terms of the poetics of the third

Hercules and his Labors as Allegories of Christ and His Victory over Sin in Dante's &lt;i&gt;Inferno&lt;/i&gt;

Every student of Dante's Inferno knows that, although hell was created by divine power, wisdom, and love— that is by all three persons of the Trinity (Inf. III. 4-6)— the name of Christ is never mentioned in the realm of the damned. But Christ's relation to hell is progressively and systematically revealed to Dante the pilgrim and to the reader by strategically placed allusions to the effect on hell of the earthquake which occurred at the crucifixion and to Christ's descent into hell to rescue the souls in limbo, the harrowing of hell. The effect of the earthquake is presented as a topographical fact in hell, a fissure which is seen in each of the three major divisions of hell (the incontinent, violent, and fraudulent) and understood more fully each time it is encountered. On the other hand, Christ as narrower of hell is presented not only literally (Inf. IV. 52-54) but also through the surrogate figure or type of Hercules. Dante makes the parallel quite unmistakeable when the divine messenger who helps Virgil at the gate of Dis be

Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ's Descent Into Hell in Elizabethan Theology

L'A. decrit et analyse la controverse entre Puritains et Anglicans au sujet de la Descente du Christ aux Enfers, apportant ainsi un eclairage aux problemes complexes de l'influence de la Reforme continentale sur la Reforme anglaise, de la penetration des idees de Calvin dans l'Angleterre elisabethaine, des differences theologiques au sein du parti puritain et de l'emergence d'une theologie proprement anglicane a la fin du regne d'Elisabeth et au debut du regne de Jacques I.