I was asked by one of our Logos students about Matthew 27: 50-53, four verses that only occur in Matthew: “Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the...
Andrea Mantegna. Christ’s Descent into Limbo (tempera and gold on panel), c. 1470-1475.
Private Collection.
[Mantegna painted this scene originally for Lodovico Gonzaga in June of 1468. It was so highly regarded that Mantegna painted several other versions, including this smaller one (15 ½ x 16 ¼) for Ferdinando Carlo the last Duke of Mantua sometime between 1470-1475. The painting was in the Barbara Plasecka Johnson Collection in Princeton, New Jersey and had been on loan to the Frick Collection in New York City, where it was exhibited September 8, 2000 – July 8, 2002. Johnson then consigned the painting to Sotheby’s, where on January 23, 2003 it was sold as part of Lot 62 to an anonymous private buyer for $28,568,000.]
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I was asked by one of our Logos students about Matthew 27: 50-53, four verses that only occur in Matthew:
“Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.”
(27: 50-53)
Crucified people typically died in 3-5 days, and when they expired they did so quietly, their breath slowing and barely perceptible, their heart rate diminishing and simply stopping. But here, Jesus cries out in a loud voice [???? ??????, fo-nay’ may-ga’-lay] not with a hollow man’s whimper, but with a great bang . . . a loud victory cry, as it were. And with that, “the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom,” a violent rending by God from above, giving access to the holy of holies—to God himself—once and for all. The veil in the Temple separated the “holy place” (which contained the menorah, the altar of incense and the table of showbread) from the “holy of holies,” the dwelling place of God, which prior to the destruction of Solomon’s temple in 586 B.C. had contained the ark of the covenant. When Jesus died, the veil was “torn in two from top to bottom” giving access to God once and for all through Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross.
At that moment all of creation convulsed: “the earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints [?????, hag’-ee-os] who had fallen asleep [??????, koy-mah’-o; i.e., “died”] were raised.”
In our LBS course on the Gospel according to Matthew (Lesson #24) we learn that Israel sits squarely on the Dead Sea Fault Line between the African and Arabian tectonic plates, producing frequent earthquakes, some of them massive. One of the largest struck in A.D. 746, destroying most of the towns and villages surrounding the Sea of Galilee, leveling Jericho and causing severe damage in Jerusalem. Geologists Jefferson B. Williams and Marcus J. Schwab studied three core samples from the beach adjacent to Ein Gedi (on the western shore of the Dead Sea), and the samples indicate a massive seismic event between the years A.D. 26 and 36, an event that could well have been the earthquake described here in Matthew 27: 50-53.
When the earthquake struck we read that “rocks were split, tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised” (27: 51-52). The western slope of the Mount of Olives is a vast cemetery containing over 70,000 graves, some dating as far back as the time of king David. Tradition claims that the prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi are buried on the mount of Olives, as well as Zechariah son Berekiah, whom Jesus had earlier accused the religious leaders of having murdered “between the temple and the altar” (Matthew 23: 35).
The Jewish cemetery is highlighted in this aerial view of today’s Mount of Olives
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2013-Aerial-Mount_of_Olives.jpg]
Jesus’ words in Matthew 27: 50-53 recall the famous “valley of dry bones” scene in the book of Ezekiel:
“Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Listen! I will make breath enter you so you may come to life. I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow over you, cover you with skin, and put breath into you so you may come to life. Then you shall know that I am the Lord. [So I (Ezekiel)] prophesied as I had been commanded. A sound started up, as I was prophesying, rattling like thunder. The bones came together, bone joining to bone. As I watched, sinews appeared on them, flesh grew over them, skin covered them on top, but there was no breath in them. Then [God] said to me: Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man! Say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: From the four winds come, O breath, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life. I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath entered them; they came to life and stood on their feet, a vast army.”
(37: 5-10)
Ezekiel had been taken captive to Babylon in 597 B.C. and in 585 B.C. he learned that Jerusalem had fallen to Nebuchadnezzar less than a year earlier, in the summer of 586 B.C. (Ezekiel 33: 21). Ezekiel’s vision is thus symbolic and prophetic, in that it prefigures the Jew’s return from Babylonian captivity under the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 B.C.—an event only 46 years in the future—to once again occupy Jerusalem and their land; it does not refer to a future eschatological resurrection of the dead.
Nor does Matthew’s. Matthew’s account may be literal, that those raised “after [Jesus’] resurrection [then] entered the holy city and appeared to many” (27: 53), in which case it is odd that such an astounding event is not mentioned in our other gospels, nor does it appear in any of our historical records; or like the “valley of dry bones” it may be symbolic, Jesus being “the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead,” as St. Paul writes to the Colossians (1: 18). If the latter is the case—if it is symbolic—then Matthew offers a powerful prophetic vision following the curtain in the temple being torn in two from top to bottom, giving access to God once and for all through Jesus’ redemptive death, burial and resurrection. In either case, we should note that two days pass between Jesus’ death and resurrection, two days until the resurrected ones enter the city and appear to many, whether literal or symbolic.
So, what happened during those two days?
Ignatius of Antioch, a second-century bishop of Syrian Antioch (home church to St. Paul and St. Barnabas), wrote an epistle to the church of the Magnesians [Magnesia on the Meander River was located in the fertile commercial triangle of Priene, Ephesus and Tralles]. Ignatius had been arrested during the reign of the emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117), and he was being escorted to Rome, where he would be martyred. En route, Ignatius wrote seven letters: 1) to the Ephesians; 2) the Magnesians; 3) the Trallians; 4) the Romans; 5) the Philadelphians; 6) the Smyrnaeans; and 7) a letter to his friend, Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who had been a student of the Apostle John. In his letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius writes:
“Those who lived by the ancient customs [the Jewish customs] attained a fresh hope; they no longer observed Saturday, but Sunday, the Lord’s day, for on that day life arose for us through Christ and through his death. Some deny this mystery, but through it we have received our faith and because of it we persevere, that we may prove to be disciples of our only teacher, Jesus Christ. Even the prophets awaited him as their teacher, since they were his disciples in spirit. That is why Christ, whom they rightly awaited, raised them from the dead when he appeared.”
(Ch. 9, 1-2)
Ignatius—only one degree of separation from the Apostle John, and two degrees of separation from Jesus himself—tells us that between Jesus’ death and resurrection he raised from the dead, the righteous prophets who had preceded him. Peter perhaps alludes to the same thing when he writes:
“For Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might lead you to God. Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the spirit. In it he also went to preach to the spirits in prison, who had once been disobedient while God patiently waited in the days of Noah during the building of the ark, in which a few persons, eight in all, were saved through water. This prefigured baptism . . . an appeal to God for a clear conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him.”
(1 Peter 3: 18-22)
And Ephesians adds its support:
“Grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says: ‘He ascended on high and took prisoners captive; he gave gifts to men.’ What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended into the lower [regions] of the earth?”
(Ephesians 4: 7-9).
The “harrowing of hell” (as it was later called) was picked up and developed by theologians throughout the early church. St. Melito (c. 100-180), bishop of Sardis, preached a homily on Holy Saturday—the day Jesus lies in the tomb—in which he says:
“What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.
Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.”
(“The Lord’s Descent into Hell,”
https://www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/spirit_20010414_omelia-sabato-santo_en.html)
St. Irenaeus (c. 130-202) wrote on the harrowing of hell in Against Heresies IV, 22.1-2; Tertullian (c. 155-220) in A Treatise on the Soul, 55; Hippolytus (c. 170- 235) in his Treatise on Christ and Anti-Christ, 45; Origen (c. 185-253) in Against Celsus 2.43 and in his Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, 5: 10; St. Augustine (354-430) in Letter 164.2; and Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) in Registrum Epistolarum, Book VII, Letter XV.
The harrowing of hell in which Jesus brings out of the “underworld” all those righteous men and women of scripture who predeceased him, including John the Baptist, the Old Testament patriarchs, David and Solomon, the “good kings” of Judah (Asa, Jehoshaphat, Joash, Amaziah, Uzziah, Hezekiah and Josiah) . . . and one might even argue, the virtuous pagans of old: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Trajan and Virgil. Justin Martyr (c. A.D. 100-165) proposed this in Chapter 46 of his First Apology, where he argues that since Jesus is the incarnation of the eternal ????? (“In the beginning was the Word [?????], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . [and] the Word became flesh and lived among us”—John 1: 1, 14); then anyone born prior to Jesus’ who lived a virtuous life consistent with the eternal ????? responded fully to Christ with the limited knowledge that he (or she) had at the time. According to Justin Martyr, the virtuous pagans were thus “grandfathered in” to the plan of salvation.
Anastasis [“Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection,” in the parecclesion (side chapel) of the church],
Chora Church [as of 2020, the Kariye Mosque] (fresco), 14th century.
Istanbul, Turkey.
[Having just broken down the gates of hell, Jesus pulls Adam and Eve out of their graves.
To the left, John the Baptist (holding a water pitcher) stands behind Adam, while king David and Solomon stand with John. To the right, virtuous kings and other ancient worthies wait behind Eve.]
This 14th-century fresco in the Chora Church offers an icon of the restoration between God and fallen humanity achieved by Christ’s redemptive death, burial and resurrection. In it the first Adam and the new Adam come face to face. The redemptive power of Christ’s resurrection draws Adam and Eve from the darkness of the grave into the light of life. Broken locks and chains litter the ground beneath Jesus’ feet, no longer having the power to bind souls. Satan lies crushed, bound and defeated in the very depths of hell. The underworld—???????, sheh-ole’ or ??????, gheh’-en-nah—is not destroyed, but its power to bind humanity is.
The idea of a descent to the underworld such as Jesus makes is a fairly common motif in mythology and classical literature. In the 18th-century B.C. Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s side-kick, journeys to the underworld in the final fragmentary Tablet 12 of the epic, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld. At the opening of Tablet 12, Gilgamesh has lost some valuable items, gifts from the goddess Ishtar. They have fallen through a crack in the earth and dropped into the underworld. Enkidu volunteers to retrieve them, but Enkidu must follow the rules if he hopes to return: 1) do not wear clothes of purple or red; 2) shun make-up that presents a pleasing face; 3) take no weapons; 4) go naked, filthy and tearful; 5) be quiet and distant to anyone you meet; 6) greet no girl with a kiss; 7) hold no child’s hand and strike no boy . . . in short, be as inconspicuous as possible.
Of course, Enkidu (as is his wont) breaks all the rules and he is trapped in the underworld, which becomes his eternal home. Gilgamesh mourns Enkidu who went to the underworld in his place, but the god Ea sends the warrior Nergal who guides Gilgamesh halfway through the bowels of the earth into the pit of hell, where he meets a forlorn Enkidu who says:
“If you wish to sit for a brief time, I will describe where I do stay . . . All my skin and all my bones are dead now. All my skin and all my bones are now dead. ‘Oh, no!’ cried Gilgamesh, ‘Oh, no! And Gilgamesh asks: ‘Have you seen a brother crying among relatives who chose to ignore his prayers?’ To which Enkidu replies: ‘Oh, yes. He brings bread to the hungry from the dumps of those who feed their dogs with food they keep from people and he eats trash that no other man would want.’”
The fragmentary Book 12 ends on that sad note.
In Gilgamesh, retrieving lost items provides the impetus for a journey to the underworld; in Homer’s Odyssey, gaining information motivates the quest. After the ten-year Trojan war (c. 1285-1275 B.C.), Odysseus journeys home by ship to his kingdom in Ithaca, longing to rejoin his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. The journey is only 565 nautical miles, but Odysseus meanders thousands of miles, encounters numerous adventures, loses his entire crew and spends ten years at sea before finally arriving home . . . only to find his kingdom in disarray, his wife relentlessly pursued by obnoxious suitors and his son believing Odysseus is dead. During the journey Odysseus seeks advice from the blind Theban prophet Tiresias, who Odysseus learns has died. To speak with Tiresias, Odysseus must journey to the underworld to find him.
In the Odyssey the underworld is a dark, grim place with souls flitting about, squeaking and gibbering like bats. To speak with them, Odysseus must make the proper sacrifices and libations, pouring blood into a pool to attract the dead, for as we read in Leviticus 17: 11, “the life of a creature is in the blood.” Upon drinking the blood, the dead become sentient and speak to Odysseus. He learns from Tiresias that Poseidon, the god of the sea, is angry with Odysseus for blinding Poseidon’s son, Polyphemus, and Poseidon is seeking revenge, stirring up the sea, sinking Odysseus’s ships and taking revenge on his crew. Tiresias gives Odysseus sage advice about placating Poseidon so Odysseus can make it home safely. While in the underworld, Odysseus meets many others who have died, as well: Elpenor, one of Odysseus’s men who recently died and has not yet received a proper burial; fellow king and warrior, Agamemnon, who was murdered by his own wife and her lover; Achilles, the ancient world’s greatest warrior; Heracles; Tantalus; and Odysseus’s own mother, who he learns has died of grief over missing Odysseus:
Odysseus:
“What form of death overcame you? What laid you low,
some long, slow illness? Or did Artemis showering arrows
come with her painless shafts and bring you down?”
Anticlea:
“It was my longing for you, my shining Odysseus—
you and your quickness, you and your gentle ways—
that tore away my life that had been so sweet.”
(XI, 193-195; 230-232)
Odysseus came to the underworld seeking advice about his journey home, but he receives much more. Odysseus leaves the underworld understanding his responsibility to his people, his family and his crew. He learns what it means to be truly a king, a husband and a father. Odysseus emerges from the underworld reborn, newly-equipped to re-engage the world of the living and to take his rightful place in the pantheon of ancient heroes.
Virgil follows in Homer’s footsteps with the Aeneid, the epic story of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who fled the fall of Troy and travels to Italy, where he becomes the progenitor of the Roman people. Written between 29-19 B.C., Book 6 of the Aeneid sees Aeneas land on the Italian shore near modern-day Naples. There he visits the temple of Apollo and meets the Sibyl, a priestess of Apollo. Aeneas prays that Apollo allow the Trojans to settle in Latium, but the Sibyl warns Aeneas that trouble awaits him and his people, conflict on the scale of the Trojan War and enemies as skilled and lethal as Achilles. Aeneas asks the Sibyl if she can grant him passage into Dis—the underworld—that he might consult with his dead father’s spirit. After passing an initiation rite that wins him the “Golden Bough,” the key to entering and exiting the underworld, the Sibyl leads Aeneas to the Acheron river where the infernal ferryman Charon delivers the newly arrived dead across the water and into the underworld. There Aeneas hears the dreadful wailing of thousands upon thousands of souls who await judgment before Minos.
In Homer’s underworld there is no judgment, just gray souls wandering about and longing to be alive again; in Virgil’s underworld moral and ethical scores are settled, punishments are doled out and rewards are granted. Virgil’s underworld exhibits a clear architectural design with a downward trajectory. Aeneas comes first to the Fields of Mourning, a kind of Limbo where those who never fully experienced life dwell: infants, the unjustly condemned, suicides and those who died for love all wander aimlessly. Here Aeneas meets the passionate and volatile Dido, with whom he had a blistering—and doomed—love affair at Carthage. Both caught in the throes of fiery passion and lust, Aeneas finally breaks free and continues his quest for a new homeland, a resurrected Troy on the rich and fertile soil of Italy. Dido goes mad, shrieking about her palace, clawing and clamoring. As Aeneas leaves to board his ship, Dido . . .
“Glared at him askance,
her eyes roving over him, head to foot, with a look
of stony silence . . . till abruptly she cries out
in a blaze of fury: ‘No goddess was your mother!
No Dardanus sired your line, you traitor, you liar . . .
three, four times over she beat her lovely breast,
she ripped at her golden hair and “Oh, my God,”
she cries, ‘will the stranger just sail off
and make a mockery of our realm? Will no one
rush to arms, come streaming out of the whole city,
hunt him down, race to the docks and launch the ships?
Go, quick—bring fire!
Hand out weapons!
Bend to the oars!
What am I saying? Where am I? . . .”
(IV, 454-456; 736-745)
In the end, Dido flings herself on the massive bed that she and Aeneas had shared, a bed now perched atop a funeral pyre. There she plunges a sword—a Trojan sword—into her breast, over and over. And the pyre is set ablaze. Exit Dido.
When Aeneas meets the shade of Dido in the Fields of Mourning he says, stupidly: “I heard that you were dead . . . was it I who caused your death?” Unmoved, wearing a look of stony silence, Dido simply turns and walks away, disappearing into a dark wood where the shade of her dead husband awaits.
Aeneas continues on through the Field of Heroes, where he sees many casualties of the Trojan War, and from there he enters the Blessed Groves where the good wander about in peace and comfort. At last Aeneas meets his father Anchises, who congratulates Aeneas on making the difficult journey and who answers his questions about how the dead are assigned places in the underworld and about how the good attain residence in the Elysian Fields.
Virgil’s Dis is obviously a pre-Christian concept of the afterlife, but it is a big step beyond Homer and a giant leap beyond Gilgamesh. What all three have in common, though, is permanence: once ensconced in the underworld, no one leaves: the dead check in, but they don’t check out. Dante, conversely, gives us a profoundly Christian view of the afterlife in his Divine Comedy. Nonetheless, Dante draws heavily on Virgil who serves as Dante’s guide through the nine downward circles of the Inferno and the seven-storey climb up the mountain of the Purgatorio, relinquishing him at the top to Beatrice who then leads Dante through the spheres of the Paradiso, handing him off to St. Bernard of Clairvaux for the final sprint to the beatific vision.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante at mid-life, lost in a dark wood (many of us can relate to that). Dante was born in Florence, Italy in 1265, and although he writes the Divine Comedy c. 1308-1321, he sets his poem in 1300 when Dante himself was thirty-five years old, midway in the span of a biblically-oriented life of seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong (Psalm 90: 10). As the poem opens Dante has strayed from the straight path and is lost, but as he wanders he sees a “hilltop shawled/ in morning rays of light sent from the planet/ that leads men straight ahead on every road” (I, 16-18). Dante begins to climb toward the light, but suddenly three creatures block the way: a leopard, a great lion and a she-wolf. The creatures symbolize the three categories of sin that block Dante’s progress toward the light, toward God: 1) the sins of incontinence (passions of the body that overwhelm the mind); 2) the sins of violence (against one’s self and others); and 3) the more complex and disturbing sins of fraudulence (treachery, destroying the life of a friend and so on). The three creatures correspond to the three descending levels of hell through which Dante must pass before arriving at the mountain of Purgatory, and from there onward to Paradise.
But Dante cannot make the journey alone; he is lost and he needs a guide, someone experienced, someone with reason and spiritually maturity. Escaping the three creatures, Dante writes:
“While I was rushing down to that low place,
my eyes made out a figure coming toward me
of one grown faint, perhaps from too much silence.
And when I saw him standing in this wasteland,
‘Have pity on my soul,’ I cried to him,
‘whichever you are, shade or living man!’
‘No longer living man, though once I was,’
he said, ‘and my parents were from Lombardy,
both of them were Mantuans by birth.
I was born, though somewhat late, sub Julio,
and lived in Rome when good Augustus reigned,
when still the false and lying gods were worshipped.
I was a poet and sang of that just man,
son of Anchises, who sailed off from Troy
after the burning of proud Ilium.’”
(I, 61-75)
Here Dante meets Virgil, his guide through the underworld, as well as his poetic mentor in the secular world in which Dante lived. On their descent through Hell, through the sins of incontinence, violence and fraudulence, the circles become more and more circumspect. In Dante’s imagination Hell is like a great inverted cone, wide at the top, but more and more narrow in the descent. John Milton writes in Paradise Lost that God hurled Satan “headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Sky/ With hideous ruin and combustion down/ To bottomless perdition, there to dwell/ In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,/ Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to Arms” (I, 45-49). Think of Satan hitting the ground, burrowing deeper and deeper until coming to a stop at the very bottom . . . the inverted cone of Hell. That’s the image, one of narrowing. St. Augustine wrote in his City of God that sin is the state of being incurvatus in se; that is, of “curving in on one’s self.” The deeper you go into sin, the more and constricted you become. And in Dante’s Hell, the deeper you go, the colder it gets: there is fire and brimstone at the top and freezing ice at the bottom, until at the very bottom where Satan dwells, Dante writes: “Down here, I stood on souls fixed under ice/ (I tremble as I put this into verse);/ to me they looked like straws worked into glass” (XXXIV, 10-12).
Once in Hell, from which no man escapes, Virgil leads Dante as they climb up Satan’s loins and begin ascending—a kind of topsy-turvy world—to the foot of Purgatory, the seven-storey mountain. Purgatory is not a place of punishment, of fire and brimstone; rather, it is a hospital for the sick, where sinners recuperate and heal. Christ died for our sins, once and for all, and once we accept him as our savior, our sins are forgiven, totally and completely: period. But we still retain the scars—if you will—of our sinful natures, the residual wounds of what caused us to sin to begin with. Purgatory is a school for sinners, a place where one prepares to enter into the beatific vision. As Virgil guides Dante up the seven-storey mountain, each terrace addresses one of the seven deadly sins, in order from the most to the least serious: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust. At each level the weight of Dante’s proclivity toward sin diminishes, until at the very summit of Purgatory, his weightless soul now “reborn, a tree renewed, in bloom/ with newborn foliage, immaculate/ eager to rise, now ready for the stars” (XXXIII, 143-145).
At the summit of Purgatory Dante turns . . . and Virgil is gone, replaced by Beatrice. Throughout the Divine Comedy three persons guide Dante: Virgil, representing reason, guides him throughout the Inferno and the Purgatorio; Beatrice, representing theology, guides him throughout the celestial spheres of the Paradiso; and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, representing mysticism, guides him into the pure light of the Empyrean, the mystical rose and the divine heart of God. At this point language fails Dante, utterly:
“Bernard then gestured to me with a smile
that I look up, but I already was
instinctively what he would have me be:
for now my vision as it grew more clear
was penetrating more and more the Ray
of that exalted Light of Truth Itself.
And from then on my vision rose to heights
higher than words, which fail before such sight,
and memory fails, too, at such extremes.
As he who sees things in a dream and wakes
to feel the passion of the dream still there
although no part of it remains in mind.
Just such am I: my vision fades and all
but ceases, yet the sweetness born of it
I still can feel distilling in my heart . . .
At this point power failed high fantasy
but, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire impelled
by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
(XXXIII, 49-63;142-145)
Turning back to Matthew 27: 50-53, we don’t know what happens during the two days between Jesus’ death and resurrection. Both scripture and tradition hint at the “harrowing of hell,” of Jesus descending into the underworld to release the righteous men and women of old, to break the shackles of death binding Adam and Eve, the prophets, the righteous kings and perhaps the virtuous pagans who lived before Christ and who responded authentically and fully to the eternal ????? with the limited understanding that they had. If so, we might wonder if their time in the underworld enlightened them, as it enlightened Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas and Dante. And if it did, we might also imagine their joy as they gazed into the eyes of love and heard him say to them: “It is finished.”
Postscript
I began this reflection with Andrea Mantegna’s Christ’s Descent into Limbo (tempera and gold on panel), c. 1470-1475, a painting now in the hands of a private collector who wishes to remain anonymous. In 2018 a painting long removed from permanent exhibition in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (a city about 30 miles north of Milan) had been dismissed as a contemporary copy of a lost Mantegna. However, a careful analysis of the painting by the museum’s curator, Dr. Giovanni Valagussa, demonstrated that the painting, The Resurrection of Christ, was indeed an original Mantegna; what’s more, it was the top portion of a larger painting that had been cut in half, perhaps to fit the space where the painting was to be hung, or more likely to sell each half separately. I reproduce The Resurrection of Christ below. Notice how in joining the two paintings the stone arch matches exactly, reflecting the sequence of Jesus’ resurrection and of his harrowing of hell. Perhaps one day we’ll see the two paintings displayed together, or better yet restored to their original condition. One can only hope.
