Christ's Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of

Love: A Spirituality of Holy Saturday

Belden C. Lane

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 23, Number 1,

Spring 2023, pp. 146-154 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2023.a899760

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/899760

[187.62.116.244] Project MUSE (2024-01-24 13:13 GMT)

 Christ’s Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and
the Fierceness of Love:
A Spirituality of Holy Saturday
Belden C. Lane

H ieronymous Bosch was thirteen years old when a raging fire swept
through the Dutch town where he lived in fifteenth-century Brabant. It de-
stroyed 4,000 houses, including his childhood home. The memory of the trau-
ma must have lingered as a nightmare, appearing often in his later paintings of
hell. In one of these compositions, “Christ’s Descent into Hell,” Jesus appears
as a tiny figure casting a scant light in a surreal landscape of fiery shadows and
macabre images. I think of the young Bosch wrestling with God’s absence in
his early experience of unfathomable loss, wondering what angst kept flowing
from the tip of his brush through the rest of his life.1
[187.62.116.244] Project MUSE (2024-01-24 13:13 GMT)

Hieronymous Bosch, “Christ’s Descent into Hell” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“Where in the Hell is God?” This is a question frequently heard by

chaplains, pastors, and theologians—asked more often by people desperately
wanting to believe than by those inclined to scoff. I’ve asked it again myself, as
the result of a recent tragedy in my life and my reading of Douglas Christie’s
new book, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the
Common Life.2
Christie draws his title from Hadewijch of Antwerp, the thirteenth-century
mystic who lived two hundred years earlier than Hieronymous Bosch, in the

SPIRITUS | 23.1 Spiritus 23 (2023): 146–154 © 2023 by Johns Hopkins University Press
same Dutch province of Brabant. She, too, had been gripped by the feroc-
ity of hell, but in a very different way. Her most intimate encounter with the
divine involved her descent into the deepest abyss of God’s abandonment. Hell,
she claimed, is “the highest form of God’s love.”3 This remarkable poet and
contemplative wasn’t a cloistered nun. She lived in a Beguine house, caring for
the sick and poor—at a time when famine stalked the land, and the bubonic
plague was on its way.
Influenced by courtly love poetry and other women mystics of her time,
she knew that the heights of God’s love required a fiery and ruthless self-emp-
tying.4 She could be “wholly God’s” only to the extent that she relinquished
everything—trusting nothing in herself, abandoning any assurance of God’s 147
care. Only then could she identify with those around her who had themselves
lost everything. Sometimes a shared darkness is all we have. For Hadewijch,
mystical experience meant throwing herself into the wild improbability of
God’s love: “To founder unceasingly in heat and cold, in the depths of love, its
high darkness. This outdoes the work of hell,” she cried.5
I’m drawn to her poetry by my own experience of losing a son to acute
myeloid leukemia, one of the deadliest forms of cancer. He died two years ago
at the age of forty, leaving his wife and a four-year-old daughter who—like
me—have struggled to understand his death. How do you pray when prayer
feels like falling into an abyss? How do you imagine the hell of God’s absence
as constituting the highest form of love? You’re tempted to retreat into a soli-
tary hell of your own. Withdrawing to lick your wounds.
C. S. Lewis observed that the doors of hell are locked from the inside.
People there want to be left alone. In The Great Divorce, he pictures hell
as a sprawling, unkempt town where people are continually moving their
houses farther away from each other.6 I’m not thinking here of hell as simply
a destination of the damned on the other side of death. Hell is also the chosen
“escape” of those on this side, who in their paralyzing grief, guilt, and fear
descend into lonely despair.
They find it impossible to leap over the vast chasm between Good Friday
and Easter Sunday. The price of a cruel death is too much to pay for a cheap
and quick resurrection. Their sense of loss is too overwhelming to allow for
easy answers. In apocalyptic times like these, they’re stunned already by too
many stories of senseless war, oceans filled with plastic, immigrant families left
to die in the desert. Stuck in the dread, middle passage of Holy Saturday, they
can’t conceive of the Paschal Mystery as more than an empty promise.
My wife and I had been assured, after months and months of chemo, that
our son was cancer free. He’d rung the bell at the hospital, returned home, and
gone back to work. But two months later the cancer returned and he was dead
within a week. Hell is like that . . . turning hope into horror.

Lane | Christ’s Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of Love
 And yet the doctrine of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell insists that the hopeless
aren’t left alone.7 Four words from the Apostles’ Creed have been the thread
on which my tested faith still hangs: he descended into hell. The heart of the
three-day Triduum liturgy is Holy Saturday, this agonizing, endless day in be-
tween—when the stench of blood is still fresh, and Easter is inconceivable. It’s
the dark abyss where despair is overthrown, the damned are befriended, and
love somehow prevails.8
In the growing anxiety of a world in crisis today, the door to hell is every-
where: families grieving the loved ones they’ve lost to COVID-19. Micronesian
islanders watching rising sea levels devour their homes. Ukrainians living in the
148 constant threat of fiery violence. They wander daily through Dante’s inferno
and the last judgment of Hieronymus Bosch. For them, Christ’s descent into
hell isn’t a hypothetical concept raising questions of divine justice and univer-
sal salvation. It’s a matter of finding the wherewithal to embrace tomorrow.
Trying to imagine that God might be there . . . in the depths of their hell.

*************
Paul speaks in Ephesians 4: 8-10 of Christ descending into the depths of
the earth, “taking captivity captive” and giving gifts to his people in rising
from the dead.9 1 Peter 3: 18-19 says that in Christ’s death he “made proc-
lamation to the spirits in prison.” Eastern Orthodox Christianity has long
embraced the descent of Christ into hell, liberating the captives. Greek and
Russian icons vividly portray the scene. Christ stands over the opening of a
dark cave, crushing the devil underfoot, breaking the back of hell’s despair. He
reaches down to pull the captives from the depths, scattering prison keys and
shattered doors everywhere.10
Western Christianity has been less certain about what happens on Holy
Saturday, affirming the deliverance of the dead but wanting to make sure
that justice is maintained.11 Twentieth-century theologians like Hans Urs von
Balthasar and Karl Barth have argued, however, that the Harrowing of Hell is
[187.62.116.244] Project MUSE (2024-01-24 13:13 GMT)

crucial in securing the triumph of God’s grace, freeing those who are bound.12
It’s as if God, like Hafiz, “keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful
rowdy prisoners.” Potentially reducing the population of hell to one.13
The purpose of Christ’s descent, says von Balthasar, is a grand announce-
ment of God’s stunning generosity. Hell expresses the highest form of love in
that Christ enters into the utter absence of God, where even God wouldn’t
go unless driven by a love more dreadful still. Joining the lost in their God-
abandon-ness, Christ takes on himself the totality of the human experience of
despair, as well as the full extent of divine judgment.14
What actually “happens” on this middle day of the Paschal Triduum
remains a mystery. We know that Jesus is cast into hell, an experience more

SPIRITUS | 23.1
 149

Harrowing of Hell by Markos Bathas (1498–1578)

agonizing than the abandonment by God that he’d known on the cross.
Now—as God—he enters the absolute despair of godlessness. The Holy Trinity
is seemingly split asunder—a judging Father pitted against a suffering son. In
this moment, the universe stands on edge, everything at risk.
The world’s redemption requires that justice be served and love unleashed.
Precisely how this transpires is ultimately hidden within the Trinity itself.
Theologians have argued over it for centuries. All we know is that it occurs at
God’s great expense.15
Somewhere between the cross and the empty tomb, an explosion of
overwhelming, heart-rending love churns up from the core of the Holy Trin-
ity, bringing a revolution in the divine being. Love bursts out of a vast hole in
God’s heart, left by Christ having humbled and “emptied himself of equality
with God” (Phil 2: 6-11). The persons of the Trinity rush to fill the vacuum,
pouring themselves out in love for each other, disclosing the very essence of

Lane | Christ’s Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of Love
 God as self-surrender. Their love—in turn—spills over, extending to all those
for whom Christ died; grounding the hope of the lost in God’s astounding
vulnerability.16
What emerges is a Jesus in defeat who claims defeat as a prize. Condemna-
tions are retracted. Life sentences suspended. Love triumphs, as God declares a
new world order—radically questioning thoughts of ultimate rejection, death
as a penalty, vengeful incarceration.17 Easter dawns, with the whole of creation
breaking into praise.
Meanwhile, what’s been happening in hell itself? The unthinkable occurs
as divided prisoners gather around the crucified God—the one with a repu-
150 tation for hanging out with ostracized offenders. He listens to their tales of
violence and desperation, dark secrets they’d carried to the grave. They stare at
his grisly wounds and see in him all the things that had ever been done to them
. . . all they’d ever done themselves.
The experience is horrendous. “Being seen” by Christ’s love is more ex-
cruciating than hell itself.18 It burns to the core, leaving the soul stripped of all
that is not God. A ravishing and relentless love accomplishes what the punish-
ing fires of justice could never do. The prisoners know themselves now for who
they truly are—beloved daughters and sons of God.19 An expansive community
flares into life. A thunder of shared release rumbles forth—breaking the locks,
tearing down the very gates of hell. The impossible becomes reality.

*************
“Where is God in my suffering?” This question echoes down through the
ages, an anguished lament still crying in the night. People still cringe at soul-
killing reports of natural disasters, school shootings, nations consumed by
hatred. Parents know they shouldn’t have to bury their children. In a world
where God’s absence is palpable, the damned want no promise of a soothing
balm awaiting them at some distant point. They crave a fierce and loving God
right in the midst of their hell.
[187.62.116.244] Project MUSE (2024-01-24 13:13 GMT)

Hadewijch of Antwerp offers hope in her insistence on seeing God’s “ap-

parent desertion” as actually God’s love gone underground—heard in the
footfall of Aslan the Lion, terrible (and euphoric) in his coming. She perceives
God’s “fierceness” (fierheid) as the propelling energy of God’s deepest love.20
This gutsy, high-spirited woman knows, like Dostoyevsky, that divine love is
“a harsh and dreadful thing,” voracious enough to cut through the agony of
loss, upending self-pity, and evoking a bold confidence that brooks no timidity.
“I greet you, love, with nothing but love,” she addresses God in her poverty,
“and fierce and stout-hearted I am because of it.”21
She has learned that God’s love thrives in emptiness. A vehement love,
it evokes in return a love that’s just as ardent—laying hold on God in a way

SPIRITUS | 23.1
she’d never dared before. The Divine Lover alternately woos her and tests her
by withdrawing . . . yet always for the sake of a deeper bond.22
Hadewijch says, in effect, to those who suffer: don’t look for Christ in
anything less than the fire itself. Hope lies in self-surrender to the one who de-
scends into hell, pouring his life into the void of broken hearts. Far from being
unscathed himself, he’s known suffering at its worst. But he’s triumphed . . . as
a result of the wild and fearless love of the Holy Trinity. He elicits, in return,
the same kind of love from those who follow him. Christ desires “the fierce
heart that goes all out because she wants to gain love.”23 Hell hath no fury for
the bold lovers of an untamed God. They embrace the “fierce fury of love . . .
so as to burn in [God’s] deepest deluge and sizzle like cracklings.”24 151
Needless to say, this isn’t a spirituality for the timid. But it may be the only
thing that resonates with those weary of a shallow, ethereal spirituality that
knows nothing of hell. God comes as a shock—startling them out of despair,
prompting a sense of agency, a new assertiveness. They are no longer victims
of fate, but decisive wrestlers-with-God, vigorously claiming a love that won’t
let them go. An encounter like this emerges only on the far side of their grief,
coming after they’ve had time to feel the full weight of loss. But it waits for
them . . . there in the depths of Psalm 130.25
Once the captives are set free of their self-absorbed agony, they’re able
now to embrace the pain of others still trapped in the grey town of the hope-
less. Love drives them to it. Hadewijch’s mysticism is no individualistic,
privatized affair. It requires her discovering the mystical body of Christ in the
tormented souls around her. “You must be glad of the life in common, through
which you now have guidance toward Love,” she exhorts. “Through love I
wished to snatch the living and the dead from all the debasement of despair.”26
Johann Baptist Metz, a German theologian baptized by fire in World War
II, emphasizes the impulse to justice that attends any convincing mystical
experience. He encourages a “mysticism of open eyes,” a spiritual capacity
for seeing God in the poor and marginalized, in the ones most battered by the
storms of hell. To do this is to follow Christ in his descent into the dark cave,
making the suffering of others one’s own, participating in the overflowing love
of the Trinity.
A mysticism of this sort, says Metz, “makes visible all invisible and incon-
venient suffering, and—convenient or not—pays attention to it and takes re-
sponsibility for it, for the sake of God.” 27 It’s a compulsion that flows directly
from the “dangerous memory” of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. It
refuses to forget what happened on Holy Saturday, when Jesus shattered the
oppressive structures that held prisoners in bondage—reconfiguring the crimi-
nal justice system on a cosmic scale, as it were.”28

Lane | Christ’s Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of Love
 *************
I find myself deeply drawn to the adventurousness of Hadewijch’s spiritu-
ality and its implications for healing in a time like ours. Many of us have been
through a hell of grief over these last few years, something we wouldn’t have
thought possible to survive.
Yet I’ve found hope in this extraordinary thirteenth-century mystic who
bids me to imagine God’s abandonment as the highest form of God’s love. She
suggests that Christ comes to me in the fire—in the death of my son—disclos-
ing a God who’s present in the worst things that can happen. This is a God
who not only descends into the hell of my loss, but allures me into a new real-
152 ity, revealing who (and whose) I am.
I’m no longer the grief-stricken parent of a dead son. He and I have been
to hell and back—bound together now by a love that stoutly refuses despair.
Hadewijch marvels at her own striking new identity, coming as a result of her
passionate encounter with God. “I must practice to be what I am,” she con-
cludes. “That is what love has incited me to [do].”29
The outrageous truth of Holy Saturday is that those held hostage in the
gulag of the damned are set free and loved beyond measure . . . by a God who
summons them to an audacious affair of the heart.30 “Don’t be afraid,” Christ
says. “I am the First and the Last . . . the Living One; I was dead and I’m now
alive. The keys to death and Hell are mine” (Rev 1: 17–18).

NOTES
1. Hieronymous Bosch (1450–1516) was a representative of the Early Netherlandish
School of painting. His fantastic, nightmarish images of hell may have reflected his
membership in the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a confraternity supporting highly or-
thodox views of heaven and hell. His most famous triptych is “The Garden of Earthly
Delights,” a central painting bracketed by images of the Garden of Eden and The Last
Judgment.
2. Douglas Christie, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Suffering, and the
Common Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). The title is a phrase from
one of Hadewijch’s poems in couplets. Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother
[187.62.116.244] Project MUSE (2024-01-24 13:13 GMT)

Columba Hart (London: SPCK, 1981), 356.

3. Hart, Hadewijch, 356–357. We know very little about Hadewijch’s life. She was a
spiritual guide to the small community of women with whom she lived. Her writing
became controversial, as she wrote, for example, about God’s desire for her “to be God
with God.” She may have avoided the charge of heresy by withdrawing to live alone.
See her Seventh Vision in Hadewijch: The Complete Works, 280. Helpful introductions
include Elizabeth Dreyer’s Passionate Spirituality: Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch
of Brabant (New York: Paulist Press, 2005); and John Giles Milhaven, Hadewijch and
Her Sisters: Other Ways of Living and Knowing (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993).
4. Bernard McGinn speaks of three great Beguine mystics in the thirteenth century:
Hadewijch, Mechthilde of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete. See The Flowering of
Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, vol. 3, The Presence of God: A
History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 199–265.

SPIRITUS | 23.1
5. Hart, Hadewijch, 356.
6. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 18–19.
7. A classic study of Holy Saturday is Alan E. Lewis’s Between Cross and Resurrection:
A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001). See also Hilarion
Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox
Perspective (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2009).
8. In one of her visions, Hadewijch identifies with the personified virtue of Peacefulness,
the one who “died with Christ, freed all the prisoners with him, and . . . with him rose
again.” The Complete Works, 295.
9. Outside of the New Testament, the earliest mention of the descent into hell is found
in the second-century apocryphal work, the Ascension of Isaiah. The fourth-century
Gospel of Nicodemus recounts the story in greater detail. See Jonathan Knight, “The
Descent into Hell: Its Origin and First Development,” Journal of Theological Studies
72, no. 8 (April 2021): 155–191. 153
10. Kallistos Ware says that “Hell exists as a possibility because free will exists. Yet, trust-
ing in the inexhaustible attractiveness of God’s love, we venture to express the hope—it
is no more than a hope—that in the end, like Walter de la Mare’s Traveller, we shall find
that there is nobody there.” Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom, vol. 1 of The Collected
Works (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001), 215.
11. A shift in vocabulary occurred through the centuries, from the Eastern Church’s af-
firmation of a descent to “hell” to the Western Church’s language of a descent to the
“dead.” See Martin F. Connell, “Descensus Christi ad Inferos: Christ’s Descent to the
Dead,” Theological Studies 62, no. 2 (2001): 262–282.
12. Hell, in their thinking, is in effect turned into purgatory. C. S. Lewis says of the people
there: “If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been hell. To any that leaves
it, it is purgatory.” The Great Divorce, 67. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium
Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 148–188; and
David Lauber, Barth on the Descent into Hell: God, Atonement, and the Christian Life
(London: Routledge, 2004).
13. The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master, trans. Daniel Ladinsky (New York:
Penguin Compass, 1999), 206. See Avery Dulles, “The Population of Hell,” First Things
(May 2003), https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/05/the-population-of-hell.
14. Lewis cautions that God doesn’t force God’s grace upon those who choose to refuse
it. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be
done’, and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell
choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and
constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock, it is
opened.” The Great Divorce, 72.
15. See Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the
Idea of Atonement (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003); and Jürgen Moltmann, The
Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theol-
ogy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993).
16. “The descent of Christ into hell is the most perfect reflection of the self-surrender that
constitutes the trinitarian life,” says Joshua Brotherton in summarizing von Balthasar.
See his article, “Damnation and the Trinity in Ratzinger and von Balthasar,” in Logos:
A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 18, no. 3 (2015): 123.
17. Apocatastasis is the belief in God’s final restoration of creation, seeing fallen human-
ity as returning in the end to God’s irresistible love. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa
were among the early Church Fathers who affirmed this notion. A version of it was
condemned as heresy by the Council of Constantinople in 553 CE. Yet the idea has
persisted throughout the church’s history. Karl Barth spoke of Jesus having taken on
himself the divine rejection of human beings, yet affirmed the “impossible possibility”
that one might ultimately resist such grace. See Karl Barth, The Doctrine of God, vol.

Lane | Christ’s Descent into Hell, Hadewijch, and the Fierceness of Love
 2, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (London: T.& T. Clark,
1957), 505. See also David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and
Universal Salvation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
18. Isaac the Syrian argued that “those who are scourged in hell are tormented with the
scourgings of love. The scourges that result from love—that is, the scourges of those
who have become aware that they have sinned against love—are harder and more bitter
than the torments which result from fear.” Quoted in Kallistos Ware, The Inner King-
dom, 211.
19. Catherine of Siena would similarly insist that “you cannot become one with the fire
if you don’t throw yourself into it wholeheartedly, holding nothing back.” She once
prayed, “In your nature, God, I come to know my nature. And what is that? Fire is my
nature . . . because you, Lord, are nothing but a fire of love.” Within that fire, she told
God, “I become another you.” Letter T109 in The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans.
154 Suzanne Noffke (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008),
vol. 1, 266–267; and Prayer 12, in The Prayers of Catherine of Siena, trans. Suzanne
Noffke (San Jose, CA: Authors Choice Press, 2001), 90.
20. Marieke van Baest observes that, for Hadewijch, fierceness (fierheid, literally: “proper
pride” in Middle Dutch) is the highest virtue. Knowing herself to be joined in mystical
union with God, “this awareness causes the fire of fierceness to flare up inside her and
gives her the high-heartedness to experience her relationship with Minne (Love) in the
equivalence that is the due of a beloved partner.” Poems of Hadewijch, trans. Marieke
van Baest (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1998), 41.
21. Poems of Hadewijch, 153, 15. Hadewijch often uses chivalrous images to describe
the divine-human relationship. God is feminine—the beautiful and demanding Lady
Love (Middle Dutch: Minne). Humanity, in turn, is the medieval knight who serves her
with courage and devotion. (The Dostoyevsky quote is from chapter 4 of The Brothers
Karamazov.)
22. “If anyone dare take on love with vehement ardour, she cannot withstand that fiery
storm, and therein will he [God] dwell with her: her peer.” Poems of Hadewijch, 259.
23. Poems of Hadewijch, 153, 39.
24. Poems of Hadewijch, 171. Cf. John Donne’s invitation to a God-wrestling love in his
Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”
25. Echoing the Psalmist’s prayer, “Out of the depths, I cry unto you,” Hadewijch urges
that one should “wrestle with love, so that in love he might be brought to nought.”
Only then can she proclaim, “Ah! You sovereign and wonderful love, capable of over-
coming all with wonder, overpower me that I may overcome you in your power never
yet overthrown!” Poems of Hadewijch, 89, 143.
26. Hart, Hadewijch, 332, 277.
27. Johann Baptist Metz, Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christian-
ity, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998), 163.
28. This dangerous and liberating memory claims “a future for the hopeless, the shattered
and oppressed . . . . [It] badgers the present and calls it into question.” Johann Baptist
Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. J.
Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad, 2007), 89.
29. Poems of Hadewijch, 159.
30. Hadewijch is wonderfully scandalous in the way she describes her receiving the embod-
ied humanity of Christ in the Eucharist. “I desired to consummate my Lover completely
and to confess and to savor to the fullest extent—to fulfill his humanity blissfully with
mine . . . and to be strong and perfect so that I in turn would satisfy him perfectly . . . And
to that end, I wished, inside me, that he would satisfy me with his Godhead in one spirit
and he be all he is without restraint.” See her “Vision VII” in The Essential Writings of
Christian Mysticism, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: The Random House Publishing
Group, 2006), 103.

SPIRITUS | 23.1