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RADICAL THEOLOGIES
AND PHILOSOPHIES

LIMBO REAPPLIED
On Living in Perennial Crisis
and the Immanent Afterlife

KRISTOF K. P. VANHOUTTE
Radical Theologies and Philosophies

Series Editors
Mike Grimshaw
Department of Sociology
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand

Michael Zbaraschuk
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, USA

Joshua Ramey
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA, USA
Radical Theologies and Philosophies is a call for transformational theolo-
gies that break out of traditional locations and approaches. The rhizomic
ethos of radical theologies enable the series to engage with an ever-ex-
panding radical expression and critique of theologies that have entered or
seek to enter the public sphere, arising from the continued turn to reli-
gion and especially radical theology in politics, social sciences, philoso-
phy, theory, cultural, and literary studies. The post-theistic theology both
driving and arising from these intersections is the focus of this series.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14521
 Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte

Limbo Reapplied
On Living in Perennial Crisis and the Immanent
Afterlife
Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte
University of the Free State
Bloemfontein, South Africa

and

Pontifical University Antonianum

Rome, Italy

Radical Theologies and Philosophies

ISBN 978-3-319-78912-5 ISBN 978-3-319-78913-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2

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 To you two
Valentina and Sofia
Always
 Preface

In 1947, the famous French publishing house Gallimard issued the

remarkable book Exercises de Style by Raymond Queneau. That this
book, which reminds of Erasmus’s rhetoric textbooks De duplici copia
rerum ac verborum commentarii duo from the beginning of the sixteenth
century, is remarkable can be deduced from the simple fact that it con-
tains 99 different versions of the same story. The plot consists of a hum-
drum encounter between a man, the ‘main character’, and a stranger,
whom he meets a second time that same day; the first encounter is on
a bus and the second one at the Saint-Lazare station. Besides it having
probably been a rather fun accomplishment, it is above all a masterly
exploit and ‘an experiment in the philosophy of language’ (Queneau
1981, 14) by the hand of Queneau. He, as Barbara Wright so correctly
remarked in her introduction to the original English translation (1958),
‘pushes language around in a multiplicity of directions to see what will
happen’ (Queneau 1981, 14). ‘Pushing around to see what will happen;’
few combinations of words (bad as they might sound—and probably
will also be interpreted by some) could have better described the chore
attempt of this book.
The noun ‘exercise’ used in Queneau’s title is, however, not applicable
to the type of text that you, reader, are holding in your hands. For this
particular type of text, the French language has another precise word (a
word that is considered in French as a synonym of exercise—but that is
more than anything merely a closely related word). This word is essai,
an essay, and it derives from the verb essayer which means to try, or to

vii
viii    Preface

attempt. The Larousse, the famous French dictionary/institution, defines

the essay as a book (a text) containing various ideas regarding a specific
subject that it does not pretend to exhaust. That an essay does not pre-
tend to exhaust the ideas it treats is simply because it attempts to test
this or that quality of this or that specific subject—pushing it around to
see what will happen. Basically, the essay, and thus this study as well, is a
written non-exhaustive check and control of the functioning of the pre-
cise subject at hand that, as an attempt, allows the author of the essayistic
feature, to return to its topic further along her/his life’s road (to give
it another go) if he/she so desires. The attempt might fail, but if the
author brings it to a conclusion that generally means he/she is convinced
that it has not. For as much though as it will be brought to a fruitful
conclusion, the nature of the essay does not exclude that other and very
diverse attempts on dealing with the same specific subject can succeed as
well.
As can be seen, what is at stake in an essay, and as such also in this
work, is a rather fragile integrity that—probably contrary to what is gen-
erally considered and understood—does absolutely not allow for the
minimum of relaxation or lack of attention and strictness. Furthermore,
being precisely something ‘incomplete’, it also requires full participa-
tion, and even in-depth participation, from the reader. That the nature
of the essay is so highly demanding of author (and reader) is not only
related to its fragile nature. It also regards the fact that, more often than
not, essays turn out to become easy ‘victims’ of partisan judgments.
Rendering explicit from the very beginning that a text will not treat its
subject in an exhaustive way—while acknowledging also immediately
that a similar text can never be considered as finished and that the author
might even come back to it in the future, maybe even to say that he
was wrong all along—can and will easily be misunderstood (even by the
brainy scholar). This was also already the case with Queneau’s Exercises.
From the very beginning were they considered by some as ‘an attempt to
demolish literature’ (Queneau 1981, 15) which was neither the author’s
intention nor the actuality result of the Exercises. That this can occur is,
however, mostly known by the author.
This acknowledgment should, however, not necessarily be considered
as a lack or deficiency of a text. In fact, the exact contrary can and should
be argued for. If anything, recognizing these aspects is a rendering
explicit of the awareness that a text based on study can never truly finish
or end. St. Thomas, the Angelical doctor and one of the greatest minds
 Preface    ix

humanity has ever brought forth (he will also help us to understand the
concept of Limbo), seems to be hinting at something similar when he
confided to his secretary that everything he had ever written and taught
was but pure foolishness. And a similar realization is phrased by an old
Sigmund Freud in his melancholic acknowledging that therapy and edu-
cation (study) are interminable. Considering these affirmations, and the
many others one could bring forth, as gloomy thoughts that accompany
the process of dying or could even constitute cases of false humility is
missing the point. Texts, maybe all but certainly essayistic ones, will
always remain exercises and attempts. Some will be good, others less, but
avoiding the delusion of having offered ‘a finished product’ can but be
considered, at least that is what we feel, as a very good and honest point
to start. (It is also a registration into a certain philosophical tradition—
ready to betray it—but we are certain the reader will discover this on
her/his own in due time.)
This text finds its origin in a presentation given back in 2014 at the
University of St. Gall in Switzerland. The lecture was given during a
symposium organized by the Swiss Philosophical Association that had as
its theme: Kritik und Krise (Critic and Crisis). The basic ideas that gov-
ern the pages that follow were already present in their embryonic state in
the original text. The ‘embryo’, however, has since passed various grow-
ing phases and prangs, becoming a muscled adult. And as it goes with all
births, some ‘original’ parts get lost along the road while others come
along to change what was considered originally as the direction to take.
A number of people have been directly or indirectly involved in a vari-
ety of ways in the process of realization of this book; I am, obviously, the
only person responsible for all the possible remaining weaknesses. These
people are, first of all, my philosopher friends and friends in philoso-
phy. The first to mention is necessarily Carlo Salzani, whose continuous
dedication to this project has been truly humbling. Thank you Carlo!
Second, there are the group of people with whom I share the research
adventure called The Small Circle; they are Christo Lombaard, Iain
T. Benson, and Calvyn du Toit (Carlo is also a part of this exciting enter-
prise). I have also received very helpful assistance, references, or stimula-
tion from too large a number of colleagues to name them all. Some need
to be mentioned by name, however, and they are: Jackie Du Toit, Father
Gianluca Montaldi, Lancelot Kirby, Jonathan Rée (who got me think-
ing about the spatial implications of what it was I was writing about),
Fra. Ernesto Dezza (you have safeguarded the medieval scholars), Fra.
x    Preface

Stéphane Oppes, Benjamin McCraw, Christopher Beiting, and Father

Johannes Maria Schwarz. The first person who published me and who
has ever since remained a driving force, Marco Cardinali, also needs a
special mentioning. Katrin Meyer and Hubert Schnüriger from the
University of Basel also need explicit thanks. They allowed me to pres-
ent a series of chapters at the seminar in political philosophy they organ-
ized. Jan Müller, Domink Renner, and Dominique Haab, who offered
critical comments during and after the seminar, also need thanks. The
two nameless reviewers from Palgrave also need a special mention as they
did offer very helpful comments. Great gratitude also goes to my edi-
tor Philip Getz, who believed in this project from the very beginning—
thanks. Philip’s right hands, Alexis Nelson in the beginning and Amy
Invernizzi afterward, have always been there to help, thanks for your
professionality. Sofie Vanhoutte needs to be mentioned as well, thanks
soeure, you know why. Finally, Udo and Geinsson need a very special
mentioning. Without their willingness to sell their little paradise, half
of this book would not have been written in one of the most beautiful
places I have ever worked.

Basel, Switzerland Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte

 Contents

1 Introduction 1
References 9

2 Visual Anteprima 11
References 32

3 Limbo 35
3.1 Pope Benedict XVI and the Cancellation of Limbo 35
3.2 Limbo’s (Pre-Christian) Genealogy and Geography 42
3.3 The History of Limbo 49
3.3.1 No Third Place: Saint Augustine and His Legacy 50
3.3.2 Original Sin Becomes Privative: Gregory of Nyssa
and Gregory Nazianzen 60
3.3.3 Lacking Punishment: Anselm and Abelard 65
3.3.4 The Birth of Limbo: Albertus Magnus and
Alexander of Hales 70
3.3.5 From Neutral to Joyous Limbo: Saint Bonaventure
and Saint Thomas 74
3.4 Poetic Limbo in Dante and Milton 86
3.5 Prolegomena to Any Translation of Limbo 99
References 110

xi
xii    Contents

4 Crisis 115
4.1 Interesting Times 115
4.2 Taking It Seriously 132
4.3 What’s in a Meaning 142
4.4 The Crisis of Crisis 151
References 164

5 Modernity: A Limboic Fool’s Paradise 169

5.1 Time Is Out of Joint 170
5.2 Exhausted Space 194
5.3 Limbo as Perennial Crisis 215
References 225

6 Extraduction: Ascent Out of Limbo 229

References 237

Bibliography 239

Index 253
 About the Author

Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte is a Research Fellow of the International

Studies Group at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein,
South Africa, and an Invited Professor of philosophy at the Pontifical
University Antonianum, Rome, Italy. He started his studies in philoso-
phy at the Higher Institute for Philosophy at the Catholic University of
Leuven, Belgium, and obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy at the Pontifical
University Antonianum, Rome, Italy. He studied spiritual theology at the
Pontifical University Gregoriana and was Postdoctoral Research Fellow
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University
of Edinburgh. In 2010, he was awarded the ‘European Philosophy from
Kant to the Present Prize’, issued by the University of Kentucky. He has
published on topics ranging from continental philosophy, patristics, the-
ology-philosophy-politics interdependencies, educational theory, to foot-
ball.

xiii
 List of Images

Image 2.1 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione

e Discesa di Cristo al Limbo, Firenze, Museo di Santa
Maria Novella, Capellone degli Spagnoli 13
Image 2.2 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Discesa di Cristo al Limbo (detail),
Firenze, Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Capellone
degli Spagnoli 18
Image 2.3 Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, © 2017,
ProLitteris, Zurich 25
Image 2.4 Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, © 2017,
ProLitteris, Zurich 26

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Language, if we can ‘radicalize’ the Italian philosopher Giorgio

Agamben, is not just a historical but also a living ‘being’ (cf. Agamben
2016, 25). Not only should the human being be considered as the
‘animal’ that has language—man is not just homo sapiens, according to
Agamben, but, above all, homo sapiens loquendi, the living being that can
talk (cf. Agamben 2016, 27–28)—but language itself should be consid-
ered as a living ‘being’ (language has a history that does not coincide
with human’s history). However, not always does human language and
languages being coincide. These are (at least philosophically speaking)
the most interesting moments. They constitute the limit-moments of
insanity, when pure language is being spoken through a language-less
human or when a human being is speaking non-language (not always
is this reducible to nonsense). This non-coinciding is also the cause of
the more common phenomenon where not the whole of language ‘goes
missing’, but merely words. Very few people, in fact, have not directly
or indirectly experienced moments or events that are considered to go
‘beyond words’. Love, hate, joy, evil, but also art (beauty) seem to all be
categories that vouch for and can produce ‘beyond word’ experiences.
Although more often than not these ‘beyond word’ experiences can be
reduced to wordy-experience suffered by people who lack the adequate
vocabulary, this is not always the case. Certain ‘beyond words’ experi-
ences are, in fact, merely caused by the lack of a vocabulary (still) in use.
Let me try to make this rather enigmatic statement somewhat clearer
by turning to the example of evil as it was presented in the text that

© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. K. P. Vanhoutte, Limbo Reapplied, Radical Theologies
and Philosophies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_1
2 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

constituted a major influence in the coming about of this book: Gordon

Graham’s Evil and Christian Ethics (2003). In the fourth chapter of this
very provocative book, Graham, daringly, corners the topic of the great
evils. These evils are great violent excesses of war, the atrocious crimi-
nal murders of the likes of Charles Manson, and the more recent school
massacres in the USA. What strikes Graham, is that when these mas-
sacres happen, or when more general judgment is offered on the per-
petrators of past warlike atrocities, is that the first thing that is done is
‘to condemn the perpetrators as evil; the second is to declare them mad
or mentally ill’ (Graham 2003, 122). As Graham correctly remarks, for
these particular cases of ‘mental illness’ ‘there is virtually no theoreti-
cal understanding of the physical basis of these, and … there is neither
effective drug therapy nor even the beginnings of a neurophysiological
explanation’ (Graham 2003, 125). If all of this did not suffice already, as
the anthropologist Elliot Leyton put it, ‘if the killers are merely insane,
why do they in fact so rarely display the cluster of identifiable clin-
ical symptoms’ of those few mental diseases of which the ‘psychiatrists
agree’ (proposed in Graham 2003, 127)? For as much as these atrocious
evils almost oblige one to auto-protectively judge them as ‘abnormal’,
it has to be acknowledged—even by the fiercest positivist or advocate
of exclusivist scientific research—that ‘scientific sensibility lacks an ade-
quate explanation of evil’, and ‘[H]umanism cannot explain the evil of
evil, and naturalistic science, even of a well-informed psychological kind,
cannot explain its occurrence’ (Graham 2003, 154). What does have an
adequate sensibility of evil is not scientific language but religious lan-
guage. In fact, when confronted with these cases of pure evil, it was, at
least in the past, the language of the daemonic that took over. And this
language would have offered explanations both of ‘the degree of evil’
and of ‘the sense of compulsion’ with which the perpetrator would have
acted (Graham 2003, 138). Graham postulates from this, and we think
correctly, a hypothesis of the supernatural in which our (moral) lives are
set in. This would then provide us with a much better explanation of evil
than the purely scientific one that clearly fails in these cases of evil.
This (the conclusion) is obviously not what is of interest to this book.
What is, however, of absolute interest to us, as Susan Sontag phrased her
encounter with a very similar problem, is that ‘we have a sense of evil but no
longer the … language to talk intelligently about [it]’ (Sontag 1978, 85).
Said differently and more generally, and this is where we wanted to
arrive at, regarding certain problems we no longer have the language to
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

talk intelligently about them. We have all kinds of intelligent theories and
(pseudo-)scientific explanations that at times fail to live up to their prom-
ise of being the most accurate or most appropriate to turn to r­egarding
­certain phenomena. And even when they are worthy candidates for the
‘throne’ of explanation and clarification, sometimes they would (and
we are appositely changing the time of the verb) have been easily passed
over, were it not that we no longer have that particular type of language
anymore. On many occasions, the type of language that has gone missing
is religious or even philosophical language, overpowered as it has been
by the secular language of the secularized world. Also regarding the case
that is of interest to this book, it is religious language that has gone miss-
ing. And the ‘case’ that would have befitted so much by the usage of a
certain type of religious language is nothing other than the interpretation
of the times, ‘our times’, we live in. The aim of this volume is, first of all,
to bring back to life this particular religious discourse (something we will
do in the Visual Anteprima Chap. 2 and the third section of this book)
and, secondly, to read ‘the signs of our times’ with it (to which section
four and five are dedicated). The religious discourse we will bring back in
the pages that follow is that regarding one of the more enigmatic realms
of the afterlife, namely Limbo. As we will attempt to demonstrate, it is
not sociology, not economy, not politics, but religion—that is, the par-
ticular religious discourse about Limbo—that is best at explaining and
making us understand our modern epoch.
*

In an interesting little booklet called Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of

Uncertainty (Capps and Carlin 2010) a variety of types of situations in our
daily lives are described as ‘Limbo-experiences’. According to the two editors
of this volume, there are two different types of these ‘Limbo-experiences’ (cf.
Capps and Carlin 2010, 3). On the one hand, there are the chronic and
very basic Limbo-experiences where one’s life is sensed or understood as being
indeterminate or also intermediate. These experiences mainly involve wait-
ing: waiting in line, waiting for e-mail, etc. On the other hand, there are
also times in our lives where a much more acute form of ‘Limbo’ is experi-
enced. This second category can, according to Capps and Carlin, be further
subdivided into five different categories. They regard cases of acute Limbo-
experiences that relate to youth, relations, work, illness, and immigration.
And even though the scope of this book is on a completely different plane,
and we disagree with a number of aspects of the understanding of Limbo
as introduced by the editors—they, for example, consider ‘transition’ as a
4 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

good synonym for Limbo (Capps and Carlin 2010, 8–9), something which,
as we will come to see, it is not—the idea that Limbo is not just something
related to the afterlife but is intertwined with our life now, here, today, in
an immanent way is something we agree with and will investigate in the
pages of this book.

*
We are, obviously, not the first to try to re-introduce older (religious)
concepts into an explicative discourse foreign to it while claiming its
highly productive contribution in the understanding of that particu-
lar discourse. We already referred to Gordon Graham’s work, but
other examples, such as Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben (among
others), can be brought forward. Toward the end of her The Origins
of Totalitarianism, Arendt thus presents us with the intriguing analogy
of the division of the concentration camps as corresponding to three
types of realms of the afterlife: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell (cf. Arendt
1973, 445). Arendt even adds intriguingly that ‘[S]uddenly it becomes
evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagina-
tion had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be man-
ufactured right here on earth, …’ (Arendt 1973, 446)—confirming,
as such, the thesis we are trying to establish here. Giorgio Agamben—
whose influence on the pages that follow cannot be ignored—has made
of these more isolated events in Arendt a more consistent characteris-
tic of his work. For Agamben, to offer only one, but very significant,
example (which also evinces the divergence of the thesis of this book
from Agamben’s main political thesis), it is Hell, characterized as it
is by eternal government, that is the true paradigm of modern politics
(cf. Agamben 2011, 164).
For as much as we are offering a reading, through Limboic glasses,
of our modern epoch, this reading does not claim to be an all-encom-
passing one (something which is far beyond our capacities and which,
more than probably, is not even possible). The proposed reading of
the ‘signs of our times’, an expression that will return and be explained
in the course of this text, will focus on what has become the quintes-
sential characteristic, the cipher, of our times. This characteristic is the
‘crisis’. As we are all familiar with, the past decade(s) have been char-
acterized ever more frequently by this word crisis. Crisis is everywhere
and everything is in crisis; all types of crisis have been reported, going
from political, financial, climatic, social/societal, cultural, intellectual,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

and educational crisis, to even an anthropological crisis. However, crisis

is, as we will demonstrate in due course, not just a ‘recent’ phenomenon
or qualifier of the times we live in. It was from the very beginning of
our modern period considered one of its main features. The focus of our
reading will thus be our modern times, understood as times of a crisis
which, as we will discover, will have taken on the features of lastingness,
of being a ‘perennial crisis’. In fact, as Michel Serres, the French philos-
opher and member of the Académie Française, wrote recently in a small
booklet on the crisis that struck the Western world some years ago: the
current crisis ‘not only touches the financial markets, work and industry,
but the whole of society and all of humanity’. Serres goes even so far
to claim that what is at stake is ‘the essential relation of humans to the
world’ (Serres 2014, Chapter 1, Sect. 2). It seems as if Serres’s friend,
the French scholar Bruno Latour, was correct when he denounced,
already more than two decades ago, our ‘morose delight in being in per-
petual crisis’ (Latour 1993, 114). What if being in a perennial crisis was,
however, not some dour glee but a structural feature of modernity?
As can be deduced from the just-mentioned orientation on the con-
cept of (perennial) crisis, the Limboic reading we propose will not
engage or participate in what can be considered the monotonous or
even trite ‘existential’ question regarding a crisis—something which has
characterized the recent literature on ‘crisis’. Whether or not there is a
crisis is not the question that will be asked in this book. In fact, we con-
sider the question regarding the actuality of a crisis or not (something
which is almost impossible to ‘objectively’ verify during its course, and
which is even afterward difficult to establish once and for all due to its
extreme sensitivity to partisanship) as a redundant duality that needs to
be surpassed if one wants to take the concept of crisis truly seriously and
understand what is at stake in its usage (for too long has this concept
been among us for it not to have become suspicious, but this does not
seem to be the case). What we intend to do, and this is the quest into
which we thus embark in this volume, is to discover whether the bino-
mial of the perennial crisis and the concept of Limbo could in some way
be related. And if so, in what way and what that could or would mean
for the times we are living in.
From all of the preceding comments, it will already be clear that this
book is to be considered as containing a rather high dosage of ‘specu-
lation’. It does, and some speculations are also rather risky—but maybe
for that very reason they are also much more productive than any old
6 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

form of cold reasoning. We do realize, however, that this also implies

that maybe not all of what we have written will hold up to extremely
specialized research. This, however, worries us not too much and is a risk
we gladly take. First, because we obviously do hope that most of what we
claim will hold (or, at least, be recognizable) and, secondly, because the
tidy white-painted sterilized vacuum laboratory room has very little to
offer to philosophy anyhow (we highly prefer the dirty wandering cloak
[the famous pallium] and knapsack of the philosopher than the white
laboratory overcoat).
Limbo Reapplied, then, is divided into three main chapters, each
treating one of the three main aspects of this book: Limbo, crisis and
its lastingness, and the reading of our modern times. These three chap-
ters are, respectively, subdivided into five, four, and three sections. The
first Chap. 3, which is dedicated to the concept of Limbo, begins with a
brief treatment of Pope Benedict XVI’s (hope of) cancellation of Limbo
in 2007. Following this first section, we turn to the past and start by
considering Limbo’s pre-Christian genealogy and the discourse on its
whereabouts, its geography. This is followed by a more detailed inter-
action with some of the main players in the formation of Limbo in
Christianity. We start this historical study with Saint Augustine. After
the bishop of Hippo come Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen,
who are followed by Peter Abelard and Anselm of Canterbury.
Starting to come closer to Limbo’s ‘birth’, we treat Albertus Magnus
and Alexander of Hales and reach the apex of Limbo’s theorization in
the Christian world with Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and Saint
Thomas of Aquinas. A study into the nature of Limbo could not be con-
sidered complete without a look into some of the poetic interpretations
of this intriguing concept. We will fulfill this task by considering Dante
Alighieri’s treatment of Limbo in his Divine Comedy and John Milton’s
in Paradise Lost. A short detour will also be taken into Ludovico
Ariosto’s Paradise on the Moon from his Orlando Furioso. We will con-
clude this first chapter by focusing on the necessary requirements (that
is, if there are any) to ‘translate’ what we will have discovered in our
research on Limbo. Can this discourse on Limbo have any repercussion
at all on the understanding of our times, and what is the peculiar nature
of the cancellation of Limbo as a region of the afterlife by Pope Benedict
XVI with which we began this chapter?
The second main Chap. 4, which deals with the concept of crisis (in
its normal as well as in its ‘pimped’ version as a perennial phenomenon),
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

starts by offering a first delineation of this concept. Although it has, con-

trary to what has been occasionally claimed (cf. Bauman and Bordoni
2014, 3), a negative undertone, the inauguration of a period of crisis or
the state of perennial crisis does not imply the arrival of the apocalypse or
the (final) catastrophe. For as much as a state of (perennial) crisis should
not be considered as the beginning of the end of the world, neither can a
crisis simply be argued away as being solely a linguistic activity that pro-
duces meaning without ever referring back to an actual state of affairs
(second delineation and second part of this chapter). A crisis, even if it
can result into something innocuous or totally irrelevant post-factum,
should always be taken seriously as a crisis, even the mere linguistically
produced crisis. Having reached this ‘middle ground’ in our position
regarding the crisis, we then go on to study the history and etymology of
the concept of crisis. We will consider the medical, theological, and polit-
ical understandings and applications of the concept. This will bring us to
realize that the nature of a crisis lies in its time-space structure. If we thus
really intend to understand this concept and how it operates, we need
to study how its temporality and spatiality function. This realization and
study, of which consists the final section of the second chapter, will be
concluded by the full disclosure of the effects of the addition of the qual-
ifier of ‘perennial’ to both the spatial and temporal structures of a crisis.
Having discovered the fundamental quality of both the temporal
and spatial structuring of the perennial crisis’s operation, the third main
Chap. 5, begins with an investigation into the deployment of ­modernity’s
time. More precisely, what has been described as the main temporal
­
characteristic of modernity, namely ‘acceleration’, will be studied. We
­
will turn to Hartmut Rosa’s quintessential study on the theory of accel-
eration: Social Acceleration (Rosa 2015). The second section will, logi-
cally, concentrate on modernity’s particular spatial organization. Marshall
McLuhan’s theorization of the ‘global village’ will function as the start-
ing point of our investigation. This will be followed by a close reading
of a discussion between Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy on the (crea-
tion of the) world. The chapter, and the argumentative part of this book,
ends with the unification (the summarizing) of the results from the two
preceding sections on modernity’s time and space deployment and its
confrontation with both the structural aspects of the perennial crisis and
the operationality of the Limbo discourse that resulted from the research
of, respectively, the two previous chapters.
8 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

The book comes to an end with some meditation on the possible

road(s) to embark upon when faced with the reached conclusions. These
will only be meditations, not solutions or answers—we are, in fact, not
convinced that somebody who has identified a problem should also always
already propose a solution to that problem (at times, discovering a prob-
lem is much more ‘valuable’ than any possible solution could ever be).
The Portuguese Nobel laureate, José Saramago will be our main
­interlocutor in our Extraduction Chap. 6.
Two final considerations before we can start our investigation into our
crisis-ridden Limboic world. First, the main body of the text is at times
interrupted by either cursive text that stands in-between two asterisks (*)
or plain written text in-between —O.D.—. The cursive text in-between
asterisks consists of minor further elucidations of the text directly preced-
ing the interruption. The text that is englobed by —O.D.— with O.D.
standing for Obiter Dictum—which is a legal or judicial term that literally
means ‘by the way’—regards more general reasoning and argumentation
about the argument of the text in general. We consider these interrup-
tions important as they can help the reader to understand some elements
of the thinking process that would otherwise have been left hidden,
underneath the words themselves.
Second, our reverting to the concept of Limbo has one more meaning
than the one we described at the beginning of this introduction. In fact,
not only do we think that a renewed taking up of the discourse of Limbo
can help us in reading the ‘signs of our times’, but it also allows us to
be actively part in an attempt to ‘re-enchant’ the world a little. Time
has come to understand that the disenchanted world—which is basically
nothing more than a myth, as has been demonstrated so accurately, most
recently, by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm (2017)1—is but a sad, mono-
lithic and monotone (yes, very much like Limbo) world. It is time to

1 Josephson-Storm is obviously not the first, nor will he hopefully be the last to denounce

the myth of the disenchantment of the world by means of modern science. Already C. S.
Lewis in his The Abolition of Man (2009), to give just one example, clearly reveals that
‘something … unites magic and applied science’ (Lewis 2009, 77), and although it ‘might
be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth:…
it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour’ (Lewis 2009, 78),
only the ‘fatal serialism of the modern imagination’ (Lewis 2009, 79) can convince itself of
the falseness of this fact.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

overcome the repetitive and single-sided representation of the world in

favor, once more, of a more enchanted and vibrant one. And although
the Limboic world we will paint in the coming pages has a rather sharp
negative undertone (enchanting is by no means obligatorily a positive
operation), it constitutes a (good) start.

References
Agamben, G. (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of
Economy and Government. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2016). Che cos’è la filosofia? Macerata: Quodlibet.
Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego and New York:
Harvest Book.
Bauman, Z., & Bordoni, C. (2014). State of Crisis. Cambridge and Malden:
Polity Press.
Capps, D., & Carlin, N. (Eds.). (2010). Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of
Uncertainty. Eugene: Cascade Books.
Graham, G. (2003). Evil and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Josephson-Storm, J. Ā. (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment. Magic, Modernity,
and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Lewis, C. S. (2009). The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with
Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New
York: HarperCollins. Kindle edition.
Rosa, H. (2015). Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity. New York and
Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Serres, M. (2014). Times of Crisis. What the Financial Crisis Revealed and How
to Reinvent Out Lives and Future. New York and London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
 CHAPTER 2

Visual Anteprima

We probably all have a vague understanding of the meaning of the word

‘Limbo’. For some, I am aware, the term is solely related to a type of
exotic ‘dance’ from the West Indies (Trinidad, to be more precise) which
requires people to bend backward to pass under some sort of bar which
is continuously lowered to make the exploit of passing under that stick
ever more complicated (after which a whole lot of shouting and scream-
ing needs to emphasize the joy in having overcome this arduous task).
For those who know that Limbo is more than just a dance (and related
song from the sixties), they probably are aware that it is a region in the
afterlife/afterworld, mainly in Roman Catholic Theology. They probably
also know the saying ‘being cast into Limbo’ means being cast into a
state of undecidedness or in some state of oblivion. When one has been
cast in Limbo, one has been cast aside and there is darn little hope of
some sort of help coming at any foreseeable moment.1
In order to get a better take on what is at stake in the concept of
Limbo, it is interesting to start by looking at some images that have vis-
ually reproduced what the Limbo that stands at the center of this text is
about. We will start with a medieval fresco after which a contemporary
take on Limbo will be proposed. Describing the more important aspects

1Limbo, the dance, does seem to have a distant relation with the afterlife as well. At least

according to http://www.tntisland.com/limbo.html, the Limmm-Bó was originally a ritual

dance performed at wakes or funeral ceremonies. We have not found any confirmation of
this fact.

© The Author(s) 2018 11

K. K. P. Vanhoutte, Limbo Reapplied, Radical Theologies and
Philosophies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_2
12 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

of these pictorial takes on Limbo will be our first move, after which these
aspects will be discussed and interpreted. This first take on Limbo will
already allow us to start considering Limbo as a good candidate to offer
a new and intriguing understanding of our current precarious contem-
porary state of affairs which is ever more often described as a ‘perennial
crisis’. Without anticipating too much, let us, however, immediately turn
to the first image we will study.
In the Florentine museum complex named Santa Maria Novella, on
the right side of the ‘Chiostro dei morti’, you can find the Cappella
Spagnolo (sometimes also called the Cappellone degli Spagnuoli or just
simply the Chapter House), the Spanish Chapel with an impressive
fresco by the Italian artist Andrea di Bonaiuto entitled Salita al Calvario,
Crocefissione e Discesa al Limbo (The Ascent to Calvary, Crucifixion, and
Descent into Limbo).2 This rather unique and grandiose fresco, which
can hardly be rendered justice to by any photographic representation,
depicts what are known as three of the more salient moments of Christ’s
Passion. Not subject to the rules of perspective—they would only come
to rule the world of painting centuries later—which makes the first
moments of observation somewhat awkward, the fresco stands out by
the vibrant colors used and the attention for detail that di Bonaiuto has
been able to produce with the little time at disposition—he was given
only two years (1365–1367) to paint the entire chapel. Most remarkable,
however, is the wide and varied presence of Biblical symbology which we
need to consider a bit more in detail (Image 2.1).
As mentioned, the main fresco at the back wall of the chapel (the only
one that is of interest to us) depicts three scenes of Christ’s Passion. The
first, at the lower left side of the arch-shaped fresco, depicts Christ, who
has just exited one of the gates of the fortified city of Jerusalem, ascending
to the place where he will be crucified: Golgotha, the place of (the) skull
as all the evangelists define it (Mt 27:33; Mk 15:22; Lk 23:33; Jn 19:17),
or, as Golgotha has also been named (translated?—both concepts refer to

2 There is very little Spanish about this chapel. The only reference or link to the Iberian

Peninsula is the fact that this chapel was used by Eleanor of Toledo, her retinue, and
other members of the flourishing Spanish colony in Florence. A further and more distant
‘Spanish connection’ is the fact that the chapel was also used for several important gen-
eral chapters of the Dominican Order (which, as is known, was founded by the Spaniard
Domenico de Guzmán). di Bonaiuto’s Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione e Discesa al Limbo is,
in fact, accompanied, as a reminder of this, by two fresco’s that depict Dominican scenarios.
 2
VISUAL ANTEPRIMA

Image 2.1 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione e Discesa di Cristo al Limbo, Firenze, Museo di Santa
Maria Novella, Capellone degli Spagnoli
13
14 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

the kranion), Calvary. At the center of this first scene, we discover Christ
still personally bearing his cross—there seems to be no trace of Simon the
Cyrenian who was obliged to help Christ carry his cross up the hill. Christ
is followed by Mary (characteristically dressed in blue) and another woman,
who is probably Mary from Magdala, and a (young) male closely follow
Christ’s mother. The young male, who has his hands folded as in prayer,
is probably the disciple who Jesus will ‘assign’ to his own mother when
already on the cross (cf. Jn 19:26). All three can be clearly distinguished as
their head is surrounded, just like Jesus’, by what is known as a halo—‘the
[absolutely in-essential] supplement added to perfection’ (Agamben 1993,
54) as Giorgio Agamben interestingly explains Saint Thomas’s discussion
on halo’s. A lot of other characters are present in this first scene: Roman
soldiers and other inhabitants of Jerusalem, but no other member of the
first group of Christ’s first followers seems to be present.
The largest section of the fresco, the top and rounded part of the
arch, depicts Christ’s crucifixion. Jesus, who can be seen at the center, is
depicted on the cross and is surrounded by angels (also all of the angels
have halo’s). Following the gospels, he is surrounded by the two crimi-
nals or revolutionaries (depending on what gospel) who were crucified
together with him. di Bonaiuto seems to have followed the Gospel of Luke
(23:39–43) on this occasion, as it is evident that one of the criminals is
saved while the other is damned (in none of the other three gospels are
the criminals/revolutionaries qualified—they are simply the one on the
left and the one on the right, and, according to the Gospel of Matthew
(27:44), both kept on abusing him in a similar way as the crowd). The
criminal on his right has a little devil with some sort of spear sitting on
his cross. Clearly, he is waiting to capture the criminal’s soul which will
then be placed in the container the three other devils are holding nearby.
Below, on the left of this criminal there is a soldier dressed in black who
has a blunt object in both his hands. He is in the act of breaking the crimi-
nal’s legs as John tells in his Gospel (Jn 19:31–32). Death would thus come
sooner, and the bodies would not remain hanging on the solemn day of
the Sabbath. The criminal/revolutionary on his left has a small group of
six angels waiting close by and, contrary to the non-repented criminal/rev-
olutionary on Christ’s right, has a halo as well. He will, as Christ will soon
promise to him, travel with him to the hereafter and be saved.
di Bonaiuto has also depicted a huge crowd. This crowd consists of
various soldiers, Jewish scribes and priests, and ordinary spectators that
had gathered on Golgotha to assist the spectacle of the multiple cru-
cifixions. Some of these bystanders can also be clearly identified. For
 2 VISUAL ANTEPRIMA 15

example, the Centurion from, once more, the Gospel of Luke (23:47)—
Matthew tells the same story (Mt 27:54)—who realized that Christ was
innocent and did not deserve to die on the cross, can be seen directly
below Christ on the left (he is dressed in black as the bone-breaking sol-
diers and seated on a white horse; he too has a halo). Below him we see
the bystander responsible for not clenching Christ’s thirst as he gave him
wine mixed with gall (Mt 27:34). The sponge is still sticking on his spear
and in his other hand is the pitcher with the ‘corrected’ wine (Mark tells
the story a little bit different (cf. Mk 15:23); in fact, for Mark the wine
was not mixed with gall but with myrrh, making it as such into some
sort of narcotic that would have helped Christ against the blunt pain).
Another familiar scene has been depicted on the extreme right of the
fresco. Four soldiers are discussing what to do with Christ’s tunic ‘which
was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down’ (Jn 19:23)—
a similar account is given in the Gospel of Mark (15:25) and the Gospel
of Luke (23:34). In the very front of this main section of the fresco, on
the immediate right of Christ, we can individuate (most probably) the
Gospel character known as Joseph of Arimathea (he is sitting on a black
horse). This ‘distinguished member of the council’ (Mk 15:43), as Mark
describes him, who was most probably a secret disciple of Christ, had
obtained from Pilate (the Roman prefect of the province of Judaea) the
possibility to bury Christ. Joseph too has a halo surrounding his head.
Maybe he is looking at who could be Nicodemus (sitting on a red-brown
horse holding something in his right hand) who, according to the Gospel
of John (Jn 19:39), brought myrrh (it could perfectly be that what this
character behind Joseph is holding in his right hand are myrrh branches)
and helped Joseph take Jesus down from the cross when dusk sets in.
Finally, at the front of the scene, at the left, there is a small group of
people that stand out because of the fact that all of them have halo’s.
Andrea di Bonaiuto seems to have wanted to play it safe, and instead of
choosing one gospel version, he simply assembled all the possible disci-
ples together who have been told as being present in the various gos-
pels (this could explain the fact that the group consists of six people and
not the three or four as generally recounted). The Gospel of Matthew, the
Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of John name the group of faithful at the
site of the cross, but in all three versions the group consists of differ-
ent people. Matthew says that ‘Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of
James and John, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee’ (Mt 27:56)
were present; Mark claims that ‘Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of
the younger James and of Joses, and Salome’ (Mk 15:40) were present;
16 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE

and John claims that ‘his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife
of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala’ where there together with the ‘disci-
ple… whom he loved’ (Jn 19:25–26)—it is not clear if Jesus’s mother’s
sister is to be identified with Mary the wife of Clopas or whether this
regards two different women.
For as much as recognizing familiar gospel presences is of inter-
est, what is of primary importance to this book is the third scene pres-
ent on this fresco. In fact, at the bottom right of the arch, Andrea di
Bonaiuto has painted Christ’s descent into Limbo. Before we ven-
ture into a discussion of this third scene of di Bonaiuto’s fresco, a cou-
ple of words are necessary to explain this descent and its historical and
religious sources. First of all, it needs to be said that Christ’s descent
into Limbo originates as Christ’s descent into Hell. In the original ver-
sions of the descent, the place where Christ went to was Hell and not
Limbo (the concept of Limbo, as we will see, will emerge at the end of
the twelfth century). Secondly, once the place in the afterlife into which
Christ descended became Limbo, Christ’s descent always just consisted
into that specific Limbo known as the ‘Limbo of the Fathers’ (at times
also known as the ‘Limbo of the Just’). Never has any mention been
made of Christ descending into the other Limbo known as the ‘Limbo
of the (unbaptized) children’ (I will return to this differentiation in the
next section). Thirdly, according to certain traditions, the place occu-
pied by the Fathers before it became the Limbo of the Fathers was not
Hell, but the so-called bosom of Abraham to which Luke alludes in his
Gospel: ‘When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the
bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried’ (Lk 16:22).
Although the transformation of Abraham’s bosom into the Limbo of the
Fathers is not to be ignored, our main focus will not be on this process
of transformation.
Saint Paul is historically the first to mention the possibility of this
descent. He writes, for example, in his letter which has become known as
the Letter to the Ephesians (Paul had actually spent time in this community
and so the very formal tone of the letter and the absence of any sort of
greeting in the beginning of the letter can make one doubt that this com-
munity was actually the addressee of the letter—or even that Paul in person
did write the letter): ‘[W]hat does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he
also descended into the lower (regions) of the earth’ (Eph 4:9). Paul
had already hinted at this event in his earlier Letter to the Romans where
he wrote: ‘But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not
say in your heart, ‘Who will go up into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ
Another random document with
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 “I never catch cold, thank you,” said. Miss Methvyn. Mr. Guildford
fancied she spoke stiffly, and was annoyed with himself for the
suggestion. “That is not a bit of your business,” he imagined her
manner to imply. But her next words reassured him. “Perhaps it is
not wise to stand still so long,” she said, and she set off walking
round the little garden.
There was an opening at the other side in the shrubs and trees
that surrounded the enclosure of flower-beds. Here Miss Methvyn
paused. “By daylight there is such a pretty view from here,” she said.
“You can see Haverstock village, and the church, and the little river.
Even now you can see it gleaming—over there to the right, over
there where the railway bridge crosses it.”
“Ah! yes, I see. Do you think that the railway spoils the landscape,
Miss Methvyn?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it,” she said. “It has always
been there. Charlie used to be so fond of watching for the white
feathers of steam coming into sight and disappearing again. He liked
the railway, because he had a notion that any day, if he ran to
Haverstock, he could get to his mother at once. The fancy cheered
him when he first came to live here, and she went away. I have
never cared to see the trains go by lately.”
As she spoke a shrill whistle sounded in the distance. Cicely
turned and began to retrace her steps.
“Associations must sometimes be terrible things,” said Mr.
Guildford gently.
Something in his voice encouraged Cicely to say more. “There is
a still more painful feeling that I have never heard described,” she
said. “I have often wondered if other people have felt it. The sound of
that railway whistle put it into my mind, and the speaking of Charlie’s
fancy about it. What I mean is a sort of hatred of everything tangible
—material rather. It came over me dreadfully after he died. It seemed
to me that even the material things he had loved now separated me
from him. Just as he, in his innocence, loved the railway, because he
thought it would take him to his mother, so I could not endure to see
it, because I felt that it—that nothing material could take me to him or
bring him back to me. Everything, except memory, seemed to
separate me further from him. I have had this feeling twice; yes, I
think, twice in my life,” she repeated. “Did you ever feel it, or is it only
a womanish feeling?”
Mr. Guildford had listened to her with some surprise, but still with
attention and a wish to follow her meaning.
“I think I understand you,” he said thoughtfully. “It seems to me
your feeling must somewhere have affinity with what I—like every
student of practical science—realise incessantly; the utter
insurmountability of the barrier between matter and spirit. It sounds
very commonplace, but it is the puzzle. We are so hedged in, in
every direction the old hitting one’s head against the wall. And the
only thing to be done is to turn round and work one’s hardest inside
the limits.”
“Yes,” said Cicely. “Yes. I understand.” Then she was silent for a
minute or two. “I suppose,” she said at last, “I suppose if we could
put our feelings into words, we should always find some one who
shared them.”
“I suppose so,” he said. “Not that I have ever felt your special kind
of revolt against our prison bars, Miss Methvyn. I have never been
separated by death from any one that I cared very much about.”
“You have been very happy then,” she said.
“I don’t know. There are two ways of putting it. Perhaps the truth
is that I have never had any one to care enough for, for separation to
be or seem terrible,” he answered, in a tone not very easy to
interpret.
They were close to the window again. Geneviève’s music had
ceased, and glancing up, Cicely saw her cousin standing inside the
glass door looking out.
“Mr. Guildford,” she said hastily, “will you just come to the end of
the walk again for a moment. I have wanted to ask you something all
this evening, and I thought you might be annoyed at it. I want to
know what you think about my father. I cannot tell you why I ask you
—there—there is something that depends upon it. And I know you
are very clever. You must not think me very strange. I am so at a
loss,” she hurried on with what she had to say, in evident fear of Mr.
Guildford interrupting her with some cold expression of disapproval
or annoyance; for she could see that he looked grave and perplexed.
“What do you mean exactly, Miss Methvyn?” he said formally. “Do
you want to know if I think Colonel Methvyn in a critical state, or
what?”
He thought her inquiry uncalled for and hardly delicate. He felt
surprised, and a little disappointed. She was her father’s heiress;
Colonel Methvyn had told him so. Could it be—surely not—that she
was eager to claim her inheritance, making plans contingent on her
speedy succession?
“Yes,” she replied, “that is partly what I want to know. I also want
to know if any vexation—being thwarted about anything on which he
had set his heart, for instance, could do him harm.”
“Most assuredly it would,” he said somewhat sternly, “the very
gravest harm. It is very early for me to give an opinion,” he went on,
feeling anxious to avoid saying much. “I never saw Colonel Methvyn
till to-day, but I have seen similar cases. I should say he may live as
he is for many years, provided his mind is kept at ease, and that he
is not thwarted or exposed to vexation. The effect of any great
shock, of course, I could not predict.”
“Thank you,” she said very gently, almost humbly, “you have told
me what I wanted to know.”
Why did she want to know? he asked himself. She stood still for a
minute or two, as if thinking of what he had said. The moonlight fell
full on her fair face, and as she looked up with her clear honest eyes,
his heart smote him for even his passing misgiving that her motives,
her reasons, could be but of the purest and best.
“She is not a commonplace girl,” he thought, “and she won’t be a
commonplace woman; but she is too self-reliant for one so young.”
It was almost with a feeling of relief, or what he imagined to be
such, that he turned to Geneviève, who had opened the glass door
and stood waiting for them.
“How charming it is!” she said; “but, my cousin, my aunt fears lest
you should take cold.”
“I am coming in now, mother,” Cicely said as they came within
hearing, “do come here for a moment and look at the beautiful
moonlight.”
Mrs. Methvyn rose from her seat by the table, and joined the little
group at the window.
“Yes,” she said, “it is lovely, but it is rather cold.” She shivered as
she spoke, and retired to the fire. The others were following her,
when suddenly a whistle was heard, not a railway whistle this time. It
sounded at some little distance away, down among the shrubberies.
Cicely stopped, and seemed to listen.
“What was that? It surely can’t be” The whistle was repeated. “Go
in, Geneviève,” she said, “I shall be back directly.”
And almost before her cousin and Mr. Guildford saw what she
was doing, she had started off and was lost to sight among the
bushes.
Geneviève and Mr. Guildford looked at each other in surprise.
Then Geneviève came into the library again and spoke to her aunt.
“My cousin has gone out again, aunt,” she said; “shall we leave
the door open till she returns?”
“Cicely gone out again!” exclaimed Mrs. Methvyn. “How very
foolish! Do you see her Mr. Guildford?” she asked, for the young
man was still standing by the window.
“No, I don’t,” he replied; “Miss Methvyn ran off so quickly. We had
better shut the door in the meantime, however.”
He came inside and closed it. Mrs. Methvyn looked annoyed and
uneasy.
“I can’t understand what Cicely is thinking of,” she said.
 “There was a—what do you call—siffle, siffle—a fistle—wistle?”
said Geneviève, “down in the garden, and then Cicely ran.”
“What do you mean, my dear?” said Mrs. Methvyn with slight
impatience. “Do you know, Mr. Guildford?”
He was half annoyed and half amused.
“It is just as Miss Casalis says,” he replied. “We heard a whistle at
some little distance, and Miss Methvyn ran off at once.”
“Was it a peculiar whistle, like two short notes and then a long
one?” inquired Mrs. Methvyn more composedly.
“Yes,” said Mr. Guildford; “I heard it twice; it was just that.”
“Then the Fawcetts must have returned,” exclaimed Cicely’s
mother. “How surprised every one will be! They intended to stay
abroad till July.”
“The Fawcetts!” repeated Geneviève impulsively.
“Yes, of course,” said Mrs. Methvyn, “the Fawcetts—our nearest
neighbours Colonel Methvyn’s cousins. Mr. Fawcett has been in the
habit of coming here at all hours since he was a boy, and there is a
short cut through the fields that saves a couple of miles,” she went
on, in a sort of generally explanatory way; “it comes out at the little
gate in the laurel-walk. By the bye, I wonder if Cicely has the key. We
generally keep it locked, for a good many tramps come round by the
Ash Lane, and Trev—Mr. Fawcett, always whistles, on the chance of
our hearing him, before coming round the other way by the lodge.”
“Cicely had a key to-day,” said Geneviève. “We went through the
little gate when we were out, and my cousin unlocked it.”
“Ah! that is all right, then; she often carries it in her pocket,”
replied Mrs. Methvyn.
She went to the glass door, and opening it, stood listening as if for
approaching voices. Geneviève sat down by the table and began idly
turning over some photographs. Mr. Guildford stood at a little
distance, wishing the carriage would come round that he might go.
From time to time, however, he could not help glancing at the face
bent over the photograph book. In profile it was hardly so perfect as
when in full view; still it was very lovely—every feature so clear, and
yet rounded, the long black eyelashes sweeping the delicately tinted
cheek, the expression so innocently wistful.
“I doubt if that little southern flower will take kindly to this soil,”
thought Mr. Guildford.
Just then Geneviève happened to look up, and catching sight of
the young man’s eyes fixed upon her, blushed vividly. Pitying her
discomfort, and annoyed with himself for being the cause of it, he
hastily made some remark about the pictures she was looking at,
thinking to himself as he did so of the shallowness of the popular
notion that French girls were more artificial, less unsophisticated and
retiring, than English maidens. Geneviève was on the point of
replying to his observation, when the door opened.
“The carriage for Mr. Guildford,” said the footman.
Mr. Guildford turned to Mrs. Methvyn, and was beginning to say
good-bye, when voices were heard outside—cheerful voices they
sounded as they came nearer—Miss Methvyn’s and another, a
deeper, fuller toned voice, and in a moment their owners appeared at
the glass door.
“Mother,” said Cicely, and to Mr. Guildford her tone sounded bright
and eager, “mother, here is Trevor, are you not astonished? Did you
think me insane when I ran off in such a hurry?” she went on
laughingly.
“We only arrived this afternoon,” said the gentleman, “two months
before we were expected. You can fancy what a comfortable
reception we had at Lingthurst. My mother and Miss Winter ended by
discovering they had lost all their luggage, that is to say, only twenty-
nine boxes turned up, and there was such a to-do that I came off.”
“It was very good of you, dear Trevor,” said Mrs. Methvyn. “It is so
nice to see you again. But why have you come home so soon?
Nothing wrong, I hope?
“Everything wrong,” said the young man laughing. But as he came
into the room he caught sight of Mr. Guildford, and, further off,
Geneviève seated by the table, but with her face turned away from
the others. “You are not alone,” he said hastily, his tone changing a
little. The change of tone, slight as it was, was enough to make Mr.
Guildford wish that his goodbyes had been completed before the
appearance of the new-comers, but almost ere he could realise the
wish Miss Methvyn had come forward.
“It was very rude of me to run away in such a hurry, Mr. Guildford,”
she said gently, “but I did not like to keep my cousin Mr. Fawcett
waiting. I was afraid he would think we had not heard him.”
“I was just about going round by the lodge when I heard your
tardy footsteps, Miss Cicely,” said Mr. Fawcett. “I had whistled till I
was tired and was thinking of trying a verse or two of Come into the
garden, Maud, for I am very tired indeed of being here at the gate
alone.”
“It would not have been at all appropriate,” said Cicely, a very
slight shadow of annoyance creeping over her face. Then there
came a little pause, which Mr. Guildford took advantage of to finish
his good-nights this time without interruption. He carried away with
him no very distinct impression of the new-comer, only that he was
tall and fair and good-looking, and that his voice was soft and
pleasant.
“She said he was her cousin,” Mr. Guildford repeated to himself.
“Ah! well, I am not likely ever to know more of her, but I almost think
she is the sort of woman one might come to make a friend of.”
CHAPTER VI.
 “LE JEUNE MILORD.”

“He is as sober a man as most of the young nobility. His fortune is great. In
sense he neither abounds nor is wanting; and that class of men, take my word for
it, are the best qualified of all others to make good husbands to women of superior
talents. They know just enough to admire in her what they have not in
themselves.”

Sir Charles Grandison.

HE was tall and fair and very good-looking. He had pleasant

somewhat sleepy blue eyes, and a pleasant somewhat sleepy
manner. Take him as a whole he was a favourable specimen of the
upper class young Englishman of a certain type, prosperous,
amiable, well-principled according to his lights, very fairly satisfied
with things as he found them, little disposed by nature or education
to dive below the surface.
In the little bustle of Mr. Guildford’s leave-taking, the figure of the
girl sitting quietly by the table had almost escaped Mr. Fawcett’s
notice. But Geneviève had risen to say good-bye to the doctor, and
before she sat down again Mrs. Methvyn addressed her.
“Geneviève, my dear, don’t stay over there all alone. By the bye I
must introduce a new cousin to you. Not exactly a cousin certainly,
but as you both call me aunt, it seems something like it. This is Mr.
Fawcett, Geneviève, and this, Trevor, is my little niece—niece ‘à la
mode de Bretagne,’ as your mother says, Geneviève—Geneviève
Casalis who has come to us all the way from Hivèritz. You must have
been near there not long ago, Trevor. I think your mother,” but she
stopped short in her sentence, startled by a sudden expression of
surprise from the young man.
“By Jove,” he exclaimed, but recovering himself almost
immediately, “I beg your pardon, aunt,” he went on, “I was so
astonished at seeing Miss Casalis again. I had no idea—”
Geneviève had come forward when her aunt first spoke to her,
and when Mrs. Methvyn had gone on to introduce the so-called
cousins, Mr. Fawcett had naturally turned towards the young lady,
obtaining thus for the first time a full view of her face, her lovely
blushing face, with timid up-looking eyes; the face that not many
weeks ago had rested white and unconscious on his shoulder, which
he had often vaguely wondered if he should ever see again. This
very evening, as he had stood waiting by the gate, something had
recalled to his mind the accident at Hivèritz, and he had thought to
himself that he would tell Cicely about it and try to describe to her the
girl’s beautiful face.
“If she could see her, she would want to paint her I am sure,” he
thought. “She would make such a stunning gipsy, or Italian peasant
girl, or something like that. I wish Cicely could see her. She is so
ready to admire pretty girls. I never knew any woman like her for
that. Even my mother and Miss Winter began criticising that lovely
girl. My mother said she had no manners—poor little soul! she was
frightened out of her wits—and Miss Winter found fault with her
dress.”
And within ten minutes of his standing at the gate, and thinking
over the adventure of Hivèritz, behold the heroine of it standing
before him in the flesh! It was enough to excuse a pretty forcible
expression of astonishment.
Mrs. Methvyn looked bewildered in the extreme.
“Do you mean that you and Geneviève have met before?” she
inquired. “You never told us so, Geneviève?”
“Perhaps she did not know Trevor’s name,” suggested Cicely,
fancying that Geneviève looked shy and embarrassed.
“I knew it was Fawcett,” said Geneviève, “but I knew not but that
here in England there are many Fawcetts.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Fawcett eagerly. “Of course. I only wonder
you remember the name at all.” He could not have explained why,
but he certainly was rather pleased than the reverse to find that
Mademoiselle Casalis had not talked about their former meeting.
“When was it you met Mr. Fawcett before? On your way through
France?” inquired Mrs. Methvyn of Geneviève.
“Oh! no, dear aunt. It was while I was still at the home. Before I
knew that I should come to England at all,” the girl replied simply
enough. And then she told about the accident, how kind “Miladi
Fawcett” had been, how thankful “maman” had felt that it had done
her no harm—all in her pretty, broken English, stopping here and
there for a word, or glancing up appealingly with a “how do you say
so and so?”—all just as it had happened; Mr. Fawcett now and then
joining in with some observation; reserving only to herself her
mother’s recollection of the English family’s name and speculation as
to whether the Fawcetts of her youth and those of Geneviève’s
adventure could be the same. For the mention of this would
assuredly have led to a repetition of the question, “Why did you not
tell us about it before?” a question that Geneviève was not prepared
to answer, for the simple reason that she could not really exactly say
why she had not done so. It would have been only natural, girlishly
natural, to have inquired of her aunt or cousin if among their
neighbours were any family corresponding to her description, but
though natural to most girls, to Geneviève anything so frank and
straightforward was the reverse. To her the question, “Why should I
not tell?” less frequently presented itself than the reverse, “Why
should I?”
Perhaps the only definite reason she could have given for her
reserve, was one she might certainly be excused for keeping to
herself—a foolish, vague, half-romantic, half calculating anticipation
of the effect and possible result of her sudden appearance before old
Mathurine’s ‘jeune milord,’ the hero of the girl’s latest day-dream.
So she told her little adventure simply and prettily, with here and
there a timid blush, and a suspicion of tears in her eyes as she
recalled her mother’s thankfulness, the anxiety and terror of ‘cette
bonne Mathurine.’
“It is quite a curious coincidence,” said Mrs. Methvyn with interest.
“I must take you to see Lady Frederica some day soon Geneviève.
She will be pleased to meet you again. In any case she would be
glad to see you, for she remembers your mother. In one of her letters
to me she said so, and was sorry I had not given her Madame
Casalis’s address in case of your passing through Hivèritz, Trevor. It
was too late then, for you had already been there.”
“Yes, what a pity,” exclaimed Mr. Fawcett. “I remember my mother
saying something about it when we were in Switzerland. She could
not remember where Madame Casalis lived. We little thought we had
already made her daughter’s acquaintance.”
“Did you not hear Geneviève’s name?” inquired Cicely.
Trevor looked a little bit annoyed—he hardly liked to own that
while the young lady had remembered his, hers had completely
escaped his memory.
“We did hear it, we must have heard it,” he said. “I think Miss
Casalis mentioned it when I was telling our courier where the
coachman was to drive to. But, I suppose it was the stupidity of my
English ears—I did not catch it clearly.”
Geneviève smiled sweetly, as if in condonation of the offence, but
in her heart she was wishing, oh! so earnestly, that she had not
prevented “Miladi Fawcett” from accompanying her home to the Rue
de la Croix blanche, that Sunday evening, to see her safely in her
mother’s care. What would it have mattered that the house was
small and shabby, and that Madame Casalis herself had to open the
door, if, as would almost surely have been the case, the familiar
name of Fawcett had caught her mother’s ears, and led to a mutual
recognition! What pleasant results might not have followed!
Geneviève felt exceedingly provoked with herself, and Mrs. Methvyn,
unconsciously, added to her vexation.
What a pity,” she too exclaimed. “If Caroline and Lady Frederica
had met, it would probably have been arranged for Geneviève to
have travelled some part of the way here with your party, Trevor, for I
know Madame Casalis was very anxious at that time to hear of a
suitable escort. And you would have seen something of Paris, my
dear, as you wished so much,” she added, turning to Geneviève,
“instead of having to hurry through with Monsieur
Rouet.”—“Geneviève came under the care of a pasteur who had to
attend some meeting in London,” she went on to explain to Mr.
Fawcett.
“And had to travel second-class all the way, and saw nothing of
Paris,” added Geneviève in her own mind (though not for worlds
would she have said it aloud), feeling too disgusted with herself even
to smile. Her one day in Paris had been a Sunday, which the
Reverend Joseph Rouet, faithful to his charge, had caused her to
spend among the Protestant brethren at Passy, attending two
services in a stuffy meeting-house,—Geneviève, whose soul had
long ago soared far beyond the homeliness of the Casalis’ narrow
little circle at Hivèritz, whose imagination had pictured drives in the
Bois de Boulogne, shopping in the Boulevards, nay (‘comble de
bonheur,’ hardly to be thought of but with bated breath), even a visit
to the theatre itself, as blissful possibilities of a few days in Paris!
“It was really a chapter of cross-purposes,” continued Mrs.
Methvyn. “I wonder your mother did not remember the name
Fawcett, when you told her of your accident, Geneviève?”
“Perhaps I did not rightly pronounce it,” said the girl. “And mamma
was much occupied in her thoughts just then, I remember.”
 She happened to catch Cicely’s eye as she spoke, and blushed
vividly. A slight look of perplexity crossed Miss Methvyn’s face.
“I hope Geneviève is not afraid of me,” she thought to herself.
“What was there to make her look so uncomfortable just now! I am
so anxious to be kind to her and win her confidence, but I fear I
seem cold and distant to her, poor girl!”
But no more was said on the subject of Geneviève’s former
meeting with the Fawcetts.
“Shall I come to see your mother to-morrow, Trevor?” said Mrs.
Methvyn as she was bidding Mr. Fawcett good night. “Or will she be
busy?”
“She will probably be rather in a state of mind if the missing boxes
haven’t turned up,” said the young man. “I’ll look in some time to-
morrow and tell you. I have to drive to the village to call on the new
clergyman, and I may as well come round this way.”
“Oh! then the new clergyman has come,” said Cicely. “I am very
glad. I don’t like driving to Haverstock Church half as well as going to
Lingthurst. The walk through the woods is so pretty, Geneviève,” she
added; “I almost think it is what I like best about our Sundays here.”
“Cicely, my dear!” said her mother in a somewhat similar tone to
that in which Mrs. Crichton had reproved her brother for the avowed
reason of his predilection for church.
Cicely smiled. “Well, mother dear,” she said coaxingly, “the walk to
church was really more edifying than what we heard when we got
there, in the old days. I am so glad Sir Thomas is getting a new
organ,” she went on. “We hear Mr.—I don’t think I have heard h is
name—is a zealous reformer.”
“Tremendous,” said Mr. Fawcett. “I don’t think my father had any
idea what he was bringing upon us when he gave the living to Mr.
Hayle.”
“Mr. Hayle, oh! that’s his name, is it? But I thought he was not
coming for two months,” said Miss Methvyn.
 “So thought everybody except Mr. Hayle,” replied Mr. Fawcett.
“There was some mistake about it, and it turned out he had made all
his plans for coming at once; that was one of the things that made us
come home sooner. But I must be going. Good night, aunt. I shall be
sure to look in to-morrow.”
That night when the two girls went upstairs to their rooms, Cicely
accompanied Geneviève into hers. She stood for a moment by the
dressing-table idly playing with some pretty little toilet ornaments that
stood upon it. They were unusually pretty little trifles, and belonged
to a set which had been given to her by an old lady who was a
connoisseur in such things, and Cicely had placed them in her
cousin’s room to please her eye on first arriving. The sight of the little
ornament seemed to remind her of what she had to say, or perhaps
to encourage her to say it.
“Geneviève,” she began, and her blue eyes looked earnest and
thoughtful, “I want to say something to you. I am afraid I seem cold
to you, and it would grieve me if you thought I felt so. I am not
naturally very demonstrative, and since my father has been so ill, I
have had to learn to be even more quiet and calm in manner. And
being the only one at home, I have had to do what I could to help my
parents, and I fear it has given me a sort of decided, managing
manner that may strike you disagreeably. I want to ask you not to be
afraid to tell me if I ever seem either cold or hard. You don’t know me
yet; you can’t trust me all of a sudden; I should not wish it. But when
you know me better, I hope you will believe that I don’t feel cold and
indifferent, and that I am very anxious, dear, to make you happy.”
Considering that the burden of the speech was herself and her
own feelings, it was an unusually long one for Cicely. But the simple
words betrayed no egotism; the kind, true eyes expressed their
owner’s real feelings. Impressionable Geneviève threw her arms
round her cousin’s neck.
“I do trust you, dear Cécile,” she exclaimed impetuously. “I love
you and trust you, and I think you so good and so wise. I wish I were
good like you, but I am not. I am foolish and discontent, and at home
I did not help the mother and think for her, as you do for my aunt.
Teach me to be like you, dear Cécile; let me trust you and give you
all my confidence.”
Cicely smiled. It was no sudden friend ship she was asking of her
cousin, no romantic compact of girlish devotion which she was
proposing—such things were little in her way. But she would not for
worlds have chilled Geneviève’s affectionate impulse, so she
submitted with apparent satisfaction to a kiss on each cheek, and
kissed her again in return, saying as she did so, “Good night, dear
Geneviève, and thank you. Now you must ring for Parker and go to
bed. It is rather late and you look tired.”
Coming along the passage after leaving Geneviève, Miss
Methvyn met her mother.
“I was looking for you, dear,” said Mrs. Methvyn. “It is late, but
your father is very comfortable to-night. He is still reading the
papers.”
They were close to the door of Cicely’s little sitting-room. They
went in and stood in silence for a minute by the mantelpiece. All
looked the same as on the night little Charlie died; the birds were all
asleep, the flowers looked fresh and cared for, the Skye terrier lay on
the hearthrug. Cicely sighed as she looked round, for her glance fell
on an object she had not yet had the heart to dislodge from its
accustomed place—a toy horse, Charlie’s favourite steed, stalled in
one corner, which he had called his stable.
But the sigh was quickly stifled. “What did you want me for,
mother?” she said.
“I was thinking, Cicely,” began Mrs. Methvyn, “that it would now be
well to tell Geneviève of your engagement—don’t you think so? It is
different now that Trevor is here again. It may seem strange to her
afterwards not to have been told of it.”
Cicely hesitated. “I would much rather she were not told of it just
yet,” she said. “She is so young, and I want so much to make her
feel quite at ease with me. Besides,” she went on, “you know,
mother, what we were saying this afternoon—my engagement is
rather an indefinite one; it is not as if I were going to be married
soon.”
“But if your father sets his heart upon it—the Fawcetts have
always wished to hasten the marriage, you know, Cicely dear—it
may not be a very long engagement after all,” said Mrs. Methvyn.
“I hope papa won’t set his heart upon it,” said Cicely with a faint
smile. But she did not oppose the suggestion as vehemently as a
few hours before.
“Then, you don’t object to my telling Geneviève?” asked her
mother.
“Of course not, if you think it best,” said Cicely. “I wish, however,
you would not tell her quite yet. Wait a few days. I think she is
beginning to feel more at home with me. She will not be surprised at
seeing Trevor often here; she knows they are our cousins.”
“Very well,” said Mrs. Methvyn.
Geneviève’s last thought that night before she went to sleep was
of Mr. Fawcett. To her girlish fancy the coincidence of their meeting
again was suggestive of all manner of speculations.
“How I wish Mathurine knew of it,” she said to herself; “how
delighted she would be! She thought him so handsome and
distinguished. So he certainly is, and his manners are so agreeable,
not at all like those of most Englishmen, cold and gloomy” (forgetting
her extremely limited experience of Mr. Fawcett’s countrymen). “And
then how rich they must be! Ah, how I should have enjoyed travelling
with them! No doubt they had a courier, an appartement au premier
—everything of the best.”
And another idea entered her silly little head. How delightful would
be a wedding journey to Paris with such a hero—rich, amiable, living
but to gratify her wishes! Such things had come to pass, thought
Geneviève; such good fortune had been the lot of portionless girls
far inferior to herself in personal attractions. She did not fear her
cousin Cicely as a rival; the idea never even occurred to her. She
liked Cicely, and was very well pleased to make a friend of her, but in
some respects she could hardly help looking down upon her a little.
“She is so good and wise,” thought Geneviève, “but so slow and
quiet. English girls never seem half awake. And her dress; bah! if I
had all the money she has to spend upon it, would I be content to
wear such plain things? She might make herself look twice as well if
she liked.”
Such was the maiden meditation, such the “fancy free” of the
pasteur’s daughter, who had been brought up in the seclusion and
simplicity of a French Protestant household, sheltered, as her
parents fondly thought, from every breath of worldliness or ambition.
Mr. Fawcett made his appearance again about luncheon-time the
next day. Cicely was alone in the morning room when he came in.
“I’ve been to see the new man,” he said, establishing himself on a
comfortable low chair and looking ready for a cousinly chat. “I’m
hardly fit to come in here, Cicely; I’m covered with dust.”
He looked dubiously at his boots as he spoke, and began
switching them lightly with his riding-whip.”
“Never mind,” said Miss Methvyn; “only please don’t send the dust
on to me.” She spoke laughingly; but her tone sobered into gravity as
she went on, “Black dresses catch dust so easily.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said. Then he looked up from his boots
and fixed his pleasant, good-tempered blue eyes on his cousin. She
was sitting at a little table near him,—writing, in point of fact making
up accounts. She had stopped when Mr. Fawcett first came in, but
had not altogether withdrawn her attention from the papers. before
her; and now in the intervals of his remarks, she ran her eye up and
down the neat little columns of figures, and jotted down the results of
her calculations.
“What are you so busy about, Cicely?” said Mr. Fawcett after a
little pause.
Miss Methvyn stopped to put down a figure before she spoke. “It’s
Saturday,” she replied laconically, glancing up for a moment, and
then putting down another.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” replied her cousin. “What about it?”
 His tone was perfectly good-natured. Something in it struck
Cicely’s sense of the ludicrous. She threw down her pen and began
to laugh.
“You’re very long suffering, Trevor,” she said, “and I’m very rude.
On Saturdays I have always to go over all the accounts; the bailiff’s,
the gardener’s, and all—and make a sort of summary of them for
papa. I generally do them upstairs in my own room, but Geneviève
was working at something up there this morning, so I brought them
down here.”
“It isn’t proper work for you. Your father should get a regular
agent,” said Mr. Fawcett.
“No he shouldn’t,” said Cicely; but the tone and manner disarmed
the abruptness of her speech. She glanced at her cousin with an
expression of half-playful defiance. He smiled.
There was a likeness of feature and complexion between these
two—a material resemblance, which seemed, in a sense, to render
more visible the underlying dissimilarity. Both pairs of blue eyes were
calm and gentle; but those of the young man told of repose from the
absence of conflicting elements; those of the girl, of the quiet of
restrained power. There was decision in both faces; in Trevor’s it
was that of a straightforward, healthy, uncultivated, not acutely
sensitive nature; in Cicely’s it was the firmness of an organisation
strong to resist where the necessity of resistance should be the
result of conviction, but at the same time exquisitely keen to suffer. A
glance at the man told you pretty correctly the extent of his mental
capacity. He was no fool, but there was small promise of further
intellectual development; such as he was, he was likely to remain;
but it took more than many glances to estimate justly the reserve of
power and depths of feeling hidden below the stillness of Cicely
Methvyn’s young face.
Something in the girl’s manner told Mr. Fawcett that the occasion
would not be an auspicious one for entering upon a subject he had
come half prepared to discuss. So he said nothing for a minute or
two, and Cicely went on with her accounts. As Mr. Fawcett watched
her, a slight expression of dissatisfaction crept over his face.
 “Cicely,” he said.
“Well,” said Cicely, without looking up this time.
“You’re not going to wear that deep mourning much longer, are
you?”
Cicely’s face lost its brightness. There was a slight constraint in
her tone as she answered.
“It is not very deep mourning,” she said, glancing at her gown.
“There is no crape on my dress. I dislike very deep, elaborate
mourning.”
“If it was handsomer of its kind, perhaps it would be more
becoming,” said Mr. Fawcett agreeably. “As it is, Cicely, I can’t say I
think it so. You are too colourless for that sort of dull-looking dress. It
might suit some people—your cousin, for instance; I dare say if we
saw her in a plain black dress like yours, we should think she
couldn’t wear anything that would suit her as well. She is so brilliant,”
he added reflectively.
“Yes,” said Cicely. “I dare say we should. But then, Trevor, I
strongly suspect we should think so whatever Geneviève wore. She
is so very lovely. But as for me, Trevor, you know I wasn’t thinking of
whether it would suit me or not when I got this dress.”
Her coloured deepened a little as she spoke, and the words
sounded almost reproachful.
“Of course not. I know that,” said Mr. Fawcett hastily. “Of course,
Cicely, you know I didn’t mean to speak unfeelingly. How curious it is
about your cousin by the bye,” he went on, as if anxious to change
the subject, “about our having knocked her down at Hivèritz, I mean.”
“Yes, it was very curious,” said Cicely. “But you knew a cousin
was coming to stay with us, Trevor; I mentioned it in several of my
letters.”
“Oh! yes. I knew a Miss Casalis was coming,” said Trevor, “but
somehow I didn’t fancy she would be that sort of a cousin.”
“What sort did you expect?” asked Miss Methvyn.