logic – eyebeleave

Holy Saturday: the logic of freedom

1864 words, 10 min read

A highlight of the Easter Triduum has for me always been Holy Saturday, when the tabernacle’s emptiness, the stripped altar and the absence of the Eucharist are all stark reminders of what a world without God’s incarnation as a fellow human would be like. It is, for me, a day for being particularly close to atheists and agnostics and for reflecting on the gift of Jesus’ friendship, whose enormity is heightened by its apparent absence.

I have, for some years now, had a feeling that there is much more to Holy Saturday than I am aware of, that Jesus’ participation in death is saying more than I am hearing. Against this background, I have come across Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter”, whose 4th chapter is dedicated to Holy Saturday, and I would here like to give you a sense of the beautiful line of thought he sets out there.

Von Balthasar starts by tracing the origins of the idea of Jesus’ participation in death to the New Testament and argues for this being a consequence of redemption’s scope extending beyond the living. Jesus’ death here is a “being with” a “solidarity” with death as a human condition:

“‘[G]oing to the dead’, an expression justified, in our opinion, by I Peter 3, 19: ‘he went, poreutheis, and preached to the spirits in prison’—preached, that is, the ‘good news’ as I Peter 4, 6 adds by way of a self-evident clarification. […]

There is no difficulty about understanding this ‘going to the souls in prison’ as, first and foremost, a ‘being with’, and the ‘preaching’ in the same primary fashion as the publication of the ‘redemption’, actively suffered, and brought about by the Cross of the living Jesus—and not as a new activity, distinct from the first. For then the solidarity with the condition of the dead would be the prior condition for the work of redemption, whose effects would be deployed and exercised in the ‘realm’ of the dead, though that work itself would remain fundamentally finished (consummatum est!) on the Cross. In this sense the actively formulated term ‘preaching’ (I Peter 3, 19; in 4, 6 it is passive, evēngelisthē) should be conceived as the efficacious outworking in the world beyond of what was accomplished in the temporality of history.”

More important even than his descent and the being with the departed, is Jesus’ ascent from the dead, as a paving of the way for the resurrection of all:

“It is not the going to the dead which is important here—that is taken for granted, and identified, simply, with what it is to be genuinely dead—but rather the return from that bourn. God has not ‘left’ (or ‘abandoned’) Jesus ‘in Hades’ where he tarried; he has not let his Holy One see corruption. The accent is placed on the whence—the phrase ek nekrōn occurs some fifty times in the New Testament—a whence which implies a point of departure, namely, being with the dead. Death here is characterised by ‘pangs’, by ‘pains’ (?dines), and by its lust to seize and hold (krateisthai): but God is stronger than death. The only thing that matters is the facticity of the ‘being’ of the one who is dead in ‘death’ or—for this amounts to the same thing—in Hades, whose character is (objectively) referred to by the term ‘pains’. It is from thence that Jesus is ‘awoken’. […]

[I]n the Cross the power of Hell is already broken (down), the locked door of the grave is already burst open, yet Christ’s own laying in the tomb and his ‘being with the dead’ is still necessary, so that, on Easter Day, the common resurrection ek tōn nekrōn—with ‘Christ the first-fruits’—can follow.”

Von Balthasar then turns to the motivation for Jesus’ descent and again ascribes it to solidarity with the “unredeemed dead”, relying on St. Augustine who insists that Christ’s descent extended not only to the as-yet-unredeemed, but redemption-worthy, but also to those considered unworthy:

“The fact of being with the unredeemed dead, in the Sheol of the Old Testament, signifies a solidarity in whose absence the condition of standing for sinful man before God would not be complete. This is why Sheol must be understood in the classic Old Testament sense […]

Augustine distinguishes between a lower infernum (where the ‘rich man’ lives) and a higher (where Lazarus dwells, in the bosom of Abraham). The two are separated by a chaos magnum, yet both belong equally to Hades. That Christ descended even to the lower infernum, in order to ‘deliver from their sufferings tortured souls, that is, sinners’ (salvos facere a doloribus) Augustine regards as certain (non dubito). The grace of Christ redeemed all those who tarried there: adhuc requiro¹. […]

This ultimate solidarity is the final point and the goal of that first ‘descent’, so clearly described in the Scriptures, into a ‘lower world’.

Looking at what the Early Fathers of the Church have written about Holy Saturday, von Balthasar presents the descent into hell as a matter of logical necessity, following from the incarnation. To become fully human, Christ had to participate in death too. Without this, his incarnation would have been incomplete, as would his redemptive action:

“And so, in order to assume the entire penalty imposed upon sinners, Christ willed not only to die, but to go down, in his soul, ad infernum. As early as the Fathers of the second century, this act of sharing constituted the term and aim of the Incarnation. The ‘terrors of death’ into which Jesus himself falls are only dispelled when the Father raises him again. According to Tertullian, the Son of God adapted himself to the whole law of human death: Huic quoque legi satisfecit, forma humanae mortis apud inferos functus². The same affirmation is found in Irenaeus: Dominus legem mortuorum servavit, ut fieret primogenitus a mortuis.³ He insists on his own grounding principle, namely, that only what has been endured is healed and saved. Since above all this is a matter of penetrating into the realm of the inferi, so for Ambrosiaster in the Quaestiones ex Novo Testamento, Christ had to die so as to be capable of this step. Christ willed to be like us, says Andrew of Crete, in ‘walking amidst the shadows of death, in that place where souls had been bound with chains unbreakable’. All that only expresses the law of human death, thought through to its logical conclusion.”

Von Balthasar then draws our attention to a seemingly paradoxical aspect of Christ’s being among the dead – i.e., that is was a “solitary [being] with others” that did not come with a subjective experience:

“To the extent that the experience of death was objectively capable of containing an interior victory and thus a triumph over hostile powers, to that extent it was in no way necessary that this triumph be subjectively experienced. For precisely that would have abolished the law of solidarity. Let it not be forgotten: among the dead, there is no living communication. Here solidarity means: being solitary like, and with, the others.”

A further aspect of Christ’s being with the dead is that it is both an act of ultimate obedience and an act of the Trinity, where the self-noughting of its persons is enacted here in creation. This is also reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s concept of God taking into himself the gap that may otherwise be between Him and humanity:

“His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s)⁴ of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, of the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is ‘cast down’ (hormēmati blēthēsetai, Apocalypse 18, 21; John 12, 31; Matthew 22, 13). But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father’s mission in all its amplitude: the ‘exploration’ of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity.”

Finally, von Balthasar brings his line of thought to its pinnacle, by presenting Jesus’ being among the dead as a logical consequence of his having received the power to judge from the Father and from Hell being the “supreme entailment of human liberty”. Without participating in it, and to do so as a human entails death, the transformation he brought about by his resurrection would have been incomplete.

“If the Father must be considered as the Creator of human freedom—with all its foreseeable consequences—then judgment belongs primordially to him, and thereby Hell also; and when he sends the Son into the world to save it instead of judging it, and, to equip him for this function, gives ‘all judgment to the Son’ (John 5, 22), then he must also introduce the Son made man into ‘Hell’ (as the supreme entailment of human liberty). But the Son cannot really be introduced into Hell save as a dead man, on Holy Saturday. This introducing is needful since the dead must ‘hear the voice of the Son of God’, and hearing that voice, ‘live’ (John 5, 15). The Son must ‘take in with his own eyes what in the realm of creation is imperfect, unformed, chaotic’ so as to make it pass over into his own domain as the Redeemer.”

To my mind, von Balthasar presents a beautiful insight into the events of Holy Saturday, whose coverage in Scripture is scant, by returning to a close reading of those passages, by understanding what the Early Church and the saints have written about it and by connecting it with the drama of salvation, which entails a transformation of creation as a whole. Only by being with the dead could Christ’s incarnation be complete and his redeeming power extend to the full scale of the consequences of human freedom.

¹ “I yet enquire.”
² “He also satisfied this law, enduring the form of human death in Hell.” De Anima, Chapter LIV.
³ “The Lord observed the law of the dead, that he would be the first-born from the dead.”
⁴ This is a reference to the following passage from St. Francis’ The Mirror of Perfection:

““Tell us, Father, what is perfect obedience?” To which he answered, speaking of true and perfect obedience under the figure of a corpse, “ Take a dead body and place it anywhere you please, it will not murmur at being moved, it will not change its position or cry out if you let it go. If you seat it on a throne it will not look up but down, and to clothe it in purple but makes it more pale. This is the type of perfect obedience, that asks not why he is moved, minds not where he is placed, nor insists upon being sent elsewhere. If he be promoted to office he still keeps humble, and the more he is honoured the more he counts himself unworthy.”

Faith in science

A couple of days ago I saw Prof. Steven Pinker tweet about an article (“No Faith in Science”) by Prof. Jerry Coyne, who argues that science does not involve faith. I was curious to see whether Coyne would come up with a convincing argument or whether the piece was going to be a rather ill-informed rant against religion (as has been the case previously).

My summary of Coyne’s argument – and do read it in full if you are that way inclined – is the following:

Religious faith is “intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person” (Walter Kaufmann), “involves pretending to know things you don’t” and is “wish-thinking.” The term “faith” used in the context of science is “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.” In other words faith when applied to religion is delusional pretense while when applied to science it is rational confidence. “The conflation of faith as “unevidenced belief” with faith as “justified confidence” is simply a word trick used to buttress religion. In fact, you’ll never hear a scientist saying, “I have faith in evolution” or “I have faith in electrons.””
Confidence in a scientist’s statements “is based on the doubt and criticism inherent in science (but not religion): the understanding that their expertise has been continuously vetted by other [scientists]. In contrast, a priest’s claims about God are no more demonstrable than anyone else’s. We know no more now about the divine than we did 1,000 years ago.” Science is advancing while religion is arbitrary and static.
Science is built on evidence while religion can’t be: “There is strong evidence for the Higgs boson, whose existence was confirmed last year by two independent teams using a giant accelerator and rigorous statistical analysis. But there isn’t, and never will be, any evidence for [religious claims].”
“The orderliness of nature—the set of so-called natural laws—is not an assumption but an observation.”
In summary – and in Richard Dawkins’ words – Coyne argues that “There’s all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.”

Since I completely disagree with the above, let me try to be explicit about my reasons, which will be made from my perspective as a Catholic (and scientist), but many features of which also apply to believers of other religions (and practitioners of other rational pursuits):

Let’s first look at the Kaufmann definition: religious faith as “usually confident” and insufficient to “command assent from every reasonable person.” Here I’d first like to point to the pervasive presence of doubt in Christianity – starting right with the apostles themselves (Thomas being the obvious choice, but the rest of them were an equally incredulous lot too, much to Jesus’ frustration 🙂 and explicit in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which in its opening paragraphs says: “Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. […] We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God — “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable” — with our human representations” (§40-42). Far from being over-confident, this opening caveat sounds eminently transparent and humble to me. Turning to the second feature of the Kaufmann definition, I struggle to think of many things that “command assent from every reasonable person” – least of all new scientific theories or even observations of phenomena that appear contradictory of the accepted science of the day. One could argue that such an attitude – of cautious assent – is good and is a feature of being critical. That is all well, but then it becomes problematic to use it as a test of reasonableness of faith. Finally, let’s look at the claim that scientists don’t make statements like “I have faith in evolution.” That may well be, but slight variants like “I believe evolution to be true,” or “I consider evolution to be a likely mechanism accounting for the variety of changing life-forms on Earth” are much easier to come by. Is Coyne arguing that the specific grammar and vocabulary of “I have faith in …” has some special features that its alternative formulations don’t?
Next, there is the juxtaposition of “unevidenced belief” with “justified confidence.” Here I’d like to argue that beliefs, assumptions, working hypotheses, views, etc. of both scientific and religious nature can easily fall into these two categories. As a scientist, my adherence to theories whose consistency with observation I have not tested can be as much based on authority and tradition (I read them in text books and other scientists also hold them to be true), as those of a religious person with regard to the teachings of their faith. Conversely, many of my beliefs are very much backed up by evidence: that the merciful will be shown mercy (Matthew 5:7), that walking an extra mile (Matthew 5:41) or welcoming strangers (Matthew 25:35) are sources of joy, or that the pinnacle of love is self-sacrifice (John 15:13). I believe these not because someone has tricked me or made me believe them, but because I have experienced their truth. This is not to say that religious faith and the beliefs that form part of science are the same – they are not – but just to argue that the line is not between the two but among different beliefs in both.
The claim that “we know no more now about the divine than we did 1,000 years ago” may well be true for a “we” that includes Coyne, but certainly not for a “we” that includes me or a vast number of Christians. Christianity is in constant flux and if a Catholic from 500 years ago time-travelled to the present day, they would be stunned by many of the features of present-day Christianity. The Church’s teachings change constantly based on the experiences of her members trying to put Jesus’ words into practice. For a simple, but very specific, example, see a previous post, and for a greater variety, just take a look at a number of statements made by Pope Francis over the last months – causing a stir with regard to atheists, homosexuals, the poor, etc. – even the cross he uses is a source of controversy, which couldn’t exist if Catholics were just a bunch of nodding sheep. To look at all that and say that there is no change in religion is plain irrational.
Arguing from “giant accelerator[s] and rigorous statistical analysis” is just scarily naïve. Statistics is all about compliance with assumptions (about populations, sampling, distributions, …) and the scale of a device has no bearing on its capacity to access the truth. The scary thing to me here is the underlying naïveté by virtue of which observation is considered to be about the “given” (data) instead of realizing that it is all about the “taken.” There is no observation without theory (language itself being theory laden) – what you are looking for, how you measure, are a consequence of what your expectations are and the result can either be consistency or inconsistency (where in the latter case the theory can be revised or the content of observation questioned). This is not meant as a criticism – the process leads to progress and great understanding, but just as an emphasizing of observation and measurement not starting from scratch or being an independent entity with respect to theory.
Finally, let’s look at the claim that the “orderliness of nature is not an assumption but an observation.” Beyond the implicit challenges of observation, I’d ask about what observation or observations result in the belief in orderliness, repeatability, the uniformity of the laws of nature? For this universally-quantified claim to be attributable to a finite set of observation, requires an assumption or even a belief in finite observations lending credence to the nature of other observations of greater cardinality and holding under conditions for which no observations were made (e.g., in the past) or for which no observations can be made (e.g. the future). Again, this is not a criticism of science – making the assumption of orderliness and repeatability is a useful and rational thing to do (it is inherent to rationality itself), but it is not a consequence of observation. Instead, it is a precursor. Without such a belief or assumption, observation would be pointless.

Ultimately it is up to you to decide for yourself whether my arguments above – the arguments of a Catholic – are “intense, usually confident, belief[s] that [are] not based on evidence,” “supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation,” or whether they make recourse to “evidence and logic” and can therefore co-exist happily with scientific convictions.