CSotD: The Harrowing of Hell & Weighing of Ducks
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Christian tradition is that, during the three days Christ was dead, he visited Hell, defeated the Devil (seen crushed under the door in Fra Angelico‘s painting) and brought forth the righteous of the Old Testament from their confinement.
I say “tradition” because it’s necessary to differentiate between pious traditions and the things you are actually required to believe.
Or, to simplify for the atheists amongst us, to separate the folklore from the philosophy: You don’t have to believe in Noah’s Ark to be a good Christian, but you do have to love your neighbors.
As a famous Lutheran said, “it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.”
I played Beelzebub in the medieval play, The Harrowing of Hell, originally put on by the Saddlemakers’ Guild as part of the York Cycle. I think that’s him scooting out the door while his boss is crushed, Satan and Jesus having had a bodacious sword fight.
Beelzebub makes speeches but stays out of the actual combat. Yes, I was probably typecast.
But since then, I’ve tried to pull as many people out of Hell as I have recommended tossing in, and today will feature a bit of both.
Here’s Ed Hall, commenting on the gulf between belief and tradition. My guess is that Granny has enjoyed plenty of jelly beans and colored eggs in her time and that it hasn’t clashed with her beliefs, and I’d go farther by saying if Junior doesn’t know why we celebrate, that’s on the grown-ups who let him grow up Mowgli-like, apart from his own species.
Which is to say that all belief systems are grounded in cultural traditions, and most let that line between tradition and belief blur in order that the lessons be readily absorbed.
We recognize a difference between the German traditional story of Snow White and the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan, not because one happened and one didn’t, but because one was on a relatively low level of teaching while the other encapsulated a central value.
When Frank Linderman was collecting stories of the Cree, Blackfoot and Ojibway, he found that the storytellers readily differentiated between a trickster god and the Great Spirit:
Old Man or Napa created the world and its inhabitants. His mistakes and weaknesses are freely discussed, and the laugh accompanies talks of his doings, but mention Manitou and silence falls upon the merrymakers. Reverential awe replaces gaiety, and you will feel that you are guilty of intended sacrilege.
Most systems have some equivalence, such that we can make jokes about Noah’s Ark but need to step cautiously around the Resurrection, even if we consider them both folkloric.
In practice, as John Branch (KFS) suggests, the real issue isn’t whether you can enjoy chocolate rabbits and also take Jesus seriously, but whether you can claim to follow him and yet ignore his central teachings.
Our current crew of whited sepulchres make the Harrowing of Hell seem, in the words of St. Lucy of VanPelt, like bailing water with a pitchfork.
It’s fun to mock those we think deserve mockery, and Mike Lester (AMS) seizes on the self-righteous foolishness of witch hunts to condemn NBC’s hiring, and firing, of Ronna McDaniel. His accusation is that, like the moronic peasants in Monty Python, liberals dressed McDaniel up to make her appear to be evil.
We don’t have firm figures of how many witch hunts really happened, but, like other atrocities, how often they happened is secondary to the fact that they happened at all.
In Monty Python, the largely forgotten climax is that, while the ignorant, superstitious villagers did indeed dress the woman up as a witch and make ridiculous claims about what she’d done to them, she turned out to weigh the same as a duck.
So she really was a witch.
Most people citing the scene aren’t thinking as far as the ending.
As Jeff Stahler (AMS) points out, whether your words and actions get you in trouble seems to depend on who you are, or, at least, on what level of legal representation you can afford.
In the Holy Grail, the witch really was a witch, but the villagers really were morons. Not every moron gets the benefit of coincidental truth.
For instance, a state legislator in Michigan reported the Gonzaga men’s basketball team as illegal aliens, and when his ridiculous mistake was pointed out, he denounced the person as a “kommie.”
However, we should place the Gonzaga men’s basketball team on a scale with 14 ducks before we condemn Matt Maddock.
Whether Gonzaga weighs the same as 14 ducks, there is a reasonable measure to test Lisa Benson (Counterpoint)‘s cartoon, because in the latest polls, Joe Biden weighs the same as Donald Trump, at least within the margin of error if not in the actual figures themselves.
Perhaps the reason his boat sank is because his war chest is so much heavier. Donors appear skeptical of Trump, who has announced that he doesn’t want the support of Nikki Haley’s voters and whose own fundraising seems mostly personal, not political.
And if sticking a carrot on a woman’s nose to justify accusing her of witchcraft seems funny, there are plenty of people unamused by Trump’s posting of a pickup truck, flying Trump and US flags, with a picture of the president bound as if in the truck bed.
In her Substack, Joyce Vance has a great deal to say about this applauding of political violence, but the takeaway, besides her point that threatening the president normally brings men in sunglasses to your porch, is that this is part of a dangerous program of bullying and of encouraging bullies.
UPDATE
Trump says he saw the truck as he was going to the wake for a slain police officer, where he addressed reporters on the sidewalk outside, saying “We have to get back to law and order.”
The family of Brian Sicknick, who died in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, noted that Trump didn’t show up for his funeral and is, instead, pledging to pardon the rioters who assaulted police that day. His brother said:
As for who gets harrowed out of Hell and who gets left behind, I believe the story is folkloric.
But, then again, it is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’?”
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