Holy Saturday and Harrowing of Hell in Shakespeare and Christianity

Today is Holy Saturday, traditionally a day Jesus spends in the underworld, the “Harrowing of Hell,” referenced in the Apostles Creed: “He descended into hell,” or “to the dead.” Ancient sources claimed that after his death, Jesus went to the underworld to free the souls of the just, all who died in faith before the life and death of Jesus. The use of the word “harrowing” has old English roots [1].

Shakespeare parodies a medieval Mystery play based on the harrowing of hell in the porter scene of Macbeth [2] [3]. He uses the word “harrow” three times, once in Coriolanus, and twice in Hamlet, first by Horatio (1.1.51), and second, by the ghost (1.5.21).

Some might claim that this was quite nice of Christians. Although to them, salvation and eternal life are only through Christ, how generous to say that Jesus descended to the dead to free the souls of the just. How inclusive.

But this warrants greater scrutiny. The Christian claim that eternal life can only be obtained through Christ is inherently exclusive: Christians are on the inside, all others on the outside. Starting with such an inherently exclusivist claim, and then tacking on a descent by Jesus to liberate other souls, does not undo the damage of the initial exclusive claim.

These claims led not only to troubles between Catholics, Protestants, and other Christians in Shakespeare’s time; centuries earlier, it manifested itself in inquisitions, and in crusades against Muslims, continued in our own time’s “War on Terror,” and before that, the expulsion of Jews from England and other nations of Europe.

A thousand years earlier, when early Christian scriptures were being written, there were competing claims of exclusivity between Jews and Christians. But as Christianity won the empire, this led to Jewish ghettos, and pogroms by Christians against Jews.

The Harrowing of Hell is an idea that was always problematic and exclusivist in its foundations. It deserves our scrutiny.

EDIT:
Another way to view it would be that the logical (theological and political) mind comes up with the concept of salvation through Christ alone (which is limiting, exclusive);
but the imaginative trickster mind transcends this by offering the tale of Jesus himself descending to the underworld to be more inclusive, so that the souls of the just and good will not be denied eternal life by a merciful God.

We should also remember that these are cultural constructs, ways of imagining what happens after death, and our relationship to the dead, and of the dead to one another. Such constructs may say far more about the people who imagine them than they do about any literal metaphysics of what happens after people die.

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NOTES: All references to Hamlet are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online version: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/entire-play/

[1] “Harrowing”: earliest use in England in the homilies of Ælfric of Eynsham (circa 1000 AD), first to use the term. See Wikipedia article on the Harrowing of Hell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrowing_of_Hell

[2] https://interestingliterature.com/2021/02/macbeth-porter-scene-act-2-scene-3-summary-analysis/

[3] https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9780801452901.003.0006
 https://academic.oup.com/cornell-scholarship-online/book/16668/chapter-abstract/173766138?redirectedFrom=fulltext



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