|
Article Excerpt
IN THE DEDICATION to his treatise on the creedal position that Christ descended to hell after the Crucifixion, Adam Hill warned that "there is like to be ... great strife about the true vnderstanding of this Article in England," and that such conflict would give divines an "occasion [to] striue more bitterly one against another, then either of both do against our common aduersarye." (1) The question of the historicity as well as the meaning of Christ's descent had received attention from English reformers in the middle of the century, but Hill sensed (or wanted to prompt) a resurgence of interest in the issue in the early 1590s. (2) The controversy that resulted, preserved in a flurry of pamphlets largely drowned out by more voluble debates focused explicitly on predestination, makes strikingly visible the doctrinal flash points in the Protestant treatment of Christ's Passion, death, and resurrection. That is, in its exacting, at times seemingly scholastic, disagreements about whether or not Christ's soul literally went down to hell, the controversy reveals the reformers' investment in, as well as uncertainty about, what was necessary or essential to Christ's perfectly efficacious sacrifice. Its manifest subject was hell, but the latent content of the debate was a preoccupation with what was enough for Christ to do to redeem an infinite number of Christian souls.
The question of what counts as satisfactory--as "making enough," in its true etymological sense--haunts early modern Protestant theology, which had, in essence, substituted the absolute will of God for the efficacy of human penitential activity in effecting salvation. Efforts to deal with this substitution took a variety of forms in the period's religious literature but also in its drama, which displays deep concern for determining and achieving the parameters of spiritual as well as political, economic, or sexual satisfaction. And if these concerns occupy a large space in the plots of Renaissance plays, they are nowhere more explicit than in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1594), whose protagonist is tormented with questions about theological sufficiency, about what is enough for the effecting of his salvation or damnation. Faustus's torment, like the debates about Christ's descent with which it is exactly contemporary, is manifest in his obsession with hell--not only in his persistent, peculiar questions to Mephistopheles but in his overarching commitment to necromancy, the calling and raising up of dead spirits.
In the remainder of the essay I explore Faustus's fascination with hell in terms of a controversy related to, but distinct from, the doctrine of predestination: the sixteenth-century debate about the descent of Christ. This debate certainly has affiliations with the period's larger questions about predestination, questions that, as the 1590s Cambridge disputes make clear, were the core theological, if not ecclesiastical, concern of the late sixteenth-century Anglican Church. (3) But the controversy over Christ's descent illuminates with special intensity a set of concepts problematic for Reformation theologians. It reveals a specific conceptual instability about the definitions of sufficiency and excess, an instability, I would suggest, initiated by Protestant doctrines that eliminated the role of human activity in satisfying for sin. In its baroque efforts to identify what constitutes a sufficient sacrifice, the controversy demonstrates that the loss of human agency in the process of atonement generates questions about, and challenges to, the nature of Christ's sacrificial efficacy. Having introduced a theology that, in its opposition to Catholic belief, stressed what theologians called the "omnisufficent" nature of Christ's atonement, Protestants of different denominations found themselves in the late sixteenth century arguing not only about the limitations of human satisfaction for sin but also about what exactly constituted Christ's satisfaction.
A vibrant staple of medieval religious iconography and especially the cycle drama, Christ's descent into hell remained, with important modifications, a feature of reformed theology, taking its place in the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and as the third of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Anglican Church of 1572. What varied, however, was the interpretation of exactly what the descent involved. The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1580), for instance, maintains a literal descent to a real, local hell: "It is enough to know that Christ went to hell, destroyed hell for all believers, and has redeemed them from the power of death, of the devil, and of the eternal damnation of the hellish jaws." (4) Calvin, on the other hand, offers a distinctly different exegesis: Christ, he explains, in order to make a full expiation for man's sin, suffered in his soul the torment of God's wrath, which is equivalent to the pangs of hell:
If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual. No--it was expedient at the same time for him to undergo the severity of God's vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment. For this reason, he must also grapple hand to hand with the armies of hell and the dread of everlasting death.... The point is that the Creed sets forth what Christ suffered in the sight of men, and then appositely speaks of that invisible and incomprehensible judgment which he underwent in the sight of God in order that we might know not only that Christ's body was given as the price of our redemption, but that he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul the terrible torments of a condemned and forsaken man. (5)
Calvin condemned literal readings, including the Lutheran one, as "nothing but a story" that supported the idea of purgatory. And against those who suggest that spiritual suffering would be impossible for Christ, Calvin endorses the glory, rather than the despair, of Christ's pain and estrangement from God. To detractors that claim it is "incongruous for [Christ] to fear for the salvation of his soul," Calvin responded that, "we must with assurance, therefore, confess Christ's sorrow, as Ambrose rightly teaches,...
|
