When I was four years old, a nun asked me to draw a picture of Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo.
This was in my first school in Galway in the late 1950s, when these were not presented to four-year-olds as interesting theological possibilities. They were places. The assignment was therefore essentially one of geography.
Heaven was easy. Heaven went at the top.
Hell was equally straightforward. Hell went at the bottom.
Purgatory required a little more thought, but somewhere in between seemed reasonable. It was, after all, temporary. You were on your way somewhere else.
But Limbo completely threw me.
Where do you put Limbo?
I knew what it was. Limbo was where unbaptised babies went. They hadn’t done anything wrong, so they couldn’t be sent to Hell. But they hadn’t been baptised, so they couldn’t go to Heaven either.
Even at four, this seemed like an unfortunate administrative arrangement.
But my immediate problem wasn’t theological. It was cartographic. I had been asked to draw the universe and nobody had told me where one of its departments was located.
I don’t remember what solution I eventually came up with.
I do remember something else about the nuns.
Every day they gave each child a slice of bread with a daub of jam in the middle.
It was delicious.
Nearly seventy years later, most mornings I walk the dogs along the beach in Salthill. Around the changing room I encounter more or less the same group of swimmers. Some mornings we exchange a word or two. Sometimes I stop and chat. Occasionally I tell a story.
Yesterday morning I was telling them about my first school.
Jim, one of the swimmers who tends to hover at the edge of the group, went to the same school. He remembers the bread and jam too.
So that part of the story, at least, has independent verification.
I told them about the nun and the drawing. About Heaven at the top, Hell at the bottom, Purgatory somewhere in between, and the four-year-old me unable to work out where Limbo belonged.
Over the years the story had acquired what I regarded as a very satisfactory punchline.
“And then,” I said, “they got rid of Limbo.”
Gabriel was listening.
Gabriel is another of the swimmers. He’s an academic and a member of the Edith Stein Society.
This morning he came over to me.
“You should look up the Limbo of the Fathers,” he said.
“And the Harrowing of Hell.”
This was not what I had expected.
It turns out that the Limbo I was taught about wasn’t even the only Limbo.
The Limbo of the Fathers was an answer to a rather different theological problem. What happened to all the righteous people who died before Christ?
Abraham. Moses. David. The prophets.
If Christ’s death and resurrection opened the way to salvation, what happened to the good people who had inconveniently died before any of this took place?
The answer that developed in Christian tradition was that they waited among the dead.
And then came the Harrowing of Hell.
Between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, Christ descended into the realm of the dead. This is the mysterious line still sitting there in the Apostles’ Creed:
He descended into hell.
But this wasn’t Hell quite as the nuns had described it to me.
This was Hades, the realm of the dead. And Christ wasn’t there to stay.
He was there to break in.
In the great Christian tradition of the Harrowing, Christ smashes the gates of Hades, defeats the power of death and leads the righteous dead to freedom. In the magnificent old Eastern Christian images, he stands over the shattered gates and reaches down to pull Adam and Eve from their graves.
Adam and Eve.
Abraham.
Moses.
The prophets.
All waiting for him.
Now this was a story.
If you like Tolkien, you’ll like the Harrowing.
I had been struggling with the municipal planning problem of where to put Limbo on a sheet of paper while this magnificent cosmic jailbreak was sitting unused in the Christian back catalogue.
Why had nobody told me this when I was four?
Perhaps my problem wasn’t that the story I was told was too fantastical.
Perhaps it wasn’t fantastical enough.
Tolkien would never have left out the Harrowing of Hell.
There is something rather wonderful about discovering all this nearly seventy years later, and discovering it because of a conversation beside a changing room on the beach in Salthill.
I had always remembered Limbo as one of those strange certainties of childhood that eventually ceased to be certain.
I thought I knew the story.
I didn’t even know there were two Limbos.
Perhaps that’s the more interesting thing about the stories we inherit. As children, we aren’t told that they have histories. Nobody says: here is an idea that people have argued about, embellished, revised and reinterpreted for centuries.
They simply hand you the map.
And, if you’re four, some crayons.
I don’t blame the nuns. They were passing on the world as it had been passed on to them. And whatever shortcomings there may have been in the metaphysics, they were kind to us.
Nearly seventy years later, Gabriel finally explained why I couldn’t find anywhere to put Limbo.
I still don’t know where I should have drawn it.
But I remember exactly where the nun put the jam.
Right in the middle of the bread.
And Jim can confirm it.