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RADICAL THEOLOGIES
AND PHILOSOPHIES
LIMBO REAPPLIED
On Living in Perennial Crisis
and the Immanent Afterlife
KRISTOF K. P. VANHOUTTE
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
Series Editors
Mike Grimshaw
Department of Sociology
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
Michael Zbaraschuk
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, USA
Joshua Ramey
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA, USA
Radical Theologies and Philosophies is a call for transformational theolo-
gies that break out of traditional locations and approaches. The rhizomic
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panding radical expression and critique of theologies that have entered or
seek to enter the public sphere, arising from the continued turn to reli-
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phy, theory, cultural, and literary studies. The post-theistic theology both
driving and arising from these intersections is the focus of this series.
More information about this series at

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Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte
Limbo Reapplied
On Living in Perennial Crisis and the Immanent
Afterlife
Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte
University of the Free State
Bloemfontein, South Africa
and
Pontifical University Antonianum

Rome, Italy
Radical Theologies and Philosophies

ISBN 978-3-319-78912-5 ISBN 978-3-319-78913-2 (eBook)
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To you two
Valentina and Sofia
Always
Preface
In 1947, the famous French publishing house Gallimard issued the

remarkable book Exercises de Style by Raymond Queneau. That this
book, which reminds of Erasmus’s rhetoric textbooks De duplici copia
rerum ac verborum commentarii duo from the beginning of the sixteenth
century, is remarkable can be deduced from the simple fact that it con-
tains 99 different versions of the same story. The plot consists of a hum-
drum encounter between a man, the ‘main character’, and a stranger,
whom he meets a second time that same day; the first encounter is on
a bus and the second one at the Saint-Lazare station. Besides it having
probably been a rather fun accomplishment, it is above all a masterly
exploit and ‘an experiment in the philosophy of language’ (Queneau
1981, 14) by the hand of Queneau. He, as Barbara Wright so correctly
remarked in her introduction to the original English translation (1958),
‘pushes language around in a multiplicity of directions to see what will
happen’ (Queneau 1981, 14). ‘Pushing around to see what will happen;’
few combinations of words (bad as they might sound—and probably
will also be interpreted by some) could have better described the chore
attempt of this book.
The noun ‘exercise’ used in Queneau’s title is, however, not applicable
to the type of text that you, reader, are holding in your hands. For this
particular type of text, the French language has another precise word (a
word that is considered in French as a synonym of exercise—but that is
more than anything merely a closely related word). This word is essai,
an essay, and it derives from the verb essayer which means to try, or to
vii
viii Preface
attempt. The Larousse, the famous French dictionary/institution, defines

the essay as a book (a text) containing various ideas regarding a specific
subject that it does not pretend to exhaust. That an essay does not pre-
tend to exhaust the ideas it treats is simply because it attempts to test
this or that quality of this or that specific subject—pushing it around to
see what will happen. Basically, the essay, and thus this study as well, is a
written non-exhaustive check and control of the functioning of the pre-
cise subject at hand that, as an attempt, allows the author of the essayistic
feature, to return to its topic further along her/his life’s road (to give
it another go) if he/she so desires. The attempt might fail, but if the
author brings it to a conclusion that generally means he/she is convinced
that it has not. For as much though as it will be brought to a fruitful
conclusion, the nature of the essay does not exclude that other and very
diverse attempts on dealing with the same specific subject can succeed as
well.
As can be seen, what is at stake in an essay, and as such also in this
work, is a rather fragile integrity that—probably contrary to what is gen-
erally considered and understood—does absolutely not allow for the
minimum of relaxation or lack of attention and strictness. Furthermore,
being precisely something ‘incomplete’, it also requires full participa-
tion, and even in-depth participation, from the reader. That the nature
of the essay is so highly demanding of author (and reader) is not only
related to its fragile nature. It also regards the fact that, more often than
not, essays turn out to become easy ‘victims’ of partisan judgments.
Rendering explicit from the very beginning that a text will not treat its
subject in an exhaustive way—while acknowledging also immediately
that a similar text can never be considered as finished and that the author
might even come back to it in the future, maybe even to say that he
was wrong all along—can and will easily be misunderstood (even by the
brainy scholar). This was also already the case with Queneau’s Exercises.
From the very beginning were they considered by some as ‘an attempt to
demolish literature’ (Queneau 1981, 15) which was neither the author’s
intention nor the actuality result of the Exercises. That this can occur is,
however, mostly known by the author.
This acknowledgment should, however, not necessarily be considered
as a lack or deficiency of a text. In fact, the exact contrary can and should
be argued for. If anything, recognizing these aspects is a rendering
explicit of the awareness that a text based on study can never truly finish
or end. St. Thomas, the Angelical doctor and one of the greatest minds
Preface ix
humanity has ever brought forth (he will also help us to understand the
concept of Limbo), seems to be hinting at something similar when he
confided to his secretary that everything he had ever written and taught
was but pure foolishness. And a similar realization is phrased by an old
Sigmund Freud in his melancholic acknowledging that therapy and edu-
cation (study) are interminable. Considering these affirmations, and the
many others one could bring forth, as gloomy thoughts that accompany
the process of dying or could even constitute cases of false humility is
missing the point. Texts, maybe all but certainly essayistic ones, will
always remain exercises and attempts. Some will be good, others less, but
avoiding the delusion of having offered ‘a finished product’ can but be
considered, at least that is what we feel, as a very good and honest point
to start. (It is also a registration into a certain philosophical tradition—
ready to betray it—but we are certain the reader will discover this on
her/his own in due time.)
This text finds its origin in a presentation given back in 2014 at the
University of St. Gall in Switzerland. The lecture was given during a
symposium organized by the Swiss Philosophical Association that had as
its theme: Kritik und Krise (Critic and Crisis). The basic ideas that gov-
ern the pages that follow were already present in their embryonic state in
the original text. The ‘embryo’, however, has since passed various grow-
ing phases and prangs, becoming a muscled adult. And as it goes with all
births, some ‘original’ parts get lost along the road while others come
along to change what was considered originally as the direction to take.
A number of people have been directly or indirectly involved in a vari-
ety of ways in the process of realization of this book; I am, obviously, the
only person responsible for all the possible remaining weaknesses. These
people are, first of all, my philosopher friends and friends in philoso-
phy. The first to mention is necessarily Carlo Salzani, whose continuous
dedication to this project has been truly humbling. Thank you Carlo!
Second, there are the group of people with whom I share the research
adventure called The Small Circle; they are Christo Lombaard, Iain
T. Benson, and Calvyn du Toit (Carlo is also a part of this exciting enter-
prise). I have also received very helpful assistance, references, or stimula-
tion from too large a number of colleagues to name them all. Some need
to be mentioned by name, however, and they are: Jackie Du Toit, Father
Gianluca Montaldi, Lancelot Kirby, Jonathan Rée (who got me think-
ing about the spatial implications of what it was I was writing about),
Fra. Ernesto Dezza (you have safeguarded the medieval scholars), Fra.
x Preface
Stéphane Oppes, Benjamin McCraw, Christopher Beiting, and Father

Johannes Maria Schwarz. The first person who published me and who
has ever since remained a driving force, Marco Cardinali, also needs a
special mentioning. Katrin Meyer and Hubert Schnüriger from the
University of Basel also need explicit thanks. They allowed me to pres-
ent a series of chapters at the seminar in political philosophy they organ-
ized. Jan Müller, Domink Renner, and Dominique Haab, who offered
critical comments during and after the seminar, also need thanks. The
two nameless reviewers from Palgrave also need a special mention as they
did offer very helpful comments. Great gratitude also goes to my edi-
tor Philip Getz, who believed in this project from the very beginning—
thanks. Philip’s right hands, Alexis Nelson in the beginning and Amy
Invernizzi afterward, have always been there to help, thanks for your
professionality. Sofie Vanhoutte needs to be mentioned as well, thanks
soeure, you know why. Finally, Udo and Geinsson need a very special
mentioning. Without their willingness to sell their little paradise, half
of this book would not have been written in one of the most beautiful
places I have ever worked.
Basel, Switzerland Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte

Contents
1 Introduction 1
References 9
2 Visual Anteprima 11
References 32
3 Limbo 35
3.1 Pope Benedict XVI and the Cancellation of Limbo 35
3.2 Limbo’s (Pre-Christian) Genealogy and Geography 42
3.3 The History of Limbo 49
3.3.1 No Third Place: Saint Augustine and His Legacy 50
3.3.2 Original Sin Becomes Privative: Gregory of Nyssa
and Gregory Nazianzen 60
3.3.3 Lacking Punishment: Anselm and Abelard 65
3.3.4 The Birth of Limbo: Albertus Magnus and
Alexander of Hales 70
3.3.5 From Neutral to Joyous Limbo: Saint Bonaventure
and Saint Thomas 74
3.4 Poetic Limbo in Dante and Milton 86
3.5 Prolegomena to Any Translation of Limbo 99
References 110
xi
xii Contents
4 Crisis 115
4.1 Interesting Times 115
4.2 Taking It Seriously 132
4.3 What’s in a Meaning 142
4.4 The Crisis of Crisis 151
References 164
5 Modernity: A Limboic Fool’s Paradise 169

5.1 Time Is Out of Joint 170
5.2 Exhausted Space 194
5.3 Limbo as Perennial Crisis 215
References 225
6 Extraduction: Ascent Out of Limbo 229

References 237
Bibliography 239
Index 253
About the Author
Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte is a Research Fellow of the International

Studies Group at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein,
South Africa, and an Invited Professor of philosophy at the Pontifical
University Antonianum, Rome, Italy. He started his studies in philoso-
phy at the Higher Institute for Philosophy at the Catholic University of
Leuven, Belgium, and obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy at the Pontifical
University Antonianum, Rome, Italy. He studied spiritual theology at the
Pontifical University Gregoriana and was Postdoctoral Research Fellow
at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University
of Edinburgh. In 2010, he was awarded the ‘European Philosophy from
Kant to the Present Prize’, issued by the University of Kentucky. He has
published on topics ranging from continental philosophy, patristics, the-
ology-philosophy-politics interdependencies, educational theory, to foot-
ball.
xiii
List of Images
Image 2.1 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione

e Discesa di Cristo al Limbo, Firenze, Museo di Santa
Maria Novella, Capellone degli Spagnoli 13
Image 2.2 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Discesa di Cristo al Limbo (detail),
Firenze, Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Capellone
degli Spagnoli 18
Image 2.3 Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, © 2017,
ProLitteris, Zurich 25
Image 2.4 Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, © 2017,
ProLitteris, Zurich 26
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Language, if we can ‘radicalize’ the Italian philosopher Giorgio

Agamben, is not just a historical but also a living ‘being’ (cf. Agamben
2016, 25). Not only should the human being be considered as the
‘animal’ that has language—man is not just homo sapiens, according to
Agamben, but, above all, homo sapiens loquendi, the living being that can
talk (cf. Agamben 2016, 27–28)—but language itself should be consid-
ered as a living ‘being’ (language has a history that does not coincide
with human’s history). However, not always does human language and
languages being coincide. These are (at least philosophically speaking)
the most interesting moments. They constitute the limit-moments of
insanity, when pure language is being spoken through a language-less
human or when a human being is speaking non-language (not always
is this reducible to nonsense). This non-coinciding is also the cause of
the more common phenomenon where not the whole of language ‘goes
missing’, but merely words. Very few people, in fact, have not directly
or indirectly experienced moments or events that are considered to go
‘beyond words’. Love, hate, joy, evil, but also art (beauty) seem to all be
categories that vouch for and can produce ‘beyond word’ experiences.
Although more often than not these ‘beyond word’ experiences can be
reduced to wordy-experience suffered by people who lack the adequate
vocabulary, this is not always the case. Certain ‘beyond words’ experi-
ences are, in fact, merely caused by the lack of a vocabulary (still) in use.
Let me try to make this rather enigmatic statement somewhat clearer
by turning to the example of evil as it was presented in the text that
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. K. P. Vanhoutte, Limbo Reapplied, Radical Theologies
and Philosophies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_1
2 K. K. P. VANHOUTTE
constituted a major influence in the coming about of this book: Gordon

Graham’s Evil and Christian Ethics (2003). In the fourth chapter of this
very provocative book, Graham, daringly, corners the topic of the great
evils. These evils are great violent excesses of war, the atrocious crimi-
nal murders of the likes of Charles Manson, and the more recent school
massacres in the USA. What strikes Graham, is that when these mas-
sacres happen, or when more general judgment is offered on the per-
petrators of past warlike atrocities, is that the first thing that is done is
‘to condemn the perpetrators as evil; the second is to declare them mad
or mentally ill’ (Graham 2003, 122). As Graham correctly remarks, for
these particular cases of ‘mental illness’ ‘there is virtually no theoreti-
cal understanding of the physical basis of these, and … there is neither
effective drug therapy nor even the beginnings of a neurophysiological
explanation’ (Graham 2003, 125). If all of this did not suffice already, as
the anthropologist Elliot Leyton put it, ‘if the killers are merely insane,
why do they in fact so rarely display the cluster of identifiable clin-
ical symptoms’ of those few mental diseases of which the ‘psychiatrists
agree’ (proposed in Graham 2003, 127)? For as much as these atrocious
evils almost oblige one to auto-protectively judge them as ‘abnormal’,
it has to be acknowledged—even by the fiercest positivist or advocate
of exclusivist scientific research—that ‘scientific sensibility lacks an ade-
quate explanation of evil’, and ‘[H]umanism cannot explain the evil of
evil, and naturalistic science, even of a well-informed psychological kind,
cannot explain its occurrence’ (Graham 2003, 154). What does have an
adequate sensibility of evil is not scientific language but religious lan-
guage. In fact, when confronted with these cases of pure evil, it was, at
least in the past, the language of the daemonic that took over. And this
language would have offered explanations both of ‘the degree of evil’
and of ‘the sense of compulsion’ with which the perpetrator would have
acted (Graham 2003, 138). Graham postulates from this, and we think
correctly, a hypothesis of the supernatural in which our (moral) lives are
set in. This would then provide us with a much better explanation of evil
than the purely scientific one that clearly fails in these cases of evil.
This (the conclusion) is obviously not what is of interest to this book.
What is, however, of absolute interest to us, as Susan Sontag phrased her
encounter with a very similar problem, is that ‘we have a sense of evil but no
longer the … language to talk intelligently about [it]’ (Sontag 1978, 85).
Said differently and more generally, and this is where we wanted to
arrive at, regarding certain problems we no longer have the language to
1 INTRODUCTION 3
talk intelligently about them. We have all kinds of intelligent theories and
(pseudo-)scientific explanations that at times fail to live up to their prom-
ise of being the most accurate or most appropriate to turn to regarding
certain phenomena. And even when they are worthy candidates for the
‘throne’ of explanation and clarification, sometimes they would (and
we are appositely changing the time of the verb) have been easily passed
over, were it not that we no longer have that particular type of language
anymore. On many occasions, the type of language that has gone missing
is religious or even philosophical language, overpowered as it has been
by the secular language of the secularized world. Also regarding the case
that is of interest to this book, it is religious language that has gone miss-
ing. And the ‘case’ that would have befitted so much by the usage of a
certain type of religious language is nothing other than the interpretation
of the times, ‘our times’, we live in. The aim of this volume is, first of all,
to bring back to life this particular religious discourse (something we will
do in the Visual Anteprima Chap. 2 and the third section of this book)
and, secondly, to read ‘the signs of our times’ with it (to which section
four and five are dedicated). The religious discourse we will bring back in
the pages that follow is that regarding one of the more enigmatic realms
of the afterlife, namely Limbo. As we will attempt to demonstrate, it is
not sociology, not economy, not politics, but religion—that is, the par-
ticular religious discourse about Limbo—that is best at explaining and
making us understand our modern epoch.
*
In an interesting little booklet called Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of

Uncertainty (Capps and Carlin 2010) a variety of types of situations in our
daily lives are described as ‘Limbo-experiences’. According to the two editors
of this volume, there are two different types of these ‘Limbo-experiences’ (cf.
Capps and Carlin 2010, 3). On the one hand, there are the chronic and
very basic Limbo-experiences where one’s life is sensed or understood as being
indeterminate or also intermediate. These experiences mainly involve wait-
ing: waiting in line, waiting for e-mail, etc. On the other hand, there are
also times in our lives where a much more acute form of ‘Limbo’ is experi-
enced. This second category can, according to Capps and Carlin, be further
subdivided into five different categories. They regard cases of acute Limbo-
experiences that relate to youth, relations, work, illness, and immigration.
And even though the scope of this book is on a completely different plane,
and we disagree with a number of aspects of the understanding of Limbo
as introduced by the editors—they, for example, consider ‘transition’ as a
good synonym for Limbo (Capps and Carlin 2010, 8–9), something which,
as we will come to see, it is not—the idea that Limbo is not just something
related to the afterlife but is intertwined with our life now, here, today, in
an immanent way is something we agree with and will investigate in the
pages of this book.
*
We are, obviously, not the first to try to re-introduce older (religious)
concepts into an explicative discourse foreign to it while claiming its
highly productive contribution in the understanding of that particu-
lar discourse. We already referred to Gordon Graham’s work, but
other examples, such as Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben (among
others), can be brought forward. Toward the end of her The Origins
of Totalitarianism, Arendt thus presents us with the intriguing analogy
of the division of the concentration camps as corresponding to three
types of realms of the afterlife: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell (cf. Arendt
1973, 445). Arendt even adds intriguingly that ‘[S]uddenly it becomes
evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagina-
tion had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be man-
ufactured right here on earth, …’ (Arendt 1973, 446)—confirming,
as such, the thesis we are trying to establish here. Giorgio Agamben—
whose influence on the pages that follow cannot be ignored—has made
of these more isolated events in Arendt a more consistent characteris-
tic of his work. For Agamben, to offer only one, but very significant,
example (which also evinces the divergence of the thesis of this book
from Agamben’s main political thesis), it is Hell, characterized as it
is by eternal government, that is the true paradigm of modern politics
(cf. Agamben 2011, 164).
For as much as we are offering a reading, through Limboic glasses,
of our modern epoch, this reading does not claim to be an all-encom-
passing one (something which is far beyond our capacities and which,
more than probably, is not even possible). The proposed reading of
the ‘signs of our times’, an expression that will return and be explained
in the course of this text, will focus on what has become the quintes-
sential characteristic, the cipher, of our times. This characteristic is the
‘crisis’. As we are all familiar with, the past decade(s) have been char-
acterized ever more frequently by this word crisis. Crisis is everywhere
and everything is in crisis; all types of crisis have been reported, going
from political, financial, climatic, social/societal, cultural, intellectual,
1 INTRODUCTION 5
and educational crisis, to even an anthropological crisis. However, crisis

is, as we will demonstrate in due course, not just a ‘recent’ phenomenon
or qualifier of the times we live in. It was from the very beginning of
our modern period considered one of its main features. The focus of our
reading will thus be our modern times, understood as times of a crisis
which, as we will discover, will have taken on the features of lastingness,
of being a ‘perennial crisis’. In fact, as Michel Serres, the French philos-
opher and member of the Académie Française, wrote recently in a small
booklet on the crisis that struck the Western world some years ago: the
current crisis ‘not only touches the financial markets, work and industry,
but the whole of society and all of humanity’. Serres goes even so far
to claim that what is at stake is ‘the essential relation of humans to the
world’ (Serres 2014, Chapter 1, Sect. 2). It seems as if Serres’s friend,
the French scholar Bruno Latour, was correct when he denounced,
already more than two decades ago, our ‘morose delight in being in per-
petual crisis’ (Latour 1993, 114). What if being in a perennial crisis was,
however, not some dour glee but a structural feature of modernity?
As can be deduced from the just-mentioned orientation on the con-
cept of (perennial) crisis, the Limboic reading we propose will not
engage or participate in what can be considered the monotonous or
even trite ‘existential’ question regarding a crisis—something which has
characterized the recent literature on ‘crisis’. Whether or not there is a
crisis is not the question that will be asked in this book. In fact, we con-
sider the question regarding the actuality of a crisis or not (something
which is almost impossible to ‘objectively’ verify during its course, and
which is even afterward difficult to establish once and for all due to its
extreme sensitivity to partisanship) as a redundant duality that needs to
be surpassed if one wants to take the concept of crisis truly seriously and
understand what is at stake in its usage (for too long has this concept
been among us for it not to have become suspicious, but this does not
seem to be the case). What we intend to do, and this is the quest into
which we thus embark in this volume, is to discover whether the bino-
mial of the perennial crisis and the concept of Limbo could in some way
be related. And if so, in what way and what that could or would mean
for the times we are living in.
From all of the preceding comments, it will already be clear that this
book is to be considered as containing a rather high dosage of ‘specu-
lation’. It does, and some speculations are also rather risky—but maybe
for that very reason they are also much more productive than any old
form of cold reasoning. We do realize, however, that this also implies

that maybe not all of what we have written will hold up to extremely
specialized research. This, however, worries us not too much and is a risk
we gladly take. First, because we obviously do hope that most of what we
claim will hold (or, at least, be recognizable) and, secondly, because the
tidy white-painted sterilized vacuum laboratory room has very little to
offer to philosophy anyhow (we highly prefer the dirty wandering cloak
[the famous pallium] and knapsack of the philosopher than the white
laboratory overcoat).
Limbo Reapplied, then, is divided into three main chapters, each
treating one of the three main aspects of this book: Limbo, crisis and
its lastingness, and the reading of our modern times. These three chap-
ters are, respectively, subdivided into five, four, and three sections. The
first Chap. 3, which is dedicated to the concept of Limbo, begins with a
brief treatment of Pope Benedict XVI’s (hope of) cancellation of Limbo
in 2007. Following this first section, we turn to the past and start by
considering Limbo’s pre-Christian genealogy and the discourse on its
whereabouts, its geography. This is followed by a more detailed inter-
action with some of the main players in the formation of Limbo in
Christianity. We start this historical study with Saint Augustine. After
the bishop of Hippo come Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen,
who are followed by Peter Abelard and Anselm of Canterbury.
Starting to come closer to Limbo’s ‘birth’, we treat Albertus Magnus
and Alexander of Hales and reach the apex of Limbo’s theorization in
the Christian world with Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and Saint
Thomas of Aquinas. A study into the nature of Limbo could not be con-
sidered complete without a look into some of the poetic interpretations
of this intriguing concept. We will fulfill this task by considering Dante
Alighieri’s treatment of Limbo in his Divine Comedy and John Milton’s
in Paradise Lost. A short detour will also be taken into Ludovico
Ariosto’s Paradise on the Moon from his Orlando Furioso. We will con-
clude this first chapter by focusing on the necessary requirements (that
is, if there are any) to ‘translate’ what we will have discovered in our
research on Limbo. Can this discourse on Limbo have any repercussion
at all on the understanding of our times, and what is the peculiar nature
of the cancellation of Limbo as a region of the afterlife by Pope Benedict
XVI with which we began this chapter?
The second main Chap. 4, which deals with the concept of crisis (in
its normal as well as in its ‘pimped’ version as a perennial phenomenon),
1 INTRODUCTION 7
starts by offering a first delineation of this concept. Although it has, con-

trary to what has been occasionally claimed (cf. Bauman and Bordoni
2014, 3), a negative undertone, the inauguration of a period of crisis or
the state of perennial crisis does not imply the arrival of the apocalypse or
the (final) catastrophe. For as much as a state of (perennial) crisis should
not be considered as the beginning of the end of the world, neither can a
crisis simply be argued away as being solely a linguistic activity that pro-
duces meaning without ever referring back to an actual state of affairs
(second delineation and second part of this chapter). A crisis, even if it
can result into something innocuous or totally irrelevant post-factum,
should always be taken seriously as a crisis, even the mere linguistically
produced crisis. Having reached this ‘middle ground’ in our position
regarding the crisis, we then go on to study the history and etymology of
the concept of crisis. We will consider the medical, theological, and polit-
ical understandings and applications of the concept. This will bring us to
realize that the nature of a crisis lies in its time-space structure. If we thus
really intend to understand this concept and how it operates, we need
to study how its temporality and spatiality function. This realization and
study, of which consists the final section of the second chapter, will be
concluded by the full disclosure of the effects of the addition of the qual-
ifier of ‘perennial’ to both the spatial and temporal structures of a crisis.
Having discovered the fundamental quality of both the temporal
and spatial structuring of the perennial crisis’s operation, the third main
Chap. 5, begins with an investigation into the deployment of modernity’s
time. More precisely, what has been described as the main temporal

characteristic of modernity, namely ‘acceleration’, will be studied. We

will turn to Hartmut Rosa’s quintessential study on the theory of accel-
eration: Social Acceleration (Rosa 2015). The second section will, logi-
cally, concentrate on modernity’s particular spatial organization. Marshall
McLuhan’s theorization of the ‘global village’ will function as the start-
ing point of our investigation. This will be followed by a close reading
of a discussion between Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy on the (crea-
tion of the) world. The chapter, and the argumentative part of this book,
ends with the unification (the summarizing) of the results from the two
preceding sections on modernity’s time and space deployment and its
confrontation with both the structural aspects of the perennial crisis and
the operationality of the Limbo discourse that resulted from the research
of, respectively, the two previous chapters.
The book comes to an end with some meditation on the possible

road(s) to embark upon when faced with the reached conclusions. These
will only be meditations, not solutions or answers—we are, in fact, not
convinced that somebody who has identified a problem should also always
already propose a solution to that problem (at times, discovering a prob-
lem is much more ‘valuable’ than any possible solution could ever be).
The Portuguese Nobel laureate, José Saramago will be our main
interlocutor in our Extraduction Chap. 6.
Two final considerations before we can start our investigation into our
crisis-ridden Limboic world. First, the main body of the text is at times
interrupted by either cursive text that stands in-between two asterisks (*)
or plain written text in-between —O.D.—. The cursive text in-between
asterisks consists of minor further elucidations of the text directly preced-
ing the interruption. The text that is englobed by —O.D.— with O.D.
standing for Obiter Dictum—which is a legal or judicial term that literally
means ‘by the way’—regards more general reasoning and argumentation
about the argument of the text in general. We consider these interrup-
tions important as they can help the reader to understand some elements
of the thinking process that would otherwise have been left hidden,
underneath the words themselves.
Second, our reverting to the concept of Limbo has one more meaning
than the one we described at the beginning of this introduction. In fact,
not only do we think that a renewed taking up of the discourse of Limbo
can help us in reading the ‘signs of our times’, but it also allows us to
be actively part in an attempt to ‘re-enchant’ the world a little. Time
has come to understand that the disenchanted world—which is basically
nothing more than a myth, as has been demonstrated so accurately, most
recently, by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm (2017)1—is but a sad, mono-
lithic and monotone (yes, very much like Limbo) world. It is time to
1 Josephson-Storm is obviously not the first, nor will he hopefully be the last to denounce
the myth of the disenchantment of the world by means of modern science. Already C. S.
Lewis in his The Abolition of Man (2009), to give just one example, clearly reveals that
‘something … unites magic and applied science’ (Lewis 2009, 77), and although it ‘might
be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth:…
it was born in an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour’ (Lewis 2009, 78),
only the ‘fatal serialism of the modern imagination’ (Lewis 2009, 79) can convince itself of
the falseness of this fact.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
overcome the repetitive and single-sided representation of the world in

favor, once more, of a more enchanted and vibrant one. And although
the Limboic world we will paint in the coming pages has a rather sharp
negative undertone (enchanting is by no means obligatorily a positive
operation), it constitutes a (good) start.
References
Agamben, G. (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory. For a Theological Genealogy of
Economy and Government. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, G. (2016). Che cos’è la filosofia? Macerata: Quodlibet.
Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego and New York:
Harvest Book.
Bauman, Z., & Bordoni, C. (2014). State of Crisis. Cambridge and Malden:
Polity Press.
Capps, D., & Carlin, N. (Eds.). (2010). Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of
Uncertainty. Eugene: Cascade Books.
Graham, G. (2003). Evil and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Josephson-Storm, J. Ā. (2017). The Myth of Disenchantment. Magic, Modernity,
and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Lewis, C. S. (2009). The Abolition of Man: Or Reflections on Education with
Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. New
York: HarperCollins. Kindle edition.
Rosa, H. (2015). Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity. New York and
Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Serres, M. (2014). Times of Crisis. What the Financial Crisis Revealed and How
to Reinvent Out Lives and Future. New York and London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
CHAPTER 2
Visual Anteprima
We probably all have a vague understanding of the meaning of the word

‘Limbo’. For some, I am aware, the term is solely related to a type of
exotic ‘dance’ from the West Indies (Trinidad, to be more precise) which
requires people to bend backward to pass under some sort of bar which
is continuously lowered to make the exploit of passing under that stick
ever more complicated (after which a whole lot of shouting and scream-
ing needs to emphasize the joy in having overcome this arduous task).
For those who know that Limbo is more than just a dance (and related
song from the sixties), they probably are aware that it is a region in the
afterlife/afterworld, mainly in Roman Catholic Theology. They probably
also know the saying ‘being cast into Limbo’ means being cast into a
state of undecidedness or in some state of oblivion. When one has been
cast in Limbo, one has been cast aside and there is darn little hope of
some sort of help coming at any foreseeable moment.1
In order to get a better take on what is at stake in the concept of
Limbo, it is interesting to start by looking at some images that have vis-
ually reproduced what the Limbo that stands at the center of this text is
about. We will start with a medieval fresco after which a contemporary
take on Limbo will be proposed. Describing the more important aspects
1Limbo, the dance, does seem to have a distant relation with the afterlife as well. At least
according to http://www.tntisland.com/limbo.html, the Limmm-Bó was originally a ritual

dance performed at wakes or funeral ceremonies. We have not found any confirmation of
this fact.
© The Author(s) 2018 11

K. K. P. Vanhoutte, Limbo Reapplied, Radical Theologies and
Philosophies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_2
of these pictorial takes on Limbo will be our first move, after which these
aspects will be discussed and interpreted. This first take on Limbo will
already allow us to start considering Limbo as a good candidate to offer
a new and intriguing understanding of our current precarious contem-
porary state of affairs which is ever more often described as a ‘perennial
crisis’. Without anticipating too much, let us, however, immediately turn
to the first image we will study.
In the Florentine museum complex named Santa Maria Novella, on
the right side of the ‘Chiostro dei morti’, you can find the Cappella
Spagnolo (sometimes also called the Cappellone degli Spagnuoli or just
simply the Chapter House), the Spanish Chapel with an impressive
fresco by the Italian artist Andrea di Bonaiuto entitled Salita al Calvario,
Crocefissione e Discesa al Limbo (The Ascent to Calvary, Crucifixion, and
Descent into Limbo).2 This rather unique and grandiose fresco, which
can hardly be rendered justice to by any photographic representation,
depicts what are known as three of the more salient moments of Christ’s
Passion. Not subject to the rules of perspective—they would only come
to rule the world of painting centuries later—which makes the first
moments of observation somewhat awkward, the fresco stands out by
the vibrant colors used and the attention for detail that di Bonaiuto has
been able to produce with the little time at disposition—he was given
only two years (1365–1367) to paint the entire chapel. Most remarkable,
however, is the wide and varied presence of Biblical symbology which we
need to consider a bit more in detail (Image 2.1).
As mentioned, the main fresco at the back wall of the chapel (the only
one that is of interest to us) depicts three scenes of Christ’s Passion. The
first, at the lower left side of the arch-shaped fresco, depicts Christ, who
has just exited one of the gates of the fortified city of Jerusalem, ascending
to the place where he will be crucified: Golgotha, the place of (the) skull
as all the evangelists define it (Mt 27:33; Mk 15:22; Lk 23:33; Jn 19:17),
or, as Golgotha has also been named (translated?—both concepts refer to
2 There is very little Spanish about this chapel. The only reference or link to the Iberian
Peninsula is the fact that this chapel was used by Eleanor of Toledo, her retinue, and
other members of the flourishing Spanish colony in Florence. A further and more distant
‘Spanish connection’ is the fact that the chapel was also used for several important gen-
eral chapters of the Dominican Order (which, as is known, was founded by the Spaniard
Domenico de Guzmán). di Bonaiuto’s Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione e Discesa al Limbo is,
in fact, accompanied, as a reminder of this, by two fresco’s that depict Dominican scenarios.
2
VISUAL ANTEPRIMA
Image 2.1 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione e Discesa di Cristo al Limbo, Firenze, Museo di Santa
Maria Novella, Capellone degli Spagnoli
13
the kranion), Calvary. At the center of this first scene, we discover Christ
still personally bearing his cross—there seems to be no trace of Simon the
Cyrenian who was obliged to help Christ carry his cross up the hill. Christ
is followed by Mary (characteristically dressed in blue) and another woman,
who is probably Mary from Magdala, and a (young) male closely follow
Christ’s mother. The young male, who has his hands folded as in prayer,
is probably the disciple who Jesus will ‘assign’ to his own mother when
already on the cross (cf. Jn 19:26). All three can be clearly distinguished as
their head is surrounded, just like Jesus’, by what is known as a halo—‘the
[absolutely in-essential] supplement added to perfection’ (Agamben 1993,
54) as Giorgio Agamben interestingly explains Saint Thomas’s discussion
on halo’s. A lot of other characters are present in this first scene: Roman
soldiers and other inhabitants of Jerusalem, but no other member of the
first group of Christ’s first followers seems to be present.
The largest section of the fresco, the top and rounded part of the
arch, depicts Christ’s crucifixion. Jesus, who can be seen at the center, is
depicted on the cross and is surrounded by angels (also all of the angels
have halo’s). Following the gospels, he is surrounded by the two crimi-
nals or revolutionaries (depending on what gospel) who were crucified
together with him. di Bonaiuto seems to have followed the Gospel of Luke
(23:39–43) on this occasion, as it is evident that one of the criminals is
saved while the other is damned (in none of the other three gospels are
the criminals/revolutionaries qualified—they are simply the one on the
left and the one on the right, and, according to the Gospel of Matthew
(27:44), both kept on abusing him in a similar way as the crowd). The
criminal on his right has a little devil with some sort of spear sitting on
his cross. Clearly, he is waiting to capture the criminal’s soul which will
then be placed in the container the three other devils are holding nearby.
Below, on the left of this criminal there is a soldier dressed in black who
has a blunt object in both his hands. He is in the act of breaking the crimi-
nal’s legs as John tells in his Gospel (Jn 19:31–32). Death would thus come
sooner, and the bodies would not remain hanging on the solemn day of
the Sabbath. The criminal/revolutionary on his left has a small group of
six angels waiting close by and, contrary to the non-repented criminal/rev-
olutionary on Christ’s right, has a halo as well. He will, as Christ will soon
promise to him, travel with him to the hereafter and be saved.
di Bonaiuto has also depicted a huge crowd. This crowd consists of
various soldiers, Jewish scribes and priests, and ordinary spectators that
had gathered on Golgotha to assist the spectacle of the multiple cru-
cifixions. Some of these bystanders can also be clearly identified. For
2 VISUAL ANTEPRIMA 15
example, the Centurion from, once more, the Gospel of Luke (23:47)—
Matthew tells the same story (Mt 27:54)—who realized that Christ was
innocent and did not deserve to die on the cross, can be seen directly
below Christ on the left (he is dressed in black as the bone-breaking sol-
diers and seated on a white horse; he too has a halo). Below him we see
the bystander responsible for not clenching Christ’s thirst as he gave him
wine mixed with gall (Mt 27:34). The sponge is still sticking on his spear
and in his other hand is the pitcher with the ‘corrected’ wine (Mark tells
the story a little bit different (cf. Mk 15:23); in fact, for Mark the wine
was not mixed with gall but with myrrh, making it as such into some
sort of narcotic that would have helped Christ against the blunt pain).
Another familiar scene has been depicted on the extreme right of the
fresco. Four soldiers are discussing what to do with Christ’s tunic ‘which
was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down’ (Jn 19:23)—
a similar account is given in the Gospel of Mark (15:25) and the Gospel
of Luke (23:34). In the very front of this main section of the fresco, on
the immediate right of Christ, we can individuate (most probably) the
Gospel character known as Joseph of Arimathea (he is sitting on a black
horse). This ‘distinguished member of the council’ (Mk 15:43), as Mark
describes him, who was most probably a secret disciple of Christ, had
obtained from Pilate (the Roman prefect of the province of Judaea) the
possibility to bury Christ. Joseph too has a halo surrounding his head.
Maybe he is looking at who could be Nicodemus (sitting on a red-brown
horse holding something in his right hand) who, according to the Gospel
of John (Jn 19:39), brought myrrh (it could perfectly be that what this
character behind Joseph is holding in his right hand are myrrh branches)
and helped Joseph take Jesus down from the cross when dusk sets in.
Finally, at the front of the scene, at the left, there is a small group of
people that stand out because of the fact that all of them have halo’s.
Andrea di Bonaiuto seems to have wanted to play it safe, and instead of
choosing one gospel version, he simply assembled all the possible disci-
ples together who have been told as being present in the various gos-
pels (this could explain the fact that the group consists of six people and
not the three or four as generally recounted). The Gospel of Matthew, the
Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of John name the group of faithful at the
site of the cross, but in all three versions the group consists of differ-
ent people. Matthew says that ‘Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of
James and John, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee’ (Mt 27:56)
were present; Mark claims that ‘Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of
the younger James and of Joses, and Salome’ (Mk 15:40) were present;
and John claims that ‘his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife
of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala’ where there together with the ‘disci-
ple… whom he loved’ (Jn 19:25–26)—it is not clear if Jesus’s mother’s
sister is to be identified with Mary the wife of Clopas or whether this
regards two different women.
For as much as recognizing familiar gospel presences is of inter-
est, what is of primary importance to this book is the third scene pres-
ent on this fresco. In fact, at the bottom right of the arch, Andrea di
Bonaiuto has painted Christ’s descent into Limbo. Before we ven-
ture into a discussion of this third scene of di Bonaiuto’s fresco, a cou-
ple of words are necessary to explain this descent and its historical and
religious sources. First of all, it needs to be said that Christ’s descent
into Limbo originates as Christ’s descent into Hell. In the original ver-
sions of the descent, the place where Christ went to was Hell and not
Limbo (the concept of Limbo, as we will see, will emerge at the end of
the twelfth century). Secondly, once the place in the afterlife into which
Christ descended became Limbo, Christ’s descent always just consisted
into that specific Limbo known as the ‘Limbo of the Fathers’ (at times
also known as the ‘Limbo of the Just’). Never has any mention been
made of Christ descending into the other Limbo known as the ‘Limbo
of the (unbaptized) children’ (I will return to this differentiation in the
next section). Thirdly, according to certain traditions, the place occu-
pied by the Fathers before it became the Limbo of the Fathers was not
Hell, but the so-called bosom of Abraham to which Luke alludes in his
Gospel: ‘When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the
bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried’ (Lk 16:22).
Although the transformation of Abraham’s bosom into the Limbo of the
Fathers is not to be ignored, our main focus will not be on this process
of transformation.
Saint Paul is historically the first to mention the possibility of this
descent. He writes, for example, in his letter which has become known as
the Letter to the Ephesians (Paul had actually spent time in this community
and so the very formal tone of the letter and the absence of any sort of
greeting in the beginning of the letter can make one doubt that this com-
munity was actually the addressee of the letter—or even that Paul in person
did write the letter): ‘[W]hat does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he
also descended into the lower (regions) of the earth’ (Eph 4:9). Paul
had already hinted at this event in his earlier Letter to the Romans where
he wrote: ‘But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not
say in your heart, ‘Who will go up into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ
down) or ‘Who will go down into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up
from the dead)”’(Rom 10:6–7). A much more easily understandable ref-
erence to Christ’s descent into Hell is found in the Gospel of Matthew:
‘Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights,
so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three
nights’ (Mt 12:40). Occasionally also the rather enigmatic sentence that
Christ also ‘went to preach to the souls in prison’ (1 Pet 3:19) from the
First letter of Peter is understood as a reference to this descent into Hell.
There is, however, hardly unanimity among New Testament scholars on
this account. Also an event told in the Acts of the Apostles has, at times, been
invoked as a fortification of this descent-theory. It regards a reference to
an otherwise unconfirmed prophesy attributed to King David who had
foreseen Christ’s resurrection: ‘He foresaw and spoke of the resurrection
of the Messiah, that neither was he abandoned to the netherworld nor
did his flesh see corruption. God raised this Jesus; of this we are all wit-
nesses’ (Acts 2:31–32). Friedrich Loofs, somewhat speculatively, also sees
in another couple of Matthew’s lines ‘an incomplete and coarse reminis-
cence of the descent-story’ (Loofs 1908, 299). These verses go as follows:
‘[A]nd behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to
bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened, and

the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming
forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and
appeared to many’ (Mt 27:51–53). The New Testament is, however, not
the only source for possible references to Christ’s descent into Hell/Limbo.
In fact, those who have (occasionally) participated in Western Christian reli-
gious services might be familiar with the phrases of what is known as the
Apostle’s Creed, a liturgical statement of one’s belief first mentioned at the
end of the fourth century. The recitation of the Creed goes as follows: ‘I
believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in
Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the
Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. Under Pontius Pilate he was cru-
cified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he
rose again. …’ (Catechism, Part 1, Sect. 1, Chapter 3, Art. 2, The Credo—
emphasis added).3 It has to be said, however, that the idea of the descent
was not present in the first versions of the Creed.
Let us now turn to the third section of Andrea di Bonaiuto’s fresco
that deals with Christ’s descent into Limbo and discover the different
elements present in this last scene (Image 2.2).
3 Available: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P13.HTM.
18
K. K. P. VANHOUTTE
Image 2.2 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Discesa di Cristo al Limbo (detail), Firenze, Museo di Santa Maria Novella, Capellone
degli Spagnoli
At a first glance, we can immediately notice, while considering the

general construction of the two regions of the afterlife that are depicted,
that the Limbo-region, although separated by what seems like a wall of
rocks, is indeed at the very edge, the border, of Hell. Devils are standing
and are even inserted in the rock-wall that separates Limbo from Hell.
The four devils that are standing at the threshold of Hell (the darkest
one is actually hiding in a little niche in the dividing wall between Limbo
and Hell) can be recognized, considering their color (black, red, white,
and yellowish-pale), as the four ‘horsemen’ of the apocalypse. At the
extreme right of the fresco, appearing from another tiny niche, a single
inhabitant of Hell can be seen as well (he seems to be being eaten by a
horned creature and nibbled upon by some kind of feral in his face). If
we are to believe Dante, this sole figure is probably Judas who is embed-
ded in Satan himself and perpetually being chewed upon and scratched
with Satan’s scraping claws (cf. Dante 1996, XXXIV, 55–63; 537).
Focusing our attention exclusively on Limbo now, we can discover,
returning once more to a theme upon which we have already insisted,
that all the inhabitants of Limbo have halos. In the other two scenes we
already discussed, the halos were only present with Jesus, his mother
Mary and Mary of Magdala, and with those that he forgave or that
understood who he truly was. The halo was, in fact, the way, and not
just in Christian iconography, of rendering explicit the sacred or holy
nature of the persons embraced by the circular light that is oft under-
stood as representing God’s divine grace that suffuses the soul of sanc-
tity (one recalls Saint Thomas’s supplement of the already perfect, from
a couple of paragraphs ago). All the Fathers—and, to be honest, also
some Mothers—whether they be patriarchs, prophets, or Greek phi-
losophers, or simply just, are surrounded by the halo. The halo is also
the reason why, contrary to the complete black darkness in Hell, there
is some light in Limbo. Albertus Magnus, who was the first to make a
distinction between the two Limbos (one for the Fathers and one for the
unbaptized dead infants), already mentioned that, although the limbus
sanctorum patrum was characterized by darkness, it did have some light
because of the great faith of the inhabitants there.
Besides Limbo and the entrance to Hell, this third section of di
Bonaiuto’s fresco has another important visual part as well, namely the
one that portrays a victorious Christ. When considering this section a bit
more closely, we can quite easily notice—but maybe in inverted order—
that Christ is standing on top of a door that was violently pulled open
(the sign of Christ’s triumph is rendered more explicit by his carrying
the banner of victory, that features a red cross over a white background).
The strength with which Christ must have forcefully opened the gates
of the border of Hell that Limbo is, must have been extreme as even the
brickwork that stood as protection came completely down on one side.
Some kind of creature, a devil holding a key, is trapped under the door
mounted by Jesus. Christ’s victorious towering on top of Hell’s gate is a
very important aspect of the iconography related to Limbo as it is pres-
ent in almost all the versions of the descents into Limbo painted in these
centuries. One thinketh, for example, of Fra Angelico’s or Benvenuto
di Giovanni’s Christ in Limbo (in Fra Angelico’s case the door is even
made out of iron), Hieronymus Bosch’s and Duccio di Buoninsegna’s
homonymous Christ in Limbo, Bartolomé Bermejo’s Descent of Christ
into Limbo, Jacopo Bellini’s Christ’s Descent into Limbo, Gerolamo di
Romano’s Descent of Christ to Limbo, and so many more. There are obvi-
ously examples of ‘descents’ where Christ is not standing on top a door
he has Himself violently opened (Domenico Beccafumi Christ in Limbo
is one example, and the depicted Descent into Limbo that can be found in
Berlin’s Marienkirche is another one), but these examples are very few.
------------------------------------- ---O.D.----------------------------------------
Di Bonaiuto’s Descent is, like most of the medieval figurative reproduc-
tions of, and literary references to, this theme and event (highly) influ-
enced not only by the gospels, but especially by a text from (most
probably) the fourth or the sixth century. The text is the apocryphal Gospel
of Nicodemus (2003),4 also known as The Acts of Pontius Pilate.5 This ‘gos-
pel’ is of interest to our project in a revelatory way—especially the sec-
ond section known as the Descensus Christi ad infernos (Chapters 17–27),
which recounts of Christ’s descent into Hell—so it seems propaedeutic to
hold still with it for a while in this introducing section.
4 In what follows we will refer to the Gospel of Nicodemus in the following way (GN date,
chapter paragraph; page of the edition of Schneemelcher’s volume I used).

5 As the historian Friedrich Loofs accurately remarked: ‘[T]here can be no doubt that
the fancy of the medieval painters and theologians arose from the so-called “Gospel of
Nicodemus”, an apocryphon perhaps of the fourth century which was widespread in the
Middle Ages’ (Loofs 1908, 292). Furthermore, as Hack Chin Kim states: ‘[T]he influence
of the Gospel of Nicodemus in general and of the Descensus story in particular on medieval
belief, on medieval art of every kind, and above all on medieval literature was so great that
it cannot be easily summarized’ (Kim 1973, 7).
According to the words of Zbigniew Izydorczyk, who edited the

impressive collection of essays that treat the medieval legacy of this apoc-
ryphal gospel (Izydorczyk 1997), the Gospel of Nicodemus is one of ‘the
most successful and culturally pregnant among the daring narratives’
(Izydorczyk 1997, 1) that focus on Christ’s Passion. That this text is not
only daring but also intriguing—notwithstanding its acknowledged apoc-
ryphalness—can be highlighted by revealing the authority it once pos-
sessed6 in the last centuries of the first millennium and during the first
centuries of the second millennium. Even Albertus Magnus—who must
have known of it absolutely not being a canonical gospel story—made
frequent references to it alongside nothing else but Scripture and the
Apostles’ Creed (cf. Beiting 2004, 494). Let us thus have a look at this
Apocrypha.
The gospel begins not with Christ’s birth or his angelical concep-
tion, but with the Jewish high priests and scribes, and their arrival before
the court of Pilate asking him to condemn Jesus to death. This event
(recounted with much more detail than in any of the canonical gospels),
is followed, first, by the saving of Barabbas and then by the Passion itself.
The last two parts are very similar to (and probably based on) the four
canonical gospels. One of the few differences is that in this gospel Joseph
of Arimathea is captured and thrown into jail for having buried Jesus—
he then miraculously escapes and returns to Arimathea. When the word
of Jesus’ resurrection starts to spread, the high priests and scribes imme-
diately sent out scouts to track him down. They, however, fail in their
search but do find Joseph who they bring in. Joseph tells them of his
escape from prison by means of the hand of a risen Christ and reveals
that not only did he, Christ, rise, but he also raised many others from
the dead. Two of whom (Leucius and Carinus, the sons of the former
high priest Simeon, who had circumcised little Jesus decades before), so
Joseph reveals, could be found in the same town of Arimathea. It will
be the story of these two brothers that will form the main narrative of
Christ’s descent and harrowing of Hell in GN.
6 In this sense, it is similar to the mid-second century text known as The Shepherd of
Hermas. This text, just like the Gospel of Nicodemus, was once accredited as highly author-
itative—it was actually present in one of the first versions of the list of canonical books
that would end up constituting the official New Testament—but then almost vanished into
complete forgetfulness.
Simeon’s two sons start by revealing that they were in the darkness
of Hades (in Hell, Hades here is understood as the personification of
the ‘prince’ or proprietor of Hell) and they were there with ‘all who
have died since the beginning of the world’ (GN 2003, XVIII, 1; 522).
Among those present in that realm of the afterlife were Abraham, the
patriarchs and the prophets. From this latter group, Isaiah and John the
Baptist are the only ones mentioned in this first part of the story, and
King David is the only patriarch mentioned (cf. GN 2003, XXI, 2; 524).
Adam, the first man, was there as well with his son Seth. The two proph-
ets thus reveal how they foretold that which was taking place, namely the
coming of a stark light, strong as the sun, that was the Son of the Father.
Seth too reveals how an angel had announced him Christ’s descend into
Hell and subsequent savior of those present.
The joy of the patriarchs and the prophets seems to be contagious as
also Satan is joyous—Satan has not yet evolved in GN to the all-power-
ful character he would become in the high Middle Ages, here he is still
somewhat of a lesser demon who needs to give accounting to Hades.
We find Satan, in fact, in the coming section bragging to Hades how he
had finally been victorious over Jesus, who proclaimed to be the Son of
God. He, in fact, had been able to put him to death with the help of the
Jews. This Jesus character had caused Satan a lot of grief when he was
still among the living. Now, however, he was dead and on his way to
Hades just as all the other simple mortal beings. Satan thus spurs Hades
to secure Jesus and not let him slip away. Hades is not so convinced of
Satan’s move to kill Jesus. In fact, not so long ago Hades had a certain
Lazarus among those who dwelled in his sad place, but by a mere word
from this Jesus did he, Hades, lose all powers over Lazarus. So Hades
pleads with Satan not to let Jesus descend into Hell.
But it was already too late. The first calls to open the gates of Hell
were already heard. Hades thus gathers his demons to ‘[M]ake fast
well and strongly the gates of brass and the bars of iron, and hold
my locks, and stand upright and watch every point. For if he comes
in, woe will seize us’ (GN 2003, XXI, 1; 524). As the story of the
two brothers continues, shortly after the demands to open the gates
resounded for the second time, ‘the gates of brass were broken in
pieces and the bars of iron were crushed and all the dead who were
bound were loosed from their chains, and we with them. And the King
of glory entered in like a man, and all the dark places of Hades were
illumined’ (GN 2003, XXI, 3; 524). Before Jesus frees the Fathers,
starting with Adam, he seizes Satan and delivers him to Hades who
reveals his future as full of punishment and pain. Satan is thus confined
to the lowest of the regions of Hades, and it is here that the nature of
Hell (it being a place of eternal punishment and pain) comes clearly to
the fore. The idea of confining Satan to a region of Hades is one of the
first implicit affirmations of there being various regions in Hell, one
where there is no punishment and one where punishment would be
present.
The story continues revealing how Jesus blessed Adam with the sign
of the cross, after which he did this to ‘the patriarchs and prophets
and martyrs and forefathers, and he took them and leaped up out of
Hades’ (GN 2003, XXIV, 2; 525). Upon their entrance into Paradise,
they encounter two old men who had already been saved (Enoch
and Elijah the Tishbite) and the good thief who had been crucified
together with Christ. As such the story ends. The two brothers con-
clude that—after they, together with all the others that had been saved
by Christ from Hell, had been baptized in the river Jordan—their mis-
sion had been to reveal Christ’s resurrection which could now be con-
sidered concluded. Upon this they vanish, and the Gospel of Nicodemus
abruptly ends.
Although GN contains some highly fantastic elements and mate-
rial, it has to be admitted that it is far less fabulous than many other
Apocrypha. Furthermore, the whole story is put in a coherent narrative
whole—also something which is not always the case with other similar
‘narratives’. The addition of particularly pregnant scenic imagery did
nothing but add to its already existing attraction. The violent bursting of
the gate to Hell and the trampling of the devil, as we already discovered,
were like manna falling from the sky for all those who desired some-
what more extravagant elements to put in a homily, a play for Easter, or
an artistic representation—all means that were far more important and
effective in communicating the Christian faith to the common man than
any book could do at that time. And in the end, and notwithstanding
its imaginative elements and aspects, it has to be admitted, GN consists
of clean orthodox narrative material—Kim goes even so far as to claim
that it was actually composed to complete and document that which was
already present in the Creed (Kim 1973, 2). It should, thus, not surprise
that GN had the fortune it had, and the fresco of Andrea di Bonaiuto we
have been studying up until now is a clear sign and proof of this fortune.
----------------------------------------O.D.----------------------------------------
Returning to di Bonaiuto’s Descent into Limbo, some further char-
acteristics of the fresco could be highlighted. They would, however,
only be but minor ones. It might be more interesting to confront di
Bonaiuto’s Descent with a much more recent artwork, namely the homo-
nym work Descent into limbo by the British artist, sir Anish Kapoor. This
‘installation’ dating from 1992 is of importance for our visual under-
standing as it can be considered as having stripped Limbo down to its
essential parts. Only the most essential elements have remained, and
they underscore the importance of the aspects we have already men-
tioned. Before we look at Kapoor’s installation or sculpture (a symbol-
ically not to be misunderstood 6 × 6 × 6 m stucco and concrete cube
[cage/box] first shown at Kassel’s Documenta IX of 1992), two minor
comments need to be made on the fact that Kapoor dedicated an art-
work to the idea of (Christ’s) descent into Limbo, a topic that was ‘en
vogue’ in the Middle Ages but not in 1992. First, if we are to believe
Marshall McLuhan’s statement that artists ‘know that they are engaged
in making live models of situations that have not yet matured in the soci-
ety at large…In their artistic play, they discover what is actually happen-
ing’ (McLuhan 1994, 243), then Kapoor, who has always been working
around the central issues of space and emptiness, did seem to find in his
Descent a very spatial contemporary aspect at work. Secondly, and as will
become fundamental in the chapters that will follow, it is essential to real-
ize that Kapoor sees in the series of work to which his Descent belongs a
thorough examination of ‘that condition that seems to be abidingly static
and at the same time dynamic’.7 This condition that Kapoor attempted
to put in his sculpture will be the returning condition of what we will
call the contemporary operativity of, on the one hand, acceleration and
deceleration/rigidification and, on the other, expansion and contraction.
Without wanting to run too much ahead of ourselves, let us have a look
at Kapoor’s take on the Descent into Limbo (Images 2.3 and 2.4).
7 For the reference of Kapoor, see the very conspicuous observations reported by Homi
Bhaba in his ‘The True Sign of Emptiness’. Available: http://anishkapoor.com/185/mak-

ing-emptiness-by-homi-k-bhabha; last accessed September 2, 1997.
Image 2.3 Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, © 2017, ProLitteris,
Zurich
At first glance, one might think to be confronted with a simple, appo-

sitely badly painted, cubical structure with a black circle in the mid-
dle. However, upon a closer look, a lot of aspects that were present in
di Bonaiuto’s fresco are present in Kapoor’s installation as well, albeit
in a more abstracted way. We could start with what I have just dubbed
the ‘appositely badly painted walls’. Kapoor did not put much attention
in painting the walls immaculately white. It is not a shining white, and
some of the coloring has come off. Even though this might just be a
coincidence, the bleak white, at moments turning into gray (muffled old-
ness), does seem to be in continuance with di Bonaiuto’s fresco where
Image 2.4 Anish Kapoor, Descent into Limbo, 1992, © 2017, ProLitteris,
Zurich
it is very clear that there is some light on the walls of Limbo—espe-

cially compared to the complete and utter blackness of Hell (both of the
neighboring cave in di Bonaiuto’s mural and in Kapoor’s circle in the
middle of the floor)—produced, as we saw, by the halos of the patriarchs,
prophets, and just.
Secondly, one also immediately notices the presence of the door—a
characteristic, the violently opened door, which was discovered to be
present in almost all of the medieval representations of Christ’s descent
into Limbo. True, in Kapoor’s installation the door is not violently
opened, nor is there a Christ figure standing on top of the remnants of
a door that has been pulled out, but, at least to us, this hardly seems
detrimental in stressing the importance of the presence of a door also in
Kapoor’s work (there could simply have been some kind of opening).
Thirdly, and something which we indicated only sideways, the
abstracted and emptied space created by Kapoor allows us to understand
the importance of the walled space that Limbo represents. Already in di
Bonaiuto’s fresco, we discovered how Limbo consisted of a clearly cir-
cumscribed space. Whereas we then only insisted on this as function-
ing as a separation from the limit of Hell, by taking into consideration
Kapoor’s four walls, we can understand how its character of limit should
not overshadow its being a walled space, that is, a space that is clearly
and accurately confined.
*
That the religious(/geographical) concept of Limbo is related to walls and
doors/gates should not surprise. Walls and doors/gates are important in reli-
gious traditions (especially the Christian religious tradition to which the con-
cept of Limbo belongs). A manifold of prophecies are dedicated to walls and
gates and even half of a book of the Old Testament is dedicated to the con-
struction of the walls and gates of Jerusalem. The book in question is the sec-
ond volume of the last four books of the Hebrew canon, namely the book of
Nehemiah. Nehemiah lived in the period known as the Restauration which
followed the period of the Babylonian exile. He was a man of importance as
he is defined as the ‘cupbearer’ of the King (of Persia). Upon hearing about
the state of Jerusalem—the ‘wall of Jerusalem lies breached, and its gates have
been gutted with fire’ (Neh 1:3)—Nehemiah became utterly depressed and
wept and ‘continued mourning for several days’ (Neh 1:4). After having
asked the permission of the Persian King Artaxerxes, he is appointed governor
in the land of Judah (Neh 5:14) and sets out to rebuild the wall and restore
the gates so that ‘we may no longer be an object of derision’ (Neh 2:17). But
(avoiding) derision is not the sole purpose nor meaning of the rebuilding of
the wall and gates of the Holy city. The crumbled and breached wall and the
burnt gates are not only signs of the political defeat and exile (of—a lack of—
military power). They represent, first and foremost, the breach in the protec-
tion of God (which caused the exile). The walls and gates express a theological
power. As the prophet Isaiah already clearly proclaimed: ‘You shall call your
walls “Salvation” and your gates “Praise”’(Is 60:18). Just like the Temple is
the dwelling place of the Lord, the wall and its gates, their standing tall or
being destroyed, respectively mean the faithfulness (and salvation and protec-
tion) or the unfaithfulness (punishment and destruction) of the chosen people.
*
Kapoor’s depiction of (the entrance to) Hell as the black blotted circle
in the middle of the confined space of Limbo also finds a parallel in di
Bonaiuto’s cave-like entrance to Hell. But whereas di Bonaiuto’s work
seems to allow the speculation that also Hell seems to be a walled sur-
rounding, Kapoor allows us to understand that what lies below is only
unconfined and vast plains of torture. Hell and Heaven, in fact, don’t
have walls. Limbo, on the contrary, has walls. Limbo is the enclosed and
walled surrounding in the afterlife by antonomasia.8
----------------------------------------O.D.----------------------------------------
The presence of walls, brass gates, bars of iron, and bolted doors gives
us a first indication that a possible reading of Limbo as applicable to
our contemporary times can be considered as not totally out of place.
Contemporary political debates and promises of walls, even the actual
and physical construction of walls in multiple countries all over the
world, as well as the reintroducing of closed, locked by frontier, doors/
gates, and iron fences do seem to allow a similar reading.9 This, how-
ever, not only seems to be the case for temporal reasons, but even for
structural ones. In fact, already Rousseau (one of the founding Fathers
of social contract theory—which is still our governing political para-
digm) phrased the relationship between politics and enclosing in the
well-known phrase at the beginning of his Discourse on Inequality: ‘[T]he
8 This difference between Limbo (confined) and Heaven and Hell (vast and unconfined)
will return later in this book (Sect. 5.3) under a different guise. Heaven and Hell will be
considered as eternal while Limbo will result as being endless.
9 Although talking about war (state appropriated war machines, as Deleuze and Guattari
would specify) and not ordinary day politics—but what is the difference? Isn’t there a par-
ticularly close, in the understanding of extension, relationship between war and politics
as Foucault already claimed through his inversion of general von Clausewitz’s saying that
‘[W]ar is nothing but the continuation of policy (politics) with other means’ (Clausewitz
2007, 7) into ‘politics is the continuation of war by other means’ (Foucault 2003, 15)—it
seems that the late Zygmunt Bauman was not very prophetic when he wrote that what was
really at stake in contemporary new war is ‘not the conquest of a new territory, but crush-
ing the walls which stopped the flow of new, fluid global powers; beating out the enemy’s
head the desire to set up his own rules, and so opening up the so-far barricaded and walled-
off, inaccessible space …’ (Bauman 2000, 12).
first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred

to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him,
was the true founder of civil society’ (Rousseau 2003, 161). So accord-
ing to Rousseau, a courageous imperialist and some simpletons was all
that it took to start (our) society. For as much as Rousseau’s affirma-
tion might seem nothing but a provocation, his idea is, centuries later,
still re-proposed. Enclosure is also for Carl Schmitt, for example, still
one of the founding stones of society. We can thus read in his Nomos of
the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, that
‘land appropriation is the primary legal title that underlies all subsequent
law’ (Schmitt 2006, 47). Schmitt goes even further and states that land
enclosure and appropriation is ‘the reproductive root in the normative
order of history’ (Schmitt 2006, 48).
But putting up iron fences, building walls, and having bolted gates do
not only have the constitutive powers that inaugurate civil society.10 Our
contemporary walls and locked (frontier) doors/gates signify something
else as well—something that seems to be rather specific to our times.
In fact, besides being—walls and gates that is—clothed with constitu-
tive powers and, as the book of Nehemiah revealed, being a theologi-
cal remainder (and reminder), walls are, as Wendy Brown so accurately
observes, ‘icons of erosion’ to the weakened (nation) state and its sover-
eignty (Brown 2010, 24). In fact, while walls are constructed under the
heralds of resolving certain issues (violence, crime, uncontrolled and ille-
gal immigration, etc.) the walls actually intensify these issues—“[M]ore
than simply failing, however, walls often compound the problems they
putatively address” (Brown 2010, 112). Or, said differently, the walls
‘do not merely border, but invent the societies they limn’ (Brown 2010,
90). Zygmunt Bauman argues similarly when he writes in his Liquid
Modernity, a book that will feature numerous times in the pages that
follow, that ‘borders do not acknowledge and register the already exist-
ing estrangement’ but they actually create the estrangement: they ‘are
drawn, as a rule, before the estrangement is brought about’ (Bauman
2000, 177).
10 These walls and fences don’t even have to be actual walls or fences as Edward Said
has rendered evident. Peoples will have or create a certain number of territorial boundaries
that will function as means of separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This is what Said named
‘imaginative geography’ (cf. Said 1979, 54).
The importance of the image of a wall, iron fences, and gates (so
important in the imaginary of Limbo as we came to see) is, however, not
just important for our present-day (nation-)state. Walls and fences also
have repercussions on the individual, that is, on personhood, and this
not just because the (city-)wall can and has been considered as an exten-
sion of our skin—as McLuhan interpreted Lewis Mumford (McLuhan
1994, 47). The influence of walls has, according to Greg Eghigian, cre-
ated a whole new type of men which he has given the conceptual name
of ‘homo munitus’ (Eghigian 2008, 41). Homo munitus is understood
by Eghigian as the sheltered, the defended, or the protected (by walls)
individual—munitus derives from the Latin verb munire which means,
according to Eghigian, to fortify, guard, and protect, and it also relates
to moenia which, in its turn, means ‘defensive and city walls, or fortifi-
cations’ (Eghigian 2008, 41). Through a study of East German person-
ality and subjectivity, Eghigian comes to the surprising conclusion that
‘[T]he figure of homo munitus … is not solely the concoction of patroniz-
ing Wessis [the name given by Eghigian, following the existing tradition in
popular language, to inhabitants of the reunited Germany who belonged
to West Germany (GDR) from before the fall of the Wall, K.K.P.V.]. It
is an image of the East German propagated by East Germans as well’
(Eghigian 2008, 59). This means that, as Wendy Brown understood so
well, that which the walls intend to block out is actually produced by the
walls themselves (cf. Brown 2010, 41). One can thus wonder or ques-
tion whether this ‘conformist, passive, paranoid, and predictable creature’
(Brown 2010, 41), this homo munitus or walled-in person, is not being
recreated in our walled contemporary societies as well—simply because of
the presence of the walls.
What is, however, of utmost importance for our discourse on Limbo
is not the erosion of the nation-state as indicated by Brown and Bauman.
Nor is it the creation of estrangement or diversification between two
social groups, and neither does it regard the paradox of the creation of
the homo munitus. All of these elements are obviously of great signifi-
cance and indicators that the paradox has become the governing para-
digm of our contemporary times (something which will obviously return
continuously in the coming sections and chapters). However, what,
above all, helps us in understanding what is at stake in what follows, and
what these walls thus indicate, regards the implications of this erosion
for the operating of these walls, fences, and gates. In fact, as Brown’s
treatise renders clear, they (the walls and fences and gates) don’t actually
work or function as they are supposed to work or function. While they

appear to have a functionality, they, in actuality, do absolutely nothing
(cf. Brown 2010, 93). What these walls do, or perform, is, the para-
doxical contemporary operativity of two opposite powers, they exclude
what their walling-excluding operation includes (creates). As Kapoor said
about his Limbo-installation, it is the condition of being abidingly static
and at the same time dynamic. Or as we will attempt to demonstrate, it
regards a functioning that proceeds along the lines of a double paradox-
ical condition that enables the contemporary operativity of, on the one
hand, modernity’s acceleration and deceleration/rigidification and, on
the other, modernity’s expansion and contraction.
----------------------------------------O.D.----------------------------------------
There is one more fundamental characteristic that, unfortunately, is
not present in neither di Bonaiuto’s fresco nor Kapoor’s installation, or
at least only indirectly. That this aspect is only to be found after deep
meditation is not caused by the explicit desire of the artists, but by the
very essence of that which is missing, namely Limbo’s particular expe-
rience of time (and time-experiences are, obviously, particularly hard
if not impossible to render with certain styles of art). The traces of the
particular experience of time of Limbo can be discovered in the warm,
seemingly dense, white light, of which one cannot find the origin, in
Kapoor’s installation, or in the serene expression on the faces of the just
in di Bonaiuto’s fresco. It is a serenity not solely caused by the patriarchs’
and prophets’ being just or finally salvaged. A similar utterly composed
expression can only be caused by the full awareness of the complete pur-
poselessness of waiting. If, as Jacques Le Goff so accurately remarked,
l’attente, the characteristic of the ‘awaiting’, is the attitude that defines
the Christian in this life as well as in certain realms of the afterlife (cf. Le
Goff 1986, 153), then an ‘eternal awaiting’—the aspect typical of Limbo
as we will discover in the coming chapters—has no sense whatsoever (cf.
Le Goff 1986, 173). (As we will discover in Sect. 3.3, there are only two
time-modes in the afterlife: timeless everlastingness or transient tempo-
ralities. Only Purgatory belongs to the latter category, while Heaven,
Hell, and the Limbo of the children clearly belong to the timeless
everlasting. The only exception seems to be the Limbo of the Fathers.
However, more than an exception, Christ’s descent is simply the violent
irruption, and interruption, not solely into the walled space of Limbo,
but also of the timeless everlastingness of this section of Limbo as well.)
In fact, the particular time experience of Limbo indirectly expressed
by Kapoor’s embracing cushioning light or the expression of yielded
acquiescence of the Fathers or the just can be described as an eternal
present, but a present in a time outside of time. More than anything,
it regards an eternity where there is no time for the present (which is
absent). Said differently, it is like the time of ‘no time’ or similar to what
Manuel Castells calls the ‘timeless time’. This ‘timeless time’ is a time
where ‘there is systemic perturbation in the sequential order’ (Castells
2010, xli; 494), that is, a time where the sequence of time is disturbed
or (as is the case with Limbo) even lacking. And as Castells correctly
remarked: ‘[E]limination of sequence creates undifferentiated time,
which is tantamount to eternity’ (Castells 2010, 494) or, as we will claim
in Sect. 5.3, which is tantamount to end-less-ness. According to Castells,
this timeless time is the time typical of our age, and as such we are once
more brought directly from Limbo into our contemporary epoch.
However, before we start to investigate deeper into these possible rela-
tions (and their nature) between our time and Limbo, let us investigate
in a more theoretical way the nature of Limbo. The specific characteris-
tics that we have already been able to individuate by means of this brief
study of di Bonaiuto’s fresco and Kapoor’s installation/sculpture will
hopefully allow for a much easier entry into these more technical aspects.
References
Agamben, G. (1993). Infancy and History. Essays on the Destruction of Experience.
London and New York: Verso.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.
Beiting, C. (2004). The Nature and Structure of Limbo in the Works of Albertus
Magnus. New Blackfriars Review, 85(999), 492–509.
Brown, W. (2010). Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books.
Castells, M. (2010). The Rise of the Network Society. Malden and Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Dante, A. (1996). The Divine Comedy, Vol. 1 Inferno. New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Eghigian, G. (2008). Homo Munitus. In Paul Betts & Katherine Pence (Eds.),
Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (pp. 37–70).
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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the blind, and the ignorant, metaphorically speaking. Papa brought
them home and mamma took pity on them. Now it was Becky Sill, a
great, overgrown girl of sixteen, whose intemperate father had just
died in the poorhouse, where the three younger children—boys—
were waiting for a chance to be put out to the farmers.
“Look at this ’ere floor, Miss Rose! I’ve scrubbed it white as snow.
And I’ve been a peelin’ of pertaters.”
“This floor is sufficient, Becky; and peeling, and potatoes.”
“O, law, you’re just like your mother. Some people are born ladies
and have fine ways. I wasn’t.”
“You have been very industrious,” I returned, cheerfully; and then I
went at the dinner.
The hungry, noisy troop came home from school. What if they
were all boys!
Do you want a photograph of us? I was past seventeen, not very
tall, with a round sort of figure, and dimples everywhere in my face,
where one could have been put by accident or design. My skin was
fair, my hair—that was my sore point. I may as well tell the truth; it
was red, a sort of deep mahogany red, and curled. My features were
just passable. So, you see, I was not likely to set up for a beauty.
Fan was sixteen, taller than I, slender, blonde, with saucy blue eyes
and golden hair, and given to rather coquettish ways. Nelly was
fourteen, almost as tall as I, with papa’s gray eyes,—only hers had a
violet tint,—and mamma’s dark hair. Daisy was next, eleven, and on
the blonde order. Lily, whose name was Elizabeth, and Tim, aged
seven. Her real cognomen was Gertrude; but we began to call her
Tiny Tim, and the name, somehow stuck to her. What a host of girls,
to be sure!
“Papa,” I said that evening, going to the study for a good night
kiss, where he was writing in the quiet,—“papa, are you sorry to
have so many girls?”
I had been exercised on the subject all day, and I wanted to
dispose of it before I slept.
“Why, my dear! no;” with a sweet gravity.
“But, papa,”—and I stumbled a little,—“it isn’t likely that—that—we
shall all—get married—”
I could not proceed any farther, and hid my face on his shoulder.
“Married! What ever put such an absurd idea into your head,
Rosalind? A parcel of children—married!”
I knew papa was displeased, or he would never have called me
Rosalind.
“O, dear papa, don’t be angry!” I cried. “I was not thinking of being
married, I’m sure. I don’t believe any one will ever like me very
much, because my hair is red, and I may be fat as Mrs. Downs. And
if I should be an old maid,—and I know I shall,—I want you to love
me a little; and if I’m queer and fussy, and all that, you must be
patient with me. I will try to do my best always.”
“My dear darling! what a foolish little thing you are! Some of the
old women have been talking to you, I know. I shall certainly have to
turn the barrel upside down, and find the sermon on bridling the
tongue. You are all little girls, and I will not have the bloom rudely
rubbed off of my peaches. There don’t cry about it;” and he kissed
my wet face so tenderly that I did cry more than ever.
“My little girl, I want us to have a good many years of happiness
together,” he said, with solemn tenderness. “Put all these things out
of your head, and love your mother and me, and do your duty in that
state of life to which it shall please God to call you. I want you to be
like Martin Luther’s bird, who sat on the tree and sang, and let God
think for him. And now, run to bed, for I wish to finish this sermon
while I am in the humor.”
I kissed him many, many times. I was so sure of his sweet, never-
failing love. And I suppose fathers and mothers never do get tired of
us!
CHAPTER II.
T was a bright June morning. The windows were all

open; the birds were singing, and the air was sweet with
out-of-door smells. Waving grasses, hosts of flowers,
rose and honeysuckle out on the porch in the very
height of riotous living, each trying to outbloom the
other.
We were at breakfast. We never had this meal very early at the
Rectory. On summer mornings papa loved to get up and take a stroll,
and botanize a little. Mamma rose, looked after Becky, and took a
quiet supervision of us all. I helped dress the three younger children,
for Fan usually had some lessons on hand, as she was still in
school. By the time we were ready papa would be back. Then we
sang a verse or two of a hymn, said the Lord’s prayer together, and
papa pronounced the greater benediction over us. It was so short,
simple, and enjoyable! Somehow I do not think children take
naturally to prayers, unless they are rendered very sweet and
attractive. We were allowed sufficient time to get wide awake before
coming to breakfast. Mamma was at the head of the table again,
looking as sweet as a new pink. Papa’s place was at the foot. Fan
and I sat opposite each other, about half way down. She poured the
water and the milk. I had the three younger children on my side, and
spread their bread or biscuits for them. I used to think of Goethe’s
Charlotte, only she had brothers as well as sisters.
It was nearly eight o’clock. Lemmy Collins came up with the mail.
There had been a shower the evening before, and none of us had
gone for it.
“Ah!” exclaimed papa, “we are bountifully supplied this morning.
One for Nelly, two for mamma, and two for me.”
“O, what elegant writing!” said Nell, leaning over to look at papa’s.
“Yes;” slowly. “I cannot think;” and papa fell into a brown study.
“Why don’t you open it?” asked bright-eyed Daisy; “then you won’t
have to think.”
“To be sure, little wisdom!” and papa smiled. “I will look over this
thin one first, though.”
That was only an invitation to a meeting of the clergy. We were all
watching to see him open the letter par excellence. He took out his
penknife and cut round the seal, which he handed to Tim.
“W—h—y!” lengthening the word out indefinitely. “From Stephen
Duncan!” Then he read on in thoughtful silence, now and then
knitting his brows.
Mamma’s letters were from an aunt and a cousin, with some kindly
messages for us all.
“Girls,” said father, with a sudden start, “would you like to have
some brothers large enough to keep their hands and faces clean,
and strong enough to help you garden?”
“Boys are a nuisance!” declared Nell.
“Well, I have an offer of two. One is something of an invalid,
though. My wards, I suppose, for that matter; though I have never
considered myself much of a guardian, since Stephen was old
enough to look after the boys. Then I always thought their uncle,
James Duncan, was annoyed at my being put in at all. It seems he
died very suddenly, a month ago, in London. Stephen has to go over
and settle his affairs, and he wants me to keep the boys. Rose, pass
this letter up to your mother.”
“How old are they?” asked Fan.
“Well, I can’t say. Louis is ready to enter college, but has studied
himself out, and will have to go to the country. Stuart is—a boy, I
suppose. I have not seen them since their father died.”
“Poor boys!” said mamma. “And Stephen is coming. Why, he will
be here to-morrow afternoon. This letter has been delayed on its
way;” and mamma glanced at the date and the postmark.
The children were through, and we rose from the table. There was
a perfect hubbub of questions then. Lily swung on father’s arm, while
Tim took a leg, and they were all eagerness to know about the
brothers.
“Mamma will have to consider the subject,” he said. “Come, let us
go out and look at the flower-beds. I dare say the rain brought up a
regiment of weeds last night.”
Fanny went to put her room in order; Nelly had some buttons to
sew on her school dress, and followed mamma to the nursery. Becky
came in and helped take the dishes to the kitchen; while I went to my
chambers up stairs.
I hurried a little, I must confess. Then I bundled the youngsters off
to school, and ran into the nursery. Mamma was washing and
dressing baby.
“What about the boys?” I asked. “Will they really come? Should
you like to have them?”
“Perhaps it would be as well for you to read the letter, Rose. You
are old enough to be taken into family council. It seems so odd, too!
Only last evening papa and I were talking about—”
Mamma made so long a pause that I glanced up from the letter,
having only read the preface, as one might say. There was a
perplexed look on the sweet face.
“What is it, mamma?” and I knelt beside her, kissing baby’s fat
cheek.
“My dear, I resolved long ago never to burden my girls with cares
and worries before their time. And yet, it would be so delightful to
have you for a friend! A clergyman’s wife has to be doubly discreet
on some points. Now, if I was to say to two or three good friends in
the parish, ‘Our circumstances are somewhat straightened by the
recent expenses,’ they would, no doubt, seek to make it up in some
way. But I have a horror of anything that looks like begging.”
“O, yes, mamma. Aunt Letty Perkins wondered, the day after the
baby was born, if there would not be a donation visit.”
Mamma’s sweet face flushed.
“We have managed so far,” she said; “and everything has gone
very pleasantly. Papa is well loved, and we have a delightful home.
This great old house and garden are worth a good deal. But I am
wandering from my text into byways and highways. I feel that I
should sometimes like to have a friend to talk to who would be a sort
of second self—”
“O, mamma take me!” I cried.
“I have always wanted to be like an elder sister to my girls as they
grew to womanhood.”
I wanted to cry, and I was resolved not to. Mamma’s tone was so
sweet that it went to my heart. But to stop myself, I laughed, and
exclaimed,—
“Fan would say that your hands would be pretty full if you were
going to be a sister to each one of us. Or you would have to be
divided into infinitesimal pieces.”
“And fourteen girls might not be desirable, if their father was a
clergyman,” she answered, smilingly.
“So, let us be the best of friends, mamma, dearest, and you shall
tell me your troubles. It is being so poor, for one, I know.”
“Yes, dear. Poverty is not always a delightful guest. Last evening
we were resolving ways and means, and papa proposed to give up
the magazines, and be very careful about his journeys. But I cannot
bear to have him pinch. And, you see, if we took these boys, the
extra living would not cost us anything to speak of. Ten weeks would
be—two hundred dollars.”
“O, mamma!”
“It is right that I should consult you about the work. It will make
your duties more arduous. Then taking strangers into your family is
never quite so pleasant. But go on with the letter. We will discuss it
afterwards.”
I felt drawn so near to mamma by the talk and the confidence, that
at first I could hardly take the sense of what I was reading. But I will
tell you the story more briefly.
Papa and Mr. Duncan had been very dear friends for many years;
in fact, I believe, since papa’s boyhood. When Mr. Duncan died he
left papa a small legacy, and some valuable books and pictures,
besides associating him with his brother in the guardianship of his
three boys. Mr. James Duncan, who was an exceedingly proud and
exclusive man, seemed to resent this, and treated papa rather coolly.
Their business was done in writing, and papa had never seen his
wards since their father’s funeral.
Stephen had spent one summer at our house when he was quite a
boy. It seemed now that he preserved the liveliest recollection of my
mother’s kindness and care, and desired very much to see my
father. The taking of the boys he asked as a great favor, since he
would have to spend all the summer in England; and he appeared to
feel the responsibility of his brothers very keenly. It was such a nice,
kind, gentlemanly letter, evincing a good deal of thoughtfulness, and
respect for papa; and even where he spoke of the terms, he did it
with so much delicacy, as if he were fearful that it would not be
sufficient compensation, and proposed to come and talk the matter
over, as he should, no doubt, need a good deal of advice from papa
in the course of the next few years.
“What a good, sweet letter this is, mamma!” I said. “It makes me
think of papa.”
“Yes; I liked it exceedingly. Papa is greatly interested with the plan.
He thinks it will help us to straighten up matters, so that we can
begin next fall quite easy in our minds. The only other thing he could
do would be to take some boys to prepare for college. That is very
wearing. In this we could all help.”
“I hope the boys will be nice,” I said, with a little misgiving.
“They will be out of doors a great deal, and certainly ought to
behave like gentlemen, since they have been at the best of schools.
You will have to keep their room in order; there will be rather more in
the way of cooking and deserts; but Fanny must help a little during
vacation. You see, baby is going to take up much of my time. But if I
thought it would be uncomfortable for you girls—”
“O, mamma, it will only last such a little while, after all! And the two
hundred dollars—”
“We must not be mercenary, little one.”
Before we had finished, papa came in again. We were all on the
boys’ side, I could plainly see.
The next morning I aired the large spare room, brought out fresh
towels, and arranged some flowers in the vases. There was matting
on the floor, a maple bureau, wash-stand, and bedstead. The
curtains were thin white muslin, with green blinds outside, which
gave the apartment a pretty, pale tint.
I didn’t mean to put the two boys in this room when they came.
There was another, opposite, not quite so nice, plenty good enough
for rollicking boys.
Papa went over to the station for Stephen.—Mr. Duncan, I mean. I
wondered why I should have such an inclination to call him by his
Christian name—a perfect stranger, too. But when I saw him I was
as formal as you please.
As tall as papa, and somewhat stouter, with a grave and rather
impressive air, eyes that could look you through, a firm mouth, that,
somehow, seemed to me, might be very stern and pitiless. He had a
broad forehead, with a good deal of fine, dark hair; but, what I
thought very singular, blue eyes, which reminded you of a lake in the
shade. His side-whiskers and mustache gave him a very stylish look,
and he was dressed elegantly. Poor papa looked shabby beside him.
Mamma and the baby, Fanny and I, were on the wide porch, while
the children were playing croquet on the grassy lawn, though I do so
much like the old-fashioned name of “door-yard.” Papa introduced
him in his homelike, cordial fashion, and he shook hands in a kind of
stately manner that didn’t seem a bit like his letter.
He came to me last. I knew he did not like me. I think you can
always tell when any one is pleased with you. He studied me rather
sharply, and almost frowned a little. I felt that it was my red hair. And
then I colored all over, put out my hand awkwardly, and wished I was
anywhere out of sight.
“And all the small crowd out there,” said papa, in so gay a voice
that it quite restored me to composure.
“Really, friend Endicott, I was not prepared for this.—Why, Mrs.
Endicott, how have you kept your youth and bloom? Why, I am
suddenly conscience-smitten that I have proposed to add to your
cares.”
“You will feel easy when you see the inside of the house. There is
plenty of room, plenty;” and papa laughed.
“You had only a small nest when I visited you before,” Mr. Duncan
said to mother. “But how very lovely the whole village is! I am so glad
to find such a place for Louis. I hope my boys will not worry you to
death, Mrs. Endicott, for, somehow, I do not know as I can give up
the idea of sending them here, especially as Mr. Endicott is their
guardian. I think it will do them both good to be acquainted intimately
with such a man.”
It was all settled then.
“I have wished a great many times that we had a sister for Louis’s
sake. Oddly enough, my uncle James’s children were all boys, and
Louis is very peculiar in some respects. It is asking a great deal of
you. I understand that well, and shall appreciate it.”
I knew that I ought to look after Becky and the supper; so I rose
and slipped away.
“Two boys,” I said to myself. “I do not believe that I shall like them;”
and I shook my head solemnly.
CHAPTER III.
WENT out to the kitchen and advised a few moments

with our maid of all work, and then began to arrange the
supper table. The visitor must sit next to papa, of
course, but not on my side of the table. I did not mean to
have him any nearer than I could help; for, if he disliked
red hair, I would not flirt it under his eyes. Or, suppose I placed him
next to Fan! She was so carelessly good natured that he would not
be likely to disturb her thoughts.
Mamma took the baby to the nursery, and then came in to give an
approving look. I placed the two tall vases of flowers on the table,
and it did present a very pretty appearance.
“We are all ready now,” she said. “Call papa.”
I rang the bell, and the children came trooping in, papa and Mr.
Duncan bringing up the rear. Fan glanced at the places, and looked
pleased, I thought.
“Here Mr. Duncan,” she said, with a pretty wave of her hand; and
he took the proffered seat, giving me a quick glance, that brought the
warm blood to my cheeks.
We had a merry time; for, after all, strangers were no great rarity;
and we were always merry in our snug little nest. It was said through
the parish that every one had a good time at our house; and Mr.
Duncan appeared to be no exception. When we were almost
through, we began to say verses, each one repeating a passage of
Scripture commencing with the same letter. We caught Mr. Duncan
right away. He commenced two or three before he could hit upon the
right beginning.
“You see, I am not very ready with my wits,” he said, laughingly.
Lily, Daisy, and Tim always had a romp with papa afterwards; but
my duties were not ended until they were snugly tucked in bed. You
see, we could not afford nurse-maids and all that on papa’s salary.
But then, frolicking with them in bed was such a delight that I never
minded the knots in their shoestrings, and the loads of trash that had
to be emptied out of their pockets, to say nothing of mischief and
dawdling, and the heaps of dresses and skirts lying round in little
pyramids. Now and then I would make some stringent rules: every
child must hang up her clothes, take care of her shoes and
stockings, and put her comb and hair-ribbon just where they could
be found in the morning. But, somehow, the rules were never kept. I
suppose I was a poor disciplinarian.
I went down stairs at length. Mr. Duncan was pacing the porch
alone. Papa had been called to see a sick neighbor. Mamma was
listening to poor old Mrs. Hairdsley’s troubles, told over for the
hundredth time, I am sure. She was a mild, inoffensive, weak-eyed
old lady, living with rather a sharp-tempered daughter-in-law. Fan
was out on an errand of mercy also.
“What a busy little woman you are!” he said. “I am glad to see you
at last; and I hope no one will fall sick, or want broth, or be in trouble
for the next fifteen minutes. I suppose clergymen’s houses are
always houses of mercy. I begin to feel conscience-smitten to think
that I am adding to the general burden. What will you do with two
boys?”
“I cannot exactly tell,” I answered slowly, at which he appeared a
good deal amused, though I did not see anything particularly funny in
it.
“I think I would like to come myself, if I were not going ‘over the
seas.’ What would I be good for? Could I do parish visiting?”
“Yes; and teach the Sunday school, and go around with a
subscription list, and—”
“O, the subscription list finishes me. I should stop at every gate,
and put down a certain amount, and pay it out of my own pocket.
Begging I utterly abhor.”
“But if you had nothing in your pocket? If your neighbors were
richer than you, and if you were trying to teach people that it was
their duty to provide for the sick and the needy?”
“Why, what a little preacher you are! Let us go out in the
moonlight. What a lovely night! Suppose we walk down to meet your
father. He said he should not stay long.”
I could think of no good excuse to offer; so we sauntered slowly
through the little yard and out to the street, both keeping silent for
some time.
“Miss Endicott,” he began presently, “I wish I could interest you in
my brothers. You have such a quaint, elder-sister air, that I know you
would have a good influence over them; though they may not prove
so very interesting,” he went on, doubtfully. “Louis is nervous, and
has been ill; and boys are—well, different from girls.”
I was not such a great ignoramus. I suppose he thought, because
we had a houseful of girls, we knew nothing whatever of boys; so I
answered, warmly,—
“The parishioners sometimes come to tea with two or three boys,
who think they ought to demolish the furniture as well as the supper.
Then there are the Sunday schools, and the picnics, and the
children’s festivals—”
“So you do see boys in abundance.”
“They are no great rarity,” I replied, drily.
“And you do not like them very much?”
“I do not exactly know.”
He laughed there. It vexed me, and I was silent.
“I think it a mistake when the girls are put in one family and the
boys in another. Sisters generally soften boys, tone them down, and
give them a tender grace.”
“And what are the brothers’ graces?” I asked.
“Boys have numberless virtues, we must concede,” he returned
laughingly. “I think they perfect your patience, broaden your ideas,
and add a general symmetry. They keep you from getting too set in
your ways.”
I saw him smile down into my face in the soft moonlight, and it did
annoy me. Men are always thinking themselves so superior!
“Our mother died when Stuart was a baby. She was always an
invalid. But the summer I spent with your mother is such a sunny
little oasis in my life, that I wanted the boys to have at least one
pleasant memory. I suppose I am selfish—one of the strong points of
the sex.”
“O,” I said, “I thought you were all virtues.”
“We have just about enough faults to preserve ballast. But
perhaps you do not like the idea of their coming.”
He studied my face intently for a moment, from my round chin up
to my hair. I remembered, in great confusion, that red-haired people
were suspected of being quick-tempered.
“I am sorry. They will be an annoyance. I ought to have thought—”
“You misunderstood me, Mr. Duncan,” I began, with a tremble in
my voice. “I should not have objected to their coming, even if I
considered that I had a right. It will ease papa’s burdens in another
way, and I am quite ready to do my part.”
“Little girl, there are a good many things that money cannot buy,”
he said gravely.
I had surely done it now! How mercenary he would think us! I
could have cried with vexation.
There was a silence of some minutes. I had an inward
consciousness that we were not foreordained to get on nicely
together.
“It is of some of these things that I would like to speak,” he began,
slowly. “The boys have been to a good school, to be sure; but they
never have had a home, or home training. And on some of the higher
points of morals, a woman’s influence does more by its silent grace
than hundreds of lectures. Will you be a little patient with their rough
ways and want of consideration? I am offering you a part of my
burden, to be sure; but then, with your father’s permission, I am to
share part of yours. I am to stand with you to-morrow at your little
sister’s christening. Believe me, that I am very glad to be here.”
Papa had intended to ask Mr. Searle, his senior warden. I was
surprised at the change.
“Do you not like that, either?” and there was a tinge of
disappointment in his tone.
“Excuse me. It was only the suddenness.”
“I like the claim it gives me upon all your remembrances. Then
your interest need only last a little while, if you so elect, while mine
stretches over a whole life.”
“There is papa!” I exclaimed, with a great breath of relief, and
sprang towards him. He put his dear arm around me, and I felt as if
my perplexities had come to a sudden end.
On the porch we found Fanny and mamma, and the conversation
became very bright and general. Indeed, we sat up past our usual
hour.
When Fan and I were up stairs she began at once.
“Mr. Duncan is just splendid! I envied you your walk, and I came
back so soon that I had half a mind to run after you.”
“I wish you had been in my place. We did not get on at all. I
wonder if we shall like the boys.”
“I shall not worry about them until they come.”
“But a fortnight soon passes, and then good-by to our quiet
house.”
“A quiet house, with seven children in it!” and Fan laughed merrily.
“Well they are not—”
“Boys! of course. But then, boys grow to be men. And men like
Stephen Duncan are charming. One can afford to have a little
trouble.”
“O, Fan! how can you talk so?”
“I wasn’t born blind or dumb. I cannot account for it in any other
way. Now, I dare say, Miss Prim, you are thinking of the two hundred
dollars at the end of the summer, and all that it is to buy.”
“It has to be earned first.”
“We will take Mrs. Green’s cheerful view of boarders. ‘They are not
much trouble in the summer, when you only eat ’em and sleep ’em.’”
I could not help smiling at the quotation.
“I wish it were Stephen instead. And how he talks of running over
to England! Not making as much of it as we should of going to New
York. It is just royal to be rich. Rose, I think I shall marry for money,
and set a good example to the five girls coming after me; for, my
dear, I have a strong suspicion that you will be an old maid.”
“O, Fanny, to-morrow will be Sunday, and the baby’s christening.”
“Dear little Tot! yes. And we must set her a pattern of sweetness,
so that she may see the manifest duty of all women. So, good-night,
Mother Hubbard of many troubles.”
Fan gave me two or three smothering kisses, and subsided. I tried
to do a little serious thinking, but was too sleepy; and, in spite of my
efforts, I went off in a dream about her and Mr. Duncan walking up
the church aisle together, Fan in a trailing white dress. I awoke with
the thought in my mind. But it was foolish, and I tried to get it out.
Sunday was beautiful. The air was full of fragrance; bloom of tree
and shrub, pungent odors of growing evergreens, and the freshening
breath of grassy fields. After a pleasant breakfast, the children were
made ready for church. Sundays were always such enjoyable days
with us! I don’t know quite what the charm was; but they seemed
restful, and full of tender talking and sweet singing.
After Sunday school, in the afternoon, the children were
catechized, and there was a short service.
Very few knew of the baby’s christening; so the congregation was
not larger than usual. After the lesson, we went forward, mamma,
Mrs. Whitcomb, baby, Mr. Duncan, and I. A sweet solemn service it
was, baby being very good and quiet. Edith Duncan. The second
name had been agreed upon in the morning, at Stephen’s request.
The children crowded around papa afterwards.
“I do not wonder that everybody loves him,” Mr. Duncan said, as
we walked homeward. “And I feel as if I had a small claim upon him
myself. I am a sort of brother to you now, Nelly.”
“Are you?” answered Nelly, with a roguish laugh. “I did not think it
was so near a relation as that.”
“Perhaps it may be a grandfather, then,” was the grave reply.
“O, that’s splendid!” declared Tiny Tim, who had big ears. “For we
never had a grandfather, you know, only—”
“Only what?”
“Your hair is not very white,” commented Tim, as if suspicious of so
near a relationship with a young man.
He laughed gayly.
“I mean to be adopted into the family, nevertheless. My hair may
turn white some day.”
“There is no hurry,” returned Fanny. “I doubt if Tim would be the
more cordial on that account.”
“Perhaps not;” with a shrewd smile. “But you will have to give me a
sort of elder brother’s place.”
“Will you really be our brother?” asked Daisy.
“I shall be delighted to, if every one will consent. Ask Miss Rose if I
may.”
“You like him—don’t you, Rose?” Papa said—
“We will take him for a brother,” I returned, gaspingly, my cheeks
scarlet, for fear of some indiscreet revelation.
“I have never had any sisters; so I am very glad to get you all. I
hope you will treat me well, and bring me home something nice
when you go abroad.”
“But we are not going,” said Tim; “and I don’t believe I could hem a
handkerchief nicely enough for you.”
“Then it will have to be the other way. Let me see: seven sisters.
Well, I shall not forget you while I am gone.”
Mr. Duncan went to church that evening with Fan and Nelly, and,
after he came home, had a long talk with papa out on the porch.
Papa had enjoyed his guest very much and I was glad of that. It had
been quite a holiday time.
After breakfast the next morning, Mr. Duncan went away. He took
little Edith in his arms, and walked up and down the room with her.
“I feel as if I did not want to go away,” he said, turning to mamma.
“I think you must spoil everybody in this house. I almost envy the
boys their summer vacation.—Ah, Miss Fanny, you see I am by no
means perfect.”
Fan nodded her head rather approvingly. I am not sure but she
liked a spice of wickedness.
“I shall remember your promise,” he said to me, with his good-by.
What had I promised? About the boys—was it? Well I would do my
best. I should have done it without his asking.
“And in three months or so I shall see you again. Good by, little
flock.”
Ah, little did we guess then how many things were to happen
before we saw him again!
But the house seemed quite lonesome without him. I made the
children ready for school, and then went at my rooms. If the boys
should be like Stephen, it would not be so very bad after all.
There was a deal of work to be done in the next fortnight. Our
maid, as usual, was called away, providentially, as Fan used to say
of them at any new disappearance, and we succeeded in getting a
middle-aged Irish woman, who could wash and iron excellently, but
who knew very little about cooking. But mamma said there was
always something lacking; and, since she was good and strong, it
would do. All these matters were barely settled, when a note came,
saying that Louis and Stuart Duncan would be at the station on
Friday at four.
Nelly walked over with papa. I had relented a little, and made their
apartment bright and sweet with flowers. I had a fancy that I should
like Louis the better; he, being an invalid, was, doubtless, gentle; and
I wheeled the easy-chair to a view of the most enchanting prospect
out of the south window. Then, as usual, I went back to the work of
getting supper. There is always so much eating going on in this
world, and you need so many dishes to eat it off of! We are not
flowers of the field, or fairies, to sup on dew.
“O, there they come—in a carriage!”
Tiny Tim clapped her hands at that, whereupon the baby crowed
and laughed.
A hack with two trunks. A bright, curly-haired boy sprang out, and
assisted Nelly in the most approved style. Then papa, and a tall,
slender young man, looking old for his eighteen years.
It did not seem a prepossessing face to me. The lips were thin, the
brow contracted with a fretful expression, the nose undeniably
haughty, and the cheeks sunken and sallow. Stuart was so different!
red and white, with glittering chestnut hair, and laughing eyes, that
were hazel, with a kind of yellowish tint in them, that gave his whole
face a sunny look. One warmed to him immediately.
Mamma went to the hall, and we followed; and the introductions
took place there.
“Take the trunks up to the room, Mat,” said my father.
The boys bowed, and followed, Stuart casting back a gay glance.
Papa took off his hat, kissed the baby, and sat down.
“I was quite shocked to see Louis,” he said, in an anxious tone.
“He looks very poorly indeed. We must try our best to nurse him
back to health and strength. Rose, there is some more work to do.”
The voices up stairs were raised quite high in dispute. Louis gave
a tantalizing laugh.
We never quarrelled. I do not know that we were so much more
amiable by nature; but our disputes were of small importance, and
never reached any great height. So we all started rather nervously.
“Boys!” said Fan, sententiously. “O, papa, dearest, I am so glad
that you came into the world a full-grown, evenly-tempered man, and
that we all could not help being sweet if we tried, seeing that we
follow your example.”
“Do you?” returned papa, archly. “I hope you do not use it all up,
and that there is a little left for the parish.”
“And the stranger within our gates.”
There seemed to be no cessation in the discussion up stairs; so,
presently, papa asked that the bell might be rung. Stuart answered
the summons, coming down two steps at a bound, and shaking the
house.
“Louis begs you to excuse him,” he said, with a graceful
inclination. “He is knocked up completely. He made such a muff of
himself at the examinations, that he has been cross as a bear ever
since. He has a lovely temper.”
There was a droll light in his eyes as he uttered this.
“Your brother said he was in poor health. So he—failed then?” and
papa’s voice dropped softly.
“Yes. Steve did not want him to try. He said there was no hurry
about his getting into college. I only wish somebody would coddle
me up, and tell me that I needn’t study. I think the whole world is in a
conspiracy against me.”
“You seem to thrive on it,” returned papa.
“O, there is no use of worrying one’s self into the grave, so far as I
can see. I believe in enjoying everything that I can squeeze a bit of
fun out of. So I laugh at Louis, and he gets angry.”
“It is just possible that he may not see the fun,” said papa, soberly.
“That is his lookout.”
“Is he really ill?” asked mamma.
“Not much, I guess. But he is as full of whims as any old granny!
He should have been a girl.”
“Keep him on your side of the house,” retorted Fan. “It is a good
thing that boys do not monopolize all the virtues.”
He looked at her with a peculiar stare, then laughed. He did seem
brimming over with merriment, and rather pleased that Fanny had
shown her colors. So they had a little gay sparring.
“Do you not think your brother would like a cup of tea?” asked
mamma.
“When he gets in a fit like this, he generally sulks it out,” returned
Stuart carelessly, rising and sauntering out on the porch.
Mamma could not resist, and presently went up stairs, tapping
lightly at the half-open door.
“I wish you would go away,” said a voice, crossly.
“It is I,” exclaimed mamma, in her soft, yet firm, tones, that always
commanded respect.
“O! excuse me;” and Louis half raised his head.
“Will you not have a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you;” rather ungraciously.
“Can I not do something for you? Does your head ache?”
“Yes. I do not want anything but quiet.”
“Very well; you shall have that,” she said, softly.
She came down stairs, with a little sigh.
“Is the bear still on exhibition, Mrs. Endicott?” asked Stuart.
“I am afraid you, in your perfect health, do not realize how hard
some things are to endure,” she said, with a touch of reproof in her
voice.

Limbo Reapplied On Living in Perennial Crisis and The Immanent Afterlife 1St Ed 2018 Edition Kristof K P Vanhoutte Full Chapter

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Limbo Reapplied: On Living in

Perennial Crisis and the Immanent

More information about this series at

Pontifical University Antonianum

Radical Theologies and Philosophies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939712

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Cultura Creative (RF)/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

In 1947, the famous French publishing house Gallimard issued the

attempt. The Larousse, the famous French dictionary/institution, defines

Stéphane Oppes, Benjamin McCraw, Christopher Beiting, and Father

Basel, Switzerland Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte

5 Modernity: A Limboic Fool’s Paradise 169

6 Extraduction: Ascent Out of Limbo 229

Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte is a Research Fellow of the International

Image 2.1 Andrea di Bonaiuto, Salita al Calvario, Crocefissione

Language, if we can ‘radicalize’ the Italian philosopher Giorgio

© The Author(s) 2018 1

constituted a major influence in the coming about of this book: Gordon

In an interesting little booklet called Living in Limbo: Life in the Midst of

and educational crisis, to even an anthropological crisis. However, crisis

form of cold reasoning. We do realize, however, that this also implies

starts by offering a first delineation of this concept. Although it has, con-

The book comes to an end with some meditation on the possible

overcome the repetitive and single-sided representation of the world in

We probably all have a vague understanding of the meaning of the word

according to http://www.tntisland.com/limbo.html, the Limmm-Bó was originally a ritual

© The Author(s) 2018 11

At a first glance, we can immediately notice, while considering the

chapter paragraph; page of the edition of Schneemelcher’s volume I used).

According to the words of Zbigniew Izydorczyk, who edited the

Bhaba in his ‘The True Sign of Emptiness’. Available: http://anishkapoor.com/185/mak-

At first glance, one might think to be confronted with a simple, appo-

it is very clear that there is some light on the walls of Limbo—espe-

first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred

work or function as they are supposed to work or function. While they

T was a bright June morning. The windows were all

WENT out to the kitchen and advised a few moments

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