A child who has to go through the woods in the dark will still be scared even if you prove to him a hundred times that there is no danger. He is not afraid of something specific that he could name, but rather he experiences in the dark the insecurity, the vulnerability, and the eeriness of existence in itself. Only a human voice could console the child; only the hand of a loving person could dispel the fear like a bad dream. There is a fear – the actual fear dwelling in the depth of our solitude – that cannot be overcome by reason but only through the presence of a loving person, because this fear does not concern something we can give a name to, but rather the eerie strangeness of our final solitude. Who has never known the holy-consoling miracle that a loving word in such a moment means? from The Sabbath of History … Ratzinger and Congdon … upcoming exhibit …
For the questions emerge: what in fact is death? And what actually happens when one descends into the depths of death? We shall have to think too that death is no longer the same since Christ descended into it, human existence are no longer the same since the human nature of Christ was and is allowed to touch God’s own being. Before, death was only death, separation from the land of the living and – even if in contrasting depth – something like hell was the nocturnal side of existence, impenetrable darkness. Now, however, even death is still life, and when we pass through the icy solitude of the gate of death, we ever encounter him who is the life, the one who wanted to be the companion of our final loneliness and who in the deadly solitude of Gethsemane’s fear and his cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” became sharer of our abandonments. A child who has to go through the woods in the dark will still be scared even if you prove to him a hundred times that there is no danger. He is not afraid of something specific that he could name, but rather he experiences in the dark the insecurity, the vulnerability, and the eeriness of existence in itself. Only a human voice could console the child; only the hand of a loving person could dispel the fear like a bad dream. There is a fear – the actual fear dwelling in the depth of our solitude – that cannot be overcome by reason but only through the presence of a loving person, because this fear does not concern something we can give a name to, but rather the eerie strangeness of our final solitude. Who has never known the holy-consoling miracle that a loving word in such a moment means? But where solitude occurs into which a transforming word of love can no longer penetrate, there we speak of hell. And we know that not a few people of our apparently so optimistic time are of the opinion that all encounter remains on the surface, that no one has access to the last, actual depth of the other, and that in the deepest foundation of the existence of us all dwells despair, yes, hell. Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this in one of his dramas artistically, at the same time exposing the core of his teaching on man. And, to be sure, one thing is certain. There is a night whose forsakenness no consoling voice penetrates; there is a door we pass through alone, the portal of death. All the fear of this world is finally the fear of this solitude. For this reason in the Old Testament the word for the realm of death and for hell were one and the same, sheol. For death is loneliness par excellence. The loneliness, however, that can no longer be illuminated by love, that is so deep that love no longer gains access, is hell.