Abstract
What is Limbo, and what is it all about? To allow a smoother encounter with the purely technical aspects of the theological discourse on Limbo, this chapter starts with a discussion, a sort of visual ‘appetizer’, of Andrea di Bonaiuto’s (1367) and Anish Kapoor’s (1992) respective fresco and installation entitled ‘Descent into Limbo’. This first encounter with Limbo, it being a walled-in realm (like large parts of today’s world), allows to establish a first clear analogous link with living in perennial crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
Limbo, 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.
- 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 general 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.
- 3.
Available: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P13.HTM.
- 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).
- 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 authoritative—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.
- 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/making-emptiness-by-homi-k-bhabha; last accessed September 2, 1997.
- 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 particularly 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 crushing 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).
- 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).
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Vanhoutte, K.K.P. (2018). Visual Anteprima. In: Limbo Reapplied. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78913-2_2
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