Holy Saturday is an interesting day. One of von Balthasar's most provocative concepts were his reflections on Holy Saturday -- Christ's descent into Hell. His classical text is Mysterium Pascale: The Mystery of Easter, pp. 148-88. Perhaps his introductory comments can introduce us to his reflections:

The more eloquently the Gospels describe the passion of the living Jesus, his death and burial, the more striking is their entirely understandable silence when it comes to the time inbetween his placing in the grave and the event of the Resurrection. We are grateful to them for this. Death calls for this silence, not only by reason of the mourning of the survivors but, even more, because of what we know of the dwelling and condition of the dead. When we ascribe to the dead forms of activity that are ne and yet prolong those of earth, we are not simply expressing our perplexity. We are also defining ourselves against a partial event. It is a happening which affects the whole person, though not necessarily to the point of obliterating the huan subject altogether. It is a situation whcih signifies inteh first place the abandonment of all spontaneous activity and so a passivity, a state in which, perhaps the vital activity now brought to its end is mysteriously summed up" (p. 148).

One of von Balthasar's crucial reflections from Holy Saturday, is Christ's solidarity with the dead. As a consistent theme in von Balthasar is the objectivity of salvation in which we participate through Christ's participation as God taking on the fullness of human life -- even death. He writes at the end of the chapter, "The proclamation, in its sheer objectivity, and inasmuch as it is evangelion or good news, should be understood as an action which plants within eternal death a manifesto of eternal life-- not matter how that proclamation is made, or which persons are its heralds, or what the positive, or less positive dispositions of those whom the proclamation conerns. This removes at a stroke the problem, so pre-occupying for teh Fathers, of how those already dead can be subsequently converted, and not only of the possibility of such a post-mortem conversion but also of the number of thsoe thus converting.

The theme of liberation, that is, of the salvation offered to the dead, as the content of this proclamation, must be understood no less objectively. Jus as Jersus' condition in death is scarcely described in its subjective aspect, so here too the subjective effect of the proclamationon the 'spirits in prison' hardly enters into the reckoning. The dramactic portrait of the experience of triumph, of a joyful encounter between Jesus and the prsinoners, and inparticular between the new Adam and the old, is not prohibited as a form of pious contemplatoin, but it does go beyond what theology can affirm. . . . .

On Holy Saturday the Church is invited rather to follow at a distance" (pp. 180-1).