Descent and Ascent as Theological Grammar

From Katabasis to Kenosis, From Anabasis to Theosis.

I wish to argue here that the recurring pattern of descent and ascent, expressed mythically as katabasis and anabasis, and metaphysically in Neoplatonism as proodos and epistrophe, is not only a formal analogy to Christian theology. Rather, it is decisively reconfigured and fulfilled in the doctrines of kenosis and theosis. In Christianity, this pattern ceases to be merely narrative or purely metaphysical. It becomes Christological and participatory, thereby deepening and fulfilling the soteriological promise latent in all earlier cycles of descent and ascent. The descent–ascent schema thus functions as a kind of “grammar” of transformation; a symbolic system of rules that governs how the language of salvation is spoken and understood. This grammar reaches its culmination in the claim that divine self-emptying (kenosis) grounds and enables human participation in the divine life (theosis). My argument proceeds by tracing the pattern from its mythic roots through Neoplatonic metaphysics into its theological fulfillment in Christianity, with particular attention to how the doctrine of Christ’s descent into Hell integrates and radicalizes earlier forms of katabasis.

Joakim Skovgaard, Christ in the Realm of the Dead (1891-1894), National Gallery of Denmark

I. Katabasis and Anabasis: Narrative Descent as Transformation

In mythic literature, the paired motifs of descent (katabasis) and ascent (anabasis) function as narrative structures that embody transformation through crisis, a moment of intense trial and confrontation, and negation, the symbolic passage through loss, death, and reversal. The hero’s archetypal journey into the underworld is thus never a mere adventure story. At its most profound, it is a symbolic passage through death that reconstitutes identity and enables the hero’s return to the world above with newly acquired understanding and power. A paradigmatic instance appears in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus descends to the house of Hades to consult the shade of Tiresias. The encounter is stark and visceral: “And once my vows and prayers had invoked the nations of the dead, I took the victims, over the trench I cut their throats and the dark blood flowed in—and up out of Erebus they came, flocking toward me now, the ghosts of the dead and gone ...”¹

As scholars like Walter Burkert have pointed out, such mythic descents echo ancient ritual patterns of initiation, in which the participant undergoes a symbolic death, often enacted through an ordeal or ritual confrontation with the underworld, only to be reborn into a new existential status.² Hence, katabasis functions as a structured passage through radical negation. The hero confronts mortality, chaos, the dissolution of ordinary identity, and even the limits of human knowledge. Yet what appears as loss or personal destruction becomes the necessary condition for renewal. Only by passing through this darkness does the hero emerge reoriented and empowered, bearing new insight or authority that makes the return (anabasis) and the reconstitution of order possible.

This structure reaches a profound intensification in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The poem opens with a personal and universal katabasis: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Here, the descent through the circles of Hell is no longer simply a Homeric quest for prophetic knowledge or heroic glory. Dante’s katabatic descent becomes a moral and ontological unveiling ordered by divine justice, in which the pilgrim confronts sin, both personal and cosmic, equally under the gaze of history and eternity.

In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach argues that Dante achieves this breakthrough beyond ancient forms of katabasis /anabasis by means of “figural realism.” Dante represents real, historically specific individuals (such as in his portrayal of contemporary figures like Farinata and Cavalcante) with full psychological depth, yet situates them within a divine, eternal order where their earthly lives are not effaced but fulfilled and revealed in their ultimate meaning.³ Unlike classical literature, which tends to reduce characters into types, Dante shows that a person’s concrete historical identity, encompassing political loyalties, personal loves, and inner temperament, persists even in the afterlife, so that the temporal and the eternal coexist in a single, unified reality. In this way, each figure is both a literal individual and a typological “figure” whose life points beyond itself, and whose journey of descent or ascent is therefore simultaneously immanent and transcendent.

Archaic myth, such as we encounter in Homer, supplies the primordial narrative form of descent and ascent, one in which authentic transformation requires a passage through darkness, negation, and confrontation with death. Yet while myth vividly dramatizes this pattern, it does not yet provide a metaphysical or theological explanation for why this structure appears so universally compelling. For that, we turn to a philosophical articulation of this pattern in Neoplatonic philosophy.

II. Proodos and Epistrophe: Ontological Descent and Return

Neoplatonism makes explicit the metaphysical underpinnings that remain implicit in mythic narratives of katabasis and anabasis. Whereas myth presents descent and ascent as dramatic events, Neoplatonism elevates them into ontological principles governing the structure of reality itself. In Plotinus, for example, katabatic descent finds its philosophical expression as proodos (procession), the necessary emanation of all immanent things from the One. Plotinus writes: “It is like a spring which has no other source but gives itself to all rivers and is not exhausted by them, but remains itself in peace.”⁴ As A. H. Armstrong emphasizes, this production is not a temporal event or act of creation, but an eternal, necessary relation of dependence. It is like an eternally overflowing fountain, and multiplicity flows from the originary unity as its natural expression and outward radiance, without in any way diminishing the source. The One remains transcendent, perfectly unchanging, and everything that exists is an overflowing image of its perfection.

The countervailing movement of return (anabasis), embodied in classical myth by the heroes’ return from the underworld, corresponds to the Neoplatonic epistrophe (reversion or conversion), which describes the soul’s ascent back towards its point of origin. Plotinus describes it as an interior journey: “The soul… must ascend again to the Good… becoming one with it.”⁹ As the Neoplatonic scholar John M. Dillon observes, this ascent is fundamentally contemplative. It is brought about through a reorientation of consciousness away from the fragmented multiplicity of the sensible world and toward the integrative domain of intelligible reality. By means of purification and intellectual elevation, the soul recognizes its true nature and seeks reunion with the divine source. Later Neoplatonism, especially in Proclus, formalizes this dynamic into a comprehensive triadic structure: “Every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it.”¹¹

This tripartite schema represents the most systematically eloquent and philosophically rigorous articulation of the descent–ascent pattern in antiquity. It provides a precise metaphysical language for understanding why transformation requires both an outgoing movement and a parallel return. The soul’s return journey to the One is described as ecstatic, yet Neoplatonism remains fundamentally impersonal and abstract. Unlike the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the process of descent (proodos) into multiform being is an inevitable metaphysical necessity rather than a free, voluntary act of a creator God. Ascent (epistrophe) is achieved through contemplative detachment and intellectual vision, not through personal relationship with the Divine or salvation through sacrificial love. For all its metaphysical rigor and architectural beauty, however, it lacks the existential richness and personal communion that will come to define its Christian reconfiguration.

III. Kenosis and Theosis: Christological Reconfiguration

Christian theology reconfigures the descent–ascent pattern by grounding it decisively in the person and work of Christ. What was mythic narrative in Homer and metaphysical necessity in Plotinus becomes personal, voluntary, and salvific action. The ancient grammar of transformation reaches its fulfillment when the eternal Logos enacts a descent that is neither heroic trial nor inevitable procession. In the incarnate Son, katabasis is transformed into self-emptying love (kenosis), and the corresponding ascent (anabasis) metamorphoses into participatory deification (theosis) rather than contemplative reversion to an impersonal source.

The Christological hymn in the Epistle to the Philippians articulates this movement with unique concision and force:

“[Christ Jesus], though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself [ekenōsen], taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”

Here, descent is no longer a necessary emanation from the One or a hero’s ordeal in the underworld, but the free, loving self-gift of the divine Son, who voluntarily assumes the full reality of human suffering and mortality. The eternal Logos does not merely ‘overflow’ but empties himself (Phil 2:7). This kenosis does not imply any loss or diminution of his divinity; the Son remains fully and unchangingly God. Rather, the eternal Word freely assumes a human nature in addition to his divine nature, taking the ‘form of a servant’ with all its limitations.⁵ In this humble state, the enfleshed Son submits himself to death, even death on a cross, for the sake of our salvation.

This kenotic movement reaches its furthest radicalization in Christ’s descent into Hell (Descensus ad inferos or the Harrowing of Hell). Tradition, drawing on 1 Peter 3:19 and Ephesians 4:9, portrays the crucified Christ entering the realm of the dead not as a powerless shadow but as a victorious liberator. Unlike Odysseus and other mythic heroes, he does not consult the dead for knowledge or glory. He shatters the gates of Hades, binds the “strong man” (Satan), and leads Adam, Eve, and the righteous of the Old Testament out of Sheol.⁶ In this way, katabasis becomes a redemptive invasion wherein death and godforsakenness are not merely endured but assumed and defeated from within. What ancient myth could only dramatize as a symbolic passage through negation, Christ’s resurrection enacts as an ontological victory over negation itself.

IV. Kenosis and Theosis as a Single Reciprocal Movement

As the Harrowing of Hell serves to illustrate, Christ’s kenotic descent does not stand in isolation from the rest of his earthly mission. It participates in a single complementary movement whose other term is theosis (divinization). On this account, unlike katabasis and anabasis, kenosis and theosis should not be understood as purely sequential stages, where descent is later superseded by ascent, but reciprocally implied elements of a singularly salvific divine–human exchange. Two thinkers who elucidate this reciprocity with special clarity are Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) and the modern Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944).

To begin with, both men reject any account in which kenosis functions merely as a provisional descent later overridden by ascent and glory. On the contrary, they see kenosis as the means by which God communicates His divine life, and theosis as redeemed humanity’s resulting participation in that life. Bulgakov goes so far as to identify kenosis as the “basic, unifying idea for theology,” extending far beyond the Incarnation, and functioning as the governing force at the heart of everything from creation to eschatology.

While Bulgakov concedes that “kenosis as self-diminution, or condescension, is foreign to creation, which, on the contrary, is oriented toward ascent, deification,” nevertheless, in the fullness of time, “the two postulates are to be vitally, ontologically united.” In this union, divine self-limitation and creaturely ascent find their mutual fulfillment when “God will be all in all.” This structural insight closely parallels Maximus’s formulation in Ambiguum 10, where he presents God and humanity as “paradigms of one another.” Here, Maximus posits that “as much as man, enabled by love, has divinized himself for God, to that same extent God is humanized for man by His love for mankind.” In this reciprocal exchange, divine “humanization” (kenotic descent) and human “deification” are not opposed but mutually corresponding movements. Hence, for both thinkers, the Incarnation is not a contingent remedy for sin but the eternal intention of God. As Maximus declares, “the Logos of God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”

Bulgakov’s elevation of kenosis to a universal theological principle stands in deep continuity with this vision. The Logos does not descend once, for the mystery of divine enfleshment, the Son’s kenosis, permeates the entire economy of creation and salvation. This logic echoes Maximus’s teaching in the Mystagogia that creatures participate in God “in proportion to their capacity.” In other words, God gives Himself fully, yet kenotically; that is to say, in a manner accommodated to the creature’s freedom and finitude. Kenosis thus safeguards, rather than undermines, the possibility of genuine theosis.

Finally, both theologians understand that eschatological consummation is not the abolition but fulfillment of kenosis, enabling humanity to attain its supreme vocation “by becoming a ‘god by grace.’” Maximus likewise sees the end as the state in which God is “all in all,” not by erasing creaturely distinction but by bringing creation into perfect, yet differentiated, communion with Himself. Deification perfects rather than dissolves difference. To become godlike is not to transcend humanity but to participate ever more deeply in the self-giving love that is the inner life of the divine Godhead.

V. Poetics of Descent and Ascent: George Mackay Brown’s “The Harrowing of Hell”

The theological and metaphysical structures traced in this essay, from mythic katabasis and anabasis, through Neoplatonic proodos and epistrophe, to their Christological fulfillment in kenosis and theosis, find vivid poetic embodiment in George Mackay Brown’s short lyric “The Harrowing of Hell.” The theological and metaphysical structures traced in this essay, from mythic katabasis and anabasis, through Neoplatonic proodos and epistrophe, to their Christological fulfillment in kenosis and theosis, find vivid poetic embodiment in George Mackay Brown’s short lyric “The Harrowing of Hell.”

Completed in the final days of the Orkney poet’s life, the poem does not merely illustrate the doctrine of the descensus ad inferos. Instead, it enacts the descent–ascent grammar as a symbolic, liturgical, and imagistic whole. In Brown’s spare, resonant lines, the ancient pattern of transformation is rendered visible. What commences as narrative crisis in Homer, continues as ontological necessity in Plotinus, and concludes as voluntary redemptive love in Christian theology, converges here in a single, luminous movement. The poem thus serves as a culminating demonstration of the essay’s argument that this grammar of descent and ascent reaches its deepest fulfillment when divine self-emptying (kenosis) grounds and enables human participation in divine life (theosis).

Andrea Mantegna, Descent into Limbo (1492).

The poem opens with a deliberate, measured katabasis:

He went down the first step.
His lantern shone like the morning star.
Down and round he went
Clothed in his five wounds.

This initial descent immediately merges mythic katabasis with Christological kenosis. The downward spiral into darkness recalls the hero’s archetypal journey into the underworld (as in Odysseus’s consultation of Tiresias), yet the lighted “lantern” (John 1:9; 9:5; 12:46) shining “like the morning star” (Rev 22:16) already intimates that this is not a simple exploratory quest or heroic trial.⁷ It is the salvific invasion of death by the One who spoke of Himself as the “Light of the world,” and that those who follow Him “will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Clothed in his “five wounds,” the descending figure is unmistakably the crucified Christ, whose movement enacts the kenotic hymn of Philippians 2: the eternal Son freely emptying himself, assuming the full reality of human suffering and mortality. Unlike the Neoplatonic proodos, an impersonal, necessary emanation from the One into multiplicity, this descent is personal, voluntary, and ecstatic. It is the divine light going “outside itself” into the realm of shadows and death. The lantern’s radiance thus portrays this ekstasis as both an act of self-transcendence and a redemptive mission to fallen creation’s most benighted region.

The poem’s structure, seven successive “steps” spiraling downward, renders descent as ordered and progressive, evoking the triadic Neoplatonic schema of remaining, proceeding, and returning, while reversing and personalizing its direction. Rather than a diffusion from unity into fragmented multiplicity, this katabasis becomes a gathering and liberating movement. At each level, figures from salvation history emerge from the shadows in reverse chronological order: Solomon (teacher of wisdom), David (the shepherd king and psalmist):

Solomon whose coat was like daffodils
Came out of the shadows.
He kissed Wisdom there, on the second step.

The boy whose mouth had been filled with harp-songs,
The shepherd king
Gave, on the third step, his purest cry.
     At the root of the Tree of Man, an urn
     With dust of apple blossom.

Downward, past the biblical figures of Joseph (dreamer and patriarch), Jacob (wrestler with the angel), and Abel (first victim of death), the poem descends:

Joseph, harvest-dreamer, counsellor of pharaohs
Stood on the fourth step.
He blessed the lingering Bread of Life.

He who had wrestled with an angel,
The third of the chosen,
Hailed the King of Angels on the fifth step.

Abel with his flute and fleeces
Who bore the first wound
Came to the sixth step with his pastorals

This descent thus traverses not only spatial but historical and ontological depth, reaching back to the root of fallen humanity. In this way, Brown’s poem integrates the mythic confrontation with death, the metaphysical procession into being, and the kenotic assumption of creaturely limits into a single redemptive trajectory.

Each encounter on the steps deepens the meaning of Christ’s descent as transfiguration-within-negation. Each encounter on the steps deepens the meaning of descent as transfiguration-within-negation. Solomon, the wise king, kisses the embodied “Wisdom” of God on the second step. David offers his “purest cry,” the fruit of his Christological Psalmody, on the third; Joseph blesses the “Bread of Life,” the immolated yet revivified and vivifying body of Christ, on the fourth, introducing an unmistakable Eucharistic resonance that links the Harrowing to the Son’s ongoing sacramental presence.

Abel, “who bore the first wound,” and thus a type of Christ, arrives at the sixth step “with his pastorals,” the sacrificial firstborn of his flock (Genesis 4:4) that God found pleasing. A reminder that the effects of Christ’s atoning death and resurrection reach all the way back to the archetypal act of violence in human history itself. These moments reveal that katabasis, when reconfigured as kenosis, can never be mere negation or loss. It is divine love willingly descending into the abyss, turning the silence of the tomb into a cry of the heart and the fields of death into the very ground of blessing.

The echo of the Psalmist’s cry carries over to the seventh and final step, where the poem reaches its ontological nadir and its kenotic climax:

On the seventh step down
The tall primal dust
Turned with a cry from digging and delving.

The descent fittingly arrives at the ground of human existence itself, the “primal dust,” Adam, the primordial man. In these lines, we can also catch an echoing of the Genesis creation account, as well as a reverberation from the urn of “dust of apple blossom” introduced earlier.

Adam’s turning “with a cry” marks a pivotal reversal in the poem. It is the crucial moment when katabasis/kenosis achieves its purpose and opens onto anabasis/theosis. The cry seems to act as both an awakening and a response, the first movement of the soul’s return to life. What Neoplatonism described as contemplative epistrophe, an intellectual reorientation toward the One, becomes, in Mackay Brown’s Christian vision, a personal, relational turning enabled by Christ’s victorious presence, a poetic and spiritual metanoia. Here, the kenotic Christ does not merely consult the dead (as Odysseus did) or emanate abstractly. He liberates from within, shattering the power of katabatic negation itself.

The final stanza completes this reciprocal movement with an evocatively quiet, almost eschatological radiance:

     Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in a garden
     Through drifts of apple-blossom.

The “garden” recalls Eden, yet it is transfigured. The “apple-blossom” whose dust appeared at the root of the Tree of Man in the third stanza, now drifts along as an enchanting sign of renewed creation. This is no simple return to origins (anabasis as restoration alone) but an elevated beginning, what Christian theology understands as theosis, humanity’s participation in divine life “by grace.” The most profound descent (kenosis) has already become the beginning of ascent (theosis). Divine self-emptying reaches down to the primal dust so that creaturely existence might be drawn up into communion with the self-giving love of God.

The poem’s final image thus fulfills the essay’s central claim. The ancient grammar of transformation finds its culmination when mythic drama and metaphysical necessity are taken up into the personal, voluntary, and participatory reality of Christ’s work. In this way, it offers a fitting poetic synthesis of the argument developed here. Christianity does not discard the primordial grammar of descent and ascent but appropriates, radicalizes, and brings it to fruition.

The long journey of descent and ascent thus reaches its telos in the Christian mystery. What myth dramatized and philosophy formalized finds its consummation when the eternal Logos empties himself even to the point of death and hell, so that humanity might be raised into participation in the divine nature. Kenosis grounds theosis; or, to put it in mythopoetic terms, the deepest katabasis enables the truest anabasis. In Christ, this ancient pattern is not abandoned but perfected. Divine self-emptying and human deification become one reciprocal movement, the selfsame grammar by which God speaks salvation, and creation learns to express its grateful return.

1. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 11.38–42.

2. See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion. Trans. J Raffian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), especially “IV. The Dead, Heroes, and Chthonic Gods,” 190-215.

3. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), in particular “8. Farinata and Cavalcante,” 174-202.

4. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), III.8.10: ὥσπερ πηγὴ μὴ ἔχουσα ἄλλην ἀρχήν, ἑαυτὴν δὲ πᾶσι τοῖς ποταμοῖς παρέχουσα, καὶ οὐκ ἐκλείπουσα ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν, μένουσα δὲ αὐτὴ ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ.

5. “He emptied himself, not by laying aside the divine nature, but by assuming human nature. He is said to have emptied himself, not because he lost what he had, but because he took on what he did not have.” Aquinas, Commentary on Philippians, ch. 2, lect. 2. See also Summa Theologiae, III, q. 1, a. 2.

6. In addition to Ephesians 4:8-10 (leading captives in His train, descending into the “lower parts of the earth”) and 1 Peter 3:18-20 (Christ preached to the spirits in prison), Tradition also invokes Colossians 2:15 (disarming rulers and authorities, triumphing over them), Acts 2:24-31, and Revelation 1:18 (Christ holding the keys of Death and Hades) in ellaborating the Son’s trimphant liberation of Satan’s captives from Hell. See J.A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell: A Comparative Study of an Early Christian Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1930), and Jeffrey A. Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead: The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

In the Harrowing, Jesus confronts and defeats the powers of darkness, often including binding or chaining Satan as part of plundering hell’s “house” (echoing Jesus’ parable in Matthew 12:29 / Mark 3:27 about binding the “strong man” to plunder his goods). Revelation’s binding (an angel seizing, chaining, and sealing Satan in the abyss for 1,000 years to prevent him from deceiving the nations) can be seen as a parallel imaging of this cosmic victory over sin and death:

“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.” Revelation 20: 1-3.

7. All lines quoted are taken from George Mackay Brown, “The Harrowing of Hell,” in The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, ed. A. Bevan and B. Murray (London: John Murray, 2006), 400-401.