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'THERE can be no more hope," says a character in one of Elie Wiesel's Holocaust novels. "The Messiah came and the executioner goes right on executing. The Messiah came and the world is a vast slaughterhouse." The charge is brutally honest, and--by man--unanswerable. But in his powerful new book The Suffering of Love: Christ's Descent into the Hell of Human Hopelessness (Ignatius, 254 pp., $16.95), Catholic theologian Regis Martin finds an answer in the God who was forsaken by God. In the Holocaust, Martin writes, "we now see more clearly the centrality of the Cross in the work of the Incarnation"--because "only the Cross truly fashions a convincing link between God and man, especially the man who suffers without apparent meaning or hope."

The most ecumenical of Christian creeds affirm that Christ descended into Hell. In this doctrine Martin sees Christ--a Jewish man and the eternal Word--reduced to wordless silence in "complete vulnerability," in "solidarity with numberless silent victims." The reality of human suffering and lostness is within the very heart of the Trinity, for eternity; this solidarity in hopelessness suggests also a solidarity in hope--that somehow we men may also be unified with God in the heart of His joy and peace.

* Acrucial resource for Martin is the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88), who did a great deal to revive interest in the doctrine of Christ's descent into Hell. It should be noted that Balthasar's work on this particular issue has been paid the compliment of a massive dissent, in the form of the recently published Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell (Eerdmans, 458 pp., $36), by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick. The author contends that Balthasar has departed from the traditional understanding of this doctrine, in which Christ's descent was seen more as a part of the victory of Easter Sunday than as a part of the crushing defeat of Good Friday: "The truth of Christ's descent stands over against any 'tragic Christianity,' any seeking of redemption in God-abandonment as such, any attempt to breed the nihilism of the last century with holy death to selfishness." This book--based on the author's doctoral dissertation--is difficult and academic, not welcoming to the non-specialist. But it will give the curious reader some insight into how the Christian intellect has grappled, over the centuries, with its central mystery--a God who emptied himself, a God without sin who nonetheless became sin, to deliver mankind from evil.