On Descending into Hell
Q. What do we mean when we say that he descended to the dead?
A. We mean that he went to the departed and offered them also the benefits of redemption.
“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and giving life to those in the tomb.”
This, the first of the anthems the prayer book recommends in the burial liturgy to be sung or said as the body is borne from the church, is the 1979 Book of Common Prayer’s rendition of the Paschal troparion, a refrain sung during the celebration of Easter in the Byzantine Rite.
I’ll admit that the answer to “what do we mean when we say that he descended to the dead” feels equal parts sterile and anemic. It’s not wrong, but it feels so underwhelming. But this use of a classical element of the Easter liturgy to conclude the (Church portion of) the burial liturgy gets to the deeper theological point that underlies the affirmation of Christ’s descent to the dead.
The almost-Christian, popular portrayal of a guaranteed post-mortem ascent to heaven or descent to Hell, of a more-or-less continuous conscious existence with simply infinitely more pleasure or pain, has perhaps blunted the terror, offense, and reality of death itself. Death is not the problem, but merely a doorway. “Fear of death” is really just another way of saying “fear of Hell,” fear that comes with the uncertainty of whether you will be cast into an eternal torture chamber. It is such an account, an account that soft-peddles death as a mere doorway or transition point, that could offer up the pseudo-profound, cloyingly sentimentalized vision of death as a potential friend and equal offered by something like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Such a vision does not really present us with death itself, at least not as it has been understood in the Christian tradition, and, indeed by the Greek and Near Eastern thought-worlds that preceded it. Death was understood not only as the cessation of this embodied life, but as the end, or at the very least the radical diminishment of Life itself. Expressing the miserable, shadowy existence of the dead, Achilles proclaims in Homer’s Odyssey, “I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all these breathless dead” (11.556-8). Similarly, the Epic of Gilgamesh offers a grim view of all the dead existing in a land of eternal shadows with nothing but dust and mud to eat (tablet 7). At best, the “hope” for all the dead is a shadowy, half-conscious existence devoid of any of the pleasures of this life. At worst, and perhaps more likely, these are poetic or symbolic representations of the grave, of a realization that death means only decay and dissolution, the end of consciousness and personal being. Insofar as knowing and experiencing the world and the self as a center of consciousness is at least part of what it means to bear the image of God and part of the goodness of our existence, death understood in this way cannot be anything more than an evil and a tragedy. Much better an attitude toward death in and of itself than that contained in Harry Potter is that of Dylan Thomas, imploring us, “Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Even if under our own power death is an inevitability, it can in and of itself only ever be an enemy of life, deserving only of rage and contempt as it drags us away.
Such seems to have been the position of Saint Paul in referring to death as the “last enemy” (1st Corinthians 15:26). If God is fullness of life and being and relationship and harmony, death is the complete opposite, a turning toward chaos, isolation, and, ultimately, annihilation. Death manifests in the physical cessation of life and decay of the body, but it also emerges in the forces of violence, of war, of social division, of cruelty and abuse. The wages of Sin is Death, Paul tells us in Romans 6:23, because the logical outcome of separation from God, from the source of existence, is dissolution into nothingness.
There is for the Christian no friendship with Death because Death is the end of relationship. There is no equality with Death because Death is the end of beings that can be compared. And, while there may be the kind of sad resignation toward Death seen equally in Homer and the story of Gilgamesh, there can be no peace with Death, since peace is a state of wholeness and integration, a state definitionally opposed to the dis-integration of Death.
Left to our own devices, resignation or raging are the only options open to us in relation to death. Yet, the troparion and the burial liturgy and the catechism and, above all, Saint Paul affirm a third more glorious possibility—that death can be, indeed has been, defeated. This defeat of death is brought about through death itself, and I talked in much greater depth about this in my post on the significance of the Resurrection.
All of what has so far been said would point to the sufficiency of saying that Jesus died and was resurrected—certainly that is where the Nicene Creed stops, affirming as it does that Christ suffered, was buried, and rose again. Similarly Paul’s core proclamation of the good news is that Christ died, was buried, and was raised on the third day (1st Corinthians 15:3-4). Is anything more added by the affirmation that Jesus “descended to the dead”? Is this just another way of describing his burial?
Certainly there are Christian traditions that would claim that nothing extra is added by an assertion to Jesus descended to the dead. There is a tradition that sees the most faithful interpretation of scripture as an affirmation of “soul sleep,” or some similar concept, of the idea of the complete end of consciousness for the dead until the general resurrection and judgement. However, there is also a long-standing tradition of the Harrowing of Hell, of the idea that Christ essentially did a jailbreak for those who died in the time before the incarnation. Such thinking appeared already as early as the second century and was an especially prominent part of English Christianity in the middle ages. Moreover, while they do not speak to Christ releasing any captive dead, 1st Peter 3:1-19 and 1 Peter 4:6 both imply the dead existing in a state whereby the Gospel can be proclaimed to them, a prospect that seems significantly more difficult in a state of utter non-consciousness.
Christ’s descent to the dead, as both the Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds affirm, means more than simply some kind of hope for a continued conscious existence in death before the resurrection or even a second chance for those who died prior to the incarnation, although it seems to include these ideas. More importantly, the affirmation of the descent among the dead is an affirmation of a kind of dramatic prevenient grace of a kind affirmed in John Wesley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Karl Rahner, of a God who allows us to turn from God but never abandons us to the full consequences of that decision, of a God whose “Yes” to us is always bigger than our “no” to God. We see in this affirmation that even the state following physical death is not the full extent and annihilation of the Death that is God’s final enemy. As Psalm 139:7 says, “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.” God refuses to abandon us completely, even as we seem to be at the uttermost extreme of self-imposed separation from God.
This last point raises my last point, a significant terminological question: Those familiar with both Rite I and Rite II versions of the Apostles’ Creed will see that the framers of the Catechism have opted to use the Rite II’s “he descended to the dead,” a translation of the Latin phrase descendit ad inferos, rather than Rite I’s “he descended into hell.” At first blush this may seem a more biblically sound and theologically expansive position. Certainly the concept of Hell as a place of eternal punishment is a later development and codification. The Old Testament knows almost nothing of such a place, and the New Testament offers us various parabolic and metaphoric images founded on no less than three separate Greek words that only ambiguously point toward a concrete place of conscious eternal punishments. Likewise, one could point to the rise in prominence of either hopeful or dogmatic universalism, positions seemingly disallowed by an affirmation of Hell.
Except that affirming a descent to the more neutral place of the dead may actually have the opposite consequence. Aquinas, who had no problem accepting an eternal hell of the damned, actually went to great pains to distinguish Christ’s descent to Hell in terms of essence and effects so that Christ could not be said to descend in essence to this particular neighborhood of the infernal city (ST III, q. 52, art 2). Affirmation that Christ descended to the uttermost point of separation from God, the essential character of the affirmation of Hell, opens up the possibility of universal redemption in a way that simply affirming Christ’s descent to the dead does not. This, I believe, is the real import of affirming Christ’s descent to the dead, or better, Hell, and his defeat of it. Here lies an affirmation that there is no place that we can go that is completely cut off from God, no place that is truly and fully beyond redemption. It is to affirm that as long as there is being there is hope—and that the dead still have in some way some manner of being. Equally importantly, this is to affirm a hope in Christ, not just some hope in our capacity to embrace or rage against death, or in some natural state of affairs in the world. Death is truly an enemy, a force driving toward annihilation, and yet God enters into this space, catches us as we plummet into the abyss and always offers a way to turn back and ascend again toward God.
Read More
