The descent into Hades

The Apostles’ Creed, an ancient Western baptismal confession of faith, not actually authored by any of the holy apostles but rather believed to contain their teaching, includes the phrase, “He descended into hell.” As a young child in a Polish-American family, I learned this creed by heart in preparation for my first holy communion. All I could picture when saying the phrase and thinking about it was a fiery horizontal with dozens of hands and heads bobbing up and down in it, to the din of screams and moans. “Do they mean Jesus went down into that?” I thought to myself, “Ugh!” No further explanation was thought necessary. Somehow, there was also a notion that the hell that was being talked about was actually a place called purgatory, because no one ever got out of hell, but you could get out of purgatory if you knew how. It had something to do with having your living relatives say hundreds and hundreds of Hail Mary’s and naming you as the beneficiary. Again I thought, “Ugh!” But on first holy communion day, I was dressed up like a little bridegroom, given a black prayerbook and a black rosary, and marched into church side by side with a buck-toothed girl dressed up like a little bride carrying a white prayerbook and white rosary. Her parents and mine thought we made a cute couple, and made sure we would receive the sacrament side-by-side, like little newly-weds. And yes, now that we had come of age, we had the tools of our trade and expected to be little prayer warriors. I liked to read my prayerbook because it was written in Polish, and I was already becoming a linguist. The rosary got some half-hearted, dutiful use, and then used to hang on the crucifix above my bed till I went off to college, draped across the nailed hands of Jesus.

The foregoing ramble was conjured by my reading of Fr Stephen’s post Metaphors of the Atonement, in which he compares the Western Christian beliefs about Christ’s descent into Hades to those held by Eastern Christians, that is, the Orthodox. In my passage from the Episcopal Church to Greek Orthodoxy twenty-two years ago, those odd beliefs surrounding “He descended into hell” somehow disappeared unnoticed, along with many other facets of my childhood ‘faith.’ The richly-colored, mysterious ikons inundated my bewildered imagination as I attempted to adapt my mind to the Eastern Church as quickly as possible. The phrase “He descended into hell” disappeared, never to return, and so did all those poor souls tormented in the fire.

As an Orthodox catechumen, I discovered that faith was not formulated in creeds, but in the Σύμβολον της Πίστεως, the Symbol of the Faith (of Nicæa), in which the holy apostles and their successors, with fear and trembling, defined in human words the deposit of the Faith in a statement called The Symbol, from the Greek σύμβολον, sýmvolon, from the root words συν-, meaning ‘together,’ and βολή, a ‘throw’ or ‘volley,’ thus having the approximate meaning of ‘thrown together.’

“Thrown together?” I thought, and asked my catechist, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The answer was unexpected but convincing. The Symbol was the bringing back into unity the tongues that were divided and the peoples that were scattered at the destruction of the Tower of Babel. The opposite of The Symbol was the Diabol, the splitter, that which divides, the root phoneme of words such as diabolic and devil. The opposite event in scripture to the dividing of the tongues at Babel is the unification of the tongues that happened when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the holy apostles on the day of Pentecost. “Does that mean that we’re overriding God’s human containment policy?” I wondered. Not really. The people who received the Spirit of the living God were so changed that though they spoke a multitude of languages, they all could be understood to mean the same thing. “Everything begins to speak with strange dogmas, strange words and the strange teachings of the Holy Trinity” (lauds and vespers of Pentecost). What was received by the holy apostles in their anointing by the Spirit on Pentecost was handed over to their successors who handed it over to us. The Church therefore, I was told, does not teach this or that, as if it had teachings of its own. It only hands over the teaching that it has received from Christ and the apostles. To me, brought up as a Western Christian, these certainly were “strange dogmas, strange words and the strange teachings of the Holy Trinity,” and yet I was very glad to know them.

Returning to the topic, the descent into Hades, Fr Stephen writes,

The doctrine of the descent of Christ into Hades occupies an essential place in the works of Cyril of Alexandria. In his Paschal Homilies, he repeatedly mentions that as a consequence of the descent of Christ into Hades, the devil was left all alone, while hell was devastated: ‘For having destroyed hell and opened the impassable gates for the departed spirits, He left the devil there abandoned and lonely.’ This imagery is also found in John Chrysostom’s famous Catechetical Homily: “And not one dead is left in the grave.”

...[Contrast] this with the Descent into Hades’ development in Western Christianity:

The general conclusion can now be drawn from a comparative analysis of Eastern and Western understandings of the descent into Hades. In the first three centuries of the Christian Church, there was considerable similarity between the interpretation of this doctrine by theologians in East and West. However, already by the fourth to fifth centuries, substantial differences can be identified. In the West, a juridical understanding of the doctrine prevailed. It gave increasingly more weight to notions of predestination (Christ delivered from hell those who were predestined for salvation from the beginning) and original sin (salvation given by Christ was deliverance from the general original sin, not from the ‘personal’ sins of individuals). The range of those to whom the saving action of the descent into hell is extended becomes ever more narrow. First, it excludes sinners doomed to eternal torment, then those in purgatory and finally unbaptized infants.

This kind of legalism was alien to the Orthodox East, where the descent into Hades continued to be perceived in the spirit in which it is expressed in the liturgical texts of Great Friday and Easter, i.e., as an event significant not only for all people, but also for the entire cosmos, for all created life.

During the Portland Greek Festival, the first weekend of October every year, as a church tour guide people are always asking me, “What’s the difference between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism? They’re pretty much the same, aren’t they?” They often look startled when I tell them, “No, they are really very, very different.” They won’t let go, “But you guys look like Roman Catholics, you’ve got holy pictures and candles and statues and the mass, and all that stuff, don’t you?”

I blow the whistle (metaphorically), “CUT! No statues, no masses, yes ikons, yes candles and incense, yes ceremonial, but look more closely, please. There is no meaningless detail in Orthodoxy. Everything teaches, and more than just teaching, everything preserves us in the true following of Jesus, in true faith. When Jesus suffered for us, He descended into Hades, and emptied it of its captives, opening Paradise for them through the open gateway of His pure body, while trampling death by His death. Devil, here’s mud in your eye!”

This is the way I talk to them. Hmm, maybe that’s why I only get to give the tour by default, when no clergy show up on occasion.

A final thought on the descent into Hades.

Many Christians have never even heard of this act of God in Christ, being ignorant of the Symbol of the Faith and also of the scriptures’ foundational testimony. The first Christians knew and believed the fact of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day. They knew and believed the testimony of the holy apostles, with whom the resurrected Lord physically sojourned for forty days after His victory over death, teaching them all that they in turn handed over to us.
The Orthodox ikon usually called The Resurrection is actually an ikon of the descent into Hades. Notice, there is no fire anywhere. Just the poor old devil lying there in the dark with his hands and feet bound, surrounded by broken locks and chains and severed gates.
What a relief!

Christ is risen from the dead. By death trampling down death, and to those in the tombs, bestowing life.