The Descent into Hell: Why Christ Went Down and Which Hell He Entered (Question 52, Articles 1–2)

Orientation #

He opens by noting that having treated what happened to Christ’s body (the sepulchre), we now come to what happened to his soul: the descent into hell, as scripture and the Creed say. He mentions a talk he once gave called “the Forgotten Article,” since the descent appears in the Apostles’ Creed but not in the Nicene. The neighbouring classes treat Christ’s death and burial in the Tertia Pars and, after this, the parallel questions on the descent in the Commentary on the Sentences.

The class, in order #

1. The eight questions of q. 52 (“about this eight things are asked”) #

He reads Thomas’s division of the question: (1) was it suitable for Christ to descend to hell; (2) into which hell he descended; (3) whether he was there as a whole; (4) whether he contracted any delay there; (5) whether he liberated the holy fathers; (6) whether he liberated the damned; (7) whether he liberated the boys who died in original sin; (8) whether he liberated men from purgatory. Aside: “the Forgotten Article” — because the Nicene Creed omits it, people do not think about it.

2. Objections of a. 1 (“it was not suitable for Christ to descend”) #

1. Augustine, Epistle to Evodius: nowhere in Scripture is hell (infernum) mentioned as something good. But Christ’s soul does not descend to something bad — nor do the souls of the just. He glosses uspiam = “anywhere.” Aside: hell used to be the old standby of the four last things — death, judgment, heaven, hell — which put the fear of God in people.
2. Descent cannot belong to Christ’s divine nature, which is wholly immobile, so only to the assumed nature; but what Christ did in the assumed nature is ordered to human salvation, and salvation was already achieved by the passion, which freed us from guilt and punishment.
3. At death his soul was separated from the body placed in the sepulchre; but the soul, being incorporeal, cannot move locally, since local motion belongs to bodies, and “descent” implies bodily motion. Sed contra: the Symbol (of the Apostles) — “he descended into hell”; and Ephesians 4:9, “who is it that ascended but because he first descended to the lower parts of the earth.”

3. The three reasons in the body of a. 1 (“He Himself came to carry our punishment”) #

1. He came to bear our punishment to free us from it (Isaiah: “truly he bore our infirmities and carried our sorrows”). From sin man incurs not only bodily death but descent into hell; so as he died to free us from death, he descended to free us from that descent. Hosea: “O death, I will be your death; I will be your bite/morsel” — he jokes that he does not take the whole thing, he bites it.
2. That the devil, overcome by the passion, be despoiled of those he detained (Zechariah 9, “you also, in the blood of your testament, have sent out those chained in the lake”; Colossians 2, taking away the princes and powers, he led them forth confidently).
3. That as he showed his power on earth living and dying, so he might show it in hell by visiting and illuminating it (Psalm 23, “Lift up your gates, princes” — i.e. princes of hell, take away the power by which until now you detained men; Philippians 2, every knee bending, celestial, terrestrial and infernal).

4. Replies of a. 1 (“the name of hell sounds in the evil of punishment”) #

• Ad 1: “hell” names the evil of punishment, not the evil of guilt; Christ descended not as owing punishment but to free those subject to it — the punishment here being especially the denial of the vision of God, which could not be overcome until he had died on the cross.
• Ad 2: the passion is a universal cause of salvation for living and dead; a universal cause is applied to singular effects through something special — to the living through the sacraments, which configure us to the passion; to the dead through the descent. Hence Zechariah 9 says he brought them out “in the blood of your testament,” i.e. through the power of his passion. His gloss: what the sacraments do for us, the descent does for those who died before Christ’s death.
• Ad 3: Christ’s soul goes down not by the motion by which bodies are moved but by that by which angels are moved — an angel is said to move because he applies his power to something to which it was not applied before. So Christ applies his power to those in hell. (He refers back to the treatment in the First Part.)

5. Objections of a. 2 (“whether Christ descended also to the hell of the damned”) #

He notes that this answers the second of the eight — in quem infernum descendit — and that Thomas will distinguish the hell where the fathers and prophets are from the hell of the damned.

1. Ecclesiasticus 24, divine Wisdom: “I will penetrate all the lower parts of the earth”; the hell of the damned is counted among the lower parts (Psalm 62).
2. Acts 2:24, God raised Christ up, the pains of hell being dissolved; but there are no pains in the hell of the fathers, nor in the hell of the boys, who suffer only the pain of loss for original sin, not the pain of sense for actual sin. So he descended to the hell of the damned, or to purgatory, where men are punished by sense for actual sins.
3. 1 Peter 3: Christ preached in the spirit to those contained in prison, who had been unbelieving — which Athanasius (Epistle to Epictetus) understands of the descent: his body was in the sepulchre while he went to preach to the spirits in custody. The unbelieving are in the hell of the damned.
4. Augustine, Epistle to Evodius: if Scripture had said only that Christ came into Abraham’s bosom, and not named hell and its sorrows, no one would dare say he descended to hell; but since the testimonies name hell and its sorrows, the only cause for his coming is to free them from those sorrows — and the place of sorrows is the hell of the damned. He puts the question to the class: was there sorrow there for the fathers, the prophets who do not yet see God as he is?
5. Augustine, sermon on the Passion: descending, Christ absolved all the just held by original sin; among them Job, who says “all mine have descended into the most deep parts of hell.” Sed contra: Job 10, “before I go and do not return to the dark earth covered with the cloud of death”; and 2 Corinthians, there is no fellowship of light with darkness — so Christ, who is light, did not descend to the hell of the damned.

6. The body of a. 2: by effect and by essence (“in two ways is said something to be somewhere”) #

A thing is said to be somewhere (a) by its effect, (b) by its essence.

• By effect he descended into every hell, but differently: in the hell of the damned he confounded/upbraided their unbelief and malice; to those in purgatory he gave the hope of obtaining glory; into the holy fathers, detained for original sin alone, he poured the light of eternal glory.
• By essence his soul descended only to that place of hell where the just were detained, whom he visited inwardly by grace according to his divinity and also according to his soul, in a place. Existing in one part of hell, his effect was derived to all parts — just as suffering in one place of the earth he liberated the whole world by his action. He remarks that it is not clear to him whether the “hell of the just” here includes purgatory; and that the effect reaching the damned was “not very pleasant.”

7. Digression: two divisions of the articles of faith about Christ’s humanity (“three articles of descent”) #

(a) Six articles divided into descent and ascent, three each: incarnation (taking the form of a slave, Philippians), passion and death, descent into hell; then resurrection, ascension, second coming. Thomas says explicitly the resurrection is the reward of the death, the ascension of the descent; the second coming in glory answers the first coming in humility. (b) The division found in the Te Deum: three parts — incarnation; the middle, the death on the cross with its effects; the second coming and judgment. The middle divides into the meritorious death and what he gives us, which follows the Greeks’ division of goods: good of the soul (descent into hell, giving the fathers the beatific vision), good of the body (resurrection), exterior good of a good place (ascension). He calls this “kind of beautiful the way it’s presented.” A student asks him to name the levels: hell of the damned, hell of the fathers, purgatory. Aside: on praying for the dead — he tells of being told never to stop praying for his father after his death, since we do not know when someone is out of purgatory, barring a special revelation; and if the person is already in heaven the prayers go elsewhere and benefit someone else, so they are not lost.

8. Replies of a. 2, first three (“not in a local way, but by extending the effect”) #

• Ad 1: Wisdom penetrated all the lower parts not locally, by running around them according to his soul, but by extending the effect of his power to all — yet so that he enlightened only the just: “and I will enlighten all those hoping in the Lord.”
• Ad 2: sadness is twofold — from the suffering of punishment for actual sin (Psalm 17, “the sorrows of hell surrounded me”), and from the delay of glory (Proverbs 13, “hope deferred afflicts the soul”). The holy fathers suffered the second. Augustine’s sermon: they prayed Christ with a tearful entreaty (lacrimabilis obsecratio). Christ dissolved both sorrows but in different ways: the sorrows of punishment by preserving from them, as a doctor “unties” a sickness he preserves someone from by medicine; the sorrow of delayed glory actually, by bestowing glory. Aside: he recalls the lacrimosa at his brother’s funeral.
• Ad 3 (the Peter text): some refer it to the descent — “in prison” = in hell, “in spirit” = according to the soul; Christ preached not to convert the unbelieving to faith but to put their infidelity to shame, since the preaching can only be understood as a manifestation of his divinity through the powerful descent. But Augustine in the Epistle to Evodius “better expounds” (melius exponit) it of the operation of his divinity at the beginning of the world: “in prison” = living in a mortal body, a kind of prison of the soul (as Socrates thought); he preached by interior inspirations and exterior admonitions through the mouths of the just, to those once unbelieving — to those not believing Noah’s preaching while they awaited God’s patience deferring the flood; “once” is joined to “in the days of Noah when the ark was being built.” He advises studying the scripture texts to see the fullness of the discourse.

9. Ad 4: the bosom of Abraham, and a student’s question (“according to two things”) #

Abraham’s bosom can be considered (a) as the rest there from sensible pain — in that respect neither the name “hell” nor any sorrows belong to it; (b) as the privation of the glory hoped for — in that respect it has the notion of hell and of sorrow. Hence now the rest of the blessed called Abraham’s bosom is not called hell, nor are there now sorrows in it. A student asks him to go over the reply, saying he wants the understanding of “bosom of Abraham.” His answer: the phrase can be taken in either sense — being saved, or actually possessing the vision of God. In the case of the vision there is no sorrow at all. Of the rich man and Lazarus: Lazarus is in Abraham’s bosom, but since Christ speaks before his own death on the cross, Lazarus is not there in the sense of seeing God as he is — though he is no longer suffering punishment. So “now,” after the cross, we call that blessed rest the bosom of Abraham and not hell. He adds that being in the bosom of Abraham may be so named because the vision of God is in a way the reward of faith, and Abraham is our father in faith. Sub-point raised in the exchange: Augustine says you are not perfectly happy until you get your body back; Thomas says you would be more whole and therefore more blessed with the body, though you already have the substance of beatitude in the vision. Aside: Shakespeare has Falstaff go to “the bosom of Arthur” instead of Abraham — “little corruption in the English mind,” not Shakespeare’s own view; and the landlady at Falstaff’s death thinking there was no reason yet to trouble him about penance. He praises Shakespeare’s gentleness with common people and says Shakespeare understood women better than they understand themselves — though in Cymbeline he asks “who is it that can read a woman?”, when the queen’s true evil nature is brought out at the end.

10. Ad 5: the “most profound hell” (“as Gregory there says”) #

Gregory: the higher regions of hell may be called the deepest hell, for if with respect to the height of heaven the dark air is hell, then the earth lying below that same air can be understood as hell and called profound. He warns against reading “the most profound parts of hell” as Dante’s lowest circle with Satan in the ice; in Gregory’s sense even the higher parts — the hell of the fathers and prophets — may be called most profound simply because they are so far distant from heaven. He stops there.

His words #

• “the Forgotten Article” — his own name for the descent into hell, absent from the Nicene Creed.
• uspiam — “anywhere” (in Augustine’s text).
• “bite / morsel” — his rendering of Hosea’s morsus tuus, “I will be your bite.”
• “refute / upbraid / put to shame” — his shifting renderings of what Christ did to the incredulity and malice of the damned.
• “by its effect” vs. “by its essence” — the two ways something is said to be somewhere.
• lacrimabilis obsecratio — “tearful entreaty”; he glosses obsecratio as having the sense of beseeching.
• melius exponit — “he better expounds,” of Augustine’s second reading of 1 Peter 3.
• “pain of sense” vs. “pain of loss” — punishment for actual sin vs. for original sin alone.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 52, prologue (the eight articles)
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 52, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Summa Theologiae III, q. 52, a. 2 (five objections, sed contra, body, five replies)
• Within these: Augustine, Epistle to Evodius; Augustine, sermon on the Passion; Athanasius, Epistle to Epictetus; Gregory (ad 5); Isaiah 53 (inferred); Hosea 13 (inferred); Zechariah 9; Colossians 2; Psalm 23; Philippians 2; Ephesians 4:9; Ecclesiasticus 24; Psalm 62; Acts 2:24; 1 Peter 3; Job 10; 2 Corinthians 6 (inferred); Psalm 17; Proverbs 13.

Mentioned

• The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed; the Te Deum
• Aquinas on the first part of the Summa — angelic motion (locus not given)
• Luke’s rich man and Lazarus (inferred)
• Shakespeare, Henry V on Falstaff’s death (inferred); Cymbeline
• Dante, Inferno — Satan in the ice (inferred)

His questions #

• Why did he go down there? Because he came to bear our punishment and free us from it, to despoil the devil of those he detained, and to show his power in hell by visiting and illuminating it.
• If the passion already freed us from guilt and punishment, what need of the descent? The passion is a universal cause applied to singulars through something special: to the living by the sacraments, to the dead by the descent.
• How can an incorporeal soul “descend”? Not by the motion of bodies but by that of angels — applying its power where it was not applied before.
• Into which hell did he descend? By essence only to the hell of the just; by effect to all three — shaming the damned, giving hope in purgatory, pouring glory into the fathers.
• Was there sorrow there for the fathers, the prophets who do not yet see God as he is? Yes, but the sorrow of delayed glory, not of punishment; and this he dissolved by actually bestowing glory.
• What are the levels of hell here? The hell of the damned, the hell of the fathers, and purgatory — though he says it is not clear to him whether the “hell of the just” in the body includes purgatory.
• What does “bosom of Abraham” mean? Either the rest from sensible pain (and then no sorrow and no “hell”), or the state still lacking the glory hoped for (and then it has the notion of hell and sorrow); now it names the blessed rest.
• Is “the most profound hell” the lowest place, as in Dante? No — on Gregory’s reading even the higher parts may be called most profound, as being so far distant from heaven.