04 "He Descended Into Hell"

"HE DESCENDED INTO HELL"

Faced with the final fixation of the popular mind in the belief of the soul’s ascent to heaven or alternate descent to hell after earth-life, orthodox religion has had to reckon with the situation developing out of the implications and involvements arising from the body of early Christian literature, especially when these are examined for evidences of derivation from antecedent pagan sources. Furthermore certain passages in the Christian Bible, Old and New Testaments alike, themselves present elements constituting challenge and demanding explication or rationalisation. For some of this material poses difficulties, provokes questions and stirs wonder or doubt.

One of these passages in particular turns out to have had a quite crucial part to play in the accommodation of Christian dogmatism to popular forms of belief as to the soul’s after-death habitat and condition. When the central type-figure of our divinity in the ancient dramatic representations was transformed into the carnalized character of Jesus of Nazareth, all that pertained fittingly and luminously to him as mystic typism depicting its corresponding reality in man’s nature had to be explained all afresh in a totally new frame of reference as relating to him in person. So his descending into hell after his death on the cross immediately gave rise in all naïve minds to the wonder - how it was that he, the perfect God, had to descend to a world still lower than this, into which the common theological assumption consigned only the sinner and the evildoer. But ecclesiasticism, basing its position on a few words in the Bible text, had an answer that appeared to cover the ground and resolve doubt. The potential dilemma was satisfactorily elucidated by the explanation that this descent of God’s Son into the dark limbo of an underworld was a "special" mission, of only three days duration and for a specific purpose of benevolence in obedience to the Father’s will. It was an extraordinary errand of divine mercy on behalf of those "spirits in prison", the souls of pre-Christian humanity and fell at an interval when, so to say, there was nothing else for Jesus to do. Jesus’ sojourn of three days in the lower region of darkness was rationalised, for the appeasement of pietistic orthodox doubt, as in no way a natural necessity for the sacrificial Lamb of God, but as an act of divine condescension on his part to crown his mission of salvation to the race by extending it retrogressively back in time to cover all previous ages of humanity. He came to earth to save not only those who were fortunate enough to have been blessed with a knowledge of his message and those to come in the future, but as well those who, having lived prior to his advent, had missed his preaching on earth. With his soul released from body while it lay in the Palestinian tomb, he could readily devote the three days to a visit among the dead in the Plutonian underworld and convey his saving message to them. As he had given three years to preach salvation to the living on the earth, so he could give three days to a similar mission to the dead in the underworld. Before his glorious ascension he had this chore of cosmic justice to perform. And what better opportunity was there to attend to it than during the three days his soulless body lay in the grave? His spirit, then free of the flesh, could project itself to Tartarus, to Gehinnom, to Tophet, to Avernus, to Sheol, to Amenta, to Hades, to hell, and bring the message of liberation to the hosts whose spirits, never having been christened with the oil of divine grace, awaited in darkness the coming of the light that would release them from the bonds of ignorance and the prison-house of death, as Isaiah had foretold. Not only was the seeming inconsistency of the Lord’s descent to hell thus met with a plausible explanation, but the answer itself was provided - and it was an answer of crucial consequence - to the glaring reflection that sprang up in even the most uncritical thought, as to what provision for salvation God had made for the multitudes living before his Son’s advent. It was a fateful question. Theological discomfiture threatened the ecclesiastical system if a satisfactory answer was not forthcoming from the collegium of orthodoxy. Someone seized on the verses of the sacred script which told of Jesus’ three days visit to the realm of Hades and his preaching to the spirits in prison there and it was happily adopted as a theoretical solution to the baffling query, one at any rate that could still the dangerous force of a sound logical challenge.

Few have ever stopped to reflect how implausible this quirk of Biblical "interpretation" really is, even if granted argumentative recognition. Of the millions presumed to be living at the year 33 A.D. Only the tiniest fraction, a few thousand at most, even then heard the "glad tidings" in person, or by report or in literature. Millions, living since that time have lived and died without ever having heard of the Galilean carpenter’s existence or his message. Even those hundreds who may actually have heard Jesus’ discourses would have had but a sermon or two out of which to extract the essence of salvation’s power. Along with that, granting Jesus’ brief Good Friday to Easter visit and exhortation to the hosts of souls slumbering in death in this underworld, in what way, form, manner are we to conceive his having assembled and preached to those trillions of souls lying inert or grovelling in Stygian darkness, how his voice could reach all of them? And it seems fair to ask how we can assure ourselves that, even with this colossal miracle magically achieved, the forty-eight hours of preaching could open the heavenly gates and the everlasting doors for the entry of the King of Glory into the life of all previous humanity. Granting the utmost of fairyland efficacy to the divine voice to work this propitious marvel, there is still the dubious question of God’s justice and what the Hindus call karmic equity, in gratuitously causing all these trillions of the pre-Christian time to wait in duress, in darkness, in suspension - it is implied - of life and progress for thousands of years until, a bit suddenly, on two days of the spring of year 33 A.D., From a Friday until the Sunday falling first after the full moon of the Hebrew month Nisan, God finally sent his son down to earth, with a further side trip on down to Hades, with his physical body lying comatose in a rocky tomb in Judea, to release those hosts of benighted souls from the prison-house of Gehenna. (One who ventures to introduce a touch of realism into these sacred mysteries will be charged with irreverent scurrility).

Right here it might be observed that there could and should have been a hint of great enlightenment for all the Bible exegetists from ancient days to the present, if the significance of the fact that the Son of God went to both places, earth above and Hades below, for identically the same objective, the liberation of souls from the kingdom and power of spiritual darkness. Could they at the same time have weighed the import, in this connection, of the additional item well known to many scholars, that the ancient mythicizing Sages, the Egyptians first and then the Greeks, considered souls incarnated on earth as "the dead", needing rebirth and resurrection, they would have been in position to save the Western world from sixteen centuries of direful religious superstition. This essay will deal in particular with certain involvements of this situation.

It must now be seen that the old argument based on Jesus’ descent to Hades never could merit the rating of a competent or tenable answer to the great challenge that confronts Christianity ineluctably. When the utmost is made of its potential, either as fact or as hypothesis, it still falls far short of logical adequacy. It leaves the Christian God still answerable to the challenge of human reason and human sincerity: why, if the Christian theological structure correctly rests on the asseveration of the power of the supercharged blood of his only Son shed on a wooden cross about the year 33 A.D., Had he thus left the uncounted hosts of his children living on earth prior to that date (and other billions living since, but not even having heard of that power) without the provision of any means of salvation? It is at best a "solution" so weak that it is shameless for the religious hierarchy to continue using it as an answer to the grave challenge. The full measure of its incompetency, the abject hollowness of its pretence, have not hitherto been detected because of the obtuseness of orthodox scholarship with respect to the subtle intimations carried by the Scriptural term "death" and the mythological "underworld". By the failure of mental acumen to grasp these arcane connotations, both the locale of this supposedly under-earth Hades and the identity of its population were wrongly determined, the result being that the whole structure of the scheme of salvation was thrown out of focus and turned topsy-turvy. And from the double misconception sprang the entire mass of gullible beliefs, the illogical and impossible superstitions of a Christian theology warped beyond recognition out of its original forms of intelligibility and beauty. It is the aim of this essay to divest these distorted structures of their false representations of meaning and to restore them to their first forms of sublime truth. This matter of the descent of Jesus to the realm of Hades during his three days in the tomb is in the general religious mind a thing of incidental occurrence and practically of no major or axial importance in the Christian theological purview. Quite on the contrary, it is, if not the central item of all Christian doctrinism, an integral element, link or indispensable part of the system. In the form of a short allegorical or dramatic paralogue, it is nothing less than the pronunciamento of the divine incarnation itself. The descent of the Christ into Hades to "preach to the spirits in prison" is a compact dramatization of the descent of the collective units of God’s sons, his mind-born spiritual progeny, into fleshly bodies in this Hades-world called earth. And what the drama represented as "his" (collectively their) "preaching" to the souls bound in darkness there, was their impartation of their Christly message of a new dispensation of life, charity and graciousness to the race of men once born on the physical basis of life, but not yet reborn on the spiritual plane. Their mission to earth was precisely to inaugurate, through the potency of their higher spiritual nature, that regeneration. The Hades into which their divine mission called them was this old earth, and the "prison" in which they lay fettered was this human fleshly body which the soul must put on to accommodate itself to the rigorous conditions of life on this planet. The construction was just another of the variant parables or allegories adumbrating the basic principia of all theology, fabricated on a slightly different pattern from that of the Prodigal Son allegory, the parable of the Sower of the Seed, that of the treasure hidden in a napkin, and others. Because its identity of meaning with these was lost through interpretative blindness, it was falsely assumed to be the announcement of a visitation of Godhood to another limbo of lost souls beside the one we know so indubitably from our present experience. The Christ’s descent to Hades was just the birth of the infant Sons of God ("Now are we the sons of God" - 1 John 3:2) into this earthly humanity that we affect to celebrate at Christmas. For this good earth that under religious persuasions we berate as evil is the only Hell, Hades, Sheol, Amenta, Avichi, Gehenna, Tartarus or Tophet of an underworld that souls from the empyrean have visited. Or at any rate it is the only one to which the Biblical allegories refer; there may of course be different hells for the life manifested on other planets. And we, living souls, are those "dead" lying inert in our graves which we call these human bodies. We are those "spirits in prison", those captives chained in the dark dungeons of this underworld. For the Greeks equated the body (soma) with the tomb (sema) by giving both the same name! In the profound Greek philosophy "souls were confined in bodies as in a prison or a grave". The mummy in its coffin was the Egyptian type-figure of a soul lying "dead" in its earthly body, its "grave" or "prison-house", awaiting the advent of the Christly power to release it. The spirit-soul was represented as the goddess Hathor confined in her "birdcage of the soul" - the body of flesh. This is the substance and the essential truth of the theology thus dramatically pictorialized in the ancient Scriptures. This is the Greek "descent of the soul" into physical embodiment on earth. This is the Fourth Gospel’s "and was made flesh" of the cosmic Logos. This was that doctrine which Christian misconception travestied into the "fall of man into sin" from literal following of Genesis. And this, too, is man’s rebellion against the passivity of heaven and his consequent expatriation therefrom and loss of Paradise, of Milton’s great epic. There is no other "preaching" of Christhood to spirits in prison than that of the still small voice of conscience, which is the admonition of the evolving Christ-soul in the heart and mind of all humans. For this earth, the foster-mother of our divinity, is that "mount" on which deity came and stood to proclaim its message of its magical power to transform man’s nature from that of the beast to that of the god. (The evidence for this etymological construction is clear throughout the ancient literature, but it is conclusively clinched by its derivation from the Latin word for "world" itself, mundus.) The "Sermon on the Mount" is just that discourse which our inner Christ consciousness preaches to us perennially throughout life on this stellar mount. But when this mount was liberalised from its mundane reference and taken to be some fictitious hill in Judea, again misconception perpetrated a most wretched caricature of precious truth.