09 Is Hades Under the Earth?

IS HADES UNDER THE EARTH?

Inevitably we will re reminded that in the Genesis account of creation and elsewhere in the Bible not only are two regions spoken of, but three are clearly distinguished. The story narrates that God created things in heaven, on earth and under the earth. MacCulloch quotes Hippolytus as saying that Christ was ordained Lord of things in heaven, on earth and under the earth (Greek kata chthonia). MacCulloch’s explanation of this is that Christ became man to live as and among men and thus transfigure manhood with divinity: that he ruled things under the earth in order that, as one who submitted to mortal death and thereby could preach to the dead of past time, he might overcome death by combating and defeating its dread power in its own realm. Here it can again be clearly seen that early theological thought equated death with life in the ancient representation. But here again literalism wrecks the proper sense of allegory. Any third locality apart from heaven and earth that is listed as pertaining to man in the old sacred books, is meaningless and non-existent. If it is postulated in the history of man it is a baseless figment of bad literary bungling. A region physically located "under the earth" in the sense of beneath the ground surface, can have no place in the field of man’s evolutionary activity. If man lives some eighty years on earth, then has to spend a period of comparatively vaster length in the bowels of the earth, physically considered, why has not the Christian theology given due accentuation to a feature of such startling character? Christian exegesis here has been caught by a Biblical phrase, wholly missing its real import and through the fallacy of a literal interpretation entangling itself in an illogical complex. Only the esoteric approach and methodology in Scriptural reading, which it rejects with fright at every turn, can rescue it from its own disordered creedology.

Man stands at a point which might be considered about midway in the scale and gamut of being between the natural energies below him and the spiritual grades of consciousness above him. He is thus balanced between heaven above him and the subordinate and preparatory orders of life below him. As his place in the cosmos was on earth, his life had to be lived in a subordinate relation to the life of higher beings in heaven above and in a superior relation to inferior creatures below his station. A comprehensive reference to his position would have to cover, so to say, the three stories of his place of residence in the universe, his own story, the earth, the next story above, and the kingdom immediately below, or "under the earth". This lower region would extend over the three kingdoms below man in the evolution of life, animal, vegetable and mineral, and presumably the sub-elemental, sub-atomic level of life which our wondrous modern science is now exploring. But as a physical locality in which any part of man’s redemptive process is alleged to take place, the region so vaguely, so indeterminately fancied to exist down under the earth in any physical sense, is again a fictional delusion of the theological brain, straining to make ends meet in carrying allegory over into literal realism.

Having seen in the Exodus passage that an Old Testament forerunner of the Jesus (Joshua) descent to the lower world, namely Moses, preceded the descent of the true divine Lord, we should register no surprise on finding that the early Christian commentaries similarly have John the Baptist preceding the descent of Jesus to the prison-house below. Must not, then, this place of descent of deity be one and the same place? As New Testament "history" is uncompromisingly held to be fulfillment of Old Testament "prophecy" is it not entirely legitimate to assume that the locale in which the fulfillment takes place is the locale in which it did take place? Otherwise it would not be the fulfillment of the given prophecy. The great lost and stubbornly resisted truth of all this is, - mirabile dictu - that neither is the Old Testament to be taken as objective prophecy of future events believed to have been fulfilled in the first century A.D., Nor is the New Testament a record of the fulfillment of such alleged prophecy. All these utterances in both books, as Gerald Massey indubitably demonstrates, are allegories of man’s experience in his line of march up the ladder of being, grossly mistaken in the Old Testament for prophecies and in the New for miracles. The world owes - but refuses ungraciously to requite - to Gerald Massey an incalculable debt for showing us that the same "miracles" that are enumerated in the Gospels as the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity, are found ages before his advent in old Egyptian books as spiritual apologues.

Clement of Alexandria is broad and liberal enough to include "righteous Pagans", as well as the sainted Patriarchs of the Old Testament among those dead in the underworld who are to be rescued by the Lord’s preaching in Hades. A chapter in his Miscellanies treats of a passage cited from The Shepherd of Hermas in which even the apostles preach and baptized in Hades. With even such a direct hint of the identity of Hades with earth under their eyes, the scholars still remained blind to the truth. Are we to take it that the apostles, as well as Jesus, descended to Hades and preached to the spirits in prison? And how could they have done so when they were still alive in body during the three days of Jesus’ visit to the underworld? And if not at that time, when in their lives did they make this extraordinary visit?

Clement does divide the righteous Jews and Pagans from the sinners in Hades. "Who in his senses," he asks, would charge Providence with injustice and suppose souls of the righteous and those of sinners to be under one condemnation?" MacCulloch suggests that Clement might logically have included even the sinners themselves as privileged to hear the crucial underworld sermonizing of Jesus, as they could hardly be expected to repent without some exhortation from divine power above them. Clement seems to have held rigidly to the applicability of the "chained" and "those in prison" to Jews and Gentiles. Christians of course were not in such lowly or precarious condition. It is not to be missed in passing how completely MacCulloch fails to see a slip of logic in Clement’s comment to the effect that righteous Jews were entitled to hear the precious preaching in Hades on the ground that they, too, needed the chance to repent. This is one of those numerous little traps of logic in which the inveterate prejudices now and again have caught Christian theorizers, involving them in bizarre situations. For how can it be logical to hold that a "righteous Jew" or Pagan should need to repent? When has righteousness become something that needs to be absolved by repentance? Is it not unrighteousness that calls for repentance? We are forced to the conclusion that in early Christian ideology righteousness absolved a Christian, but not a Jew. It seems that even MacCulloch’s statement carries the assumption that a righteous Jew is under condemnation and needs repentance, not for being righteous, but for being a Jew! If one is not correct in an analysis of this sort, one has to wonder whether logic has a place in religious thinking at all. And if righteousness does not count on a soul’s credit balance, one has to wonder what is the good of being righteous. But Christian mentality was caught in this anomaly because in truth Christian doctrine is loud in proclaiming that one’s best righteousness is as filthy rages in the sight of God. Not your righteousness, but only the mercy of God will save you. And in early Christian presumption, righteousness would certainly not have absolved one from the sin of being a Jew or a Pagan.

Clement quotes The Shepherd of Hermas document as saying that while Christ preached to the long-dead Jewish Patriarchs and "good" Jews in Hades, the apostles preached to the Gentiles who were ready for conversion. This Apocryphal book states that the apostles "went down with them into the water, and again came up." We have universally been told that Hades is a place where souls are tortured in the flames of an undying fire. What shibboleth in popular parlance is more common than "hot as hell?" Books on Christian theology combed the dictionary for terms adequate to picture the fierceness of hell’s igneous fury. From Dante’s Inferno to the modern cinema we have seen the troops of souls writhing in agony in the unquenchable fires of hell. But how different the picture we find here! The apostles are said to have gone down to this same Hades to help Jesus save the hordes of the dead, but it was water into which they plunged, not fire! So here ancient semantic ingenuity, in typifying the lower level of life, switched from the symbolism of fire to that of water. Our learned author, MacCulloch appears to take no notice of this drastic shift in the symbolism. Shall we guess that it provoked a momentary puzzlement or impasse in his mind and that, with no solution at hand, he dodged the obligation to discuss it? For owing to the theological position and attitudes of Christian systematism there is still wanting the capability of elucidating the semantic usages in Biblical writing. Nature does not limit her epiphany of truth to one objectification, one phenomenon. Emerson has said that God is present in all his parts in every moss, cobweb and blade of grass. Therefore more than one of her elements may serve to enlighten the human mind with an apt ideation of a given truth. Truly enough has the underworld into which the soul units of God’s fatherhood have descended for life’s benison of experience to evolve divine potential by overcoming the inertia of matter has been characterized in symbolic language by the Egyptians as the "crucible of the great house of flame," or the "fiery furnace" of Scriptural imagery. At the same time, but from another angle of poetization, this lower bodily habitat of incarnated souls is depicted as the place where souls are in imminent danger of drowning in its deep waters. For the physical bodies which souls inhabit in this underworld are composed of seven-eighths water and one-eighth earthy elements. This combination of earth and water gives the "certain mire" of Plato’s symbolic depiction and the "miry clay" of the Bible Psalmist, in which the soul finds itself bogged down here in body (Psalms 40:2 thew:2 thew:2). The fire symbolism pertains to the spiritual energies and potencies of the soul, the water poetizes the coarser nature of matter and body. Soul’s incarnation in watery body bring the two elements into interaction and conflict; the water struggles to extinguish the fire, the fire endeavors to dry up the water. Raging sense can overwhelm soul as water quenches fire; spirit can overcome rampant sense as the sun’s fiery rays dry up the streams. For man this conflict, this battle of Armageddon, becomes more than poetry, for it is the actuality of every moment of his living experience in this life. It is the great aeonial battle that Genesis describes as being fought on the border of the salt marshes, or in the valley of Siddim (a paraphrase for Sodom), which it says is the salt sea (Genesis 14:1-12). When it is seen that Sodom is a cover for sodium chloride, which is the chemical name for salt, and when to this astonishing datum is added the still more amazing fact that human body blood is identical in chemical composition with sea salt water - biological evolution of life having issued from the sea, with salt water in its veins, so to say - the mind of the Western world can at last open up to the understanding that the mighty battle between spirit and matter is fought right here in the valley of the salt marshes of the human body blood, which, being sea water and turned red by oxidation in the lungs, is the Red Sea which all souls must cross by night, when spirit is immersed in the water and the darkness of corporeal existence on earth. Should we be surprised to find that it was while fleeing Sodom that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26)? As "history" these narratives baffle and perturb the human mind; as allegories they vividly enlighten it.

Any one knows that when the higher energies of fire are brought in touch with water they cause it to boil. They throw it into agitation and separate the oxygen from the hydrogen. Spirit duplicates this action by stirring into vigorous motion the sensual elements of consciousness and separating the hydrogen (water) from the oxygen (air), or in the psychic field separating emotion (water) from mind (air). So this salt water of our body blood, when acted upon by the higher fires of the spirit, can veritably boil with the surging energies of lust, passion, elemental animal fury and frenzy. These - be it known at last - are the fires of Tophet and all the underground hells of Scripture. This knowledge will grant to Western man for the first time the inestimable boon of releasing him forever from the religiously inspired fear of future torment in hell’s fires, since he will understand that he is in those raging fires now and by wisdom he can turn them into their true power to refine the dross of his nature into the pure gold of spiritual light. (It is not strange that the words "light" and "gold" are identical or nearly so in many languages).

Clear to us also with this elucidation come the meanings of the Biblical "thrice refined in the fire" and the ordeal by water, or the baptism (Zechariah 13:9). Souls must both be baptized in the water of earthly body and thrice refined in the fires of that same life. So that the two symbols go hand in hand in semantic portrayal of our life here.

It is most interesting to note how symbolism becomes almost indiscriminately blended into seeming meaninglessness in a passage taken from Origen’s exegetical commentary on Luke. Here the tree, the way, the river, fire and water are jumbled together with no evident perception of their semantic implications. But his presentments so aptly accentuate the correctness of our dissertation on the duplex association of fire and water in the life and body of man that there is warrant for quoting them. He says that there is a fiery river through which all must pass on the way to the tree of life in Paradise. As souls pass over this river, says Origen, they receive a baptism of fire. Did not the tongue of flame mount on the head of Jesus at the end of his baptism in the Jordan? Missing the solid import of all this symbolism, MacCulloch says that this baptism of fire cannot harm the righteous, but all who pass through it without being harmed, pass on to Paradise. Here the obvious inference is that if you are not righteous, the fiery baptism will harm you, and you could use this experience in it to tell whether you were righteous or not. All this becomes silly when it is known that the test of the fiery baptism is indeed the temptation under which all souls must go, the ordeal of living in a body of water, which our fiery forces of feeling and will may heat up until, as was said in old Egypt, you are "scalded thereby." It is true enough to say that the fire can not harm the righteous, but all souls are something less than righteous before they develop the intelligence and self-control to stabilize their righteous character, and its various degrees of burning are themselves the elements and influences that shape human life to righteousness.

Origen, whose discernment in dealing with the symbols and allegories was usually keener than that of the other Church Fathers, took a more rigid stand, asserting that earth retained all those devoured in Hades.