10 Drama in the Underworld

DRAMA IN THE UNDERWORLD

God himself in the Old Testament says: "I send down to death and I raise up again." The sons of Israel go down to "Egypt" and later make their exodus. Abraham and Moses descend into "Egypt" and again come up. In the Gospels Jesus is secreted in "Egypt" and returns (Matthew 2:13-15). Paul asserts that if the Christ is to ascend he must first have descended. Every seed, the divine as well as the vegetable, or the human sperm, must be buried in the body of mother matter if it is to have a resurrection and a new life. Water has been the universal ancient symbol of matter. As matter itself nurses within its deepest bosom (as we now so well know) the soul of fire, so water holds the electric potency of fire within its bosom, as any thunderstorm demonstrates. These two, fire and water, are the inseparable dual potencies in man’s combined association of body and soul, flesh and spirit. A chapter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead is entitled "Of boiling water in the underworld and not being scalded thereby." These venerable Scriptures also say that souls were sent down to earth to "cause a burning within the sea." So earth must be Hades. In view of all this would it not be legitimate for us to paraphrase Clement’s rhetorical question and ask: "Who in his senses would presume to charge Providence with the idiotic scheme of providing no natural way for the progressive education of the souls of his own beloved children over millions of years and then suddenly decide to retrieve this lost time and sad neglect by sending one only of his sons, while his body lay inert in a rocky tomb in Judea on a Friday and Saturday of the year 33 A.D., Down to a spooky Hades and through a few hours of his "preaching" redeeming a very uncertainly determined portion of hell’s dead (though somehow still living) population held there over thousands of years? Are we not warranted in wondering why Clement, or why MacCulloch or a thousand other Christian scholars have not asked, then answered, this and related questions? An incidental detail brought out in many of the apocryphal scripts is that those dead in the underworld did not see the form of Jesus, but heard his voice. On the contrary, other aspects of the description assert that at his appearance his body shed a blazing light about him, illuminating the darkest recesses of the cavernous dungeons. Not only was Jesus’ descent to earth’s bowels heralded by a forerunner, John the Baptist, but as his advent to earth was prophesied long in advance by the seers of the Old Testament, so would his redemptive sally into the domain of the lower powers be foretold by these same prophets. Those who proclaimed his coming to earth likewise announced it in Hades. Every place, Origin argued, had need of Christ, and therefore he needed his prophets in every world he visited. This most learned of the Church Fathers, whose discernment of the profounder sense of the symbols and allegories was far keener than that of the other early exegetists, took a more rigid stand as to those who were to be freed by the Christ’s preaching, asserting that the earth retained all those devoured in Hades. Language so loosely employed as this is virtually useless for definite meaning. How can souls be devoured by death or any other agency and still remain intact? Scholars have not discerned that many terms used in the ancient Scriptural language of symbolism can not carry their factual meaning into the world of abstract conception, and must be understood as the shadows of ideal things, the outward signs of inner and invisible truths. The Bible literalists have never caught the idea that the death which God declared would be the penalty for first man’s eating the forbidden fruit was a death that did not kill its victim, but let him survive. So here the devouring of souls by death and hell must be seen as meaning simply that souls have been separated from their human bodies and are thereafter in Hade’s realm. In this intended sense it is figuratively true that death "devours" all humans. And could any Christian tell us what specific location is meant by the "bowels of the earth" and the "lower parts of the earth?" It can hardly be taken other than literally, but so taken it can have no recognizable identity. This region is as fatuous a chimera of theological hallucination as would be the asserted location of heaven a few miles above the earth. Literalism in such things is deceptive because states of consciousness are incommensurable with physical dimensions. The dimensions in a physical world can be merely suggestive of spiritual dimensions. As Vergil located the door to the underworld near the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae in Italy, possibly Christian literalists will encourage us to believe that we may soon use space ships to locate heaven. According to all this Christian speculation of minds teased and buffeted by the legerdemain of ancient allegorism, Jesus must be presumed to have gone down somewhere in the earth’s physical underground to reach and preach to the captive spirits held there. Or are we to take it that he merely descended the six feet to grave level and flitted about over the cemeteries preaching and awakening the dead? If the Christian theologians cannot tell us with specificality where we are to place this prison-house of the dead that Jesus visited, they ought to cease bandying about the terms in loose fashion. They do but mystify and confuse. Celsus, in his argument which Origen recasts in Contra Celsum, makes his dramatic spokesman, the Jew, remind Origen that the fabled descent of many heroes, such as Orpheus, Hercules, Theseus, Aeneas, are "juggling impossibilities," and that the Christian dogma of Christ’s descent is just as hollow as the others. Origen rebuts this with the statement that Christ’s descent and resurrection were not mythical; they were indeed real and factual. Celsus ridicules the Christian assertion that Jesus went to Hades to convert those sequestered there, seeing he had signally failed to persuade the living on earth. If he could not win living men on earth, how is it to be supposed that he could, in forty-eight hours, redeem all unregenerate antiquity in Hades? This assignment would indeed call for some cosmic wizardry in the doing.

Origen expressed the opinion that St. Paul, too, was in Hades after his death. Being the apostle to the Gentiles, in particular, it would be supposed that Gentiles dead would need his preaching in Hades as well as Gentiles living above.

Those accepting Christ on his preaching are translated from Hades to Paradise. Origen curiously grades the order in which those in Hades will recognize and accept the descending Lord and ascend with him: those see him first who yearningly have looked for his coming; of non-Christian believers the prophets next respond; then all the other righteous ones; then the sinners in the Christian fold; then the outsiders, the Gentiles. The theorizing capabilities of the theological imagination are well demonstrated here. A number of the ecclesiastical writers, notably Ephrem Syrus, recite dialogues between personified Death, Satan, Sin and Hades. Death upbraids Satan and Hades for thinking they could easily catch or trap and overcome Jesus as he entered their domain. He berates them for fleeing in panic at the sight of the Master entering the underworld, or cringing in fright as they see Jesus stealing away their captives. Much is made of the idea of Satan or Hell essaying to catch Jesus on a great hook which they throw at him. It turns out that the hook rebounds and impales its throwers instead. In anticipation these dark powers exult at seeing their prospective new prey approach their province and they eagerly await the moment of his capture as that of any other mortal. But they stand petrified with terror or are thrown back as his majesty confounds them. Death is heard expressing his amazement on seeing that his powers can not enthrall the Shining One. Christ came irresistibly on, plundered the storehouses and emptied the treasuries of Hades. Death was swallowed up by Life after Life seemingly had been devoured by Death. The sublime apostrophe in the Psalms exhorting the everlasting gates to be lifted up and the King of Glory to come in, is definitely part of the underworld drama (Psalms 24:9). Christ fought for three days and nights (wasn’t he supposed to be preaching?) in his battle to blast the powers of death, and when the victory is won the cry goes up for the lifting up the gates and the everlasting refrain: "O Grave, where is thy victory? O Death, where is thy sting?" The angels then inquire: "Who is this King of Glory?" And the Christ answers: "The Lord of Hosts, he is the King of Glory; the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle."

St. Augustine registers puzzlement as to the nature, location and grade, so to say, of the underworld of death. He can not regard the word inferus (lower) as used in any good sense. The good people should not go down. It seems absurd, he hints, to think that the ancient saints who believed in the future coming of Christ could have been retained in places far removed from the wicked, yet shared with the inferos, or "below" ones. Doubtless he was caught in the dilemma which is clearly discerned in Christ’s saying to the thief on one of the other crosses at the crucifixion: "this day shalt thou be with me in Paradise (Luke 23:43)." If "this day" is considered one of the three (two) days Jesus was to be preaching and fighting in Hades, here is an overlap which involves Jesus’ presence in both Paradise and Hades at the same time. It would be resolved if Paradise and Hades could be regarded as being the same place. But this outlandishly flouts all Christian persuasion. MacCulloch elucidates Augustine’s belief that Paradise can be no part of heaven (sad news to piously expectant believers), since Christ, or at any rate his soul, went ad inferos. Paradise, he infers, is then that nether place into which Christ descended. He visited the prisoners in the darkest, lowest penal section, but not those in Abraham’s Bosom or in Paradise. Could otherwise capable minds be any worse entangled in skulduggery, hopelessly victimized by senseless literalism?

Augustine is greatly perplexed that Christ’s descent should have completely emptied hell’s purlieus. To free all the captives there would compromise God’s justice in his punishment of the vile sinners of the past and the wicked generally, would nullify its efficacy and rob it of its due power. If all the past wicked were to be freed into blessedness above, how could God’s just judgments be carried out in equity? Those evil transgressors whom God had to overwhelm in the flood, how could they be counted worthy of forgiveness and divine favor? On those terms hell could not be a place of everlasting damnation. Augustine denies that Abraham’s Bosom - much less Paradise - was an integral part of the infernal regions. Augustine stands confounded by these puzzles.

One gleam of at least partial light flashes on the saint’s mind when he speculates that the "spirits in prison" may be considered to be souls still resident in bodies, but enshrouded in the darkness of ignorance (1 Peter 3:19). And he guesses that perhaps the preaching to the dead need not refer to an oratorical presentment in Hades, but simply exhortation to those spiritual dead right here on earth. Having shared Plotinus’ studies under Ammonias Saccas, Augustine could not have been ignorant of the latent esoteric sense of Scripture. Could he here have been enunciating what he knew to be the occult truth of the matter under the slight disguise of poetic speculation?

Cyril of Jerusalem ventures so far into the allegory as to mention Jonah’s captivity in the whale as typical of Christ’s descent. In a document called The Odes of Solomon the symbolic interrelation of the baptism doctrine with the descent to Hades is brought out. The "abyss" of darkness is closely associated with water as symbol. Dramatism depicted the waters, like the gate guardians in Hades, as being terrified at Jesus’ approach and their ensouling elemental beings fleeing in terror. Water of course is overcome by fire and vanishes away. But for fire to combat the water and extinguish it was the achievement of victory of spirit over matter. So the baptism meant "death", then resurrection from its thraldom. We see how clearly this relation of the soul’s "death" to incarnation in a watery body is shown in St. Paul’s statement, referring to Christ: "We suffer death with him in his baptism (Romans 6:4, Colossians 2:12)." In a so-called Gospel of Peter, Docetic in character, there is described a scene that has suggestive semantic implications. Two men descend in the night from heaven and all radiant with light, enter the sepulcher. They emerge carrying a third body, and a cross follows them. The heads of the two men reach to heaven; that of the third even extends beyond. A voice out of heaven is heard asking: "Hast thou preached to them that slept?" And from the cross a voice is heard in reply: "Yea." What can all this mean but that the two powers of life, the radiant spirit and the equally radiant light of atomic matter, descend onto the field of lower creation, symboled as the tomb of death for the cosmic light, and in the end of the cycle emerge with their product and progeny the Christ consciousness, which is greater than they? If these ancient constructions are not to yield meaning that is related to reality, but otherwise have to be "explained" as miracles, what are they but worthless rubbish? In another document, The Epistle of the Apostles, the Christ says: "I descended to the place of Lazarus and preached to the righteous and the prophets." Is the raising of "dead" Lazarus in John’s Gospel presumed, then, not to have been enacted in Judea, but down in the theological after-death underworld of Hades?

Another old book, The Ascension of Isaiah, tells how Isaiah is conducted by an angel through the seventh, or highest heaven, and, beholding the blessed righteous there, is told that although these are now in possession of their "garments of the upper world," they will not be given their crowns and thrones until the Christ descends into the world in the last days. He will not be recognized as divine, but taken as a man and crucified. When he has despoiled the powers of death he will ascend on the final day accompanied by many righteous, who will then receive their garments of glory. A feature notable in this is that it is a precise copy of the transactions allocated always elsewhere to Hades, but here clearly enacted on earth. It is another hint to those of open eye and mind that the allegorical Hades is earth itself.

MacCulloch reveals that baptism was known in the early Church as "illumination" (Greek photismos), and from this hint guesses that references in certain apocryphal documents to "enlightenment" may relate to baptism. The association of two things so elementally distinct as illumination, a purely spiritual development, and baptism, a physical performance, has proved too bewildering for the theological acumen of centuries. Water extinguishes fire and its light. How, then, can it be a suggestive symbol of illumination? The challenge to our semantic sense should not be too overpowering. The sense is readily apprehended when one closely considers the elements entering into the problem. Baptism clearly connotes immersion of the soul’s fiery nature under the water of the body. Experience in that watery habitat eventuates in the soul’s spiritual illumination. As out of watery clouds flashes the lightning, so out of the watery baptism comes illumination. St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:29) indeed refers to baptism "for the dead." Frequently in the old writings the effects of baptism have been equated with the experience of the descent. Baptism took place on Easter Eve, intimating that renewal of life which incarnation brings. Christ’s coming into Hades always shed a great light, and the advent, the entry of spirit into and under the water of body, is the baptism. In The Ascension of Isaiah, this prophet hears the Father commission his son, the Christ, to descend to the firmament and to this world and to the angel in Sheol, but not to Haguel, which is a Hebrew variant for Gehenna itself. This could be very significant, seeming to say that the soul should go no lower than the earth. MacCulloch suggests that this Isaiah document may be a work of Gnostic influence. The Gnostics had not fallen into the trap of literalism, and this fact makes their writings taboo to the orthodox Christian scholar. But MacCulloch is frank enough to say that when one reads many of these texts "in the Gnostic sense," one gathers the impression that the word "Hades" would seem to mean this earth! Here for a moment the biased Christian mind caught the tail of the truth, but could not hold on to it. The light was rejected, and simply because it was - Gnostic. Having been pronounced heretics, the Gnostics must be disparaged at every turn. MacCulloch also admits that there may have been influence exerted upon these constructions from the side of mythology! How extensive this influence surely was he would be more than surprised to know. He states that Marcion could not have been a true Gnostic because he did not believe in a descensus ad inferos. It has never come to his discernment that true Gnostics certainly believed in the descent of deity into the underworld, but were sagacious enough to know that they were in it right here in this life and therefore did not look for it in some sub-terra region.