By Clement Harrold
April 11, 2024
In reciting the Apostles Creed, the Christian faithful affirm that Jesus “descended into hell” following His crucifixion and death. This event is also sometimes known as the harrowing of hell. But did Jesus really do this? And does the Creed use the word “hell” in the same way that we understand it today?
Multiple Meanings
The Apostles Creed uses hell in a broader sense than how we use it today. This is because, prior to Jesus’s death and resurrection, “hell” was a more generic word, known as sheol in Hebrew, or hades in Greek. And while this more generic understanding of hell included the souls of the damned, it wasn’t limited to them.
In ancient Jewish thought, “hell” was simply the realm of the dead. According to Catholic belief, this hell was split into two different spheres. The first of these spheres is referred to in the New Testament as gehenna, and it’s what we typically think of when we use the word “hell” today, i.e., the abode of Satan and his demons, together with human souls who die refusing to repent of their wicked ways and now experience eternal torments as a result.
In Jesus’s day, the name gehenna was also associated with a physical place: it referred to one of the valleys which lay just outside Jerusalem and served as a giant garbage dump for the city. As such, gehenna was a vile, awful area in which human and animal waste was continually being burnt—truly a place where the “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48).
The second sphere of hell, by contrast, was composed of those souls who were on their way to heaven, but unable to enter it because Christ’s salvific work—i.e. His Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension—had not yet been completed. This sphere was further split into two parts: the limbo of the patriarchs (also known as Abraham’s bosom) and purgatory.
Limbo was a state of perfect contentment inhabited by the righteous souls who were cleansed of all attachment to actual sin during their earthly life; but since they still suffered from the stain of original sin, they couldn’t enter heaven until Jesus came. As for purgatory, this was (and is) inhabited by souls who cooperated with God’s grace during their time on earth but still retained an attachment to actual sin. Unlike limbo, purgatory was (and is) a state of painful purification.
To re-cap, then, the hell which existed at the time of Christ’s death included two separate spheres: on the one hand, you had gehenna, inhabited by the souls who permanently rejected God; on other hand, you had limbo and purgatory, inhabited by the souls who wanted God but couldn’t yet access heaven. In the case of limbo, the souls couldn’t access heaven because of the stain of original sin; in the case of purgatory, the souls couldn’t access heaven because of both the stain of original sin and their ongoing attachment to actual sin.
Finally, we should note (as if things weren’t already complicated enough!) that Jews in biblical times weren’t entirely consistent in the language they used about hell. Although the Greek noun hades was a generic word for the realm of the dead, by the first century A.D. it was often (though not always) being used more or less synonymously with the word gehenna. An example of this comes in Matthew 16:18 when Jesus declares, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against it.” In this verse, Jesus seems to be using the word hades to denote specifically the evil powers of the underworld; He doesn’t seem to be talking about limbo or purgatory.
“He Descended Into Hell . . .”
Although some contemporary theologians (most famously, the 20th century Swiss priest Hans Urs von Balthasar) have tried to argue otherwise, the traditional teaching of the Church is that when Christ descended into hell, He did not visit the souls of the damned who resided in gehenna. Since these souls had already definitively rejected God, there was nothing Jesus could do for them. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him” (§633).
“The just who had gone before him” is a reference to the souls in limbo. In the course of His emancipatory descent, Jesus heralded the end of the limbo of the patriarchs; the souls there now experienced His glory, and forty days later they would enter heaven with Him at the time of His Ascension. (St. Thomas Aquinas takes the view that the souls in limbo began to share in Christ’s glory from the time of His descent, but it wasn’t until the Christ’s Ascension that they properly entered heaven together with Him; see Summa Theologiae III.57.6.co; 52.2.ad2; 52.4.ad1. This is fitting, as it wouldn’t make sense for the members of the Mystical Body to enter heaven before Christ who is the head of that body.)
What about the souls in purgatory? Here Aquinas clarifies that while Jesus did not descend into purgatory directly, nevertheless His descent into the underworld gave the souls in purgatory the hope of attaining eternal glory. In other words, Christ’s descent brought consolation to the souls in purgatory by assuring them that the doors of heaven now lay open to them as soon as their purifications were complete.
We can therefore summarize the situation as follows. The hell which is mentioned in the Apostles Creed is hell as it existed at the time of Christ’s descent. Jesus descended into part of this hell, but not all of it. What we joyfully affirm in the Creed is that He visited limbo, delivering the souls who had been kept in bondage there. His descent also brought tidings of hope and victory to the souls in purgatory.
The part of hell Jesus did not descend to was the place we typically have in mind when we use the word “hell” today: gehenna, or what Scripture calls “a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7). This brings us to our final point: nowadays the Church no longer uses the word “hell” to describe limbo or purgatory, for the simple reason that Jesus Christ has forever changed them. Through His saving work, the Son of God emptied limbo of its captives, and He transformed purgatory from a perpetual waiting room into a real pathway to heaven.
Further Reading:
https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-he-descended-into-hell-means
https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-is-the-limbo-of-the-fathers
