Harrowing of Hell

Life of Christ Infancy · Baptism · Ministry · Passion · Resurrection and Ascension

Harrowing of Hell names Christ’s descent to the dead between his death and Resurrection, and the artistic and literary traditions depicting it. Catholic teaching holds that Christ truly died and freed the just who awaited the Redeemer; this is distinct from freeing the damned or ending their damnation.

Creed and biblical language

The descent is part of the Apostles' Creed. The Catechism explains the language of Sheol or Hades through the condition of the dead awaiting the Redeemer, while distinguishing the righteous from the wicked. It uses the biblical image of Abraham's bosom in explaining the holy souls' expectation.

In this exposition the preaching of salvation to the dead brings Christ's messianic mission to completion. The descent expresses the reach of his redemptive work across human history; the Catechism also connects his victory over death with the scriptural image of the keys of Death and Hades. These statements should be distinguished from the later dialogues, settings and dramatic details used to represent the event.

Holy Saturday

The Catechism quotes an ancient homily for Holy Saturday that dramatizes Christ seeking Adam among the dead. Its imagery gives a devotional expression to the descent and the bringing of salvation. The liturgical setting and the theological meaning are related without making every dramatic detail a separate creedal proposition.

Aquinas's theological questions

Aquinas treats the descent in eight articles of Summa theologiae III, question 52. The sequence separates its fittingness, the manner of Christ's presence, its duration and the different groups whose deliverance is considered. It is a later theological analysis of the creedal teaching.

Presence and effect

In article 2 Aquinas distinguishes presence by the soul from the effects of the descent. He holds that Christ's soul visited the abode of the just, while the effects of his victory extended beyond it. This prevents treating every use of hell in the question as the same place and condition.

Article3 considers whether the whole Christ was there. Aquinas answers through the unity of the divine Person: the Son is present by his soul among the dead and by his body in the tomb, while his divinity is not confined to a place. The separation of soul and body in death is not a separation of either from the Person of the Son.

Deliverance of the Fathers and other questions

Articles 5 and6 distinguish freeing the holy Fathers from the deliverance of the damned. Aquinas understands the former as release from exclusion from glory; he rejects the latter. Article7 then asks separately about children who died in original sin, and gives a negative answer within his theological account. Article8 treats souls in purgatory. These are distinct questions rather than an assertion that everyone mentioned in the broader realm of the dead shared the same condition.

The question about children must also be distinguished from the status of the later infant-limbo hypothesis. An account offered by a theologian is not automatically a dogmatic definition of every conclusion in that account. See Limbo for the separate treatment of the Fathers and of unbaptized infants.

Literary representations

The historical source preserved below describes the development of the English term and medieval dramatic treatments. Its discussion of the Gospel of Nicodemus identifies an apocryphal source for details of later retellings. A representation can therefore be important for the history of literature and devotion without every narrative detail forming part of the Creed.

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

This is the Old English and Middle English term for the triumphant descent of Christ into hell (or Hades) between the time of His Crucifixion and His Resurrection, when, according to Christian belief, He brought salvation to the souls held captive there since the beginning of the world. According to the "New English Dictionary" the word Harrowing in the above connection first occurs in Aelfric's homilies, about A.D. 1000; but, long before this, the descent into hell had been related in the Old English poems connected with the name of Caedmon and Cynewulf. Writers of Old English prose homilies and lives of saints continually employ the subject, but it is in medieval English literature that it is most fully found, both in prose and verse, and particularly in the drama. Art and literature all through Europe had from early times embodied in many forms the Descent into Hell, and specimen plays upon this theme in various European literatures still exist, but it is in Middle English dramatic literature that we find the fullest and most dramatic development of the subject. The earliest specimen extant of the English religious drama is upon the Harrowing of Hell, and the four great cycles of English mystery plays each devote to it a separate scene. It is found also in the ancient Cornish plays. These medieval versions of the story, while ultimately based upon the New Testament and the Fathers, have yet, in their details, been found to proceed from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the literary form of a part of which is said to date back to the second or third century. In its Latin form this "gospel" was known in England from a very early time; Bede and other Old English writers are said to show intimate acquaintance with it. English translations were made of it in the Middle Ages, and in the long Middle English poem known as "Cursor Mundi" a paraphrase of it is found.

EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY, The Middle English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. HULME (London, 1908), in which will be found a full bibliography of the whole subject.