Underworld

Pub Theology: Underworld

At our last Pub Theology night, I asked for topic requests and received one: an attendee had read in a devotional book that Christ “descended into Purgatory,” and she wanted us to explore and to explain that. The following are merely introductory remarks intended to kick-off a conversation about life, death, and what comes after. Let’s raise a pint and a prayer.

The afterlife appears to be well-nigh universal. Every culture encounters ghosts. Every culture tells of realms that we would recognize as heaven and as hell. Every culture speaks of angels and of demons, if but under other names.

These beliefs tap into core questions of reality and humanity. What is consciousness; why am I aware? What is the meaning or the purpose of this life; where are we going? And what of justice? If justice is to be found only in this world, then we must confess that it does not exist, and we simply cannot bring ourselves to confess absurdity. This life makes no sense without a life to come.

In early world literature, the gods, or the angels, inhabit realms above: better, truer, brighter, saner, more rational realities. They shine eternal like the stars in the heavens. Indeed, the stars are traditionally understood to be icons of divinities.

The dead go down, to a darker deader world. Hebrews call it Sheol, the Pit. Greeks call it Hades. It isn’t understood to be a place of torment, but it is seen to be lesser and lower than this world. Better to live than to die: that’s the message of Homer and of the early Hebrew Bible.

Sometimes the dead visit the living. Like I said, everyone encounters ghosts. Special rites and acts of justice are required to keep the dead quiet, to lay them down to rest. But can the living visit the dead, to glimpse that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns?

Greco-Romans tour the dead. Their heroes make it back alive: Orpheus, Herakles, Odysseus, Aeneas. They describe a varied geography, rewards and punishments for earthly life. Egyptians write Books of the Dead to guide the recently deceased through underworld perils.

Here we have Elyseum, the Asphodel Meadows, and Tartarus, the underworld’s underworld, prison of the demons and the damned, nine days’ fall beneath Hades, thrice-wrapped in night. This is what Jewish literature comes to call the Abyss, and Christians call Hell. Which states, if any, are permanent? Is reincarnation an option, as in karmic faith? Would we even want it to be?

During the Exile, the Prophets start to speak of resurrection. On one level this applies to the nation of Israel, yet on another it comes to apply to humanity as a whole. A new sort of Messiah is long-expected to bring in a new Kingdom of God.

A tradition of heavenly journeys—Temple ritual, Exilic Prophets, intertestamental literature, Merkabah mysticism—gives humanity a window into Heaven. Can humans become “sons of god,” i.e. angels? Can humanity even dare to dream of sitting on God’s throne?

This notion of heavenly assent is something quite different from Hades’ nicer neighborhoods. And it’s what makes Christ’s Ascension such a big deal. He opens Heaven to humanity. His is the Merkabah assent that fulfills the mystic’s hopes.

And what of perdition? Of the five centers of Early Christian thought, one taught eternal conscious torment (ECT), one taught annihilationism, and three taught Apokatastasis. Arguments for all three can be found throughout the Scriptures.

As ECT went mainstream, for reasons that we can discuss, people asked: but what of those sinners who don’t deserve eternal agonies? What of unbaptized babies who never had access to the Sacraments? New afterlife realms emerge: Purgatory and Limbo.

Purgation is temporary: it has an end, in both senses of the term. We are saved through fire, purified as silver seven times. George MacDonald famously quipped that Protestants found three afterlife domains too many, but alas they rid themselves of the wrong one.

Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, like His Hallowing of Heaven, is an oft-overlooked yet vitally important part of Christian faith. In the former, Christ descends to the dead and conquers, liberating the spirits trapped in prison “from the time of Noah.” He reorders both Heaven and Hell, making one Kingdom to hand to His Father. “And the last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

Reframing Christ’s descent as something that only went so far as Purgatory defangs the entire narrative of Holy Week. It replaces radical grace with works-righteousness. And it makes a pretty penny to boot: “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.”

Far truer is the Orthodox icon of Resurrection, with Christ deep in Hell, pulling up from its depths both Adam and Eve, and thereby all of humankind.