The Descent into Hades

Between the death and the Resurrection stands the descent — the harrowing of Hades, which in the Orthodox Church is not a devotional appendix but the very image by which the Resurrection is depicted. This file sets out the scriptural basis, the liturgical texts of Great Saturday, the ancient homily read at that service, the iconography, and the question the tradition leaves open about the extent of the deliverance.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Church Sings on Great Saturday

Great Saturday is the day the Byzantine rite treats as the hinge of the year, and its texts are the primary source for the doctrine.

The kontakion: “He who shut in the deeps is beheld dead, and, wrapped in fine linen and spices, is laid in a grave as a mortal man, the King of immortality.” The troparion of the day, sung at the Vesperal Liturgy: “When Thou didst descend to death, O Life immortal, then didst Thou slay Hades with the lightning of Thy Godhead; and when Thou didst also raise the dead out of the nethermost depths, all the powers of the heavens cried out: O Giver of life, Christ our God, glory be to Thee.”

And the exapostilarion, in which the whole doctrine is compressed: “Thou didst fall asleep in the flesh as a mortal man, O King and Lord; on the third day Thou didst arise, raising up Adam from corruption and abolishing death: O Pascha of incorruption, salvation of the world!” (The Lenten Triodion, the services of Great Saturday).

The Church’s proclamation, in other words, is not that Christ waited in the tomb but that he acted in Hades. The three days are not an interval but an event.

The Scriptural Basis

The New Testament basis is real but narrow, and it should be stated exactly rather than overstated.

1 Peter 3:18–20 is the principal text: Christ was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.” 1 Peter 4:6 adds: “this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God.”

Ephesians 4:8–10 — “he descended into the lower parts of the earth” — is read in the same sense by most of the Fathers, though the phrase is grammatically capable of meaning simply the earth itself. Acts 2:24–31 cites Psalm 15/16:10, “thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let thy Holy One see corruption,” and applies it to Christ’s death. Matthew 27:52–53, the tombs opened and many bodies of the saints raised, is a Passion text that the tradition reads in this connection. Romans 10:7 and Revelation 1:18 (“I have the keys of Death and Hades”) supply the rest.

[Disputed: the exegesis of 1 Peter 3:19. The patristic mainstream, and the Church’s liturgical use, understand the “spirits in prison” as the dead of the old covenant to whom Christ preached in Hades. Modern critical exegesis has proposed alternatives — that the “spirits” are the disobedient angels of Genesis 6 and the Enochic tradition, and that the “proclamation” is one of victory to the imprisoned powers rather than of the gospel to human souls; and, in an older Reformed reading found in Calvin, that the passage refers to the preaching of Christ’s Spirit through Noah to his contemporaries (Calvin, Institutes II.16.9). This repository records the dispute; the Church’s doctrine of the descent does not rest on a single verse but on the whole of her paschal liturgy.]

The Ancient Homily on Holy Saturday

The text read at the Office of Readings of Holy Saturday in the Roman rite is an anonymous ancient homily transmitted among the works of St. Epiphanius of Salamis and printed in Migne (PG 43:439–464). Its authorship is not established and it should not be attributed to Epiphanius as though it were secure; what is secure is that it is an early witness to how the descent was preached.

“Something strange is happening — there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began… He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him.”
(Ancient homily on Holy Saturday, transmitted among the works of Epiphanius [PG 43:439–464]; the attribution is traditional and not critically secured.)

The homily gives the descent its dramatic form: Christ seeks Adam, takes him by the hand, and addresses him — “I am your God, who for your sake have become your son… I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.”

The Icon

In the Orthodox Church the icon of the Resurrection is the icon of the descent, and this is a doctrinal statement made in paint.

The image — Greek ἡ Ἀνάστασις, Slavonic Soshestvie vo ad — shows Christ in a mandorla of glory standing on the shattered gates of Hades, laid crosswise beneath his feet, with locks, bolts, nails, and keys scattered in the darkness below. He grasps Adam and Eve by the wrist, not by the hand: the grip is that of a rescuer taking hold of someone who cannot help himself. Behind them stand the righteous of the old covenant — David and Solomon crowned, the Forerunner, sometimes Abel with his shepherd’s staff. The bound figure of Hades personified sometimes appears beneath.

That the Orthodox Church has never adopted the Western image of Christ rising alone from the tomb as her festal icon of Pascha is not an accident of style. The chosen image says that the Resurrection is corporate: what is celebrated is not the reanimation of one body but the emptying of the grave (see The Icons of Christ; The Divergence from Western Religious Art).

Why It Belongs to the Doctrine of the Atonement

Three things follow, and they bear directly on the argument of this collection.

It shows what kind of act the Cross is. In the descent there is no negotiation, no payment, and no second party with whom terms are agreed. There is an entry, a breaking of gates, and a leading out. The gates lie broken beneath Christ’s feet in the icon because they were not opened from the inside and not opened by agreement — they were smashed. Whatever else the Cross is, it is presented here as a rescue by force applied to the prison, not as a transaction with the jailer (see To Whom Was the Ransom Paid?).

It shows the reach of the act backwards in time. The people Christ takes by the wrist are Adam and Eve — those who died before the Incarnation. The descent is the tradition’s answer to the question of what the Cross accomplishes for those who could not have known of it, and the answer is given not as a theory but as an image and a hymn.

It places the accomplishment in the union of natures. The Church confesses that in the three days the divinity remained united to both the soul and the body of Christ, so that it is God who is in the tomb and God who is in Hades; the hypostasis was not divided (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.27; trans. NPNF II/9). This is why the descent is a defeat of death rather than merely a visit to it: what enters Hades is uncontainable there (see The Unassumed Is the Unhealed).

What Is Left Open

The Church’s liturgical texts speak with great breadth — “raising up Adam from corruption,” “emptying the tombs,” “Hades is despoiled” — and the paschal homily read on the night of Pascha declares that “not one dead remains in the grave.” The question of who was in fact delivered, and whether the deliverance was universal or extended to the righteous of the old covenant, is not settled by definition.

[Disputed: the extent of the deliverance in the descent. (a) A broad reading, supported by the sweeping language of the Great Saturday and paschal texts and by the ancient homily’s address to Adam as the whole of fallen humanity, holds that Christ’s preaching in Hades was offered to all the dead. (b) A more restricted reading, common in the patristic commentaries on 1 Peter and reflected in the iconographic convention of the crowned prophets and the Forerunner, holds that those raised were the righteous who had awaited him. The Church has not defined the point, and it touches the wider question of universal restoration, which this repository treats — with the positions named and unadjudicated — at The Apokatastasis Question and Origen, Nyssa, and the 553 Condemnations. This collection does not adjudicate it and does not need to.]

What is not open is that the descent happened and that it is confessed. It stands in the Creed’s “and was buried” as the Church reads it, in the Anaphora of St. Basil (“he descended through the Cross into Hades”), in the propers of Great Saturday, and in the festal icon of Pascha.

References

The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. (The services of Great Saturday.)
The Pentecostarion. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1990. (The Paschal Catechetical Homily attributed to St John Chrysostom.)
Ancient homily on Holy Saturday, transmitted among the works of Epiphanius of Salamis [PG 43:439–464]. (Authorship traditional and not critically established; cited as an early witness to the preaching of the descent.)
John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.27, III.29. Translated in NPNF II/9.
Melito of Sardis. On Pascha 102. Trans. Alistair Stewart-Sykes, PPS 20. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.9. Trans. Beveridge. (Cited for the alternative exegesis of 1 Peter 3:19, reported accurately per METHODOLOGY §4.1.)
Alfeyev, Hilarion. Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox Perspective. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. (The fullest modern Orthodox monograph; its own conclusions on the extent of the deliverance are among the positions the disposition above declines to adjudicate.)
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982. (On the iconography of the Anastasis.)