In medieval Christian tradition, the soul of Christ
was believed to have descended into hell after his
crucifixion and before his resurrection, and to
have delivered from their imprisonment the souls
of the righteous held there from the beginning of
time. The tradition, popular in art and literature,
commemorates Christ’s victory over death. In the
Byzantine Church, this event was called the Anastasis (meaning “resurrection”), and was a standard
theme of Byzantine iconography. In OLD ENGLISH
and MIDDLE ENGLISH, the event was called the Harrowing of Hell, and was a popular theme in homilies, poems, and particularly in the CORPUS CHRISTI
cycles of MYSTERY PLAYS.
The doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell seems
to have its roots in the early church. Two passages
from the first letter of Peter (probably a secondcentury text) allude to Christ preaching to the
souls that were disobedient in the time of Noah (1
Pet. 3.19–20), and later, to the Gospel being
preached among the dead (1 Pet. 4.6). So pervasive was the tradition that it was adopted as part
of the Apostle’s Creed, the earliest extant universal statement of orthodox Christian belief, in
which is included the phrase descendit ad inferos
(“he descended into hell”). The story is first told
unambiguously in the apocryphal Gospel of
Nicodemus (possibly from the third or fourth century), chapters 17 through 27 of which describe
Christ’s descent into hell. Here, Satan and a character called Hades engage in a dialogue, during
which the King of Glory enters hell to rescue the
souls of the righteous who, until his crucifixion,
had no path to salvation. He leads the Old Testament “saints” into heaven, and casts Satan himself into Tartarus.
Some Christians had difficulty dealing with the
notion that Christ would enter hell, since it was assumed only those who sinned would do so, and
they would suffer torments while there. The orthodox medieval view of the Harrowing was expressed
by Thomas AQUINAS, who explained that Christ
did not descend in order to suffer punishment, nor
to convert unbelievers in hell, but rather as a part
of his triumph over death: Before his sacrifice none
could enter heaven, but now he descended to deliver all those who before his death had lived in
faith and in charity—those, technically, who dwelt
in Limbo, that region pictured by DANTE as the
topmost circle of hell where the only punishment
was separation from God.
In early Christian and Byzantine art, Christ is
usually shown surrounded by a mandorla and
reaching out, grasping Adam and/or Eve by the arm
to raise them from a grave or tomb. As time went
on, other pre-Christian figures were added, including John the Baptist, Abel, David and Solomon, and
many of the prophets, and Christ is depicted trampling on the fallen gates of Hell or, sometimes, on
Satan himself. In later medieval art, he might be
shown entering a wide-open monstrous mouth,
symbolizing the Mouth of Hell as Leviathan, to take
hold of our first parents entrapped there.
The Latin text of the Gospel of Nicodemus was
known in England from early times. The Venerable
BEDE seems to have been acquainted with the text,
and there are early Old English poems alluding to
Christ’s descent into hell. The first use of the term
Harrowing appears in one of the sermons of AELFRIC. The story is paraphrased in the MIDDLE ENGLISH poem called the CURSOR MUNDI, but the
fullest development of the theme appears in the
mystery plays. All four of the extant cycles (the
YORK CYCLE, the CHESTER CYCLE, the N-TOWN
PLAYS and the TOWNELEY CYCLE) include a separate
pageant depicting the Harrowing, in vivid and dramatic detail, generally depicting the devils as comic
in their overconfidence and subsequent confusion.
Probably owing something to these dramatic
scenes, the great Harrowing of Hell passus from
William LANGLAND’s PIERS PLOWMAN (ca. 1377) is
certainly the most colorful and memorable of all
medieval literary presentations of the story. Here
Christ enters hell, and debates with the devil over
the justification for his depriving the devil of the
souls that had been his for thousands of years. The
devil claims rights to the souls because of Adam’s
fall, but Christ claims he has paid any outstanding
debt by his death, and argues (in terms reminiscent
of St. ANSELM’s argument for “Why God became
man”) that he has also made satisfaction to God,
and thereby saved humanity. He ultimately leads
all human souls into salvation.
Bibliography
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