Hades in Christianity
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Top panel: The rich man feasting, while Lazarus begs at his door.
Middle panel: Lazarus' soul is carried to Paradise by two angels; Lazarus in the Bosom of Abraham.
Bottom panel: The rich man's soul is carried off by two devils to Hades; he is tortured in Hades.
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[edit] Hades in the Bible
Hades is "the place or state of departed spirits".[1] In later Judaism, the term came to mean a place of reward for the pious dead or, especially later, a place of waiting before judgment.[1]
In the Septuagint (the ancient translation of the Tanakh and the Deuterocanonical books into Greek), the Greek term "ᾅδης" (Hades) is used to translate the Hebrew term "שׁאול" (Sheol) in, for example, Isaiah 38:18).[1] Thus too, in New Testament Greek, the Hebrew phrase "לא־תעזב נפשׁי לשׁאול" (you will not abandon my soul to Sheol) in Psalm 16:10 is quoted in Acts 2:27 as "οὐκ ἐγκαταλείψεις τὴν ψυχήν μου εἰς ᾅδου" (you will not abandon my soul to Hades).
In the New Testament the word "ᾅδης" (Hades) appears 11 times. The King James Version rendered the word once as "grave" and ten times as "hell".[2] Modern translations mostly use the transliteration "Hades".
Death and Hades are repeatedly associated in the Book of Revelation.[3] The word "Hades" appears in Jesus' promise to Peter: "And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it",[4] and in the warning to Capernaum: "And thou, Capernaum, shalt thou be exalted unto heaven? thou shalt go down unto Hades."[5]
The word appears in a unique way in Luke's parable of Lazarus and the rich man. In all other appearances Hades has little if any relation to afterlife rewards or punishments, but here, while after death the angels take Lazarus to "the bosom of Abraham",[6] described as a state of comfort,[7] the rich man finds himself in Hades,[8] and "in anguish in this flame".[9]
[edit] Views of some early third-century writers
Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225), making an exception only for the martyrs, argued that the souls of the dead go down beneath the earth, and will go up to the sky (heaven) only at the end of the world: "You must suppose Hades to be a subterranean region, and keep at arm's length those who are too proud to believe that the souls of the faithful deserve a place in the lower regions … How, indeed, shall the soul mount up to heaven, where Christ is already sitting at the Father's right hand, when as yet the archangel's trumpet has not been heard by the command of God, when as yet those whom the coming of the Lord is to find on the earth, have not been caught up into the air to meet Him at His coming, in company with the dead in Christ, who shall be the first to arise? … The sole key to unlock Paradise is your own life's blood."[10].
The variously titled fragment "Against Plato" or "De Universo", attributed to Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170 – c. 236), has the following: "Now we must speak of Hades, in which the souls both of the righteous and the unrighteous are detained. Hades is a place in the created system, rude, a locality beneath the earth, in which the light of the world does not shine; and as the sun does not shine in this locality, there must necessarily be perpetual darkness there. This locality has been destined to be as it were a guard-house for souls, at which the angels are stationed as guards, distributing according to each one's deeds the temporary punishments for (different) characters." It goes on to describe the wicked as tormented by the thought of the "lake of unquenchable fire" into which they will be cast on judgment day, while the righteous are in a place of light called Abraham's bosom enjoying the blessings they already have and delighting in the expectation of greater.
In his study, "Hades of Hippolytus or Tartarus of Tertullian? The Authorship of the Fragment De Universo", C. E. Hill argues that the doctrine of the intermediate state of the righteous expounded in this text is radically opposed to that found in the authentic works of Hippolytus and must have been written by Tertullian.[11]
[edit] Church teachings
The Latin word infernus or "infernum" (underworld) indicated the abode of the dead and so was used as the equivalent of the Greek word "ᾅδης" (hades). It appears in both the documents quoted above, and pointed more obviously than the Greek word to an existence beneath the earth. Later, the transliteration "hades" of the Greek word ceased to be used in Latin and "infernum" became the normal way of expressing the idea of Hades. Though "infernus" is usually translated into English as "hell", it did not have the narrow sense that the English word has now acquired. It continued to have the generic meaning of "abode of the dead". For the modern narrow sense the term "infernum damnatorum" (hell of the damned) was used, as in question 69, article 7 of the Supplement of the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which distinguishes five states or abodes of the dead: paradise, hell of the damned, limbo of children, purgatory, and limbo of the Fathers: "The soul separated from the body is in the state of receiving good or evil for its merits; so that after death it is either in the state of receiving its final reward, or in the state of being hindered from receiving it. If it is in the state of receiving its final retribution, this happens in two ways: either in the respect of good, and then it is paradise; or in respect of evil, and thus as regards actual sin it is hell, and as regards original sin it is the limbo of children. On the other hand, if it be in the state where it is hindered from receiving its final reward, this is either on account of a defect of the person, and thus we have purgatory where souls are detained from receiving their reward at once on account of the sins they have committed, or else it is on account of a defect of nature, and thus we have the limbo of the Fathers, where the Fathers were detained from obtaining glory on account of the guilt of human nature which could not yet be expiated."[12]
The Limbo of the Patriarchs is postulated as having existed only until the Redemption by Christ, and the medieval theory of the Limbo of Infants was never made official Church teaching. Accordingly the Roman Catholic Church holds that the dead are either in heaven (in the case, in particular, of the canonized saints), in the hell of the damned (no particular case has been declared), or undergoing purification in purgatory (believed to be the intermediate destiny of most souls).
The happiness even of the souls in heaven is considered to be in some sense incomplete until reunited with their bodies and "until the number of the elect is complete" and the whole Mystical Body of Christ has reached perfection.[13]
The teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church is that, "after the soul leaves the body, it journeys to the abode of the dead (Hades). There are exceptions, such as the Theotokos, who was borne by the angels directly into heaven. As for the rest, we must remain in this condition of waiting. Because some have a prevision of the glory to come and others foretaste their suffering, the state of waiting is called "Particular Judgment". When Christ returns, the soul rejoins its risen body to be judged by Him. The 'good and faithful servant' will inherit eternal life, the unfaithful with the unbeliever will spend eternity in hell. Their sins and their unbelief will torture them as fire."[14]
The ancient Christian Churches, in particular the Assyrian Church of the East, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, hold that a final universal judgement will be pronounced on all human beings when soul and body are reunited in the resurrection of the dead. They also believe that the fate of those in the abode of the dead differs, even while awaiting resurrection: "The souls of the righteous are in light and rest, with a foretaste of eternal happiness; but the souls of the wicked are in a state the reverse of this."[15]
The ancient Christian Churches also believe that the saints among the dead can intercede for the living, and that the living can help "such souls as have departed with faith, but without having had time to bring forth fruits worthy of repentance … towards the attainment of a blessed resurrection by prayers offered in their behalf, especially such as are offered in union with the oblation of the bloodless sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ, and by works of mercy done in faith for their memory."[16]
From early times, Christians have supposed that Prayer for the those in the abode of the dead (in "Hades", or in the older senses of "infernum" and "hell") is effective for changing their situation. The Latin Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, a text possibly edited by Tertullian,[1] presents the prayer of Perpetua as obtaining that her brother Dinocrates, who had died at seven years of age, was "translated from the place of punishment",[17] and in the Greek Acts of Paul and Thecla Thecla prays for a dead woman, "that she may be translated into a state of happiness, and to life eternal".[18]
Jehovah's Witnesses hold that, until the resurrection, the dead simply cease to exist (see annihilationism) or, if they exist at all, do so in a state of unconsciousness.[19] The latter notion, known as soul sleep, may perhaps have been the belief of Martin Luther.
[edit] The word "Hades" in Christian usage in English
In English usage the word "Hades" first appears around 1600, as a term used to explain the article in the Apostles' Creed, "He descended into hell", where the place of waiting (the place of "the souls in prison" 1 Peter 3:19) into which Jesus is there affirmed to have gone after the Crucifixion needed to be distinguished from what had come to be more usually called "hell", i.e. the place or state of those finally damned. [1]
This development whereby "hell" came to be used to mean only the "hell of the damned" affected also the Latin word "infernum" and the corresponding words in Latin-derived languages, as in the name "Inferno" given to the first part of Dante's Divina Commedia. Greek, on the other hand, has kept the original meaning of "ᾅδης" (Hades) and uses the word "κόλασις" (kolasis – literally, "punishment"; cf. Mathew 25:14, which speaks of "everlasting kolasis") to refer to what nowadays is usually meant by "hell" in English.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford University Press 2005 ISBN 978-0-19-280290-3): Hades
- ^ Blue Letter Bible. "Dictionary and Word Search for hadēs (Strong's 86)"
- ^ Revelation 1:18, 6:8, Rev-nb 20:13–14
- ^ Matthew 16:18
- ^ Matthew 11:23; Luke 10:15
- ^ Luke 16:22
- ^ Luke 16:25
- ^ Luke 16:23
- ^ Luke 16:24-25
- ^ A Treatise on the Soul, chapter 55
- ^ Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Jun., 1989), pp. 105-126
- ^ Question 69. Matters concerning the resurrection, and first of the place where souls are after death
- ^ Donath Hercsik: Quale speranza salverà il mondo? in Civiltà Cattolica 3787 (5 April 2008), pp. 22-33
- ^ Michael Azkoul What Are the Differences Between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism?
- ^ The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church, 372
- ^ The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church, 376
- ^ The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicity chapter 2
- ^ Acts of Paul and Thecla chapter 8
- ^ "The dead are conscious of nothing." Beliefs — God, Man, and the Future
