4 Sections of Hell according to Thomas Aquinas (by Dr Taylor Marshall)

Howdy, welcome back to the New St. Thomas Institute. I'm so glad you're here. We're going to talk about one of my favorite topics in all of Thomas Aquinas because it's one of the most confusing topics in all of theology, and that is the descent of Jesus Christ into hell, what theologians call the harrowing of hell. So we say in the Apostles Creed, he descended into hell and oftentimes in church art or in icons, you'll see a picture of Christ where he's descended into hell, Sheol, Hades. And he's taking the hands of Adam and Eve and he's escorting them and behind them are like Moses and Abraham and David and Esther, and he's escorting them out of the underworld and bringing them to heaven. So a lot of people have questions about this because they're like, well, why would Jesus go to hell? And why are people in the Old Testament in hell? Are they suffering? And then to make things even more complicated on the cross, when Jesus is dying, he says to the good thief, today you will be with me in paradise. And yet he descends into hell to redeem the Old Testament people. How does all of this work? Okay, well, Thomas Aquinas breaks it down in a really easy way to understand. And following the early church tradition, actually the Jewish tradition, the early church tradition and then the medieval tradition, they break the underworld, the netherworld into four sections. And we're going to go through each of those four sections now. So the section that we identify in English with hell, H-E, double hockey stick, the H-E-L-L, capital H, in the Greek and in the Latin and in the Hebrew is called Gehenna, Gehenna. This is the fires of hell. This is where the devil goes, all the demons and all the damn people go. It's fire, it's torture, there's hatred, there's discord. This is total evil pandemonium. You don't want to go there. This is called Gehenna. So that's one of the four sections of hell. Now, I should back up a little bit here. In Latin, the word for hell is infernus, infernus. And what that means is literally the lower regions. We might say in English, the netherworld, the below area, the downward. And so in English, unfortunately, we use the word hell to describe everything. But in Latin and in Greek and in Hebrew, they use different words. And that's where we're going to get in today. These different words to describe different abodes or different sections in the infernus, the netherworld. Okay, so the lowest in the bad place is called Gehenna, all right, the fires of Gehenna. And in the gospels, when Christ is talking about hell, he's using not the word Sheol, which is a Hebrew word for the lower places, or purgatory or limbo. He's using the term Gehenna, the fires of Gehenna. That's where you don't want to go. Now, the next area is purgatory. This is where people go when they need that extra measure of sanctification, right? They need to be purified because in this life, they were not fully sanctified. They weren't fully made saints in this life. And we get this from both the Old Testament, for example, in 1 and 2 Maccabees, we learn about how they prayed for the dead, right, because they had certain sins. But also St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 3, verse 15, talks about how there will be some people who will kind of barely be saved, but they will pass through fire after they die. It says 1 Corinthians 3, verse 15, they will pass through fire. And this is describing this experience of those who have faith in Christ, they hope in God, they love God, even just if it's a little bit, but their life isn't fully reconciled to God. And so they go to purgatory, passing through fire to be purified. It's not a pleasant experience. Some people nowadays say, well, purgatory is just sort of like the antechamber or the lounge in front of heaven. No, purgatory is through fire. It's not a pleasant experience. I mean, of course, you're going to get heaven, so that's pleasant. But there is some pain involved in this, right? There is a punitive element to purgatory, so we want to avoid that as well. As someone once said, a priest friend of mine once said, Gehenna and purgatory are on the same heating system, right? So you don't want to go to either. All right, so that's the first two. The next one is the one we're going to talk about most today, and that is the limbo of the fathers, also in scripture called Abraham's bosom. Now, before Jesus died on the cross, there were none of the seven sacraments existed in the Old Testament. Sanctifying grace was not as widespread, and they didn't have the fullness of the faith. Not only that, their sins had not been paid for because Jesus had not died on the cross. So they weren't going to go to hell and suffer. So instead, they went to this netherworld, what they called in the Old Testament in Hebrew, Sheol, which means the grave or the pit or the underworld. They went there, and we read in scripture that it's a place that's like a paradise. There are trees in it, and there is cool running water. And it's called in Latin, limbo, or actually in Latin, limbus, because limbus means an edge or a hem, like the edge of my jacket here. So if you think of hell as an upside-down cone, right, going down like this, like Dante does in his Inferno, goes like this, and the very bottom is the fires of hell, Gehenna, right? Up at the top of the cone, up around the edge, the hem, or in Latin, the limbus, up around the top, you're no longer in really hell anymore. You're kind of on the outskirts of it, where it's cool and nice and not so bad. The theologians, for example, Augustine, would call this a natural paradise, a natural beatitude. And this is where the saints, the good people of the Old Testament, lived and dwelled while they waited for the Messiah to come and purchase their redemption on the cross on Good Friday. So when Christ says to the good fief, today you will be with me in paradise, he's saying, you're going to go with me to this netherworld, where the Old Testament faithful are, to this paradise, and then I'm going to escort all of you to the supernatural paradise, which is heaven. And this is why we see on icons, Christ kicking in the gates of hell, and then right there at the top of it, not down in the deep Gehenna, but at the top, you see Moses and Adam and David and all these great saints, and he's leading them out like, you are my friends, I love you, I want you to be in heaven with me forever, I have paid the price of your redemption, I've died for you, and he leads them up. And this is called the harrowing of hell. Now, some Protestants, and nowadays there's even a few Catholics, and you don't want to believe this, say that Christ ascended all the way to the bottom of that cone to Gehenna, and that's heresy, that's false. You can't believe that as a Catholic. Thomas Aquinas specifically teaches that that is not allowed. We do not believe that. Christ, of course, defeated all the powers of hell, but he did not go down into the fires of hell and suffer, right? He was without sin. All of salvation was purchased. Our redemption was complete on the cross. This is why he said, it is finished, period. That was it. He didn't have to go and start suffering in hell for three days. That did not happen. That is not the tradition. That is not what we read in scripture. Even if you hear people say something like that, don't believe it, okay? So he went and he rescued them from Abraham's bosom. And there's a passage I want to read from the Gospels that describes Abraham's bosom. It's from Luke 16, 22. And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by angels into Abraham's bosom. And the rich man also died and he was buried into hell or Gehenna. Okay, so here we see, this is before Christ died on the cross. This is a Jewish context. It happens in the Gospels, but it's technically part of the Old Testament because it's before the death of Jesus on the cross on Good Friday. And the good man is taken down to Abraham's bosom. So this is the place where Abraham is. He's held Abraham, who's his spiritual father, father of the Jews. He goes down to be with his people. But the rich man goes into the fires of hell. And in this story, the rich man says, bring me some water. Help me out down here, Abraham. And Abraham says, look, there's a vast chasm between where you are, Gehenna, and where we are, Limbo of the Fathers. Okay, so this third section, we have Gehenna, Purgatory, and then we have the Limbo of the Fathers. This is where Christ came to redeem the Old Testament. And then Thomas Aquinas talks about the Limbo of the Children. And this, according to Thomas Aquinas, is where unbaptized babies go because they do not have sanctifying grace, and yet they have never committed any sins. And so they go to this outer region, right, this edge, where they have perfect happiness, perfect joy. And as Thomas Aquinas says elsewhere, they are illuminated and taught by angels. Now, nowadays, there's a lot of controversy about limbo and whether or not unbaptized babies go to heaven. I don't want to get into it in this topic. In fact, we'll save that for one in the future in our sacramental studies. For now, we're just talking about the descent into hell. Okay, so we've discussed these four regions. We've determined that Christ did not descend into Gehenna. Instead, he went to Abraham's bosom or the Shale of the Fathers. And there he redeemed all the Old Testament faithful. And this, by the way, is where we get the phrase, waiting in limbo. You may have used this phrase. You may have heard others use it. It's referring to how the people in the Old Testament, some of them waited hundreds of years. Some of them waited thousands of years for the coming of the Messiah. They were waiting for Jesus to die on the cross. They were waiting in limbo. Now, I want to close with a passage from St. Thomas Aquinas that's very beautiful, and it sums all of this up. It also explains how sacramental efficacy relates to us in the New Testament and the saints in the Old Testament. And it goes like this. Hence, as the power of the passion is applied to the living through the sacraments, which make us like unto Christ's passion, so likewise it is applied to the dead through his descent into hell, on which account it is written in Zechariah that he sent forth prisoners out of the pit in the blood of his testament, that is, by the power of his passion. And that's from Summa Theologiae, Part 3, Question 52, Article 1. What's amazing about this is for us in the New Testament, we receive the grace of Christ, the merits of his passion, death, and resurrection through the sacraments, baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, confession, etc. But for the saints of the Old Testament, really he's saying here that the only sacrament that they received was in fact the descent of Jesus into hell. When Christ ascended into hell for the Old Testament faithful, that was for them baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, confession. That event is what distributed grace and redemption to them down below and then enabled them to ascend with him into heaven and have the beatific vision, which is our hope in the New Testament as well. Well, I think this is a beautiful mystery. I think as you study this, and I would really encourage you to go back to this section in the third part, Question 52, and read about this. Read more about what Thomas Aquinas says, because you'll see that God had a plan for those in the Old Testament, and he certainly has a plan for us in the New Testament. And also it clears up a lot of confusion about this mystery. Did Christ really descend into hell? Well, hey, thanks for being a member of the New Saint Thomas Institute. I hope you're learning a lot. I love engaging with you in the forums. And again, thanks for watching. God bless. We'll see you in the next video.