Dr. Augustine Sokolovski
On Great Saturday, the Church commemorates the Descent of the Lord Jesus into Hell. The Epistle of Peter states that after His death on the Cross, the Lord descended in spirit into Hell, where He preached to the souls there. The Apostles’ Creed also bears witness to this. The descent of the Lord Jesus into hell is proclaimed by the Church Fathers and ancient liturgical texts.
In the Orthodox liturgy, the troparion “In the tomb with the body, in Hades with the soul as God” is recited at every divine liturgy. On Great Saturday, the body of the Lord Jesus rests in the tomb; He is dead. Therefore, the festive aspect of the Descent into Hell is, as it were, set aside and transferred to Antipascha, when, on the eighth day after the Resurrection, the Church commemorates Thomas’s assurance and the Lord’s Descent into Hell.
The Church Fathers devoted considerable thought to the Descent into Hell. From the very beginning, Eastern authors differed from their Western counterparts in their understanding of the results of this descent. Here, by “Western Fathers,” we mean primarily the African holy fathers, who wrote and thought in Latin.
The Eastern Church Fathers believed that the Lord Jesus brought out of hell the souls of all those who were there. The Western Fathers—and this is particularly evident in St. Augustine—believed that the Lord delivered from hell only the righteous, only those who were awaiting Him. Each of these viewpoints has its own justification in both Scripture and Tradition. In reflecting on the possibility of deliverance from eternal damnation for those who did not know or could not have known Christ during their lifetime in our time, by analogy with the Descent into Hell on Great Saturday, believers may draw inspiration from either of these two patristic perspectives.
On Holy Saturday, the Descent into Hell is revealed not as a triumphal procession of the Risen Christ, but as the culminating moment of kenosis—what theology terms the “divine self-emptying” of God, who became flesh in Jesus and entered into history. The theology of the Church Fathers, as expressed in the decrees of the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon (451), posits not only the possibility but the necessity of the “communication of properties,” whereby, in Christ Jesus, the characteristics of the divine nature are imparted to the human nature, and, conversely, the human nature is imparted to the divine. Great Saturday is the most radical manifestation of this dogma, which is of paramount importance for understanding the essence of Orthodox Christianity.
God is dead; He lies in the tomb. We—all of us together, pagans and Jews, the righteous and the sinners, believers and non-believers—have killed God. God rested from all His works; He fulfilled the commandment which He Himself had originally given, and which He Himself had always broken—that is, the commandment regarding the Sabbath rest. On Great Saturday, He fulfilled this commandment once and for all, so that, after just a few hours, one night, and one day, He might rise again, trample upon death—that is, literally step upon death with His own death.