HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Dates: c. 200 · Wikipedia
Summary: Clement (c. 150–215), head of the Alexandrian catechetical school, pictures a conscious, divided Hades in which "the souls of the righteous and those of sinners" are emphatically not "in the same condemnation." His distinctive contribution is that Christ's descent was an act of preaching: the Lord (and, after him, the apostles) "preached the Gospel to those in Hades," so that even the righteous who died before the Incarnation — Jews under the Law and Gentiles who "lived rightly" under philosophy — might hear, repent, and be saved there.
It is not plainly the place, which, the words above say, heard the voice, but those who have been put in Hades, and have abandoned themselves to destruction, as persons who have thrown themselves voluntarily from a ship into the sea. They, then, are those that hear the divine power and voice. For who in his senses can suppose the souls of the righteous and those of sinners in the same condemnation, charging Providence with injustice?
— The Stromata, Book 6, historicalchristian.faith. Clement assumes the structured Hades of the earlier tradition: the dead are conscious and sorted, the righteous in one condition and sinners in another, so that it would charge God with injustice to lump them together. This is the same divided underworld that Hippolytus and Tertullian map, here taken for granted as the backdrop of the descent.
Wherefore the Lord preached the Gospel to those in Hades. … Do not [the Scriptures] show that the Lord preached the Gospel to those that perished in the flood, or rather had been chained, and to those kept "in ward and guard"? [1 Peter 3:19-20] And it has been shown also, in the second book of the Stromata, that the apostles, following the Lord, preached the Gospel to those in Hades. … If, then, the Lord descended to Hades for no other end but to preach the Gospel, as He did descend; it was either to preach the Gospel to all or to the Hebrews only.
— The Stromata, Book 6, historicalchristian.faith. Reading 1 Peter 3:19 together with the descent, Clement makes the descensus a missionary act: the gospel reaches "those who had lived in righteousness according to the Law and Philosophy, who had ended life not perfectly, but sinfully," and the offer extends "to all that turn to Him, whether here or elsewhere." This is the seed of the later (and contested) idea of post-mortem evangelization, which Origen would develop.
Therefore he adds, "For this cause was the Gospel preached also to the dead"—to us, namely, who were at one time unbelievers. "That they might be judged according to men," he says, "in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." Because, that is, they have fallen away from faith; whilst they are still in the flesh they are judged according to preceding judgments, that they might repent.
— Fragments: From the Latin Translation of Cassiodorus (on 1 Peter 4:6), historicalchristian.faith. Clement takes 1 Peter 4:6 ("the gospel preached also to the dead") as proof that God's judgments in this life and the next are remedial — aimed "that they might repent" and "live according to God in the spirit." The intermediate state is thus, for him, not merely a holding-pen but a place where the divine economy of salvation is still at work.