HistoricalChristian.Faith

Melito of Sardis on the Intermediate State

Dates: c. 170 · Wikipedia
Summary: Melito, bishop of Sardis, in his paschal homily On Pascha (Peri Pascha) — the oldest surviving Christian Easter sermon — puts the harrowing of Hades on the lips of the risen Christ himself: by his death and resurrection Christ "trampled Hades under foot," "bound the strong one," and "carried off man to the heights of heaven." It is among the earliest liturgical proclamations of the descent as a victory over the realm of the dead.

Claims & evidence

The risen Christ "trampled Hades under foot … and carried off man to the heights of heaven"

Who is my opponent? I, he says, am the Christ. I am the one who destroyed death, and triumphed over the enemy, and trampled Hades under foot, and bound the strong one, and carried off man to the heights of heaven, I, he says, am the Christ.

— On Pascha (Peri Pascha), §102, historicalchristian.faith. The homily closes with the exalted Christ speaking in the first person (§§100–104): having "arose from the dead and mounted up to the heights of heaven" (§100), he declares himself the conqueror of death and Hades. "Trampled Hades under foot" and "bound the strong one" (cf. Matt 12:29, the binding of the "strong man") express the harrowing — Christ's descent breaking the power of the realm of the dead — while "carried off man to the heights of heaven" is the deliverance of humanity out of that realm and up to God.

The redemptive movement runs down into the grave and up to heaven

This is the one who became human in a virgin, who was hanged on the tree, who was buried in the earth, who was resurrected from among the dead, and who raised mankind up out of the grave below to the heights of heaven.

— On Pascha (Peri Pascha), §70, historicalchristian.faith. Melito repeatedly pairs Christ's burial "in the earth / the grave below" with his raising "mankind up … to the heights of heaven" (so also §47, §103), the same descent-and-ascent pattern the later tradition reads as the emptying of the holding-place of the dead.

Notes

• Melito is a paschal preacher, not a systematic teacher of the intermediate state: the descent appears as triumphant proclamation, not as a mapped geography of Hades' compartments. His witness establishes how early — within a generation of Justin (c. 165) — the harrowing of Hades was a settled theme of the Church's Easter worship.
• A further descent image is preserved in the Melitonian fragments — "by the cross the gates of hell are burst, and by the cross the gates of paradise are opened" (New Fragments III) — but that fragment lies outside the On Pascha text; the verbatim quotations above are from the homily itself.
• For the wider adjudication of whether the descended Christ freed the OT righteous and "led captivity captive," see the descent to the dead argument page. Melito's "trampled Hades under foot … carried off man to the heights of heaven" is an early poetic statement of exactly that motif, developed at length by Irenaeus and Origen shortly after.