Macarius on the Harrowing of Hell

Even if you haven’t read the Macarian Homilies,¹ there’s a good chance you’ve come across this famous passage:

The heart itself is awesome but a small vessel, yet there also are dragons and there are lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. And there are rough and uneven roads; there are precipices. But there is also God, also the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the Apostles, the treasures of grace – there are all things.²

This is one of the most distinctive features of Macarius’ spiritual writings: his insistence each and every human heart is itself a battleground on which the whole story of salvation is played out. The fall of Adam, the incarnation of Christ, the descent of Christ into Hades, the preaching of the apostles; all the events of ‘salvation history’ occur in our own hearts.

I just wanted to share here one of the most striking instances of this theme, where Macarius applies it to that most mysterious and powerful of doctrinal images, the “Harrowing of Hell”: the period between Christ’s death and resurrection, where He is said to have descended into the realm of the dead and called all the righteous souls out of their tombs. The idea seems to have been inspired initially by a few cryptic phrases sprinkled throughout the New Testament (e.g. Jn 5:25, 1 Pt 3:19), but grew into a very popular theme for icons and hymns (for an excellent history of its development, see Metropolitan Hilarion’s Christ the Conqueror of Hell). The most striking imagery associated with it is Christ ‘opening the tombs’ of all the dead.

At any rate, here is what Macarius says about the harrowing of Hell – in his characteristic move, he insists that this harrowing is not just an event from the past, but a real occurrence in our own hearts; our sinful souls are really a kind of Hell, and Christ descends into this Hell to call us back to life:

 

Really, when you hear that at that time the Lord freed the souls from hell and the regions of darkness and that he descended into hell and did an amazing work, do not think that this does not have any personal meaning for you … Death has its grip on the children of Adam and their thoughts are imprisoned in darkness. And when you hear mention made of tombs, do not at once think only of visible ones. For your heart is a tomb and a sepulchre. When the prince of evil and his angels have built their nest there and have built roads and highways on which the powers of Satan walk about inside your mind and in your thoughts, then, really, are you not a hell and a sepulchre and a tomb dead to God?

… But the Lord descends into the souls of those who seek him. He goes into the depths of the hellish heart and there he commands death, saying: ‘Release those captive souls that seek after me, those that you hold by force in bondage.’ He breaks through the heavy stones that cover the soul. He opens the tombs. He truly raises to life the dead person and leads that captive soul forth out of the dark prison.³