St. Paul himself never says that
hell is below the earth. Indeed (and this is a very noteworthy
thing) St. Paul never, in his epistles, mentions in plain words hell
at all; so what St. Paul thought about the matter, we can never
know. Whether by Christ's descending into the lower parts of the
earth, he meant descending into hell, or merely that our Lord came
down on this earth of ours, poor, humble, and despised, laying his
glory by for a while, this we cannot tell. Some wise men think one
thing, some another. Two of the wisest and best of the great old
fathers of the Church think that he meant only Christ's death and
burial. So how dare I give a positive opinion, where wiser men than
I differ?
But about the other half of the text, which says, that he ascended
high above all heavens, there is no such difficulty.
All agree as to what that means: though, perhaps, in old times they
would have put it in different words.
The old belief was, that as hell was below the flat earth, so heaven
was above it; and that there were many heavens, seven heavens, in
layers, as it were, one above the other; and that the seventh
heaven, which was the highest of all, was where God dwelt. Now,
whether St. Paul believed this, we cannot tell. He speaks of being
himself caught up into the third heaven, and here Christ is spoken
of as ascending above all heavens.
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