This world, which we do see, is far too wonderful for us to understand.  How much more wonderful must be the world which we do not see?  How much more wonderful must heaven be?  How can we tell what is there, or what is not there?  We can tell of some things that are not there, and those are sin, evil, disorder, harm of any kind.  Heaven is utterly good.  Beyond that, we know nothing.  Therefore I dare not be positive about this text, for fear I should try to explain it according to my own fancies.  Wise fathers and divines have differed very much as to what it means; how far any one of them is right, I cannot tell you.

The ancient way of explaining this text was this.  People believed in old times that the earth was flat.  Then, they held, hell was below the earth, or inside it in some way:  and the burning mountains, out of which came fire and smoke, were the mouths of hell.  And when they believed that, it was easy for them to suppose that St. Paul spoke of Christ’s descending into hell.  He went down, says St. Paul, into the lower parts of the earth.  What could those lower parts be, they asked, but the hell which lay under the earth?

Now about that we know nothing.  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.