Annotatio CCLXI

”Thou also, in the blood of thy testament, hast sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit, in which there was no water.” — Zechariah 9:11

Jerome, in the second commentary on Zechariah, is thought to have placed the bosom of Abraham in the hell of the damned, and to have thought both [to be] the same;¹ for there he put these words: “‘Thou also, in the blood,’ etc. — which is thus understood: ‘In the blood of thy passion [thou hast freed] those who were bound in the prison,

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in which there is no mercy — by thy clemency thou hast freed [them].’ And a little after: ‘In the prefiguration of this pit, which did not have water, both Joseph was sent by [his] brothers into the pit, and Jeremiah [was cast] by the Chaldeans — not into the water of the pit, but into the mud; and into the mire the pit was sunk down, which could suffocate rather than refresh. Whence in the psalm it is written, ‘I am fixed in the mud of the deep, and there is no footing.’² In this pit of hell tarried that rich man once clothed in purple,³ whose boastful tongue was burned with the burnings of punishments; and to such a degree he had no refreshment of the punishments, that he demanded the refreshment of the extreme finger of the poor man, dipped in water.”

The divine Augustine — [in] epistle 57 to Dardanus, epistle 99 to Evodius, and in book 12 On Genesis to the Letter — seems to refute this opinion for a twofold cause: first, because in the Gospel there is said to be a vast chaos, and a deep and impassable gulf set between the bosom of Abraham (where Lazarus enjoyed solace) and Hell (where the rich man burned in torments); then, because, since in the sacred Letters nowhere is the name of the infernal [places] found to be taken in a good sense, it is not credible that that rest, in which Lazarus with the other souls of the holy Fathers rejoiced, was among the Infernal [places]. The Scholastic theologians teach that the bosom of Abraham and Hell are the same in situation, [but] differ in quality; [being] moreover enclosed by the same enclosure of a subterranean place — as Jerome rightly holds — each is comprised together, yet so that they are distinguished into a supreme and a lowest region by some interval. But the quality of each region is so diverse, that there [in the one] were of old the refreshments of pious souls, but here [in the other] are the perpetual punishments of the impious; and that [gulf], moreover, [is] χάσμα, that is, an immense gap, lying between each region — whether Augustine understood it corporeally, or spiritually, as a most firm law of God, as [it were] by a certain impermeable abyss prohibiting the commingling of these and those. Nothing prohibits but that the bosom of Abraham and Hell are comprehended in the same circuit of the earthly cavity.⁴ But to that which Augustine says — that nowhere is Hell called in a good sense — Thomas, in the fourth volume of the Sentences, distinction 45, question 1, responds plainly in these words: “The place and state of the holy Fathers, as to that which it had of good, was called the bosom of Abraham; but as to that which it had of defect, was called hell: and so neither is the bosom of Abraham taken in an evil sense, nor hell in a good sense — although in a certain manner they are one.”