25. The gates of death, that is, the adverse powers, He overcame. — For the gates of death are the adverse powers. These the Lord, descending, opened, because by dying He overcame their strength. These are also called by another name the gates of darkness, because, while through the snares of their concealment they are not seen, they open the way of death to deceived minds. These dark gates the Lord sees, because He both perceives and presses down the deceitful malice of the unclean spirits. And unless He, by seeing them, prohibited them for us who know it not, our mind would neither know anything of their snares, and, taken by those same snares, would perish. These dark gates even we discern when we are enlightened by the rays of the supernal light. Whence it is also said through the prophet:
The Lord is my helper, and I shall look upon my enemies (Psalm 118:7). Therefore He Himself sees our foes, who by His own gift makes them visible to us. Or certainly the Lord then saw the dark gates, when, penetrating the prisons of hell, He struck the cruel spirits, and by dying condemned those set over death. And this is here said not still of the future, but already of the past, because what He was going to do in deed, He had assuredly already done in predestination. But because after His death and resurrection the Church grew, and was spread abroad amid the groanings in all nations, it is fittingly added: