Purgatory

← Encyclopedia

Purgatory is, in Catholic doctrine, a condition or process after death by which souls destined for heaven but still marked by the residue of sin are purified before they can enter it. It is not a second chance at salvation. Those in purgatory are already saved; what remains is a cleansing, often imagined as fire, of what would otherwise keep them from the presence of God. The distinction is exact and easily lost. The damned in hell are not there to be improved; their state is final. The souls in purgatory are on the far side of that division already — their salvation is settled, their destination is the vision of God, and the only thing unfinished is their readiness for it. Purgatory names the interval, however it is measured, in which that readiness is completed.

What is purified is not guilt in the sense of liability to damnation, which the saved no longer carry, but what later theology called the reatus poenae — the temporal consequence of sin that remains after the eternal guilt is forgiven. A wound can be pardoned and still need to heal. The soul that dies in friendship with God yet still bent toward lesser goods, still attached to what it should have left behind, is not fit, on that account, for the undivided sight of God; purgatory is the straightening of that bend. The affirmed core is narrow. Around it the tradition has wrapped a great deal of imagery — fire above all, and after Dante a mountain — but the imagery has never been raised to the level of doctrine. Catholic teaching distinguishes the certainty of the state from the pictures used to depict it, and binds itself only to the first.

A doctrine grown from a problem

The doctrine grew from a problem the early Church faced rather than from a single text. Scripture nowhere names purgatory, and the tradition has always conceded as much; what it offers instead is a small set of passages read, over centuries, as pointing toward the thing the word later named. The first is a scene in the Second Book of Maccabees, where Judas Maccabeus, finding that fallen soldiers had worn pagan amulets under their tunics, takes up a collection and sends it to Jerusalem so that sacrifice may be offered for the dead — an act, the text says, made in the hope of resurrection, and described as a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from sin. The book sits in the Catholic and Orthodox canons and outside the Hebrew and Protestant ones, which is itself part of the later argument; the passage is preserved in Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, translated there by James Moffatt. The second is a line in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where each person’s work is tried by fire, and one whose work is burned away is nonetheless saved — yet so as through fire. Around these two verses, and around the very old Christian practice of praying for the dead attested in catacomb inscriptions and early liturgies long before any theory explained it, a more defined teaching slowly formed.

The Latin word that did the defining is itself a late arrival. Purgatorium as a noun — purgatory as a place or intermediate region, rather than merely a purifying that happens — is medieval. The historian Jacques Le Goff, in La naissance du purgatoire (1981; English, The Birth of Purgatory, 1984), argued that the substantive purgatorium designating a discrete third place, distinct from both heaven and hell, first appears between roughly 1170 and 1200, in Cistercian and Parisian milieux, and that before that the sources speak only of a purgatorial fire as process, not of a third country with a name. The hardening of the noun, in his reading, is bound up with the high-medieval mind: its appetite for system, its new geography of the otherworld, the rise of the schools, even a shifting sense of justice and of time. Dante’s poem is, in his phrase, the triumph of the idea in literature.

The thesis has been pressed hard since — contested in its dating but not abandoned. Isabel Moreira’s Heaven’s Purge (2010) pushes the formation back into late-antique and early-medieval monastic and penitential culture, well before the twelfth century; Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul (2015) locates a watershed in the seventh-century Irish penitential world, where the account-keeping of sin and satisfaction took on a new precision. None of these scholars denies that purgatorial ideas existed early — all agree they did, reaching back to Augustine of Hippo, who spoke of a cleansing fire that some might pass through, and to Gregory the Great’s tales of souls in temporary suffering. The question they divide on is narrower: whether the reification of purgatory into a discrete place, with a name of its own, required the scholastic elaboration of the late twelfth century, or had already been built, more quietly, in the monasteries.

The scholastics gave the inherited material its sharpest theological articulation. Within the systematic theology of the high Middle Ages, the distinction that anchors the whole doctrine — between the eternal guilt of sin, which the saved no longer bear, and its temporal residue, which they may still owe — was set out with new exactness. Thomas Aquinas located purgatory in precisely this gap: the soul that dies in grace but with satisfaction still unmade is cleansed after death of what penance left undone, and the suffrages of the living, applied to it from the communion of the Church, genuinely reach and relieve it. The fire he and his contemporaries discussed remained a disputed image rather than a defined article, but the architecture — forgiveness already given, satisfaction still owing, a purifying that completes it, a body of the faithful able to assist — was the frame the councils would ratify.

The councils

The Western Church gave the teaching conciliar definition three times, each under different pressure. At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, in the course of a short-lived reunion with the Greek Church, the Latins set down that souls truly penitent who die in charity before they have made satisfaction for their sins are cleansed after death by purgatorial or purifying penalties, and that the suffrages of the living — the Mass, prayers, alms — avail to relieve them. At the Council of Florence, in the union decree Laetentur Caeli of 6 July 1439, the formula was renewed, again as part of an attempt to heal the schism with the East. Here the difference with the Greeks surfaced sharply and was, in the end, papered over: the Latin language of cleansing punishment was accepted into the decree, while the Greek delegates resisted, above all, the notion of a material purgatorial fire. The definition stood; the agreement it sealed did not survive the delegates’ return home.

The third definition came at the Council of Trent, in its twenty-fifth and final session, on 4 December 1563, in answer to the Reformation. Trent affirmed that there is a purgatory and that the souls detained there are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, above all by the sacrifice of the Mass — and, with unusual restraint, warned its own preachers against the more difficult and subtle questions, against curiosity and superstition, and against treating as certain what was not. The decree defended the doctrine while disowning the luridness that had grown around it. The same restraint runs into the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church, whose paragraphs 1030 to 1032 name the state, ground it in the practice of prayer for the dead and in the two scriptural verses, and call it a final purification of the elect entirely different from the punishment of the damned.

What the living could do for the dead

What the living could do for the dead became the doctrine’s most consequential feature, and its most dangerous. If souls in purgatory could be helped by the prayers, Masses, and good works of those still alive, then the duration or intensity of their cleansing could be eased — and the medieval economy of suffrages grew around exactly this claim. Chantries were endowed so that Masses might be sung in perpetuity for a founder’s soul; confraternities pooled prayer; the Mass for the dead, the Requiem, became the liturgical form of the whole conviction. Onto this structure was grafted the indulgence: a remission, drawn from the Church’s treasury of merit, of the temporal penalty still owed for forgiven sin, applicable — by the later Middle Ages — to the souls in purgatory as well as to the living.

The applicability of indulgences to the dead is where the system bent toward abuse. By the early sixteenth century indulgences attached to almsgiving were being preached, in effect, as purchasable transfers of relief to departed kin. The campaign of the Dominican Johann Tetzel in Saxony, raising funds tied to the rebuilding of St. Peter’s in Rome, was the immediate provocation for the ninety-five theses that Martin Luther posted on 31 October 1517 — theses that still, at that date, assumed purgatory existed and attacked the commerce in its relief rather than the state itself. The argument did not stay there. The Protestant Reformers came to reject purgatory outright, holding that nothing in the canonical Scripture warranted it, that the books that seemed to (Maccabees among them) lay outside the canon, and that the finished work of Christ left nothing for the dead to satisfy. With purgatory went the Masses, the chantries, and the indulgences that had presupposed it; the English chantries were dissolved by statute within a generation. In the Protestant frame the dead are already where they will be, and the living have nothing to do for them but remember.

Eastern Orthodox Christianity has likewise declined the Latin definition, though from a different direction and without joining the Protestant rejection of prayer for the dead. The Orthodox Church prays for the departed, offers the Eucharist for them, and holds that they may be helped; what it declines is the specific Latin apparatus — a distinct purgatorial fire and a juridical accounting of temporal punishment. At Florence the Greek spokesman, Mark of Ephesus, set the objection in its classic form: souls not yet ready are cleansed, he allowed, but by the prayers of the Church and the mercy of God, in a state of darkness and deprivation of the divine light, and not by any material fire or measured penalty in a place. The three positions — the Latin definition, the Protestant denial, the Orthodox demurral — divide over what happens between death and glory and over what, if anything, the living may do about it; each reads the same handful of texts toward a different end.

Dante’s mountain

The most influential rendering of the idea is not a creed but a poem. Dante’s Purgatorio, the second part of the Commedia written in the early fourteenth century, gives purgatory a shape the doctrine never required and the imagination never relinquished: a mountain rising alone from the ocean of the southern hemisphere, antipodal to Jerusalem, raised — in the poem’s geography — from the earth displaced by Lucifer’s fall. It is climbed in stages. Below the gate lies ante-purgatory, where the late-repentant wait; above it rise seven terraces, one for each of the capital dispositions — pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust — and on each the souls are reshaped out of the disposition that held them, by a penance fitted to it, until the bent is straight. The governing principle, the contrapasso that in hell fixes an eternal mirror to sin, works on the mountain to a different logic: not retribution without end but correction under time, each terrace a school the soul finishes and leaves. At the summit is the earthly paradise, and beyond it the ascent to the stars. The poem made purgatory a place one could see — graded, climbable, directional, with an exit — and that picture has shaped the Western imagination of the state far beyond the boundaries of the doctrine itself.

Catholic teaching has kept the distinction the poem makes easy to forget. The fire and the mountain are images; the Church has not bound itself to them, and the modern magisterium speaks more readily of purification as an encounter than as a geography. The doctrine sits inside the larger map of last things — eschatology, the bible’s handful of read-in verses, the sacramental economy that links the living to the dead — and within that map it occupies a small and particular cell. What it affirms is narrower and stranger: that some who are saved are not yet ready, and that the readiness can still be made.

→ In the library: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Charles, 1913) — 2 Maccabees

→ Related: Sacrament · Middle Ages · Mass For The Dead · Hell · Eschatology · Sin · Soul · Thomas Aquinas · Augustine Of Hippo · Martin Luther · Christianity · Bible