Purgatory

• 1. Introduction

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  Purgatory sits at the intersection of mercy and justice, promising neither heaven nor hell but something in between. The word itself traces back through Anglo-Norman and Old French to the Latin purgatorium, meaning simply a place of cleansing, from the verb purgo: to clean. It appeared as a noun perhaps only between 1160 and 1180, giving the idea a name that made it easier to think of as an actual location. Before that, theologians spoke of purifying fire and cleansing processes, but not quite of a place called Purgatory. What changed when the noun arrived? And what does Catholic doctrine actually teach, once you strip away centuries of popular imagery involving demons and flames? The answers reveal a concept far older, far more debated, and far stranger than most people suppose.

• 2. The Official Doctrine

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  At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, the Catholic Church formally defined its teaching on Purgatory for the first time, reducing it to two points: some saved souls need to be purified after death, and those souls benefit from the prayers and pious acts of the living. The council declared that souls of those who die truly repentant in charity, before making full satisfaction for their sins, are cleansed by purgatorial punishments, and that the prayers, Masses, alms, and other acts of piety performed by the faithful are of advantage to them. A century and a half later, the Council of Florence repeated those same two points in almost identical words, explicitly excluding fire and a specific place from the definition. The Council of Trent in its decree of the 4th of December 1563 repeated the two points again and added a caution: difficult and speculative questions that do not make for edification should be kept away from uneducated people, and uncertain matters or those that savor of filthy lucre should be prohibited as scandals to the faithful. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have both written that the term purgatory indicates not a place but a condition of existence. Pope John Paul II stated this directly on the 4th of August 1999.

• 3. Sin, Purification, and the Soul

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  Catholic doctrine distinguishes carefully between two kinds of sin and what each requires. Mortal sin, committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent over grave matter, causes exclusion from Christ's kingdom and the eternal death of hell. Venial sin, while not severing the soul's friendship with God, weakens charity and creates what the Catechism calls an unhealthy attachment to creatures; it merits temporal punishment rather than eternal condemnation. Purgatory addresses that temporal punishment, not the forgiveness of sins already granted. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, paraphrased the doctrine this way: purgatory is not some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where punishment is inflicted in an arbitrary fashion, but rather the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God, and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints. The process can be assisted by the living: whenever the Eucharist is celebrated, souls in Purgatory are said to receive a full remission of sin and punishment and pass into heaven. Indulgences, which the Church describes as opening the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints to obtain from the Father of mercies the remission of temporal punishments, are paired with purgatory as defined doctrines, unlike limbo.

• 4. Catherine of Genoa's Inner Fire

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  Catherine of Genoa, who lived from 1447 to 1510 and stood on the cusp of the Reformation, recast the entire theology of purgatory as something voluntary, loving, and even joyful. In her writing she described paradise as having no doors: whoever wishes to enter, does so, and an all-merciful God stands there with arms open. Yet she also wrote that the divine presence is so pure and light-filled that a soul with the slightest imperfection would rather throw itself into a thousand hells than appear thus before it. For her, purgatory is therefore both joy and voluntary pain, the soul's instinct craving to be unhindered as it strains toward that divine light. Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 encyclical Spe salvi, cited her vision and noted the contrast with her contemporaries: in her day purgatory was depicted mainly using images linked to space, but for Catherine it was not an exterior scene in the bowels of the earth but rather an interior fire. He recommended her presentation to theologians and quoted her description of the soul still bound to desires and suffering derived from sin, unable to enjoy the beatific vision, until love for God itself becomes a flame that cleanses it from the residue of sin. In that same encyclical Benedict interpreted Paul the Apostle's words in 1 Corinthians 3:12-15 to suggest that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour, whose gaze transforms and frees the soul through a blessed pain.

• 5. Fire, Place, and Popular Imagination

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  Historian Jacques Le Goff, in his La naissance du Purgatoire (The Birth of Purgatory), attributed the idea of purgatory as a third other-world domain to Paris intellectuals and Cistercian monks, possibly as early as 1170-1180. The timing coincided with the composition of a book called Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, an English Cistercian account of a penitent knight visiting a purgatory reached through a cave on Station Island, also known as St Patrick's Purgatory, in the lake of Lough Derg, County Donegal, Ireland. Le Goff described this book as occupying an essential place in the history of Purgatory, playing an important, if not decisive, role in its popular success. One of the earliest known depictions of St Patrick's Purgatory is a fresco in the Convent of San Francisco in Todi, Umbria, Italy, dated to around 1345 and attributed to Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio. Whitewashed and lost for centuries, it was only restored in 1976. The fresco shows purgatory as a rocky hill with separate openings; each of the seven deadly sins has its own region and its own tortures. Theologian Robert Bellarmine taught that purgatory is situated in the interior of the earth, sharing the same subterranean space as the damned. Thomas Aquinas considered it probable that the same fire tormenting the damned also cleansed the just souls in purgatory. By the early 20th century, the Catholic Encyclopedia reported that opinion had shifted: what then seemed to be the majority of theologians viewed the fire of purgatory as metaphorical rather than material.

• 6. Dante and the Literary Tradition

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  Le Goff dedicates the final chapter of La naissance du Purgatoire to the Purgatorio, the second canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. In an interview Le Goff declared that Dante's Purgatorio represents the sublime conclusion of the slow development of Purgatory that took place in the course of the Middle Ages, and that the power of Dante's poetry made a decisive contribution to fixing in the public imagination this third place, whose birth was on the whole quite recent. Dante pictures purgatory as an island at the antipodes of Jerusalem, pushed up from an otherwise empty sea by the displacement caused by Satan's fall, which left Satan fixed at the central point of the globe of the Earth. The cone-shaped island has seven terraces where souls are cleansed from the seven deadly sins as they ascend. At the base, additional spurs hold those whose ascent is delayed because in life they were excommunicates, indolent penitents, or late repenters. At the summit stands the Garden of Eden, from which souls, cleansed of evil tendencies and made perfect, pass directly to heaven. Anglican theologian C. S. Lewis, who lived from 1898 to 1963, engaged this literary tradition directly. He believed in purgatory as presented in John Henry Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius, and wrote that by that poem religion had reclaimed purgatory as a process of purification that will normally involve suffering. Lewis also explored the idea in his 1945 allegory The Great Divorce, which imagines a refrigidarium: the opportunity for souls to visit a lower region of heaven and choose to be saved, or not.

• 7. Other Traditions and Denominations

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  Eastern Orthodox churches share with Catholics the belief that prayer for the dead is efficacious, but they reject the term purgatory and its associated images of fire and a fixed place. At the Council of Florence (1431-1449), Eastern Orthodox representatives declared that they do hold there is a cleansing after death of the souls of the saved, but not by some purifying fire and particular punishments in some place. The agreement known as the Union of Brest, which formalized the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's full communion with Rome, stated simply: we shall not debate about purgatory, but we entrust ourselves to the teaching of the Holy Church. The Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila, who lived from 1596 to 1646, and the Eastern Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 both affirm that souls can be aided by the prayers of the living and the unbloody sacrifice of the Eucharist, while explicitly rejecting the idea that the souls themselves undergo punishment by fire. Among Protestants, Martin Luther's 1537 Smalcald Articles called purgatory nothing but a specter of the devil, a conflict with the chief article that only Christ sets souls free. Methodism's Article XIV of the Articles of Religion echoes the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles almost verbatim in rejecting the Romish doctrine. Protestant philosopher Jerry L. Walls, in his 2012 book Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, argues from within a Protestant framework that a sanctification model of purgatory, understood as a regimen to regain spiritual health rather than a satisfaction of God's justice, can be affirmed by Protestants without contradicting their theology. In Judaism, the school of R. Akiba held that purgatory in Gehenna lasts twelve months, while R. Johanan b. Nuri argued for forty-nine days, each interpretation anchored in a different reading of a single passage from Isaiah.