What Is Purgatory? A Doctrine, Its Rise and the Reformation It Helped Start
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Between heaven and hell, in the Catholic map of the afterlife, there is a third place, or a third state, in which the soul that has died in God's friendship but with faults unpurged is made ready, and for a thousand years the living have prayed, paid and fasted to shorten the stay of their dead. Purgatory is not in the Bible by name, it was defined by the church only in the thirteenth century, its sale by indulgence was the spark that lit the Reformation, and Dante gave it a mountain. It is the doctrine that answered a question every religion faces, which is what happens to the ordinary dead, who were neither saints nor monsters.
The problem it solved
Christianity inherited a stark afterlife, the saved and the damned, and a practice that did not fit it: from the second century Christians prayed for their dead, and prayer for the dead makes no sense if the dead are already fixed in heaven or hell. A passage in the second book of Maccabees, in which Judas Maccabeus has sacrifices offered for fallen soldiers, and Paul's remark that some will be saved as through fire, were the scriptural hooks, and Augustine in the fifth century allowed a purifying fire after death for some sins; Gregory the Great around 600 told stories of souls released from suffering by masses said for them. The place had no name until the twelfth century, when purgatorium, the purifying, appeared as a noun in Paris, and the historian Jacques Le Goff argued that the birth of purgatory as a distinct third place, with its geography and its timetable, belongs to those decades.
The doctrine
The church defined it at the Councils of Lyon in 1274 and Florence in 1439 and restated it at Trent in 1563, in terms that are narrower than the popular picture:
- •It is for those who die in a state of grace but with venial sins unforgiven or the temporal punishment of forgiven sins unpaid; the damned do not pass through it and the perfect do not need it
- •It is temporary, and everyone in it will reach heaven; it is not a second chance and not a lesser hell
- •The living can help the souls there by prayer, almsgiving, fasting and above all the mass, which is why every medieval will endowed masses for the testator's soul
- •The nature of the suffering, fire in the Western tradition, and the duration, once counted in years and days, were never defined; the Eastern churches accept a purification after death and reject the Latin details
Indulgences
An indulgence is the church's remission of the temporal punishment due for sin, drawn from a treasury of merit built up by Christ and the saints, and by the fourteenth century it could be applied to the dead. A soul's time in purgatory could be shortened by a pilgrimage, a prayer, a good work, or a donation to which an indulgence was attached, and the donation became the point. In 1517 the Dominican Johann Tetzel toured Germany selling indulgences to finance the rebuilding of St Peter's, with a jingle promising that as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs, and Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, nailed up in Wittenberg that October, were an attack on exactly that. Luther came to reject purgatory altogether as unscriptural, and every Protestant church followed; the Catholic church at Trent kept the doctrine, banned the sale of indulgences, and still grants them, without money, for prayers and acts of devotion.
Dante's mountain
The most famous account of purgatory is a poem. In the Purgatorio, the middle third of the Divine Comedy, Dante climbs a mountain in the southern ocean on whose seven terraces the souls purge the seven deadly sins in order, the proud bent under stones, the envious with their eyes sewn shut, the slothful running, each terrace ending with an angel's wing brushing a letter from the pilgrim's forehead, and at the summit the earthly paradise and Beatrice. Where the Inferno is static, the Purgatorio is a place of movement and hope, with dawn and song and souls asking for prayers from the living, and it fixed the doctrine in the European imagination as a mountain to be climbed rather than a fire to be endured.
Where it stands
The Catholic Catechism of 1992 affirms purgatory as a final purification of the elect, entirely different from the punishment of the damned, and says nothing about fire or years; the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, described it as the encounter with Christ that burns away what is not love, which takes no time because it is outside time. November, the month of the dead, and All Souls' Day on the second of it are still given to prayer for the souls there. Protestants reject the doctrine, the Orthodox keep prayer for the dead without the Latin theory, and the question purgatory answered, what becomes of the good-enough dead, is answered in the other traditions by degrees of paradise, by rebirth, or by silence.
The takeaway
Purgatory is the Catholic doctrine that souls who die in grace but with faults unpurged are purified before entering heaven, a state the living can shorten by prayer and the mass; it grew from the early practice of praying for the dead, was named in the twelfth century and defined in the thirteenth, was mapped by Dante as a mountain of seven terraces, and its sale through indulgences provoked Luther and the Reformation. Catholicism keeps it without the fire and the years; Protestants reject it and the Orthodox keep the prayer without the theory.