purgatory

/perr"geuh tawr'ee, -tohr'ee/, n., pl. purgatories, adj.

n.

1. (in the belief of Roman Catholics and others) a condition or place in which the souls of those dying penitent are purified from venial sins, or undergo the temporal punishment that, after the guilt of mortal sin has been remitted, still remains to be endured by the sinner.

2. (cap., italics) Italian, Purgatorio /poohrdd'gah taw"rddyaw/. the second part of Dante's Divine Comedy, in which the repentant sinners are depicted. Cf. inferno (def. 3), paradise (def. 7).

3. any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation, or the like.

adj.

4. serving to cleanse, purify, or expiate.

[1175-1225; (n.) ME purgatorie ( < AF) < ML purgatorium, n. use of neut. of LL purgatorius purging, equiv. to purga(re) to PURGE + -torius -TORY¹; (adj.) ME purgatorie < LL purgatorius]

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In Roman Catholic doctrine, the condition of those who have died in a state of grace but have not been purged of sin.

These remaining sins include unforgiven venial sins or forgiven mortal sins. Souls burdened by such sins must be purified before entering heaven. The church also teaches that souls in purgatory may be aided by efforts of the living faithful through prayers, almsgiving, indulgences, and other works. The existence of purgatory has been denied as unbiblical by Protestant churches and most Eastern Orthodox churches.

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▪ Roman Catholicism

Introduction

      the condition, process, or place of purification or temporary punishment in which, according to medieval Christian and Roman Catholic (Roman Catholicism) belief, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for heaven. Purgatory (Latin: purgatorium; from purgare, “to purge”) has come to refer as well to a wide range of historical and modern conceptions of postmortem suffering short of everlasting damnation.

Purgatory in world religions

      The idea of purification or temporary punishment after death has ancient roots and is well-attested in early Christian literature. The conception of purgatory as a geographically situated place is largely the achievement of medieval Christian piety and imagination. Beliefs and practices relating to purgatory profoundly affected Western society in the Middle Ages and beyond. As the focus of a complex system of suffrages (intercessory prayers, masses, alms, and fasting on behalf of the dead), penitential practices, and indulgences, purgatory strengthened the bond between the living and dead, provided motivation for works of social philanthropy as well as for pilgrimages and Crusade (Crusades)s, and furnished abundant matter for visionary and imaginative literature.

      In general, the origins of purgatory may be sought in the worldwide practice of praying for the dead and caring for their needs. Such ministrations presuppose that the dead are in a temporal state between earthly life and their final abode and that they can benefit from the generosity or transferred merit of the living. Purgatory answers the human need to believe in a just and merciful cosmos, one in which ordinary people, neither hardened sinners (sin) nor perfect saints, may undergo correction, balance life's accounts, satisfy old debts, cleanse accumulated defilements, and heal troubled memories. Since these are universal concerns, there are parallels to the Christian conception of purgatory in many religious and cultural traditions.

      According to classical Buddhism, for example, rebirth in any of the six realms—whether as a god, human, demigod (asura), animal, hungry ghost, or hell being—is a temporary state conditioned by the character of the intentional actions performed in a person's past lives ( karma). Donations to a monastic community, altruistic practice of spiritual disciplines, and good deeds are ways of generating merit that may be dedicated to relieving the purgatorial suffering of beings imprisoned in sorrowful rebirths or in transit between lives. In medieval Chinese Buddhism, the classical Buddhist understanding of rebirth and transfer of merit merged with traditional practices and beliefs concerning the veneration of ancestors and the placation of potentially troublesome ghosts. The Chinese Buddhist afterworld is perceived as an imperial bureaucracy in which the deceased is subjected to a series of trials whose outcome depends largely upon the offerings made by family members. The monastic community, as a “field of merit” for lay donors, serves an intermediary function. The popularity of the annual Ghost Festival (rite in which offerings are made to ancestral ghosts), as well as the persistence of other seasonal, domestic, and esoteric rites for the care and feeding of the dead, demonstrates that responsibility for beings in “purgatory” is an enduring preoccupation of Chinese society—as it is in other East Asian cultures.

Christian (Christianity) traditions

      Among Christians, the biblical warrant for purgatory is contested. Supporters of the Roman Catholic (Roman Catholicism) belief cite biblical passages in which there are intimations of the three major components of purgatory: prayer for the dead, an active interim state between death and resurrection, and a purifying fire after death. These texts yield a consistent notion of purgatory, however, only when viewed from the standpoint of the formal Roman Catholic doctrine, which was defined at the councils of Lyon (Lyon, councils of) (1274), Ferrara-Florence (Ferrara-Florence, Council of) (1438–45), and Trent (Trent, Council of) (1545–63) after a prolonged period of development by lay Christians and theologians.

Origins of the doctrine

 Advocates of purgatory find support in numerous scriptural and non-scriptural traditions. The well-attested early Christian practice of prayer for the dead, for example, was encouraged by the episode (rejected by Protestants as apocryphal) in which Judas Maccabeus (Maccabeus, Judas) (Jewish leader of the revolt against the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes) makes atonement for the idolatry of his fallen soldiers by providing prayers and a monetary sin offering on their behalf (2 Maccabees (Maccabees, The Books of the) 12:41–46); by the apostle Paul's prayer for Onesiphorus (2 Timothy 1:18); and by the implication in Matthew 12:32 that there may be forgiveness of sins in the world to come. The parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke (Luke, Gospel According to) 16:19–26 and the words of Jesus from the cross to the repentant thief in Luke 23:43 are also cited in support of an interim period before the Day of Judgment (Last Judgment) during which the damned may hope for respite, the blessed preview their reward, and the “mixed” undergo correction. The noncanonical tradition that on Holy Saturday Christ invaded the realm of the dead and liberated Adam and Eve and the biblical patriarchs lends support to the view that there is a temporary realm of imprisonment after death.

      Some Christian writers speak of an “intelligent” fire that tortures the damned, tests and purifies the mixed (e.g., 1 Corinthians (Corinthians, The Letter of Paul to the) 3:11–15), and is pleasant to the saints. Analogous ideas are found in rabbinic literature, including the Babylonian Talmud. According to Hebrews 12:29, God himself is “a consuming fire.” Against the view that all mankind will ultimately be saved by passing through a cleansing fire—a doctrine considered sympathetically by the theologians Origen (c. 185–c. 254) and St. Gregory of Nyssa (Gregory of Nyssa, Saint) (c. 335–c. 394) and prominent in Zoroastrian (Zoroastrianism) eschatology—St. Augustine (Augustine, Saint) (354–430) distinguished between the purgatorial fire that burns off stains and the everlasting fire that consumes those who die unrepentant and unreconciled to the church. Pope Gregory I (Gregory I, Saint) (reigned 590–604) elaborated the doctrine still further, treating the purgatorial fire as an extension beyond the grave of the metaphorical fire of redemptive suffering. While commending the practice of offering masses for the sake of suffering souls, he emphasized, as Augustine did, that the question of salvation or damnation is settled at the moment of death; only those destined for salvation pass through purgatory.

Development of the tradition

      Visionary literature, such as the 3rd-century Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua), and return-from-the-dead stories recounted by Gregory I, Bede (Bede the Venerable, Saint) (672/673–735), and subsequent Christian authors, reinforced the idea that the dead can undergo purgation and can benefit from acts of intercession by the living. Canonical penance, as it evolved in the West, was predicated on the belief that even forgiven sins incur specific punishments and that satisfaction not completed during life must be made after death. Indulgences (indulgence) granted by the church from the “treasury of merits” (Christ's infinite merit and the merits of all the saints) could remit some or all of this temporal punishment, and suffrages performed by the living on behalf of the dead could lesson its severity.

       All Souls' Day, established as a liturgical feast in the early 11th century by the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, encouraged popular devotion to the souls in purgatory and contributed to the rise of folk customs that were analogous in some respects to the Chinese Ghost Festival, including English mumming plays, soul cakes (cakes offered in exchange for prayers for the dead), and bonfires for the dead. A parallel development in Judaism is the mourner's recitation of the Kaddish prayer sanctifying God's name. The practice arose in the 12th century among Ashkenazim (Ashkenazi) of the Rhineland, who kept lists of their dead in Memorbücher and recited the Kaddish to help the dead through the interim period of purification after death.

      According to the French historian Jacques Le Goff, the conception of purgatory as a physical place dates to the 12th century, the heyday of medieval otherworld-journey narratives and of pilgrims' tales about St. Patrick's Purgatory, a cavelike entrance to purgatory on a remote island in northern Ireland. As late as 1220, however, Caesarius Of Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk and preacher, thought that purgatory could be in several places at once. With his Purgatorio, in which the “second kingdom” of the afterlife is a seven-story mountain situated at the antipodes to Jerusalem, Dante Alighieri (Dante) (1265–1321) created a poetic synthesis of theology, Ptolemaic cosmology, and moral psychology depicting the gradual purification of the image and likeness of God in the human soul. Other works of literature in which purgatory themes loom large are Shakespeare's Hamlet (1603), the traditional British folk ballad "A Lyke-Wake Dirge," Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1797–98), John Henry Newman's "The Dream of Gerontius" (1865), and the entire European ghost-story (ghost story) tradition, most notably Charles Dickens (Dickens, Charles)'s A Christmas Carol.

Non-Catholic and modern attitudes

      The idea of purgatory remains controversial, however. Eastern Orthodox (Eastern Orthodoxy) Christians, while upholding the ancient Christian practice of prayer for the dead, generally reject the Roman Catholic understanding, as well as the penitential system to which it is tied, as unwarranted innovations. The granting of indulgences in exchange for donations epitomized for Protestant reformers (Reformation) of the 16th century the false “works-righteousness”—i.e., the teaching that salvation could be earned by doing good works—and the venal corruption of the medieval church, and only a few Protestant thinkers have defended the doctrine in modern times. The suppression of purgatory beliefs in Protestant societies contributed to its reinvention by Swedenborgian, Spiritualist, Theosophical, and New Age writers as a mentally constructed realm of education and spiritual progress. Contemporary Roman Catholic doctrine, while confirming traditional teachings on purgatory, has moved away from infernal imagery and softened the punitive aspect, stressing that souls in purgatory, assured of salvation, willingly undergo purification to prepare them for the joy of the beatific vision (the full vision of God granted to the saved in heaven).

Carol Zaleski

Additional Reading

Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (1984, reissued 1990; originally published in French, 1981), is the most focused treatment of Western Christian beliefs about purgatory. Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (1998; originally published in French, 1994) traces the connection between ghosts, dreams, and purgatory in medieval culture. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (2001), studies the history of purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes in Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.Purgatory in medieval vision literature is examined in Robert Easting (ed.), St. Patrick's Purgatory (1991); Eileen Gardiner (ed.), Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (1989); Michael Haren and Yolande de Pontfarcy (eds.), The Medieval Pilgrimage to St Patrick's Purgatory: Lough Derg and the European Tradition (1988); Takami Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry (1997); Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (1990); Howard Rollin Patch, The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (1950, reissued 1970); and Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (1987).The idea of purgatory in Chinese traditions is best discussed in Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (1994, reissued 2003); and Arthur P. Wolf (ed.), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (1974).Carol Zaleski

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