WHAT IS PURGATORY?
Photo by Gabriel Castles on Unsplash.
The catechism of the Episcopal Church asks the question, "Why do we pray for the dead?" and then answers it, "We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is." (1)
This process of growth in God's love after death is, like much of our faith, a mystery. We do not know the details of how it works. The idea that the dead undergo a process of purification and growth prior to the resurrection and final judgment is an ancient hope, rooted in pre-Christian Jewish theology.
The Gospels express a clear proclamation of a final judgment, but also a proclamation about God's longing that each of God's beloved creatures pass that final judgment and be restored to unity with God.
Dating back to some of the early theologians, there is a strain of Christian theology that expresses the hope that all of creation might eventually reconciled to God. The Greek term for this hope is apocatastasis. It finds its roots in the divine longing for seeking out the lost sheep, coupled with the fact that God is all-powerful. Apocatastasis is often understood as a hope for the possibility of universal salvation, but it is not a guarantee that all will be restored to goodness, nor is it a universalism that denies judgment or simply says that everything and everyone is okay.
If the last judgment can be understood as a sort of “final exam” for creation, some forms of universalism deny the existence of a final exam, asserting instead that everyone just automatically passes the class. Apocatastasis says there is a final exam, and it's a very very challenging one, but God holds enough supplemental study groups even after the class ends but before the date of the final that there's the hope that all students will be transformed by God's efforts into ones who can pass the final exam. The study groups are very difficult, perhaps even painful, but God is infinitely patient, and can freeze time on the clock ticking down toward the final so that everyone might be prepared to pass the final exam. Even for those who reject the hope of universal salvation, a process of growth prior to the final judgment is consistent with a belief that God longs for the group being saved to be larger rather than smaller.
The Second Council of Lyon in 1274 first formally declared a doctrine of "purgatory," often understood as a physical place in which this purification occurs, although more recently cast not as a place but more of a condition. Within fifty years of the council, the concept of purgatory was rather graphically described and fixed into the popular imagination as a literal place by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in his work Purgatorio, the middle section of his narrative poem The Divine Comedy. For all its considerable influence on the popular imagination regarding the afterlife, it is important to remember that Dante's imagination of hell, purgatory, and paradise are just that: his imagination. Dante's depictions have never been adopted as the doctrine of the church.
Purgatory, like hell, is full of fire in Dante's depiction. The fires of hell, however, exist to torment the damned. The fires that Dante and others depict in purgatory might cause torment as a side effect, but they exist for a constructive purpose: to burn away all that is impure. This leaves those who undergo this treatment purged of all the power of sin that holds them back from participating fully in the Kingdom of Heaven. Purgatory, even in these lurid depictions, is not (primarily) a place of punishment, but a remedial cleansing that can allow those who were not prepared by life to enter into the kingdom of heaven to still have the hope of everlasting salvation.
The medieval church taught that sin had both an eternal and a temporal consequence; God’s forgiveness frees a person from the eternal consequence of sin, but some concrete penitence was also required to free a person from the temporal consequences of sin. A more modern understanding might talk instead about the guilt and power of sin. A soul would need purgation (time spent in this state of purgatory) if a person were to die with their sins forgiven (thus freed from the guilt of sin) and yet not having been transformed through penitence into someone free from the power those sins have over the person. But how much penitence is truly needed to atone from any particular sin? When faced with the incomprehensible, we humans often long to suck the mystery out of it, and give a certainty and measurability to things we really can only begin to wrap our minds around.
This is not only a modern phenomenon; the church has long seemed all too eager to quantify God’s grace. Penitential manuals, originally written as guides for often less-educated parish priests, began to prescribe the length of public penance required to atone for specific sinful acts. These manuals could get very precise about the time of atonement needed to be set free from the consequences of particular sins. God could instantly remit the guilt of sin, but its power over the sinner remained until the sinner had somehow satisfied the needed temporal consequences created by sin. The times prescribed for the combinations of sinful acts a person might engage in could add up to lengthy spans of time doing penance. In the face of these onerous sentences, the church attempted to reintroduce a measure of grace into its understanding of the forgiveness of sins.
It was in response to these codified terms of penance that the doctrine of indulgences arose. The concept began as a way in which a person might participate in some holy activity that could lessen the time of atonement needed for a particular sin. Making a pilgrimage, saying a particular prayer, and giving money to support particular works of the church all have the potential to transform the person who undertakes these acts, and so the church attached indulgences to them. In this highly quantified system of penitential manuals, the indulgences too had specific times attached to them. Those times would shorten the public penance required for a sin, but since “time in purgatory” was popularly understood to be time served for penance not performed in one’s lifetime, the indulgences quickly became understood as shortening the time in purgatory by a prescribed number of hours, days, or years, as if we mortals could measure that or know God’s precise dosages prescribed for our spiritual health.
The practice of indulgences took a turn with the development of undertaking indulgences on behalf of others. If the indulgence were attached to the completion of act itself, and not the effect the process of undertaking the act has on the one doing it, a notion of indulgences as somehow transferable began, so that one could undertake indulgences on behalf of one’s deceased relatives. One could have requiem masses offered for the spiritual benefit of one’s late parents, or undertake a pilgrimage for the benefit of a dead brother or sister. But this reached an apex (or perhaps a nadir) with regard to donations.
Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, was placed in charge of the issuing of indulgences in the territories that make up modern Germany in 1517. Tetzel aggressively promoted the sale of cash indulgences on behalf of the dead, asserting in rhyme (here translated into English) that, “As soon as the gold in the casket rings, / The rescued soul to heaven springs.” Some portion of the money raised by the sale of these indulgences went toward the financing of the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This notion that deliverance from purgatory was literally on sale, combined with the suggestion that one could buy forgiveness for one’s own sins not yet committed, was several steps too far not only for people of his time but even for those today who support the concept of indulgences. Tetzel’s teachings were clearly an abuse of the doctrine. It was into this scene that a young Augustinian friar named Martin Luther emerged, directly challenging and preaching against Tetzel’s attempts to sell free passes out of purgatory.
The English reformers continued where Luther led the way, and in Article XXII of the Articles of Religion adopted by the Anglican Church to assert its reformed identity, the Church averred in 1571 that “the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” (2)
At the time of the Oxford Movement almost three centuries later, John Henry Newman attempted to revive the older doctrine of purgatory, noting that the Articles of Religion did not condemn the notion of purgatory per se, but rather the “Romish doctrine” of purgatory. Newman argued that it was the abuse of the doctrine of purgatory that the Articles of Religion condemned, and not a doctrine of purgatory purged of sixteenth-century Roman abuses.
Despite Newman’s advocacy, purgatory has become something of a dirty word in broad swaths of Christianity. Newman’s arguments were not especially well received in his day, leading Newman himself to exit Anglicanism for Rome. Today his arguments are better received, and yet purgatory is still often associated with punishment, excessive legalism, and even corruption within the institutional church. I believe that it is a mistake, however, to dismiss purgatory as a relic of our unenlightened past. The underlying concept of a "place" or condition of growth in holiness after death is a cause for joy. The hope that comes from the idea of purgatory is this: just because someone has died, God is not necessarily done working on them. Growth in God continues after we die.
There is a long association of purgatory with pain. I believe this association is correct, but the pain involved is not pain inflicted as a form of punishment for sin, as has often been understood, but rather the pain associated with physical therapy or athletic training: suffering is not its goal, but a passing condition in the process of growth.
Without purgatory, we seem to be left with two possibilities for the dead: they are, as they died, ready for the kingdom of heaven, so that spending eternity with them would be paradise; or else being with them for eternity would not be heavenly, so they must be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven. A state of growth beyond death, whether one uses the word "purgatory" or not, opens the door to a third way: if the heart of the deceased is set upon growth in God but they have not yet completed growing into God's vision, there is room for them to grow beyond death. I find the doctrine of purgatory to be profoundly hopeful.
So, then, why do we pray for the dead? How do we really believe that our prayers affect process of growth in God’s love of those who have gone before us? Do we really believe that what we do here on Earth can affect the journey through the process of purgation and growth that our departed loved ones are undergoing?
In my mind, what is most offensive about the idea that indulgences could somehow spring a soul out of purgatory is the idea that a loving God would arbitrarily choose to sentence someone to a minute more in a place of suffering then is absolutely necessary for the sanctification of their soul, or that a loving God would deny someone a single minute of the time of challenging growth that their soul needs to attain sanctification. God loves us too much to make us suffer unnecessarily, but likewise, God values our growth too much to shorten our stay there by one minute less than what we need.
Because purgatory is too intensely painful to subject someone to who doesn’t absolutely need it, and too urgent to the process of salvation to deny to someone who does need it, it follows then that the only way our prayers and actions could affect the souls in purgatory is if somehow the process of transforming someone into a person of the Kingdom of God is different because of the prayers and actions that we offer on behalf of the dead. If the knowledge that we are praying in solidarity with them actually affects a person’s spiritual growth and thus their sanctification, then our prayers for the dead are not just to somehow appease God, but to strengthen the person journeying through the process of growth.
As a former cross-country runner, I can attest that people cheering you on makes a difference in the process of running a race. It’s easier to power up a hill when there are people watching, cheering, shouting that you can do it. Their support changes the experience of the race for the runners being cheered on. Perhaps our prayers for the departed are the same thing. We can’t influence God to spring them free from purgatory. We can't buy their way out. But maybe, just maybe, our solidarity can help them through. We pray for the dead because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in God’s love, until they see God as God is.
A doctrine of purgatory ultimately expresses the hope that God’s sanctifying power extends beyond the reach of the grave. It is an expression of our assurance as Christians that nothing, not even death, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 862.
Book of Common Prayer, 1979, p. 872.
