Sheer Purgatory
Eric Christiansen
The Birth of Purgatory Jacques Le Goff Translated by A. Goldhammer (Scolar Press £20 until 31 Dec)
The historian's purgatory is not difficult to imagine. It is a huge piazza, swim- ming in the hot sun and overlooked by dark refreshing archives. The archives are all shut on various pretexts: for repairs, until the end of August, while the emergency lasts, during reorganisation, pending the resolution of the strike. There are no cafés, no bars, and no amusements. Languid gendarmes inspect the crowds through dark glasses. The crowds circulate in the heat, burdened with brief-cases and card-indexes and portable typewriters. The piazza has no exits. The smell is getting worse.
Other professions, other purgatories. It is our right if not our duty to speculate on this matter, since the 22nd Article of the Church of England condemns the `Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory' as a 'fond thing vainly invented', without putting anything else in its place, or suggesting the nature of non-Roman doctrines on the subject. The papist view — that purgatory is a place outside this world where the souls of the dead are subjected to finite punish- ment — is rejected by all other Christian churches; yet no Christian in the world can give a firm answer to the question 'are all divine punishments after death perpetual?'
So it is not surprising that the Romish purgatory came into being, and has flourished for the last eight centuries. The story of how this came about is now re-told by a French professor who must feel quite at home among the torments of the pur- gatorial piazza. At times, he sounds like a plain sinner, the victim of circumstances and the atmosphere of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales which, as director, he must inhale.
It is believed over there, for example, that all ideas must reflect, no, must ex- press, the social and economic circum- stances of the people who originate or entertain them. Thus it is not merely desirable but quite essential to ascribe the idea of purgatory (as well as heaven and hell) to one particular innings, or over within that innings, or ball within that over, during the test match of history. I don't just mean dates, or places, or verifi- able appurtenances, although Le Goff seems disappointed that he cannot be wholly precise about those; I mean the habit of continually referring to 'the turbu- lent new life of the quays and the market- place' and 'the challenging new ideas of the schools', as if the former explained the latter. So Professor Le Goff is obliged to suspend his acute unravelling of purgato- rial theories with asides about the econo- mic state of Europe at the time, even though the effect of these punctuations is to add confusion and uncertainty to an already difficult exposition.
Ignore all that. It is quite possible to do so, because a mere recapitulation of the main ideas about purgatory from the first century to Dante is enthralling to read, and this is what The Birth of Purgatory offers.
It came as a surprise to learn that there are no Christian inscriptions asking prayers for the dead that can be dated much before 500. This may not be significant of what was generally believed in the early chur- ches, but on the whole the Fathers say little of the matter. Origen thought that all souls would go into the fire, and all might emerge from it; most Christians appear to have disagreed. They wanted perpetual torment for some, if not for themselves. Hell was being promoted, according to Le Goff, as a way of controlling the lower classes; an argument that used to be applied to the 18th-century Methodists. Be that as it may, it was never made clear by any of the early councils what exactly was going to happen after death.
The information was supplied, some- what unofficially, by visionaries and dreamers who went to the next world and reported what they saw. Readers of Bede — scotticised in this translation as a monk of 'Yarrow' — will remember the visions of Fursey and Drythelm, Fursey being an Irish missionary who was scorched on one of his visits to hell and carried the mark on him for the rest of his life. He saw punishment without end in hell, and joy without end in heaven. Bede's account of this experience is second-hand, and rather misleading, but Le Goff is justified in assuming that the earlier Vita Fursei plays no part in the history of purgatory. Never- theless, it remained one of the most popular texts — when translated — among the pious laity of Italy down to the 19th century; that is, among the most earnest believers in purgatory, who ought to have rejected Fursey as hopelessly out of date. Perhaps somebody knows why.
About 50 years later, Drythelm went to the other world and found that things had been arranged quite differently. There were souls being tormented outside the mouth of hell until the Day of Judgement, and no longer — penitent sinners. These temporary torments could be alleviated by the prayers, alms and fasting of the living. There were also happy souls in a green meadow who were not yet admitted into heaven, but were not undergoing pain.
That seems to be purgatory in all but name, but it comes about 500 years before the word was invented. Not good enough, says Le Goff. Purgatory must be one place. equal in status to heaven and hell, and it must be called purgatory. To cut a long story short, it cannot be allowed to have existed before it was named by a group of Parisian intellectuals in the fifth, or poss- ibly sixth arrondissement, not long after 1170. The public is warned against spurious imitations of supposedly earlier date, espe- cially those of Irish or Sicilian manufac- ture. The faithful may have been praying for and alleviating the sufferings of souls immersed in purgatorial fire for hundreds of years before that, but they hadn't quite got their geography up to the required level of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes.
I love a man who is loyal to his college, but I cannot help feeling that Professor Le Goff carries this virtue to excess. His amiable partiality for the logical tradition in which he was educated may have led him to over-emphasise the importance of the Parisian purgatory at the expense of less clearly articulated versions. After all, there is no scriptural warrant for purgatory, as our articles of religion rightly affirm: It must either be seen, or deduced by reason- ing from a few ambiguous hints in the New Testament. Those who claimed to have seen the place, or the thing, or the condi- tion, deserve as much authority as those who provided the word for it; and there were dozens of sightings from Drythelm onwards. It was a great moment when the Parisian masters declared 'It must be 3 place, and it must fit into our view of the world just here', but, as Le Goff demons- trates, most Catholics were already behav- ing as if purgatory existed: praying for the alleviation and shortening of torments after death, hoping for a somewhere be' tween heaven and hell, for favours, remis- sions and privileges beyond the grave. Moreover, the papacy remained remark- ably reticent on the subject, even after the Council of Trent and two centuries of brisk commercial exploitation based on the lay- man's trust in negotiable purgation. The precise geographer of purgatory was Dante, rather than the pope or the doctors. The authorities could only sanction a set of beliefs, which varied greatly, within broad theological limits; and there, I suspect, the matter rests.
No Christian can be sure that purgatorY does not exist. Many are sure that the inhabitants of this world cannot interfere with the penal processes of the next. ManY believe that they can. In either case, the processes themselves are mysterious. St Gregory the Great knew of a man who died and expiated his sins by coming back to this world and working as an attendant in thepublic baths. The many other possi- bilities cited by Le Goff cover only 3 fraction of this overwhelming subject, but such is their fascination and power that I would recommend this book to all wh° approach their own death with their intel- lectual curiosity unimpaired.
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