IV. Catherine and Purgatory

1. Introductory.

(1) Changed feeling concerning Purgatory.

In the matter of a Purgatory, a very striking return of religious feeling towards its normal equilibrium has been occurring in the most unexpected, entirely unprejudiced quarters, within the last century and a half. In Germany we have Lessing, who, in the wake of Leibniz, encourages the acceptance of “that middle state which the greater part of our fellow-Christians have adopted”: Schleiermacher, who calls the overpassing of a middle state by a violent leap at death “a magical proceeding”; David F. Strauss, who entirely agrees; Carl von Hase, who, in his very Manual of Anti-Roman Polemics admits that “most men when they die are probably too good for Hell, but they are certainly too bad for Heaven”; the delicately thoughtful philosopher Fechner who, in the most sober-minded of his religious works, insists upon our “conceiving the life beyond according to the analogy of this-life conditions,” and refers wistfully to “the belief which is found amongst all peoples and is quite shrunken only among Protestants—that the living can still do something to aid the dead”; and Prof. Anrich, probably the greatest contemporary authority on the Hellenic elements incorporated in Christian doctrine, declares, all definite Protestant though he is, that “legitimate religious postulates underlie the doctrine of Purgatory.” And in England that sensitively religious Unitarian, W. R. Greg, tells us “Purgatory, ranging from a single day to a century of ages, offers that borderland of discriminating retribution for which justice and humanity cry out”; and the Positivist, John Stuart Mill, declares at the end of his life: “All the probabilities in case of a future life are that such as we have been made or have made ourselves before the change, such we shall enter into the life hereafter.… To imagine that a miracle will be wrought at death … making perfect every one whom it is His will to include among His elect … is utterly opposed to every presumption that can be adduced from the light of nature.”

(2) Causes of the previous prejudice.

Indeed the general principle of ameliorative suffering is so obviously true and inexhaustibly profound that only many, long-lived abuses in the practice, and a frequent obscuration in the teaching, of the doctrine, can explain and excuse the sad neglect, indeed discredit, into which the very principle and root-doctrine has fallen among well-nigh one-half of Western Christendom. As to the deplorably widespread existence, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, of both these causes, which largely occasioned or strengthened each other, we have the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Trent itself: for it orders the Bishops “not to permit that uncertain doctrines, or such as labour under the presumption of falsity, be propagated and taught,” and “to prohibit, as so many scandals and stones of stumbling for the faithful, whatever belongs to a certain curiosity or superstition or savours of filthy lucre.” The cautious admissions of the strictly Catholic scholar-theologian, Dr. N. Paulus, and the precise documentary additions and corrections to Paulus furnished, directly from the contemporary documents, by the fair-minded Protestant worker at Reformation History, Prof. T. Brieger, now furnish us, conjointly, with the most vivid and detailed picture of the sad subtleties and abuses which gave occasion to that Decree.

(3) Catherine’s purgatorial conceptions avoid those causes. Her conceptions harbour two currents of thought.

It is surely not a small recommendation of Catherine’s mode of conceiving Purgatory, that it cuts, as we shall see, at the very root of those abuses. Yet we must first face certain opposite dangers and ambiguities which are closely intertwined with the group of terms and images taken over, for the purpose of describing an immanental Purgation, by her and her great Alexandrian Christian predecessors, from the Greek Heathen world. And only after the delimitation of the defect in the suggestions which still so readily operate from out of these originally Hellenic ideas, can we consider the difficulties and imperfections peculiar to the other, in modern times the predominant, element in the complete teaching as to the Middle State, an element mostly of Jewish and Roman provenance, and aiming at an extrinsically punitive conception. Both currents can be properly elucidated only if we first take them historically.

1. Jewish prayers for the dead.

It is admitted on all hands that, in the practical form of Prayers for the Dead, the general doctrine of a Middle State can be traced back, in Judaism, up to the important passage in the Second Book of Maccabees, c. ii, vv. 43-45, where Judas Maccabaeus sends about two thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem, in order that a Sin-Offering may be offered up for the Jews fallen in battle against Gorgias, upon whose bodies heathen amulets had been found. “He did excellently in this … it is a holy and devout thought. Hence he instituted the Sin-Offering for the dead, that they might be loosed from their sins.” That battle occurred in B.C. 166, and this book appears to have been written in B.C. 124, in Egypt, by a Jew of the school of the Pharisees.

Now it is difficult not to recognize, in the doctrinal comment upon the facts here given, rather as yet the opinions of a Judaeo-Alexandrian circle, which was small even at the time of the composition of the comment, than the general opinion of Judaism at the date of Judas’s act. For if this act had been prompted by a clear and generally accepted conviction as to the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayers for the dead, the writer would have had no occasion or inclination to make an induction of his own as to the meaning and worth of that act; and we should find some indications of such a doctrine and practice in the voluminous works of Philo and Josephus, some century and a half later on. But all such indications are wanting in these writers.

And in the New Testament there is, with regard to helping the dead, only that curious passage: “If the dead do not arise, what shall they do who are baptized for the dead?” where St. Paul refers, without either acceptance or blame, to a contemporary custom among Christian Proselytes from Paganism, who offered up that bath of initiation for the benefit of the souls of deceased relatives who had died without any such purification. Perhaps not till Rabbi Akiba’s time, about 130 A.D., had prayers for the dead become part of the regular Synagogue ritual. By 200 A.D. Tertullian speaks of the practice as of an established usage among the Christian communities: “we make oblations for the Dead, on their anniversary, every year”; although “if you ask where is the law concerning this custom in Scripture, you cannot read of any such there. Tradition will appear before you as its initiator, custom as its confirmer, and faith as its observer.”

It is interesting to note how considerably subsequent to the practice is, in this instance also, its clear doctrinal justification. Indeed the Jews are, to this hour, extraordinarily deficient in explicit, harmonious conceptions on the matter. Certainly throughout Prof. W. Bacher’s five volumes of Sayings of the Jewish Rabbis from 30 B.C. to 400 A.D., I can only find the following saying, by Jochanan the Amoraean, who died 279 A.D.: “There are three books before God, in which men are inscribed according to their merit and their guilt: that of the perfectly devout, that of the perfect evil-doers, and that of the middle, the uncertain souls. The devout and the evil-doers receive their sentence on New Year’s day … the first, unto life; the second, unto death. As to middle souls, their sentence remains in suspense till the day of Atonement: if by then they have done penance, they get written down alongside of the devout; if not, they are written down alongside of the evil-doers.”

2. Alexandrine Fathers on Purgatory.

Yet it is the Platonizing Alexandrian Fathers Clement and Origen, (they died, respectively, in about 215 and in 254 A.D.), who are the first, and to this hour the most important, Christian spokesmen for a state of true intrinsic purgation. We have already deliberately rejected their Universalism; but this error in no way weakens the profound truth of their teaching as to the immanental, necessary inter-connection between suffering and morally imperfect habits, and as to the ameliorative effects of suffering where, as in Purgatory, it is willed by a right moral determination. Thus Clement: “As children at the hands of their teacher or father, so also are we punished by Providence. God does not avenge Himself, for vengeance is to repay evil by evil, but His punishment aims at our good.” “Although a punishment, it is an emendation of the soul.” “The training which men call punishments.” And Origen: “The fury of God’s vengeance profits unto the purification of souls; the punishment is unto purgation.” “These souls receive, in the prison, not the retribution of their folly, but a benefaction in the purification from the evils contracted in that folly,—a purification effected by means of salutary troubles.”

Now Clement is fully aware of the chief source for his formulation of these deeply spiritual and Christian instincts and convictions. “Plato speaks well when he teaches that ‘men who are punished, experience in truth a benefit: for those who get justly punished, profit through their souls becoming better.’” But Plato, in contradistinction from Clement, holds that this applies only to such imperfect souls as “have sinned curable sins”; he has a Hell as well as a Purgatory: yet his Purgatory, as Clement’s, truly purges: the souls are there because they are partially impure, and they cease to be there when they are completely purified.

And Plato, in his turn, makes no secret as to whence he got his suggestions and raw materials, viz. the Orphic priesthood and its literature, which, ever since the sixth century B.C., had been succeeding to and supplanting the previous Orgiastic Dionysianism. Plato gives us vivid pictures of their doings in Athens, at the time of his writing, in about 380 B.C. “Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors, and persuade these men that they have a power committed to them of making an atonement for their sins, or for those of their fathers, by sacrifices and incantations … and they persuade whole cities that expiations and purifications of sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead.”—Yet from these men, thus scorned as well-nigh sheer impostors, Plato takes over certain conceptions and formulations which contribute one of the profoundest, still unexhausted elements to his teaching,—although this element is, at bottom, in conflict with that beautiful but inadequate, quite anti-Orphic, conception of his—the purely negative character of Evil. For the Orphic literary remains, fragmentary and late though they be, plainly teach that moral or ritual transgressions are a defilement of the soul, an infliction of positive stains upon it; that these single offences and “spots” produce a generally sinful and “spotted” condition; and that this condition is amenable to and requires purification by suffering,—water, or more frequently fire, which wash or burn out these stains of sin. So Plutarch (who died about 120 A.D.) still declares that the souls in Hades have stains of different colours according to the different passions; and the object of the purificatory punishment is “that, these stains having been worn away, the soul may become altogether resplendent.” And Virgil, when he declares “the guilt which infects the soul is washed out or burnt out … until a long time-span has effaced the clotted stain, and leaves the heavenly conscience pure”: is utilizing an Orphic-Pythagorean Hades-book.

This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over by the Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of “removing, by continuous prayer, the stains (κηλίδας) contracted through former sins,” and declares that “the Gnostic,” the perfect Christian, “fears not death, having purified himself from all the spots (σπίλους) on his soul.” And Origen describes “the pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of wickedness,” where the spots have turned to leaden pellets such as were fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement, “post-baptismal sins have to be purified out” of the soul; and, says Origen, “these rivers of fire are declared to be of God, who causes the evil that is mixed up with the whole soul to disappear from out of it.”

In Pseudo-Dionysius the non-Orphic, purely negative, view prevails: “Evil is neither in demons nor in us as an existent evil, but as a failure and dearth in the perfection of our own proper goods.” And St. Thomas similarly declares that “different souls have correspondingly different stains, like shadows differ in accordance with the difference of the bodies which interpose themselves between the light.”

But Catherine, in this inconsistent with her own general Privation-doctrine, again conceives the stain, the “macchia del peccato,” as Cardinal Manning has acutely observed, not simply as a deprivation of the light of glory, but “as the cause, not the effect, of God’s not shining into the soul”: it includes in it the idea of an imperfection, weakness with regard to virtue, bad (secondary) dispositions, and unheavenly tastes.

3. The true and the false in the Orphic conception.

Now precisely in this profoundly true conception of Positive Stain there lurk certain dangers, which all proceed from the original Orphic diagnosis concerning the source of these stains, and these dangers will have to be carefully guarded against.

(1) The conviction as to the purificatory power of fire was no doubt, originally, the direct consequence from the Orphic belief as to the intrinsically staining and imprisoning effect of the body upon the soul. “The soul, as the Orphics say, is enclosed in the body, in punishment for the punishable acts”; “liberations” from the body, and “purifications” of the living and the dead, ever, with them, proceed together. And hence to burn the dead body was considered to purify the soul that had been stained by that prison-house: the slain Clytemnestra, says Euripides, “is purified, as to her body, by fire,” for, as the Scholiast explains, “fire purifies all things, and burnt bodies are considered holy.” And such an intensely anti-body attitude we find, not only fully developed later on into a deliberate anti-Incarnational doctrine, among the Gnostics, but, as we have already seen, slighter traces of this same tone may be found in the (doubtless Alexandrian) Book of Wisdom, and in one, not formally doctrinal passage, a momentary echo of it, in St. Paul himself. And Catherine’s attitude is generally, and often strongly, in this direction.

(2) A careful distinction is evidently necessary here. The doctrine that sin defiles,—affects the quality of the soul’s moral and spiritual dispositions, and that this defilement and perversion, ever occasioned by the search after facile pleasure or the flight from fruitful pain, can normally be removed and corrected only by a long discipline of fully accepted, gradually restorative pain, either here, or hereafter, or both: are profound anticipations, and have been most rightly made integral parts, of the Christian life and conception. The doctrine that the body is essentially a mere accident or superaddition or necessary defilement to the soul, is profoundly untrue, in its exaggeration and one-sidedness: for if the body is the occasion of the least spiritual of our sins, it can and should become the chief servant of the spirit; the slow and difficult training of this servant is one of the most important means of development for the soul itself; and many faults and vices are not occasioned by the body at all, whilst none are directly and necessarily caused by it. Without the body, we should not have impurity, but neither should we have specifically human purity of soul; and without it, given the persistence and activity of the soul, there could be as great, perhaps greater, pride and solipsism, the most anti-Christian of all the vices. Hence if, in Our Lord’s teaching, we find no trace of a Gnostic desire for purification from all things bodily as essentially soul-staining, we do find a profound insistence upon purity of heart, and upon the soul’s real, active “turning,” conversion, (an interior change from an un- or anti-moral attitude to an ethical and spiritual dependence upon God), as a sine qua non condition for entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. And the Joannine teachings re-affirm this great truth for us as a Metabasis, a moving from Death over to Life.

4. Catherine’s conceptions as to the character of the stains and of their purgation.

And this idea, as to an intrinsic purgation through suffering of impurities contracted by the soul, can be kept thoroughly Christian, if we ever insist, with Catherine in her most emphatic and deepest teachings, that Purgation can and should be effected in this life, hence in the body,—in and through all the right uses of the body, as well as in and through all the legitimate and will-strengthening abstentions from such uses; that the subject-matter of such purgation are the habits and inclinations contrary to our best spiritual lights, and which we have largely ourselves built up by our variously perverse or slothful acts, but which in no case are directly caused by the body, and in many cases are not even occasioned by it; and, finally, that holiness consists primarily, not in the absence of faults, but in the presence of spiritual force, in Love creative, Love triumphant,—the soul becoming flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do, give and be, rather than upon what to shun.—Catherine’s predominant, ultimate tone possesses this profound positiveness, and corrects all but entirely whatever, if taken alone, would appear to render the soul’s substantial purity impossible in this life; to constitute the body a direct and necessary cause of impurity to the soul; and to find the ideal of perfection in the negative condition of being free from stain. In her greatest sayings, and in her actual life, Purity is found to be Love, and this Love is exercised, not only in the inward, home-coming, recollective movement,—in the purifying of the soul’s dispositions, but also in the outgoing, world-visiting, dispersive movement,—in action towards fellow-souls.

5. Judaeo-Roman conception of Purgatory.

And this social side and movement brings us to the second element and current in the complete doctrine of a Middle State,—a constituent which possesses affinities and advantages, and produces excesses and abuses, directly contrary to those proper to the element of an intrinsic purgation.

(1) Here we get early Christian utilizations, for purposes of a doctrine concerning the Intermediate State, of sayings and images which dwell directly only upon certain extrinsic consequences of evil-doing, or which, again, describe a future historical and social event,—the Last Day. For already Origen interprets, in his beautiful Treatise on Prayer, XXIX, 16, Our Lord’s words as to the debtor: “Thou shalt be cast into prison, thou shalt not come forth from thence, until thou hast paid the uttermost farthing,” Matt, v, 25, 26, as applying to Purgatory. And in his Contra Celsum, VII, 13, he already takes, as the Biblical locus classicus for a Purgatory, St. Paul’s words as to how men build, upon the one foundation Christ, either gold, silver, gems, or wood, hay, stubble; and how fire will test each man’s work; and, if the work remain, he shall receive a reward, but if it be burnt, he shall suffer loss and yet he himself shall be saved yet so as by fire, 1 Cor. iii, 10-15. It appears certain, however, that St. Paul is, in this passage, thinking directly of the Last Day, the End of the World, with its accompaniment of physical fire, and as to how far the various human beings, then on earth, will be able to endure the dread stress and testing of that crisis; and he holds that some will be fit to bear it and some will not.

Such a destruction of the world by fire appears elsewhere in Palestinian Jewish literature,—in the Book of Enoch and the Testament of Levi; and in the New Testament, in 2 Peter iii, 12: “The heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, the elements shall melt with fervent heat.” Josephus, Antiquities, XI, ii, 3, teaches a destruction by fire and another by water. And the Stoics, to whom also Clement and Origen appeal, had gradually modified their first doctrine of a simply cosmological Ekpyrōsis, a renovation of the physical universe by fire, into a moral purification of the earth, occasioned by, and applied to, the sinfulness of man. Thus Seneca has the double, water-and-fire, instrument: “At that time the tide” of the sea “will be borne along free from all measure, for the same reason which will cause the future conflagration. Both occur when it seems fit to God to initiate a better order of things and to have done with the old.… The judgment of mankind being concluded, the primitive order of things will be recalled, and to the earth will be re-given man innocent of crimes.”

(2) It is interesting to note how—largely under the influence of the forensic temper and growth of the Canonical Penitential system, and of its successive relaxations in the form of substituted lighter good works, Indulgences,—the Latin half of Christendom, ever more social and immediately practical than the Greek portion, came, in general, more and more to dwell upon two ideas suggested to their minds by those two, Gospel and Pauline, passages. The one idea was that souls which, whilst fundamentally well-disposed, are not fit for Heaven at the body’s death, can receive instant purification by the momentary fire of the Particular Judgment; and the other held that, thus already entirely purified and interiorly fit for Heaven, they are but detained (in what we ought, properly, to term a Satisfactorium), to suffer the now completely non-ameliorative, simply vindictive, infliction of punishment,—a punishment still, in strict justice, due to them for past sins, of which the guilt and the deteriorating effects upon their own souls have been fully remitted and cured.

In this way it was felt that the complete unchangeableness of the condition of every kind of soul after death, or at least after the Particular Judgment (a Judgment held practically to synchronize with death), was assured. And indeed how could there be any interior growth in Purgatory, seeing that there is no meriting there? Again it was thought that thus the vision of God at the moment of Judgment was given an operative value for the spiritual amelioration of souls which, already in substantially good dispositions, could hardly be held to pass through so profound an experience without intrinsic improvement, as the other view seemed to hold.—And, above all, this form of the doctrine was found greatly to favour the multiplication among the people of prayers, Masses and good-works for the dead; since the modus operandi of such acts seemed thus to become entirely clear, simple, immediate, and, as it were, measurable and mechanical. For these souls in their “Satisfactorium,” being, from its very beginning, already completely purged and fit for Heaven,—God is, as it were, free to relax at any instant, in favour of sufficiently fervent or numerous intercessions, the exigencies of his entirely extrinsic justice.

(3) The position of a purely extrinsic punishment is emphasized, with even unusual vehemence, in the theological glosses inserted, in about 1512 to 1529, in Catherine’s Dicchiarazione. Yet it is probably the very influential Jesuit theologian Francesco Suarez, who died in 1617, who has done most towards formulating and theologically popularizing this view. All the guilt of sin, he teaches, is remitted (in these Middle souls) at the first moment of the soul’s separation from the body, by means of a single act of contrition, whereby the will is wholly converted to God, and turned away from every venial sin. “And in this way sin may be remitted, as to its guilt, in Purgatory, because the soul’s purification dates from this moment”;—in strictness, from before the first moment of what should be here termed the “Satisfactorium.” As to bad habits and vicious inclinations, “we ought not to imagine that the soul is detained for these”: but “they are either taken away at the moment of death, or expelled by an infusion of the contrary virtues when the soul enters into glory.” This highly artificial, inorganic view is adopted, amongst other of our contemporary theologians, by Atzberger, the continuator of Scheeben.

6. The Judaeo-Roman conception must be taken in synthesis with the Alexandrine.

Now it is plain that the long-enduring Penitential system of the Latin Church, and the doctrine and practice of Indulgences stand for certain important truths liable to being insufficiently emphasized by the Greek teachings concerning an intrinsically ameliorative Purgatorium, and that there can be no question of simply eliminating these truths. But neither are they capable of simple co-ordination with, still less of super-ordination to, those most profound and spiritually central immanental positions. As between the primarily forensic and governmental, and the directly ethical and spiritual, it will be the former that will have to be conceived and practised as, somehow, an expression and amplification of, and a practical corrective and means to, the latter.

(1) The ordinary, indeed the strictly obligatory, Church teaching clearly marks the suggested relation as the right one, at three, simply cardinal points. We are bound, by the Confession of Faith of Michael Palaeologus, 1267 A.D., and by the Decree of the Council of Florence, 1429 A.D., to hold that these Middle souls “are purged after death by purgatorial or cathartic pains”; and by that of Trent “that there is a Purgatory.” Yet we have here a true lucus a non lucendo, if this place or state does not involve purgation: for no theologian dares explicitly to transfer and restrict the name “Purgatory” to the instant of the soul’s Particular Judgment; even Suarez, as we have seen, has to extend the name somehow.

Next we are bound, by the same three great Decrees, to hold indeed that “the Masses, Prayers, Alms, and other pious offices of the Faithful Living are profitable towards the relief of these pains,” yet this by mode of “suffrage,” since, as the severely orthodox Jesuit, Father H. Hurter, explains in his standard Theologiae Dogmaticae Compendium, “the fruit of this impetration and satisfaction is not infallible, for it depends upon the merciful acceptance of God.” Hence in no case can we, short of superstition, conceive such good works as operating automatically: so that the a priori simplest view concerning the mode of operation of these prayers is declared to be mistaken. We can and ought, then, to choose among the conceptions, not in proportion to their mechanical simplicity, but according to their spiritual richness and to their analogy with our deepest this-life experiences.

And we are all bound, by the Decree of Trent and the Condemnation of Baius, 1567 A.D., to hold that Contrition springing from Perfect Love reconciles man with God, even before Confession, and this also outside of cases of necessity or of martyrdom. Indeed, it is the common doctrine that one single act of Pure Love abolishes, not only Hell, but Purgatory, so that, if the soul were to die whilst that act was in operation, it would forthwith be in Heaven. If then, in case of perfect purity, the soul is at once in heaven, the soul cannot be quite pure and yet continue in Purgatory.

(2) It is thus plain that, as regards Sin in its relation to the Sinner, there are, in strictness, ever three points to consider: the guilty act, the reflex effect of the act upon the disposition the agent, and the punishment; for all theologians admit that the more or less bad disposition, contracted through the sinful act, remains in the soul, except in the case of Perfect Contrition, after the guilt of the act has been remitted. But whilst the holders of an Extrinsic, Vindictive Purgatory, work for a punishment as independent as possible of these moral effects of sin still present in the pardoned soul, the advocates of an Intrinsic, Ameliorative Purgatory find the punishment centre in the pain and difficulty attendant upon “getting slowly back to fully virtuous dispositions, through retracing the steps we have taken in departing from it.” And the system of Indulgences appears, in this latter view, to find its chief justification in that it keeps up a link with the past Penitential system of the Church; that it vividly recalls and applies the profound truth of the interaction, for good even more than for evil, between all human souls, alive and dead; and that it insists upon the readily forgotten truth of even the forgiven sinner, the man with the good determination, having ordinarily still much to do and to suffer before he is quit of the effects of his sin.

(3) And the difficulties and motives special to those who supplant the Intrinsic, Ameliorating Purgatory by an Extrinsic, Vindicative Satisfactorium, can indeed be met by those who would preserve that beautifully dynamic, ethical, and spiritual conception. For we can hold that the fundamental condition,—the particular determination of the active will,—remains quite unchanged, from Death to Heaven, in these souls; that this determination of the active will requires more or less of time and suffering fully to permeate and assimilate to itself all the semi-voluntary wishes and habits of the soul; and that this permeation takes place among conditions in which the soul’s acts are too little resisted and too certain of success to be constituted meritorious. We can take Catherine’s beautiful Plunge-conception as indicating the kind of operation effected in and by the soul, at and through the momentary vision of God. And we can feel convinced that it is ever, in the long run, profoundly dangerous to try to clarify and simplify doctrines beyond or against the scope and direction of the analogies of Nature and of Grace, which are ever so dynamic and organic in type: for the poor and simple, as truly as the rich and learned, ever require, not to be merely taken and left as they are, but to be raised and trained to the most adequate conceptions possible to each.—It is, in any case, very certain that the marked and widespread movement of return to belief in a Middle State is distinctly towards a truly Purgative Purgatory, although few of these sincere truth-seekers are aware, as is Dr. Anrich, that they are groping after a doctrine all but quite explained away by a large body of late Scholastic and Neo-Scholastic theologians.

(4) Yet it is very satisfactory to note how numerous, and especially how important are, after all is said, the theologians who have continued to walk, in this matter, in the footsteps of the great Alexandrines. St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches a healing of the soul in the beyond and a purification by fire. St. Augustine says that “fire burns up the work of him who thinketh of the things of this world, since possessions, that are loved, do not perish without pain on the part of their possessor. It is not incredible that something of this sort takes place after this life.”

St. Thomas declares most plainly: “Venial guilt, in a soul which dies in a state of grace, is remitted after this life by the purging fire, because that pain, which is in some manner accepted by the will, has, in virtue of grace, the power of expiating all such guilt as can co-exist with a state of grace.” “After this life … there can be merit with respect to some accidental reward, so long as a man remains in some manner in a state of probation: and hence there can be meritorious acts in Purgatory, with respect to the remission of venial sin.”—Dante (d. 1321) also appears, as Father Faber finely notes, to hold such a voluntary, immanental Purgatory, where the poet sees an Angel impelling, across the sea at dawn, a bark filled with souls bent for Purgatory: for the boat is described as driving towards the shore so lightly as to draw no wake upon the water.

Cardinal Bellarmine, perhaps the greatest of all anti-Protestant theologians (d. 1621) teaches that “venial sin is remitted in Purgatory quoad culpam,” and that “this guilt, as St. Thomas rightly insists, is remitted in Purgatory by an act of love and patient endurance.” St. Francis of Sales, that high ascetical authority (d. 1622), declares: “By Purgatory we understand a place where souls undergo purgation, for a while, from the stains and imperfections which they have carried away with them from this mortal life.”

And recently and in England we have had Father Faber, Cardinal Manning, and Cardinal Newman, although differing from each other on many other points, fully united in holding and propagating this finely life-like, purgative conception of purgatory.

7. A final difficulty.

One final point concerning a Middle State. In the Synoptic tradition there is a recurrent insistence upon the forgiveness of particular sins, at particular moments, by particular human and divine acts of contrition and pardon. In the Purgatorial teaching the stress lies upon entire states and habits, stains and perversities of soul, and upon God’s general grace working, in and through immanently necessary, freely accepted sufferings, on to a slow purification of the complete personality. As Origen says: “The soul’s single acts, good or bad, go by; but, according to their quality, they give form and figure to to the mind of the agent, and leave it either good or bad, and destined for pains or for rewards.”

The antagonism here is but apparent. For the fact that a certain condition of soul precedes, and that another condition succeed, each act of the same soul, in proportion as this act is full and deliberate, does not prevent the corresponding, complimentary fact that such acts take the preceding condition as their occasion, and make the succeeding condition into a further expression of themselves. Single acts which fully express the character, whether good or bad, are doubtless rarer than is mostly thought. Yet Catherine, in union with the Gospels and the Church, is deeply convinced of the power of one single act of Pure Love to abolish, not of course the effects outward, but the reflex spiritual consequences upon the soul itself, of sinful acts or states.

Catherine’s picture again, of the deliberate Plunge into Purgatory, gives us a similar heroic act which, summing up the whole soul’s active volitions, initiates and encloses the whole subsequent purification, but which itself involves a prevenient act of Divine Love and mercy, to which this act of human love is but the return and response. Indeed, as we know, this plunge-conception was but the direct projection, on to the other-world-picture, of her own personal experience at her conversion, when a short span of clock-time held acts of love received and acts of love returned, which transformed all her previous condition, and initiated a whole series of states ever more expressive of her truest self.—Act and state and state and act, each presupposes and requires the other: and both are present in the Synoptic pictures, and both are operative in the Purgatorial teaching; although in the former the accounts are so brief as to make states and acts alike look as though one single act; and, in the latter, the descriptions are so large as to make the single acts almost disappear behind the states.