Purgatory is a complex notion. Thirty years ago Jacques LeGoff informed us of its rather late “birth,” and now Isabel Moreira, historian at the University of Utah, invites us to reconsider it within an earlier, broader, and more social context. By sidestepping the importance of the admittedly late term purgatorium, and thus its topographical locus in the geography of the afterlife, she concentrates on the related issues of sin and salvation, spiritual cleansing or purging, and of fire as the agent of cleansing. Moreira considers these to be embedded deeply in Christian theology, and her study traces at least one major strand of development from scripture through the controversies over Origen's teachings and the Augustinian synthesis that influenced Pope Gregory I, and finally the Anglo-Saxons Bede and Boniface.
The Christian is called to holiness or spiritual purity despite a natural tendency to sin, and baptism has long served a purifying function. Scripture calls one to repent, amend, and repair the sin-sick soul while one is able in this life, seeming to preclude postmortem measures. Yet in a Christianity of free will is the perfection necessary for heaven even remotely possible for any but the faith's heroes and heroines? Moreira traces the evolution of postmortem purgation in preparation for heavenly bliss. She begins with the standard scriptural evidence in 1 Corinthians 3: 11–15, with Paul's reference to works being tried “as if through fire,” and Malachi's “refiner's fire.” It becomes readily apparent that early Christian writers, and presumably communities, had varying ideas of the afterlife, of whether this “fire” was before or after death, and of the role of postmortem purgation. Like his society, Augustine had varying views of whether one's fate could be affected after death, by God through fiery purgation or through the intercessory prayers and actions of those left behind. Moreira draws from her reading of Augustine that his emphasis on human failing all but necessitated a painful trial after death that paralleled the cleansing ascesis in this life and finished its work.
In her second and third chapters Moreira considers the social world beyond theologians. She notes the position of slaves and male children among the Romans and the role of corporeal punishment in correcting and forming them into useful members of the family. This she sets beside the popularity of the Vision of Paul text and its graphic depictions of infernal torture. Unlike corrective punishment, hellfire and other tortures are summative, but Moreira sees a popular shift from purgatorial fire as painless to its role as corrective and in line with social use of disciplinary violence. She admits that contrapasso-style physical trials appear only in the ninth century, but finds the groundwork being laid during the fifth century. Similarly, her third chapter, on purgative cures effected at St. Martin's shrine and reported by Gregory of Tours, examines the role of physically violent divine action (vomiting, for example) as essential parts of cures. These little-noted texts also shed oblique light on the expectations of the day: like a father or master, God would use violence to correct sons or slaves; as he does at the shrine, God the healer will cure through painful physical purgation, as much a Galenic notion as a theological one. But these are this-worldly purifications; “others,” she avers, would have to apply these to the afterlife.
Moreira continues with her narrative: in the sixth and seventh centuries sacramental penance blended with images of the afterlife in literary visions to create this application. She quickly and efficiently lays out monastic vision stories and broader practices such as intercessory prayer, prayer for the dead, sacramental baptism and penance, and funeral practices and epitaphs to establish two centuries of “incremental steps” linking purgation in the afterlife and prayer for the savable soul. Moreira emphasizes that those involved believed themselves to be transmitting the authentic traditions and inventing nothing, but they were leading toward the position that prayers and fire could save the otherwise unacceptable.
Moreira's real contribution—controversial though it might prove to be—is in her firm placement of the developing paradigm in the agency of Bede and Boniface. Again, visions played the part of defining the theological fine points, the Vision of Drythelm for Bede and the Vision of the Monk of Wenlock for Boniface. In Bede's case, the angelic guide is crystal clear about what the visionary was seeing: punishment by fire and ice that cleansed those late to repent (though repent on their deathbeds they did). It made equally clear that alms, fasting, and dedicated masses could shorten their temporal punishment. She disputes the contentions of LeGoff and Claude Carozzi that Drythelm witnessed no purification, merely punishment: “it was a fully operative system of intercession” (157). She continues to build her argument, including Bede's deathbed distribution of his few goods among friends who, she claims, were expected to pray on behalf of his soul. Her penultimate chapter deftly examines why this evolving and optimistic idea of temporary correction and intercessory prayer as a mitigator served its age so well. Eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missionaries, such as Boniface himself, could draw better responses from an afterlife that was subject to tempering through the Church's direction (alms, masses) than through one in which the pagans were simply damned.
In two chapters Moreira explores and dismisses the possible influence of Irish penitentials and clerical direction of penance, and of Germanic legal codes in shaping purgatory. Heaven's Purgatory is a work the specialist will have to consider in light of her revisions of LeGoff, Carozzi, and Peter Brown. Well supported and presented, rejection of her arguments requires a high level of sophistication and knowledge of the sources. For the less well-informed reader Moreira's picture is clear and reasonable if not compelling. She casts her net so widely that a fully satisfactory treatment of her many sub-arguments would require many more than her 200 pages of text. One hopes that at some point she produces such a text.
