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?”[253] 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.”[254]
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.”[255]
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.”[256] 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.”[257]
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.’”[258] 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.[259] 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.”[260]—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.[261]