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.”[266]
(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.”[267] This highly artificial, inorganic view is adopted, amongst other of our contemporary theologians, by Atzberger, the continuator of Scheeben.[268]
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.[269]
(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.”[270] 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.”[271] 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.