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.[272] 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.”[273] 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.[274]
(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.[275] 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.”[276]
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.”[277]—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.[278]
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.”[279] 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.”[280]
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.[281]
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.”[282]