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Purgatory 219
awaited the final judgment and their subsequent
assignment to a realm of damnation or beatitude.
Although the idea of a final judgment does not
require that the dead be bodily resurrected for the
last judgment to take place, these notions became
inextricably connected in Zoroastrian eschatology.
These connections were bequeathed to
Zoroastrianism’s sister/brother faiths, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. Of these four traditions,
Judaism has exhibited the least interest in providing
the dead with a realm to inhabit between death
and resurrection, although the pre-Zoroastrian
conception of Sheol from which the dead could
communicate with the living could be interpreted
as indicating a kind of limbo realm for the
departed (e.g., 1 Samuel 28).
The afterlife limbos of other traditions were
realms where souls of the departed—who, for
some reason, had not made it to the other world—
were “stuck,” usually temporarily. Virgil, for
example, placed souls who had not been properly
buried in a limbo realm where they had to wait a
hundred years before being admitted to the Land
of the Dead. The notion of the dead as stuck in a
neither here nor there realm is ancient. In most of
the world’s religious traditions, the journey from
this world to the abode of the dead is not thought
of as a step that one takes immediately upon
death. Instead, following death, spirits must find
their way to the otherworld. In many cases souls
are unable or unwilling to undertake the journey
to the realm of the dead, and continue to remain
in the presence of their surviving relatives, often
bothering the living in some way. As spirits who
are no longer a part of the realm of the living, and
yet who cannot or will not find their way to the
realm of the dead, these “haunting” spirits exist in
a kind of borderland—a limbo—between life and
death. Thus at least a rudimentary notion of an
afterlife limbo is widespread in world cultures.
In religious traditions that postulate a heaven
and a hell as the final abode of the soul, serious
thinkers have grappled with the fate of those who,
while not ethical exemplars, have been more or
less good, and not guilty of truly evil actions. This
led to the development of ideas of “intermediate”
afterlife abodes in which “mixed” souls are purified
and made fit for paradise. Such an intermediate
realm is referred to as purgatory, alluding to
the purification (“purgation”) that souls in purgatory
undergo. The basic idea seems to have first
appeared in later Zoroastrianism, which postulates
that, after the final battle between good and
evil, there will be a general judgment in which
everyone will be put through an ordeal of fire—a
river of molten metal in which morally mixed
individuals will have their dross burned away
rather than be consumed in hell.
The Zoroastrian purgatory, which is more of
an event than a realm, appears to have influenced
the traditional Catholic notion of purgatory
(easily the best known of such “mixed” realms),
especially in the particular of a purifying fire.
Officially, however, the Catholic acceptance of
purgatory did not begin until a papal letter of
1253, an idea that was not completely confirmed
until the Council of Trent. The Catechism of the
Council of Trent states that, “there is a purgatorial
fire in which the souls of the pious are purified by
a temporary punishment so that an entrance may
be opened for them into the eternal country in
which nothing stained can enter.” Purgatory,
which in this view is a kind of limbo, provided
explanations for such questions as the eternal fate
of babies who died in infancy: Unbaptized babies
entered heaven after a brief sojourn in purgatory—a
far kinder fate than the one imagined by
St. Augustine, who asserted that if even infants
died without the sacrament of baptism they would
be eternally damned. It also helped to explain
ghosts, who were viewed as souls undergoing
purgatorial cleansing.
The Church cautiously embraced the notion
that the prayers and other actions of the living
could shorten the time the deceased spent in
purgatory. As a merciful intercessor, the Virgin
Mary became Queen of Purgatory to whom
prayers for the deceased were addressed. This role
led more or less directly to the medieval cult of
Mary. As is well known to those familiar with the
history, it was the doctrine of the role the living
could play to rescue souls from purgatory that set
the stage for the Protestant Reformation.
Islam embraced the Zoroastrian notion of
purgatory as an afterdeath realm in which all
human beings reside between death and Judgment