The Social Cancer, by José Rizal - Home

CHAPTER XIV 74
believes it to have been two thousand five hundred years before our era. However that may be, it is certain
that Zarathustra talked of a kind of purgatory and showed ways of getting free from it. The living could
redeem the souls of those who died in sin by reciting passages from the Avesta and by doing good works, but
under the condition that the person offering the petitions should be a relative, up to the fourth generation. The
time for this occurred every year and lasted five days. Later, when this belief had become fixed among the
people, the priests of that religion saw in it a chance of profit and so they exploited 'the deep and dark prison
where remorse reigns,' as Zarathustra called it. They declared that by the payment of a small coin it was
possible to save a soul from a year of torture, but as in that religion there were sins punishable by three
hundred to a thousand years of suffering, such as lying, faithlessness, failure to keep one's word, and so on, it
resulted that the rascals took in countless sums. Here you will observe something like our purgatory, if you
take into account the differences in the religions."
A vivid flash of lightning, followed by rolling thunder, caused Doray to start up and exclaim, as she crossed
herself: "Jesús, María, y José! I'm going to leave you, I'm going to burn some sacred palm and light candles
of penitence."
The rain began to fall in torrents. The Sage Tasio, watching the young woman leave, continued: "Now that she
is not here, we can consider this matter more rationally. Doray, even though a little superstitious, is a good
Catholic, and I don't care to root out the faith from her heart. A pure and simple faith is as distinct from
fanaticism as the flame from smoke or music from discords: only the fools and the deaf confuse them.
Between ourselves we can say that the idea of purgatory is good, holy, and rational. It perpetuates the union of
those who were and those who are, leading thus to greater purity of life. The evil is in its abuse.
"But let us now see where Catholicism got this idea, which does not exist in the Old Testament nor in the
Gospels. Neither Moses nor Christ made the slightest mention of it, and the single passage which is cited from
Maccabees is insufficient. Besides, this book was declared apocryphal by the Council of Laodicea and the
holy Catholic Church accepted it only later. Neither have the pagan religions anything like it. The oft-quoted
passage in Virgil, Aliae panduntur inanes, [55] which probably gave occasion for St. Gregory the Great to
speak of drowned souls, and to Dante for another narrative in his Divine Comedy, cannot have been the origin
of this belief. Neither the Brahmins, the Buddhists, nor the Egyptians, who may have given Rome her Charon
and her Avernus, had anything like this idea. I won't speak now of the religions of northern Europe, for they
were religions of warriors, bards, and hunters, and not of philosophers. While they yet preserve their beliefs
and even their rites under Christian forms, they were unable to accompany the hordes in the spoliation of
Rome or to seat themselves on the Capitoline; the religions of the mists were dissipated by the southern sun.
Now then, the early Christians did not believe in a purgatory but died in the blissful confidence of shortly
seeing God face to face. Apparently the first fathers of the Church who mentioned it were St. Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, and St. Irenaeus, who were all perhaps influenced by Zarathustra's religion, which still
flourished and was widely spread throughout the East, since at every step we read reproaches against Origen's
Orientalism. St. Irenaeus proved its existence by the fact that Christ remained 'three days in the depths of the
earth,' three days of purgatory, and deduced from this that every soul must remain there until the resurrection
of the body, although the 'Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso' [56] seems to contradict it. St. Augustine also
speaks of purgatory and, if not affirming its existence, yet he did not believe it impossible, conjecturing that in
another existence there might continue the punishments that we receive in this life for our sins."
"The devil with St. Augustine!" ejaculated Don Filipo. "He wasn't satisfied with what we suffer here but
wished a continuance."
"Well, so it went" some believed it and others didn't. Although St. Gregory finally came to admit it in his de
quibusdam levibus culpis esse ante judicium purgatorius ignis credendus est, [57] yet nothing definite was
done until the year 1439, that is, eight centuries later, when the Council of Florence declared that there must
exist a purifying fire for the souls of those who have died in the love of God but without having satisfied
divine Justice. Lastly, the Council of Trent under Pius IV in 1563, in the twenty-fifth session, issued the