In Our Time - Purgatory

Episode Date: May 25, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the flourishing of the idea of Purgatory from C12th, when it was imagined as a place alongside Hell and Heaven in which the souls of sinners would be purged of those sins by fire. In the West, there were new systems put in place to pray for the souls of the dead, on a greater scale, with opportunities to buy pardons to shorten time in Purgatory. The idea was enriched with visions, some religious and some literary; Dante imagined Purgatory as a mountain in the southern hemisphere, others such as Marie de France told of The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick, in which the entrance was on Station Island in County Donegal. This idea of purification by fire had appalled the Eastern Orthodox Church and was one of the factors in the split from Rome in 1054, but flourished in the West up to the reformations of C16th when it was again particularly divisive.WithLaura Ashe Associate Professor of English and fellow of Worcester College at the University of OxfordMatthew Treherne Professor of Italian Literature at the University of LeedsandHelen Foxhall Forbes Associate Professor of Early Medieval History at Durham UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in the Middle Ages, most Christians in the West hoped that when they died, their souls would go straight to purgatory until what they believed was an imminent final judgment. Only saints would go straight to heaven.

There were few of them, while unrepentant citizens, sinners would go directly to hell. Pergatory was thought of as more than an idea. It was a real place somewhere, perhaps under Mount Etna, or on a mountain in the southern hemisphere, or on an island on an Irish loch. And there your soul would burn in purifying flames until made clean you'd be ready to enter heaven.

And for how long, as for how long you spent there, that would depend on whether you'd bought indulgences while alive, or been on a pilgrimage, or whether your surviving relatives, prayed for your soul. With me to discuss the rise and fall Purgatory are Laura Ash, Associate Professor of English and Fellow of Worcester College at the University of Oxford. Matthew Tahrin, Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Lees, and Helen Foxwell Forbes, Associate Professor of Early Medieval History at Durham University.

Laura Ash, before Purgatory, there was a general sense, was there a general sense of what happened to the souls of the dead? Well, in early Christianity, there was actually a comparatively vague sense of the afterlife. In the Old Testament, we used. We have a shadowy underworld, shiel, which is often translated as hell and is associated with the grave and darkness, and that God can protect you from this, could guide you through it or pass it or perhaps save you from it. But there's not a great deal more than that. And then in the Gospels, we have direct statements about a binary between heaven and hell, that the blessed will go to eternal life and the damned will go to eternal punishment. we have this kind of statement. But in comparison with co-existing traditions, like the classical tradition,

there's not a great deal of detail. So in the Aeneid, for example, when Ineus goes down to the underworld, he hasn't explained to him that people are punished according to their desserts and there are different gradations, different kinds of punishment. You can eventually attain the Elysian fields and so on. So in that sense, Christianity in its earliest days was quite vague. What did they find in the Bible? You just mentioned the Old Testament.

What did they find in the Bible for what might happen after you died? There was heaven and there was hell. The mentions of heaven and hell. Yes. Was there anything else specifically mentioned? Well, so strictly speaking, no. But there were a few passages that were taken over time to be indicators of purgatory, to be indicators of what came to be known as purgatory.

So there's a moment in Matthew's Gospel when he says that there are some sins which shall not be forgiven neither here nor in the, the life to come. Is this in the Corinthians? So that bit is Matthew, that's 1232, and that was just taken to indicate that perhaps we could still work on sins in the life to come. So that's a kind of side indication. But the bit in Corinthians that I think you're referring to, which is very famous, is when Paul says, if you have a foundation in Christ, men build upon that foundation in gold or silver or precious stones or wood or hay or stubble, and then they will be passed through fire and their works will be revealed in fire.

And he says, you know, some will pass through fire and their works will survive and some will pass through fire and their works will be burnt and they will suffer losses but then be saved, but saved as though through fire. And so this was taken to be the sense that somehow in between this binary of heaven and hell, what you had done in your life would be seared through fire, purged, cleansed. there was a great surge in the idea of the development of purgatory in the second half of the 12th century onwards was there any connection between what had been said in the scriptures and what was taken to be the case later in one or two cases or did you just

come up again there's absolutely connection and it's a connection that's mediated through the church fathers and through writings that became canonical in themselves even though they weren't actually in scripture, you know, Gregory the great, many people wrote about this idea of purgatorial fire. So the idea of purging by fire after death had been there throughout. What changes... In the scriptures? Well, in the scriptures, they're only there in that statement in Corinthians that I just gave you. You know, their works will be revealed by fire.

They will be saved through fire. There's that. There's also a rich man in hell sees Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. which gives you the sense that there must be some kind of contiguous connection between the damned and the saved. But that's really all there is. There isn't a great deal in scripture, but there was enough for people to work on it. Because really, you can understand why they had to work on it. Because if you have, you know, in Eneas underworld, there's a gradation and you can improve and you can get better.

In the Christian heaven and hell, it's binary. And the question is, who are you to say you're worthy of heaven? Helen, Boxwell, Paul, let's stay in this area for a result. while Gregory the Great developed this idea. Gregory the Great developed this idea. Can you tell us when and how he did it? Yes. So Gregory wrote a work called The Dialogues, which was incredibly popular, and he produced this towards the end of the 6th century, probably in about 593 or 4. And much of the dialogues is stories about saints, miracles. So the work is in four books, and it's in the final book that he really starts to talk about ideas about what happens after death. And so some of

these are kind of theologically oriented. So the passage that Laura mentioned from one Corinthians comes up there. The work is called the dialogues because it's in the form of a dialogue between Gregory and someone called Peter who's asking the questions. And one of the questions that Gregory has Peter ask him is, must we believe that there is a purgatorial fire after death? And Gregory says, yes, we must believe this. And he talks about this with reference to this passage from the Corinthians. And he talks about the purging that happens and how sins are removed. But the other thing that made Gregory's dialogues really popular is that alongside this kind of theological discussion,

he also has accounts of visions or kind of miraculous occurrence. So we hear, for example, about somebody who is the ghost, I suppose, of somebody who's died, who's kind of working in a bathhouse and somebody else comes and encounters him and says, well, how are you here, what's going on? And he says, well, I'm suffering, you know, offer things for my soul. And so the man goes away and does this, and when he returns to the bathhouse, this sort of ghost figure is no longer there. And he also tells us things about, for example, a monk named Eustas

who has kept some gold coins. This is discovered on his deathbed. Gregory says, well, this is not allowed. We're going to throw you into a pit. Afterwards. These are commentaries, though. The commentaries take over a lot of the Catholic churches we know, and they sometimes

given higher authorities than the scriptures, although not by the reformers, but there we are. There were also, let's just refer to the bead man. The St. Drithelm is I pronounces? Drithelm, yeah. And let's talk about him and then conclude that there isn't a great

evidence for purgatory in the scriptures and the Bible. But let's talk about St Drithelm because he's quite interesting. Drichthelm, okay, well so Bede is writing in 731. He writes his ecclesiastical history and he records a vision that was supposed to have happened to a layman called Drichthelm in the late 7th century in Northumbria.

And Drichthelm died and when he was dead he was shown around the afterlife by an angel and he was shown heaven which he couldn't get into it was kind of walled off and he was shown hell he was also shown two separate kind of intermediate areas and so one of these which is looks like purgatory is a valley of fire and ice with souls leaping from one side to the other and the other was a paradise

the other was a paradise yeah And so that's the evidence so far. And it moves through, it moves through. But it was, can I just move to Matthew? Because I think we've established that it was there in Gregory, it was there in Beed, it was there in visions, it was there in commentators, there's very little there in the scriptures and reference that you have to dig hard at in the scriptures

to get what you want out of it. Is that fair enough? Matthew, Matthew Treherne. Let's go back to what, need was the idea of purgatory addressing? I think there are certain human needs that the idea of purgatory really helped to fulfil. So one is about, I think, the idea of a single Christian community reaching from the living on earth through to the saints in paradise and across the dead in purgatory who were saved yet in the process of being cleansed in some way. And

this connection between these different groups was really emphasised. by the kind of practices that developed around purgatory. We know that praying for the dead was common in many religions, briefly outlined at the beginning of the programme. Is there something there that you find interestingly consistent and to do with the basic need, or was it a passage of history that's now gone? No, I mean, I think that idea of praying for the dead

really is where purgatory comes alive for Christians in this period. So the idea that really is, you can imagine it, I think, as part of the grieving process. So you would say prayers, hold masses on behalf of the dead in order to assist them as they progress through purgatory. Was it assisting them or assisting the person who was making the prayer? Well, depending on, I mean, it could be both. But I mean, both practices were common. So practices of penance would help to alleviate the process of purgatory for. the people who were saying them, but then saying prayers for the dead

would be on behalf of those who are in purgatory, not on behalf of those living on earth. So let's say in the Middle, Middle Ages, in the late 12th century, when it comes in, we've got this idea of the community, the living in the dead are part of one Christian community, all of which are abidient to the absolute rules, if we can use that word, or wishes of God. And then purgatory develops a bigger life.

it becomes a third place. That's right. Although, I mean, it's interesting, I think, when you look at the way in which theologians started to talk about, or continue to talk about it, there was a certain amount of hesitancy about some of the points of detail about where Pergatry. Which day do we in now?

Well, I mean, taking, for example, Aquinas, so the supplement to the summer. That's a bit later than we want to be Aquinas. I mean, what about when he kicks up a bit early, really kicks in, a bit earlier, about the 12th century? So the idea that it's an actual place becomes quite firmly established at this time. And what sort of places that they have in mind that there is this place called purgatory, which is on earth in, well, I've said it in the introduction,

but it's better if you say it now, more authoritative. Well, it's a physical space. It's a space which is often conceived as a kind of an annex of hell. So it's the same fires that are there in hell. experienced differently for the souls in purgatory, as would be experienced for the souls in hell. It's a temporary state, crucially. But it is a place people see it's under Mount Etna,

it's on an Irish loch, it's maybe in the southern hemisphere, it's a place-place. All sorts of traditions develop around where it is, so local traditions. There's also some evidence that there was a strong belief that purgatory might take place in the place where the sins themselves were actually committed as well, although Aquinas comes to dismiss that very firmly.

But theologians, that is, commentators inside and outside of the church, you're beginning to get hold of it and shape it and elaborate it and develop it at this time. I think that's right. I think it's the ideas, as firm as they do become, are firmed up at this point, and that in turn is expressed in terms of the imaginative ideas around purgatory, how it comes to be seen by writers. Why, Laura, why do you think it was so attractive to people at that time? We've been mentioned, and Helen's very keen on this in her nose,

mentioned its predecessors, there's precedents. There's precedents there, nothing comes of nothing in that time, by Gregory. But they move in now. What is so attractive to them? Is it the idea or is it the power? So I think we can look at this from two sides. We can say that for the church,

this was going to be a huge source of power and control and a capacity to modify people's behaviour and affect people's behaviour. But what's equally interesting about poetry is how much it appealed to the laity. It was taken over by the laity. It was such an exciting idea. And I think it's associated with broader changes in the 12th century such that there had been an old idea that penitence and repentance was something that you could do once before death. And it had to be total.

And this was very frightening to people they weren't sure they would ever have time. And over the 12th century we get the doctrine of confession, the idea that you could repent more than once, that you could repent more than once, you could sin and confess and be forgiven and beset penances, which if you then couldn't complete in your lifetime, you could complete in purgatory. And so it just holds out more and more hope for salvation. So purgatory in that sense is a place of hope, even though you're getting lashed, boiled in oil,

and nailed to the floor of all, and things, whatever they say, your eyes sewn up, your eyelid sewn up, sorry. It's still a place of hope because when you go through all this, you're going to get to heaven. Exactly, yeah. It's a place where you cannot yet see the face of God, but you live in hope and faith that you will.

And in that sense, purgatory is with heaven and hell is somewhere else entirely. This idea, Helen, spread across Western Christianity, but it was met with, it was rebutted by the eastern section of the church. Why is that? One of the reasons for this is that the Eastern churches never seem to have developed any kind of systematized. understanding of what happens immediately after death in the way that the Western churches did.

So the discussion between the Eastern and Western churches over purgatory is prompted really in the 13th century. The Eastern churches discovered this doctrine and it comes really as something of a surprise and they don't really understand what is happening because as far as they were concerned, everybody was on the same page and suddenly it appears that actually the Western churches are doing something different. And there are a number of reasons that this might be. but I think the main one is connected with the differences in the way that the two churches understand sin and the way that they understand forgiveness of sin. So there are differences in the understanding of original sin between the two churches

in terms of what's inherited and whether it's actual sin or simply guilt. But there are also differences in the way it's forgiven. So in the Eastern churches, one of the things that we see is that sin is forgiven kind of as a sort of a pardon, that we have a sort of God as emperor, figure who sort of gives out pardon on a kind of personal basis with a sort of personal appeal to God. In contrast, in the Western Church, there's a slightly different understanding of the way that you have to atone for the guilt that attaches to sin and how this can kind of accumulate and how you can sort of work this off, if you like. So there are lots of things that are common

to both, but it's that kind of final understanding of how you deal with sin and the effects of sin that ends up separating the two churches in the end. It wasn't part of the Great Sism, which was in the middle of the 11th century, but it was another pulling away, wasn't it, probably the Eastern Church? Yes, it was. And I think, as I said, I think the Eastern Churches really were quite surprised in some ways to discover that this idea was there in the West. And the Eastern Churches did have a tradition of literature that talked about various things

that happened in the afterlife, you get the idea of toll houses. So people are called to account for a series of individual sins as they go through these sort of toll gates where the demons can interrogate them about their different sins. And this sort of looks purificatory and it sort of looks a bit like purgatory. But it's about accounting for sins and not necessarily kind of cleansing them in the same way. Just for a moment, Laura, can we go back to this idea of place? One of the most famous places was St. Patrick's purgatory. He discovered this when he tried to convert the Irish and the Irish didn't want to be converted,

so he showed them this cave where there was heaven and hell and they began to be converted. But many centuries later, this was rediscovered, as it were, reopened up and became one of the places where purgatory might be. Yes, so an English monk was writing in the early 1180s, and he tells us this story, which begins, as you say, in the 5th century, when Patrick is given this access to this cave by which he can prove to the Irish the truths of the Bible. And in the 12th century, the story moves forward to it and describes the quest of a knight Owen who goes into the cave for a night and a day

and the visions he has. So he's warned that he'll be threatened by demons and that he might lose his life and soul at any moment and he should call on Christ whenever he's in doubt. And he witnesses people being nailed to the floor with burning nails and people hung up from iron hooks in their eyes. sockets and people being lowered into vats of molten metal.

Can we stop now? Yeah, it's not good. And he sees the entrance to hell, which is a flaming hole in the ground, from which souls kind of peep up and then are dragged back down again. And then one of the most vivid images, he sees a bridge, which is so narrow you can't step on it and so slippery and sharp and is over a vast chasm. But he screws up his faith and he walks across the bridge.

and the further he gets, the wider it gets and the easier it gets. And then he gets to the earthly paradise, this beautiful field. And someone says to him, I'm going to explain to you what you have seen. And he says, you have seen the mouth of hell from which no one returns. And you have seen the punishments that people go through in this place of purgatory. I, standing here in the earthly paradise, have been through those places. And I have now made it this far. And then one day I will make it to heaven.

It's so far in this program already. Lied on visions as Hahn-Ebbins quite a few times. That's fine. That's the way it's going. Okay. Matthew, one thing that we can also rely on if we want to is one of the greatest poems in Western literature, which is by Dante. And his great imagination of purgatory,

which is, if I'd read it ever, I hadn't read it for, let's say I hadn't read it. I read it again for this. It was obviously so wonderful. Can you tell us about it and why it's important? Absolutely. I mean, I think that Dante, when Dante thinks about purgatory,

he really takes advantage of the fact that there's quite a lot of, there's a lack of specificity around certain aspects of pergatory and then he uses that in order to really put his own stamp on what he thinks pergatory is like. And I think the important... One day we're talking about here? We're talking about the early, the first two decades of the 14th century. So it's not only that he develops a more elaborate

and detailed account of purgatory than there has been before, but also that in many ways he overturned, I think some of the expectations that his contemporaries would have had. So can you tell us about Dante's purgatory? What is it? What happens there? So Dante's Purgatory is a mountain. It's divided into three major sections. There's a section of waiting,

sometimes known as anti-pergatory, for those who need to wait for one reason or another. Just to remind our listeners, these are people who have repented. So they haven't got to hell. They haven't yet got into heaven. They're never going to be sent to hell because they're in purgatory,

which is a waiting station and if they get through all they're supposed to get through they will get through all this or they will go to heaven. That's right. Yes, these are saved souls but they're imperfect souls. And so in the major part of purgatory, up the mountain, Dante divides the mountain into seven terraces, each of which corresponds to a particular vice.

Are they the seven deadly sins? These are the seven, yes, and Dante would think of these as vices which are habits to be corrected rather than sins to be punished, and that's a really important distinction to what happens in hell. So he imagines various forms of suffering. It's really important, I think, that we don't think of these as punishments,

like the punishments of hell, because the souls themselves willingly embrace them. And they're still fairly punishing them. They're absolutely horrendous. So the souls of the envious have their eyes sewn up. The souls of the proud are weighed down by great boulders. So they're humbled? They're humbled by that.

What do they do about lust at the top? Lust is a purifying fire. And Dante interestingly fills the terrace of lust with near contemporary poets. So he's wanting to say something about his immediate peer group, I think. But the souls are actually joyful. When one of the souls finds himself talking about suffering and he corrects himself, he says, I say pain, but I should say solace. How was far, how radical was it?

did people say, hmm, we hadn't thought of it like that until now, and I don't know whether you want to think a bit like that, because it's very positive. You've just said the praise. It's not suffering, it's sweetness. Although these things are terrible, you know you're going to get through them because there's nowhere else to go,

except forward or upwards, I suppose, you would say, wouldn't you? So what did people think about Dante putting it the way he did? Well, I think very quickly after Dante's death, the people who were commenting on, him were at pains to stress the thing which Dante actually was very keen on. Sorry, they contradict the thing that Dante's very keen on, which is they stress that he didn't mean it literally. Whereas Dante throughout the text, throughout the divine comedy, is constantly stressing

the truth of what he's seen. So I think that they recognize that this is in many ways a dangerous vision, not only because of the account of purgatory, but also because of... So what's dangerous about it? About Dante's comedy. About the purgatory? About the purgatory. Well, I think there are...

certain ways in which it intersects with what the church was practicing in terms of purgatory. So the really strong emphasis on souls conversion, the kind of psychological change, Dante's not really so interested in things like indulgences. Okay, Laura. Yeah, just to add to what Matthews been saying, I think poetry is on a knife edge as a concept because on the one hand, the church needs to say the pains in poetry are worse than any pains on earth. Because the risk, of course, is that you're effectively saying to people, sin as much as you like, you can deal with it all after you've died. So the church had to keep saying, no, no, no, you don't want to do that.

You want to die in as good a state as you can. But at the same time, say, no, this is a gift from God. This is grace that he has given us that even in our imperfect selves we can be saved. And so it's balanced on that edge. Briefly, can you tell us, there's a text that I've read in the notes of all three called the South English Legendary. Can you briefly say what that brings to bear on the subject? So this is a fascinating text. The earliest version, late 13th century, written in Middle English, clearly for dealing directly with the laity, has a version of the vision of Patrick's purgatory in it.

But it also has a long description about All Souls Day, the day when we think most of the dead. And this really conjures up a sense of community. So we have stories about there is a man, a priest who always prays for the dead when he goes through a churchyard. One day he's set upon by thieves in the churchyard and all the corpses rise up out of the graves and attack the thieves. Hard evidence again. Exactly. And the thieves run away in panic

and the man goes home happy, which seems slightly unrealistic. But this sense of a bonded community, there's a direction in this moment that says, you know, if someone cannot fulfil their penance before they die, someone else who loves them can do it for them. Helen Foxhole Forbes, when we think of purgatory, nowadays a lot of us think about indulgences.

There were various ways in which you on earth could help those in poetry by prayer, by various ways, if you want to go through those quickly. But I'd like to get on to indulgences. Where did indulgences come in, and how did they get so corrupted? So indulgences seem to start, Excuse me. Indulnerces seem to start in the 11th century.

And probably around the time that All Souls Day, which Laura just mentioned, is kind of coming into existence. And they start out as a kind of forgiveness of sin. And they're not initially intended to be forgiveness of sin for people who have already died. They then end up being used for all sorts of things. And we find them in a range of context, most famously in terms of forgiveness of sin when people go on crusade. And again, initially these are kind of free remissions of the sin of individuals. So if you do... I remember how many people you kill, you're okay because you're on a crusade for Christ.

More or less. Not entirely. Well, what else you're saying then? If you get indulgence when you're on a crusade, that's what it means, doesn't it? The point of an indulgence is that it remits you from some of the penance that you would have otherwise had to do. But it isn't as absolute as I suggested. It seemed like it from all your notes. In many cases...

In many cases, it's not as absolute. And actually this is one of the things that people start to complain about. Well, let's get back to the mainstream of indulges. Because it says in all your notes, you're going to crusade, you get rid of all these things, but that's not here and another. Indulgences, they began to be sold. Can you tell people about that? Yes.

So eventually they do come to be sold, but not sold in the way that we would think of, You pay money and you get something and that's simply how the transaction is understood. So what is the sale then? So you're giving money as arms giving. You're giving money to help something. Help somebody in purgatory? Sometimes, but also to simply as an offering to the church.

In return, that arms giving, if you like, can then allow you remission of some of that penance that you would have otherwise had to do. it's not until quite late in the Middle Ages that people really start offering indulgences or asking for indulgences for the souls of the dead and that's something that's then much more difficult in a way for people to kind of control if you like because it's not about penance that somebody otherwise would have given if a priest gives you a certain penance

and an indulgence takes one third of it off then you still do two thirds of it But if you have an indulgence that covers the sins of somebody who's in purgatory, this is suddenly much less quantifiable. That person can't confess anymore. That person is already in a state where penance is kind of done or not, if you like. Why did it get such a bad name then? I mean, what you're saying is wonderful to listen to me.

God, an absolutely stinking name. You could actually go, a priest, you could bribe somebody in the case. Catholic Church to let you off your sins and to help your friends and relatives, wherever they were in purgatory, to let them off and give them a shorter time, so they went swiftly, more swiftly up the mountain. Absolutely. And that's a real... And that's what, in a sense, that fired Luther's belly for the Reformation.

Well, so there's a really big difference between the theory of indulgences and the practice. That's what I was trying to get at the practice, yes. And so in the theory, that's how it works. That's how I've explained. But the problem is that in terms of how people... people start to see these and how they start to be, for example, accessible to the laity, is that you do have people who can kind of give them out. And this is something that we see, for example, in Chaucer's Pardner's tale,

which I think is something that Laura may be able to talk about. Well, talk about the pardoner. In Chaucer's tale, in the Canterbury Tales, this is a totally corrupt man. It's in about 1381, 1380, and he is, tell us what he is. Yeah, so he is a partner, a quite, who goes around the country. So these men were tasked with going around to raise money for particular charitable projects,

often building projects in the church. And the idea, as Helen says, the idea was quite pure. The idea is that someone, a person would give money for this charitable project and they would do so in a spirit of charity and that therefore that would benefit their soul. I mean, the key thing about indulgences is that they don't remit sin.

What they do is remit penance. And that was an important thing and that was why once indulgences, as Helen has said, once they were asked for for the dead, the principle had already been lost. Because as a living person, you can be repentant, you can confess, and then you can have your indulgence instead of performing your penance.

But the dead person is not engaged in that. The dead person is just someone undergoing penance, and now you're just paying to get them less penance. And so you could see... But that's quite important, isn't it? Instead of staying there 100 years, you stay there 10 years, that's quite important. Yeah, it was, well, it was a huge thing.

I mean, people were utterly convinced of the power of this. I was looking through some English wills, and there was a man called William Fitzhury. In 1431, he left £50,000, which is £51,000 in today's money, to have someone to sing for his soul for five years, in the hope that that would give him less time in purgatory. But Chaucer, clearly, you know, he lives at a time when people are aware that this has become corrupt.

In terms of building projects, famously at Ruan Cathedral, there's a tower that was known as the Butter Tower because apparently it had been built on the proceeds of giving people indulgences so they could eat butter during Lent. So clearly people would mock these things. Can I, Matthew Trehan, can we bring Dante back into play here? Did he have anything to say on this? Well, Dante's really insistent.

on the idea that progress through purgatory depends on psychological change. So the souls in purgatory are there, the time that it takes. They undergo the suffering that's appropriate to the vice in order to have that vice corrected and to acquire an opposite virtue. The only exception to this rule, I think, is that he talks about how when prayers are offered by the living on behalf of the dead, souls can accelerate through purgatory, their progress can be accelerated. But he insists on, I think, on prayer as the means for doing this.

And I think it shows that the idea for Dante, the idea of community, actually trumps anything else. So it's a collective endeavor, if you like, the progress through purgatory. The idea of helping people to go faster or yourself to go past through purgatory is in Chaucer as well, isn't it? They're on a pilgrimage. And if you go in a pilgrimage, that helps you, in confession helps you, various things.

Yes, absolutely. And this is one of the things that we find right back to the 7th century, the things that can help people, whether living or dead, can be good for the soul. Our prayers, arms giving, masses in particular, but also things like pilgrimage. Anything that's kind of... Or if you're helping building a church. Precisely, anything that's a kind of good deed or sort of penitential act can help in that way. Laura. Josa is interesting because he is the only person I know of who uses purgatory actually in a humorous way,

well as in a serious way. So he has the wife of Bath to say that she was her husband's purgatory. She says, I treated him so badly, and I hope that's let him off some of the punishment later. But that's just Chaucer doing that. But when Chaucer's writing about the pardon, it's in an easy way in the sense that, oh, we all know about this. We all know this is a scrub. We all know that the pillar case wasn't the veil of Virgin Mary. We all know these relics.

There's a few pigs' bones he picked up in her back. and that sort of thing, and they're not the bones of any saint or anything. But it is interesting. He is saying to his readers, who are a considerable number in well. Look, this is all phony. Well, absolutely.

So the partner is a complete fraud, but he is also a very disturbing character. And I think that we underestimate the effect that the partner has on those around him. So he's uncanny. He makes people feel uneasy. And when he at the end says, to them. He's said to them throughout, my relics

were all fake, it's just pillowcases and sheep's bones, and then he says to them anyway, so want to buy a relic? And the host goes crazy. He's very, very angry and insulted, and they have a famous route. But it seems to me that the host's anger expresses the fact that

this is the edifice on which society is built. If we're all going to sit here and say, oh, come, we all know this is fake, then we don't actually have anything else. Matthew. I think in common with what Laura's saying, I think one of the things that Dante, if I can bring Dante back in. Bring him in as often as you want.

He really wants to stress. Is that an easy sense of purgatory actually is a very dangerous thing. And that's why he has so many surprises in his purgatory. So he puts it in a completely different place to where people might have expected, putting it in the southern hemisphere. Diammatically opposite Jerusalem. Exactly. So it's on a single axis.

He puts the Garden of Eden at the top of purgatory. So the journey through purgatory is a very unexpected kind of journey. it's a place of prayer You go back to the beginning in the garden of Eden, don't you? That's right, it's a return in a way to the condition of before the fall of man. And the sense that as you're reading Dante's purgatory, he wants you to be thinking, actually this doesn't quite fit any easy sense I had is really important to, I think, how he wants people to internalise the idea of purgatory

and bring it into their own lives. To turn you to the last section of the programme, Helen, is there a sense in which indulgences and purgatory therefore were the trigger for the Reformation? They did inflame Luther. I mean, he had a great number of theses. He pinned to the door and nailed the door. But this seems to have been the central one.

It is one of the main issues that Luther complains about, but there are lots of other things. Yeah, but let's stick to indulgence. And purgatory. So this is a tricky one, because Luther clearly gets very inflamed by indulgences, but it's not because he objects to purgatory, at least not initially.

He's quite happy with the idea of purgatory. It's the indulgences that upset him. Yes, absolutely. I mean, for the first few years, and then he's not happy with it at all. And then he changes his mind. Yeah, and all the Protestants do, and they rule it out. He isn't in the scripture, it doesn't exist, we're not going there. I mean, we're not going there as an idea.

Yeah. No, that's right. And I think this is precisely because of a change in thinking, And so where people start to say, we need to look very clearly for what's in the scriptures, they have changed the way that theology has been done in some ways. Well, they want to do it more purified way, don't they, to come back to that terrible way. Well, that's a value judgment. Well, it isn't, in my view.

No, you can say that. But they want to do it from the scriptures. That is the word of God, as mediated by through Christ. That is what they want to go back to. Luther in Germany and then Tyndall in this country. Sorry, please, I interrupted you. No, that's fine. But I was saying, so this is a different way of doing theology.

So where people have in the past looked, of course, used the Bible and the scriptures as the basis for what they work on. They've also worked on a body of tradition. They've worked on a series of working things out. And that's why, for people in the Middle Ages, the fact that there wasn't a specific statement in the Bible that said, this is purgatory and this is what it does, wasn't a problem, because there was enough evidence of other sorts,

not just from visions, but from other kind of working things out and the sort of logic of sin, of grace, of penance, that makes this important. But when we have this change at the Reformation, and people are saying it has to be in the Bible, then yes, that's when purgatory becomes very problematic. Fine. Laura. But just to add to that, of course, this is now hugely dangerous. because, of course, as we've discussed, as Matthew said,

purgatory has been serving a human need and above all connecting the living with the dead. And so Thomas Moore, arguing for purgatory, said, you know, this is where your parents are. How can you abandon them? This is where everyone you've loved is. And so that explains, I think, the sort of fudge over purgatory in the early days of the Protestant Reformation.

The 10 articles of the Church of England in 1536 said, well, we do think you can pray for the dead. We're just not sure where they are. Because the idea of cutting everyone off From their dead relatives From all the people they've loved The idea of slicing through that community Is horrifying, was horrifying to ordinary people

It is extraordinary though But you have this massive edifice With controlling edifice To do with money, to do with power To do with interference To do with controlling Not in the living and a dead But anybody, the whole lot

Just attacked and crumbles fairly quickly, Matthew? It crumbles except in the sense that, of course, that the Catholic Church reasserts the idea of purgatory in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. So I think it's really interesting how that takes place. So when the Council of Trent talks about purgatory, it's absolutely clear that purgatory exists.

It needs to be part of Catholic doctrine. But they also emphasize the dangers of thinking about it in too much detail. So for preachers to talk too much about the details of what happens in purgatory, where it is, all of these things that we couldn't possibly know, is a dangerous thing for uneducated simple souls. Helen?

Yeah, so one of the things that we've seen throughout the Middle Ages is the importance of fire in purgatory. And this is something that I think starts to kind of tail off from that point, that people start to be less focused on the fire and more focused on the function. What does purgatory do rather than how exactly does it do it, if you like? Does it ameliorate the horrible tortures and so on as it goes on? As the counter-reformation comes back, do we still have people nailed to boiling oil, flaws and all the rest of it?

We still get images of souls in purgatory. But one of the interesting things about representations of purgatory is that we start to see much less of the punishment and much more of the kind of hopeful aspect of purgatory. So people are being released and that's one of the ways you can often tell the difference between purgatory in hell is this idea of hope, as Laura said before. so that people are able to get out and this kind of escape from purgatory is ultimately the point. The point is not to be there forever

it's because you go through and then leave again. What legacy does it have today, Laura, in the Catholic Church, purgatory? Well, in the Catholic Church, it's still very important in terms of, you know, it's vital to the sense that we can be saved even in our imperfections. And that's why it's very important, as Matthew said, that we don't, you know,

There's not focus on torturous detail and so on, and quantification. The quantification has been pushed away very firmly to say, no, this is an abstract concept which indicates how God's grace can work to save us from ourselves. Is it still thought of in any way as being a place? Well, people still go on pilgrimage every year. 15,000 people a year go to Loch Derg where St Patrick's Purgatory is. So obviously these places still have a call in people's minds. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Laura Rice. Thank you Helen,

Vauxhall Forbes, and Matthew Treher. And next week we'll be discussing enzymes, excuse me, enzymes of proteins that speed up chemical reactions in living organisms. And thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Thank you all very much. Thank you.

It's difficult to get a serious grip on with the evidence base, isn't it? What in particular? Well, in the... The idea of purgatory itself or where it comes from? As an idea, it's wonderful. And the way to work out by Dante is well. But the evidence, the evidence that it's brought to bear is tenuous. It's tricky.

I mean, one of the things that we see... And who would you call it evidence, truly? Visions and intimations. It's not that kind of phenomenon. But I was going to say, yeah, it's not like that. Yeah, but that doesn't mean... Does that mean it doesn't have to follow rules of evidence? Yes, because it's faith.

All right, so we abandon all that. I see. I think many of all Christians would, you know, in the West would have seen evidence as a different kind of thing. I mean, tradition has a different way. Yeah, it is still a kind of evidence and this kind of working things out, this sort of rational and logical argument is really important. I mean, it's actually, people do this now as academics. If you have a thing and you talk about it and you think about it,

you also make logical and rational arguments from. from whatever it is. And so one of the things that people think about is, for example, how penance works or how sin works, you have to kind of work from that. There's all sorts of stuff that the Bible doesn't tell us. And so people are always having to take one passage of the Bible and then kind of work something from it. And one of the things that's interesting in terms of the evidence, this discussion of fire in the Corinthians, initially seems to be applied to the idea of the purging of souls at the last judgment, not in purgatory. it's something that's kind of delayed until the end of time.

And as people work through the concept of prayer for the dead and what it does, that's when they start to apply it to the interim and to say, okay, so actually this is something that's affecting souls immediately and it's not being held off until the end of time. There is a real timing problem, just with things like the harrowing of hell as well. So at some point in history, Christ goes into hell and brings some people out of hell. you know, where are the people's souls who died before Christ and then where are you if you die now?

And on it goes, the timing, the question of limbo, debates about whether limbo exists. And debates about whether Plato was a good man even though Christ had a new born when he was born. That's a fairly big debate. What about the burning of martyrs? Now, what function is fire that? I thought, I'm going to be told exactly what. that one of the reasons for burning is that the body therefore was destroyed and couldn't couldn't meet the soul on the day of judgment was not one of the reasons for burning martyrs

the respect for the body was a reason not to burn corpses and why corpses were not usually burnt therefore burning was a heinous heinous punishment there were people who argued that that meant that the body couldn't be resurrected but that also easily that seems ridiculous because that implies that God can do something's not others. But it was a shaming punishment to destroy the body in this way. In the 5th century Augustine states very clearly

that whatever happened to the bodies of the martyrs, they will all be gathered up together and they will meet the soul on the day of judgment. So this is quite kind of summarily dismissed. Which is wonderful, like the soul, how can fire possibly burn a soul? I think it's, so it's obviously available to be read as metaphorical fire,

you know, the image of something which strips away all that is temporary or finite or fragile and leaves only the core, leaves only truth. So in that sense, it's available as a metaphor. In lots of ways, that's what's so dramatic about what Dante did, that he found a really humane way of thinking about actual literal physical punishments, which is a bizarre combination. You'd think either you can be humane and say, oh, come on, it's all a metaphor, or you can be vicious and say, no, you really.

are being burnt unendingly. But I'm just intrigued by how you, what the soul is that it can be, it can both be burnt by fire and resist fire. I'm just not sure how literally people take these. Is it important for how literally people take these? Matthew, you're trying to get in, sorry. No, no, no, don't know, please finish.

All I was going to say is that one of the key things where we actually see purgatory kind of, in a geography of the afterlife, if you like, in these visions, that it's always separate from heaven and therefore separate from God. And I think that's actually much more important than the burning. And it's the same in Dante where people are trying to move towards the Garden of Eve and trying to move towards heaven. But they're not really separate from God because the promises they'll get there.

But they are separate at that moment. And it's that absence of God which kind of inflicts the punishment, if you like. I mean, they're looking for the full beatific vision. That's what they want. The beatific vision. So being in the full presence of and having full sight of God. but what I was going to say is about the sort of physical suffering in the afterlife, the physical suffering of the soul,

is that actually in the 13th, 14th centuries, there's a lot of debate around what this might mean for the relationship between the body and the soul. And certainly Dante comes up, as you'd expect, with a very clear explanation as to how it is that the souls in the afterlife can actually suffer physically. So, I mean, the stark example. example that prompts his discussion is that in the terrace of gluttony, the souls become emaciated,

which is a paradox, isn't it, when you put it in those terms. But it's explained that the soul and the body are so closely bonded that the moment that the body dies, the soul lands in the afterlife, and it projects a kind of aerial body, which still has the sensory, capacities of the physical body. The ideas are all wonderful. I mean, the wonderful idea is you just think, God, I wish you could prove it in some way. But you can't.

But this thing about the body and the soul, I think, is a really interesting sort of space to inhabit mentally because any idea that the body and the soul are two separate things is just alien. And that, I think, can transform how you think about the human person. And current science tells us absolutely. Yeah, the mind and the body cannot be separated. I think the body is about to be satisfied with the great offer from the...

I'm Simon Tillerson, the producer, who makes a magnificent opera here. Well, I'm definitely there's two or coffee in poetry. There are many more religion and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk. com.uk slash Radio 4.