Last Judgment and Purgatory

Christianity inherited from Judaism the belief in a God who is both a loving father and a righteous judge -- a paradoxical God, who combines both mercy and justice. On the one hand, God punishes evil and rewards good: man is accountable to Him for his acts.

Christianity also inherited from Judaism the belief that at the end of history God will come to judge the nations of the world, including the souls of all people who have ever lived. In the Old Testament the Last Judgment is awaited with joy: to be sure, many will be punished, but at the same time the messianic age of peace and justice and love will be introduced. ^Similarly, in Christian doctrine it is declared that at the end of time Christ will return "to judge the living and the dead," and that this will inaugurate his reign of peace and justice and love in the world. 4However, the threat of eternal punishment, and the corresponding emphasis on repentance and forgiveness, are stronger in the New Testament than in the Old. Jesus declares that at the end of history, "when the Son of Man comes in his glory," "all nations will be assembled before him," and he will separate all men into two groups: those who, while on

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earth, ministered to the needs of the hungry, the sick, the naked, the stranger, and the prisoner will be given eternal life, while those who neglected them will be cast into "the eternal fire" and "eternal punishment." 5 _

The belief that God is a righteous judge, and that Christ will return as a judge, played an important part in the development of the legal values of the Eastern as well as the Western Church.

Similarly, the church in the first three centuries respected Roman law but rejected its absolute authority. On the one hand, it was believed that "the powers that be are ordained of God" (Rom. 13:1). On the other hand, an immoral law was not considered to be binding in conscience, and indeed there might be a positive duty to disobey it. The principle of civil disobedience was in fact inherent in the experience of the early church, since Christian worship was itself illegal.

Thus the Judaic-Christian belief that God is a judge -- and a legislator as well, for the Bible takes an "activist" position on divine adjudication -was at first considered in the church to be related almost solely to such ultimate concerns as the nature and destiny of man, the struggle in his soul between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, the explanation of human suffering, the meaning of life and death.

The conversion of Emperor Constantine in 313 A.D. and the establishment of Christianity as the official imperial religion raised in stark terms the question whether Christianity had anything positive to

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contribute to the ruler's role as supreme judge and supreme legislator in his domain. The question was rendered especially acute by the belief that the emperor was head of the church and represented Christ on earth. The answer that was given was not essentially different from the answer given to the same question upon the conversion of the Germanic kings in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. Christianity was received as an apocalyptic faith, not as a social program. Yet it had certain implications for social reform which could not be avoided even by the most otherworldly of its adherents. The Christian emperors of Byzantium considered it their Christian responsibility to revise the laws, as they put it, "in the direction of greater humanity." 6 JJnder the influence of Christianity, and also under the" influence of Stoic and neo_Platonic ideas adopted by Christian philosophy, changes were made: (1) in family law, giving the wife a position of greater equality before the law, requiring mutual consent of both spouses for the validity of a marriage, making divorce more d ifficult (which at that time was a step toward women's liberation), and abolishing the father's power of life or death over his children (patria potestas); (2) in the law of slavery, giving a slave the right to appeal to a magistrate if his master abused his powers and even in some cases the right to freedom if the master exercised cruelty, multiplying modes of manumission of slaves, and permitting slaves to acquire rights by kinship with freemen; (3) in the relation between strict law and equity, strengthening the concept of equity and tempering the strictness of general prescriptions.

The effort to eliminate from the law those of its features which were repugnant to a Christian ethic suffered, in the East as in the West, from the absence of a vision of what kind of legal order a Christian ethic required. In the West, prior to the twelfth century, this defect was compounded by the absence of a consciously systematized body of law: there was no professional class of lawyers and judges, there were no law schools, no legal literature, and very little legislation. By and large, law in the West consisted of customary norms and procedures, and these were diffused in political, economic, and social institutions generally. In Byzantium, on the contrary, there was a distinct legal heritage, founded on Greek concepts of the supremacy of natural reason and on the Roman sense of order. There were lawyers and judges, a legal literature, law schools, and a developed system of legislation and administration. Yet during most of Byzantine history the Roman legal system was in decay; the movement to reform it "in the direction of greater humanity" lacked the necessary driving power to be effective. Law schools came

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and went. The changes enacted by one emperor were repealed by the next. There was little organic development. The level of legal analysis of the classical jurists of the second and third centuries was never equaled by their Christian successors. Justinian forbade commentaries on his collection of laws; ironically, it fell more or less into oblivion when the official language of the empire was changed from Latin to Greek shortly after his death. Despite its generally humanizing influence on the law, Eastern Christianity may indeed have ultimately exerted, on the whole, a negative effect upon Byzantine legal science, since it robbed Roman law of its ultimate significance while offering no alternative system of justice in this world.

As long as the Last Judgment was understood solely as the inauguration of divine rule in the world to come, imminent or already present, it did not inspire the creation of parallel legal institutions for the interim period on earth. The vision was essentially apocalyptic rather than prophetic. This was characteristic of the church of the first millennium, both in the East and in the West. Christian faith was represented above all in the monastic life, where men and women who had "died to this world" sought to live impeccable lives in the heavenly kingdom. The church did not usually stand in a critical or reforming posture toward the world: the fundamental hopelessness of secular life in a decaying "terrestrial city" was accepted, and the return of the Messiah "to judge the living and the dead" was awaited patiently and faithfully.

In the early part of the eleventh century, however, belief in the Last Judgment acquired a new significance in the West through the development of a parallel belief in an intermediate judgment upon individual souls at the moment of their death, and an intermediate time of "purging" between the death of each individual Christian and the final coming of the divine judge. The Last Judgment continued to refer to the time when all souls that had ever lived would be resurrected, judged, and admitted together to the kingdom of God or else consigned, with the devil, to eternal punishment. Purgatory, however, was conceived as a temporal condition of punishment of individual Christian souls: having been baptized, they were freed from the debt of "original" (or natural) sin; nevertheless, justice required that they suffer punishment in time, after death, for "personal" (or actual) sins not fully expiated during their life on earth. Except in rare cases, no expiation on earth was sufficient to absolve a soul from liability to further expiation after death. Expiation meant payment of a price, not gradual reformation: the soul remained guilty (indebted) until the full price was paid.

In the Eastern Church there was -- and is -- no generally accepted doctrine of expiatory suffering of the soul after death and before the Day of Judgment, although there were (and are) prayers for the dead. 7In the West as well, prior to the eleventh century, the idea of purgatory,

-169- although introduced as early as the fifth century and reinforced by the monastic penitentials, did not have the doctrinal significance that it later acquired. It was not a necessary part of Christian faith, nor was it clearly articulated or defined.

Shortly after the year 1000 a new holiday was created in the West, called All Souls' Day, which is still celebrated by Roman Catholics each year on November 2, the day after All Saints' Day. (All Saints' Day is celebrated in both the East and the West, but All Souls' Day is celebrated only in the West and mainly in the Roman Catholic Church.) The Abbot of Cluny, Odilo, conceived the idea of the holiday, and Cluny brought about its general adoption. It was a day to celebrate the community of all souls who had ever lived or ever would live, who were visualized as trembling before the Judge on the last day of history. Meanwhile, Christian souls on earth and in purgatory anticipated that day with their prayers for mercy. Roscnstock-Huessy has written eloquently about this holiday as a shared vision of death which united Western Christendom. "The liturgical readings for All Souls emphasize the utter naught that is man. Man is like Job, like grass, like a shadow. Yet God thinks highly enough of him to fix His eyes upon him and to call him to judgment... the idea of Judgment... revealed man's dignity, his claim not to be thrown into the fire like a weed, but to be judged... the army of Christian soldiers marches with irresistible faith before the Saviour who was their comrade, and is now their judge. The triumphant outcry in the mass for the dead on All Souls runs: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and I shall rise on the Last Day.' " 8The great hymn Dies irae ("Day of Wrath") was written in the thirteenth century to express the thoughts and emotions of All Souls' Day. The theme that runs throughout is the conflict of justice and mercy and their ultimate reconciliation by divine judgment at the end of time.

Prior to that final judgment, however, the Christian soul remained in purgatory until fully purged by suffering. The punishments of purgatory were meted out to all Christians except the very few who were in heaven (the saints) or in hell (the unrepentant), and every one in purgatory was punished, regardless of rank, in accordance with his sins. As the Last Judgment was conceived as a great universal democracy, so purgatory was conceived as a great Christian democracy. In the vivid account of Dante Alighieri ( 1265-1321), popes and emperors suffered there together with serfs and brigands. The only principle that distinguished the fate of one from that of another was the allocation of punishment according to the gravity of personal sins.

The idea of a Last Judgment presupposes that life is more than mere flux, that it has a purpose -- and more than that, that man is responsible for the realization of that purpose. One's whole life on earth is something to be accounted for at the Last Judgment. But the accounting does not

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necessarily proceed according to an elaborate system of rules and standards. The idea of purgatory, on the other hand, presupposes that the accounting does proceed according to an elaborate system of rules and standards. Individual sins are to be weighed, and the penalties in purgatory are to be allocated according to the gravity of each sin. Moreover, the church, and more specifically the pope, is considered to have jurisdiction over purgatory. The pope administers the so_called Treasury of

Merits; he may distribute merits in purgatory equivalent to the time period of penance that would be required on earth to expiate the penitent's sins___________________________________________ provided, however, that the penitent's soul is in the

same condition it would have been in if he had done the required penance. This means, in effect, that the time to be spent in purgatory can be reduced by clerical decislon. 9 With the emergence of papal monarchy at the end of the eleventh century, the Council of Clermont under Pope Urban II granted the first "plenary indulgence," absolving all who would go on the First Crusade from liability for punishment in purgatory for sins committed prior to their joining the holy army of crusaders.

The liturgy of All Souls' Day and the doctrine of Purgatory provide an important link between theology and jurisprudence in Western Christendom. Sin had formerly been understood to be a condition of alienation, a diminution of a person's being; it now came to be understood in legal terms as specific wrongful acts or desires or thoughts for which various penalties must be paid in temporal suffering, whether in this life or the next. The more fundamental understanding of sin as a separation from God and from neighbor came to play only a secondary role. What specific sinful acts or desires or thoughts were to be punished, and by what kinds or degrees of temporal suffering, was to be established primarily by the moral law revealed by God first in Scripture (divine law) and second in the hearts and minds of men (natural law); but it was to be further defined by the positive laws of the church. Such ecclesiastical laws were to be derived from and tested by divine law.

Eventually the legalization, so to speak, of life after death resulted in a substantial reduction of the significance of the Last Judgment itself. The logical implication was drawn that all who were in purgatory would in fact be purged of their guilt; having paid the full price, they would automatically enter the kingdom of heaven. Thus it was assumed that the vindication of the law must have a happy ending. By the same token, however, those who chose to remain outside the system-the unrepentant Christian and also those infidels who had consciously rejected Christianity -- were condemned to eternal punishment from the moment of death. Thus the role of God at the Last Judgment became a ministerial one, at least with respect to the souls of all who died before Christ's Second Coming. Man was beginning to take the center of the stage. His

171- freedom of choice was becoming the determining factor in his progress toward salvation. The route was charted by a system of punishments and rewards that extended from this world through the next, until the final goal was reached.