Purgatory: What the Catholic Instinct Is Pointing At

The Catholic doctrine of purgatory deserves respect and careful engagement. It is not a medieval invention designed to generate indulgence revenue, though indulgence revenue did become attached to it and the attachment did enormous damage. The instinct underneath the doctrine is ancient and points at something real.

The instinct is this: most people who die in Christ do not die in a state of perfected holiness. They die with remaining sin, remaining attachment, remaining damage from their own failures and the failures of others against them. The question the doctrine is trying to answer is a genuine one: how does the imperfect soul come into the presence of the perfectly holy God?

The answer purgatory offers is a process of purification after biological death, a period of preparation in which the remaining imperfection is burned away — the fire metaphor comes from 1 Corinthians 3:15, which describes the day of judgment revealing each person's work, and the person whose work is burned suffering loss but being saved "as through fire." The passage is about the quality of ministry and discipleship, not primarily about the condition of the soul after death, but it has carried the weight of the purgatory tradition for a long time.

The problem with the doctrine is not what it is pointing at. The problem is the mechanism it proposes. Purgatory, in its developed Western form, is the soul working its way across the asymptote — burning away imperfection through a process of suffering or preparation that the soul undergoes in order to become fit for the divine presence. The mechanism requires that we have something to contribute to the crossing.

But the asymptote has already been crossed. From the other side. By the one who descended to the bottom of Sheol and came back out. The imperfect soul does not need a post-mortem purification process to become fit for the divine presence. The imperfect soul needs what every human soul needs — the righteousness of Christ, received through the relational knowing of John 17:3, which is precisely what poverty of spirit positions the soul to receive.

This does not mean nothing happens at death or between death and resurrection. The man in the parking lot, if he dies in Christ, enters a condition that is "far better" than what he has now — and whatever the process is by which the fog of mortality lifts and the full reality of the divine presence becomes what it was always going to be, that process is not his to produce. It is the work of the one who crossed the asymptote. The soul receives. That is its permanent vocation and its permanent dignity.

The Eastern church has a more instinctively accurate way of framing this, and it is worth spending a few paragraphs there.