Heaven's Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity

by Isabel Moreira

Overview

The doctrine of purgatory - the state after death in which Christians undergo punishment by God for unforgiven sins - raises many questions. What is purgatory like? Who experiences it? Does purgatory purify souls, or punish them, or both? How painful is it? Heaven's Purge explores the first posing of these questions in Christianity's early history, from the first century to the eighth: an era in which the notion that sinful Christians might improve their lot after death was contentious, or even heretical.

Isabel Moreira discusses a wide range of influences at play in purgatory's early formation, including ideas about punishment and correction in the Roman world, slavery, the value of medical purges at the shrines of saints, and the authority of visions of the afterlife for informing Christians of the hereafter. She also challenges the deeply ingrained supposition that belief in purgatory was a symptom of barbarized Christianity, and assesses the extent to which Irish and Germanic views of society, and the sources associated with them - penitentials and legal tariffs - played a role in purgatory's formation. Special attention is given to the writings of the last patristic author of antiquity, the Northumbrian monk Bede.

Heaven's Purge is the first study to focus on purgatory's history in late antiquity, challenging the conclusions of recent scholarship through an examination of the texts, communities and cultural ideas that informed purgatory's early history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199736041
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2010
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Isabel Moreira is Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of numerous studies of religion and society in late antiquity and the early middle ages, including Dreams, Visions and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul and is co-editor of the forthcoming Hell and Its Afterlife: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband and two daughters.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Purgatory in Late Antiquity
Chapter One. Purgatory in Early Christian and Patristic Thought
Chapter Two. Of Sons and Slaves: Violence and Correction in the Afterlife
Chapter Three. O Purgatorium Caeleste!: Purging Body and Soul at St. Martin's Shrine
Chapter Four. Purgation in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries
Chapter Five. Purgatory, Penitentials, and the Irish Question
Chapter Six. Purgatory in Bede and Boniface
Chapter Seven. Missionary Eschatology and the Politics of Certainty
Chapter Eight. Barbarians, Law Codes, and Purgatory
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"A book that is thoughtful, learned, and refreshingly independent-minded. She [Moreira] avoids the conventional explanations that have been advance by scholars since the Reformation... remarkable." —The New York Review of Books

"This is an important and thoughtful study...This monograph does more than illustrate the development of the doctrine of purgatory; it contributes to the intellectual and social history of early-medieval Europe."—The Catholic Historical Review

"An impressively researched and lucidly written monograph. Isabel Moreira's account of the coming together of Christian thinking on purgatory represents a compelling history of ideas which also manages to illuminate the social worlds of late antiquity and the early middle ages." —Peter Marshall, Professor of History, University of Warwick

"This compelling investigation of the origins of purgatory gives long overdue recognition to late antique and Anglo-Saxon discussions of penance and topography of the afterlife. Moreira's superb study reminds us how anticipation of purgatorial suffering was deeply integral to Christian life from an early date. Had it not been for belief in purgatory, and attendant fears of the painful suffering that even devout Christians would undergo in this place, the subsequent development of Catholicism would have been very different." —Bonnie Effros, Professor of History and Rothman Chair and Director of the Center of the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of Florida

"Professor Isabel Moreira's masterful synthesis is the most comprehensive study of Purgatory in thirty years. She performs her sensitive and scholarly analysis in graceful, accessible language. Heaven's Purge will rivet the attention of specialists even as it introduces the controversial yet pivotal concept and the wrongly neglected but fascinating age that created it to the much broader public it deserves." —Alan E. Bernstein, author of The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds

From the Publisher