page_title: History of purgatory
section_title: Early Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: History of purgatory / Early Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: English: Saint Gregory the Great
context_page_description: The idea of purgatory has roots that date back into antiquity. A sort of proto-purgatory called the "celestial Hades" appears in the writings of Plato and Heraclides Ponticus and in many other pagan writers. This concept is distinguished from the Hades of the underworld described in the works of Homer and Hesiod. In contrast, the celestial Hades was understood as an intermediary place where souls spent an undetermined time after death before either moving on to a higher level of existence or being reincarnated back on earth. Its exact location varied from author to author. Heraclides of Pontus thought it was in the Milky Way; the Academicians, the Stoics, Cicero, Virgil, Plutarch, the Hermetical writings situated it between the Moon and the Earth or around the Moon; while Numenius and the Latin Neoplatonists thought it was located between the sphere of the fixed stars and the Earth.
  Perhaps under the influence of Hellenistic thought, the intermediate state entered Jewish religious thought in the last centuries B.C.E.. In Maccabees we find the practice of prayer for the dead with a view to their after life purification a practice accepted by some Christians.
context_section_description: During the Early Middle Ages, the doctrine of final purification developed distinctive features in the Latin-speaking West – these differed from developments in the Greek-speaking East.
caption: Gregory the Great with a dove alighting on his shoulder while the pontiff writes his homilies, an ancient tradition about the saint[30]
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