Heaven's purge
Subtitle: purgatory in late antiquity
By: Isabel Moreira.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9780199736041
Subjects: Purgatory -- History of doctrines -- Early church, ca. 30-600
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: Purgatory in early Christian and patristic thought; title: Of sons and slaves : violence and correction in the afterlife; title: O purgatorium caeleste! : purging body and soul at St. Martin's shrine; title: Purgation in the sixth and seventh centuries; title: Purgatory, penitentials, and the Irish question; title: Purgatory in Bede and Boniface; title: Missionary eschatology and the politics of certainty; title: Barbarians, law codes, and purgatory.