Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 vie
Trade ReviewA 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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. 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
