Icons of Hope: The "Last Things" in Catholic Imagination

Chapter 4: Imagining the Last Judgment

C H A P T E R 4 Imagining the Last Judgment Purgatorial time was imagined to extend, and so to equalize to some degree, the duration of spiritual competition for heavenly reward in the otherwise unequal hierarchy of discipleship shared by martyrs, ascetical saints, ascetics, and laypeople. In order to serve this purpose, though, purgatorial time was imagined to be an odd sort of time. Like time in the natural world on this side of death, purgatorial time measured change, specifically the purgative change for the better that prepared the soul for the Beatific Vision. And like natural time, which seems sometimes to pass quickly or slowly, this supernatural time possessed a kind of flexibility in the Catholic imagination, which could just as easily imagine purgatorial time to pass quickly or slowly. What made purgatorial time odd, and so different from natural time, was that its supernatural duration, whether imagined as long or short, was not beholden to natural duration. A personal story can illustrate this point. I can recall a moment in church as an eleven-year-old in 1963. The Second Vatican Council had just begun, but had not yet influenced Catholic parish life. Mass was celebrated in Latin and the faithful followed along in their missals, books that provided an English translation 107 side-by-side with the Latin text of the liturgy. My missal was a recent gift and so new to me. As I explored its pages I noticed that this edition supplemented the words of the sacred liturgy with pages of prayers suited for all sorts of occasions and circumstances. I noticed that some of these prayers concluded with a notation that a partial indulgence could be earned by their recitation, and by fulfilling other devotional conditions defined by the Church. A partial indulgence is the remission of some of the time of purgation fixed by God’s particular judgment at the moment of the believer’s death, and fixed in a way proportional to the sinfulness of the believer’s life. The indulgence is a pardon, offered by the grace of God and mediated by the offices of the Church, and simply by intention may be earned for oneself as a future purgatorial sufferer or for another who will be or who is now believed to be in purgatory. One prayer especially caught my eye, since it assured the remission of five hundred years of purgatorial suffering . In a self-centered mood that day, I said the prayer with the intention of claiming the indulgence for myself. The indulgence was especially appealing because the prayer to which it was attached was especially short—no more than six or seven lines. I recall feeling utterly relieved that I could so easily remit so much purgatorial suffering. Indeed, my relief was founded on my quick assumption that five hundred years vastly exceeded whatever purgatorial time I would amass in a lifetime and that this really good indulgence had already gained me the straight road to heaven. But then the future theologian in me, looking closely at the page, made more of the fact that this was a partial, and not a plenary, indulgence. Its fulfillment promised to remit only some, and not all, of the purgatorial suffering owed God. And that distinction immediately propelled my imagination into purgatory’s odd temporal parameters. If five hundred years could be remitted so easily, then perhaps one’s time in purgatory could last for thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years.1 Needless to say, this was a moment of eschatological anxiety, the likes of which has characterized Catholic culture through nearly all of its history, and for which, I have argued, purgatory was a partial, and not a plenary, solution. 108 Icons of Hope Purgatory’s supernatural time is odd because it is not limited by the boundary of personal death, which, for all but the very young and the very unreflective, becomes in life an existential index for marking time. The suffering souls in purgatory have passed beyond death and so its boundary no longer provides temporal orientation, causing the Catholic imagination to drift between images of purgatorial suffering as thankfully short or as distressingly long in duration. And yet, purgatorial time is finite, and not simply because each and every suffering soul eventually will be purged of sin and gain release...