waiting for admission to Heaven. By the time of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), it was
clearly defined that Heaven as a place for the souls of the dead had not been “opened”
until Christ’s resurrection, hence the good dead of the pre-Chris-tian era had been waiting
in the upper reaches of Hell for Christ’s advent and their deliverance.
A number of “visions” of the otherworld in the form of “dream” or “out-of-body”
journeys were reported in medieval texts and conveyed a vivid understanding of the
sufferings of those in Hell and especially in the upper re gions thereof, the place where
those being purified for eventual entry into Heaven were enduring appropriate torment.
Among these were three visions recorded in Gregory the Great, Dialogues, 4. 36; the
vision of Drythelm (in Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum); the Visio Wettini
by Walafrid Strabo; visions associated with St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland; and the
Vision of Tundal recorded in numerous works, including Vincent de Beauvais’s
Speculum historiale.
Biblical commentators and theologians gradually began a clarification of the nature of
purification, the definition of the place of purgation, and the relation of this to the
penitential system of the church, and eventually to the system of indulgences granted by
papal decree or initiative. In France, the Parisian theologians Hugh of Saint-Victor (d.
1141) and Peter Lombard (d. 1160) continued with the Augustinian fourfold division of
the dead, the necessity of purgation, and the vagueness of the place for that purification.
The late 12th and 13th centuries saw the development in the writings of the Parisian
theologians of a clearer definition of the place for purgation and something of a recasting
of the division of the dead into three groups: they now became the entirely good (to
Heaven), the entirely damned (to Hell, with no possibility of deliverance), and the
medium (mediocriter) good, who have confessed and done penance but need further
purification. Purgatory now becomes a place in which souls that have begun to work out
punishment in this world for sins, through the sacrament of penance, can continue that
process beyond the grave. Augustine’s idea that various suffrages could benefit the good
souls in Purgatory continued to bear rich fruit in the numerous actions, especially the
endowment of Masses, carried out on behalf of the dead. The requirement promulgated
by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) that all faithful Christians had to confess yearly to a
priest and the continuing “quantification” of penitential punishment for sins in handbooks
for confessors, books developed by masters at Paris and elsewhere especially in light of
the decision of the Lateran Council, led to both a more specific measure for and a more
thorough presence of penance in this life and a deeper concern with the continuation of
penitential suffering in the place of purification after death. Beginining with the call for
the First Crusade and continuing throughout the later Middle Ages, the doctrine of
indulgences, the specific forgiveness of all or part of the assigned penitential punishment
due for sin, led to the development of a complex process in which an ecclesiastically
sanctioned grant might mitigate the time in Purgatory. In the 15th century, the papacy
declared that the treasury of merits applicable to the living for indulgences might be
applied to those in Purgatory as well, thus widening again the field of interaction between
the living and the dead in Purgatory.
Grover A.Zinn
[See also: DIGULLEVILLE, GUILLAUME DE; HUGH OF SAINT-VICTOR;
INDULGENCES; MARIE DE FRANCE; PETER LOMBARD; WALAFRID STRABO]
Gardiner, Eileen, ed. Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante. New York: Italica, 1989.
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