From Augustine to Gregory the Great: an Evaluation of the Emergence of the Doctrine of Purgatory

Abstract

‘Almost everything in him has its roots in Augustine and yet almost nothing is genuinely Augustinian.’ The words are those of Reinhold Seeberg and the subject of the appraisal Gregory the Great (540–90). It is an observation that has a particular validity when applied to Gregory's adaptation of Augustine's material in his doctrine of Purgatory, which is the subject of this article. In his thought about life after death, Gregory adopted Augustine's theological framework at almost every point. Dogmatic questions such as: ‘At or after death, do the redeemed people of God, other than martyrs, need purification to make them fit for the love and presence of their holy Creator and Judge?’; ‘Does prayer for the dead relate to this growth?’; or ‘Is the life-to-come static?’; and ‘How should St Paul's more obscure statements in his First Letter to the Corinthians concerning salvation “yet so as by fire” be interpreted?’ were questions that Augustine had himself inherited and explored with diligence and real coherence. In large measure, Gregory was content to adopt Augustine's solutions. But in matters of detail Gregory departed from his great forebear, and then, significantly, it was to ‘firm-up’ some of Augustine's more cautious pronouncements particularly about the possibility of purgative suffering in the afterlife. In the celebrated phrase of B. J. Kidd, Gregory ‘erected speculation into a certainty’.