Heaven's Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity. By ISABEL MOREIRA.

Abstract

Isabel Moreira's account of the changing face of purgatory in late antiquity and into the early Middle Ages explores both the historical development of purification after death and the social practices which influenced the ways in which discussions of such purification were perceived and received. A work such as this cannot help but respond to Jacques Le Goff's La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris, 1981), but Moreira carefully repositions the question, arguing that ‘we come closest to understanding purgatory's success and longevity when we ask, not when did purgatory achieve doctrinal status, but when did purgatory achieve theological viability’ (p. 211). By following this line of enquiry her answers are in many cases far more useful for late antiquity and the early Middle Ages than Le Goff's rigid insistence that until purgatory had a name, it had no existence. One of Moreira's key contentions is that some of the most significant developments in Christian thinking about purgatory were made in response to concern over Origen's ideas about universal salvation and their continued echoes in canons and other texts throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. She also explores in some detail the missionary context of purgatory (ch. 7) and the considerable difficulties that some missionaries may have faced in asking would-be Christians to distance themselves from their non-Christian pasts, arguing that ‘the importance of cultivating “softer” views of salvation in conjunction with missionary work is underscored by reference to the past’, and that the situations in which missionaries found themselves meant that they required ‘inclusive ideas of salvation’ (p. 189). Her discussion of scholarship which has sought to link purgatory with ‘barbarians’ and their law-codes or with a clash of Mediterranean and barbarian/northern/Irish cultures is also helpful: she concludes that ‘the later Christian barbarian kingdoms contributed very little to visions of purgatory’ (p. 205), and emphasizes that in many cases it is more sensible to consider texts as ‘early medieval’ than as ‘Germanic’ or ‘Irish’ (p. 199). Her careful analysis of the seventh-century vision of Fursey and its eighth-century reworking by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica is likewise enlightening as she repositions the vision away from its perceived ‘Irishness’ and emphasizes instead the much broader context—Frankish and East Anglian as well as Irish—in which this vision should be interpreted (ch. 5).