We continue our query of what happens in purgatory and what causes anguish for those in purgatory.

Tears Over Our Sins

While in purgatory, what will we remember exactly? Will we be given the ability to remember everything, both good and bad?[1] St. Augustine thought so. We may prefer not to have such an exhaustive memory. In his Confessions Augustine wrote that in the afterlife, all is in the present “at the same time”: “in eternity nothing passes, for the whole is present, whereas time cannot be present all at once.”[2] David Vincent Meconi, editor of my edition of Confessions, writes that memory, for St. Augustine, “is where all the experiences of one’s life’s story are held together in a single moment…”[3] We become naked before God. We see ourselves as God sees us. And it isn’t pretty.

In the early 14^th century, Dante (c. 1265-1321) explored this topic in his Purgatorio, the second part of his Divine Comedy, in which his characters climb a seven-level mountain.[4] (Trappist monk Thomas Merton referred to Dante’s work in the title of his bestselling 1948 autobiography Seven Storey Mountain.) Dante described a bathing, a washing, a cleansing. He wrote of two rivers. The waters of the River Eunoè had the power to end one’s memory of sin[5] and the waters of the River Lethe the power to restore the recall of every good deed.[6]

We can experience this all-seeing capacity in a virtual way through fiction. For example, in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), Emily Webb Gibbs dies in childbirth and decides to go back and see what happened on a fairly ordinary day, her 12^th birthday, fourteen years earlier.[7] In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Clarence, George Bailey’s guardian angel, lets George see a day as if he had never been born.[8]

The lyrics to the song The Way We Were tell us that we try to forget the painful memories. No memory or memories could be more painful than our sins, even if they were forgiven in confession. When we pray the Morning Offering, we offer our “prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day.” One of the sufferings is the mental anguish we experience when we remember any of our past sins and, moreover, when we realize we may well sin again “this day.” In some forms of the Act of Contrition, we tell God that we “detest all” our sins and that we “dread the loss of heaven.”

Let’s return to considering our experience of purgatory on earth because this experience will continue into actual purgatory. St. Augustine wrote this of the pain of sin we experience on earth: “Every disordered soul is its own punishment.”[9] We punish ourselves with the effect of sin on our lives. As we see, appreciate, and glory in God’s utter goodness, unsurpassed beauty, absolute truth, and life eternal, anguish from our sin grows more acute.

While we are alive on earth, how do we move forward each day from memories of our sins, the emotions they evoke in us, and the mental anguish of detestation and dread, even if these memories are accompanied by the joy and gratitude for their having been forgiven? In addition to our memories of our sins of commission and omission of which we are aware, our anguish is heightened by knowing there are also sins of which we are unaware.[10] And there is yet another level: How do we move forward from the effect of sin on our lives? And how do we move forward knowing that our sins have had ill effects on the lives of other people — spouse, children, parents, siblings, neighbors, co-workers? Particularly if those effects contributed to their downfall?[11]

What one feels are the full range of human emotions. Yes, there is joy in being closer to God and knowing you’re on the road to Paradise. There is joy in seeing loved ones in purgatory. But there is so much mental anguish.

Tears Over Our Manner of Death

First among the sorrows of those in purgatory might be the place, time, and manner of our death and the deaths of our loved ones. In The Jesus I Hardly Knew, author Phillip Yancey says that, ultimately, there will be one prayer God will not answer. He will not save us from death. We will die. Recall the plea of Lazarus’s sister Martha: “Lord, if only You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). Yes, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, but eventually he did die. And many people die angry that they have to die. Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas warned that Americans think they can, in his felicitous phrase, escape from this life alive.[12] That attitude will remain with us in purgatory where we will demand an explanation from God about the timing, place, and manner of our death and the deaths of our loved ones.

For so many, life is, in Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.”[13] Why did I starve to death? Or die in battle? Or die in a car accident? Or drown? Or get murdered? Or die from cancer? Or from something freakish like lightning? Or at the command of a drunken king making a sweeping promise after his stepdaughter’s dance at her birthday party?[14] Or from a mad dog’s bite, a mosquito bite, a shark bite, an overturned golfcart,[15] a tree?[16] Our Lord was familiar with unexpected death. In Luke 13:4, He tells listeners that the collapse of the Tower of Siloam in Old Jerusalem which killed 18 people was not their fault.

You might be upset in purgatory if you died before you reached adolescence,[17] or before you reached adulthood, or before you reached middle-age, or, indeed, before you were born. You are distraught that you lost one or both of your parents when you were young, or when you were adolescent, or when you were a young adult. Or you lost a dear aunt or a sibling. Or you lost your spouse. Or you lost a daughter or son.[18] You are upset that your parents divorced, or you were divorced, or you were orphaned and never adopted, or you were orphaned and didn’t get along with your adoptive parents. Or you lost a parent or sibling or child to addiction.

The next installment, Part 4, will take up losses and lost opportunities.

[A link to Part 2 is here.]

[1] Like for those with “highly superior autobiographical memory.” See the experience of actress Marilu Henner with her “highly superior autobiographical memory.” See also Alexander Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968; regarding Solomon Shereshevsky). In Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), the principal character, Mersault, is imprisoned. While in prison, he can remember every detail of his residence, enough to last a hundred years without being bored.

[2] Confessions (Maria Boulding, O.S.B., trans., David Vincent Meconi, S.J., ed.; 2012), Bk XI, ch. 11, sec. 13, p. 341.

[3] Ibid., p. 273, n. 45. On St. Augustine’s writings on memory, see also Rev. Kevin G. Grove, C.S.C., Augustine on Memory (2021); Paige E. Hochschild, Memory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology (2012); and George Heffernan, “Augustine on Memory and Lethargy: A New Approach to Book X of the Confessions,” Proceedings of the XXIIII World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 7, 2018, pp. 35-42.

[4] In the letter to Titus, the author refers to a cleansing and to a bath: “Jesus Christ, Who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for Himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good” (Titus 2:14). “We ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deluded, slaves to various desires and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful ourselves and hating one another. But when the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of His mercy, He saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, Whom He richly poured out on us…” (Titus 3:4-6). See also Nora Hamerman, “Dante in the National Gallery,” Arlington [Virginia] Catholic Herald, Sept. 14, 2021: “In a way, though, Dante did invent Purgatory. The teaching had only been adopted by the church a few centuries earlier, and it was imagined exactly like hellfire, but temporary. Dante created the mountain shown in a painting in the National Gallery of Art — night and day, light and shadow, art and music, struggle and repose — like a mirror of life on earth, but moving toward a purpose, as Pope Francis put it: ‘pointing toward the ultimate goal of that journey: happiness, understood both as the fullness of life in time and history, and as eternal beatitude in God.’”

[5] Canto XXXIII.

[6] Canto XXXI.

[7] Page 59.

[8] Full script, p. 58, here.

[9] Ibid., Bk I, ch. 12, sec. 19, p. 21.

[10] See Matt. 35:44: “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?”

[11] Jesus said, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble!” (Matt. 18:6-7)

[12] See his 2002 essay here, at sixth paragraph from bottom.

[13] Leviathan (1651).

[14] The fate of John the Baptist (see Matt. 14).

[15] More than 20 years ago, an elderly friend was on vacation in Florida. She sat in the golf cart near her husband who was swinging his club. The cart took off, went down an incline, and into the water. The water was not shallow but was a former quarry. The cart turned upside down and she drowned. “Retired Harper College Professor Drowns After Golf Cart Plunges in Florida,” Chicago Tribune, March 17, 2001. Both she, dead, and her widowed husband, alive, had to be outraged at such a freakish way to die. When I searched online to find this report, I found a number of deaths by drowning due to golfcarts.

[16] In 2009 a woman and her daughter were stopped at a traffic light in Maryland amid a storm. A tree fell on the car and killed both of them, leaving her husband and five other daughters. Ellen McCarthy, “Woman Killed by Storm Leaves Legacy with Five Daughters,” Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2014. Again, when I searched online to find this report, there were a number of instances of people dying from fallen trees.

[17] St. Augustine prayed on this: “I would still thank you even if you had not willed me to live beyond boyhood.” Confessions (Maria Boulding, O.S.B., trans., David Vincent Meconi, S.J., ed.; 2012), Bk I, ch. 20, sec. 31, p. 31.

[18] The mothers of the Holy Innocents wept: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matt. 2:18, quoting Jeremiah 31:15)