A Four Year Old Discovers Purgatory

David W. Fagerberg
America, Nov 18, 1995, Vol. 173, No 16, 23-24.
No, this is not a cute anecdotal story about a crisis conversation with a toddler whose
hamster has died. I am the four-year-old Catholic, and among the opinions held by the life-long
Catholics I meet, there is one which puzzles me. It is the current shyness about Purgatory. I
wonder why Catholics dont realize the potential of this doctrine.
I suppose there will always be matters which a Credo Catholic such as myself wont
understand in the same way a Cradle Catholic does. The convert's deep epistemological patterns,
having been formed in a different environment, may be like speech patterns of a first language
which will persist as accents in his second. But precisely because of this, the convert is able to
marvel at what the life-long Catholic receives as ordinary, and feel a thrill at the standard.
The insights of purgatory are a case in point. This doctrine is an amazing piece of
Catholic theological anthropology; why, then, the prevalent silence about it today? I theorize it
is a reaction against the desiccated notion of purgatory as a primitive concept of the afterlife, by
which a vindictive God externally imposes arbitrary punishments in what amounts to a type of
kindergarten hell. Such commonplace distortions might account for the contemporary silence
about the doctrine, although one sometimes meets a person who wants to restore exactly this idea
as a felt threat, as though it will stimulate piety to portray God as desirous of the opportunity to
punish everyone at least once, at least for a little while, at least passively , even if he doesnt get
a chance to punish them in hell. Silence would be preferable to that.
But preferable to silence would be a deepened psychology of sanctification. Purgatory
will make little sense, it seems to me, so long as it is only depicted as part of the alien,

metaphysical landscape of the afterlife. To be rightly comprehended, purgatory must be

understood as taking place on the landscape of the human heart.
The text for this meditation is but a single passage by Charles Williams, redacted by
Dorothy Sayers, about Dantes view of the soul in purgatory. Here purgatory is not understood
as a system of divine book-keeping, but as a process of spiritual development which is complete
precisely when it is complete. The burdens that weigh us down are the burdens of ourselves;
they last ... until God is satisfied. It is so expressed here [on this terrace of purgatory], but later,
on the highest terrace, we find that it is not the whole truth, for we find that God is satisfied when
we are satisfied. 1 What can we make of this suggestion that we will leave purgatory as soon as
God is satisfied, but that God wont be satisfied until we are satisfied?
Under the logic of external punishment this sounds about as phony as when parents make the
claim, at the outset of a spanking, that it is going to hurt them more than the child receiving it.
Any intelligent child would think to open negotiations by recommending a mutually self-serving
compromise. But I believe Williams point to be considerably more profound than this; indeed, it
is this escaped profundity which accounts for our having abandoned the doctrine today. His
friend, Dorothy Sayers, gets us started by pointing us to St. Thomas Aquinas.
Two things may be considered in sin, Thomas says: the guilty act and the consequent
stain. To remove the guilt is to purge the culpa, but the stain of sin, its reatus , must also be
removed. Sayers suggests the example of damaging a valuable china teapot belonging to a
friend: your act gives her in law a claim against you for damages. Now, if you were not
penitent, or your friend was unwilling to forgive, the story would end there. But in the divine
case, God is always ready to forgive, and we are speaking of a sinner who is penitent and
overcome with shame and wants to put matters right. When that is the case, a threefold process

unfolds. The first act is contrition, the second is to go and confess how sorry one is. By so doing
the sinner is forgiven, the relationship restored. By such purging of the culpa, the sinner is
released from guilt.
But this does not restore the teapot, Sayers continues. In law, [your friend] could still,
if she chose, take you into court; and although she is perhaps not likely to press her claim, you
will feel that you ought to do something about it - offer to pay for it, scour the shops to find
another teapot like it, or give her something else to make up. This is the third act compensation - which purges the reatus. And indeed, if you are not anxious to purge the reatus
one might feel a little dubious about the sincerity of your contrition.2
But even Dorothy Sayers seems to recognize the limits of her illustration, for she now transcends
the facile treatment of culpa and reatus, approaching Williams point. You pay the price - but
you pay it because you want to, and because that is your only means of expressing your love and
sorrow: and in paying you grow clean and fit to receive the forgiveness freely offered and to
return to that right relationship which nothing but your own folly ever disturbed .... When we sin
we alienate ourselves from God; and if we are ever to be happy in His presence again, it is
something in us that has to be altered - not anything in Him.3
In the case of the teapot, the satisfaction was externally reparable because the offense was to an
external good. But this is but the most shadowy analogy of purgatory. Its truth, with its notion
of passive suffering, comes at a deeper level.
Might I suggest an alternate example to illustrate. Suppose I have badly offended my
wife. Suppose it was not merely a case of damaging a good she possessed, but of wounding her
heart. And suppose, finally, that she is more than willing to forgive, and my contrition is sincere
beyond question. Could one nevertheless understand that I, as the offender, might suffer for a

period of time - voluntarily suffer - the consequences (reatus) of the pain caused? Quiet
evenings; introspection; retreat from the breezy familiarity that otherwise marked the
relationship; a more acute sensitivity to what other kindred behaviors cause her grief. The only
means available to express my love & sorrow would be to voluntarily suffer. No compensatory
act would be possible in so intimate a relationship. If I damaged a friends teapot, purging the
reatus is simple, formal, and negotiable; but if I hurt my beloved s heart, the number of items I
can simply give to fix it is reduced to zero. Instead, I would desire ... what? What does the soul
in purgatory or the lover purging the stain of this hurt desire? Is it not to feel what I have
caused? Feeling what she felt. The slow, painful dawning on my consciousness of what effects
my actions have had. This suffering would be the purgation.
Purgatory is feeling the pain we cause God. (Perhaps this is why the medieval had a
better grasp of the doctrine, because we moderns find it harder to imagine hurting a distant,
deistic force.) It is not the result of Gods vindictiveness. We desire it. And so Williams
statement finally takes on its full impact: in Dantes vision, each level of purgatory may be left
as soon as God is satisfied. Until God is satisfied - but it is not the whole truth, for we find
that God is satisfied when we are satisfied. The souls in purgatory ascend when they desire to
ascend; they will the ascent always, but the desire is turned to the torment as once to the sin;
when the desire finds itself free, the will too is free. 4 Purgatory is voluntarily suffering the
residual consequences which my sin has caused my beloved, and in so doing, softening a stony
heart, opening a closed mind, illuminating a blind eye. Paradise will be seeing reality, including
ourselves, as God sees them; but to reach the very beginning of paradise we must reach the end
of purgatory by feeling how sin feels to God. This is truth as knowledge of reality.

An impoverished sense of what it means to be satisfied would be revealed if we imagine

someone saying to his wounded spouse, Its finished when Im satisfied? Well, then, Id say
Im satisfied. But by saying such a thing, we would only mean the point at which wed be
willing to quit - a point always earlier than we should, a point before our hearts mending is
finished. I am easily satisfied, to my detriment. Dorothy Sayers cites her friend C. S. Lewis as
having said that the joys of Heaven would be for most of us, in our present condition, an
acquired taste.
The more adequate meaning of the word satisfied is to be found in its etymology: satis
(enough) facere (to do). We will not be satisfied until God has done enough. And what will
satisfy God? When we have been made holy. God could not think he has satisfied us so long
as we are incapable of enjoying beatitude. The only sorrow is not being a saint. Beatitude is our
sole satisfaction. The Christian life, therefore, is purgation from any remnant traces of sin which
would limit us from enjoying our proper end. Thus we have not been describing a state of affairs
which exists only post-mortem; we have been describing the liturgical life which was unleashed
in us by the waters of baptism. If one had no seed of desire for penance at all, then one would
be in hell. If ones faith is only the size of a mustard seed, one would want it to be satisfied. If
one wants a little, one wants enough. Purgatory is faiths desire.

1 Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961) p. 159-60.
2 Dorothy Sayers, The Meaning of Purgatory, Introductory Papers on Dante, (New York: Barnes &
Noble, Inc.) p. 79.
3 Sayers, p. 80.
4 Williams, p. 160