XXII: Of Purgatory

The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

by Liza Anderson

Article XXII is arguably one of the most challenging parts of the 39 Articles for many 21^st century Anglicans. After all, nearly 450 years after the Articles were written, Anglicans still profess the Holy Trinity, the Scriptures, and the Creeds. But in the last several decades, sanctoral calendars around the Anglican Communion have suddenly exploded with a proliferation of new saints, and even versions of the once-maligned doctrine of Purgatory have become thoroughly mainstream and respectable again, thanks in large part to the writings of Anglicans like C.S. Lewis, and also through the restoration of liturgical practices such as All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2 in many corners of the Anglican Communion as a counterpart to All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1. 

So reading Article XXII can feel a bit like confronting a relic of that awkward adolescent Calvinist phase that our church went through in its rebellious youth, before we grew up and realized that maybe our parent church wasn’t entirely wrong about everything.  You might instinctively cringe a little bit at some of the phrasing here, rather as you might when stumbling upon an old photograph of yourself as a teenager in a style of clothing, hair, and makeup that you now regard as a deeply questionable life choice, even if (perhaps especially if!) such a style was all the rage back in the day. 

Does Article XXII have any continuing usefulness for Anglican theology today? Or is it best relegated to the respectable obscurity of a historical documents section, where it can be preserved with all of the tender devotion that one gives to one’s old middle school photographs…and consulted roughly as often?    

Punishment or Pedagogy? The Varieties of Purgatory 

Anglican supporters of the doctrine of Purgatory have often noted triumphantly that the Articles do not, in fact, condemn every understanding of Purgatory, but merely the “Romish” doctrine concerning it. There have, in fact, been many different conceptions of Purgatory in the history of Christian theology, and the Articles are aimed squarely at one of those in particular.

While any notion of Purgatory is often regarded as an innovation of the high middle ages, a belief in some form of post-death purgation was very common among Christians in late antiquity, although it is true that they do not seem to have conceived of it as a third place existing somewhere between heaven and hell.  The ongoing purgation of our sins and imperfections was seen more as a process that one undergoes rather than as a destination to which one is temporarily sent. 

Augustine seemed to approve of this belief in his work The City of God (Book XX.25 and XXI.16) and the idea of eternal growth in holiness after death (arguably a kind of “purgatory for everyone”!) was widespread among theologians influenced by Origen, including the Cappadocians. Very often, although certainly not always, this possibility of continued growth and progress after death was joined to the hope of some kind of universal salvation. This was a kind of universalism that still attached serious consequences to human choices here on earth, but which nevertheless held that God’s punishments were always ultimately pedagogical in nature rather than merely punitive.

Indeed, if the dominant image of medieval Western Purgatory is one of burning fires and bodily torture, the imagery most favored in the Christian East tended to be the image of eternal school! Now, I will confess that I am probably far too keen on the idea of eternal school for my own good. (This fall I will be starting my 8^th academic degree and I already know what I want #9 to be…)  And I have likewise been known to express an enthusiasm for Purgatory that makes some of my clergy sigh over me nearly as loudly as my parents sigh over my status as a perpetual graduate student.  

But if the extent of my enthusiasm for continued growth and learning, both in this world and in the world to come, may admittedly be a tad eccentric, this patristic notion of eternal growth in holiness for the departed, and its corollary of continued purification from all that is not holy, is also not condemned by the Articles. Indeed, such an understanding is even hinted at in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (and, for that matter, in the 1928—hardly an example of some kind of raging Anglo-Catholicism!) (And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear [especially __________], beseeching thee to grant them continual growth in thy love and service.)  While hardly being one of the core tenets of the faith, a belief in some kind of Purgatory is thus certainly not incompatible with the classical Anglican tradition.

Purgatory and the Economics of Grace

But if not every doctrine of purgatory is condemned in Article XXII, what precisely is that “Romish doctrine” that most definitely is? The adjective “Romish” here may be misleading, for what is condemned is certainly not the doctrine of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. (Indeed, 20^th century Catholic theologians like Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger have articulated views on Purgatory that are much closer to the patristic and Orthodox vision than they are to the medieval Catholic understanding.) Neither is it even the opinion of the Council of Trent, which had not yet been formulated when this Article was first drafted. Rather, what is condemned is a collection of late medieval beliefs and practices surrounding both Purgatory and indulgences, some of which the Roman Catholic Church itself would also condemn soon afterwards.

In fact, I would like to suggest that what is actually condemned in Article XXII is the belief that human sin, guilt, and repentance can ever be quantified or monetized. The economics of sin and grace work differently. 

Attempts to precisely quantify the amount of guilt incurred by different sins stubbornly crop up at various points in Christian history. The canonical penances of the early church specified precisely how long a Christian would be excommunicated for different kinds of offenses.  The early medieval Celtic penitentials and tariff books offered a (comparatively) more merciful system, allowing for repeated confession and penance throughout one’s life, but they also affixed very precise penalties that corresponded to different sins. This trend towards quantification reached something of an apex in the high middle ages, when it became common to speak of “days” or “weeks” or “years” that would be spent in Purgatory in proportion to different offenses. 

Once sin had thus been quantified, it was only a small step from there to monetizing it. Once penance had been numerically circumscribed, people began to ask: how much it might cost to “buy” a week off from Purgatory, or a year, or even a plenary indulgence? If I can buy an indulgence to remit the penalty of my own sins, why can I not by one for the sins of my beloved relatives, even if they may have died unrepentant?

The idea that “time off” from Purgatory was something that could be bought and sold caused offense to a great many Catholics as well as to Protestant reformers, and even the Council of Trent would ultimately condemn the sale of indulgences, even while affirming that indulgences could nevertheless be obtained by pious actions that affected one’s interior disposition in a way that a mere economic transaction presumably did not.

Those medieval abuses are easy enough for us to condemn now.  But it strikes me as not terribly surprising that the church needed a few centuries to grapple with its theology of money as society shifted towards more of a monetary economy. If I can pay someone to wash my dishes or clean my house, why can I not simply pay someone to say my prayers? As long as the dishes get washed or the prayers get said, does it actually matter who does the labor? If almsgiving is a pious act that the clergy enjoin, and if my priest can assign me to say a certain number of prayers as penance, or to fast for a particular number of days, then why can’t my priest charge me a set amount of money as penance? If many Christians, both then and now, did instinctively recoil at the selling of indulgences, the theological work of explaining why it was wrong, and just what Christian grace looked like in an economy that was increasingly more monetary and transactional than it was relational, is work that is a good deal harder, and which is arguably still very much ongoing. 

If all of this talk of Purgatory and the selling of indulgences seems very far removed from the challenges confronting the church in the 21^st century, I would submit that we actually live in a world that thrives on quantifying and monetizing human guilt, which is exemplified in much of our legal system and particularly in the modern prison system. The belief that any given human sin can be quantified and thus “paid for”, either with some kind of cash fine or by “serving time” as a form of paying one’s debt, should actually be deeply problematic from the point of view of Article XXII.

It is, I think, no coincidence that much of the modern prison system developed in early modern Europe precisely among Protestants who deplored the doctrine of purgatory.  Indeed, Dr. Laurie Throness in his book A Protestant Purgatory: Theological Origins of the Penitentiary Act, has noted the fact that it was not just any Protestants who developed our modern system of mass incarceration, this rather curious idea of paying for wrongs done with units of time spent. The modern prison system was born in England, and its primary enthusiasts were Anglicans. Anglicans may have righteously evicted Purgatory from its place as a destination for spiritual correction after death, but instead of following our instinct that the economics of sin and grace are perhaps less easily quantifiable than that, we actually merely transposed Purgatory into this present life, and insisted that human beings should make quantifiable recompense for their sins, either with particular amounts of money or by serving particular amounts of time, in a kind of newly-invented earthly Purgatory.  

It is really almost as if the Anglican reaction to the doctrine of Purgatory was to say: “That’s not real! You made that up!” <pause> “Maybe…maybe it should be real. Let’s make a real version!” 

In many ways, in spite of my concerns, I generally think that Anglicanism still has good theological instincts here. For example, with regards to sacramental confession, I have heard from many of my Roman Catholic friends that they generally do still receive rather quantitative penances like the classic “say X number of Our Fathers and Y number of Hail Marys.” Whereas I can honestly say that in 15 years of going to confession as an Anglican, I have only ever received penances that relate meaningfully to some kind of transformation of life rather than those that would suggest that guilt and grace can somehow be mathematically computed and transacted. 

But I also think that we are far too easy on ourselves here, lulled into complacency because we no longer speak about “time served” in Purgatory or of paying for our sins by giving money to the church, while we nevertheless still either actively or tacitly support a legal system that works precisely according to those same late medieval assumptions about sin and penance that we supposedly deplore. 

The Communion of Saints

If Article XXII’s commentary about Purgatory is perhaps more immediately relevant to contemporary concerns than it might seem, what, then, of the role of saints within Anglicanism?

From 2015-2018, I was sentenced to my own personal purgatory as secretary of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music and chair of the calendar committee. From that vantage point, I must say that I am genuinely fascinated by how contentious the issue of the calendar has become over the past decade. In a triennium in which we were discussing prayer book revision and hymnal revision, and in which we were revising the Book of Occasional Services, I would nevertheless estimate that at least three quarters of the correspondence that I received related to the calendar. I can certainly understand why people care, but (although I have some theories) I am less certain of why it is that so many people seem to care so disproportionately much.   

The state of the Episcopal Church’s calendar confusion has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, and so I will not belabor it here. But, it has become rather commonplace to dismiss the whole debacle by lamenting with a sigh that the real problem is that we lack a coherent theology of sainthood in the church today, and that we really need to fix that.

After three years of being asked by the church to do multiple completely contradictory things, I certainly cannot disagree with the diagnosis that we lack a coherent theology of sainthood.  (After the 9^th email I received angrily demanding to know WHY we had not yet put Presiding Bishop Michael Curry on the sanctoral calendar, I almost started to genuinely worry that maybe he had secretly died and we were actually just using a hologram or a body double!  On the other hand, for people who see the calendar merely as a collection of exemplary biographies rather than as a list of figures whose intercession one might ask in prayer, I will concede that it is arguably not completely beyond reason to also include biographies of the living.) 

The problem with suggesting that we need to come up with a coherent theology of sainthood, though, is that Anglicanism has very arguably never had a coherent theology of sainthood. 

For all of Article XXII’s critique of the cult of saints as it existed in Catholic practice, the fact is that saints certainly never disappeared from Anglicanism. Most obviously, churches continued to be named after them. While many of the named saints were quickly removed from the Litany of 1544, all of the traditional categories of saints were still named in it, and the Litany continued to entreat each category of saints with the traditional phrase of “pray for us”. 

While many popular medieval saints were purged from the Anglican calendar, by no means all of them were, and it is difficult to intuit a clear rationale behind those who were kept. (For example, the twelve remaining female saints included Saint Anne, known only from non-canonical writings, and several virgin martyrs whose historicity was questioned even in the early modern period.) Books such as the wildly popular Foxe’s Book of Martyrs lifted many early Christian saints to new prominence, and placed them alongside more recent Protestants who had also died for their faith, functioning as a kind of Protestant sanctoral calendar far broader in scope than the more limited range of official liturgical commemorations.

At a time when even the bonds that used to unite Anglicans (like the creeds or a shared liturgy) are fraying in some places, is it particularly realistic to imagine that we will now be able to achieve consensus on a point of doctrine about which we really never had a single coherent theology to begin with? 

It does seem, however, that those Anglicans who first adopted Article XXII would be mystified and undoubtedly dismayed by the fact that the Episcopal Church’s calendar of commemorations is now vastly more crowded with saints than the General Calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. (Indeed, a proposal to General Convention to create something rather like the Roman General Calendar—a core list of common commemorations and a much wider list of optional ones—was quickly squashed by fervent protests, while even more names for inclusion were proposed.) This sudden proliferation of commemorations is not a uniquely American problem. Recent calendar efforts in other Anglican provinces, such as the Church of England’s Exciting Holiness (a book title that I have never successfully pronounced with a straight face…) show a similar trend.

I am enough of an Anglo-Catholic that I am more or less content for us to continue wantonly adding people to the calendar every three years, so long as they were all actually Christians and are all definitely dead. But I do nevertheless think that Article XXII should, at the very least, challenge us to ask why this sudden proliferation of saints has flourished over the last couple of decades.  What work is it doing for us? Does this ever-growing list of intercessors and exemplars enhance our worship of God, or does it detract from it? 

Article XXII was written in a context in which it seemed clear to many Anglicans that devotion to the saints had far exceeded its proper bounds, even though they were generally not willing to go as far as some other Christian traditions in expunging the saints altogether from their theology and worship. As our own theology and practice around the saints continues to develop, it will be important for us to keep a sense of appropriate perspective, remembering that God is to be the only recipient of our worship, and that the saints are ultimately our partners and companions in that worship, never its object. That is one part of Article XXII’s critique that remains very timely. 

Liza Anderson received her PhD in historical theology from Yale University in 2016. She is an assistant professor of theology at the College of Saint Scholastica in Duluth, MN and a lay member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council. 

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