A Question of Death: How Purgatory Influenced Late Medieval Funerary Doctrine and Practice
When I was studying history at university (many moons ago now), one of the myriad topics I covered was the study of death. More specifically (because there is a lot of death in history — take my word for it), practices and doctrines regarding the conduct of funerals and commemorative ceremonies for the recently departed from the Dark Ages to the late medieval period. One of the key subjects I happened upon throughout the study of the macabre was Purgatory.
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, all is explained in the introduction to the essay I dredged up from my uni days below. Now that I have your interest, read on to learn more…
In traditional Catholic doctrine, Purgatory, or Purgatorio, was one of three primary levels of the afterlife, the other two being Heaven, Paradiso, and Hell, Inferno. The doctrine of Purgatory itself was first elaborated upon by the First Council of Lyon in 1245, who decreed on the grounds of scripture that those who had not committed a mortal sin in life, yet retained some unatoned slight or venial sin to their name, may be cleansed in the afterlife and allowed to enter Heaven once this cleansing had concluded, however long it may have been. In other words, the doctrine established that only virtuous souls could enter Heaven, but the genuinely repentant unvirtuous had the opportunity to redeem themselves through a trial by fire, often a quite literal one. Though in this regard it was similar to Hell, the main difference was that in Purgatory, one always had sight of God even as their sins were being burned away, so hope of redemption for the penitent was always omnipresent and available (a stay in Hell, on the other hand, was permanent). The relevance that this had to the world of the living was primarily that the spirits of the departed were supposed to be consoled by the knowledge that their surviving loved ones were praying for them. This way, it allowed families to remain connected with their dead to a highly intimate degree, arguably serving as a means of consolation in a time of great grief by appending spiritual significance to death and the potential for eternal bliss after it.
With that idea accounted for, it can be argued that Purgatory was an evolution, a Christianisation, of the methods of ancestor worship that formed a component of pre-Abrahamic pagan religions. This idea is elaborated upon by Roberta Gilchrist in Magic for the Dead? The Archaeology of Magic in Later Medieval Burials, who specifically compares the practice of placing apotropaic objects and marks, such as etchings of the Virgin Mary’s initials, in late and high medieval burials to similar practices in the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages. These practices, such as the Anglo-Saxon practice of burying their dead in wooden house-like structures alongside a collection of grave goods, were based upon various incarnations of folk magic. Yet, largely because the inclusion of these grave goods contradicted established Christian burial doctrine, it was necessary at one point to separate from old pagan practices and replace them with methods deemed suitably ‘Christian’. At the same time, it was arguably a necessity to maintain that much-vaunted intimacy with the dead that particular aspects of folk religion before the advent of Christianity proffered. Particularly, Gilchrist uses the presence of staves in later medieval graves, such as those of priests and laymen, to suggest “that there was no lingering connection between timber rods and Viking traditions of sorcery”, reminding us that they were included as a reference to the biblical Psalm 23:4, which proceeds: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. From these practices, judging their importance in relation to establishing the doctrine that would become Purgatory, as a result of ascertaining a link from past burial practices to Christian theology, is no difficult task.
This leads us onto the question of the degree of influence that preaching both for and against the doctrine of Purgatory had upon funerary and commemorative practices in the period of schism between Protestantism and Catholicism. With the decline in influence of the latter that followed the Great Schism and the subsequent Protestant Reformation, however, Purgatory — seen as a Catholic decadence by the more austere Protestants — was targeted and subsequently abolished in Protestant-majority countries Europe-wide. In his work, The Reformation: A History, Diarmiad MacCulloch explains that this came primarily as a result of a doctrinal change regarding the practices of justification and sanctification. In doing so, he describes the difference between Catholic and Protestant ideas on the matter. In Catholicism, “one is made righteous by a progressive infusion of divine grace accepted through faith and cooperated with through good works” — that is to say, one must act to appease God if an infraction has been committed. A classic example of this idea in action as observed in the modern day is the ‘Hail Mary’, where a priest will instruct the penitent to utter a prayer to the Virgin Mary, usually several times in succession.
The doctrines of Martin Luther, however, consider the administration of salvation to be instantaneous, necessitating little or no penance on the penitent’s part; “justification rather meant “the declaring of one to be righteous”, where God imputes the merits of Christ upon one who remains without inherent merit”, to paraphrase MacCulloch. This is because God and Christ are preached as omnibenevolent rather than vindictive or sadistic (as the Old Testament of the Bible can be argued to suggest God to be) — the performances of ‘good works’ are unnecessary to achieve righteousness. This not only brought into question the necessity of Purgatorial doctrine, it also posed a stark theological question with immense and terrifying implications. After all, if praying for the dead was no longer necessary, one could rightly ask how souls supposedly in need of aid would reach Heaven without the support of those who mourn them.
This quandary was handily resolved amongst Protestants by a new philosophy, stating that if the soul was judged at the point of death, it would undermine the value of the Final Judgement at the End of Days. As a result, Protestant theologians argued, the doctrine of Purgatory was rendered ultimately pointless, because a righteous soul could go straight to Heaven (or Hell, if they were unrighteous) without any intervention from the living being necessary. Any other assertion can be argued to have contradicted the entire New Testament, by portraying God as a vindictive figure who contradicts the laws set down in his own holiest works. Thus, the authority of the Church could potentially be undermined by these allegations of hypocrisy. It is also possible, and arguably more likely, that part of the development of the Protestant doctrine, as it was put forward, might have been to do with the abuse of the indulgence system, in the case of money being given to greedy Catholic figures as an essential free ticket through Purgatory to reach Heaven. Hence, Protestants could correctly perceive the doctrine as a mechanic for the corruption that plagued the late medieval Church.
Contemporary clerical reformist Simon Fish did just this in his treatise A Supplication for the Beggars, where he complained that indulgences rendered Purgatory a pointless affair because “[if] the pope with his pardons for money may deliuer one soule thens: he may deliuer him aswel without money, if he may deliuer one, he may deliuer a thousand: yf he may deliuer a thousand he may deliuer theim all, and so destroy purgatory”. His argument was that if Catholic authorities under and including the Pope refused to grant absolution without monetary payment, then the Catholic authorities were nought but tyrants — an insinuation that stood in stark opposition to the new Protestant assertions of God as a figure of omnibenevolence. In other words, if the Pope is an evil tyrant, then he cannot be a terrestrial representative of God. Hence, it can be argued from a Protestant point of view, the propagation of Purgatory by the Catholic Church was not only unnecessary, but it was also blasphemous — along with the practices surrounding the doctrine. This was particularly the case as far as ringing bells for the dead was concerned, a practice that was said to ward away evil spirits from the deceased.
There may have also been a more practical purpose for the disappearance of Purgatory from Protestant theology. This is elaborated upon by Finnish historians Mia Korpiola and Anu Lahtinen, editors of Cultures of Death and Dying in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Their argument relates to a superstition that keeping a corpse among the family after their death and up to their burial not only eases their passage through Purgatory through provision of comfort, “but also protected the living as long as the corpse was among them”. Taking into consideration the various instances of the bubonic plague that were in the process of ravaging Western Europe by the Late Medieval period, it may be reasonable to assume that part of the reason why Purgatorial doctrine was abolished by the Protestants was to suppress such unhygienic practices as this one. Superstitions like staying with a plague-ridden corpse to help its passage through the trials of Purgatory did nothing to stop the spread of the disease back in the world of the living — if anything, it worsened it and led to more death.
Whatever the reasons for its abolition, the condemnation and subsequent disappearance of Purgatory from Protestant theology had a profound effect on practices relating to the funeral and commemorations in the appropriate parts of Western Europe that followed the denomination, such as England (after Henry’s split from the Catholic Church), Germany and Sweden. This particularly applied to monasteries, described in Peter Marshall’s Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England specifically as “purgatorial institutions” — intended from their construction to reinforce the doctrine of praying for the souls of their founders and benefactors. Indeed, monasteries played such an important role in the propagation of Purgatory as a doctrine that, when Henry VIII of England ordered their disbandment in 1536, Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester, was compelled to inform him that “the founding of monasteries argued purgatory to be, so the putting of them down argues it not to be”.
To elaborate upon what the aforementioned means, one key purpose for the presence of the monasteries was to grant its denizens seclusion so that they could pray for the souls of the dead as intercessors. This gave it a role of exceptional importance in the propagation of the doctrine, and thus without Purgatory, there would be little if any reason for the monasteries to continue to exist. With the disbandment of these monasteries, these veritable and arguably crucial bastions of Purgatorial doctrine, its belief and propagation would begin to wane. As a result, the abolition of other commemorative practices related to Purgatory could commence throughout the Protestant world in short order. The common reformist perception of the lazy, unduly wealthy monks who made the monasteries their home and profiteered from holdings on the land surrounding it can be argued to have simply been one of several pretexts for these abolitions. The same can also be said of the other practices associated with Purgatory, such as the aforementioned indulgences whose abuse by corrupt clergymen — such as the same Johann Tetzel (who was himself a Dominican friar) who inspired Luther to write his Ninety-Five Theses — ultimately led to the birth of Protestantism itself.
Prayer for the dead by intercessory parties was not the only practice affected by the dissolution of the monasteries, however. Arguably, it was a far lesser concern to those whose deceased relatives and ancestors were interred in tombs within, and/or buried under, a monastery that had just been dissolved. Traditionally, Christian burial doctrine mandated that the deceased have their burial sites on consecrated ground. That is to say, ground that has been liturgically blessed, or possesses the virtue of being where a sacred object and/or building stands — such as, for example, a monastery. By removing the aforementioned sacred object and/or building from the premises, the ground loses its spiritual value, and as a result the fate of the soul is thrown into jeopardy — a matter that greatly concerned families in the prelude to the dissolution, when the idea of reforming, let alone abandoning, Catholicism was still an alien idea to many pious Christians in Europe. Protestant theologians devised two responses to this rather understandable predicament.
The first, relating to the fates of the souls in question, was the conception of “soul sleep”, an idea also referred to as Christian mortalism. Martin Luther, one of the founding fathers of the Protestant movement, was one of the foremost proponents of this idea. He devised the idea through a statement in one of his theological works, Ecclesiastes, that “Salomon judgeth that the dead are a sleepe, and feele nothing at all. For the dead lye there accompting neyther dayes nor yeares, but when they are awoken, they shall seeme to have slept scarce one minute … Before a man should turn round, he is already a fair angel”. In other words, the souls are not brought to Purgatory, for Purgatory does not exist in Protestant theology, but rather they sleep until the Final Judgment is brought upon them — the sleep, from their perspective, is an exceptionally short one. As a result, even if the souls do suffer as a result of their burial ground being deconsecrated, their suffering, assuming that they even suffer at all, is temporary enough for the problem to be rendered irrelevant. The other, far less complicated response was, quite simply, to move the tombs of those interred in the monasteries along with their funerary monuments elsewhere. One example of such a movement was the re-interment of the tomb of the Earl of Arundel and his wife, Eleanor, which was moved from the dissolved priory at Lewes into Chichester Cathedral.
The end of Purgatory amongst the Protestant countries had another profound change on funerary monuments as well as their movement from one consecrated ground to another — the construction of those monuments. The problem with Purgatorial funeral ornaments was that they were often elaborately decorated, especially in the case of ornaments for the elite. Thus in Protestant and especially Puritan doctrine, they were to be considered decadent and indulgent, symbols of the excesses that accompanied Catholic dominance. This made them primary and arguably even legitimate targets for being stripped away and reused for other purposes by austere Protestants, even as they were being moved from one burial site to another (as was described in the previous paragraph). Contemporary theologian John Weever, who was himself a Protestant, derided the conduct of tomb destruction as grossly and unforgivably irreverent toward the deceased, in a 1631 treatise that was rather aptly entitled A Barbarous Rage Against the Dead. “Marbles which covered the dead”, Weever complained hence, “were dug up & put to other uses … Tombs hacked and hewn to pieces; images or representations of the defunct, broken, erased, cut, or dismembered; inscriptions or epitaphs, especially if they began with an orate pro anima, or concluded with cuius animae propitietur Deus”.
Perhaps as a result of these desecrations, future funerary monuments made by and for Protestants and their dead would be manufactured as much plainer and simpler, lacking the magnificent and highly colourful decorations that would be characterised by similar monuments for deceased Catholic figures. This can be interpreted as a reflection either of their disbelief in Purgatory, largely replaced as it was by the concept of soul sleep, or their austerity relating to the possession of grave goods — a practice that largely died (no pun intended) with the end of other pagan burial practices in Western Europe. It can also be interpreted from a practical point of view as a means to stop the tombs from being destroyed in the manner that Weever described, if they were to be moved from their original resting place towards a new one.
As we have already established, the adoption of Protestantism and their subsequent rejection of Purgatorial doctrine led to a radical shift in such practices and even their abolition, such as praying for the dead and the movement of burial sites from the dissolved monasteries to other sanctified burial locations, is a key example of that influence. Of course, what must be pointed out for the sake of good form is that not everyone in Western Europe at the time was a Protestant, nor did they express a profuse disbelief in Purgatory. In this regard, funerary practices and commemorations in majority Catholic countries remained for the most part unchanged. Prayers and masses for the souls of the dead believed to be residing in Purgatory are still conducted even to this day, as are the associated final rites. What did change amongst the European Catholics in the late medieval period, however, was how they preached about Purgatory. The Council of Trent in particular — formed in 1545 and defined as the embodiment of the so-called ‘Counter Reformation’ — issued a dogmatic decree, handily referred to as the Decree on Purgatory, that specified Catholic doctrine on Purgatory, affirming its existence as taught by the First Council of Lyon three hundred years before, in 1245.
At the same time, however, the Council commanded preachers to “let the more difficult and subtle questions which do not make for edification and, for the most part, are not conducive to an increase of piety, be excluded from the popular sermons to uneducated people … As for those things that belong to the realm of curiosity or superstition, or smack of dishonourable gain, they should forbid them as scandalous and injurious to the faithful”. Arguably, the idea in passing such an edict on Purgatorial practice and superstitions formed in relation to it was that, as a result of striking down the teaching that indulgences alone could forgive sins as a heretical belief, the corruption that was undermining the authority of the Catholic Church could be brought under a satisfactory degree of control, if not stopped outright. The same would be applied to unhelpful superstitions, few of which were actually given legitimacy by scripture (a notable exception being the high medieval practice of burying the dead alongside a pair of staffs, as has already been mentioned in the second paragraph of this treatise), that seemed to cause more problems than they really solved. As a direct result of this, the shift in thinking relating to the doctrine of Purgatory can be argued to have been responsible for a series of changes in the conduct of funerals and commemorative practices thereof — changes that have been elaborated upon above.
Having posed the argument that the doctrine of Purgatory was a major factor in the initial appearance and the eventual ascendancy of Protestantism, and all of the practices associated with it, it would appear that its influence is profound. As a tenet of Catholicism in particular, the existence of Purgatory was all but essential for the elaborate construction and decoration of tombs and other funeral monuments, the practice of intercessory prayer that served as one of several foundations for monasteries and monastic orders, and the existence of good works — along with the abuses associated therewith. In turn, both the development of superstitions and the abuse of the doctrine by corrupt clergymen in Europe served to change the landscape of Christian funerary practices forever, with the advent of Protestant austerity and elaborations by the Catholic authorities intended to combat the aforementioned abuses and impious superstitions. It seems appropriate, therefore, to conclude this treatise with the statement that the doctrine of Purgatory not only influenced, but was essential, towards the sustainment of particular practices relating to funerals, burials and the commemoration of the aforementioned. This was both as a result of its disappearance from Protestant theology altogether and its modification and elaboration by the Council of Trent.
Thank you for reading, and I will see you again next week.
~ Harry