I imagine it is exactly like hell, all fiery torment etc but temporal, with possibility of release at some point, instead of eternal. Please can I be wrong about this?
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Philosophy/religion
is there any chance that purgatory is not completely horrible?
100 replies
Mitchy1nge · 21/03/2013 14:43
OP posts:
LRDtheFeministDragon ·
22/03/2013 15:47
Oh, that's a pity. 
I didn't know.
I love the kind of historical fiction where there's a note at the back telling you all the bits where the author played around with the facts, that sort of thing.
But, then, doesn't Eamon Duffy (sorry to keep going on at him, I do love his books) have an equally explicit agenda? And he's not writing fiction, either.
sieglinde ·
22/03/2013 17:47
Duffy is RC, but I don't think he's as vindictive in The Stripping of the Altars as he later becomes in Fires of Faith, and even then he's not as vindictive as Mantel. 
And C Haigh has no agenda of this sort.
LRDtheFeministDragon ·
22/03/2013 18:14
No, sorry - I've not read that, only Stripping the Altars and Marking the Hours. I think they're lovely books and I love his enthusiasm about it all. It's just I know how some people view those books.
It is hard to estimate lay devotion ... but that's what makes it fun! I love how what we think about the past is influenced by what we believe now, and what we believe now is influenced by what we think about the past.
I don't share your views on Mantel, but I can see her books get at you!
Chocolateporridge ·
22/03/2013 18:45
Happy to confirm that Purgatory and Hell are not actually Bible teachings, they're teachings that have snuck in through the back door over the ages. There are no scriptures that mention them. Sometimes the word "Hell" is used in some Bible translations but it comes from the translation of the words "Sheol" which is the common grave, or "Gehenna" which in Israelite times was the dumping area outside of the city. The Bible teaches that we "go back to the dust" when we die and that we will be "conscious of nothing" . 
sieglinde ·
23/03/2013 11:47
Pan, I hope you love Mantel. Lots do. Though I had a long cosy chat with a former Booker judge who is ABSOLUTELY NOT RC and she turned out to loathe it even more than I did. Can't out here, but let's say she really questioned the choice of it.
I just think she/Mantel is pandering to the totally, drearily normal use of historical fiction to ask NOT 'what would it be like to live in the sixteenth century?' but 'what would it be like for ME, wonderful modern ME, to live in the sixteenth century?' IIRC, James Wood said this about Mantel. It could be said about many.
But don't mind me, LRD and others. I'm a widely known crank....
On purgatory, I was thinking the other way around... purgatory is the incredibly stupid boring valueless bits of THIS life we somehow can't let go of, like the internet, especially Twitter, and TV we KNOW is stupid, and toxic people, and dull jobs, and the grease behind the cooker... but forever, until we can/do let it all go.
LRDtheFeministDragon ·
23/03/2013 15:51
You're not being a crank!
And besides, isn't that half the fun, being cranky and critical? I like that point about the differences between 'what would be like' and 'what would it be like for me'. But isn't Dante also culpable of this one? It's not 'what would purgatory be like' but 'OMG, I'm, like, sooo down with the purgatoriads! But, you know, a little bit better really ...'.
Interesting what you say about the Booker judge. One of my old supervisors was on the committee recently and I would really have loved to know what his views on each book was, because I remember him having, ahem, decided opinions. It's so easy to forget the comittee won't have been unanimous (or it is for me).
mad - I heard someone claim Sayers translations are in some ways the best version. Are they good? I've only just got into her books but I'm enjoying them.
My copy of Purgatorio has died. I dug it out yesterday and it fell to bits in my hands. Feel free to tell me which new version I would buy, were I to spend my not-existant cash. Parallel text would be ideal because my Italian isn't up to it.
TunipTheVegedude ·
23/03/2013 16:07
I love that point about Wolf Hall too. I never saw it in those terms before but I was getting irritated by how nearly all the novels I've seen about this period are from the point of view of the Protestants laughing at the funny superstitious Catholics with their relics. It felt somehow too easy for us to do it that way all the time.
I have to confess though, one of the things for which I am most grateful to Mantel is that Wolf Hall cured me of my 25 year old crush on Thomas More 
I re-read A Man For All Seasons after that and the way More is basically a 1960s free thinker suddenly seemed pretty absurd.
LRDtheFeministDragon ·
23/03/2013 16:20
More is quite patronizing to his wife in the TV version of Man for All Seasons.
I do still have a tiny More-crush, though.
I was chatting to my mate who does Old Norse stuff today, and she was saying that the ON ideas about what happened when you die sort of map onto Purgatory, too. There's an idea that different kinds of people go to different places, and some are better than others. I wonder how much the pre-Christian beliefs influenced ideas about Purgatory? Because if it was only formalized as doctrine as late as the Council of Florence, there might have been a lot of room for interpretation, mightn't there?
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