¹ Besides Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1990), several scholars have explored the historical development and theological significance of purgatory: George Dameron, ‘Purgatory and Modernity’, in Bridging the Medieval-Modern Divide, Medieval Themes in the World of the Reformation, ed. by James Muldoon (Abingdon-on-Thames, Milton Park; New York: Routledge, 2013), for an analysis on the role of purgatory in the medieval economic development; Isabel Moreira, Heaven’s Purge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), for a revision of Le Goff’s work, and particularly the role of Venerable Bede in the inception of purgatory’s doctrine. Literature regarding different philosophical and theological aspects of purgatory is abundant, but a recent general analysis on the core role of purgatory can be seen in William Charlton, ‘Purgatory’, New Blackfriars, 102 (1099) (2021), 1–13. Some future prospects of research instead can be found in Travis Dumsday, ‘Purgatory’, Philosophy Compass, 9(10) (2014), 732–740.

² Even though Martin Luther’s opinion on purgatory evolved over time, he stated his more mature and vitriolic opinion about it in The Smalcald Articles, p. II, a. II,5 in Martin Luther, Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989): ‘Consequently purgatory and all the pomp, services, and business transactions associated with it are to be regarded as nothing else than illusions of the devil, for purgatory, too, is contrary to the fundamental article that Christ alone, and not the work of man, can help souls.’ Calvin too associated the doctrine of purgatory to the works of Satan in his Institutes of the Christian Religion – Vol. I (Louisville: The Westminster Press, 2006), Book III, Chapter V,6: ‘[S]ince purgatory is constructed out of many blasphemies and is daily propped up with new ones, and since it incites to many grave offenses, it is certainly not to be winked at. One could for a time perhaps in a way conceal the fact that is was devised apart from God’s Word in curious and bold rashness; that men believed in it by some sort of “revelations” forge by Satans craft.’ For a historical summary of protestant perspectives on purgatory, see Jerry Walls, Purgatory – The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 35–51.

³ Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. 17 (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 123.

⁴ John Casey, After Lives – A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 242.

⁵ Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, pp. 204–205: ‘Purgatory was attracted toward two poles: Paradise and Hell. It might have developed into either a near-paradise or a quasi-hell. At a very early date, Purgatory (in various rudimentary forms) veered toward the infernal pole, and it was a long time before it began to differentiate itself from Hell. Not before the thirteenth century – and in some accounts even later – did it become anything other than a shallow region of Hell in which souls were tormented not for eternity but for a specified length of time, an upper Gehenna.’

⁶ Although Aquinas himself presented at least two locational accounts of purgatory, in Summa Theologiae, trans. Fr. Laurence Shapcote (Green Bay: Aquinas Institute, Inc., 2023) Supp., App. 1, a. 2. Moreover, Aquinas states in a. 3: ‘In purgatory there are two punishments: one of loss, namely, inasmuch as souls are held back from the divine vision; the other, of sense, according as they are physically punished by fire. And in both, the least punishment of purgatory exceeds the greatest punishment of this life.’ In a. 6, he excludes that demons punish the repentant souls, but they are not completely out of sight: ‘nevertheless it is possible that they [the angels] lead them to places of suffering, and that even the demons themselves, who rejoice in the sufferings of men, accompany them and attend those to be purified, both so that they might be sated by their sufferings, and so that at the departure from the body, they might seize upon something of their own there’.

⁷ Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy – Vol. II: Purgatory, trans. Mark Musa (New York, London: Penguin Books, 1985).

⁸ See, for instance, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Città del Vaticano; Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), n. 1030: ‘All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.’ The heavenly destination of purgatory is clearly underlined by the Catechism, as well as the state of grace, even if imperfect, of the penitents of purgatory.

⁹ Some examples of explicitly or implicitly issuantist authors are: Clive S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Dublin: William Collins, 2015 reissue); Jerry Walls, Hell – The Logic of Damnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jonathan Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Harvey J. Egan, ‘Hell: The Mystery of Eternal Love and Eternal Obduracy’, Theological Studies, 75(1) (2014), 52–73; Adrian J. Reimers, Hell and the Mercy of God (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019). Though not expressed in full detail, an issuant definition of hell can also be found in Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988) 215–218, and in Introduction to Christianity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), p. 239: ‘The depths we call hell man can only give to himself. Indeed, we must put it more pointedly: hell consists in man’s being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient’.

¹⁰ Clive S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Dublin: William Collins, 2015 reissue), p. 75.

¹¹ Clive S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 119: ‘There is no doctrine which I would more willingly from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power’.

¹² For an in-depth analysis, see Ramon Baker, Issuant Views of Hell in Contemporary Anglo-American Theology (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2014), pp. 71–118.

¹³ What one can mean by the term libertarian, used in the moral sense, is a vast array of meanings which would bring us far from the topic of purgatory. For instance, whether Aquinas’s account of freedom qualifies as libertarian remains a matter of debate; see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 300–306. Nevertheless, Aquinas’ consideration of free will is such that I would consider it compatible with the concept of freedom needed for the validity of this thesis.

¹⁴ Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell, p. 112.

¹⁵ ‘God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him’.

¹⁶ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), p. 174.

¹⁷ Egan, ‘Hell: The Mystery of Love’, p. 66.

¹⁸ Egan notes in ‘Hell: The Mystery of Love’, p. 73: ‘Rejected love is experienced as wrath’.

¹⁹ Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 130.

²⁰ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 216.

²¹ Walls, Hell, p. 136.

²² For an introduction on the issue, see Jennifer Furio, Restorative Justice: Prison as Hell or a Chance for Redemption (New York: Algora Publishing, 2002). For a Catholic point of view on the issue, see Redemption and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Restorative Justice, eds by Trudy D. Conway, David Matzko McCarthy, Vicky Schieber, (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017).

²³ Furio, Restorative Justice, p. 7.

²⁴ Walls, Hell, p. 150.

²⁵ Reimers, Hell, p. 170.

²⁶ In this regard, Reimers, Hell, p. 154: ‘The Last Judgment is not about God’s inflicting pain on those who broke his rules or who failed to join the right church or say the right kinds of prayers. It is about separating the merciful from those who had chosen against love. God is love, and to choose against love is to choose against God. […] Having rejected the rule of mercy, they find none for themselves’.

²⁷ Kvanvig, The Problem of Hell, p. 155.

²⁸ For a lengthy analysis of the different supplements, see Baker, Issuant Views, pp. 123–172.

²⁹ Ratzinger’s Eschatology was published in 1977 in German. The English translation was published in 1988.

³⁰ ‘According to the grace of God given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building upon it. But each one must be careful how he builds upon it, for no one can lay a foundation other than the one that is there, namely, Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, the work of each will come to light, for the Day will disclose it. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire (itself) will test the quality of each one’s work. If the work stands that someone built upon the foundation, that person will receive a wage’.

³¹ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 228.

³² Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 229.

³³ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 230.

³⁴ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 230.

³⁵ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 231.

³⁶ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Green Bay: Aquinas Institute, 2017) Ia, Q. 1, a. 8, ad. 2.

³⁷ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 231.

³⁸ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 232.

³⁹ Ratzinger, Eschatology, pp. 232–233.

⁴⁰ Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 233.

⁴¹ Ratzinger’s commitment to a strong idea of free will is evident in his comments about hell, as I have pointed out before, and as it is clear in Eschatology, p. 216: ‘Christ, descends into Hell and suffers it in all its emptiness, but he does not, for all that, treat man as an immature being deprived in the final analysis of any responsability for his own destiny. Heaven reposes upon freedom, and so leaves to the damned the right to will their own damnation’.

⁴² Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 230: ‘Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where man is forced to undergo punishment in a more or less arbitrary fashion’.

⁴³ Walls, Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 62. Walls reiterates this in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation, 2011, p. 57: ‘If God takes our freedom seriously in his work of transforming us in this life, it is reasonable to think he will continue to do so in the next. In short, purgatory is a perfectly rational theological inference for those who take seriously the role of human freedom in salvation’.

⁴⁴ Justin Barnard, ‘Purgatory and the dilemma of sanctification’, Faith and Philosophy 24(3) (2007), pp. 311–330.

⁴⁵ Walls, Purgatory, p. 121.

⁴⁶ Walls, Purgatory, p. 121.

⁴⁷ Walls argues and defends this concept primarily in Walls, Hell, pp. 88–103. To summarize his thought, though, he states in p. 89: ‘I would say grace is distributed equally if grace of optimal measure is given to all persons and all are given full opportunity to make a decisive response to it, either positively or negatively. What is crucial here is the idea of a decisive response, but it is important to recognize that this is closely connected to the idea of an optimal measure of grace’.

⁴⁸ Walls, Purgatory, p. 181.

⁴⁹ Walls, Purgatory, p. 151.

⁵⁰ Walls, Purgatory, p. 151.

⁵¹ Walls, Purgatory, p. 127.

⁵² Walls, Purgatory, pp. 147–150.

⁵³ Walls, Purgatory, p. 147.

⁵⁴ Walls, Purgatory, p. 148. Just a few lines after, he states that: ‘The blessed are settled in their choice and their final condition for reasons that have no parallel in the lost. The choice of God and the good is a settled choice that is irreversible because there is no intelligible reason to want to reverse it’.

⁵⁵ Walls, Purgatory, p. 150.

⁵⁶ Robert Ombres O.P., ‘The Doctrine of Purgatory According to St Thomas Aquinas’, The Downside Review 99 (1981), 279–287.

⁵⁷ Thomas Aquinas points this out in the Summa Theologiae, Supp., App. I, a. 2., o. 1: ‘The fire of Purgatory is eternal as to its substance, but temporal as to the effect of purification’. The eternal element is to be understood as a concretization of God’s endless disposition, and the temporary one by our experience of it.

⁵⁸ See Walls, Purgatory, pp. 92–122.

⁵⁹ Christopher M. Brown, Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven – Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021), p. 115. Aquinas explores this concept in Summa Theologiae, Ia, Q. 10, a. 5.

⁶⁰ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, Q. 10, a. 4, o. 3: ‘As eternity is the proper measure of permanent being, so time is the proper measure of movement and hence, according as any being recedes from permanence of being, and is subject to change, it recedes from eternity, and is subject to time. Therefore the being of things corruptible, because it is changeable, is not measured by eternity, but by time; for time measures not only things actually changed, but also things changeable’.

⁶¹ Brown, Eternal Life, pp. 115–116.

⁶² Ombres notes in this regard in ‘The Doctrine of Purgatory’, p. 283: ‘At death each destiny is sealed, thus preserving the value of life in the body. In purgatory the basic orientation towards God, and the fundamental option for him, persist and are made to permeate the whole subject’.

⁶³ For Aquinas God’s existence transcends not only time but aeveternity too, as Brown points out in Eternal Life, p. 118. Thus, the beatific vision, understood as the participation in the eternity of God, transcends those too; Brown explains this aspect in Eternal Life, p. 169: ‘God is eternal by nature, and because he is identical with his activity, only God is measured by eternity simpliciter. But human persons nonetheless participate in God’s eternal activity insofar as they are gifted the beatific vision, an activity that transcends all change, both actual and potential’.

⁶⁴ Tangently, another advantage that AFD has is that aeveternity, since it is traditionally thought as compatible with time, gives meaning to the bimillennial traditional practice of praying for the dead.

⁶⁵ Ombres summarizes it eminently in ‘The Doctrine of Purgatory’, p. 281: ‘To be purged is to draw closer to God’.

⁶⁶ A theologically focused parallel can be found in the document Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised, in International Theological Commission, Text and Documents – 1986-2007, Vol. 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), pp. 353–400. This document reconsiders traditional eschatological categories in light of divine mercy and the limits of human freedom. While addressing the history of this issue and a different set of cases, it shares a logic of hope and acknowledges the possibility of post-mortem transformation, even though it does not explicitly mention purgatory as an option.

⁶⁷ Brown, Eternal Life, p. 174: ‘St. Thomas thinks that God created all of the angels in a state of grace, without the beatific vision. Some angels chose to remain in grace in that first moment of their existence and were immediately granted the beatific vision; those who chose not to remain in grace in that first moment were damned in the next’. Aquinas argues his views about this topic in Summa Theologiae, Ia, Q. 62, aa. 1–5, and Q. 63, a. 6.