Speaker 1: Probably everything that you imagine purgatory is is wrong according
to the twelfth century, which is what I'm going to
be talking about now. So if I describe things to
you from the popular medieval experience of purgatory in the
twelfth century and.
Speaker 2: You're like, no, no, that's not right at all, I.
Speaker 1: Know I'm not coming at anybody. What I'm really interested
in is the world of the Middle Ages, And in fact,
I'm going to be sort of defending why this was
like a reasonable thing for them to believe, even though
it's not something that I personally believe.
Speaker 2: It's not something that my church teaches.
Speaker 3: These realities are a reality that we deal with now.
I don't believe in the idea that when we talk
about the afterlife that we're only talking about what happens
to you after you die. The reality of sin, okay,
is that it makes you suffer. When that happens, you
have two choices in dealing with the suffering that sin
causes in your life, and one is torment and the
other is purgation. Those are the two possibilities you have.
That is actually the reason you could say why sin
causes suffering. The suffering is an opportunity for repentance every time.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pesel.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the Symbolic World. So hello everyone.
Speaker 3: We are back with Richard Rowland for another Universal History
and Richard has a great surprise, one that I did
not expect, so I will let him introduce the subject today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So we're going to try something a little
tricky today, which is going to be taking you all
the way from the edge of the world, which is
of course Ireland, which is kind of where we are
in Universal History right now now, all the way to
the Mountain of Purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy, and the
unlikely connection between those two things. So what I'm going
to try to do is to outline some things that
are kind of and I know by the way that
in our last episode I said here's what we're going
to do the next two videos, and then we're not
doing either of those things today, but we will get
to them. But what I wanted to do today was
actually to outline some things that are kind of unique
and interesting about Irish Christianity, one of which is the
sort of the genesis of the popular medieval idea of purgatory.
Speaker 4: Which I did not know.
Speaker 3: This is like the massive surprise, and it comes right
at the right time because, as all of you might
know or might not know, on August twenty seventh, we
are going to start to ascend the mountain of Purgatory.
Richard and I continue on the second Dante class, so
you can please go and sign up. You know, the
first class was just an absolute blast and everybody really
enjoyed it, so we're hoping that everybody will continue on
the track with us.
Speaker 1: And yes, so we're as as Jonathan said, were starting
August to twenty seventh. You can get the course now
at Symbolic World Courses. There are payment plans and everything
there to make it convenient for you. It's going to
be incredible. Purgatorio is actually my favorite book of the
whole comedy to teach. It's the one that most people
when you're in school you start, you read Inferno when
that's all you read. If you read Dante at all
in like high school or college, you probably only read Inferno.
Purgatory is my favorite one to teach. It's the one
that is kind of, you could say, in a certain sense,
the most relevant to where many of us are in
our Christian life. That is to say, Purgatorio is about
the purification, right, It's about the process of becoming saints
and so whereas you know in Fronto is like about
sort of rejecting sid and then Paradise is about what
is what even is holiness?
Speaker 2: And Paradise is the hardest one to teach. We are
going to be doing it later this year.
Speaker 1: Paradise is the hardest one to sease though, because it's
very hard to explain to somebody exactly what it means
to be holy. But I think all of us can
understand what it's like to try to become holy. So anyway,
join us for Purgatorio. It's going to be really awesome,
and you're going to get a little bit of a
foretaste of that today, but you're going to get it
the Ireland. Yeah, all right, So in no particular order,
I've been I've been really immersing myself the last few
weeks in a ton of reading about Irish Christianity and
specifically Irish sixth century monasticism. So this is monasticism in
Ireland in the five hundreds. Why specifically that a couple
of a couple of reasons. So first of all the
thing that you could say about Irish Christianity right off
the bat and the the it's fair to call the
Church of of like the Northern like the Church of
the British Isles, and even sort of the Northern France
during the sixth and seventh centuries. It would be not
an exaggeration to call it an Irish church, even in
like northern France.
Speaker 2: Or in Gaul as it was called at the time.
Speaker 1: A lot of the main churches, a lot of the
main Christian settlements there are being established by Irish missionaries.
Christianity and Great Christianity in Britain. It's not really England
at quite at this time, quite yet, but Christianity in
Britain is also mainly founded and kind of directed by
these Irish spiritual centers.
Speaker 2: It's the same same thing and what is now called Wales, and.
Speaker 3: People have to remember that the relationship between the Gauls
and the Irish, there is a filiation like that that
would have been recognized by It's not the same the
Franks the French as we understand them today, they're not
the same peoples as.
Speaker 4: The as the Gauls and the Gallic people. All these
people that are related.
Speaker 1: To the Gauls are Celts, as are the Welsh in
the Irish right, and so yeah, you're absolutely right. There
is a kind of a similar culture there, and we'll
talk a little bit about some of the things that
were preserved in Ireland. This is actually the origin of
a very compelling thesis that was really popular, I want
to say, in like maybe the nineteen seventies. Maybe that's
the wrong decade, but there was this book that came
out called How the Irish Shape Civilization?
Speaker 2: And the thesis of.
Speaker 1: The book is not terrible, it's also very reductive, Like
almost any convincing thesis is extremely reductive, Like his history
itself is very complicated. But in the Irish How the
Irish Shaved Civilization, they basically kind of pose it that
while the Dark Ages was going on in Western Europe,
if you want to say that there is a period,
obviously everybody who knows me knows I hate the term
the Dark Ages and almost never use it. But you
could say there is a period when like the Huns
are invading and stuff is getting burned and stuff is
getting destroyed and stuf.
Speaker 2: But Ireland was.
Speaker 1: Kind of far enough removed from the action that they
were able to preserve learning and literacy, the Christian faith
and all these other really important things. Okay, so yeah,
hence why Charlemagne, yeah, monks to basically help him re
Christianize the Europe. Yeah, and again because history is a
little always a little more complicated than that. Charlemagne brings
people in not just from Ireland, but he brings people
in from the British Isles generally. So for instance, Charlemagne's
court main court theologian and basically his minister of education
was a was a an Anglo Saxon deacon named al Koen,
who is my bitter enemy. Of course he doesn't know
this because he's been dead for a long time. But
Alcoen didn't like icons. Actually there's a whole thing about this.
But he also didn't like Beowulf, so you know, it's
just like my favor. No, no, well we don't know
if he liked Beowolf specifically, but he really hates stories
like BeO Wolf, Like he hated that these monks were
like writing down and telling like old Germanic heroes stories.
And he also really rejected the idea of representational likenography.
So it was okay, with like you could depict the
arc in church like the but you couldn't like depict Christ, right,
and so anyway, this is neither here, here nor there,
but but yes, charl Lamagne basically went to the British
Isles looking for looking for help in trying to sort
of re establish his educational project on the continent. So
all of this is say, Christianity in Ireland and in
Northern Goal and in Britain in the sixth and the
seventh centuries was first and foremost monastic. So the main
unit in Irish culture, in in in the Celtic culture
in general is like the tuat, which which means basically
like the klan or the tribe. So this is the
sort of main unit. And then you have you have
somebody called Ri who is the head of the tuat.
He's the he's the chieftain, he's the warlord, he's the king.
And this is basically how Irish civilization kind of arranged itself.
And then you had these we'll talk about this in
a couple of videos when we look at the uh
the the colloquy of the Elders of Ireland or as
our friend Martin, doctor Martinshall calls it old men talking, uh,
and which you have kind of these these renmants of
war bands.
Speaker 2: So you have like the tuat and which are.
Speaker 1: Like the this is the the the ban, this is
the the tribe or the clan with a defined social
social structure and a leader. But then you also had
these roving bands of basically single young men running across
the countryside and causing trouble. And and the main job
of basically all civilization case people out there don't know
what is civilization for, the main job civilization is how
to is to figure out how to properly harness your
single young males. That's the main problem that every civilization
has ever had to solve. I'm really serious about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
but that's the main problem every civilization has has had
to solve. So the way that they would try to
solve these like roving war bands, which are basically, you know,
in some other age bandits, right, but they were like
sort of like bands of heroes you could say in
their own minds, or I mean is somebody a bandit
or a hero? This is really a matter of perspective
in the ancient world. And so they would, you know,
they you know, very often what you do is you
try to hire these people. You give them some land,
and they settle down, and you give them wives, and
they marry and they become integrated into your toot. They
become integrated into your tribe or into your plans. So anyway,
all this to say, when Christianity comes to the British
Isles under a variety of unnamed missionaries, and ultimately through
via the salmon of having Saint Patrick, who was not
himself Irish, he was British, but he came to Ireland
as a missionary after having escaped Ireland as a slave,
came back to Ireland as a missionary and sort of
converts the island. And there's all kinds of stories about this.
We'll probably read some of them. I mean, part of
the struggle, as I said last time, and talking about
Ireland is the sheer breadth of the content. I have
this wonderful collection just of Irish saints' lives which are
so mind boggling. I mean, there's some of these saints lives,
Jonathan that we could do seven or eight videos just
on the crazy sometimes really messed up symbolism in one
of these, Like there's some of these that are like
I don't know if I can even talk about this
on the internet, Like I don't know if I just
don't know if I could even like talk about this
in public. But they're really beautiful but also very strange
and wonderful and so what.
Speaker 2: And we'll come back to that in a moment.
Speaker 1: But the thing I'm trying to say is that basically
what happened was as Christianity was established in Ireland, that
the monastery took the place of the tuat and the
abbot took the place of the rie, and so what
you had was kind of in Irish Christianity is kind
of this unique situation that does show up other places
in Christianity as well, but not to the same degree
or in the same intensity, where almost every bishop is
the abbot of a monastery, and bishops are based not
out of cathedrals and cities, but they're based out of
monastic communities, and then the rest of Irish life kind
of orients itself around the monastic community, as opposed to,
you know, the situation that you have in most of
the Christian world, where you have a city and a
bishop of the city, and then there are monastic communities
that support the Christians in the city, but the bishop
has it like own cathedral, right, So it's a it's
a different kind of a situation. It's actually, honestly, it's
one of the things like being Orthodox in America day.
It's not totally dissimilar from this in the sense that
in said, you know, you still got bishops and cathedrals
and things like this, but being Orthodox is like, it's
so weird, Like it's so you're so sort of like
kind of separate from the the rest of the world
around you in a certain way that that everybody's kind
of oriented around that community. And it's not unusual at
all for us to have like our bishops living in monasteries,
even here in the United States. But but at the time, yeah,
there you go. At the time, at the time, this
was pretty kind of exceptional. So one of the other
things to say about And this is something I would
love your insight on because it's something I've noticed before,
and as I've been kind of reading through the literature
on the subject and like reading some very long dissertations
and very long books about this, like really you know,
really deep kind of academic studies, it seems to be
something everybody notices and nobody has an explanation for. And
that is that the two kind of defining features. Well,
you could say that, first of all, the the way
that the Irish thought about history. This is before the
Conversion and after the conversion. That the way that the
Irish thought about history, And this is what makes it
so interesting for universal history purposes, is of history as
embodied in persons. So the Irish are basically never interested
in what we would consider like you know, forensic sort
of history today. For them, the word history and they
have a particular word for this, and Gaelic means something
like I'm trying to remember the formulation here. It's it's
the oral traditions passed down by the elders, which are
helped and enhanced but not overwritten by the written laws.
And then it's like the sort of like the customs
of your people, like the stories of your the stories
of the barts, the stories of the Barts. So there's
those three things, and it's the sense, by the way,
this is something you find in very ancient cold is
the idea that something that's oral has precedence over something written,
where writing is actually less trustworthy than what your grandfather
told you.
Speaker 3: This is completely it's already there in the Yeah, it's
already there in the in the Fedra, in Plato's Fedra, there's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But but basically, of course, you know, Plato wrote all
of that down, but you know.
Speaker 3: There's an irony in all of the situations, right where
God reveals the lot of Moses, then then he writes
it down, and so it's it's it's like a kind
of lower level, you know. And so I think I
think that the implicit notion that in fact, the written
word is weaker than the oral tradition is something that
is there, is there everywhere. It's there even I think
in the in the Gospel to some extent.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure.
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's the whole thing that you have
kind of going off Christ and like, how's the Sabbath
supposed to be kept in these different things? Yeah, it's like, dude,
I'm the one that revealed this to Moses to begin with, right, right, Yeah,
this is something that you find in every single ancient culture,
is that oral tradition is more reliable than what is written.
Speaker 3: But also, I mean I think that the way that
written culture develops also is a testimony to that. So, right,
so if you look at early manuscripts or early inscriptions, right,
they're written without punctuation, they're written without separation between the words,
and so the only way to read it is to
say it out loud, because when you look at it
is do you just see a stream of letters? And
even the same with the Hebrew. This idea that in
fact the vowels in ancient Hebrew are not even there,
not there, and therefore the only way for you to
know the meaning of the text is to vocalize it.
But not only to vocalize it, but to vocalize it
in the way that you heard it before. That's right,
because there are multiple possible readings of the of the text,
especially Hebrew. But you've heard it in synagogue, you've heard
it read at the temple or whatever, and so you
know what it is when you vocalize it yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's that's a beautiful way to put that.
So those are the sort of the three sources of
knowledge or tradition in Ireland. Are the laws passed down
orally supplemented by what's written down, and then the stories
of the bards and the stories of the bards, and
that it's the combination of those three things is what
medieval Irish people mean by the word history, right, and
so history in this sense, actually it's much closer to
how we've been trying to help people understand universal history,
that it's the sort of the story of who you
are and how you got to be who you are.
But the role of laws.
Speaker 2: Then isn't just to help you learn right from wrong.
Speaker 1: Even the Tora is this way, by the way, it's
not just to tell you, like, here's what's right, here's
what's wrong.
Speaker 2: It's not like God. It's not like God is.
Speaker 1: Deeply offended on an onto loge level when you eat shrimp, right.
Speaker 3: So I'm sure that's as Christians we know that that's not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, yeah, for sure, as Christians we know this
is not the case. But but the the point of
much of the Torah, right is to sort of make
a the make a distinction, is how Exodus says it,
to make a distinction between you and the Egyptians, to
make a distinction between you and the nations you're going
to live among. So the purpose of a law of
of laws or of history, you know, in this sense
is to it's not just the stories that tell you
how you got to be the people you are today,
but it's the stuff that describes why, like what does
it look like to be you and not somebody else.
Speaker 3: Why you're Irish and not why you're part of this
plan and you're not justly the distinguishing characteristics that get remembered.
Speaker 1: And so the expression of this in Irish Christianity then
is that each of these monastery communities starts to develop
its own you could call them canons, which just means
a rule. You could call them a rule of life.
Very often they're called penitentials. Penitentials as in, here's like
a list of sins that somebody might come and confess,
and here's how here's the kind of penis that should
be assigned to them based on that. But basically these
different monastic centers kind of just come up with their
own and again it's not unique to Ireland, but it
seems like it happened in Ireland in a more extreme way,
that each of these monastic centers basically starts to develop
its own, its own law, its own history. In terms
of helping you understand this is what it looks like
to be a part of this community, as the monastic
community at the heart of the Christian community in a
particular like Irish place replaces the idea of being a
part of a clan or a tribe. Right, So this
is kind of one prong of this. But remember that
the other prong of history is the stories the bards,
and so one of the other things that's going on
in Irish culture seems to be a how do I
say this, a very a very free use of the imagination.
And that's not even the right, Like everything I just
said is wrong because it's so hard to talk about
this for the for the for the medieval Irish.
Speaker 4: Like you could say that like a lyrical approach to memory,
like it says like in the sense that there's a kind.
Speaker 3: Of yeah, there's a sense that it's not so much
about the it's not so much about the precision rather
than the story itself.
Speaker 2: Let's say so in.
Speaker 1: This sense, to me, Irish Christianity is really close to
Syrian mm hmm, in that way where like let's say,
like you're reading the Syrian Fathers and you come across
like certain formulations and you might be like, oh, well, okay,
I wouldn't say this like in a homily, or I
wouldn't say this like you know, we've had an ecumenical
council since then that has kind of put boundaries around
our language, so I wouldn't express this in exactly this way.
Speaker 2: Saint Ephraim, right, but sting Ephraim is not an Aryan.
You know he's writing hymns against those guys. He's not
an Aryan at all.
Speaker 1: But he's expressing things in this very creat a very
imaginative kind of a way, like his son was Kentuckia
for the Nativity and things like this is what I'm
thinking about right now.
Speaker 2: But the the.
Speaker 1: But Syrian Christianity had this beautiful and in it's it's
very much a Semitic expression just to talk about someday, guys,
we're gonna get to Syria, just but just to talk
about Syrian Christianity for a moment. People are like sant
It from the Syrian and Jacob of Saruj, who I
really love. I literally have a book of him, his
hymns on the Mother of God that I talked about
at the summit back in February, but that's just in
my jacket pocket, like I carry it everywhere because it's
so beautiful. And in these in these but and these
Syrian fathers, what you find is the same sort of
things that people are dealing with in the Greek world
at the time. And in the Greek world they're dealing
with them and these kind of very specific, precise formulations,
and then in the Syrian world they're just like writing
crazy poetry and they're really saying the same stuff. But
Irish Christianity really doesn't have dogmatic formulations. It's mostly just
crazy poetry. And what they do is they take the inheritance,
the Semitic inheritance of like second double Judaism. We've talked
about this before, and they know they do a bunch
of things, but they're really big into the Psalter. This
is what I was trying to get at, that the
Irish Christianity has much more in common with the Psalter
and with the sort of Psalmic tradition that's come out
of that, where everything in the Psalter is deeply personalized,
everything in the Psalter is deeply poetic. You're not reading
the Psalms, or at least you shouldn't be reading the
Psalms trying to derive dogmatic formulas, but what you're actually
doing is entering into a conversation really between the father
and the son, right, and that's very much what Irish
Christianity is kind of like. So it's much more like
you said, lyrical, it's.
Speaker 2: Much more poetic.
Speaker 1: There's no distinction in Irish Christianity between the natural and supernatural.
It doesn't exist at all. Now you could really say,
I think to an extent, to a very large extent,
that that's true about most of the ancient world. But
basically Ireland is one of these places, maybe because as
an island. Islands tend to have like the most extreme
versions of everything, like the most extreme language changes, the
most extreme culture, you know, everything. Nowadays, if we want
to actually say that something is being if something is
like kind of extreme, or we want to say something
is is not taking into account the culture around it,
we say it's insular, right, which means it's on an island.
So you have all these things in ancient cultures in general,
but Ireland they seem to be really emphasized, and it's
I think it's something like the sense of the other
world always being very close to you in Irish paganism
just kind of carries forward into Christianity, and so in
the lives of Irish saints there's a great deal of
what today we would probably call magical realism. And in
the future I'll give examples of this where miraculous things happen,
but we don't make a big deal about the miraculous
things that are happening, because we expect miraculous things to happen,
and in fact, it's not even accurate to call them
miraculous the things that are.
Speaker 2: You know, if the.
Speaker 1: Nearby warlord butcher's your twenty cattle and you're really sad
about this and everything, and you go to the hermit
who lives nearby, of course that hermit is going to
you know, raise those cattle up out of the cauldrons
and they're going to run around alive. By the way,
this sort of thing happens a lot in Irish hagiography. Yeah,
with catalyts, animal resurrecting, resurrecting a cooked animal in specific
like this is a this is a specific kind of
miracle that shows up a lot of Irish and Celtic hagiography.
Speaker 4: To admit that that's a new miracle for me, And.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's well there's some crazy ones in there. There's
some in there. Again, I'm like, I'm not sure we
can talk about this on you, but there's some.
Speaker 3: There's some sat Nicholas who resurrects, like the pickled boys,
like children, the cooked.
Speaker 1: Animals, Yeah, cooked cooked animals. And it's always sometimes it's
like the saint's own cattle, Like somebody gives the saint
cattle to live off of while he's like, you know.
Speaker 2: For milk and stuff because he's a hermit.
Speaker 1: And then some warlord comes by and cooks them all
and then he raises them sort of out of the pot,
and then the warlord converts. This sort of thing happens.
Speaker 2: It sounds a.
Speaker 3: Little bit like that well idea of Thor's goats, right,
that Thor has his own goats that he can eat,
and then it just come back and it just like
keeps eating them over and over.
Speaker 2: I feel like at some point you get tired of goat.
Speaker 1: But anyway, all right, yeah, I mean there there are
there accounts like this are very common another very very
kind of common miracle, and you know, at least that
looms large in terms of the number of times that
shows up in various hagiographies is the you know, the
idea of someone it's always a young woman, like a virgin,
being beheaded and then sort of like putting her head
back on her shoulders and resurrecting her. Yeah, that's that's
pretty common. But there's there's a lot of there's a
lot of crazy miracles, and and one of the things
that I like about Irish miracles is that they do
very often sort of involve food, you know, food and drink,
which seems really biblical in a certain sense.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of miracles.
Speaker 1: In the Bible that actually have to do with food,
which is not an accident.
Speaker 2: But I think that.
Speaker 1: Because we live in modern times and we're so separated
from the process of getting food, making food, you know,
in the world, if you decided I would like a
steak tonight. So for people don't know, we're recording this
on the feast of the Door Mission, So for Orthodox
Christians this means that we've just wrapped up like a
two week long feast and I'm thinking, what are my
plans for tonight. I want to rib buy tonight, That's
what I want. I want to rib buy steak. Now
I can just go down the store and buy ribb
By steak. But in the ancient world, if you decided
you want a rib by steak, then you have to
kill an animal that you've been raising for this purpose.
And once you kill that animal, you can't ever get
anything out of that animal again. Right, So there's like
a real lost economic opportunity that comes with the decision
to kill something and eat it. And so it is
very interesting to me that that so many biblical miracles
in both Old and New Testament right have to do
with food and the wondrous multiplication of food. In Ireland,
they just took that personally and they were like, yeah,
obviously this would be like your main kind of miracle
is we have milk for a year, or we have
you know, the cows come back to life after we've
eaten them, and like all these other things, and so anyway,
it's it's it's very interesting. We will probably do at
least one dedicated video just just on the the life
of Saint Brenda the Navigator, who's whose various versions of
his tales are deeply wonderful, and.
Speaker 2: I mean, you think about.
Speaker 1: H just just just an episode like celebrating Pasca on
the back of of of Leviathan.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So Leviathan, which you could say is a whale or whatever,
but it's for them, it's not a whale. It's a
it's Leviathan, right, It's a sea monster and it's amazing.
Speaker 3: But because it has cognates like every culture like you have,
there's version of that in sort of Alexander or like
like Islamic stories about Simbad and everybody, like the idea
that that that you're on the back of something and
that it thends.
Speaker 2: To be a monster.
Speaker 1: But the fact that you can like celebrate pasca there
like on the back of Leviathan, like that's that's pretty cool.
That's an incredible moment. So there's all kinds of crazy
things that I think are really kind of beautiful.
Speaker 2: And unique and kind of weird and wonderful.
Speaker 1: And this is the stuff that when you talk about
Celtic Christianity, people are really into all this stuff because
what they have is this impression that Celtic Christianity is
going to be like kind of you see and kind
of kind of like yeah, hippie Christianity and everything. And
at this point, this is the turn in the video
where we have to say nothing could be further from
the truth.
Speaker 2: Irish Christianity, which.
Speaker 1: Has all these beautiful sort you could say, imaginative expressions
that really go back to this experience of history as personal.
It's always for them, history is always embodied in a person.
So there's not a history of the period, there's just
the life of Saint Brendan.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It is also one of the most rigorous, strict ascetic
whatever you know, adjective you will to apply here forms
of Christianity that existed in the early days of our faith.
And this seems to actually also be the case for
Syrian Christianity, by the way, very strict ascetic, even for
late people, very very A lot of Syrians live very
in fact, so strict and so ascetic that they actually
add some councils how to say no, no, you guys need
to actually get married, because we're gonna run out of
people soon if you don't knock this, knock this right off, right,
Because people were people were like upon their baptisms, taking
vows of virginity, dressing in a white robe because they're reading,
you know, Revelation and they're like, oh, Jesus is coming
back soon, and so we're gonna we're gonna be here
in our white robes and we're gonna be waiting, and
eventually the church said to say, no, you guys have
to get married because we're we got to have more
Christians like like you know, and so, uh, this is
this is kind of an interesting feature to me that
you could say the most imaginative forms of Christianity. And
I know there's somebody out there who's really upset with
the way I'm using the word imagination right now, but
I don't know how I was to say, you can
say the most poetic whatever also tend to be the
most rigorous. And there's certainly this idea as well that
extreme places produce extreme kinds of Christianity. This is actually
one of Chesterton's theses in I think it's in one
of his father Brown mysteries, where he talks about like,
you know, the Scottish, the dizzying heights of the Scottish
Highlands producing the worst kind of Calvinism and things like this.
Chesterton doesn't like Calvinism, but anyway, so all that to say,
there is something to be said for the most extreme
or most asthetic forms of Christianity tend to come out
of where the Egyptian desert, right, the you know, like Siberia,
the the far reaches of you know, the European continent
like Ireland and so on and so forth. Like not,
it's not to say that. And by the way, France
has been in the news a lot lately, you guys
can't say I didn't warn you. But it's not to
say it's not to say that France or Gaul doesn't
have its own share of wonderful, amazing saints like Saint
Genevieve of Paris, who was who was such a great saint,
by the way.
Speaker 4: That we don't have a lot of extreme Christianity in
southern France.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that's that's what I'm trying to say. That's
what I'm trying to say, like, like you know, with
with notable exceptions like Saint Genevieve of Paris, who was
such a famous saint in her day, by the way
that Saint Simeon and the stylight like.
Speaker 2: Preached about her. Oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if you go to Saint Genevieve's chapel
there in Paris. Now, of course most of her relics
were destroyed by the French Revolution, but they have. There's
actually an icon of Saint Simeon at her at her
grave there in Paris, Sat Simeon the stylight. So that's
a good one if you're thinking about I need to
work in a good friend Saint into God's Dog.
Speaker 2: By the way, she was a contemporary of Saint Simians.
Speaker 1: So anyway, but yeah, that that's what I'm really trying
to say is like there's not a lot of famous
asthetics in you know, like southern France.
Speaker 2: And in fact, when you do have like.
Speaker 1: A famous asthetics somewhere in for instance, Italy, they make
a big deal about it.
Speaker 2: That's the whole reason.
Speaker 1: Sat Gregory the gaologist, you know, Saint Gregory, the Great
public Rome. It's the whole reason he wrote the Dialogues
is because you're like, no, no, Italians have had famous saints
as well. It's the whole reason anybody remembers Saint Benedict,
Saint Gregor.
Speaker 2: Who was like, no, no, no, we actually.
Speaker 1: Have a really great Italian assetic. Look, we can do
it too, because because you know, Italy is just like
a pleasant place, like it's pleasant places tend to just
sort of produce pleasant people. I don't know how it's
to say it, but but these extreme places, these extreme
places do tend to produce kind of more extreme variants
of Christianity. And I don't know if you have an
answer for like what is connection why the connection between
like the more imaginative poetic there a certain sense, you
could even say, literal forms of Christianity and then the
very like strict aesthetic rigor. I don't know if you
have anything for that, but it's something that's bothered me
and it seems to bother everybody else who studies this.
Speaker 3: Well, there's definitely probably a relationship between the strictness of
the Christianity and the miraculous that I think is something
that's not that surprising, you know, because because deprivation caught
brings about miracles.
Speaker 4: You know, this is one of the.
Speaker 3: Things that we've difficult for a secular person to understand.
But anybody who's experienced it will know that in the
moments when you have nothing, there is a far better
possibility that you will experience a miracle because you basically
are completely dependent on the grace of God. Like you
you've you know that the secondary causes that you usually
trust are not available to you. You know, and so
there might be some of that that that's happening. And
then but as for the so in some ways you
would say that we maybe we see it imaginative, but
maybe that's not the way that they see it. You know,
it's more like for them, the rigor is equal to
the miraculous, because.
Speaker 2: You know, because how else would have happened exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, you could say also like maybe just like
extreme people are going to have extreme experiences something like this,
It's like, yeah, might.
Speaker 3: There might also be something about also the saints, if
they live a very esthetic and rigorous life, that they
also had more revelations and more kind of mystical experiences
that would be difficult to translate, and maybe it would
also translate themselves into stories that seem pretty wild to
us at the outset. Just like when you read the
Book of Revelation, you know, the way that it's described
is really it's you know, it's it's very exploded to
the to the to the mind of a of just
someone reading it at the first level. And so that
might also be be something that that was happening to
the saying.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine not growing up with the Bible and
then you read something like the Epistle of James or
something like, oh, this seems pretty reasonable, and then you
flip the page and it's revelation. You're like, what is happening, right,
Like coming into that like totally unarmed, totally unequipped. Oh
my god, yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be crazy.
Speaker 4: So there might be some of that in the stories,
like the fact that why the stories are so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that even like.
Speaker 3: The way that they're remembered, you know, I mean we
have the same issue. I mean not issue, but like
we have we have saint stories like our most Like
if you take the story of Saint Mayor of Egypt
for example, right, it's like that story the way that
it's remembered, Right, it's remembered by the asthetics for quite
a while before it's it's it's ever written down. So
there's something about the manner in which the aesthetic remember
it and how she becomes in Sant Sosi mouths become
the shining kind of bright lights in the story itself.
And so the fact that that, like I said, Ireland
is so isolated in the fact that they have these
kind of oral traditions, there's probably a refining process which
also makes these stories more.
Speaker 1: And even the fact that we read Saint Mary of
Egypt's life liturgically like in a service during Lent, you know, twice,
you know, once or twice a year, depending on your
parish practice, but that the way that most of us
encounter that story is orally.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So this kind of leads us to part two of
this video, which is to talk about one of the
more extreme things which came out of Ireland, and this
is the popular medieval belief in purgatory. Now I've chosen
my words carefully theology nerds I have. I didn't say
the dogma of purgatory or the doctrine of purgatory. So
the popular medieval belie about purgatory. So we'll talk about
this some more when we get into our purgatorial class
on Dante's Purgatory for those of you signed up for it.
Literally as soon as I announced that, I had people
coming at me on the Internet like, oh, your Orthodox,
you shouldn't even be talking about purgatory, blah blah blah.
So I want to sort of say a couple of
little preparatory notes here. The first is that for those
of us who come from strongly Protestant backgrounds, as you
and I do. There's probably no teaching of the Roman
Catholic Church except for maybe the veneration of the Mother
of God, which is more you could say triggering in
a sense, in the doctrine of purgatory. Right, we have
this mythological moment, you know, the disputation between Johann Tetzel
and Martin Luther, and it's one of the this is
you know, according to our mythology, this is one of
the major flash points of the Reformation. And there are
also certain medieval expressions of this doctrine which were rejected
by the Orthodox Church, notably by Saint Mark of Ephesus,
who for the Orthodox Church is considered to be like
one of the pillars of the faith. So what I
want to say first of all is that if you're
somebody who is like a really strong reaction to the
word purgatory, especially as a modern person, especially if you're
either a modern Roman Catholic or a modern procesct probably
everything that you imagine purgatory is is wrong according to
the twelfth century, which is what I'm going to be
talking about now. So if I describe things to you
from the popular medieval experience of purgatory in the twelfth century,
and you're like, no, no, that's not right at all. That's
not what the that's not what the Baltimore Catechism.
Speaker 2: Says, or something like that.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I'm not coming at anybody, okay,
but this is the this is what I'm really interested in,
is the world of the Middle Ages and the idea
of and in fact, I'm going to be sort of
defending why this was like a reasonable thing for them
to believe, even though it's not something that I personally believe,
it's not something that my church teaches. But what I
want to do is proceed from the assumption that our
ancestors are not completely fools, that there are reasonable you know,
that there are reasons right that it was reasonable for
them to believe this in light of kind of what
they'd received and what they experienced. So one of the
things that kind of comes out of this period of
the Irish penitentials, which which assign and these start sort
of being written in the sixth century, and they basically
assigned very strict discipline, very strict penances for different kinds
of sins. And I could go into the specifics of this.
It wouldn't maybe even be helpful to do so because
it would probably scandalize some people.
Speaker 4: But I'll give you an example, though, at least one example.
Speaker 1: Well, I'll give you an example of something it's not
even a penance, yeah, okay, And this is that in
many Irish monasteries in the sixth century, the common practice
was this is not lay people, this is monks. When
somebody is tauntured as a monk, they're not even given
communion the first Easter after their taunture.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: They receive communion only in the body the second taught
Easter after their taunture, and they don't even receive communion
in the blood until the third Easter after the taunture.
So if this is the level of rigor and strictness
that is being applied to monastics, you can well imagine
what it was like to be a lay person in
this context. I mean, to be totally honest, most of
us would probably wither and die. This is very strict,
a very very strict form of Christianity. It's not at
all Lucy gucy. It is definitely not hippie Christianity. This
is why I get a little annoyed, as somebody once
told me that Celtic Christianity is like something of a
wax nose. That is, people just shape it to be
whatever they want it to do.
Speaker 2: But I get really.
Speaker 1: Annoyed with sort of like these new age like age
come out and so on, and it's like, listen, you
think anything you're doing, they would have the remotest patients
for like these were These were serious people. And I
don't say that to like judge them or say I
know better than they do, because I know for a
fact that I couldn't hack being a Christian in sixth
century Ireland, right, I just don't have it in me.
I'm I'm too comfortable, I'm too easy going, you know.
Speaker 2: And and uh but there these are.
Speaker 1: People who really loved rigor and who saw a rigor
as as like a proof of sanctity, and so uh.
All this to say, the the penitential tradition eventually results
in kind of the popularizing of the idea of purgatory. Now,
what I want to say is that, first of all,
there's a long history in judy and I'm going to
just throw this out here as a preparatory comment. You
can come at me in the comments, but I'm not
gonna argue with anybody, Okay. So there's a long history
in Judaism and in Christianity of two ideas. The first
is that when people die, they may undergo a period
of purification. That is to say that this like not
instant from this life to heaven or hell, but that
sometimes there is an intermediary period. Now, maybe this period
is forty days, maybe it's however long, but this is
commonly believed in Judaism at the time that the New
Testament is written, Okay, and there are hints of this,
even things like Lazarus Lazarus's in a Resurrection. The second
is the idea that the prayers of the living are
in some way efficacious to the souls of the dead. Now,
this was something that was practiced in ancient Judaism, is
something that was practiced in Christianity all the way up
to the Protestant Reformation.
Speaker 2: You can argue about whether or not.
Speaker 1: It's biblical, whether or not you want to do it,
whether or not it makes you feel weird, whether or not
it's necromancer or whatever. But the thing that I'm trying
to say is that these are two sort of universal
assumptions in the ancient world, right, and there's sort of
things that from an Orthodox perspective, there's no question about this, right,
this is something that all ancient Christian traditions agree about.
Speaker 3: But the thing is the thing I mean, but it
is a thing in orthodox tradition, which in my impression
of it is that it's definitely not fixed. Like, you know,
people fublish these big books about what happens after death
and then everybody is like, yeah.
Speaker 1: Maybe, you know, I mean, the big question is always
like what do you actually do? Right if somebody dies,
how do you how do you treat that person when
they die?
Speaker 2: Well, if somebody dies.
Speaker 1: And you you you know, like prayers for the passage
of the soul and then third Day prayers and four
and you know, forty day prayers and annual remembrances and
things like this.
Speaker 2: Then then you know, what are you saying.
Speaker 1: You're saying that we think this is doing something because
we know that God loves us, yeah, and it doesn't
want anybody to perish. And beyond that, you know, like
who can really say like where this person is right now,
By the time that we say somebody is a saint,
it sort of means that we're like, we we're pretty
sure we should stop praying for them and they should
start praying for us, now, right, That's really That's really
all we're kind of saying. And I think there's there's
been a shift. I mean, again, I'm not a Roman Catholic,
and I'm really chary of mis representing people, you know,
and so I don't want to mis represent like modern
Roman Catholic teaching about this and I but I the
impresson I've gotten from talking to Roman Catholics is is
like things have sort of moved in a direction that's
more similar to that. But anyway, I don't know so
much about that. I'm going to talk right now about
twelfth century Catholicism, which is something I know a lot about.
So by the twelfth century, this idea of like a
perative interlude, or this idea of like purification after death right,
which is basically just the idea that whatever state your
soul is in when you die, what doesn't change immediately
when you die, like there might still be some purification necessary. Well,
this is developed into the concept of a third state
and in many cases a physical location, which is one
of the things Saint uh, Saint Mark of ephesis specifically
rejected by the way, and modern realman Catholics will say,
we don't teach it's a physical all right.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 1: I'm just talking about the twelfth century right now.
Speaker 3: So wait, let me just asked this question though, So
in the twelfth century, did they also believe in the
physical location for.
Speaker 1: Hell in popular imagination?
Speaker 2: Definitely?
Speaker 4: Well, that's fine parquay imagination, you know, is.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean sort of like nailing down nailing down.
Speaker 2: Like what are what's is there?
Speaker 1: Okay, So here's the thing. The twelfth century, there's not
really such a thing as like unofficial teaching, right, I mean,
you do have bishops, you'd have the pope who like
does like say things, you know, but like the situation
now where you can be like, oh no, I can
go to a website and look up the official teaching
of the of the subject, that situation does not exist
in the twelfth century. In the twelfth century, the official
position of the Catholic Church is whatever your parish priest
says it is right, because how else would you know right?
And this is really important because basically what happens is
by the twelfth century, the concept of purgatory is developed
across the medieval West to be this idea of a
third state, to be the idea of a physical location,
usually with physical fire and other torments, right, And this
is definitely the way that it was thought of in
the popular imagination, and these various torments there's sometimes generalize
as fire, but actually they're much more specific than that,
and they're much more graphic than that in sort of
popular and even visionary literature of the time, and the
official position at the time was that these torments are purgative,
purgative rather than punitive. That is, the point of the
torments is to purify you rather than punish you. But
that does not really make them any less grim. So
late medieval and and to sort of understand how this
sort of developed, you would say that late medieval preachers
and moralists really fear. I mean, it's it's the problem
you always face anytime you have a a anominally Christian society.
Actually the Puritans dealt with this in New England as well.
It's not specific to Catholicism. It's a problem anytime you
have a society where you know it's it's stopped being
like the Church versus the world, and it's actually just
become like everything is everybody's at least nominally in the church. Now,
then like how do you keep people from coasting?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right, because eighty percent of people, no matter what your
religion is, will always coast. So it's like how do
we how do we how do we keep people from coasting?
And so there were people who were would sometimes like
live a very indifferent spirit life spiritually speaking, but then
they would leave these huge legacies, right basically in their will,
they'd give a bunch of money to a church or
to build a new church, or to say so many masses,
or to put up a new root screen or something
like this. So basically it would sort of like the ideas, well,
maybe that will kind of like even things out a
little bit. And Protestants will say this is a problem
with Catholicism. Catholics said, this is a problem, right, this
is this is not how it's supposed to be. You're
supposed to live a life of faithfulness, you know, from
your baptism until your death. And so a lot of
people sort of maybe thought at this time of purgatory
as being kind of like the soft option over and
against hell. It's like, well, I wasn't good enough to
be a saint, but at least I'm not going to Hell.
Speaker 2: I'm going to the third place.
Speaker 1: And then eventually, once they spend enough time there whatever
it's like a little you know, quarantine or whatever, then.
Speaker 2: I get to go to heaven. And so a lot
of medieval.
Speaker 1: Preachers really saw this kind of this idea of incomplete
repentance as being actually not genuine at all, and so
the focus of most medieval purgatorial literature is on trying
to make people avoid it as much as you want
to avoid hell. And the way that they do this
is by describing the miseries of purgatory not to just
curdle the blood and impress the spirit, but to stir
the living to action, and so to get you to
live a life of mortification, to get you to live
a life of penance, alms giving, good works, and to
do these things in a time of prosperity, rather than
as you could say, to use a nice Baptist phrase,
rather than as fire insurance.
Speaker 2: Right, So.
Speaker 1: This results in medieval descriptions of purgatory being pretty extreme.
Speaker 2: I'll read you one.
Speaker 1: It's not from Ireland, but it is from the North.
This is from Bridget of Sweden, who's a medieval Catholic
visionary saint, has a lot of the more kind of
extreme like I had a vision and the Virgin Mary
told me, if you pray these three prayers, then.
Speaker 2: You'll be delivered from X, Y, and Z.
Speaker 1: You know, those kind of like very formulate visions. And
again I'm not trying to rag on anybody here, but
some of this, some of Bridget's revelations and things like
this are like really out there. So this is her
description of and this is actually only a part of
I picked the part that I thought would be not
get your video demonetized. So then the thought that there
was a band bound around his head so tight and
painfully that the forehead on the top of the ears
had met together. The eyes were hanging out on the cheeks,
the ears as though they had been burnt off with fire.
The brain burst out at the nostrils and ears. The
tongue hung out, and the teeth were broken together. The
bones and the arms were broken and woven as a rope.
Speaker 2: The skin was.
Speaker 1: Pulled off the head and bound around the neck. The
breasts and the womb were thrown together in Middle English.
This is they were told slung in together, which is
my favorite way to say things. It's Middle English. And
the ribs were broken that one might see the heart
and bowels. The shoulders were broken and hung down to
the sides, and the bones were drawn out as though
they were a thread of cloth. This is like the
least graphic part of her description of purgatory. Of purgatory,
this is a place where saved people go, and it
is a thing to remember. Everybody in purgatory is already saved.
This is being sort of prepared for heaven. But this
is how she's describing it, like it's really it's really
graphic stuff. To put it bluntly, you could say that
accounts of purgatory in the Middle Ages are actually more
often they're more graphic graphic than we would depict Hewll today. Again,
we just don't have the stomach to hang with these people.
Right again, if I say all these things, I'm not
saying it to mock. I'm not saying it to you know,
even point out being like, oh no, I'm the Christian
that has it figured out, not all these medieval people.
Speaker 2: I'm not that guy at all.
Speaker 1: Like I readily recognize that I could not keep up
with these people.
Speaker 4: Right, that's in pretty intense stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's intense stuff.
Speaker 1: And historian Eman Duffy, who's written a lot of great
stuff about like sort of Paris life in the Middle Ages,
he says that these depictions are, to quote him more often,
in fact, circumstantial treatises on the nature of avoidance of
the deadly sins which were their cause. So the thing
you're really supposed to see with these depictions of purgatory,
So the person that I just described, this is from
Bridget's vision. And this not Bridget, say, Bridge of Kildare.
This is Bridge of Sweden. This is the vision of
a soul that's guilty of lies and pride, by the way,
So just little things, you know, just little things like
lies and pride. But the point is you're supposed to
it's really supposed to sort of help you see what
the sin is, because most medieval Christians didn't think of
themselves as going to hell. Right, Hell is for you know,
the infiddle, the reprobate, you know, like for it's for like,
you know, people who like totally reject God. That doesn't
actually describe most people in the Middle ages.
Speaker 2: And uh and and so.
Speaker 1: This description of purgatory, right, it's meant to sort of
motivate those people to not coast, to not kind of
like sit on their hands and you know, have a
great death bed conversion experience and whatever else, but actually
to get up now and do the work of being
a Christian. So, as I mentioned though, there's an Irish
connection in all of this. So the idea of purgatory,
like there's the idea of of a of a of
a time of purification after death again has been there
since the beginning of Christianity, because it's also there in
jude In you know, predates us in Judaism.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe not.
Speaker 3: I want to say something about this, yeah, because you know,
it's really important, like you said, to be able to
understand the stakes of the notion of this time of purgation.
And it has to do with the fact that this
ontological reality of being saved, that is that the notion
for traditional Christians and for orthodox today you are what
you are. So it's like you it's not the idea
that Okay, so I'm I'm going to die and then
all of a sudden, I'm going to become something else
and I'm gonna totally now, all of a sudden, I'm
going to be in the glorious presence of God. You know,
It's like, no if I even if I die, whatever
state I'm in and whatever reality that I am, my
being is in. That is who I am, and therefore
that is what will continue on after life. And so people,
I think reasonably could see that, well, how could I,
let's say, as someone who knows that I'm still dealing
with sin, still dealing with all these things. How could
this person who I'm told is not going to go
to hell because I do believe, you know, I you know,
I do love God. I love my neighbor to some
extent like I I I trust in that in that
in that connection, how what what happens to me? Because
I know that I won't be like Saint, like Saint Paul,
like I won't be like the great the great Mystics,
And so how do I account for that? And what
does that mean for the for my for my the
continuation of my being. So it's not like I said,
it's not There's something really reasonable and it really kind
of down to earth in trying to figure out what
are these what what does this intermediary state look like,
because the other solution to it is that, oh so
it's a mediocre intermediate means that I'm just going to
basically be me in this state of kind of semi
whatever sainthood for eternity.
Speaker 4: Like that's it. That's that might be the other possibility.
Speaker 1: And what I want to say is nobody should want
that exactly, Like you should not get it. If you
get up in the morning and you look in the
mirror and you're like, this is the person I want
to be for all eternity, something is very wrong because
even very holy people don't think that way. That's right, Yeah, exactly,
all right, So yeah, all this to say like this,
so that is there from the beginning of the Christian
faith and experience what sort of develops in the Middle
Ages and it is really popularized, really comes out of Ireland,
comes out of this penal tradition. Is this idea of
purgatory as a specific location with specific torments for specific sins. Okay, So,
and this is related to the visionary tradition of Christianity
and ancient Judaism, where of depicting Hell in this way
that you get in the Book of Enoch even in
the Book of Revelation to some extent, and also in
like Third Zras and so on. But this, this idea
of sort of purgatory is like a third location that's
maybe like adjacent to Hell but not quite you know, Hell,
but it still has kind of this different kinds of
sins or within different kinds of places or different kinds
of ways. This this is tied to this, you know,
very much tied to this Irish penal tradition, and it's
very much tied to a very important location called the
Purgatory of Saint Patrick. So, uh, this is on an island.
Speaker 2: It's located on.
Speaker 1: Station Island in Loch There and it's a so there's
basically an island on a lake in the middle of
Ireland in what's currently Northern Ireland, and there's a there's
actually there's a church there. And there's several versions of this,
of the several accounts of the story, and basically the
story goes something like Saint Patrick the Salmon of Heaven.
Case I didn't mention that it's my favorite epithet for him,
so I just like to say it every time Patrick
the Salmon of Heaven. That's how he's always introduced in
like Irish stories when when Saint Patrick was dealing with
you could say, like some doubt about his is his
role or the you know, whether or not even in
any of this is kind of working. And so he's
shown he's taken to this island in the middle of
the lake, and he's shown an entrance into purgatory so
that he can see kind of like you know, basically,
it's a visionary experience, Like most visionary experiences in the
Christian tradition, it's something that's intended to strengthen the prophet's faith,
right that he's going through a period of doubt, and
so he's shown a foretaste of the next life, the
torment of sinners, the state of purgatory, and the and
then the bliss of the righteous. And then this develops
into a bunch of other stories, the most famous of
which is the Tale of the Night Owen, which is
sometimes which which in the or the Vision of Sir Owen,
which in the twelfth century circulated as the Tractatis de
Purgatorio Sancte Patrici Patricki, which is which was translated into
almost every medieval language. There's a Middle English version that
there's also like a Hungarian version of it, right, translated
into basically every medieval laning, which which means that this
is popular reading.
Speaker 2: This is what lay people are reading.
Speaker 1: This is like a work of devotions, not just for
clerics or and it is fundamentally, I have to say,
not a theological but there's not a dogmatic text. It's
not a theological text, right.
Speaker 2: What it is.
Speaker 1: An imaginative text. And it tells the story of Sir Owen,
who is a sinful knight who decides to be purged
of his sins by entering into Saint Patrick's purgatory, which
is this terrestrial entrance into purgatory. And by the way,
his bishop explicitly tells him, don't do this. You won't
be able to hack it, you won't be able to survive,
and he decides to do it anyway.
Speaker 2: And it's very.
Speaker 1: Notable that in all of these kind of medieval depictions,
popular medieval depictions of purgatory, you get to purgatory by
going down right. Purgatory is part of the underworld. This
will be important when we come to Dante in a minute.
Purgatory is I think, as Eamon Duffy describes it, it's
an outpatient department of hell. Basically, it's full of demons
who are there to tempt and torment you. And in fact,
according to some medieval writers, the only difference between Helen
Purgatory is the duration of the torments. Torment in hell
lasts forever torment and purgatory just lasts into you're purified.
But that's the only difference. Everything else is the same.
That's according to like a lot of medieval writers. So
after being given some instructions by monks who maybe also
might be angels, it's a little unclear. In the story,
Sir Owen descends into purgatory, which turns out to be
the sort of desolate wasteland in which there is no
kind of comfort but hunger and thirst and cold. No
trees grow here, only cold wind blows here.
Speaker 2: And then there are.
Speaker 1: These fields, and each one of the fields punishes a
different kind of sin, or purifies people from a different
kind of sin, if you to think about it this way.
So the field of the slowful is strewn with the
bodies of men and women who are dismembered and mutilated,
lying face down, begging for mercy. It's really graphic. This
is the very first sort of image you get in
the poem. These are the slowful, who basically, in their
wounded state, they're unable to help themselves. There's the field
of the gluttonous, which is men and women lying face up,
pinned with glowing hot nails through their feet and hands
and head. They're being sat upon by huge dragons.
Speaker 2: And toads and snakes.
Speaker 1: There's the field of the lustful, which are basically people
being torn out by demons wielding hooks. By the way,
this is where they try to get Owen. The demons
try to get them, because this is one of the
things he struggled with.
Speaker 2: There's the field of the thieves.
Speaker 4: Was that a night you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a knight.
Speaker 1: I mean it's I mean, that's That's the other subtext
for this is that it's very much it's very clear,
at least in the Middle English rendering of the story
that Sir Owen is a he's like a knight in
the courtly tradition, like it was sort of an Arthurian knight, right,
And that's you know, very clear that he so he
struggles with nightly sins. He doesn't struggle with sloth and gluttony,
because those aren't cool sins. But he struggles with he
struggles with lust, and he also struggles with I think covetous, yes,
you know, which is which is itself like an expression
of blust. There's the field of the lustful people who
are torn up by demons wielding hooks. The field of
the thieves, where these people are hanging by burning iron
hooks from their feet, neck and belly, they're lying on
burning gridirons.
Speaker 2: Et cetera.
Speaker 1: There's the field of backbiters, gossipers, and liars. These are
people who and also, by the way, people who falsely
swear on relics, which is a very particular kind of
Middle Aged sin. Actually I say that, but nowadays we
still like made people swear on a Bible in court.
Where do you guys think that comes from? In the
Middle Ages, people used to swear on relics or on
the Gospel book, right, and we still make people swear
in a Bible because and there is this sort of like,
you know, sense that oh, well, now I have to
really be honest. Actually you should be honest all the time.
But the idea that you're bringing is something holy, right now,
makes the oath like more binding a certain way. So
people who falsely squear and relics.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: There, and these people are, you know, the people who
have sinned with or deceived with their tongue. They're hanging
by their tongues by like burning hooks, like through their tongues,
just hanging by their tongues, you know. And there's the
field of the covetists. These are people who are bound
to hooks to a great wheel and basically hooks, a
lot of hooks, a lot of There are a lot
of hooks in this Uh. There are a lot of
hooks in this poem. You could even call them plot hooks.
There's there's the in the field of the Covetanists. They're
bound by hooks to these great wheels, and the wheels
are are spinning, so they're like constantly being crushed by
the wheels.
Speaker 2: That's over again.
Speaker 1: But then the wheels are also being struck by lightning,
which constantly like burns up the souls to powder, I
don't know. And the demons trying to get owen again
here and then finally he comes to like this blood
red mountain on which there are men and women standing
and there's this stinking river flowing under it, and Owen
is thrown into the river and he's taken to the
next location of torment, which is this hall where usurers
and other kinds of people who send with money are
basically tormented by being immersed in pits of molten precious metals.
And as you do, and then after this, you know,
the demons make one last attempt to drag him down
into the pit of Hell. And the idea is that,
you know, beneath the stinking river there's an entrance to Hell,
so like Hell in purgatory are adjacent places.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and trying to pull him into Hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there's like this danger that he's in purgatory,
but he could be pulled down to Hell if he
doesn't fight, And and so throughout the poem, Sir Owen
survives the various torments of the demons by by calling
upon the name of Jesus Christ and by calling on
the version Mary. And eventually he calls upon Christ, who
winens the bridge across the river far enough enough for
him to cross, and then he enters leaving purgatory, enters
the earthly paradise again. This will be important as we
read Dante. Yeah, he enters the earthly Paradise, which is
where he both recovers from the pains of purgatory, but
he's also granted a vision of heaven, of the heavenly Paradise,
and the earthly paradise is at once both the Garden
of Eden but also kind of like the Celtic residence
of the Blessed. It's kind of both of those things
at the same time. And Owen is given this like
mann alike food of Paradise, and then he's returned to
the world. This time he actually has to return through purgatory,
but this time he comes back to the demons just
run away from him, and there he lived out the
rest of his life. And at the end of the
poem there's an explanation from these two archbishops that he
meets there in the Earthly Paradise of basically how purgatory
works and the way, including the ways that those living
on earth can lessen the pains of the relative suffering
there by praying and doing good work on their behalf.
Speaker 2: And so along with another.
Speaker 1: Very similar Irish tale that also involves a night kind
of going through a vision of the underworld. This the
tractatus was widely circulated and medieval Western Europe. Dante would
certainly have read it. And what the really interesting thing
about Dante's depiction of purgatory is how radically different it
is from every medieval depiction that came before him. For Dante,
purgatory is not an anti chamber of Hell. It's not
an outpatient, you know, like sen you know, clinic for Hell,
but it's the anti chamber of heaven. And for Dante,
purgatory is an assent, not a descent. It's for Dante,
it's about purification, it's not about torment. And so Dante
does all these things that actually really rehabilitates purgatory in
the popular consciousness. Of course, a bunch of things come
along later, the Reformation, Tetsel, all that stuff. Not going
to really get into that so much. In the class,
I would just say that, you know, even Roman Catholics
at the time really rejected a lot of what Tetsil
was saying.
Speaker 2: But you know, anyway, the rest is history.
Speaker 1: So the thing that I really wanted to accomplish was
to was to talk about this one specific vision of
Celtic Christianity, and as an example of the ways that
like the asceticism, the the you know, the kind of
the penal tradition that came out of Ireland had a
very strong effect in medieval Western culture and and was was.
Speaker 2: Really not what a lot of.
Speaker 1: People typically associate with like Ireland or Celtic Christianity today,
but it was very imaginative, miraculous, wondrous, et cetera. But
it's also extremely ascetic, extremely asthetic, extremely focused on you know,
your job really as a Christian in this tradition is
to focus on your sin and to ask God to
help deliver you from it, because even purgatory is not
a place where you want to stay.
Speaker 3: So all right, so we so I want to I
want to really I want to really push this. I
want to really try to give the best defense I
have for purgatory.
Speaker 1: Let's go, you know, And the reason I joked earlier
by the way that this video would make nobody happy,
because like it's going to take off the Protestants, all
the Catholics are but you guys are getting purgatory wrong.
And then also like Ortho Brows are going to be
angry that we here trying to defend it as a
reasonable proposition.
Speaker 2: But going with you.
Speaker 3: So the reason why I want to do this is
mostly because you know, I I really but I do.
Speaker 4: I do believe. I believe that.
Speaker 3: These realities are realities that we deal with now. I
don't believe in the idea that when we talk about
the afterlife, that we're only talking about what happens to you
after you die.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: The afterlife is revealing to us is in some ways
the truest pattern of reality because in some ways it
it's an unlimited version of things that we deal with now,
which is why that the descriptions.
Speaker 1: It's like looking at the final state of everything, right, exactly,
the end of the why that's why it's last things right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So that's the way that I that's the way that
I understand, and that's why I try to help. I
hope that it can help us actually understand the things
that we're going through now. And So the reality of sin, okay,
is that it makes you suffer. Okay, That's the reality
of sin because what it does, if you think of
the easiest ones are, for example, like let's say, carnal desires,
whichever ones you imagine, like those carnal desires, they make
you suffer because they make you desire something and in
the in the the the grasping for it, right and
the kind of pulling it towards you. You know what
it does is it throws you back into a cycle
of suffering because it then opens up the space of
that desire again, and then you're kind of in this
weird loop where you desire it. When you have it,
it's it lasts a fleeting second, and then it throws
you back into that kind of cycle of despondency and desire.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So, obviously an addict is the easiest way to understand
it because it's so, it's so, it's such an extreme
version of it. Now, when that happens, you have two
choices in dealing with the suffering that sin causes in
your life, and one is torment and the other is purgation.
Those are the two possibilities you have. Which is that
is actually the reason you could say why sin causes suffering,
because the suffering is an opportunity for repentance every time,
So like every time you lie, and then the lie
causes pain and suffering and chaos in your life, whether
it breaks your relationships, whether it destroys your credibility, whether
it does all these things that lie does. Now you
have you have two choices in front of you. One
is you're basically going to just suffer and be tormented
by the results of your sin, or that if that
suffering will be an opportunity for repentance and transformation of
the person. So it's really important to understand this because
a lot of people they're like, well, what is this
horrible idea that people are being tortured in purgatory and
why does it causes purgation? Well, you can experience that
every day of your life, every time you sin, because,
like I said, those two choices are there in.
Speaker 2: Front of you.
Speaker 3: So to me, it's not a surprise that based on
our experience of sin and an experience of how it
brings death to us, right, how it causes things to
break down, it causes you know, chaos and conflicts and
all these things in our life that people would would
notice that when that happens, there are two possibilities, right,
One is to use it as a springboard towards transformation.
So that's why that's like I'm not saying I'm not
trying to defend the doctrine of the but I'm trying
to help people understand why people would come to that conclusion.
It's not just like they're a bunch of Sado massacres
or they just like they have this idea that you
have to punish yourself because you're because you've sinned all
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: That's not what it's about.
Speaker 1: And by the way, most of that kind of thing
happened not in the Middle Ages, that happened in the
Renaissance and like the counter Reformation.
Speaker 2: But anyway, anyway, what what what kind of thing?
Speaker 1: Oh just like like like uh, really extreme forms of
of like self fulation, self lulation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not really an the deevil thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, people can if you want to know, like
the Orthodox kind of response to all this, you can
read Saint marco ephesis. The thing that he mainly seems
to have rejected is the idea of like a definite
location with literal fire, right, That's sort of the things
And I also.
Speaker 3: Like, I don't even know what that means, Like I
don't know, well what like what that what? Because you
would even like even if the if the Catholics had
this idea of like a location where you're physically suffering
I don't even know what that means. Who's what's suffering
your body is in the tomb. So I don't know
what a literal I don't know what that means.
Speaker 1: But I think that I think that, Yeah, like I said,
I it's not something I'm hugely interested in arguing with
like Catholics about, because I think we mostly agree, honestly
about the the the the idea that yeah, some kind
of you know, I sure hope, you know, if I
were to die today, you know, I sure hope that
there would be.
Speaker 2: Purification.
Speaker 1: I hope I you know, I there's there's a person
I need to be, and there's a person I am
right now, and and I hope that I'll be able
to continue to kind of grow into that. And you know,
like I would, I hope for all those things. Yeah,
but the things that I would. The thing that I
would want to say, though, is to what you just said,
if you think back from them about what I said
about the ancient imagination, but the Irish imagination in particular, which.
Speaker 2: Is very.
Speaker 1: This is not quite right, okay, but just go with me,
like hyper literal, yeah, right, in the way that it's
very literally focused on kind of this literal experience of
the things that we would call supernatural. Right, you can
see how they'd get to a point where it's saying, oh,
when I experienced sin like this in my life right now,
that's you know, there's this toad sitting on me. Right,
there's this there's this you know, demon like everything.
Speaker 3: Between even for them, like they experience and that we
would consider would call like anxiety or you know, all
these things that they're that they're so real that they
that they become and they become embodied like the.
Speaker 4: The the.
Speaker 3: Width between indiannalogy is so thin, Like for us, it's
really thick, but for them, it's so thin that there's
no other way to say it.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason it's so thick for us
is because we've done so much to take various anxieties
and psychoses and everything else and sort of say, oh,
this is just a biological problem, or it's a chemistry problem,
or it's like this o, you know, this that and
the other thing, and it may be some combination of
all of those things, but it's but there is a
spiritual component to these things, and we've sort of like
relegated that to the background, right, And so it makes
us difficult to think about this until something happens in
your life and you have like a genuine encounter with
the demonic, right, which which is which is the thing
that people have, And I think usually when that happened,
there's there's some kind of clarity that goes in. But
that that person who has that kind of encounter is
also the person who tends to be like going to
be like the most hyper rigorous Christian that you know, right,
And to kind of go back to what we're saying,
like part of that is just the fact that everything
is so deeply real to them, right that there's no
you know, there's no space for kind of like ambiguits
and ambiguity. Sorry. So yeah, So anyway, all this to say,
all this to say, Dante's going to do something really
unique with purgatory, which is to actually reveal it to
be exactly what Jonathan just said it was, which is
not just this, here's the thing that you better avoid
when you die, but rather to show it as this
is the experience of the Christian life lived now, which
is a life as sanctification, life as purgation from your sins.
Because we're moving to parent like this life is all
we've been given with any certainty, like we don't know,
like you know, especially from an Orthodox standpoint, we certainly
don't know, like with absolute certainty, you know what the
timeline is after you die. We just don't know. But
this life is what's been given to us with absolute centnerday.
This is what's been given to us for repentance. And
so what we need to do is to begin to
is to begin to actually do it sir Owen did actually,
which is to enter purgatory voluntarily, like to begin the
process of purification now. And Dante kind of lays out
a beautiful roadmap for that in Purgatory. That's why it's
my favorite book of the comedy to teach, and it's
why I think it's in many ways, like all the
juicy stuff is in Inferno, you know, because like it's
really fun to look at these sinners getting there, you
know what's coming to them or whatever. But Purgatorio is
in many ways it's the most practical because it's it
really hits us right where at right now. So August
twenty seven, of the folks, please please please come and
join us for the class.
Speaker 2: You won't regret it.
Speaker 1: It'll be five amazing weeks of really getting deep into
the question of what does it mean to be purified?
Speaker 2: And I think you'll enjoy.
Speaker 4: It, So all right, we'll see there everybody.
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