Prayer for the dead and the relocation of purgatorial fire in the seventh century

A purgatorial fire appears in the earliest Christian writings but details of how this worked and for whom it was beneficial were often left unclear. In general, before the seventh century this was understood to take place immediately before the final judgement, so that the souls of the dead experienced purging as part of the experience of the last judgement in preparation for being brought before Christ. During the seventh century western Christian writers’ understanding of the purgatorial fire began to change, partly due to the increasingly popular practice of prayer for the dead. As a result, the post-mortem purgatorial fire was relocated chronologically in the soteriological system so that instead of occurring immediately before the last judgement, it was understood to occur immediately after death and to be connected with prayers for the dead, so that the living could help to affect the fates of their loved ones in the afterlife. Focusing on the reception of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues and other material by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), the anonymous Liber de ordine creaturarum, and the Prognosticum of Julian of Toledo (688), this paper argues that these authors provide witness to significant changes in how western Christians saw themselves within the larger soteriological schema. Their works offered new opportunities for understanding how people could flourish as Christians, in particular allowing them to participate in actions which affected the health and the state of the souls of their loved ones even after they died. These developments impacted how Christians understood the process of transformation of the soul which began on earth and continued in the afterlife, how suffering in the present might mitigate suffering in the future, and how repentance in the present could co-operate with purgatorial fire. Developments in eschatology in the twilight of Late Antiquity thus changed the ways that contemporaries understood the health of the soul in the present and in the future, while binding the living and the dead closer together in their shared quest for Christian healthfulness.