by Peter A. Kwasniewski

This article will present several meditations on the afterlife, with particular attention paid to the neglected habitations mentioned in the title. If we can grasp more clearly just a few truths about the world to come—something of its geography, so to speak, and the characteristics of its inhabitants—we may be able to infuse into our lives a greater yearning for the paradise we hope to attain by God’s grace, a deeper gratitude for the purifying power of divine love, and a wholesome loathing for the punishment reaped by unrepented mortal sin. For, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, "Let our thoughts. . .dwell on retribution, imitating the holy King Hezekiah: ‘I said, in the midst of my days I shall go to the gates of hell’ (Is. 38:10). A mind which goes down to hell often in life will not easily go down there in death."

St. Paul confirms the teaching on heaven and hell in countless places. "Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience and well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury" (Rom. 2:4-8). "Now the works of the flesh are plain: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (Gal. 5:19-21). "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 6:9-10). One can well imagine St. Paul urging us today to pay attention to his words: "Do not be deceived"—do not be deceived by liberal theologians or psychiatrists, by the mass media or the powers of this world. There will be judgment and retribution for all men according to their deeds.

Even if we had only the text of the Epistles, it would be possible to establish the truth of the Church’s unbroken testimony. But it is our Lord Jesus, the teacher of St. John and St. Paul, who speaks most fearfully and threateningly about the final judgment. "Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen" (Mt. 22:13-14). "Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few" (Mt. 7:13-14; see Lk. 13:24). "Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers’" (Mt. 7:21-23; see Lk. 13:27). "Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth" (Mt. 13:41-42). "Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’" (Mt. 25:41). "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned" (Mk. 16:15-16). "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him" (Jn. 3:36).

While it would be unhealthy to become preoccupied with such terrifying verses instead of spending one’s time seeking God’s will in prayer and promoting His kingdom by good works, nevertheless, if we forget them—and even more, if we encourage or allow others to forget them—we run the danger of betraying the integral teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. And to do this is nothing less than to betray the Person of Christ, for in denying His spoken words, one denies the incarnate Word of the Father. Jesus came to save sinners who repent, who throw themselves upon the Father’s merciful love; He did not come to grant indiscriminate amnesty.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle discusses how each man holds a kind of "inner conversation" with himself, reflecting on what he has already done and thinking about what he will do in days to come. Aristotle observes that a bad man can fall to such a miserable state that this interior conversation becomes too painful to stand; he cannot bear to live with himself anymore, and as a result, does away with his own life. He slays himself because he cannot find anything in himself to love. Aristotle later speaks of the noble or virtuous man as one who finds within himself many causes for rejoicing, whether he thinks of time already past or the deeds that lie ahead; he loves his life intensely for the good in it. This same man, however, is prepared to lay down his life on behalf of his country, his family, or his friends. He may go out to war and know that he is not likely to return alive. And when the moment comes for him to fight, he goes forth on the field and, let us say, there meets his death. Now, what is the difference between this death and the other we spoke of a moment ago? The good man gave or offered up his life for love’s sake; the bad man threw away his life out of hatred. The one sacrificed himself, the other slew himself. Between these two acts there is an infinite distance, a complete opposition of significance. Gabriel Marcel pushes the analysis further:

. . . the physical possibility of suicide which is engraved in our nature as incarnate beings is nothing but the expression of another much more profound and more hidden possibility, the possibility of a spiritual denial of self or, what comes to the same thing, of an impious and demoniac affirmation of self which amounts to a radical rejection of being. There is a sense in which that rejection is the final falsehood and absurdity; for it can exist only through someone who is; but as it becomes embodied it develops into perverted being.

Marcel’s description of the spiritual denial of self, resulting from an "impious affirmation of self," captures the essence of what it means to reject God as the Creator and Redeemer of man. God in His love gives to each human being the gift of life, which has for its purpose the knowing and loving of God in preparation for an eternity with Him. To worship the God who creates us in His image and redeems us as His children is to affirm one’s own being in the right way. Our existence and the shape of our life is worth something only when it is patterned after the love of God expressed in His gift of life to us, that is, when the way we live reflects and glorifies Him.

. . . we realize at once with what care the affirmation ‘I am’ must be approached: the affirmation which was cried on high by Descartes, who thought that he had proved its validity once and for all. I would prefer to say that it should not be put forward in any defiant or presumptuous tone; rather should it be whispered humbly, with fear and wonder. I say with humility because, after all. . .this being [of the person] is something that can only be granted to us as a gift; it is a crude illusion to believe that it is something which I can give to myself: with fear, because I cannot even be certain that I may not make myself unworthy of the gift, so unworthy that I should be condemned to losing it, did not grace come to my assistance: and finally with wonder, because this gift brings as its companion the light, because this gift is light.

To know and love God is a steady work of giving ourselves back to Him in the acts and sufferings of each day. As we strive to do His will, we are called upon to put ourselves at the periphery, Him alone at the center. In this sense, salvation is already occurring when one lovingly surrenders one’s entire being to the God who surrendered His only Son on the Cross, just as spouses who truly love one another give themselves unreservedly in their nuptial embrace. Salvation requires the grace of God because man, whose fallen nature pulls apart at his inner unity, is not able to perform by his own power an undivided act of total loving oblation. To be definitively saved, drawn at last into the kingdom of heaven, means to be graced with an eternal power of loving God perfectly, our heart adhering undividedly to His, our life perpetually renewed and poured forth in an ecstasy of union which no tongue, human or angelic, could de scribe. "No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him" (1 Cor. 2:9).

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," reads the inscription over the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. This poignant line contains a whole theology. The worst part of hell is the lack of any possibility of growing towards the truth, towards love and fullness of being. One of the merits of our life on earth is that, until the last moment, it is not "over"—there is time to make amends, time to pray, time to take spiritual stock, time in which to pursue the truth by studying or to spread this truth by teaching, preaching, rearing children, and so forth. There is time to love; one can love more than one has loved before, or at least one can continue loving as one has loved. Thus there is a kind of open-endedness to our experience of life; even the dying man has the consolation that he is not yet dead, not yet "frozen in his will." It must be one of the greatest joys of heaven to have this openness still further expanded, broken free of its limitations by the immensity of God’s love and the splendor of His truth. Heaven is a pure and everlasting ekstasis, a going-forth from self to its giver and goal. The limited experience of "having time to. . ." yet never having time enough is utterly surpassed by the eternal now of being with God, possessing the lover whose love we sought to find and keep on earth, with our pitiful succession of moments that flow through our fingers like sand.

For an inverse reason, hell would be the most dreadful of places, because all that one has is time, time, time, but no way of "redeeming the time," no way to make it open up to love and truth, which one has existentially rejected by rejecting God, the fullness of Being. St. Thomas writes: "Heaven is ruled by eternity, hell is ruled by time." The sinner has no more than his wretched old self, which needs the Other but cannot possess the Other, because the self has excluded the Other by worshipping itself. The thirst for divine Light, the ekstasis towards God for which our immortal souls were made, having been refused on earth, is forever frustrated in the regions of darkness. This is really what we mean by the hopelessness of hell, the "abandon all hope" of Dante. Hope is the virtue that causes us to open our future to God, to a future with God, in His embrace. If we have no hope, we are already living on the outskirts of hell. It is a fitting punishment for anyone who would worship the time-bound creature above the eternal Creator. He who worships the temporal is justly deprived of the eternal.

Although she is made up of millions of souls, we speak of our Church in the singular: she is the Bride of Christ. She is plurality led back to unity, a multitude bound together by the power of one Lord, whose singular glory is the highest good and most intimate possession of all the members. Heaven is a true, indeed the only perfect, society: its majestic variety streams from the Holy One, the many have their appointed place in fraternal bonds of everlasting love.

Those who are united with Christ will form the community of the redeemed, "the holy city" of God, "the Bride, the wife of the Lamb." She will not be wounded any longer by the sin, the stains, the self-love, that destroy or wound the earthly community. The beatific vision, in which God opens Himself in an inexhaustible way to the elect, will be the ever-flowing wellspring of happiness, peace, and mutual communion. (CCC 1045)

In hell, on the contrary, there is no society—only individuals. It is the triumph of individualism. They stand in disarray, like an abstract painting, formless and void of meaning; they feel no sympathy, they receive no compassion. And out of these individuals an accidental unity arises: all are heaped into a pile of misery, each is equally alone in the company of solitaries. Hell is a mockery of society: the damned are together but cannot communicate, cannot love, cannot pursue a common good. The Catechism defines hell as the "state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed." A tyrannical ego pronounces the death-sentence upon itself, and remains the guarantor of its own solitude.

Contemplating the prospects of heaven and hell also helps us to see the purpose, indeed the necessity, of a state of purgatory, where a soul dying in God’s favor is made ready to behold the divine presence, the beauty of God’s Holy Face, by the extraction of all that is unworthy of this vision. Love purges the unlovely, fire melts the hard heart, light pierces through the shadows. Shame is uprooted, guilt destroyed. Nothing evil or ugly remains to obstruct union with an infinitely holy God. All evil, all ugliness, is burned off in the furnace of God’s merciful justice, because He wants His handiwork to be restored to its original splendor, its most perfect likeness to Him. St. Augustine says that the blessed will be naked, for so God created man and woman at the beginning. How could the citizens of heaven be ashamed? Their innocence, their uprightness as children of God, will have been wholly renewed; every limb of the body and every power of the soul can then proclaim the glory of God.

With the Catholic teaching on purgatory, we are relying more on the sacred Tradition of the Church, the way the Holy Spirit has helped her to grasp the mystery of salvation. But there is certainly scriptural warrant. St. Paul and St. Peter both speak of a cleansing fire (1 Cor. 3:15; 1 Pet. 1:7). St. Gregory the Great argued as follows: Jesus declares that "whoever utters blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will be pardoned neither in this age nor in the age to come. From this sentence we understand that certain offenses can be forgiven in this age, but certain others in the age to come" (see CCC 1031). In the Book of Maccabees, we read that Judas Macaques "made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin" (2 Macc. 12:46). As the Catechism teaches, "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" (1030). Be cause our earthly contrition is almost always lacking in some way, our penance for sin—in other words, the correspondence between the soul’s interior condition and Christ’s act of atonement on Calvary—must be brought to completion so that divine justice may be satisfied and divine mercy may fulfill its promise of presenting us immaculate to the wedding feast (see Eph. 5:25-27). The soul that truly loves God desires to be made clean, to have its stains washed away forever; it would not want to enter heaven if it were not wholly sanctified, if it were not light and beauty alone but had some darkness and ugliness still mixed in. Christ saves us from within, by making us holy like Himself. Schille beeckx writes:

The notion of purgatory is a Catholic notion which I find essential for eschatology. Even if human beings have chosen the good and are to have an eternal life in heaven, they are not [yet] saints. . . They have imperfections, faults. Even if a person dies in a state of grace, as we say, he or she still remains a sinner. In the first encounter in heaven with God, the God of holiness, the first act of God’s love is a kind of catharsis, purification. God’s first act of charity is the purification of all our imperfections.

Privileged with visions of the world to come, St. Catherine of Genoa explained purgatory as God’s work of rendering the soul worthy to stand in His presence by recalling it to the pristine nobility of its creation and the exalted dignity of its baptism. Let us hear the exquisite words of the saint herself:

I see that God is in such perfect conformity with the soul, that when He beholds it in the purity wherein was created by His divine Majesty, He imparts a certain attractive impulse of His burning love, enough to annihilate it, though it be immortal; and in this way so transforms the soul into Himself, its God, that it sees in itself nothing but God, who goes on thus attracting and inflaming it, until He has brought it to that state of existence whence it came forth—that is, the spotless purity wherein it was created. And when the soul, by interior illumination, perceives that God is drawing it with such loving ardour to Himself, straightway there springs up within it a corresponding fire of love for its most sweet Lord and God, which causes it wholly to melt away: it sees in the Divine light how considerately, and with what unfailing providence, God is ever leading it to its full perfection, and that He does it all through pure love; it finds itself stopped by sin, and unable to follow that heavenly attraction—I mean that look which God casts on it to bring it into union with Himself: and this sense of the grievousness of being kept from beholding the Divine Light, coupled with that instinctive longing which would fain be without hindrance to follow the enticing look—these two things, I say, make up the pains of the souls in purgatory. Not that they think anything of their pains, however great they be; they think far more of the opposition they are making to the will of God, which they see clearly is burning intensely with pure love to them. God meanwhile goes on drawing the soul by His looks of love mightily, and, as it were with undivided energy: this the soul knows well; and could it find another purgatory greater that this by which it could sooner remove so great an obstacle, it would immediately plunge therein, impelled by that conforming love which is between God and the soul.

Indeed, the soul’s very longing to be purified, its yearning to behold the Face of God and live, is the root cause, the moving force, of its own purification. "Its single desire, to be totally united with God, takes the form of burning love. The pain results from the fact that ‘encrustations’ on the soul—the ‘rust of sin’—block the desired union." So ardent is this yearning, so painful the remaining guilt and imperfection, that the soul, if it had a choice, would refuse not being punished. Describing the fruits of suffering, Kierkegaard says:

The one time of suffering is a passing through that leaves no mark at all upon the soul, or even more glorious, it is a passing through that completely cleanses the soul, and as a result the purity becomes the mark the passing through leaves behind. Just as gold is purified in the fire, so the soul is purified in sufferings. But what does the fire take away from the gold? Well, it is a curious way of talking to call it taking away; it takes away all the impure elements from the gold. What does gold lose in the fire? Well, it is a curious way of talking to call it losing; in the fire the gold loses all that is base—that is, the gold gains through the fire. So also with all temporal suffering, the hardest, the longest; powerless in itself, it is incapable of taking away anything, and if the suffering one lets eternity rule, it takes away the impure, that is, it gives purity.

Having a foretaste of divine glory and knowing what sublime purity is necessary in order to share it worthily, the soul wants to be made pure, radiant, beautiful, like a bride preparing herself for the wedding feast. Earlier we quoted CCC 1030, which states that those who are "imperfectly purified" at the time of death must undergo further purification, "so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven." One should note how this excellent statement emphasizes the link between holiness and joy. Holiness is, in fact, the fundamental condition of perfect joy. A soul imperfectly sanctified does not have the wherewithal to share in the happiness of God, for the same reason that human lovers when their motives are selfish do not experience the full happiness of mutual surrender.

Irresponsibility in the administration of parishes, a venal promotion of indulgences, and numerous other abuses were widespread on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. Never could it be more truly said, however, that the attempted cure was worse than the disease. Like a barbaric medicine that would rather amputate a wounded limb than take steps to heal it, the Protestant sects banished indulgences and sacramentals, rejected both the sacrament of confession and the doctrine of purgatory, and more drastically, in some instances denied the distinction between mortal and venial sin. In so doing, and quite likely against their better intentions, they prepared the way for the obscuring and eventual undermining of the complex relations between sin and mercy, guilt and grace, purification and worthiness, that are central to the Christian faith.

Anyone who accepts the immortality of the soul and meditates on human sinfulness will naturally come to believe in an otherworldly purgatory or place of purification, as the great pagan philosopher Plato did; anyone who has lengthy experience of spiritual direction will value auricular confession as the most effective means for conquering faults; anyone who understands the bipolar constitution of man, sensual and spiritual, will sense the need for sacramentals like ikons, holy water, and prayer beads to keep him on the path of virtue. To get rid of all these is to signify that one’s conception of man is deeply flawed, or that one believes sin can be conquered by oneself alone—a conquest that has surely never been seen in the history of the world—or finally, that one has, in practice, lost sight of the seriousness of sin itself. Without an understanding of what sin is, how it is or will be punished, how it can be forgiven and avoided, its reality is likely to become subjectivized and ultimately discarded.

Those who say that fear of hell is a selfish or unworthy motive for turning to God and keeping away from sin show how little they know about man and his weaknesses. They have not looked closely enough at fallen nature’s weary brow, creased by temptation, stubbornness, and irresolution. Without the fear of hell, hell itself would be far more crowded. Take away this fear and you remove the sting, the trumpet blast, that some wandering sinners need to get them into the confessional and down on their knees. Moreover, faithful Christians need reminding from time to time of what they stand to lose by abandoning the life of grace. St. Thomas, a very sensible man, had this to say: "Men avoid wrongdoing by reminding themselves of the penalties: reflecting on damnation, we are warned against sin, for how long, keen, and manifold are the pains of hell: ‘in all thy works, remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin’ (Ecclus. 7:40)." One cannot protest strongly enough against authors who attack the Western Church on this matter. An attack on the doctrine of repenting for fear of hell (which is traditionally known as imperfect contrition) stems from a combination of naiveté and pride. Fear of hell may have been abused from time to time by preachers who forgot to mingle mercy with severity. Perhaps it may have been set up as a kind of barrier preventing laymen from deepening their friendship with Christ. Nevertheless, it is both unrealistic and impious to try to eradicate or denigrate the motive of fear itself, much less the necessary role of fear in the spiritual life of fallen man. It is not difficult to see that if fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, as Scripture teaches, there is reason to believe that fear of hell can be the beginning of sincere metanoia or conversion of heart. As Kierkegaard says:

Alas, just as the teacher’s strictness is necessary at times, not to punish inattention but in order to get attention, in order to constrain the pupil to look at that which ought to be looked at instead of sitting distracted and being cheated by looking at all sorts of things—so also the fear of perdition must help the sufferer to look at that which ought to be looked at and thereby help him to discover the joy of it.

Similar remarks are in order against those who criticize Christians for obeying Christ and His Church "in order to gain heaven." There are Christians, no doubt, whose attitude about salvation is a hidden form of selfishness or individualism hiding beneath a cloak of piety, and this, of course, is very wrong. But it is time to recover a vigorous and healthy love of heaven. Did not Christ come to save us, did He not tell us again and again what we must do to save our souls and join Him in paradise? Is it not evident from His loving words, especially in the "farewell discourses" recorded in the Gospel of St. John, that He longs to bring us into the kingdom of His Father and seat us at the marriage feast of the Lamb? It is no less clear that His disciples have always labored to gain the beatific vision and its perfect communion with God, that the whole New Testament takes the theme of salvation as its "agenda," and that the Church in her wisdom has taught us to seek salvation before and above all other things. God made us for this end, that we could be united to Him in a love freely willed and freely enjoyed, a vision of Him who is our Sovereign Lord, our divine Spouse. God created man in order to elevate and divinize him. As the Catechism teaches (1024): "This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity—this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed. . .is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness." To dwell everlastingly in the kingdom of heaven, wedded to God by a bond of indissoluble love, is our perfection, the final and all-surpassing gift of love He has prepared for us. By prayer and sacrifice, may we be made worthy to utter the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch: "There is living water in me, water that murmurs and says within me: Come to the Father."

Peter A. Kwasniewski is an Instructor in Philosophy at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria.

End Notes

1. Exposition on the Apostle’s Creed, "He descended into hell," in St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Texts, ed. and trans. Thomas Gilby (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 264.

2. See Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. I: Reflection and Mystery, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 204 et seq.

3. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. II: Faith and Reality, trans. René Hague (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 194.

4. Mystery of Being, vol. II, 36.

5. See Wojtyla’s profound analysis of shame in Love and Responsibility.

6. CCC 1021: "Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ."

7. Eastern Orthodox theologians who reject purgatory argue that, owing to the ontological status of the creature, there can be no place for a temporary purification; heaven involves, rather, an eternal purification of the saints. But this position is false for two reasons. First, a soul that bears the stains of sin cannot be admitted to the divine presence at all; it must first be made holy to its fullest capacity. Second, there is not an infinite potential for holiness on the part of a finite creature; there is only so much goodness that a human being can possess. This is the goodness required for heaven, and once a soul has attained it by the grace of God poured out in the purifications of the "middle state," there is no need for still further purification of uncleanness or unworthiness. The intellectual creature is not unworthy of the divine presence simply by being a creature, but rather, by being an unfaithful servant. When its infidelity is cured, it can stand humbly but worthily before the Almighty. The difference between West and East is rooted in a much deeper difference, namely, whether or not the blessed enjoy the immediate vision of the divine essence in itself; and it may also be connected to a difference in the degree of dignity accorded to man as an image of God. The Western insistence on purgatory, on the need for purification, stems from a higher estimation of the worthiness this image is capable of possessing in the very presence of God.

8. Cardinal Ratzinger argues that the tacit dismissal of Purgatory by contemporary Catholic theologians can be traced to a false attitude of "biblicism which was first developed in the Protestant tradition and which has rapidly come into Catholic theology as well. Here people maintain that those explicit passages of Scripture about the state which tradition calls ‘Purgatory’ (the term is certainly a relatively late one, but the reality was evidently believed from the very beginning) are inadequate and insufficiently clear. But as I have said elsewhere, this biblicism has scarcely anything to do with the Catholic understanding, according to which the Bible must be read within the Church and her faith" (The Ratzinger Re port, trans. Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985], 146). Nevertheless, Catholic authors have noted aspects of the doctrine of purgatory in numerous Scriptural passages: see, for example, Heb. 5:1, Ps. 66 [65]:9-12, Is. 4:4, Micah 7:8-9, Zech. 9:11, Mal. 3:3, 1 Cor. 3:13-15, Mt. 12:36, Lk. 12:57-59 and Mt. 5:25-26, Phil. 2:10, 2 Macc. 12:46, Mt. 12:32.

9. Sono Un Teologo Felice—Colloquicon Francesco Strazzari, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 66. See also Hans Ursvon Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), p. 79: "According to Paul, we must all undergo the fiery judgment of God (1 Cor. 3:12-15). It will test each person’s life’s work, with quite different results: what some have built will stand, what others have built will burn away to nothing. In the Catholic milieu this personal ‘dimension’ or ‘intensity’ or ‘duration’ of the process of judgment (which cannot be expressed in terms of time) is called ‘purgatory’ or ‘place of purification’ (or better: ‘purification process’)."

10. The Soul Afire, ed. H. A. Reinhold (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 246-47.

11. Review of The Fire of Love (Sophia Institute Press), in New Oxford Review, December 1997, 39-40.

12. Christian Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 102.

13. Gilby, Theological Texts, 264.

14. Our Church in her wisdom asks us to recite an act of contrition before we receive absolution. The traditional formula, simple though it is, deserves much pondering: "O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread Thy just punishments, but most of all because these sins have offended Thee, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I do firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin."

15. Christian Discourses, 142.

16. To think that we could somehow love God "just for His sake," and not because of our radical neediness, our hunger and thirst for His presence, our wants—even Kierkegaard, no friend to Catholic theology, sees the error, the blasphemy, of this. See "All Things Must Serve Us for Good—When We Love God," in Christian Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 188.