Limbo, Abraham’s Bosom, and the Harrowing of Hell

Research Vault article. Written 2026-10-17 from an exhaustive search of all 259 books in the vault (coverage 259/259 on every term set, see Appendix A), supplemented by magisterial texts the vault does not hold (Benedictus Deus 1336, Florence 1439, Auctorem Fidei 1794, the 2007 International Theological Commission study). Page numbers in the form “p. N” are the PDF page markers of the extracted text in 20-Extracted-Text, so every quotation can be re-opened.

1The problem in one paragraph

Say “Limbo” to most Catholics today and they picture a nursery of unbaptised babies. Say it to a Protestant and they hear a Catholic invention with no basis in Scripture. Say it to an Orthodox Christian and they will tell you their tradition never used the word at all (Ware, The Orthodox Church, p. 443). All three are reacting to the wrong Limbo. The Limbo that is woven into the Apostles’ Creed, preached by the Fathers, narrated in Dante, and seen by Emmerich and Ágreda is the Limbo of the Fathers (limbus patrum), which Scripture calls Abraham’s bosom, paradise, the prison, and Sheol / Hades. It is the place where every just soul from Adam to John the Baptist waited for the Redeemer. It was not hell. It was not purgatory. It no longer exists, because Christ emptied it on Holy Saturday. The babies’ Limbo (limbus infantium) is a different, later, and merely hypothetical thing that borrowed the name. Keeping the two apart dissolves most of the confusion.

2The word

Limbus is Latin for a hem, fringe, or border. Fr John Laux: the place “is called Hell [in the Creed], and in Catholic tradition Limbo, from the Latin word limbus, a fringe or edge, because it was supposed to be located beneath the earth and on the outskirts of Hell” (Chief Truths of the Faith, p. 127). The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia gives the same etymology, “hem or border, as of a garment,” and immediately divides the word into its two theological senses: (a) “the temporary place or state of the souls of the just who, although purified from sin, were excluded from the beatific vision until Christ’s triumphant ascension into Heaven (the limbus patrum)”; (b) “the permanent place or state of those unbaptized children and others who, dying without grievous personal sin, are excluded from the beatific vision on account of original sin alone (the limbus infantium)” (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Limbo”). Nicky Eltz’s purgatory book records the homely version of the etymology, “the space between the print on a page and the edge of the paper itself” (Get Us Out Of Here!!, p. 144). The image is exact: a margin, a place on the edge of the page but not off it.

John Salza’s footnote states the distinction that this whole article turns on: “This limbo of the Fathers (limbus patrum) is different from the possible limbo of babies (limbus infantium), although they may be components of the same spiritual abode” (The Biblical Basis for Purgatory, p. 32 n. 40). Note the asymmetry in his own wording: the first is a fact of the Creed, the second is “possible.”

3The Scriptural data

3.1 Sheol and Hades: one realm, two conditions

The Old Testament’s Sheol and the Greek Hades name the abode of all the dead, good and bad. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is blunt about it: “Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, ‘hell’ — Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek — because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into ‘Abraham’s bosom’” (CCC 633, vault edition p. 224). Josephus, retelling 1 Samuel 28, has the witch of Endor call Samuel “out of Hades,” and Samuel tell Saul “thou shalt then be with me [in Hades]” (Antiquities, p. 387). A prophet and a reprobate king, the same address.

3.2 Second Temple Judaism had already divided it

The vault’s Enoch literature shows that the compartmented underworld of Luke 16 was not a Christian novelty. In 1 Enoch 22 the patriarch is shown “four hollow places, deep and wide and very smooth,” and Raphael explains: “These hollow places have been created for this very purpose, that the spirits of the souls of the dead should be gathered here… until the day of their judgment.” Enoch asks why one is separated from another and is told: “These three have been made that the spirits of the dead might be separated. Divisions have been made for the spirits of the righteous, in which there is the bright spring of water. And one for sinners when they die and are buried in the earth and judgment has not been executed on them in their lifetime” (Lumpkin, The Books of Enoch, pp. 52–53). Lumpkin’s own margin sets 1 Enoch 22:9 beside Luke 16:26, “between us and you there is a great gulf fixed” (p. 13). The righteous dead have water and refreshment; the wicked have none. That is exactly the architecture of Dives and Lazarus, and the Catholic Encyclopedia’s judgement is measured: the belief “finds repeated expression” in the extra-canonical writings of the second and first centuries B.C., and “New Testament references to the subject remove all doubt as to the current Jewish belief in the time of Christ” (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Limbo”).

3.3 The New Testament texts

Luke 16:19–31. “The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom… between us and you a great chasm has been fixed” (Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, p. 386). The study note: Abraham’s bosom “refers to a temporary realm within Hades where the righteous souls of the Old Covenant era waited patiently for Christ to open the gates of heaven (Eph 4:8–10)” (p. 471). Lazarus is comforted. Dives is in flame. A chasm divides them. Both are in Hades. This single parable supplies every element of the doctrine.

Luke 23:43. “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (p. 2510). Christ’s body went to the tomb and his soul went down, so “Paradise” here cannot mean the heaven of the Trinity. Salza: “The Good Thief would have actually gone to Abraham’s bosom until Christ opened the gates of heaven with His Ascension. Thus, Jesus uses the word ‘Paradise’ in Luke 23:43 in this broader sense” (Biblical Basis for Purgatory, p. 116 n. 187). Spirago says the same: “Our Lord called the place ‘paradise’ (Luke xxiii. 43), because by His arrival the prison-house would be turned into paradise” (The Catechism Explained, p. 192).

1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6. “Being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah” (p. 1348); “the gospel was preached even to the dead” (p. 2822). This is the Creed’s proof-text, though the Fathers disagreed sharply over who the “spirits in prison” were (section 4.6 below).

Ephesians 4:8–10. “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives… he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth” (p. 2731). The Vulgate’s captivam duxit captivitatem, “led captivity captive,” is the phrase the liturgy and the Fathers use for the souls Christ brought out.

Acts 2:24–31, quoting Psalm 16:10. “God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death… ‘For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One see corruption’” (p. 2573). Peter’s first sermon assumes Christ’s soul was in Hades and did not stay there.

Hebrews 11:39–40. “And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (p. 2803). The Ignatius note: “Not until Jesus opened the way to glory did the righteous of the OT enter the inheritance they saw from a distance” (p. 1297). This is the plainest statement in Scripture that the patriarchs were waiting.

Zechariah 9:11. “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (p. 2192). Alphonsus glosses the “pit, wherein is no water” as “what is called Limbo by the Fathers, in which there was none of the water of joy” (Alphonsus Collection, p. 1935). Aquinas cites the same verse three times in his treatment of the Descent.

Hosea 13:14; Matthew 12:40; Revelation 1:18. “O death, I will be thy death; O hell, I will be thy bite” (Vulgate, as quoted by Aquinas and the Roman Catechism); “three days and three nights in the heart of the earth”; “I have the keys of Death and Hades” (p. 2846). Together these supply the “three days,” the descent, and the victory.

4The Fathers

The corpus holds three overlapping patristic collections. The passages below were located with the terms “Abraham’s bosom,” “bosom of Abraham,” “descended into hell,” “led captivity captive,” “Gospel of Nicodemus” and their variants, across all three.

4.1 Irenaeus (c. 180): Christ kept “the law of the dead”

“If, then, the Lord observed the law of the dead, that He might become the first-begotten from the dead, and tarried until the third day ‘in the lower parts of the earth;’ then afterwards rising in the flesh… how must these men not be put to confusion, who allege that ‘the lower parts’ refer to this world of ours… For as the Lord ‘went away in the midst of the shadow of death,’ where the souls of the dead were, yet afterwards arose in the body… it is manifest that the souls of His disciples also… shall go away into the invisible place allotted to them by God, and there remain until the resurrection” (Against Heresies V.31.2, Early Church Fathers Collection, p. 2798). Irenaeus is arguing against Gnostics who thought the soul flew straight to the heavens at death. His answer is that even Christ’s soul went down first.

4.2 Tertullian (c. 207): “not in heaven, yet higher than hell”

Tertullian wrote the sentence the whole later tradition repeats. Refuting Marcion, who wanted to hand Abraham’s bosom to a different god, he writes: “The Scripture itself… expressly distinguishes between Abraham’s bosom, where the poor man dwells, and the infernal place of torment. ‘Hell’ (I take it) means one thing, and ‘Abraham’s bosom’ another. ‘A great gulf’ is said to separate those regions… It must therefore be evident… that there is some determinate place called Abraham’s bosom… This region, therefore, I call Abraham’s bosom. Although it is not in heaven, it is yet higher than hell, and is appointed to afford an interval of rest to the souls of the righteous, until the consummation of all things shall complete the resurrection” (Against Marcion IV.34, pp. 7253–7254). Elsewhere he says Christ in the restored Israel will give “after this life’s course is over, repose in Hades in Abraham’s bosom” (III.24, p. 7047).

In A Treatise on the Soul 55 he gives the location and draws the consequence: Hades is “a vast deep space in the interior of the earth… inasmuch as we read that Christ in His death spent three days in the heart of the earth… nor did He ascend into the heights of heaven before descending into the lower parts of the earth, that He might there make the patriarchs and prophets partakers of Himself” (p. 6575). He then rebukes Christians “who are too proud to believe that the souls of the faithful deserve a place in the lower regions,” and adds a striking detail: Perpetua, on the day of her passion, “saw only her fellow-martyrs” in Paradise, because “the sword which guarded the entrance permitted none to go in thereat, except those who had died in Christ and not in Adam” (p. 6576). Tertullian overshoots here (he keeps ordinary Christians in Hades until the resurrection, a view the Church did not adopt), but his testimony to a graded underworld with Abraham’s bosom above the place of torment is early and explicit.

4.3 Hippolytus (c. 220): the fullest early map

The fragment Against Plato, on the Cause of the Universe is the closest thing in the ante-Nicene corpus to a floor plan. “Hades is a place in the created system, rude, a locality beneath the earth, in which the light of the world does not shine… This locality has been destined to be as it were a guard-house for souls, at which the angels are stationed as guards… the righteous shall obtain the incorruptible and unfading kingdom, who indeed are at present detained in Hades, but not in the same place with the unrighteous. For to this locality there is one descent, at the gate whereof we believe an archangel is stationed with a host… the righteous, being conducted in the light toward the right, and being hymned by the angels… are brought to a locality full of light. And there the righteous from the beginning dwell… There, there is neither fierce heat, nor cold, nor thorn; but the face of the fathers and the righteous is seen to be always smiling, as they wait for the rest and eternal revival in heaven which succeed this location. And we call it by the name Abraham’s bosom. But the unrighteous are dragged toward the left by angels who are ministers of punishment… For a deep and vast abyss is set there in the midst, so that neither can any of the righteous in sympathy think to pass it, nor any of the unrighteous dare to cross it” (pp. 13573–13574). Everything is here: one Hades, two regions, light to the right and fire to the left, a gulf between, the righteous smiling but still waiting for heaven. Hippolytus also holds that the “lake of unquenchable fire” is as yet empty, “prepared against the day determined by God” (p. 13573), so even the place of torment he describes is a pre-judgment Hades rather than Gehenna proper.

4.4 Clement of Alexandria (c. 200): the Descent as preaching

Clement reads 1 Peter 3 as a real sermon to the dead and extends it: “The Lord preached the Gospel to those in Hades… Do not [the Scriptures] show that the Lord preached the Gospel to those that perished in the flood, or rather had been chained, and to those kept ‘in ward and guard’?… it was requisite… that as here, so also there, the best of the disciples should be imitators of the Master; so that He should bring to repentance those belonging to the Hebrews, and they the Gentiles” (Stromata VI.6, pp. 5046–5047). Clement’s generosity, offering post-mortem conversion to righteous pagans, was not followed by the Latin West, but it shows how literally the first generations took “he preached to the spirits in prison.”

4.5 Jerome (c. 396): “Before Christ’s coming Abraham is in the lower regions”

Jerome supplies the two cleanest patristic one-liners. Consoling Heliodorus on the death of Nepotian: “If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob be in hell, who can be in the kingdom of heaven?… Even if Lazarus is seen in Abraham’s bosom and in a place of refreshment, still the lower regions cannot be compared with the kingdom of heaven. Before Christ’s coming Abraham is in the lower regions: after Christ’s coming the robber is in paradise. And therefore at His rising again ‘many bodies of the saints which slept arose’” (Letter 60.3, p. 70867). Writing to Paula about Blesilla, he explains why Jacob mourned Joseph as one going “into the grave”: “he only did so because Christ had not yet broken open the door of paradise, nor quenched with his blood the flaming sword and the whirling of the guardian cherubim. (Hence in the story of Dives and Lazarus, Abraham and the beggar, though really in a place of refreshment, are described as being in hell. (Apud inferos, Luke xvi. 23.))” (Letter 39.4, p. 70636). That parenthesis is the whole doctrine: in hell by location and vocabulary, in a place of refreshment by condition.

4.6 Augustine (414): the honest difficulty

Augustine’s Letter 164 to Evodius is the most important single patristic text on the subject because it refuses to smooth anything over. Evodius had asked whether Christ, descending, “preached the gospel to them all, and by grace delivered them all from darkness and punishment, so that… hell having then been completely emptied” (NPNF Series 1, p. 987). Augustine answers that the deliverance was “not of all, but only of some whom He judged worthy” (p. 990). Then he worries aloud: “As to the first man, the father of mankind, it is agreed by almost the entire Church that the Lord loosed him from that prison… Some add to this that the same favour was bestowed on the holy men of antiquity, on Abel, Seth, Noah and his house, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the other patriarchs and prophets… But, for my part, I cannot see how Abraham, into whose bosom also the pious beggar in the parable was received, can be understood to have been in these pains… I have not been able to find anywhere in Scripture the name of hell used in a good sense. And if this use of the term is nowhere found in the divine Scriptures, assuredly the bosom of Abraham, that is, the abode of a certain secluded rest, is not to be believed to be a part of hell… What is that great gulf but a chasm completely separating those places” (pp. 990–991). He concludes: “I have not yet found what benefit He, when He descended into hell, conferred upon those righteous ones who were in Abraham’s bosom, from whom I see that, so far as regarded the beatific presence of His Godhead, He never withdrew Himself” (p. 991).

Augustine is not denying the Descent, which he affirms (“that He was, however, in hell… I do not doubt,” p. 991). He is insisting on two things that matter for this article: Abraham’s bosom was not a place of pains, and therefore in the strict Scriptural sense not “hell.” Aquinas will spend an article reconciling him with the tradition (section 5.2). Augustine also, in the same letter, gives the alternative reading of 1 Peter 3 that the Ignatius Study Bible summarises: Christ “by an exercise of his preexistent divinity, preached to the ancient world through the person of Noah” (Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, p. 1361), so that the verse would not be about the Descent at all. The Study Bible’s essay surveys Clement, Augustine, Bellarmine, and the modern Enochic reading in which “the spirits in prison” are the imprisoned Watchers of Genesis 6 (pp. 1361–1362; so also Heiser, Unseen Realm, pp. 316–317, and the NABRE note at p. 4614). The Watchers reading does not touch the doctrine of Limbo; it only removes one proof-text, and the Creed never rested on that text alone.

4.7 Chrysostom: “Abraham’s bosom” as a Jewish name for the Kingdom

Preaching on “many shall come from east and west and sit down with Abraham” (Mt 8:11), Chrysostom notes that Christ softens his message to the Jews “by speaking of ‘Abraham’s bosom’ instead of ‘the kingdom.’ For neither was that term familiar to them” (Homilies on Matthew, NPNF Series 1, p. 10101). The remark confirms that “Abraham’s bosom” was ordinary first-century Jewish idiom for the blessed dead.

4.8 The Gospel of Nicodemus: the Harrowing dramatised

The apocryphal Acts of Pilate / Gospel of Nicodemus (fourth or fifth century in its present form) turned the Descent into theatre and shaped a thousand years of iconography. Satan, “the heir of darkness,” tells Hades to make ready for Jesus; Hades, wiser, is afraid: “if he be so, no one will be able to withstand him.” Then “there was a great voice like thunder, saying: Lift up your gates, O ye rulers; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting gates; and the King of glory shall come in. When Hades heard, he said to Satan: Go forth, if thou art able, and withstand him… Then Hades says to his demons: Secure well and strongly the gates of brass and the bars of iron.” The patriarchs inside begin to taunt their jailer: “O all-devouring and insatiable! open, that the King of glory may come in. David the prophet says: Dost thou not know, O blind, that I when living in the world prophesied this saying: Lift up your gates, O ye rulers?” (Greek form, chs. 4–5, pp. 24056–24059). In the Latin form “the King of glory, trampling on death by His majesty, and seizing Prince Satan, delivered him to the power of Hades, and drew Adam to His brightness,” and Hades rounds on Satan: “O Prince Satan, possessor of the keys of the lower regions, all thy riches which thou hadst acquired by the tree of transgression and the loss of paradise, thou hast now lost by the tree of the cross” (pp. 24144–24146). Christ’s closing sentence to Hades is the one the Fathers would have endorsed: “Satan the prince will be in thy power for ever, in place of Adam and his sons, my just ones” (p. 24147). The damned are not released; the just are. The brass gates and iron bars are Psalm 107:16 and Isaiah 45:2, which Aquinas also quotes.

5Why Limbo is not Hell

5.1 The Creed’s word “hell” is not the damned’s hell

The Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) settles the vocabulary. On the Fifth Article it teaches that “by the word hell is not here meant the grave, as some have not less impiously than ignorantly imagined… But, hell here signifies those hidden abodes, in which are detained the souls that have not obtained heavenly bliss” (Q. II, p. 58). It then counts those abodes: “These abodes, however, are not all of one and the same kind, for amongst them is that most loathsome and dark prison, in which the souls of the damned together with the unclean spirits are tortured in eternal and inextinguishable fire. This place is also called Gehenna, the bottomless pit, and in its literal signification, hell. There is also the fire of purgatory, in which the souls of the just are purified by punishment for a stated time… Lastly, a third sort of receptacle is that in which were received the souls of the saints who died before the coming of Christ our Lord; and where, without any sense of pain, sustained by the blessed hope of redemption, they enjoyed a tranquil abode. The souls, then, of these pious men, who in the bosom of Abraham were expecting the Saviour, Christ the Lord liberated, descending into hell” (Q. III, p. 59).

Three receptacles. Gehenna, purgatory, Abraham’s bosom. Christ’s soul went to the third.

The Baltimore Catechism put it in a form every American Catholic child once memorised: “Q. 65. Did ‘hell’ always mean only that state in which the damned are punished? A. The word ‘hell’ was sometimes used to signify the grave or a low place. In the Apostles’ Creed it means Limbo” (No. 3, p. 15). And the explanatory No. 4 adds that when Jacob says “I will go down with sorrow into hell,” “He meant the grave. Limbo is not the same…” (p. 89; the Kinkead Explanation, p. 133, gives the same text). Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s 2023 Credo keeps the traditional answer: “423. Into which part of hell did Our Lord’s soul descend substantially? Into what theologians call the limbo of the Fathers: the waiting place of those souls who were purified from their faults, united to God by faith and charity, but still awaiting the Redemption of Christ… This place is also called the ‘bosom of Abraham’ (see Lk 16:22–23)” (p. 110).

5.2 Aquinas: “it is not styled hell”

Aquinas devotes eight articles to the Descent (Summa Theologiae III q. 52, pp. 4534–4548). Article 2 asks “Whether Christ went down into the hell of the lost?” and answers with a distinction that is the key to everything that follows. Christ was present in every part of the underworld by effect, but in only one by essence: “going down into the hell of the lost He wrought this effect, that by descending thither He put them to shame for their unbelief and wickedness: but to them who were detained in Purgatory He gave hope of attaining to glory: while upon the holy Fathers detained in hell solely on account of original sin, He shed the light of glory everlasting. In another way a thing is said to be in a place through its essence: and in this way Christ’s soul descended only into that part of hell wherein the just were detained” (p. 4537).

Replying to Augustine’s objection, Aquinas explains why both “hell” and “not hell” can be true of Abraham’s bosom: “The expression ‘Abraham’s bosom’ may be taken in two senses. First of all, as implying that restfulness, existing there, from sensible pain; so that in this sense it cannot be called hell, nor are there any sorrows there. In another way it can be taken as implying the privation of longed-for glory: in this sense it has the character of hell and sorrow. Consequently, that rest of the blessed is now called Abraham’s bosom, yet it is not styled hell, nor are sorrows said to be now in Abraham’s bosom” (a. 2 ad 4, pp. 4538–4539). The only “sorrow” there was “of hoped-for glory being deferred, according to Prov. 13:12: ‘Hope that is deferred afflicteth the soul’” (a. 2 ad 2, p. 4538).

Article 6 then closes the door that Evodius had tried to open: “Whether Christ delivered any of the lost from hell?” No. “His descent into hell brought the fruits of deliverance to them only who were united to His Passion through faith quickened by charity… those detained in the hell of the lost either had no faith in Christ’s Passion, as infidels; or if they had faith, they had no conformity with the charity of the suffering Christ… And on this account Christ’s descent into hell brought them no deliverance from the debt of punishment in hell” (p. 4544). The gloss on Hosea that he quotes is the slogan of the Harrowing: “By leading forth the elect, and leaving there the reprobate” (p. 4544).

5.3 The Catechism of the Catholic Church

“Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him” (CCC 633, p. 225). “In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened heaven’s gates for the just who had gone before him” (CCC 637, p. 225). The Catechism quotes the Roman Catechism directly for the identity of the people freed: “It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Savior in Abraham’s bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell” (CCC 633). And it inserts the ancient Holy Saturday homily: “He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep… ‘I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead’” (CCC 635, p. 225).

5.4 The honest caveat

There is one sense in which the tradition does call Limbo “hell,” and it should be stated rather than hidden. In Catholic Latin, infernum names everything below heaven: the hell of the damned, purgatory, the limbo of the Fathers, and the hypothetical limbo of infants are all “the lower regions.” That is why the Creed says descendit ad inferos; why Jerome says Abraham was apud inferos; why Aquinas speaks of “the hell of the Fathers” and “the hell of the children” (a. 2 obj. 2, p. 4536); and why John XXII (1321) and the Council of Florence (1439) can say that souls dying “in mortal sin, or with only original sin, descend immediately into hell; however, to be punished with different penalties and in different places” (Denzinger 926; cf. 1306). Fr Martin Jugie’s purgatory treatise makes the same linguistic point about the liturgy: the word in the Office of the Dead “means at one time Hell in the strict sense of our usage; at another, Purgatory; again, the sojourn of the just before the coming of the Savior, called ‘Abraham’s bosom’ in the Gospels and the ‘Limbo of the Fathers’ by theologians; yet again, the vague aggregate of all these without distinction” (The Truth about Purgatory, p. 35).

So the accurate statement is this. Limbo was “hell” in the geographical and privative sense (below, and without the vision of God). It was never hell in the sense the word carries today: the Gehenna of the damned, eternal, fiery, and without hope. No source in the vault, patristic, scholastic, catechetical, or mystical, puts a single just soul into that fire, and every one of them puts a fixed gulf between the two.

6Why Limbo is not Purgatory

Four differences, each attested.

1. No pain. “Q. 66. Is Limbo the same place as Purgatory? A. Limbo is not the same place as Purgatory, because the souls in Purgatory suffer, while those in Limbo do not” (Baltimore No. 3, p. 15). The Roman Catechism: “without any sense of pain” (p. 59). Spirago: “This place is called limbo, and is quite distinct from purgatory, though the two places had this feature in common, that in neither place is there the vision of God; for while there is pain to be suffered in purgatory, there was none in limbo; nor was limbo the same as hell, where the pains are eternal; on the contrary the souls in limbo had some consolation (Luke xvi. 25), though entrance to heaven was deferred (Heb. ix. 8)” (The Catechism Explained, p. 192). Emmerich, who saw both, is precise about Limbo proper: “There were no demons in this circle, no pain nor torment, only the ardent longing for the fulfillment of the Promise” (Life of Jesus Christ, 4-vol. ed., p. 1737).

2. A different debt. Purgatory discharges personal temporal punishment. Limbo detained souls who had no personal debt left at all. Aquinas: “the holy Fathers were detained in hell for the reason, that, owing to our first parent’s sin, the approach to the life of glory was not opened” (a. 5, p. 4542); they “were delivered from original as well as actual sin through faith in Christ; also from the penalty of actual sins, but not from the penalty of original sin, whereby they were excluded from glory, since the price of man’s redemption was not yet paid” (a. 5 ad 2, p. 4543). Schneider’s Credo calls them “souls who were purified from their faults” (p. 110). Purgatory is for the imperfect. Limbo held the perfect, waiting on a door.

3. A different ending. Purgatory is emptied soul by soul as each debt is paid. Limbo was emptied all at once by a Person, and then abolished. Spirago: “After the death of Christ limbo ceased to exist” (p. 192). Aquinas, quoting Gregory the Great, draws the contrast himself: “Since our Creator and Redeemer, penetrating the bars of hell, brought out from thence the souls of the elect, He does not permit us to go thither, from whence He has already by descending set others free. But He permits us to go to Purgatory” (a. 8, p. 4547). Benedict XII’s dogmatic constitution Benedictus Deus (1336) defines the result: “souls of all the saints who departed from this world before the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ… immediately after their death… even before the resumption of their bodies and the general judgment after the ascension of our Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, into heaven, have been, are, and will be in heaven… and after the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ have seen and see the divine essence by intuitive vision, and even face to face” (Denzinger 1000). The saints before the Passion are in heaven. Nobody is in Limbo.

4. A different doctrinal status. Purgatory was defined at Lyons II (1274), Florence (1439), and Trent (1563): “if those truly penitent have departed in the love of God, before they have made satisfaction by the worthy fruits of penance… the souls of these are cleansed after death by purgatorial punishments; and… the suffrages of the living faithful are of advantage to them” (Florence, Denzinger 1304; cf. CCC 1031, p. 354). The Limbo of the Fathers was never separately defined because it did not need to be: it is contained in “he descended into hell,” which every Catholic professes every Sunday. The limbo of infants, by contrast, was never defined at all (section 8).

Even those who, like Aquinas, allow that Christ’s Descent also touched purgatory keep the two apart. He concludes that “they who were such as those who are now in Purgatory, were not set free from Purgatory by Christ’s descent into hell. But if any were found such as are now set free from Purgatory by virtue of Christ’s Passion, then there was nothing to hinder them” (a. 8, p. 4547). The reason is theological, not sentimental: “Christ’s Passion had no greater efficacy then than it has now” (p. 4547). Limbo was emptied because its one obstacle, the closed gate, was removed for everyone. Purgatory was not emptied because its obstacle is personal.

7What happened on Holy Saturday

7.1 The doctrine

Aquinas lists three fitting reasons for the Descent: “because He came to bear our penalty in order to free us from penalty… through sin man had incurred not only the death of the body, but also descent into hell”; “that Christ should deliver the captives detained in hell, according to Zech. 9:11”; and “that as He showed forth His power on earth by living and dying, so also He might manifest it in hell, by visiting it and enlightening it” (a. 1, p. 4535). The deliverance was not a march out but an illumination: “When Christ descended into hell He delivered the saints who were there, not by leading them out at once from the confines of hell, but by enlightening them with the light of glory in hell itself. Nevertheless it was fitting that His soul should abide in hell as long as His body remained in the tomb” (a. 4 ad 1, p. 4541). The “bars of hell” he glosses as “the obstacles which kept the holy Fathers from quitting hell, through the guilt of our first parent’s sin; and these bars Christ burst asunder by the power of His Passion” (a. 4 ad 2, p. 4541). The Good Thief “descended locally into hell with Christ… still as to reward he was in paradise, because he enjoyed Christ’s Godhead just as the other saints did” (a. 4 ad 3, p. 4541).

The Roman Catechism adds the pastoral emphasis: Christ “descended, not to suffer aught, but to liberate from the miserable wearisomeness of that captivity the holy and the just, and to impart to them the fruit of his passion” (p. 60); “his august presence at once brought a glorious lustre upon the captives, and filled their souls with boundless joy and gladness. Unto them he also imparted that supreme happiness, which consists in the vision of God, in which he verified his promise to the [dying] thief” (p. 60); and, at the Ascension, he “led captivity captive… [conducting] into the mansions of eternal bliss, the souls of the just, which he had delivered from prison” (p. 70). Schneider: “446. How did Jesus enter into heaven? Victorious, escorted by the angelic host and bringing with Him all the just of the Old Law, the souls in the limbo of the Fathers whom He had redeemed with His blood” (Credo, p. 114). Spirago: “His escort into heaven was formed of the souls released from limbo (Eph. iv. 8)” (p. 196).

7.2 Dante

Virgil, himself a resident of the first circle, is Dante’s eyewitness to the Harrowing:

“I was a novice in this state,
When I saw hither come a Mighty One,
With sign of victory incoronate.
Hence he drew forth the shade of the First Parent,
And that of his son Abel, and of Noah,
Of Moses the lawgiver, and the obedient
Abraham, patriarch, and David, king,
Israel with his father and his children,
And Rachel, for whose sake he did so much,
And others many, and he made them blessed;
And thou must know, that earlier than these
Never were any human spirits saved”
(Inferno IV, Longfellow tr., Doré edition, p. 48)

Dante’s Limbo after the Harrowing is a place where “lamentations none, but only sighs” are heard, “sorrow without torment,” for those who “sinned not” but lacked baptism, who “without hope… live on in desire” (p. 47). This is a poet’s picture of the limbus infantium and of the virtuous pagans, and it is often mistaken for the Church’s teaching about the patriarchs. Note that Dante himself keeps the two apart: the patriarchs are gone, “made blessed”; the unbaptised remain.

7.3 Emmerich

Anne Catherine Emmerich’s vision of the Descent (Good Friday and Holy Saturday, 1823) is the most detailed account in the corpus, and it is worth quoting at length because it independently reproduces the structure the Fathers and Aquinas reasoned their way to.

At the moment of death: “I saw His soul like a luminous phantom descending through the earth near the cross down to the sphere of Limbo” (p. 1682). Then: “I saw the place whither the soul of Jesus went. It seemed to be divided into three parts… Just in front of Limbo, there was a bright, cheerful tract of country clothed in verdure. It is into this that I always see the souls released from Purgatory entering before being conducted to Heaven. The Limbo in which were the souls awaiting Redemption was encompassed by a gray, foggy atmosphere, and divided into different circles… The one on the left contained the souls of the Leaders of the people down to Abraham, that on the right, the souls from Abraham to John the Baptist… They knew Him not, but all were filled with joy and ardent desire. It was as if this place of anxious, distressed longing was suddenly enlarged. The Redeemer passed through them like a refreshing breeze, like light, like dew” (p. 1736). He goes first to “a dimly lighted place in which were our first parents, Adam and Eve. He addressed them, and they adored Him in unspeakable rapture” (p. 1736). The left-hand circle, the pre-Abrahamic leaders, “was a species of Purgatory, for here and there were evil spirits, who in manifold ways worried and distressed some of those souls. The angels knocked and demanded admittance… ‘Open the gates! Open the doors!’… Jesus entered in triumph, while the wicked spirits retired” (pp. 1736–1737).

Then “the soul of the Lord turned to the circle on the right, to Limbo proper. There He met the soul of the good thief going under the escort of angels into Abraham’s bosom, while the bad thief, encompassed by demons, was being dragged down into Hell… This space, or circle, appeared to me to lie higher than the other. It was as if a person climbed from the earth under the churchyard up into the church itself… In this second circle were all the holy Israelites to the left, the Patriarchs, Moses, the Judges, the Kings; on the right, the Prophets and all the ancestors of Jesus, as also His relatives down to Joachim, Anne, Joseph, Zachary, Elizabeth, and John. There were no demons in this circle, no pain nor torment, only the ardent longing for the fulfillment of the Promise now realized” (p. 1737). Lower again she sees “the abiding place of pious pagans who, having had some presentiment of truth, had ardently sighed after it. It was a kind of Purgatory, a place of purification” (p. 1737). Only after all this does Christ approach “the center of the abyss, namely, Hell itself… an immeasurably vast, frightful, black stone building that shone with a metallic luster,” and there he does not deliver but subdues: “Some of the angels forced that multitude of evil spirits to prostrate before Jesus, for all had to acknowledge and adore Him. This was for them the most terrible torment… Lucifer was cast into it, chained” (pp. 1738–1739). Finally “I saw too the redeemed souls in countless numbers leaving the places of their purification, leaving Limbo, and accompanying the soul of the Lord to a place of bliss below the heavenly Jerusalem… The soul of the good thief entered with the rest and again saw the Lord, according to His promise, in Paradise” (p. 1740).

Three things in Emmerich deserve emphasis. First, Limbo proper is higher than the other regions and without demons or pain, exactly Tertullian’s “higher than hell” and the Roman Catechism’s “without any sense of pain.” Second, hell is visited for subjugation only, exactly Aquinas’s article 6. Third, she sees Limbo as a living place in the Old Testament economy: Mary’s birth is “announced also in Limbo” (p. 153; Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, p. 57: “the patriarchs advanced in their state of grace… the place of their sojourn became brighter and more spacious”); John the Baptist after his death “announced the near coming of the Redeemer” to the patriarchs (p. 1070); and in Gethsemane Jesus is shown “a long flight of steps leading down to Limbo. There He beheld Adam and Eve, all the Patriarchs and Prophets, the just of the Old Law, His Mother’s parents, and John the Baptist. They were with longing so intense awaiting His coming into that nether world that at the sight His loving Heart grew strong and courageous. His death was to open Heaven to these languishing captives!” (p. 1506).

7.4 Ágreda

Mary of Ágreda’s Mystical City of God shares every structural feature and adds the clock. “The Soul of Christ, united to the Divinity, descended to Limbo in order to release the holy Fathers from the subterranean prison, where they had been detained since the death of the first just man that had died in expectance of the advent of the Redeemer of the whole human race. By the presence of the most holy Soul this obscure cavern was converted into a heaven and was filled with a wonderful splendor; and to the souls therein contained was imparted the clear vision of the Divinity. In one instant they passed from the state of long-deferred hope to the possession of glory” (p. 414). “The divine Soul of Christ our Redeemer remained in Limbo from half past three of Friday afternoon, until after three of the Sunday morning following” (p. 415). Earlier in her narrative the archangel “Michael betook himself to the holy Patriarchs in Limbo” with news of the Incarnation (p. 226); the Holy Innocents were borne by angels “to Limbo or to the bosom of Abraham. By their arrival they rejoiced the holy ancients and confirmed them in the hope of speedy liberation” (p. 260); and the dying Joseph is told to go “to the Prophets and Saints, who await thee in Limbo” (p. 295). Mary’s own canticle at the Annunciation addresses them: “O, ye ancient Forefathers and Prophets, and all ye just, that are detained in Limbo and are waiting in the bosom of Abraham, now shall you be consoled” (p. 164).

7.5 Alphonsus

St Alphonsus, meditating on the Mass, has the priest at the Memento of the Dead recall that “when our Lord drew his last breath on the cross… his holy soul descended in triumph to Limbo and Purgatory in order to console and deliver the just that were expecting his coming” (Alphonsus Collection, p. 4115). On Psalm 15 (16) he paraphrases David as Christ: “Thou, O Lord! wilt not allow my soul to remain long in limbo, nor wilt Thou suffer my body, which is holy, to undergo corruption in the tomb” (p. 4468), and on the resurrection psalm: “his soul coming forth from Limbo and his body from the tomb” (p. 9711).

8The other Limbo: unbaptised infants

Everything above concerns the limbus patrum. The babies’ Limbo is a separate question with a separate history, and the two are confused only because they share a name.

Origin. The problem is created by two Scriptural certainties, “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (Jn 3:5) and “nothing unclean shall enter” heaven (Rev 21:27), set against the instinct that a child who never sinned should not burn. Salza lays the syllogism out: “Because baptism alone washes away original sin, unbaptized persons cannot go to heaven; however, because God does not punish those who don’t commit deliberate sin, unbaptized persons without serious sin do not justly deserve hell. If true, this would necessitate the existence of a third place… It is the common opinion of the Fathers and doctors of the Church that souls in limbo, although deprived of the Beatific Vision, experience a state of natural happiness” (Biblical Basis for Purgatory, p. 18). He is careful: “the Church has never formally elevated limbo to a dogma of the faith… Catholics are not required to believe in limbo as an article of faith” (p. 19).

Augustine’s harder view and Carthage. Augustine did not teach a painless Limbo for infants. He held that they are damned, with the “mildest pain” (ITC 2007, §26). The Council of Carthage (418), in a canon preserved in the vault’s edition of the Seven Councils, went so far as to anathematise anyone who said “that in the kingdom of heaven there will be a certain middle place, or some place somewhere, in which infants live in happiness who have gone forth from this life without baptism” (p. 1103). Note the precise target: a middle place in the kingdom of heaven, that is, a Pelagian salvation without baptism. A later Church historian in the vault summarises Augustine’s position as “Limbo (‘boundary’), which is technically Hell, in that those who live there are deprived of the presence of God, but they do not experience active torment” (History of the Catholic Church, p. 111), but that softening is really the medieval development, not Augustine’s own.

The medieval softening. Aquinas moved the infants out of the fire. “Man is punished for original sin in the children’s limbo, where there is no pain of sense” (Summa I-II q. 89 a. 6, p. 1964). In the Descent articles he states that “there are no sorrows in the hell of the Fathers, nor in the hell of the children, since they are not punished with sensible pain on account of any actual sin, but only with the pain of loss on account of original sin” (p. 4536), and, decisively for the distinction this article is drawing, that the Harrowing did not reach them: “the children who had died in original sin were in no way united to Christ’s Passion by faith and love… Consequently, Christ’s descent into hell did not deliver the children from thence” (a. 7, p. 4546). Schneider’s Credo reproduces Aquinas’s reasoning that such souls “do not know that they are deprived of such a good, and they accordingly do not grieve” (p. 380). Ware observes that Aquinas “maintained that they go not to Hell but to Limbo – a view widely accepted until recently by Roman theologians. So far as I can discover, Orthodox writers do not make use of the idea of Limbo” (The Orthodox Church, p. 443).

The magisterium guards the hypothesis without defining it. John XXII (1321) and Florence (1439) teach that souls with “only original sin descend immediately into hell; however, to be punished with different penalties and in different places” (Denzinger 926, 1306), which leaves room for a painless “place” but does not name it. When the Jansenist Synod of Pistoia dismissed the children’s limbo as “a Pelagian fable,” Pius VI condemned that dismissal as “false, rash, injurious to Catholic schools” (Auctorem Fidei, 1794, Denzinger 2626). The 2007 International Theological Commission reads this history exactly: “Papal interventions during this period, then, protected the freedom of the Catholic schools to wrestle with this question. They did not endorse the theory of Limbo as a doctrine of faith. Limbo, however, was the common Catholic teaching until the mid-20th century” (§26). Laux’s 1930s textbook is representative of that common teaching: “God has not revealed to us what becomes of those children who die without Baptism. They are certainly not condemned to hell. Some theologians say that they live in a place of natural happiness called the Limbo of Children” (Mass and the Sacraments, p. 30).

Where it stands now. The 1992 Catechism does not use the word. “As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children… allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism” (CCC 1261, p. 418). The International Theological Commission, with Benedict XVI’s approval, concluded in 2007 that “the idea of Limbo, which the Church has used for many centuries to designate the destiny of infants who die without Baptism, has no clear foundation in revelation” (§3); that it “remains a possible theological opinion” (§41); and that “in the development of doctrine, the solution in terms of Limbo can be surpassed in view of a greater theological hope” (§95). Schneider’s 2023 Credo still presents natural happiness as “a widespread theological opinion” while conceding “their destiny ultimately remains a mystery which we entrust to the loving providence of God” (p. 380). The anonymous Visions of Purgatory reports a vision of aborted children going to “what is traditionally called limbo… a heaven without the glory of the beatific vision of God, or a hell without any suffering,” and its own editor footnotes the CCC against it (pp. 48, 85 n. 22). Eltz’s “Children’s Heaven,” with Masses said to “lift them up into Heaven” (p. 144), and his purgatory-souls’ remark that “among the very young there are also some adults” (p. 92), are private claims with no standing in theology; he says as much himself (“I look forward to hearing from reputable theologians”).

The upshot for this article. The babies’ Limbo is (1) a hypothesis, (2) never defined, (3) never emptied, (4) untouched by the Harrowing, and (5) now regarded by the Church’s own theological commission as surpassable. The Limbo of the Fathers is (1) implied by an article of the Creed, (2) attested from Irenaeus onward, (3) emptied on Holy Saturday, (4) the whole point of the Harrowing, and (5) confirmed as empty by a dogmatic definition (Benedictus Deus). To let the first colour one’s picture of the second is the root misconception.

9Did Purgatory come after the Resurrection?

This question was put to the vault directly, and the sources do not all answer the same way. They should be reported as they stand.

9.1 What supports the idea

Visions of Purgatory, an anonymous twentieth-century private revelation, says it outright: “I saw that purgatory was created by Christ the Savior — or more precisely, by the Father in him — when he died on the cross to save all mankind… Before the Redemption, just souls did not have access to heaven; they waited in limbo (the underworld). Divine love attracted them, but justice kept them separated from heaven. The gate had to be opened; it was opened by the crucified and glorified Savior… Christ the Redeemer gave us purgatory as a pledge — a place of strict justice and infinite love” (pp. 33–34). Its angel adds: “Without the cross, there would be no Church, nor any purgatory either” (p. 35).

Emmerich, reflecting on her Holy Saturday vision, says something close: “The descent of Jesus into Hell was the planting of the tree of grace, the tree of His own sacred merits, for the poor souls; and the constant recurrence of today’s releasing of those souls is the fruit brought forth by that tree of grace” (p. 1741), and she sees Christ, every Good Friday, cast “upon Purgatory a glance by which many souls are released” (p. 1741).

The word “Purgatory” is late. Diarmaid MacCulloch: the idea “blossomed in the West, and this place of purging in wise fire, with its promise of an eventual entrance to heaven, was by the twelfth century given a name – Purgatory” (The Reformation, p. 36; cf. Christianity, pp. 391, 572, and the note on Le Goff’s Birth of Purgatory, p. 1091). Conciliar definition followed at Lyons II (1274), Florence (1439), and Trent (Inside Purgatory, p. 17; CCC 1031).

9.2 What contradicts it

Scripture. The Church’s own first proof-text for purgatory is pre-Christian. Judas Maccabeus, about 160 B.C., “made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin” (2 Macc 12:45, Ignatius Bible p. 2315), and the Catechism builds §1032 on it: “This teaching is also based on the practice of prayer for the dead, already mentioned in Sacred Scripture” (p. 354). If the dead of 160 B.C. could be “delivered from their sin” by sacrifice, there was already post-mortem purification before the Cross.

The Roman Catechism. In the very passage on the Descent, it says that before Christ “the souls of the just, on their departure from this life, were borne to the bosom of Abraham; or, as is still the case with those who have something to be expiated, and die indebted [to the divine justice], were purified in the fire of purgatory” (p. 61). The phrase “as is still the case” presupposes purgatory under the Old Law.

Aquinas. He treats purgatory as populated on Holy Saturday. Christ “to them who were detained in Purgatory… gave hope of attaining to glory” (a. 2, p. 4537), and article 8 asks whether he emptied it, answering that only those “already cleansed sufficiently” were released (a. 8 ad 1, pp. 4547–4548).

The mystics. Ágreda: “Then the Lord commanded the angels to bring all the souls in Purgatory, and this was immediately done… Thus on that day of the presence of the King were depopulated the prisonhouses of both Limbo and Purgatory” (p. 415). Emmerich herself, in the same vision quoted above, sees the pre-Abrahamic circle as “a species of Purgatory, for here and there were evil spirits, who in manifold ways worried and distressed some of those souls,” and the pious pagans’ sphere as “a kind of Purgatory, a place of purification” (pp. 1736–1737). Alphonsus has Christ descend “to Limbo and Purgatory” (p. 4115).

The apologists. Salza: “departed souls were required to expiate their sins in the abode of purgatory before Christ opened the gates of heaven with His Ascension, just as they are required to do so today” (Biblical Basis for Purgatory, p. 117 n. 222). Inside Purgatory finds “a rudimentary doctrine of Purgatory existed prior to the birth of Christ” and cites first-century rabbinic teaching that Gehenna purifies souls “before continuing on to Heaven” (pp. 8, 12).

The earliest Christian evidence is in any case within living memory of the apostles. Perpetua (martyred 203) prays for her brother Dinocrates, who died at seven, and sees him “going out from a gloomy place… parched and very thirsty,” unable to reach a pool whose brink was too high; after her prayers she sees “that place which I had formerly observed to be in gloom was now bright; and Dinocrates, with a clean body well clad, was finding refreshment” (Early Church Fathers Collection, pp. 8490–8491). Augustine discusses the case (p. 40017). Whatever one calls that gloomy place, it is a temporary post-mortem purification in A.D. 203, long before the twelfth century gave it a name.

9.3 The defensible form of the claim

The sources will not support “there was no purgatory before the Resurrection.” They will support something more interesting, and the Visions of Purgatory author actually says it: purgatory as “the fiery antechamber of the celestial glory” (p. 33) did not exist before the Cross, because there was no open door for it to be the antechamber of. Before Christ, a purified soul passed from its purification into Abraham’s bosom and waited there (this is what Emmerich’s “bright, cheerful tract of country” in front of Limbo, p. 1736, pictures). After the Ascension it passes into heaven. Purification is older than Calvary. Its terminus changed on Holy Saturday. Benedict XII’s definition fixes the change with a date: the pre-Passion saints, “if then there was… anything to be purged in these when after their death they have been purged,” are in heaven “after the ascension of our Savior” (Denzinger 1000). That is the orthodox way to say that the Resurrection transformed purgatory. It is not the same as saying it created it.

10The four places side by side

11Conclusions

Limbo, in the Creed and the Fathers, means Abraham’s bosom. It is the limbus patrum: the painless, lightless-but-hopeful waiting place of every just soul who died before Christ. It is attested by Luke 16, assumed by Hebrews 11:39–40 and Acts 2, mapped by Hippolytus and Tertullian, worried over by Augustine, systematised by Aquinas, catechised by Trent and Baltimore, and seen in detail by Emmerich and Ágreda. On this the vault speaks with one voice across 259 books.

It was not hell. Every witness places a fixed gulf between Abraham’s bosom and the place of torment; none puts a just soul in fire; the Descent delivered the just and left the damned where they were. The only sense in which it was “hell” is the Latin sense of infernum, “below and without the vision of God,” which the Roman Catechism, Jerome, Aquinas, and the liturgy all use consciously and explain.

It was not purgatory. No pain, no personal debt, a different ending, and a different doctrinal basis. It was emptied once, by Christ, and no longer exists. Purgatory continues.

The babies’ Limbo is a different thing. It borrowed the name in the Middle Ages, was never emptied, was never defined, was never a destination for the patriarchs, and is now treated by the Church as a hypothesis that “can be surpassed.” Conflating it with Abraham’s bosom is the source of most modern confusion about the word.

Purgatory did not begin at the Resurrection; it was redirected by it. 2 Maccabees, the Roman Catechism, Aquinas, Ágreda, and Emmerich’s own vision all place purification before Christ. What the Cross changed was the exit: purified souls once went to Abraham’s bosom and waited; since the Ascension they go to God. The single private revelation that says purgatory was “created” on Calvary is best read in its own terms, as describing purgatory in its new role as “the fiery antechamber of the celestial glory.”