Levels and Degrees

"Now if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble: Every man's work shall be manifest; for the day of the Lord shall declare it, because it shall be revealed in fire; and the fire shall try every man's work, of what sort it is." — 1 Corinthians 3:12–13

Readers who come to Purgatory through the lives of the saints find a landscape: regions one beneath another, a burning sea, prisons sorted by sin, a threshold where only longing remains. Readers who come to it through the councils find a single sentence, that the souls "are purified after death", and nothing about storeys or stages. Both are talking about something real, but not with the same authority. This chapter keeps them apart.

What the Church teaches

Defined dogma The three councils define that the souls of those who die in grace, without having made full satisfaction, are purified after death by purgatorial pains, and that the suffrages of the living help them (Lyons II, Florence, Trent; see IV). They define nothing about regions, levels or stages. Yet the doctrine itself implies difference. What is purified is each soul's own remaining debt and its own remaining attachment to sin, and no two souls come before God carrying the same.

Common teaching That purification differs in degree from soul to soul is the common teaching of the theologians. They draw it from St Paul's image above: many builders on the one foundation, which is Christ, bringing different materials into the same fire. St Thomas Aquinas (in the Supplement, compiled after his death from his commentary on the Sentences) reads the passage this way. "It is clear that wood remains longer in the fire than hay and stubble." And he explains the difference:

"Some venial sins cling more persistently than others, according as the affections are more inclined to them, and more firmly fixed in them. And since that which clings more persistently is more slowly cleansed, it follows that some are tormented in Purgatory longer than others." (Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Appendix I, q. 2, a. 6)

He then separates two measures that devotional writing often runs together:

"Severity of punishment corresponds properly speaking to the amount of guilt: whereas the length corresponds to the firmness with which sin has taken root in its subject. Hence it may happen that one may be delayed longer who is tormented less, and vice versa." (ibid., reply to obj. 1)

The theologians' "degrees", then, are degrees in the condition of each soul, not floors of a building. Fr Schouppe, whose collection supplies most of the older stories below, puts the doctrinal minimum the same way. There are innumerable degrees of expiation, as many as there are debts, from the ten thousand talents of the parable to a few farthings.

East and West agree on the intuition behind this, even where they word the doctrine differently. Pope Benedict XVI notes that "the East does not recognize the purifying and expiatory suffering of souls in the afterlife, but it does acknowledge various levels of beatitude and of suffering in the intermediate state" (Spe Salvi 48).

Open question Whether the degrees amount to distinct regions or stages through which a soul passes, whether demons have any part in the lowest of them, and how a soul moves from one degree to the next: on all of this the Church is silent. St Thomas holds that the elect "are cleansed after this life by the Divine justice alone, and neither by the ministry of the demons whom they have vanquished, nor by the ministry of the angels." He allows only that demons may "accompany them and stand by" (Supplement, Appendix I, q. 2, a. 3). Some of the visions below go further than he does.

What the saints and mystics report

Private revelation Almost every visionary who claims to have seen Purgatory describes it as layered. No two layer it alike.

How to weigh the maps

They agree that there is difference, and disagree about its shape. Three regions, a corridor of prisons, three stages, a great, a middle and a summit, three main levels, "as many levels as souls". If Purgatory had a fixed architecture that God shows to those He chooses, we would expect the plans to match. They do not. What they share is exactly what theology already teaches: that souls differ, and that the difference follows what each soul brought.

They are not independent. Later writers had read the earlier ones. Schouppe set Frances, Lidwina and Magdalen de' Pazzi side by side, and the modern interviewers had read Schouppe. All of them grew up inside a culture shaped by Dante's terraces, which are poetry, not vision. Agreement that has been copied is not corroboration.

The map that refuses to be a map is the one the tradition has trusted most. The Lantern calls Catherine of Genoa's Treatise "the most celebrated mystical account of Purgatory". She sees no storeys, only each soul's own degree of purification and of light. Her account fits the Church's warning best. Among the things to be avoided in devotion to the dead, the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001) names "the application of spacio-temporal categories to the dead" (§258). The layered maps are best read as pictures of degree, the only language a visionary has for "more" and "less". They are not surveys of a territory.

Some details should not be repeated at all. Several accounts place a named person at a particular depth, or picture a soul in grotesque animal form (for example SIM-03). Trent's instruction about "things which tend to a certain kind of curiosity" applies here. Such details add nothing to charity, and they invite the one thing no Catholic may do: pass sentence on a particular soul.

What it means for us

• Every suffrage counts, and none is wasted. Because souls differ, nobody can say that a given soul is "nearly there" and needs no more prayer, or "too deep" to be reached. The Church prays for all of them and leaves the measuring to God.
• The measure is set now. On St Thomas's principle, the length of purification follows how deeply an attachment has taken root. The cure is to uproot attachments while there is still time, through confession, examination of conscience and acts of the opposite virtue. The visionaries say the same in their own way: the Manuscript describes a "Purgatory of desire" that it says very few escape, and the Medjugorje accounts make the level depend on the prayer of a lifetime.
• Pray for the souls no one remembers. The accounts agree that the hardest-pressed are the forgotten. The Lantern's own rule of charity, to offer something daily "for the most abandoned souls", is the practical answer to this whole chapter.

Sources for this chapter

Scripture (Douay-Rheims): 1 Corinthians 3:11–15; Matthew 5:25–26.

Councils: Second Council of Lyons (1274), Profession of Faith of Michael Palaeologus; Council of Florence (1439), Laetentur Caeli; Council of Trent, Session XXV (1563), Decree concerning Purgatory, trans. J. Waterworth (1848), pp. 232–233 — https://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct25.html

Magisterium and Holy See:

• Catechism of the Catholic Church §1031 (as quoted in the Directory, §251).
• John Paul II, General Audience, 4 August 1999 — https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1999/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_04081999.html
• Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (2007), §§47–48 — https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi.html
• Congregation for Divine Worship, Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001), §§251, 255, 258 — https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html
• Paul VI, Indulgentiarum Doctrina (1 January 1967), Norm 4 — https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-vi_apc_01011967_indulgentiarum-doctrina.html

Doctors and theologians:

• St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Appendix I, q. 2, aa. 1, 3, 6 (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/6002.htm) and Appendix II, a. 2 (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/7001.htm). The Supplement was completed after St Thomas's death from his commentary on the Sentences.
• E. Hanna, "Purgatory", Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 12 (1911), for Augustine, Gregory and Bessarion at Florence — https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12575a.htm
• Fr M. Jugie AA, The Truth about Purgatory, and Fr F. X. Schouppe SJ, as quoted in the source catalogue.

The accounts: the 21 books of Encounters with the Holy Souls, cited by account code. Page references are as given in the source catalogue and have not been independently verified against the books.