Saturday, February 29, 2020

Purgatory

This afternoon I was reading W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, feeling a bit torpid, when I encountered the description of Austerlitz's foster father, a Calvinist Methodist minister,
conjuring up before the eyes of his flock ... the lurid fires of purgatory.
This did get my attention. One then reads that
[A]t the end of the service quite a number of them went home looking white as a sheet.
 John Calvin would I suppose not have been left white as a sheet by such a sermon. He would have come away unhappy, though, for he regarded the doctrine of Purgatory as a blasphemy.

Sebald is not the only writer around the turn of our century to have a loose grasp of who in particular believed in Purgatory. In the movie "A Royal Affair", set at the 18th Century Danish court, a chaplain, necessarily a Lutheran, threatens some servants with a turn in Purgatory. He also speaks of mortal sin, a term not I think much used in Lutheran doctrine.


3 comments:

  1. Purgatory, even for non-Catholics, even if no grounded in theology, remains a powerful metaphor, and I suspect most western cultures are at least familiar if not fearful. Perhaps life is purgatory.

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    1. I would not inquire into the theological commitments of someone who used purgatory as a metaphor. But the notion of a Calvinist preacher mentioning purgatory in a sermon just seems wrong.

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