From various corners of Usenet:

You might enjoy reading some of Origen's more speculative writing on the pre-existence of souls, etc. Of course, he had nothing to say about Purgatory per se, since it had not yet been invented.

There is certainly no question that our present life can be intensely "purgatorial", but it is important to retain an awareness of the context in which the actual doctrine arose. The Roman Catholic Church developed its teaching on Purgatory as part of a commercial/ transactional theology that saw "merits" and "graces" as commodities that could be quantified and apportioned by the appropriate "authority" (i.e. the pope). It was when this approach (quite logically, actually) led to the exercise of that "authority" in exchange for payments of money, that people like M. Luther decided that they had had enough.

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One response:

Two further thoughts:

1. Although the early redactors of the Scriptures tried to eliminate vestigial evidences of Jewish reference to reincarnation, they didn't quite "get all the spots out". This is one of my favorite non- sequiturs:

http://bible.cc/john/9-2.htm

How could this man possibly have been "born blind" as a consequence of HIS OWN sins? He would need to have "sinned" before he was born! There are also Scriptural speculations about certain of the Prophets -- including Jesus Himself -- having been "the return" of prophets who lived previously. It would seem that the theory of "reincarnation on earth" was not unknown to the Judaism out of which Christianity arose.

[Another: It has survived to this day among Orthodox Jews, and particularly among the Hasidim, many of whom, for example, believe that converts to Judaism are actually "Jewish souls" who were accidentally reborn into Gentile bodies. The late Lubavitcher Rebbe taught this. The Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts also offer evidence in support of this.]

2. You're absolutely bang-on about the cynical economic motive of the Medieval Church in their inventive speculation of a theory of "Purgatory". However, their corrupt motive does not negate the possibility that they had actually "tuned in" to a basic spiritual insight -- which in fact was affirmed in most of the other world religions existing at the time -- and had simply perverted that insight to a corrupt material end. Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and (as we've just seen) Judaism all entertained the possibility that a human lifetime is a "more than a single-shot event" for a journeying soul, until it returns to Full Communion with the Divine Presence.

Again, certainly not a mandatory belief for Apostolic Christians -- but an intriguing option, which explains many things about the strangeness of this "Middle Earth" in which we struggle to survive.

[Response: We are told so little about what to expect after this life, that it is difficult not to speculate, and Origen was by no means the only one who did so during the first centuries of the Church. I fully agree that a single human life-span seems a frighteningly brief "window of opportunity".... ]

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