Given its place in religious literature, it's difficult to consider purgatory as a place of hope.

Yet that's exactly the way many Christians — particularly Catholics — have interpreted it to be over the centuries, believing "it has only one door, and that's the door to heaven, "and that people whose "venial sins" of self-interest are purified through purgatory's "cleansing" can then move on to eternal bliss.

Protestant reformers rejected notions of a "purgation" or cleansing state, determining that at death souls are either assigned to heaven or hell by God's divine judgment.

Yet the roots of modern understanding about the concept of purgatory aren't all that clear, according to Isabel Moreira of the history department at the University of Utah. She's researching the history of a place most of us would prefer to avoid, and told participants during a recent lecture at the U. about her findings.

It's a concept many link to the Irish forms of penance, she said, noting the "legalistic view of sin" that resulted in handbooks containing tallies of individual sins and the required penance. "The Irish vision of the afterlife testified to a system where every debt was paid and every wrong atoned."

The first complete description of purgatory known to exist is an account of a monk's vision of the afterlife, which was written in 716 A.D. after he died and was revived. While in the afterlife, "he was brought to trial" and shown "upper and lower hell and upper and lower heaven," Moreira said. Part of the account included a "fiery river, bubbling and flowing" with a bridge over the river for those who died. All were anxious to cross to the other side, she said, but some made it and others plunged into the stream, partially submerged.

Each of those who fell in came out on the bank of the river "more brilliant and beautiful" than they had been before, no doubt purged of their sins. "They needed kindly chastisement from a merciful God."

What the text didn't reveal was whether the torture was perceived differently from the punishment of hell, she said, and was it thought to be an "instructive" experience or simply "payback for sins that didn't merit hell?"

Moreira said she's still trying to determine whether the idea of "corporeal violence is part of the divine judicial system."

How such notions came about may stem from the fact that the Romans instituted violence as part of their way of ruling not only family members but any underling. Those exempt from punishment were only spared according to power and rank. Minors were believed to "acquire education through pain and punishment," through the process becoming "God's educated creation."

The practice endured through the centuries and clergy were not necessarily spared, because in life "the soul was considered capable of change with purification through punishment."

"As you go further and further into late antiquity, the use of torture and the death penalty increases," Moreira said, but the historical connections between such violence and the notions of purgatory and penance in the afterlife remain unclear. She believes the notion of purgatory is "more Roman than Celtic, and more Augustinian than Irish."

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