Heaven, Hell and Purgatory in Christianity

Christian ideas of the afterlife begin with the resurrection of Jesus. For the earliest Christians, his rising from the dead was the first sign of a general resurrection that would come when he returned. Writing around 55 CE, the apostle Paul told the Christians of Corinth that the dead would be raised with a ‘spiritual body’, as different from the old body as a plant from its seed. The hope was not mainly that souls would escape to heaven, but that God would renew the whole of creation.

The gospels add the language of judgement. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Christ as king divides the nations, sending those who fed the hungry and visited prisoners into eternal life and the others into ‘eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’. Jesus speaks of Gehenna, a name taken from the valley outside Jerusalem, and of outer darkness, while the story of the rich man and Lazarus pictures the dead in Hades, divided by a great chasm. The Book of Revelation closes the Bible with a lake of fire and a New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, its gates each made of a single pearl.

The creeds summed up this hope. The Nicene Creed in its expanded form of 381 looks for ‘the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’, and the Apostles’ Creed confesses ‘the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. Christians came to speak of two judgements: a particular judgement of each soul at death and a general or Last Judgement at the end of time, when body and soul are reunited.

The early Church also shaped the afterlife through worship. Christians met at the tombs of martyrs, whom they believed were already with Christ, and asked for their prayers. From this grew the belief in the communion of saints, the bond between the living and the dead in Christ, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians express in prayers to the saints and for the departed. Inscriptions in the Roman catacombs ask peace and refreshment for the dead, and early liturgies remembered them by name. Augustine, writing The City of God in the early fifth century, gathered these strands into a vision of two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, whose destinies are finally revealed at the Last Judgement.

Heaven, in classical Christian teaching, is above all the presence of God. Medieval theologians called its joy the beatific vision, the direct sight of God, and in 1336 Pope Benedict XII taught that the souls of the saved enjoy it immediately after death or purification. Hell is its opposite: eternal separation from God. Older preaching dwelt on fire and torment; the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church describes hell as ‘self-exclusion from communion with God’. A minority tradition, going back to Origen in the third century, hoped that all might finally be saved, an idea that the Church condemned in later councils but that some theologians still discuss.

Between death and the Last Judgement, the churches diverge. The Catholic Church teaches purgatory, a final purification for those who die in God’s grace but still carry the effects of sin. Prayer for the dead is ancient, and Gregory the Great told stories of souls cleansed after death, but the historian Jacques Le Goff showed that purgatory as a distinct place took shape in the twelfth century. It was defined at the councils of Lyon and Florence and reaffirmed at Trent. Limbo, a realm at the edge of hell for unbaptised infants, was a widespread theological opinion but never doctrine. In 2007 the Vatican’s International Theological Commission published a document expressing hope that such infants may be saved, though it did not formally abolish the idea.

The Orthodox churches pray for the dead and believe they can be helped before the Last Judgement, but they do not teach purgatory as a place of purifying fire, and some Orthodox theologians describe heaven and hell as two ways of experiencing the same love of God. The Protestant reformers rejected purgatory as unbiblical and tied salvation to faith in Christ alone, so most Protestant churches do not pray for the dead. Some smaller groups, such as Seventh-day Adventists, teach that the dead rest unconscious until the resurrection. The diagram on this page is schematic: heaven above and hell below follow tradition, but purgatory and limbo belong to Catholic theology, not to all Christians.

Few religious ideas have inspired so much art. Medieval churches carved the Last Judgement over their doors, with Christ enthroned, the saved rising on his right and the damned led away on his left. Giotto painted one across the entrance wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua in the early fourteenth century, and Michelangelo filled the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel with his vast, muscular version, unveiled in 1541. Painters such as Hieronymus Bosch imagined hell as a nightmare of strange creatures, and countless icons show the dead rising from their tombs.

Literature added its own geography. Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the early fourteenth century, leads the poet through nine circles of Hell to the centre of the earth, up the mountain of Purgatory and through the spheres of Paradise to the vision of God. It drew on theology, classical myth and medieval visions, and its images still shape how many people picture the afterlife, but the Church has never treated it as teaching. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) did the same for Satan and the fallen angels in the English-speaking world.

The reformers’ attack on indulgences, offered to shorten time in purgatory, was a key spark of the Reformation in 1517, and the Council of Trent later curbed the abuses they had criticised. In modern times, popular culture has softened the picture into clouds, harps and pearly gates. Theologians across the churches continue to debate the nature of hell and the hope of salvation, while the creeds still end with the same words: the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.