Toward the birth of purgatory: Amnesty and penance in western Christianity from late antiquity to the early middle ages

The article considers the shift from an emphasis on the ultimate amnesty of God (modelled upon the prerogative of mercy ascribed to a late Roman emperor) as, in itself sufficient reason for the acceptance into heaven of the average sinner, to a greater emphasis on the need for specific penitential satisfaction, by the sinner, in this world and in the next. The change is related to the change in the imaginative power of certain models of mercy and reconciliation, based on specific forms of state-system, some of which forms weakened in the West - or had always been absent in the case of Ireland Elsewhere, in Byzantium and the Near East, they continued largely unchanged, and even, in the case of Islam, were heightened in intensity. The weakening of the sense of the amnesty of God was accompanied by a more intense sense of the individual. The individual believer was now seen as the bearer of specific sins, which must be atoned for by penance in this world and the next. The increased interest in "purgation" in the other world would lead, eventually, to a notion of Purgatory.