Separating the Living from the Dead:
Wessel Gansfort and the Death of Purgatory
Craig Koslofsky
This paper explores criticism of the Roman church's doctrine of Purgatory from the late fifteenth century through the early years of the German Reformation. Following the writings of the Frisian theologian Wessel Gansfort (c. 1410-1489), the Wittenberg theologians Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Martin Luther initially sought to reform Purgatory rather than abolish it entirely. Ultimately, however, their attempts to fashion new doctrines on the last things resulted in the death of Purgatory in the Protestant tradition. The intellectual and cultural history of the death of Purgatory can, like the search for its origins, illustrate the complex intersection of doctrines and practices that made medieval Purgatory.
The most thorough recent attempt to understand the social and intellectual developments that gave rise to the medieval doctrine and cult of Purgatory is the work of Jacques Le Goff on The Birth of Purgatory.1 Le Goff has sought to define the birth of Purgatory as a specific linguistic development (the use of the noun purgatorium to denote a fixed place) occurring at a distinct point in time (the late twelfth century) representing a distinct shift in "mental, ideological and religious structures" (from binary to ternary systems). Response to each of these three points in Le Goff's argument has been skeptical.2
Fortunately, the value of Le Goff's study does not rest upon his argument that Purgatory was born in the use of the noun purgatorium in the late twelfth century, symbolic of a transition from a binary (heaven-hell) system to a ternary system. Its value derives instead from Le Goff's description of "the formation of the various elements that would finally be assembled in the twelfth century into what we know as Purgatory."3 Le Goff shows how Purgatory developed at the intersection of three separate concepts in the Christian tradition: first, prayer (and other intercession) for the dead; second, postmortem purification
How did the death of Purgatory correspond to its birth? Gansfort, Karlstadt, and Luther tried to reform Purgatory by separating and reweaving the strands identified by Le Goff into new doctrines of Purgatory. As they did with other tenets of the Church, these theologians sought to reform Purgatory by returning to its theological and historical origins, separating the authentic and scriptural from human invention and corruption. In their attempts to reshape the doctrine, they began their own search for the birth of Purgatory.
In early 1523 the Wittenberg reformer Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (c.1480-1541) published the first Reformation tract on Purgatory, a sermon titled On the State of the Souls of the Christian Faithful; on the Bosom of Abraham and the Purgatory of Departed Souls (Ein Sermon vom stand der Christglaubigen Seelen von Abrahams schoß und Fegfeür / der abgeschydnen Seelen). The pamphlet was very popular, with six editions published in Augsburg, Nuremberg and Strasbourg.5 In addition, Karlstadt's brother-in-law Gerhard Westerburg published three editions of his own re-working of Karlstadt's sermon.6
The pamphlet does not dispute the existence of Purgatory. In five of the six editions of Karlstadt's sermon, the title page illustrations show souls being helped up from the fiery depths. These woodcuts point to the message of the tract: Karlstadt affirms the existence of a "spiritual Purgatory" which is essential to salvation. At the same time he attacks the Roman doctrine that connects Purgatory with suffrages for the dead, asserting that the souls of the departed can be purified only by Christ and not through any earthly intercession.
Karlstadt's doctrine of Purgatory is drawn directly from the writings of Wessel Gansfort. A comparison of Karlstadt's 1523 On the State of the Souls of the Christian Faithful with sections of Gansfort's writings, first published as a Farrago in Wittenberg in 1522, shows that Karlstadt was deeply influenced by Gansfort's notion of a "spiritual Purgatory" cut off from the intercession of the Church.7 Although Luther began to develop his views on Purgatory before Gansfort's writings were known, in the period from 1517-28 he also reshaped the doctrine of Purgatory, separating the idea of postmortem purification from the jurisdiction of the Church.
This essay will first outline Wessel Gansfort's doctrine of Purgatory, then trace the discussions of Purgatory by Karlstadt and Luther in the early years of the Reformation. The Wittenberg reformers had no single, consistent doctrine on Purgatory or the state of the soul after death. Following Gansfort, however, they agreed that intercession for the dead was impossible. Their attempts to separate postmortem purgation from intercession for the dead provide us with new insight into the rise and fall of the place called Purgatory.
Wessel Gansfort and the reformation of Purgatory
Relatively little is known of the life of Wessel Gansfort, also mistakenly called John Wessel.8 Born around 1410 in Groningen, he was sent to a school founded by the Brothers of the Common Life in nearby Zwolle. In the Mt. St. Agnes monastery of the Canons Regular, the young Gansfort met Thomas à Kempis, whose Imitatio Christi first awakened Gansfort's piety. Gansfort began studying theology in Cologne in 1450, where he learned Greek and Hebrew. He continued his studies in Paris, where he became a nominalist, finding this doctrine "considerably purer, or at least more subtle" than the realism of Cologne. Gansfort's extant writings do not show a deep nominalist influence; his self-proclaimed alignment with this school is based on his critical, anti-papal orientation.9 Gansfort remained for many years in Paris as a free-lance teacher and theologian; he also taught in Heidelberg and Basel.
Crowned with the title "master of contradictions" (magister contradictionum), Gansfort returned in 1479 to his native land. In Groningen, and at the Mt. St. Agnes monastery where he had met Thomas à Kempis fifty years earlier, Gansfort was sought out by prominent scholars such as Rudolf Agricola and Johannes Reuchlin. He corresponded and debated with friends and colleagues on the ecclesiastical issues of the day, including papal authority, indulgences, and Purgatory; his extant works all date from this period. Gansfort's life and thought combined the piety of the devotio moderna with a lifetime of scholastic training and the language skills of a humanist.
His works reached publication in an unusual way. None of his writings were printed during his lifetime; upon his death all his manuscripts were "burned through the fury of the mendicant monks and certain others."10 His writings to friends and colleagues survived, however, and were collected by humanist, reform-oriented followers over the next decades. In response to the first stirrings of the Reformation movement in Saxony and Switzerland, these followers sent copies of Gansfort's writings to Wittenberg and Basel, where they were published as a miscellany or Farrago in 1522.11
The extant writings of Gansfort do not contain a systematic presentation of his thought, but we can establish some basic points. The mendicants' suspicion of Gansfort's heresy was entirely correct. In his discussions of the Church and its priesthood, confession, the Eucharist, indulgences and Purgatory, Gansfort left the orthodoxy of the Roman church far behind.12
Gansfort's attacks on Purgatory were directed at a doctrine and practice firmly embedded in the economy of salvation of the Roman church. James of Vitry, a renowned thirteenth century preacher, provided a striking summary of the relationships between sin, death, and Purgatory in his sermon To spouses (Ad conjugatos):
Contrition changes the punishment of Hell into the punishment of Purgatory, confession [changes it] into temporal punishment, appro-riate satisfaction [changes it] into nothingness. In contrition sin dies, in confession it is removed from the house, in satisfaction, it is buried.13
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From the twelfth century on, Purgatory was the location in which the satisfaction integral to the penitential cycle could be performed after death. Suffrages for the dead (including masses, vigils, prayer, and indulgences), provided through the Church, assisted a soul in Purgatory as it suffered in giving satisfaction for its earthly sins. In the orthodox doctrine Purgatory does not purify: it is merely a place where satisfaction incomplete upon death can be completed. As James of Vitry points out, the intercession of the living can lighten the burden of satisfaction and reduce the duration of the purgation.
By the early fifteenth century even the devils assigned to torment souls in Purgatory had a firm grasp of the doctrine. An anonymous nun of Winchester described her vision of Purgatory to a confessor in 1422:
Then the devils said to them [i.e. the souls in Purgatory], "Take these pains because you abused yourselves in the foul lust of lechery and in all other sins. . . . For know well that this is not hell - this is an instrument of God's righteousness to purge you of your sin in purgatory. And take these pains because you would not do penance in your lives before you came here."14
This fifteenth century revelation of Purgatory emphasizes strongly the efficacy of intercession for the dead: the purgatorial spirit Margaret asks the anonymous nun to have masses said on Margaret's behalf by specific priests of Winchester and requests that the nun make a pilgrimage which Margaret had failed to carry out. On the next night Margaret reappears to the nun to show how the intercession of the living had lessened her purgatorial suffering.15
Although he retained the outer shell of the doctrine, Gansfort reshaped every aspect of the orthodox cult of Purgatory. He first denied any power of the Church to free persons from punishment in Purgatory: "Neither the authority of the prelates nor the validity of the sacraments renders a man in this life devoid of sin. Unless one can declare a man devoid of sin, he cannot decree that he is exempt from punishment."16
He then argues that the fire of Purgatory "does not torment, but rather cleanses the inward man of the impurity which accompanies him even when released from the flesh."17 This fire is "the zeal of burning love" of the soul for God, "a fire of intellectual discipline."18 Gansfort bases his interpretation on 1 Corinthians 3.11-13, "the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. . . . If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire." This passage, argues Gansfort, clearly rules out any corporeal fire, referring instead to "fiery torrents of intellectual discipline."19
Only this spiritual fire of reason can truly purify. Material or corporeal fire can torment: but as Gansfort points out, the Christian tradition does not hold that suffering per se purifies: "The most blessed and holy Lord Jesus endured a thousand torments and yet was in no way purified. Lucifer will endure eternal torment, but he will in no way be purified."20 This was an original and powerful argument against an infernal Purgatory of fire and suffering.
If the living understood "the happy state of souls in Purgatory,"21 Gansfort argues, they would not want to pray for their release. To clarify his eschatology Gansfort develops an elegant metaphor of darkness, dawn an daylight. In this life "everything is done as by lamplight." After death "the saints are freed from all their infirmities here, and. . . as happy wayfarers they shall pass into the dawn of the approaching day, until the sun shall rise clearly before them."22 The state of dawn is a spiritual Purgatory, in which the souls of the faithful are gradually enlightened until they reach the full light of God's presence. This point leads to Gansfort's central argument: intercession for the souls in Purgatory is both undesirable and impossible. No one should want to free souls from this Purgatory of enlightenment, and the intercession of the Church is, in any case, useless.
To support his "celestialization" of Purgatory, Gansfort uses several rhetorical strategies. Because the fires of Purgatory are not entirely without scriptural basis, as 1 Corinthians 3 shows, Gansfort attempts to rework this text and the imagery of physical, punitive fire in his writings on Purgatory. Gansfort first argues that the Fathers and the tradition of the Church spoke only metaphorically of purgatorial fire: "the examples of all the dialogues and visions of illustrious men [regarding Purgatory] must be interpreted and accepted metaphorically rather than historically."23 Gansfort then elides the fire of Purgatory into two other positive metaphors, comparing it with enlightenment, as seen in the image of dawn and daylight, and with "burning desire" for the Kingdom of Heaven, using marriage imagery from the Song of Songs.24
Gansfort's theses on Purgatory, as seen in the Farrago and several of his letters, present a detailed solution to a basic problem of mystical theology: how can the human soul, stained by sin, unite with God? For theologians influenced by late-medieval mysticism such as Karlstadt, Gansfort's arguments were convincing and useful.
Purgatory in the Outbreak of the Reformation: Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt
Andreas Bodenstein was born c. 1480 in the Franconian town of Karlstadt. He completed his B. A. at the University of Erfurt, a center of German nominalism and early humanism, in 1502. In 1510 he received his doctorate in theology from the newly-founded University of Wittenberg. As the leading member of the theology faculty at Wittenberg, he promoted Martin Luther to doctor in 1512. In the following decades Karlstadt was Luther's ally, then
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bitter foe, as the two Wittenberg theologians initiated a Reformation that Karlstadt wanted to take much further than Luther.
Research on Karlstadt has, in the last two decades, begun to bear out the reevaluation of his role in the Reformation first proposed by Hermann Barge at the beginning of the century.25 The importance of Karstadt's theology to the Lutheran Reformation, the Swiss Reformation and the Anabaptist movements is now becoming clear.26 Recent research on Karlstadt as a popular pamphlet author has revealed his importance in the early years of the Reformation: he published more German pamphlets between 1517 and 1525 than anyone except Luther.27 One of the most popular of Karlstadt's sixty-three publications in the period from 1517-1525 was the sermon on Purgatory, On the State of the Souls of the Christian Faithful.This work represents a shift from Karlstadt's first discussion of Purgatory, found in an anonymous collection of theological theses published in Basel in 1522: Lutheri Melanch. Carolostadii etc. propositiones, Wittembergae viva voce tractatae... Sunt autem id genus, De missa & celebratione eius, Sacramento panis & vini... coniuratione spirituum... etc.28 Among the various topics outlined in the collection, a set of forty-eight theses titled "Articuli de Coniuratione Mortuorum migrantium" has been attributed with certainty to Karlstadt. Karlstadt discusses several of the questions raised in the sermon on Purgatory, but he reaches different conclusions in the two works.
In the forty-eight theses Karlstadt denies the possibility of any "middle state" for souls after death: "Upon leaving the body the soul immediately enters heaven or hell" ("Anima a corpore egressa confestim coelum ingreditur aut infernum"). The theses seek to eliminate any argument which would allow the existence of Purgatory "between the place of solace and of fire" ("Inter locum solacii et cruciatus"), and conclude by stating that those who believe in the immortality of the soul based on the Purgatory of St. Patrick are already [for this reason] unbelievers ("Qui animarum immortalitatem propter beati Patricii purgatorium credunt, iam infideles sunt").29 In these theses Karlstadt rejects the Roman doctrine of Purgatory without proposing any other purgatorial state after death.
In the context of the general development of his theology, two immediate factors explain Karlstadt's shift from this denial of any intermediate state after death to his affirmation of a "spiritual Purgatory" in On the State of the Souls of the Christian Faithful of 1523. First, the writings of Wessel Gansfort decisively influenced Karlstadt's theology, in particular his eschatology and understanding of the eucharist. Karlstadt may have been instrumental in bringing Gansfort's writings to press in Wittenberg in 1522. Second, the shift from a collection of Latin academic theses to a vernacular sermon called for a message that would edify Karlstadt's parishioners. Gansfort's spiritual Purgatory could provide such a message of hope, enabling Karlstadt to go beyond an attack on the Roman doctrine of Purgatory and give his listeners a positive description of the state of souls after this life.30
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The text of the pamphlet indicates that it is based on an actual sermon given by Karlstadt in Wittenberg, probably on All Souls' Day, 1522. He refers in the text to 1 Thessalonians as "today's epistle" and "the epistle that the alleged Christian church has given to be read and sung, to aid and console departed souls."31 The pamphlet begins with Karlstadt's exegesis of the day's reading: "But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The epistle, Karlstadt argues, holds a plain and a hidden meaning. Plainly, it consoles and promises that all Christians will be reunited in the resurrection. Karlstadt develops the hidden meaning of the passage from the statement that "we should rejoice for the dead." He uses this statement as the basis for an attack on "priests, popes and bishops" who teach sorrow for the dead and fear for the souls in Purgatory. The state of the dead is far superior to ours, Karlstadt argues: "[why] would we want to bring them from that state which is better than our state?"32
Karlstadt here adopts Gansfort's attack on intercession for the dead. Not only is it useless, it is also wrong: we should wish from God nothing other than his will, otherwise "our prayer would be against God and wicked."33 The souls of the Christian dead are purified only by fire, not through the prayers of the living. To explain this fire and the state of souls after death, Karlstadt uses Gansfort's schema of the three stages of the soul's progress toward God and the metaphor of darkness, dawn and daylight.34 He also denies that Purgatory is punitive: "So I do not believe that the souls of the faithful are tortured by flames or fire."35 Karlstadt's discussion of salvation displays the mystical eschatology he shares with Gansfort. Karlstadt describes eternal life as the "knowledge of God . . . which unifies the soul with God the Lord."36 This union can only occur when the human soul is perfectly pure.
Looking from the pulpit of the Church of All Saints at his congregation, Karlstadt seems to have seen many who were "lacking and defective in their love of God, in their justification, and in their wisdom."37 He preached that upon death these Christian souls "cannot see God face to face" and need purification in Purgatory, where they will abandon all love of self and other creatures. Karlstadt searches for the words to describe this mystical transformation of souls in Purgatory:
[the souls] stand in self-denial, in the wisdom of desolation, in selfless desire, like felled or burned trees from which the leaves rot away and the bark peels off, so that their shining white trunks come to light . . . .38
This vivid image suggests that the mystical purification of the soul was no trivial concern for Karlstadt, but rather a central point of his theology. Gansfort's
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writings on Purgatory placed this purification after death, allowing Karlstadt to reconcile his mystical view of salvation with a popular reformation of the Church.
Separating the Living from the Dead
A comparison of Karlstadt's works on Purgatory with the writings of Martin Luther on the fate of Christian souls after death illustrates the uncertainty of the nascent Protestant movement on the question. Although he initially held a position similar to that of Gansfort, by 1530 Luther denied the existence of Purgatory altogether.39
Luther first criticized the orthodox doctrine of Purgatory in the context of the indulgence controversy. He did not deny its existence; in the Resolutiones disputationem de indulgentiarum virtute (1518) to his ninety-five theses he stated "It is certain to me that Purgatory exists" ("mihi certissimum purgatorium esse").40 In these resolutions he did deny that souls in Purgatory gave satisfaction for unfulfilled earthly penance, arguing instead that souls there were purified through suffering and despair. His early discussions of Purgatory follow from this argument: Luther was sympathetic to the idea of postmortem purification, but he removed Purgatory from the jurisdiction of the Church by denying the penitential theology of satisfaction and the doctrine of indulgences. Luther arrived independently at a position similar to that of Gansfort. They each stressed that Purgatory was a place of purification rather than satisfaction, and that the Church could not affect the state of souls in Purgatory.
Luther's views on Purgatory were a central article at the Leipzig disputation of 1519. He continued to argue that Purgatory did exist, but added that there was no scriptural basis for it.41 After he broke with Roman orthodoxy, Luther's view of Purgatory slowly shifted.42 In a 1522 letter to the Wittenberg theologian Nicholas Amsdorf, Luther discussed the validity of the doctrine of soul-sleeping, which ruled out any intermediate state between the death of an individual and the Last Judgement. In the same letter he described Purgatory as a torment of the soul rather than a distinct place.43 In sermons given in 1522-23 Luther stated that he could neither deny nor affirm the existence of Purgatory, but that it was "within God's power" to purify souls after death.
Could the prayers of the living influence this postmortem purification? In these sermons Luther dealt with this question by giving his parishioners a model agnostic prayer for the dead: "Dear God, if this soul is in the state so that it still can be helped, I pray that you would be merciful to it."44 This prayer is a far cry from the certain intercession for the dead offered by the Roman church through masses, vigils, and indulgences.
Luther gradually adopted the notion of soul-sleeping he had discussed with Amsdorf in 1522 as the best understanding of the state of souls after death. In a 1525 Lenten church postil he described the state of Christian souls after death:
And so death also is called sleep in the Scriptures. Just as one who falls asleep and wakes up unexpectedly the next morning does not know what has happened [in the meantime], so we will suddenly rise up on the Last Day without knowing that we were in death and have passed through death.45
Luther never elevated soul-sleeping to a firm doctrine, aware as he was of the scripture passages which required exceptions to the notion.
In his Confession concerning Christ's Supper of 1528 Luther emphasized the lack of scriptural evidence for Purgatory, but he was unwilling to deny postmortem purgation outright. He again suggested that God could purify souls through punishment after death:
Nor have we anything in Scripture concerning Purgatory. It too was certainly fabricated by goblins. Therefore, I maintain it is not necessary to believe in it; although all things are possible to God, and he could very well allow souls to be tormented after their departure from the body. But he has caused nothing of this to be spoken or written, therefore he does not wish to have it believed, either.46
Luther was slow to reject the idea of postmortem purification, even though he saw no scriptural evidence for it. Like Karlstadt, Luther was influenced by German mystical theology, which emphasized the need for purification in the process of salvation.47 An understanding of Purgatory as postmortem purification did not contradict Luther's view of salvation sola fide, sola gratia.
The passage above from the Confession concerning Christ's Supper continues: ". . . I know of a purgatory, however, in another way, but it would not be proper to teach anything about it in the church, nor on the other hand, to deal with it by means of endowments or vigils."48 This reference to another sort of purgatory is clarified in Luther's 1532 lectures on Psalm 51. There he refers to David experiencing "true purgatory, that is, he was oppressed by the sorrows of sin and of God's wrath."49 This general view of purgatory as a state of inner sorrow and separation from God during this life looks back to Augustine's view of purgation before and after death.50
Luther ultimately rejected postmortem purification in a polemic against the Roman doctrine of Purgatory. In 1530 he decisively denied Purgatory and espoused soul-sleeping in his Refutation of Purgatory (Ein Widerruf vom Fegefeur), which established his position on the soul after death. In the tract Luther refutes the various arguments of the Roman church for Purgatory and refers to his own understanding of death as sleep:
. . . the deceased who have died in the Lord are holy, . . . they rest and are at peace, as Isaiah 57 says that the just. . . when they die go in peace
as if to bed . . . and so they are called the sleepers, and their death is called sleep throughout the Scriptures.51
The process of confessionalization led Luther to sharpen the distinction between his own views on the soul after death and the Roman doctrine of Purgatory. From 1530 Luther stopped referring to any possibility of Purgatory or purification after death. When the 1522-23 sermons discussed above were reprinted in the 1530s, Luther removed from them every reference to Purgatory or a purgatorial state.52
As the writings of Karlstadt and Luther show, individual reformers shifted their positions on Purgatory; there was no consensus among them on its existence, location, or soteriological role. No clear notion of the state of the soul after death developed in first decade of the Reformation. The reformers had replaced the relatively clear teaching of the Roman church with silence or confusion.
This confusion calls our attention to the reformers' single point of agreement: the souls of the dead are irrevocably cut off from the world of the living. No reformer suggested that the true or reformed Christian church could still intercede for the dead in any way. Karlstadt described visions of the dead as demonic; following Gansfort, he and Luther reduced the pious practice of prayer for the dead to an agnostic prayer of submission to God's will. Whether they adopted the "reformation" of Purgatory offered by Wessel Gansfort or abolished it altogether, the earliest German reformers saw the realm of the dead as utterly separate from the world of the living. Their attacks on the Church's jurisdiction over souls in Purgatory and on the venality of intercession for the dead led them to renounce the entire range of intercession for the dead, from prayers and masses for the dead to indulgences and pilgrimages.53
Although the scholastic doctrine of Purgatory developed through penitential theology, prayer for the dead was the historical and theological foundation of Purgatory.54 Of the three main strands in the development of Purgatory identified by Le Goff (prayer for the dead, postmortem purification, and a distinct location for this purification), prayer for the dead is by far the oldest: it had been an integral part of the economy of salvation since the second century.55 Gansfort's attempt to fashion a purgatorial state cut off from human prayer and suffrage was completely inconsistent with the social and theological origins of Purgatory. Ignoring the conditions of the birth of Purgatory, Gansfort proposed a reformation of Purgatory that was for Karlstadt, Luther, and other theologians actually the first step on the road to its dissolution.
Following Gansfort, these reformers of the 1520s denied the efficacy of prayer for the dead and rejected the oldest element of Purgatory first. Those who like Gansfort sought to reform and retain Purgatory were doomed to failure. Medieval Purgatory was about intercession for the dead: a mystical or spiritual Purgatory that separated the dead from the prayers of the living was a shadowy construction that never became a living doctrine.