Time in Purgatory

[uruviel]

I had wondered this and thought about it for sometime now. I know that heaven is in eternity, not in time, and earth is. But what about Purgatory. Is it in time? Or eternity?? They speak of being in Purgatory for a certain amount ot 'time' such as if you do the first 5 Saturdays or however many it is, then The blessed virign will come and get you out of purgatory on the first Saturday that you are in Purgatory. So it must be in time? I don't know, some opinions would be appreciated.

~uruviel

[cappie]

People are often confused by the number of "days" that used to be attached to indulgences.

They have nothing to do with time in purgatory. Indulgences originally arose as a way of shortening a penitential period on earth. The number of "days" that were attached to indulgences were not understood as shortening time in purgatory, but as easing the purification after death by an amount analogous to the shortening of an earthly penitential period by the number of days indicated.

Because some people were confused by thinking purgatory was shortened by a set number of days with an indulgence, the Church abolished the "day" figures attached to indulgences specifically to eliminate this confusion.

The reason that the "days" were never understood to be days of literal time off in purgatory is that the medieval theologians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, and those living at precisely the period when the "days" were attached to indulgences, were very clear about the fact that time does not work the same way in the afterlife as it does here. In fact, they had a special term for it, and would contrast three different temporal modalities -- the ordinary flow of events we experience here on earth, called "time;" the perpetual present that God experiences, called "eternity;" and the middle, less well understood state experienced by those in the afterlife, known as "aeviternity."

So the Church has never said that purgatory involves the same kind of time as we experience here on earth, or even time at all. Thus Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now of course Benedict XVI , writes that purgatory may involve "existential" rather than "temporal" duration (cf. Ratzinger's book Eschatology). It may be something one experiences, but experiences in a moment, rather than something one endures over time.