What Does Purgatory Look Like?
The human experience is rarely black and white.
Most of us don’t live like saints, but we’re not mostly villains and rogues either. We try, we stumble, we grow, we carry regrets alongside good intentions. By the time we reach the end of the road, we often haven’t tied everything up neatly.
Many Christians wonder what happens to the ‘mostly-goods’? They believe in heaven and hell, but what happens to those that don’t fit into the saintly-perfect or Dr Evil-bad model?
What happens to the ‘generally okay-but-flawed’, the unfinished, the sincere-but-imperfect?
This is where the Catholic concept of purgatory comes in. It resonates with everyone on a personal level, rather than than just abstract theology.
If we’re honest, most of us occupy that bit of moral middle ground, not veering into saintliness or evil. The idea that growth and healing could continue even after death, and that the story of the soul isn’t necessarily over at the moment of death, is comforting for billions, and always has been.
In Catholic tradition, purgatory presents an answer to this very question. It’s the name given to a state of purification for people who die in God’s grace but who aren’t yet completely free of their flaws.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it as a place of hope, where souls are assured of salvation but go through a final process of preparation before entering the joy of heaven. It’s not a punishment like hell, it’s more like a sanctification zone for a final transformation.
Older Catholic teachings, like those found in the Catholic Encyclopedia, describe purgatory as a condition of temporal punishment for venial sins, those everyday failings that don’t cut us off from God but still cling to us.
It’s also about completing the penance owed for forgiven sins. In that sense, purgatory is not about guilt, but about justice and healing.
The origins of this doctrine go back a long way. Early Christians prayed for the dead, a practice that only makes sense if you believe those souls are still on a journey.
Scripture offers some glimpses: in 2 Maccabees 12:41-46, Judas Maccabeus makes atonement for his fallen soldiers. In Matthew 12:32, Jesus refers to sins that might be forgiven in the world to come. And then there are countless stories from early Christian writings that speak of visions, dreams, and post-death encounters that suggest some kind of continued spiritual path.
Over time, the idea of purgatory developed and was eventually formalised, but the central idea remained the same: that some souls, though destined for heaven, still have some work to do. And in that space, between death and glory, literature and culture have given us powerful ways of thinking about what that journey might look like.
Purgatory in Literature and Popular Culture
Dante’s Joyful Ascent – One of the most famous depictions of purgatory is found in Dante’s Purgatorio, the second part of his Divine Comedy. Unlike the infernal torments of Inferno, Dante’s purgatory is a mountain, a place of climbing, not falling. Souls here are not in despair. They’re hopeful because they know they’re on their way to Paradise.
Each terrace of the mountain represents one of the seven deadly sins, and souls climb from one to the next, shedding their burdens through meaningful suffering. But it’s not cruel, it’s transformative. It’s also communal, where souls learn from, and encourage one another. There’s even a strange kind of joy in the process, because they know where they’re going.
For Dante, purgatory is a place of purification, but also one of friendship, humility, and movement toward divine light. It captures the idea that we are shaped by others and that our flaws don’t define us forever. We are not frozen in our faults, we can grow, even after death.
Lewis and the Shadow of the Soul – A few centuries, another beautiful vision of post-death transformation is C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.
Here, Lewis imagines a bus ride from a grey, shadowy town (which might be hell or purgatory, depending on how you look at it) to the foothills of heaven. The people on the bus can choose whether to stay or return. And those who decide to stay must face their own resistance: ego, bitterness, self-deception.
For Lewis, the afterlife isn’t just reward or punishment. It’s a choice to take a journey, that involves letting go of false comforts and opening ourselves up to reality, to love, to truth, and to grace. Tho who choose the journey, undergo a kind of purgation, not unlike Dante’s pilgrims. The pain is necessary part of the process as the soul has to become solid enough for heaven.
There’s a line in the book where the guide says that for those who make the journey, the grey town will not have been hell, but purgatory. That subtle shift captures so much. What feels like suffering may be part of something redemptive, if we allow it to change us.
Modern Stories, Ancient Themes – Even outside traditional theology, the idea of postmortem growth shows up in modern storytelling.
In What Dreams May Come (1998), we see layered afterlives where characters experience love, loss, and healing. The journey is emotional and spiritual, not just spatial.
In The Leftovers, the world struggles with a sudden, inexplicable vanishing of people. While not explicitly about purgatory, the show is drenched in grief, searching, and transformation. Characters confront their pasts and try to heal. It’s purgatorial in feeling, even without using the word.
And then there’s The Good Place, which begins with a very flawed afterlife system and ends with something much closer to purgatory. People are given repeated chances to grow. They move through moral tests and soul-work. They do develop and change, and when they finally reach peace, it’s because they’ve completed something and become whole.
~ michael – “The Good Place”
“What matters isn’t if people are good or bad. What matters is if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday.”
These stories, while fictional and often secular, echo something intensely theological: the belief that our souls are on a journey, and that love and justice don’t stop working just because our hearts have stopped beating.
Theology, Philosophy, and the Mostly-Good – Catholic theology has long debated what purgatory actually is.
Is it about punishment or sanctification? Satisfaction or healing? Modern theologians tend to favour the idea of sanctification, that purgatory is a process of moral transformation.
Because most people die somewhere in the moral middle, it makes sense that heaven wouldn’t require instant perfection but woulG instead involve undertaking a kind of deep soul-work before the Pearly gates.
Philosophers like Jerry Walls and Marilyn McCord Adams have explored this too.
Walls argues that saving faith doesn’t automatically mean moral perfection. Some kind of postmortem process makes sense if we believe in both justice and mercy. Adams, writing on horrendous evils and God’s redemptive love, suggests that any real heaven must include the healing of even the worst wounds, which implies time, space, and grace.
Even Kierkegaard, though he didn’t write about purgatory directly (as understood in the Catholic tradition), saw the spiritual life as a struggle between the surface self and the deeper, God-oriented self. His concept of becoming and taking responsibility for the self before God, resonates with the purgatorial journey.
Why Does it Matter?
So much of this comes back to the Christian question: what does a just and merciful God do with the mostly-good?
Purgatory offers one possible answer. It’s not a loophole. It’s not a divine holding cell. It’s a continuation of the journey and an expression of hope that imperfection isn’t the end of the story. It shows that our failures can be healed and that we can keep growing.
The message is the same whether we imagine it as Dante’s mountain, Lewis’s shadowy plain, or a moral reboot like in The Good Place. Love purifies, grace transforms, and even the flawed are not forgotten.
If anything, purgatory reminds us that divine justice is never divorced from mercy. And maybe that second act is exactly what makes the first one worth living.