Page 296 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

296 from Italy to the Canary Islands

aspiration to the eternal city wall, where there will be no trace of passion
left.
If taking a trip is a fact, creating a myth may be a support for it, but also
precede that route, and so the first navigation is inside us, and if it spells
out horizons of glory, it expects an ascension from them.
Paradise, the Earthly Paradise, Purgatory, consciousness of a gamble:
it is all metaphysics. Latching on to purity. A place for atonement, of
transit, waiting for the redemption of our sins. But if in medieval thought
the Earthly Paradise oscillated between East and West, the identification
of Purgatory as a place made for rather frantic research. In his book la
naissance du Purgatoire [The Birth of Purgatory], Jacques Le Goff asks
at one point if Purgatory exists in germ state in Scripture, “The Christian
doctrine of Purgatory was perfected - in the Catholic form, as the Re-
th
formed rejected it - only in the 16 century, with the Council of Trent.
After Trent, the Catholic doctrinaires of Purgatory, Bellarmine and Su-
arez, used numerous texts from Scripture to support it. I shall take into
account here only those who - in the Middle Ages, and more specifically
in the early 14 century - had indeed a role in the birth of Purgatory. A
th
single passage from the Old Testament, taken from the second book of
Maccabees - which Jews and Protestants do not consider canonical - was
welcomed by the ancient and medieval Christian theology, from St. Au-
gustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, as evidence of the existence of a belief in
Purgatory. In it, after a battle during which the Jewish fighters who were
killed there allegedly committed a mysterious crime, Judah Maccabee
gives orders to pray for them”.
Here is the passage in question (II Maccabees 12.41-45), “Then, bless-
ing the actions of the Lord, the righteous judge, who makes manifest the
hidden things, they began to beg, asking that the sin they committed be
completely erased. Then the noble Judah exhorted the people to keep
themselves pure, now that they had seen with their own eyes what had
happened because of the sin of the fallen. Then, he collected nearly two
thousand pieces of silver from among his men and sent them to Jerusalem,
so as to offer a sacrifice for the sin, acting very well and thinking rightly
of their resurrection; in fact, if he had not hoped that the dead would be
resurrected, praying for the fallen would have been useless and meaning-
less, but considering that a magnificent reward is reserved for those who
fall asleep with religious piety, such a thought was holy and pious. This is
why he had an atoning sacrifice performed for the dead, that they may be