305. Immediate judgment after death
305. IMMEDIATE JUDGMENT AFTER DEATH
If the saved are assigned to Heaven immediately after death, as soon as they leave their bodies, why do they have to wait until the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the body? If they are in Purgatory, is Purgatory part of Heaven?
Whether souls are conveyed to heaven or hell immediately after death?
Even as in bodies there is gravity or levity whereby they are borne in their own place which is the end of their movement, so in souls there is merit or demerit whereby they reach their reward or punishment, which are the ends of their deeds. Wherefore just as a body is conveyed at once to its place by its gravity or levity unless there be an obstacle, so too the soul, the bonds of the flesh being broken . . . receives at once its reward or punishment unless there be an obstacle.
Thus sometimes venial sin . . . needing first to be cleansed (in Purgatory), is an obstacle to the receiving of the reward, the result being that the reward is delayed. . . . This truth is attested by the manifest authority of the canonical Scriptures and the doctrine of the holy Fathers. . . .
Objection 4. . . Hell fire and the joys of heaven will be awarded to all by the sentence of Christ judging them, namely at the last judgment, according to Matthew 25. Therefore no one will go up to heaven or down to hell before the day of judgment.
Reply to Objection 4. Gregory proposes and solves this very difficulty: If then, he says, the souls of the just are in heaven now, what will they receive in reward for their justice on the judgment day? And he answers: Surely it will be a gain to them at the judgment that whereas now they enjoy only the happiness of the soul, afterwards they will enjoy also that of the body. . . . The reason why a distinction is drawn between the time before and the time after the resurrection (of the body) is because before the resurrection they are there without the body whereas afterwards they are with the body (S69,2).
The previous question was about place after death; this one is about time.
St. Thomas says both that (1) the saved are judged and assigned to Heaven or Hell immediately after death, and (2) that for many or most of the saved, there is a delay because of the obstacle of venial sins, sinful habits which remain to be Purgatorially cleansed in the soul that is not yet perfect. This implies that Purgatory, though painful, is more a part of Heaven than a part of Hell and therefore has far more joy than pain. (This is also the teaching of St. Catherine of Genoa in her visionary dialogues on Purgatory.) In a sense “all the way to Heaven is Heaven” (St. Catherine).
St. Thomas begins with a commonsensical principle that is hardly ever adverted to today: that there is spiritual as well as physical gravity. This presupposes at least an analogy between matter and spirit, which certainly seems to follow from the psychosomatic unity, and from the Aristotelian hylomorphic anthropology of soul and body as form and matter of a single substance, as distinct from a Platonic or Cartesian two-substance dualism, or simple materialism or simple immaterialism or spiritualism. All three alternatives to Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism are logically problematic as well as not in accord with our experience.
If spirit is analogous to matter, there can be such things as spiritual gravity (what St. Thomas is talking about in this excerpt), spiritual beauty (see Plato’s Symposium), spiritual heredity (“Original Sin”), spiritual places (the previous excerpt) and spiritual time (kairos as distinct from kronos).
So do we go to Heaven immediately after we die, at the Particular Judgment, or do we have to wait in Purgatory until the end of the world, the resurrection of the body, and the Last Judgment?
“Waiting” in spiritual time, in Purgatory, is different than “waiting” in material time, on earth. The saved disembodied soul in Purgatory is already living in Heavenly time in hope, in anticipation. Heaven is guaranteed to it. Similarly, it is already in its Heavenly “place”, the eternal mansion, but in the bathroom taking a painfully hot shower to clean off the dirt, not yet in the dining room eating the feast.