358. Purgatory and Hell compared
358. PURGATORY AND HELL COMPARED
What is the difference between the pains of Purgatory and the pains of Hell?
Whether it is the same place where souls are cleansed and the damned punished?
I answer that, Nothing is clearly stated in Scripture about the situation of Purgatory, nor is it possible to offer convincing arguments on this question (Appendix II,2).
Obviously, there is an enormous difference between the two because even if the pains are the same in both places (which is doubtful), there are also more important, crucially important, goods that are present in Purgatory and not in Hell in addition to the pains: (1) faith and (2) hope and (3) charity and (4) repentance and (5) the joy of the presence of God and (6) the assurance of salvation.
But the pains themselves seem somewhat similar in that both (1) are after death, (2) are primarily spiritual pains, and (3) are incomparably greater than any earthly pains. These similarities gave rise to the popular picture, especially in the Middle Ages, of Purgatory as a sort of temporary Hell.
St. Thomas, more than most medievals, sits lightly on this picture of Purgatory as a temporary suburb of Hell, and does not insist on it, thus making room for a more positive picture of Purgatory, which we have implied in some of our comments above.
He did this because he was utterly honest and utterly humble and therefore deeply internalized Socrates’ “Lesson One”, the “learned ignorance”, knowing how little he really knew, especially about God and the next life. If divine revelation (Scripture and the Church’s infallible dogmas) do not clearly answer questions like this one (and similar questions about the next life, such as the comparative population statistics of Heaven and Hell), we must be content to know that we do not know. And that is St. Thomas’ last word.
It was also the last word of his life, for he refused to finish the Summa. These last excerpts are not from the Summa but from the “Supplement” which his successors culled from his earlier writings, precisely because St. Thomas refused to answer these questions in his more mature work. And the reason he refused, the reason he said, “I can write no more”, was because God showed him, in a supernatural vision, something of Himself and the life of Heaven that St. Thomas was destined to begin a very short time later; and in light of that light, everything he had ever written he called “straw”.
You have no right to call theology “straw” until you have written a Summa Theologiae.