Sin death and beyond

SIN, DEATH AND BEYOND: M.M.NINAN
Tertullian (c. 200) wrote that, even before final judgment, a soul "undergoes punishment and
consolation in Hades in the interval, while it awaits its alternative of judgment, in a certain
anticipation either of gloom or of glory"
Hippolytus of Rome pictured a particular judgment of souls in Hades, by which the righteous
are assigned to "a locality full of light" and the unrighteous are "forced down into the lower
parts".
Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), one of the Church fathers of the Catholic Church, wrote that the
human part of the city of God (as opposed to the part composed of the angels) "is either
sojourning on earth, or, in the persons of those who have passed through death, is resting in
the secret receptacles and abodes of disembodied spirits". He said that the dead are judged
at death and divided into four groups:
• the place of the truly virtuous, such as saints and martyrs, is Paradise;
• the unmistakably evil are damned to eternal punishment in Hell;
• the two intermediate groups, the not completely wicked, and the not completely good.
These could be helped by the prayers of the living, though it seems that for the former
repentance and the prayers of the living created a "more tolerable" hell, while the latter would
pass through a penitential fire before being admitted to heaven at the time of the Last
Judgment.
This idea which finds no scriptural verification became a dogma leading to the building up of
Purgatories in the Roman Catholic Church. Unless the hell itself act as a purgatory it will
remain another hypothesis.
The faith of the Church concerning Purgatory is clearly expressed in the Decree
of Union drawn up by the Roman Catholic Council of Florence (Mansi, t. XXXI,
col. 1031), and in the decree of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent:
"Whereas the Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Ghost, has, from the
sacred writings and the ancient tradition of the Fathers [of the Catholic Church],
taught, in sacred councils, and very recently in this OEcumenical Synod, that
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