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Sin: The Taint of Time
By Richard K. Fenn

"Modern societies have ... synchronized activities to the point that time exerts an exquisite pressure on all who are regulated by their interdependence with others rather than by the flow of tides and seasons or by biorhythms and the stars. Instead of leading to a world of pure contingency, purgatory has become a world in which contingency is mediated and controlled by institutions and corporations whose calendars, schedules, and time imperatives constrain the fate or daimon of everyone who is seeking to be approved, credentialed, tested, promoted, probated, tenured, appointed, ordained, adjudicated, or elected, to name only a few of the processes of purgation that modern societies have developed."

Modernity has become a secular form of purgatory in which time has become of the essence, not a moment of which is to be wasted. The burdens of time are many: to satisfy the expectations of others, to pay off debts, to realize potentials, to make the most of opportunities, and to keep appointments and fulfill schedules. Indeed, as a secular purgatory, modern societies have institutionalized an unending series of deadlines. For instance, novelists such as Tim Robbins, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan have presented us with a thorough and coherent portrait of a society that oppresses the individual through time-constraints.¹ The clock becomes the measure of one's progress through life, a tyrant to whom submission results in sinful alienation from one's own being. To be obsessed with time, with measuring one's accomplishments over time, is a mark of the human consciousness outside of Eden. To be liberated from time is the mark of the redeemed soul. Only the soul that has entered once and for all into possession of itself has broken the tyranny of time.

The invention of purgatory had a profound effect on the development of Western society and on Western social character because it touched on all levels of personal and social experience. The way individuals experienced their lives, their present as well as the past and the future, in short, their "subjective sense" of time, was structured by

Richard K. Fenn is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Christianity and Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. Among his recent books are The Death of Herod (1992) and The Spirit of Revolt (1986).

¹ Roger Neustadter, "Beat the Clock: The Mid-Twentieth-Century Protest Against the Reification of Time," Time and Society 1 (1992), pp. 379-98.

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the awareness that the salvation of their own souls, and, therefore, not only those of the departed, depended on what the living could do from moment to moment in time, on time, over time, and throughout a lifetime.

This intensification of the inward experience of time reflected but also reinforced the efforts of individuals and organizations to buy or borrow time, to make up for lost time, to temporize, and to initiate the future or terminate the past. Monasteries and guilds, churches and city councils, all engaged in strategies to manipulate, control, expand, contract, and structure time. These social processes, along with the inner, subjective awareness of time, in turn were reinforced by what became a defining characteristic of Western civilization itself: a deadly seriousness about time. The "taint of time," the sinful consciousness, became entrenched in much of Western civilization, mediated through social institutions and inscribed, as it were, on the soul.²

I

If we examine Dante's purgatory, we will see why time was to be made the essence not only of the sacred but also of the secular in Western societies. For Dante, purgatory is the place where souls linger in a time between their latest and their final departure; in this ghostly interim, time is always running out. The moon is waning; hours are passing; and souls are waiting through the succession of days and nights, months and years, either for their release or for Judgment Day, whichever comes first. In the meantime, they clearly reenact their lifetimes on an other worldly landscape. To be sure, Dante often envisaged purgatory as though he were in a dream. Indeed, he explicitly describes some of the most heavily burdened characters in purgatory as "...going, as in dreams one sometimes goes ...."³ (Similarly, John Bunyan described The Pilgrim's Progress through the lens of a dream.)

Yet, there is already something this-worldly about purgatory. In Dorothy Sayers formulation, ".. . it is only in Purgatory, which is situated in time, that Dante sleeps at all; not in Hell or Heaven, which are eternal states."⁴ Thus, Dante places purgatory in secular time. As Sayers reminds us, the Church dwells in time, whether in this life or the next. Indeed, for Dante, time was of the essence of purgatory; his imaginary characters were doing time and serving an indefinite sentence for crimes of the heart, the mind, and the imagination, as well as of word and deed.

² It is crucial to link "the level of subjective, inner time-consciousness ... [with] the level of social processes that structure the concept of time ... [with] the level of the comprehensive historical context" [Werner Bergmann, "The Problem of Time in Sociology: An Overview of the Literature on the State of Theory and Research on the 'Sociology of Time,' 1900-82," Time and Society 1 (1992), pp. 124-25].
³ Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Cantica II, Purgatory, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (London: Penguin Books, 1955), Canto XI, 1.27.
⁴ Ibid., p. 140.

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Not only is there some irony in this development but also, perhaps, some tragedy. Sin, for Dante, was the "taint of time" on the soul, and it was the task of purgatory to expunge that taint. In the intensification of the meaning and experience of time that emerged from the doctrinal innovation of purgatory, however, the "taint of time" was driven more deeply into individual consciousness. Instead of an innovation that could succeed in freeing the soul from the burdens of the past and from dread of the future, purgatory was the beginning of a discipline that made time of the essence in a wide range of social institutions capable of putting the individual on probation and subjecting the self to successive privations and testing over a lifetime.

In more formal sociological terms, purgatory represents a stage in the development of Western society in which biographical and social time are very closely entwined with each other. It is also a stage, however, in which individuals are beginning to enjoy a few degrees of freedom in paying off their debts to society and whatever financial obligations or penances were left unpaid at the moment of their death. Thus the timing of the doctrine of purgatory suggests that, in addition to "timetables" for the payment of debt, "schedules" are beginning to appear by which individuals enjoy some discretion in satisfying their debts; they may even take their time in doing so.⁵ Societies thus reconstruct themselves by reinventing their own sense of time, and in the case of purgatory, the invention was fateful for the development of modern societies and for a particular type of social character that intensifies the experience of time.

There is in Western civilization, and particularly (although not peculiarly) in the American context, an intensification of time that leaves indelible marks on social character. In part, that is due to the convergence of Catholicism with Protestantism in this country; both religious communities share equally in what has been thought of as the Protestant ethic, with its intensification of time and seriousness about the future. In part, the marks of a "purgatorial complex" reflect the burdens on the soul of a people torn by separation from their countries or communities of origin and confronted both with an intractable environment and a public order that was often chaotic and brutal.

It would take a more extensive study than this one to determine how widespread is the "purgatorial" social character that is burdened, even obsessed, with time. Various commentators, of course, have suggested that Americans have undertaken to increase their burdens or that social masochism is becoming increasingly widespread in the United States during the 1980s and l990s.⁶ Only a careful and comprehensive

⁵ For a discussion of these and similar terms, see Bergmann, "The Problem of Time," pp. 103 ff. In the preceding paragraph, I am relying on his interpretation of this aspect of what has become a fairly sizable and complex literature.
⁶ Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1963); Arnold M. Cooper, "The Narcissistic-Masochistic Character," in Masochism: Current Psychoanalytic Perspectives, edited by Robert A. Glick and Donald I. Meyers (London: The Analytic Press, 1988),pp.117-138.

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examination of character in a wide range of contexts and communities could begin to give the answer, of course, and such a study cannot even be attempted here. There is some evidence that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, especially in their private schools, place children under intense, even excruciating time pressures; time in these contexts is filled with moral obligation and spiritual significance.⁷ The sense of sin, I would argue, would, therefore, vary according to the nature of "social time" in each context.

With the introduction of the doctrine of purgatory, the soul itself became contingent on the meaning and passage of time. Time, thus, became of the essence of the self and its development, just as time became of the essence of the individual's slow acquisition of rights and honors, of recognition and rewards for the achievement of individuality. In this process, however, the individual, whose soul could hitherto only be discovered and saved rather than acquired or produced, eventually helped to produce a secularized social system and an ascetic culture that together embodied the very tyranny of time from which purgatory had been designed to unburden the soul. The soul, no longer given or essential, embodied or transcendent, became contingent on the passage of time.

This development, however, is prefigured in the notion of purgatory itself. In that limbo, there is nothing of the unprecedented or the impossible to hope for. Indeed, purgatory is the world of those weighed down by the burdens of actuality, by sins committed and by other sins that, however imaginary, burden the soul as though they had actually been committed. The evidence for this suggestion comes from the fact that, in Dante's vision of purgatory, the dead are in the same time zone as the living. They share the same burden of time, of everyday life, of being quotidian and, therefore, captive to the tyranny of time. Indeed, they are serving their time. Just as the dead still occupy the same time zone as the living, the living share the same burden of time as the departed and suffer a similar burden of real debts or of imaginary obligations stemming from the unconscious. Both the living and the dead are doing time, serving their time, in punishment for sins not only of commission but also of the imagination and the unconscious mind.

II

The hallmark of that sinful state is what Dante calls "time's deep stain."⁸ Some souls have been precipitous in their pursuit of fame and glory, impatient, fast-forwarding to their future glory or to their

⁷ Some have argued, furthermore, that women and African Americans are not subject to the same, purgatorial time constraints in the formation of social character. For African Americans, Cf. the discussion in Joseph E. McGrath and Janice R. Kelly, "Temporal Context and Temporal Patterning: Toward a Time-centered Perspective for Social Psychology," Time & Society 1 (1992), pp. 405 ff.
⁸ Dante Alighieri, The Purgatorio, translated by John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 1961), Canto XI, 1.35.

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destruction. Others have been tardy in their life time, slow to respond to others' needs and delaying their own payment for their sins until it is too late. Having kept others waiting in their lifetime, they in turn are punished by being kept waiting for their salvation. If they have been presumptuous in pushing others out of their way on earth, then in purgatory they are pushed aside and burdened with time indefinitely. Time is of the essence of purgatory, and a soul burdened with time is in a state of sin. Purgatory is a place where precedent, what has gone before, still dominates the present in such a way that every moment exhibits in part a repetition of the past in the form of penance.

According to Dorothy Sayers, ante-purgatory is filled with those who missed crucial opportunities to avail themselves of the "means of Grace" in their own lifetimes. Their penance fits their crime; now they must wait even to enter into the gates of purgatory, where they can begin to be purified from their sins.⁹ Note the symmetry, then, between the imagined offense and its appropriate sentence. If being too late and missing opportunities in this life means being kept waiting in the next, there is an implicit law at work here, a spiritual eye for a spiritual eye, as it were. Freud spoke of it as the lex talionis and located it in the unconscious. It is at the root of the "purgatorial complex" and the resulting masochistic social character burdened with a sinful, however secularized, consciousness.

If the stain of time in the soul is sin, then it is delay in acting on impulses of love that first stains the soul. Virgil's constant advice to Dante on their way through purgatory is never to delay, never to fail to seize the day. "Remember, this day will not dawn again" (Canto XII, 1.84). It was also Freud's advice to carpe diem. Otherwise, between the impulse to love and desire fulfilled there enters a fatal delay, a pause that allows desire to remain unfulfilled. Granted that what Dante had in mind was the feast of divine love, of agape, attendance at which should never be delayed, it was, nevertheless, delay itself that produced the fatal stain of time on the soul.

Furthermore, Dante would also have agreed with Freud that it is frustrated desire that turns into envy and eventually into the fit punishment for envy: the tedious duty and heavy burden of the soul in purgatory.¹⁰ In purgatory, one pays for possibilities that were not grasped, and salvation comes from making the most of the possibilities for true repentance and amendment of life in the time remaining.

Indeed, it is those who have delayed in responding to "sweet invitations to the feast of love" (Canto XIII, 1.27) who are now in purgatory. Having kept others waiting, it is they who are now delayed in their spiritual progress. To sin is, thus, to forfeit the opportunities to give and to receive love. The punishment for this crime is to be kept in constant remorse for having wasted time and forfeited these possibilities. The only hope for the repentant sinner in purgatory is to be

⁹ Sayers, "Introduction," in Dante, Purgatory, p. 63.
¹⁰ Cf. Ciardi's note on Canto xv, 1.51, p. 167.

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so purified of time's stain that one can allow memory to flow through one without remorse, "that memory's stream may flow without a stain in joys to come" (Canto XIII, 11.89-90).¹¹

It is the same relief, of putting the past truly behind one in the forgetful waters of Lethe, that allows the future to begin and, in particular, gains one's entry into a state of grace. Without that purification, there can indeed be no relief from the stain of time and, thus, no future. By the fourteenth century, purgatory had become a way of life; it was now incumbent on all souls to acquire a new fate, a new moira or daimon, in the time remaining, regardless of whether one is living or dead.

The "sweet invitations to the feast of love" that Dante had in mind come, of course, from heaven itself, and the feast is intended to be far more chaste than libidinal. However, it is delay in responding to more earthly promptings of love and desire that turns these very promptings into something more strenuous and forbidding, for example, into cultural commands never to waste time. Under the conditions of repression, of course, these promptings seem to come from unseen sources, just as in purgatory the souls seeking their own purification heed the promptings of unseen (and, I would add, unconscious) messengers to make the most of their time that the day of their salvation can indeed be hastened.¹²

Remember that the world of the unconscious is one in which the punishment fits the crime. It is only fitting, therefore, that the proud should suffer in purgatory and do penance in a fashion that fits their (real or imaginary) crimes. For instance, Omberto Aldobrandesco suffers in purgatory because in this life he failed to pay the penance for his "haughty ways." Having subjugated others, it is only fitting that he should therefore bear such a weight of stone that he can scarcely raise his head (Canto XI. 11.49ff.). It is precisely unfulfilled love or anger that fuels the punitive conscience, the super ego. That is the so-called higher self that towers like a mountain above the self and weighs heavily upon it, often to the point of crushing what Dante so often calls "the laden soul."

This higher self, like the mount of purgatory, does indeed weigh the self down with the burden of time. That is because every new beginning, every apparent forward step, involves a repetition of the anxiety of separation experienced at one's birth.¹³ Thus even the

¹¹ Ciardi notes: "At the top of Purgatory, the finally purified souls are washed in Lethe, and it removes from them the very memory of sin. Thus Dante is uttering a wish for the more rapid advancement of these souls, a sentiment all of them would take in good part," (p. 146, emphasis added). Dante himself, then, exhibits the demand of the conscience never to waste 'ime, to make the most of every moment; it is not only Virgil's instructions or the voices of the souls in purgatory that carry this message. Dante's compunctions about time are his own.
¹² It is not clear what, if anything, souls can do to speed up their progress in purgatory.
¹³ In this discussion, I am following John Forrester's recent treatment of the repetition compulsion; see John Forrester, "In the Beginning Was Repetition," Time and Society 1, (1992),pp. 287-300.

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spiritual progress of souls in purgatory, according to Dante, is marked by a repetition of past errors and a return of repressed desires. Certainly Dante's own progress is marked by a repetition of the states of mind that marked his life on earth and to which he will return unless his journey through the imagination cures him of the compulsion to repeat the past.

When every new possibility is also double-coded in terms of some unfortunate, painful, or tragic precedent, the only way forward is through taking one's time to live through, pay for, and finally expunge the past. If heaven is the realm of the impossible and the unprecedented, purgatory is a land of pure contingency. Everything is still possible, and, yet, precedent still conditions one's ability to embrace these possibilities and to seize the moment.

It is this compulsion to repeat the past in order to repeal it that stains the soul with time and constitutes sin. To be sure, sin is a reflection of unfulfilled desires, but, more important, the past repeats itself even in acts of the conscience that seek to 'whip' or 'rein' in (to use Dante's imagery), to stimulate and to check, those initial and unsatisfied desires. The Mount of Purgatory is indeed the repetition of past desires and fears in a new situation that withholds its promise so long as the compulsion to repeat remains alive. That is why time reigns in purgatory as well as on earth and why it stains the soul.¹⁴

The compulsion to repeat is like the yearning of the pilgrim to return home, each new departure being helped but also hindered by the last:

Now-in the hour that melts with homesick yearning
The hearts of seafarers who've had to say
Farewell to those they love, that very morning-
Hour when the new-made pilgrim on his way
Feels a sweet pang go through him, if he hears
Far chimes that seem to knell the dying day-
Did I suspend the office of my ears,
And turn to watch a spirit rising there,
And beckoning with his hand for listeners.
(Canto VIII, 11.1-9)

For this pilgrim, as for Bunyan's, time is of the essence of the soul, a sad departure that leaves him with an unfinished farewell. His homesick yearning, therefore, calls for more words to be spoken, but it is now too late. What might be turned into despair of never returning is quickly transmuted, however, into a fatal anticipation, a "sweet pang" that comes from hearing bells in the distance. In the sound of these bells, the pilgrim hears the announcement of a death, a final departure that consummates the farewell that has been uttered by the lips but not by the soul.

Note the unmistakable sounds of seduction and torment. On the one hand, the pilgrim longs to return home, to the archaic matrix of the soul in which time never runs out. Indeed, the maternal relation of the

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 290.

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infant provides just such a matrix, a time in which desire does not remain unsatisfied long enough, as it were, to start the clock of the soul ticking. On the other hand, however, succumbing to the yearning for that matrix immediately starts the pilgrim soul feeling the shortness and scarcity of time. It is time that is running out and placing the soul in fear of being late for its appointment, in fear of being unable to make its eternal connection.

Initially, of course, the carrier of this matrix that at once seduces and torments the soul was the church with its doctrine of purgatory. As the rhythms of monastic life became institutionalized in the city and were supplemented by other times of obligation, however, the matrix expanded to encompass all of life and every moment of every day. As I will shortly demonstrate, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing introduced his flock to the significance of the purgatorial "hour," a moment that seems endless since it captures the heart and fastens the soul, as it were, between two departures, both painful. In that "hour, time is of the essence of the soul, and words typically fail.

One can hear the same anguished and intense experience of time in the Protestant form of purgatory popularized by Bunyan, a way of life in which time is always of the essence. Bunyan's pilgrim is always hurrying toward a luminous goal, despairing over time that has been lost, seeking in despair to make up for lost time, temporizing (with nearly fatal consequences), and only occasionally seizing the moment. Compare the soul in purgatory, "the new-made pilgrim on his way," with the perpetually time-obsessed pilgrim of John Bunyan:

"How far," thought Christian, "have I gone in vain! Such was the lot of the Jews for their sin; they were sent back by the way of the Red Sea; and I am made to tread those steps with grief which I might have trod with joy, had it not been for this sleep. How far might I have been on my way by this time. I am made to tread those steps thrice which I need not to have trod but once; yea now too I am like to be lost in the night for the day is nigh well spent. O that I had not slept!"¹⁵

Neither Freud nor Dante counsels that one fulfill every desire or act on every impulse, loving or otherwise. Civilization will-it must-have its discontents. There is in the soul an immortal struggle, and it is human fate, if not human destiny, to be punished for the impulses that one has not fulfilled. These turn on the self and in the name of a higher law condemn the self to carry a mounting burden of guilt. Thus, desire is the "whip," and, in the name of humility or love, it lashes one on to acts of compassion and self-sacrifice; love delayed then turns into a "rein" that holds the sinner back with reminders of the punishment that falls to the proud or hard of heart. In this tension between desire and prohibition, time enters into-and stains-the soul with grief over actions delayed and opportunities forfeited. Indeed, the central sin of purgatory is acedia, the failure to act on the impulse of love or at least

¹⁵ John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, edited by Mary Godolphin (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939), pp. 330-331.

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to respond to the needs of the world, failure to live in the world of contingency on its own terms and for its own sake.

III

Here, then, is the paradox. On the one hand, the vision of purgatory appears to carry within itself the seeds of modernity. The future is open, the past remains to be settled and effaced, and salvation depends on seizing the day, making the most of its possibilities, and entering the future with a clean slate. This bold stance toward both the past and the future is a peculiarly, if not uniquely, modern impulse, and it has been carried particularly, of course, by the bourgeoisie. One does not ask for the impossible and the unprecedented but only for time to make the most of the opportunities that the world has to offer without constraint by the past or fear of the future.

On the other hand, however, the same vision of purgatory also carries within itself the seeds of a new tyranny, the tyranny of time. There is no escape from the past until and unless every old debt is paid, every score settled, every real and imaginary act of pride is compensated for by years of penance and self-mortification under weights commensurate with the burdens one has imposed on others; the past weighs heavily on the soul that is seeking to make the most of the time remaining.

The result is a modernity that has turned time into a new source of obligation and hegemony, time being the resource that one must never waste, the metronome that regulates one's activities, and the fate that carries one to one's death. Modern societies indeed have synchronized activities to the point that time exerts an exquisite pressure on all who are regulated by their interdependence with others rather than by the flow of tides and seasons or by biorhythms and the stars. Instead of leading to a world of pure contingency, purgatory has become a world in which contingency is mediated and controlled by institutions and corporations whose calendars, schedules, and time imperatives constrain the fate or daimon of everyone who is seeking to be approved, credentialed, tested, promoted, probated, tenured, appointed, ordained, adjudicated, or elected, to name only a few of the processes of purgation that modern societies have developed. Modern societies have become secular purgatories.

Of course, in an essay as brief as this, there is no way to specify or even to suggest all the links between medieval and modern conceptions of self and society. Some of the linkages developed over a long period of time: in the experience of marginal peoples or of slaves, on whose lives time is running out; in expressions in apocalyptic religious culture that slowly developed more attenuated versions of the end of time; under strong pressures for coordinating social life according to terms set by monks, councils, ministries, or the machinery of government and industry. All these can produce an intensification of the experience of time that, when taken into social character, turns time

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into an insupportable tyranny. Under these conditions, individuals, groups, and communities inevitably seek to make up for lost time, to buy time, and to temporize in any way that indeed they can.

No doubt, purgatory intensified the demands of the community on the individual, demands for sacrifice and renunciation, for hard work and endurance, for unflagging zeal and compassion. These also are the demands of modernity. Even in the twentieth century, political scientists flailed the "amoral familism" of the households of Italy for failing to support a civic culture, just as Dante's vision warned of the corrupt and self-serving households that tore the fabric of the city states of the fourteenth century. Indeed the poem Purgatorio is itself a warning to the inhabitants of warring and corrupt city-states that their time is also running out. Some will be slaughtered by the envious; others, however good they may have been compared with their enemies, will die without issue or spiritual legacy, and their houses will thus come to an end. The beginnings of a succession crisis can be found in the lines of prophetic warning, as well as the prophetic denunciation of the brutal wars among city-states in Tuscany.¹⁶ Thus, the poem is a dramatization of its own vision of purgatory, that time is of the essence, and only those who repent themselves in time and who complete a timely penance can avoid damnation, however long their period of purification in purgatory must be. As we have noted, these demands may well have been mediated by Dominican monks in Italy who counseled against wasting a moment of time; they certainly were conveyed by priests like the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who counseled his flock to turn their lives into a purgatorial form of penance and purification from the weight of past sins.

For some, these demands from the community offered welcome opportunities for entrepreneurs and for status groups anxious to increase their standing. Marginal status groups, like the barbers or surgeons in medieval cities, sought to enhance their social standing by affiliation with the monasteries, in return for which they undertook to pay off the debts of the departed members of their occupations. Thus, the intensification of the demands of the city for new forms of commitment and citizenship also intensified the meaning and significance of one's own moral commitments over one's lifetime. Part of that intensification required the payment of debts in time, the seizing of new opportunities as they came along, and the obligations of the living to satisfy the debts of the departed.

To enter modernity, however, requires not only renunciation but a way of overcoming the resistance of the past, the compulsion to repeat. As I have noted, purgatory, translated into this-worldly efforts over a lifetime, intensifies the tendency of each new departure to rekindle the memory of previous separations and disappointments. Thus, the

¹⁶ Ciardi's note on Canto XIV, 11.103 ff.

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purgatorial intensification of time and of moral obligation reinforces the compulsion to repeat, even though it purportedly demands that one finish old business before undertaking the new. The purgatorial cure, then, is part and parcel of the old disease of souls tainted by time. It is, therefore, not surprising that the brave new world, for which the pains of purgatory were intended to be a preparation, turns out to have its own forms of tyranny, in which time serves many masters and becomes, in its own right, something of a tyrant itself.

In The Cloud of Unknowing, this intensification of time turns the daily life of the spiritual pilgrim into a this-worldly purgatory:

When a man is experiencing in his spirit this nothing in its nowhere, he will find that his outlook undergoes the most surprising changes. As the soul begins to look at it, he finds that all his past sins, spiritual and physical, which he has committed from the day he was born are secretly and sombrely depicted on it. They meet his gaze at every turn, until at last after much hard work, many heartfelt sighs and many bitter tears he has virtually washed them all away....

For he that perseveres does at times feel comfort and have some hope of perfection, for he begins to feel, and indeed to see, that many of his past sins are by grace in process of being rubbed away. Though he still has to suffer, he now believes his suffering will one day come to an end, for it is all the time getting less and less. So he now begins to call it not "hell" but "Purgatory"¹⁷

There are other reasons why modernity should turn out to intensify and deepen the very "taint of time," that is, sin, from which it was supposed to provide purgatorial redemption and release. The souls in purgatory, after all, were temporizing. They were protracting their moral debts until the last ounce of suffering and purification should have been paid. In this way, they could not only delay the time of their ascent into heaven but also protract the period in which others, the living, could be called on to pay the debts of the departed. It is not surprising, therefore, that the living, subject to purgatorial self-discipline and to the "whip" and "rein" of moral exhortation and reproof from ecclesiastical, monastic, and civic offices, should also seek to defend themselves by temporizing. Those souls in purgatory who sought to return to the past may have been seeking to make up for lost time, to buy time, or to postpone judgement on their lives until they could withstand a rigorous accounting. So it is with the temporizing strategies of quite normal and ordinary individuals in modern societies, who resist the intensification of demands on their time and seek to buy time for themselves. Think for the moment of academics who try to "buy" time back from their institutions through grants, or of "release time" in the public schools, or of the myriad strategies for getting "time out" or "time off" that typify the hapless individual caught up in

¹⁷ The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, translated and edited by Clifton Wolters (London: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 143-144 (emphasis added).

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the relentless demands of a complex society for the synchronization of individual times according to the rhythms of corporate schedules.

Through the pursuit of happiness and in the requirements of civic duty, modern societies have intensified the meaning, significance, value, and scarcity of time. Dante's "whip" and "rein" have been transformed not only into injunctions to gain satisfaction at the feast of love but also to control one's own impulses in a civic ethos of enlightened self-restraint. Far from seeking either the impossible or the unprecedented, the modern soul engaged in purgatorial self-discipline in this life is, therefore, required continually to temporize. Temporizing even in modernity, that is, continuing the illusion that one can buy time or make up for lost time, only reveals a compulsion to repeat the past.

Something does get lost, however, when purgatory becomes secularized. No longer a place for the departed soul but now coterminous with the lifetime of the individual, purgatory becomes a way of life contingent on the individual's capacity to intensify the encounter with time. All that is left is an obsessive alternation between Dante's "whip" and "rein," between the impulse to satisfy the yearnings of the soul and the prohibitions and restraints that a society must inevitably impose on them. The "reality-principle" thus comes to represent a compromise, and social life itself becomes a "compromise-formation": a symptom, in Freudian terminology. For the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the believer-short of a state of grace-lives within the tension of dread over the consciousness of death and the hope inspired by the promise of forgiveness and by the gift of the love of God. Impelled by this tension, as it were, the believer "...may safely climb the high peak of perfection": a clear reference, I would argue, to the purgatorial mount.¹⁸ Within this tension, one can become obsessive about time, since "the dread of dying" leaves the believer with an intense awareness of "the shortness of time," as contrasted with the abundance of time enjoyed by those who "times without number in the course of a single hour" offer their lives and hopes to God.¹⁹

There is something both strenuous and modern in this form of self-discipline. Contrast with these purgatorial exertions the way in which souls may be redeemed in "traditional," as compared with "modern," societies. In the former, according to Roy Wagner, the soul is always in danger of being lost and requires being found because it is essentially passive and inert:

Whereas error and excess are expectable tendencies of an individual self, to be "corrected" by discipline and education, the soul, as a comparatively 'passive' quality of discernment, can only be "lost." And when the soul is

¹⁸ See "The Epistle of Prayer," in The Cloud of Unknowing, pp. 224 ff.
¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 228-229.

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lost, the only recourse is to restore it, to "find" it, rather in the way that a perspective or insight is "found," and not to constrain or educate it.²⁰

Of course, it still takes time to develop or acquire a soul in modern societies, a long process of growth, training, development, and education. That is why the soul is more likely to be more neurotic than hysterical, since the crisis of its self-possession never arrives. In traditional societies, the soul must, indeed, be found, when it is lost; hence, the possibility of hysteria. In modern societies, the purgatorial development of the soul has no clear beginning in rites of penance and no clear end in spiritual exaltation; hence, the possibility of neurosis. In a traditional society that confronts the young with the powers and authorities of their elders in critical rites of transition to adulthood, however, hysteria and the potential loss of the soul to these representations are entirely possible. Time runs out on the soul much faster in traditional than in modern societies: hence Wagner's distinction between hysteria and neurosis:

"Growing up" or "becoming adult" in this way is a cure or control of hysteria, of one's own deficiencies in the invention of self and world, in the way that our "personality development" (which is individual) is a cure or control of neurosis. "Growing up" may be helped along by confession (the differentiation of self from sin), by more guidance, or by the special magic of moral myths that "compel" and crystallize the innate morality of the listener, but it is useless and pointless unless the individual has already learned invention, the thing it constrains, in the mild hysteria of childhood.²¹

Even with the inventiveness (and possible hysteria) of childhood, the cure of the soul-spiritual pedagogy-can only perpetuate the disease of hysteria in a new form, that is, in neurosis. What passes for spiritual growth is, therefore, only a disguise for arrested development. The soul remains elusive, undiscovered, and unrevealed, while the possibility of beatitude, of possessing one's own soul, remains in the realm of the impossible and unprecedented. One is left with a lingering sense of what is possible, a sense that remains still slightly under the influence of magical thinking and touched, therefore, with the possibility of hysteria or even panic. To control that panic requires education and self-discipline, rationality and imagination, but these alone cannot provide the cure.

Thus, modernity, I would argue, fails to enable the possession of the soul, whether through cultural invention, through the mysteries, in rites of initiation, or through the honors accorded both the living and the dead. Instead of the invention of the impossible and the unprecedented, modernity offers only process and development in and through time, a process and a development in which the soul may never be

²⁰ Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), P. 98.
²¹ Ibid., p. 99.

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recognized while the self is being acquired. In that process, time is made scarce by organizational pressures and intensified by the secular residues of a purgatorial culture. Those residues leave on the psyche the "taint of time," a neurotic and diffuse consciousness of sin without religious expression or ecclesiastical remedy, made chronic rather than relieved by the combined efforts of a pedagogy that relies on reason and the imagination.

Nonetheless, the inventions of modernity have failed to innovate in the way that Wagner suggests is essential for the renewal of a people's spirit. Without that renewal, souls are indeed not only burdened with time but lost, perhaps forever.