355 - Richard Rohlin - Universal History: The Surprising Irish Origin of Purgatory

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2024

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of the Universal History podcast with Richard Rohlin, we discuss the surprising Irish origin of the medieval notion of purgatory, why it's understandable that purgatory is part of the medieval experience, its relevance to our lives today, and how Dante presents purgatory in a new, more optimistic way in his Divine Comedy.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/XBdXgwl1VYU

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Coming up
01:11 - Intro music
01:37 - Introduction
04:23 - Ireland in the medieval period
13:31 - History for the Irish
20:15 - A lyrical approach
23:51 - Magical realism
29:37 - Ireland's rigour
37:34 - The popular medieval belief of Purgatory
40:25 - The Irish Penitentials
43:03 - Purification after death
50:20 - Avoid purgatory
51:06 - Descriptions of purgatory
54:57 - The problem statement
01:07:03 - Dante's purgatory
01:09:04 - The best defense for purgatory
01:17:15 - Bringing it home

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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	probably everything that you imagine purgatory is, is wrong, according to the 12th century,
0:06.0	which is what I'm going to be talking about now. So, if I describe things to you from the popular
0:11.3	medieval experience of purgatory in the 12th century, and you're like, no, no, that's not right at all.
0:15.7	I know. I'm not coming at anybody. What I'm really interested in is the world of the Middle Ages.
0:23.7	And in fact, I'm going to be sort of defending why this was like a reasonable thing for them to
0:27.7	believe, even though it's not something that I personally believe. It's not something my church
0:31.8	teaches. These realities are realities that we deal with now. I don't believe in the idea that
0:36.9	when we talk about the
0:38.3	afterlife, that we're only talking about what happens to after you die. The reality of sin,
0:44.1	okay, is that it makes you suffer. When that happens, you have two choices in dealing with the
0:52.4	suffering that sin causes in your life. And one is torment,
0:57.4	and the other is prigation. Those are the two possibilities you have. That is actually the reason
1:02.9	you could say why sin causes suffering. The suffering is an opportunity for repentance every time.
1:22.5	This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.
1:40.4	So hello, everyone. We are back with Richard Rowland for another universal history.
1:46.4	And Richard has a great surprise, one that I did not expect. So I will let him introduce the subject today. Yeah, okay, so we're going to try something a little tricky today, which is going to be taking you all the way from the edge of the world, which is of course Ireland, which is kind of where we are in universal history right now, all the way to the Mountain of Purgatory and Dante's Divine Comedy.
2:04.6	And the unlikely connection between those two things.
2:08.6	So what I'm going to try to do is to outline some things that are kind of,
2:12.6	and I know by the way that in our last episode, I, here's what we're going to do the next two videos,
2:18.3	and then we're not doing either of those things today.
2:20.3	But we will get to them.
2:21.7	But what I wanted to do today was actually to outline some things that are kind of unique and interesting about Irish Christianity,
	...

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