Purgatory is where souls are cleansed before heaven. A bar named after it has a 4.8, which is closer to paradise than the name suggests
Purgatory Bar holds a 4.8 from six hundred and ninety people – one of the strongest real-sample scores in this Chelsea survey – and it is named after one of the strangest and most consequential ideas in the history of Western religion.
The middle place
In Catholic theology, purgatory is the place – or the state – between heaven and hell. It is where the souls of the saved, who died with sins still to be answered for, are purified before they can enter heaven. It is not damnation; it is a waiting room, a place of temporary cleansing, painful but ultimately hopeful, because everyone in purgatory is bound, eventually, for paradise.
The idea is not clearly in the Bible – it developed over centuries of theology – and it became one of the most important concepts in medieval Christianity. The living could, it was taught, reduce the time their loved ones spent in purgatory through prayers, masses and good works. This gave rise to an entire economy of the afterlife: the buying of “indulgences,” payments to the Church that supposedly shortened a soul’s time in purgatory.
The idea that split Christianity
The sale of indulgences – money for time off purgatory – became one of the great scandals of the medieval Church, and it was the specific abuse that lit the fuse of the Protestant Reformation. When Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in 1517, he was attacking, above all, the selling of indulgences and the whole machinery of paying to spring souls from purgatory.
The Protestant churches rejected purgatory entirely – they found no clear scriptural basis for it – and this single disagreement, about a waiting room in the afterlife, helped split Western Christianity in two, triggered centuries of war, and reshaped the entire history of Europe. A bar named Purgatory is named, whether it knows it or not, after one of the most explosive ideas in Western history.
Dante’s Purgatory
The most famous vision of purgatory is Dante’s, in the “Divine Comedy.” Dante imagined it as a great mountain, which souls climb, level by level, purging themselves of the seven deadly sins as they ascend toward paradise at the summit. His “Purgatorio” is, in some ways, the most human of his three books – full of hope, effort and gradual improvement, the souls climbing steadily toward the light.
There is something almost fitting in a bar named Purgatory, then. A bar is, in its way, a middle place – between the working day and home, between sober and otherwise, a waiting room where people pass the time. And this one, with its 4.8, is clearly closer to paradise than to the other place.
The bar
A genuinely well-regarded Chelsea bar, doing a strong 4.8 across a real sample of nearly seven hundred people – a number that, by this survey’s exacting standards, is convincingly good. Whatever purgatory is like, this version has excellent reviews.
Verdict
Excellent, popular, and named after the theological waiting room whose sale of time-off helped split Christianity and start the Reformation.
Go, have a drink in purgatory, and enjoy the fact that this one, unlike the original, has a 4.8 and no indulgences to buy.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Dialogue accuracy transcribed.