Dictionary

purgatorial en · ADJ

Meanings

1. Of, pertaining to, or resembling purgatory.
   • At the same time, [the three bishops] emitted a summary confession of their faith […] that there is no purgatorial state after this life […] 1784, John Brown, A Compendious History of the British Churches in England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, volume 1, Glasgow, page 113:
   • What aunswere then will you make to him that shall frame out of Saynt Paul an argument to ouerthrow the whole force and estimacion of your Purgatory on this wise? Fe. Christ needeth no Purgatoriall Expiation. Ri, Christ is our Righteousnes, out of S. Paul. So. Ergo. Our Righteousnes needeth not any Purgatoriall Expiation. 1581, Walter Haddon et al., translated by James Bell, Against Ierome Osorius Byshopp of Siluane in Portingall, London: John Daye, Book 3:
   • […] fearful lest in the midst of the purgatorial fire, which differed from the infernal only in that it was not everlasting, his penance might avail no more than a drop of moisture […] 1917, James Joyce, chapter 4, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: The Egoist, page 171:
   • […] can you suppose it would offend that benevolent Being […] to raise a devoted heart from purgatorial torments to a state of heavenly bliss, when you could do it without the slightest injury to yourself or any other? 1848, Anne Brontë, chapter 35, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
2. That purifies by removing sin; expiatory.
   • Often […] exile is conceived as a purgatorial experience which the West Indian must undergo in order to know himself. 1970, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, “George Lamming and the Colonial Situation”, in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, London: Heinemann, page 127:
   • But to enter the Church in such an unscholarly way that he could not in any probability rise to a higher grade through all his career than that of the humble curate wearing his life out in an obscure village or city slum—that might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of being followed by a remorseful man. 1895, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Part 3, Chapter 1:
   • Dante makes this earlier exchange into a protopilgrimage in the purgatorial style and retroactively imbues it with the weight of this later project, his sacrato poema. 2020, David Bowe, Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante, page 144:

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