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This chapter begins with a scene painted by the North African rhetor Julianus Pomerius, in his On the Contemplative Life, composed in southern Gaul in the early years of the sixth century. Although rarely recognized as such, the work is cast as a dialogue. As Robert Markus has emphasized, what Pomerius in fact composed was a handbook for pastors, encouraging them to participate in an ascetic understanding of moral authority and pastoral responsibility. These priorities are announced at once: having promised to define ‘in a few words’ the nature of the contemplative life, Pomerius offers to consider ‘whether one charged with ruling a Church can become a sharer in contemplative virtue’. This question in turn leads on to a host of others, all of which presume a concern with the moral exercise of episcopal office. Taken together, the evidence generated around Pomerius reveals a network of rich and cultured clerics and laity in southern Gaul and beyond, with particular interests in the ascetic life and its promotion throughout the Catholic Church.

This chapter examines writers on purgatory in the sixth and seventh centuries, including Julianus Pomerius, Caesarius of Arles, and Gregory the Great. It also examines ideas about postmortem purgation as expressed in minor works of the seventh century including De ordine creaturarum and in visions of the afterlife and in hagiography. It concludes by looking at rituals of sacramental purification, especially baptism and penance, and discusses purgation in funeral liturgies, burial practices, and prayers for the dead.

Caesarius of Arles, Julianus Pomerius’ star pupil, has the reputation of a popular preacher of great fervour and enduring influence. In one sense, Caesarius’ mission as a preacher had been to secure the assimilation by his hearers of an inherited language — the words of Scripture and the texts of the Fathers. In devoting his prodigious energies to the fulfilment of this vocation, however, Caesarius had left his successors with an indelible sense of his own voice. His claim simply to represent an established tradition jarred with the palpable force of his intervention. Caesarius’ very rhetorical charisma undermined his own attempts to routinize the spiritual purification of his flock. This tension between the language of tradition and the voice of the individual speaker was inherent in the asceticism of ‘pure speech’ as promulgated by John Cassian. Caesarius’ prowess as a popular preacher is understood to follow from his close attention to the example of Augustine of Hippo.

Gregory the Great made his own the insight sketched by Julianus Pomerius in his handbook for bishops and developed by Benedict of Nursia in a monastic context: that the speech of the ruler, when properly applied, can bind up all divisions within the body of the faithful. Gregory pursued a language of authority that would carry all before it with a degree of concentration undreamt of by earlier writers. Augustine of Hippo had denied that the quantification of the ways of power was possible; his subsequent readers had tentatively moved to reverse his verdict, but only with Gregory does one find a writer prepared to stake all on the performance of the moral ruler, and to enumerate in detail how this might be possible. Gregory was prepared to take the risk of claiming to be morally qualified to lead, to shoulder all the burdens of the faithful, to act as the servant of the servants of God.