Annotation CCLVIII

”But if any man build upon this foundation,” etc. — 1 Corinthians 3:12

Purgatory.

Theodoret’s testimony for the purgatorial fire, from the exposition of the epistle to the Corinthians, St. Thomas adduces in the book Against the Errors of the Greeks and Armenians, in these plain words: “THE APOSTLE says, ‘He shall be saved’ — thus, as [it were] through a smelting fire, purging whatever has intervened through the incaution of [his] past life, from the dust at least of the feet of the earthly sense [affection], in which [fire] he remains so long, until whatever of grossness and of earthly affection has cleaved [to him] be purged — for whom mother Church devoutly offers victims and peaceful gifts [i.e. the Mass].” These words, indeed, are nowhere extant — neither in the Latin nor in the Greek commentaries of Theodoret. It can be believed [that] they were either withdrawn by certain Greeklings hostile to purgatory, or taken by St. Thomas from some other work, where Theodoret thus expounded this passage.