In the Christian tradition, the western church believes in the doctrine of purgatory. In the eastern church, a common teaching is the doctrine of the aerial tollhouses. The idea is demons come and try to carry the soul off to hell, accusing the soul of their sins or persuading the soul to hold onto them. I know both these teachings had come into being by the medieval era. How did this become so? Where do these doctrines come from? Were they present in judaism? What did Christians believe during the patristic era?
The history of Purgatory, and its existence are quite complicated in the Christian tradition. Jacques Le Goff’s “The Birth of Purgatory” places the introduction of purgatory into the Catholic doctrine, and the invention of the word itself, in the 1200s.
When, between the second and fourth centuries, Christianity set itself to thinking about the situation in which souls find themselves between the death of the individual and the Last Judgement, and when, in the fourth century, the greatest fathers of the church conceived of the idea (shared with minor differences as we shall see, by Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine) that certain sinners might be saved, most probably by being subjected to a trial of some sort, a new belief was born, a belief that gradually matured until in the twelfth century it became the belief in purgatory. ^1
This idea was, in the patristic era, not imagining a specific place or location, such as Heaven and Hell, but the fledglings of a struggle for souls not assigned to Heaven or Hell was there. The influences on Heaven and Hell are debated, but Le Goff makes the claim that the separation of divine punishment and glory was an exaggerated version of Hades and Elysium, rather than the Jewish tradition of sheol, which had no divine eternal punishment. ^2 For these early Christians, fire played a large role in the imagination of the afterlife. In chapter 20 of Augustine’s “The City of God” he emphasizes the fire that will punish damned souls.
I shall now cite from the Gospel according to Matthew the passage which speaks of the separation of the good from the wicked by the most efficacious and final judgment of Christ: When the Son of man, he says, shall come in His glory, . . . then shall He say also unto them on His left hand, Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. ^3
Continuing into the late 6th Century, Pope Gregory I, in book 4 of his “Diologues”, discusses the nature of the spirit and how it is subject to punishment by fire despite being separated from its corporeal body. Several chapters cover proof of the separation of the soul from the body before turning to the punishment.
That a corporal thing may burn that which hath no body, whiles that an invisible burning and sorrow is drawn from visible fire, and the incorporal soul by means of corporal fire may be tormented with a spiritual and incorporal flame: although out of the Gospel we also learn that the soul is not only tormented by seeing the fire, but also by the feeling thereof. ^4
The thing you mention with demons was also very popular in early medieval visionary literature. In visionary literature, the souls is guided on a tour through the afterlife, generally by a guardian angel, and often tormented or approached by demons attempting to send them off their path. ^5 In the Vision of St. Fursey, written in the early 7th Century, Furseus is approached by demons who accuse him a great many sins and block him from heaven. Furseus and his protecting angels succeed and he makes it through Hell. He also witnesses the punishing fires of Hell. By the 7th Century, the belief in a punishing fire has a firm place in Christian thought about the afterlife. One of the more famous visionary journeys, before Dante wrote his Divine Comedy, was the Visio Wettini. It was written during the reign of Louis the Pious. The monk Wetti, on his sickbed, is harassed by a demon stating that it will punish and torment Wetti upon his death. Like many others, Wetti is saved by an angel’s intervention.
For the time period you’re asking about, Christianity doesn’t have a clear image of the afterlife. What is generally accepted by the Church Fathers was the punishing fire of Hell, which was eternal damnations, and the eternal joys of heaven. In the “Passion of Perpetua,” martyrs are already being carried straight to heaven by angels, showing the longevity of the soul being carried. Beyond that, the geographic nature of the afterlife wasn’t entirely decided.
Augustine argued that there are two fires, an everlasting fire in which the damned, for whom intercession is futile, burn forever-on which Augustine lays great stress- and a purgatorial fire, which he is more hesitant. ^6
For the Church Fathers in the patristic era, Hell was certain and damned souls would be sent there, Heaven was certain and blessed souls and martyrs would be sent there, and everyone else was questionable, possibly decided on the day of judgement. Those souls were possibly sent into a purgation that was different than eternal torment, but that is not fully clarified. There was also the question on the efficacy of intercession via prayer, which gains more and more popularity as time goes on.
1: Jacques Le Goff, “The Birth of Purgatory,” trans: Arthur Goldhammer, (Chicago: University Press, 1984), 3.
2: Le Goff, 7.
3: Augustine, “City of God,” Chapter 20.
4: Pope Gregory I, “Diologues,” Book 4, Chapter 29.
5: Eileen Gardener, “Vision of Heaven and Hell Before Dante,” (New York: Italica Press, 1989).
6: Le Goff, 69.