Purgatory is a nasty notion - someone should tell the IMF

CULTURE SHOCK: IN THE FIRST act of Hamlet, after the prince has been visited by the ghost of his father, he swears "by Saint Patrick" in order to affirm the reality of the apparition he has just experienced. The oath is not accidental.

Hamlet’s father has appeared from purgatory, where uneasy souls are sent to be purified before they can see the face of God. And for medieval and early-modern Europe purgatory was synonymous not just with Patrick but with Lough Derg in Co Donegal. The saint had discovered the entrance to purgatory on what is still a pilgrim island.

This legend had an influence on European literature, from Dante's Divine Comedyto the great 17th-century Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón, who wrote a play called Saint Patrick's Purgatory. Its long-term impact on Irish culture was the subject of a learned academic conference at St Patrick's College in Drumcondra, Dublin, last weekend. I had to speak to the conference, and, given what was happening elsewhere, it seemed an insane distraction. And then it struck me that the examination of no other aspect of European culture could have been quite so appropriate or timely.

What, after all, is the so-called bailout except the application to economics of the idea of purgatory? Though they may not even be aware of it, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are applying to the real world a mindset shaped by a religious myth. My old green Catechismdefines purgatory as "a place or state of punishment in the next life, where souls are purified before they can enter heaven". Souls go to purgatory if they are not "fully purified from sin and its effects". This is exactly the state into which we Irish are to be confined.

Irish souls are stained with the sin of financial recklessness. Before we can enter the heaven of European normality we must be tormented sufficiently to drive the badness out of us once and for all. When we are sufficiently purified we will be allowed to see God – or, in the contemporary equivalent, return to the money markets. Leopold Bloom in Ulyssesimagines the dead Dignam: "Out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory." This seems a pretty good description of our current situation.

Irish writing, perhaps in anticipation of this moment, has long had a strong purgatorial strain. WB Yeats's Purgatoryis a powerful evocation of that in-between state in which souls "know at last / The consequence of those transgressions / Whether upon others or upon themselves". Yeats's play is in turn an influence on Samuel Beckett (who attended the premiere at the Abbey in 1938). His characters are stuck in a purgatorial stasis of endless repetitions and petty sufferings. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policemanis a brilliant vision of a peculiarly Irish purgatory. Tom Murphy's first play, On the Outside, recasts the souls in purgatory waiting fruitlessly to see God as two Tuam shams trying to get into a dance hall. Seamus Heaney's Station Islandfuses Dante and Lough Derg into a purgatorial space in which dead voices can speak to him and he can, perhaps, be purified. Michael Hartnett's The Purgeevokes a kind of linguistic purgatory in which the poet's sins of cliche – "the symbols, the cant, the high allusion" – will be burned away.

And yet – and here there may be a lesson for the bailout boys – Irish writing tends to shy away from the logic of purgatory. This is, indeed, one of the decent things about our modern writers. The image of purgation is, lest we forget, a particularly dangerous one. Translated from culture into politics, it begets monsters. Totalitarian systems – fascism, Stalinism, extreme ethnic nationalism – see themselves as essentially purgatorial. They will purify the state or the nation by expunging its impurities. That very quickly comes to mean the purgation of impure people: class enemies, ideological deviants, the sexually unclean, the ethnically adulterated.

Much as Irish writers like to imagine purgatory, they seem to have an instinctive revulsion for purging. Joyce is a striking example. He sets himself up as the purger supreme, declaring in the Holy Office: "Myself unto myself will give / This name, Katharsis-Purgative. . ." But in fact he becomes, in Ulysses, the great celebrant of the impure, the imperfect, the mongrel and the merely human.

This is not untypical. The idea of purgatory in literature is heavily related to classical tragedy, whose function Aristotle saw as the “purgation” of terror and pity. For all its fascination with that idea, Irish literature is seldom tragic in this sense. It is perhaps too humane to embrace the idea of purging pity – compassion never deserts it. And it is too much in love with impure forms to embrace the idea of art as a method of purification. Tragicomedy is a much more Irish form than tragedy.

Even plays that could be straight tragedies (Brian Friel's Translations, for example) move instead towards ambiguity and uncertainty. Perhaps because it belonged so much to the church, the idea of cleansing and being cleansed doesn't ultimately appeal to most Irish writers.

This is not about being cheerful or sentimentally optimistic. One of the reasons purgatory never really works in Irish writing is that no one actually believes in heaven. There is no escape from Beckett's never-never land. At the end of On the Outsidethe lads don't get into the dance hall: the last line is, "Come on out of here to hell." But the other side of this lack of optimism is an underlying scepticism about the idea that we can be purged of our sins.

Applying the idea of purgatory to economics is daft in itself, a vestige of medieval mentalities that have no relevance to contemporary realities. If Ireland were still a deeply Catholic culture, that notion might have purchase here. But, as it is, our writers have probably produced more wisdom on the subject. They recognise that purging societies is a nasty notion. And they know that once you get consigned to purgatory it is damn hard to get out again.