Chapter 5 describes how the story of the life of the Buddha travelled from India via the Manichees and the Islamic Middle East to the West to become the life of Saint Josaphat. As Saint Josaphat, the Buddha had become a saint in the Eastern Church by the tenth century and in the Catholic Church by the thirteenth. As a result of the many translations of the story in Western vernaculars, the story of the Buddha was one of the most popular Western legends. The story of Saint Josaphat demonstrates how, unbeknownst to the West, the life of the Buddha and the ascetic ideal that it symbolised were incorporated into the ‘spiritual’ life of Christianity. That Saint Josaphat was none other than the Buddha was not recognised in the West until the ‘historical’ Buddha emerged in the nineteenth century.

More common than Dante’s afterdeath schematic was that of St Thomas Aquinas; both have a supernal heaven, but Thomas’s infernal regions, based on Scripture and tradition, consisted of the limbo of the Fathers, emptied by Christ at his death, at the highest; immediately beneath it was the temporary hell of purgatory; under that was the limbo of infants; and at the very bottom was the region of the perpetually damned.It was believed that both souls in heaven (the saints) and the suffering souls in purgatory could somehow return to the earth’s surface, and it was also believed that some of the departed souls suffered their purging on earth instead of, or as well as, in purgatory (the ghost in Hamlet is a late example). It was assumed that these souls of the ‘saved dead’ had knowledge of what was happening among still-embodied mortals, and they were able (with divine permission) to have immediate means of communication with them.