Get Clean

Healing miracles of Christ Cleansed After Death
The Eastern Orthodox Don't Believe In Purgatory... Do They?

This piece was originally part of a larger essay written for Protestants attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy. It has been adapted for a more general audience here. Any text added to quotations for clarification appears in square brackets. Footnote numbers also appear in square brackets, for example: [1].

Although Eastern Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware acknowledges several schools of thought among the Eastern Orthodox on the topic of purification after death, he writes that "Today most if not all Orthodox theologians reject the idea of Purgatory, at least in [Catholic] form."[1] This is an understatement, for some Eastern Orthodox rejection of purgatory is quite vehement,[2] and many Protestants are led to believe that the Eastern Orthodox believe as Protestants do about the matter.[3] The first step to debunking this misconception is to show that the Eastern Orthodox, unlike most Protestants, pray and make offerings for the faithful departed, for example:

Again we pray for the repose of the soul(s) of the servant(s) of God (name(s)), departed this life; and that he (she, they) may be pardoned all his (her, their) sins, both voluntary and involuntary.[4]

The second step is to show that although some Eastern Orthodox flatly deny any belief in purgatory, classic Eastern Orthodox faith about cleansing after death is - from a Catholic perspective - a "distinction without a difference."

When union between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches was attempted at the Council of Florence, the subject of purgatory was a hot topic.[5] In the end, all but one of the Eastern Orthodox representatives (Eastern Orthodox St. Mark of Ephesus) agreed to the Council's formulas.[6] What is significant is that Mark of Ephesus' belief in cleansing (the meaning of "purgation") after death, and most if not all of his speculations on what form it could take, are acceptable to Catholicism.[7] From a Catholic perspective, Mark's "dissent" was entirely semantic. Compare these two formulas:

But if souls have departed this life in faith and love, while nevertheless carrying away with themselves certain faults, whether small ones [what Catholics call "venial sins"] over which they have not repented at all, or greater ones for which - even though they have repented over them - they did not undertake to show fruits of repentance: such souls, we believe, must be cleansed from this kind of sins but not by means of some purgatorial fire or a definite punishment in some place.[8]
The souls of those who depart this life with true repentance and in the love of God, before they have rendered satisfaction for their trespasses and negligences by worthy fruits of repentance, are cleansed after death by cleansing pains.[9]

There are only two apparent differences between these two statements. The first is that Mark of Ephesus was opposed to the term "fire" and the idea that cleansing occurs "in some place," neither of which is defined by the Council of Florence (or any other Ecumenical Council) as part of Catholic teaching on purgatory.[10] The second is that the Council mentions "pain" or "suffering." But Mark of Ephesus also believed that cleansing after death involves pain or suffering. He actually called his own theories "more torment than any fire...terror....that is much more tormenting and punishing than anything else."[11] In other words, both the Council and Mark of Ephesus agreed that there is a cleansing after death, the conditions of which may be understood as suffering.[12] None of the Eastern Orthodox representatives, then, substantially disagreed with the Council.[13] Perhaps Eastern Orthodox and Catholics are closer to each other than some think?

Footnotes

[1] Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: New Edition (New York: Penguin; 1997), 255.

[2] Frank Schaeffer's assertion that purgatory is a Catholic "innovation" or "invention" is uncharacteristically generous compared to some others I have seen. Dancing Alone (Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Orthodox Press; 1994), 69.

[3] Most Protestants, and even some Eastern Orthodox, are under the erroneous impression that Eastern Orthodox do not believe in a potential cleansing after death.

[4] Service Books of the Orthodox Church, vol. I: the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (South Canaan, Pennsylvania: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press; 1984), 54.

[5] Ivan N. Ostroumoff, The History of the Council of Florence (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery; 1971), ch. 4.

[6] Ware, 70-71. Unfortunately, most Eastern representatives retracted their agreement after the Council.

[7] The same can be said of Bessarion's presentation of the Greek view of purification as recorded in Ostroumoff (48-49).

[8] Mark of Ephesus' "First Homily Concerning Purgatorial Fire" quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose's The Soul After Death (California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood; 1994).

[9] Council of Basel-Florence-Ferrara in Tanner's Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils vol. 1 (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press; 1990).

[10] Official Catholic teaching, summed up in the Florentine formula above, generally indicates that such cleansing or healing takes place, as an application of and participation in Christ's redeeming life, but the Church is reticent to say whether it occurs in a particular place or takes any particular amount of time. The Church's teaching is simply that such cleansing occurs and that it is finite (not eternal). The lack of specifics about whether this cleansing occurs in a particular place or takes any particular length of time has allowed authors like Dante, Lewis, and Kreeft to speculate, in their fiction, what forms it could take (just as Eastern Orthodox St. Mark of Ephesus did).

[11] The Soul After Death.

[12] Many people, especially Protestants, have a tendency to balk at the association of "suffering" with purgation. This is not some kind of gratuitous torture. St. Catherine of Genoa believed "the least vision [the souls being purged] have of God outweighs all woes and all joys that can be conceived" and "apart from the happiness of the saints in heaven... there is no joy comparable to that of the souls in purgatory" and "there is no peace to be compared with that of the souls in purgatory, save that of the saints in paradise, and this peace is ever augmented by the in-flowing of God into these souls, which increases in proportion as the impediments to it are removed."

[13] Some modern Eastern Orthodox vehemently oppose the use of the word "satisfaction" in the Council of Florence's statement. By reading the entire statement carefully, however, one finds that "satisfaction" is made simply by showing "fruits of repentance," which Mark of Ephesus' statement also required. This is not a substantial difference either.

Some favorite quotes by moderns on purgation...

The Divine Essence is so pure - purer than the imagination can conceive - that the soul, finding in herself the slightest imperfection, would rather cast herself into a thousand hells than appear, so stained, in the presence of the Divine Majesty. Knowing, then, that purgatory was intended for her cleansing, she throws herself therein, and finds there that great mercy: the removal of her stains. - St. Catherine of Genoa
I believe in purgatory.... Our souls demand purgatory, don't they? Would it not beak the heart if God said to us, 'It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy'? Should we not reply, 'With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleansed first.' 'It may hurt, you know.' 'Even so, sir.' - C.S.Lewis
Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where one is forced to undergo punishments in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Rather it is the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God [i.e., capable of full unity with Christ and God] and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints. Simply to look at people with any degree of realism at all is to grasp the necessity of such a process... - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

For further reading

if we die in Him we shall also rise in Him Purgatorio by Dante Aligheri - the fictional poetic classic
The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis - a fictional bus ride from Hell to Heaven
Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer by C. S. Lewis - contains some thoughts on purgation
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis - more thoughts on purgation, different book topic