Eastern Orthodoxy, Eschatology,
and the Particular Judgment

In Catholic teaching, Eschatology is the particular area of doctrine and theology that deals with the "Last Things" (the "eschata"): Death, Judgment, Purgatory, Heaven and Hell. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches as an article of Catholic Faith that:

"The New Testament... repeatedly affirms that each will be rewarded immediately after death in accordance with his life and works... Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a Particular Judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven-through a purification or immediate and everlasting damnation."
(#1021-1022)

That all are subject to Christ as the Judge of the living and the dead and His just Judgments in this life and those in the next is a truth of Divine Revelation. This truth noted in the Creed has been the subject of profound meditation by the great Fathers, Saints, theologians, and spiritual writers through the centuries who have bent every effort to secure the salvation of souls with sound teaching on the need to avoid sin and the occasions of sin, to repent and make reparation for sins committed, and to receive those sacraments which give "grace/divine life" for confounding "the spirit of the world, the flesh, and the devil".

A. They did not fear to preach the precise meaning of salvation, namely, to be eternally with Christ in the glory of Heaven;
B. They did not fear to emphasize the need for faith in Christ and a holy life to achieve salvation;
C. They were not afraid to teach self-righteous sinners that faith, repentance, and observance of the commandments as expression of love of God and neighbor are absolutely necessary for salvation;
D. They did not fear in view of the inherited weakness and fragility of man (the result of original sin) to inculcate in the faithful a healthy "fear of the Lord" (one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit -CCC #1831).

Not for nothing did St. Paul encourage his converts, his spiritual children, to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" and to be "children of God without blemish in the midst of a depraved and perverse generation." (Philippians, 2: 12-15).

Who can deny that in all too many Christian parishes today reigns the Ethos of a deadly silence concerning the meaning of the spiritual salvation Christ has brought His people and that all must give an accounting to God facing at death the Particular Judgment wherein they will know their situation before God: a time of purification and cleansing in that state called Purgatory, or immediate entrance into Heaven with the Beatific Vision of God, or the soul's immediate damnation. This Ethos is supported by the widespread falsehoods of a decadent culture: God is Love and does not punish and certainly not eternally; everyone will be saved and go to Heaven; the dark warnings in the Gospels do not apply to modern secular men and women whose morality has evolved to free them from intolerable restrictions. [A revival of Origen's apocatastasis theory?]

This unfortunate silence in Christian pulpits has resulted in the deadening of consciences in the Western world and especially with regard to sexual morality. Sitting comfortably in pews are those who remain ignorant of or who are permissive regarding the sins of fornication, adultery, contraception, abortion, sodomy, same-sex marriage, in vitro-fertilization, etc., not to mention other serious sins that disgrace the Christian name and endanger the souls of those committing them. The immorality of irreligion itself is rarely alluded to. While Christ often spoke in the most forceful and strong terms about salvation, judgment, condemnation, and damnation, one also notes the failure of Christian prelates and politicians to counteract the evils of de-Christianization busily at work in their nations. As Pope Francis observed in a recent Homily at San Marta thereby echoing the sentiments of ancient Fathers and Saints of the Church, East and West:

"When we are pervaded by fear of the Lord, then we are led to follow the Lord with humility, docility and obedience... The gift of fear of the Lord is an 'alarm' against the obstinacy of sin. When a person lives in evil, then one blasphemes against God, when one exploits others, then he tyrannizes them, when he lives only for money, for vanity, or power, or pride, then the holy fear of God sends us a warning: be careful... May fear of the Lord make them understand that one day all things will come to an end and they will have to give account to God."

Catholic teaching is clear: some souls may need purification and cleansing in purgatory; others of the righteous go immediately (mox) into Heaven or Hell after death, as noted in the Profession of faith recited at Lyons II (1274 A.D.); Pope Benedict XII's 'ex cathedra' definition (1336 A.D.), and the Council of Florence's Decree for the Greeks (1439 A.D.). The irrevocable nature of damnation is addressed once again in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#393), where the Eastern Father, St. John of Damascus, is cited.

Interestingly, and perhaps to the surprise of some Catholic ecumenists promoting the reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, doctrine in the Orthodox Churches regarding the Particular Judgment remains obscure, vague, confused, or subject to denial. The Eastern Orthodox have no clear official teaching that the just go to heaven immediately after death. Some assert the existence of an intermediate state where there is pain and suffering while others say there is no "intermediate state" such as Purgatory where souls undergo purification before entrance into Heaven.

"As to the nature of this intermediate state, Orthodox theology and popular belief are quite reticent... On the fortieth day, the souls undergoes the particular judgment, and then is assigned to an intermediate state, a state of waiting in Paradise or Hades, provisional in comparison with Heaven and Hell, that await the decisions of the Last Judgment."
(Fr. Andrew Louth, "Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology", p. 151)

When various Orthodox declare: "There are no souls in Heaven or Hell", this is because their final state occurs only with the Last Judgment. While admitting the immediate entrance of the just into Heaven, followers of the controversial 14th century Byzantine Greek theologian Gregory Palamas, hold that heavenly beatitude consists of seeing the Divine Energies of God, not His Triune Essence.

For example, the contemporary Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Hierotheos, a well-known Palamite spiritual author, maintains that neither the "good thief" nor the saints obtained the Beatific Vision of God in the Kingdom of Heaven. They have to await the Second Coming of Christ and the Resurrection to enjoy heavenly bliss. Heaven, moreover, is not the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision of God in His Unity and Trinity but rather of God's Divine Energies which are "Uncreated" and eternal. Fortunately, this aspect of Palamite theology is not shared by other Orthodox who do not distinguish between "Paradise" and the face-to-face vision of the Holy Trinity in Heaven. It can be pointed out that Catholic teaching agrees that the Saints experience a certain increase in happiness at the Last Judgment when they are reunited with their bodies in the Resurrection, but that is not when they first see God face-to-face (1 Cor. 13: 12). That occurs for the Saints immediately at death, as Pope Benedict XII defined to clarify a matter left vague or uncertain by some ancient and medieval writers. This he did with an infallible dogmatic judgment in "Benedictus Deus" (1336 A.D.).

It is not quite accurate to say simply, as some Orthodox do, that they do not believe in Purgatory, since it is obvious, they offer prayers, alms, and the Unbloody Sacrifice to benefit the deceased. Similarly, unacceptable is the view of some Orthodox who have extended the intermediate state to all the departed, even the Saints. Orthodox theology regards as a legitimate hope the universal salvation of all rational creatures, maybe even of the devil himself and his demons. Such a belief has found its defenders among modern Orthodox theologians, such as Olivier Clement, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev... and one of the greatest Orthodox saints of recent times, St. Silouan of Athos (see: Fr. Andrew Louth, op.cit., p.159). Such erratic unorthodox teaching on the After-Life reveals Eastern Orthodoxy's tolerating serious doctrinal errors which impede hopes for Reunion with the Catholic Church. The incoherence and variations in Eastern Orthodox eschatology may be said to be further compounded by the fact that some of their theologians deny there can be any development of doctrine in Church teaching.

While Catholic theologians stress that there is doctrinal development in the life of the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that this has enabled the Church to clarify its eschatological teaching via magisterial pronouncements, the Churches of the Eastern Orthodox communion are seen to possess no clear doctrine on the souls in the After-Life. As noted previously, they remain conflicted and divided regarding:

1. The existence of a Particular Judgment;
2. Whether the souls of the just enter Heaven immediately or after the Resurrection of the body;
3. Whether the souls of the just indeed see the Essence of the Triune God in the Beatific Vision;
4. Whether (despite their own liturgical prayers for the deceased) there is not an intermediate state for souls needing cleansing and purification [which Catholics term Purgatory].

Nevertheless, it is important to show that Catholic doctrine has had its strong defenders among those Orthodox most conversant with Tradition. Thus, among the most distinguished of 19th c. Russian Orthodox theologians, the Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow wrote in his "Orthodox Dogmatic Theology" (Vol. II):

"[The Church believes] the doctrine that, upon the death of a man a judgment takes place, known as the Particular Judgment in contrast to the "General", which is to be at the end of the world."

He quotes among other authorities the testimony of one of the most important Russian Saints, Demetrius of Rostov (1709), whose sentiments provide the theological ethos for understanding the nature of every memorial Liturgy offered for the deceased:

"It is meet for every one of us on every day and at every hour to look for the unknown hour of the ending of our lives, and to be ready for departing; for there will be a terrible judgment for each one of us, prior to the general terrible judgment. Judgment is two-fold: particular and general. A particular judgment is one which every man has when dying, since he will then see all of his own deeds. We look every day and every hour for the coming of the Lord to us, but not yet for that terrible [2nd Coming again, in which He will come to judge the living and the dead and to reward each of his deeds]; we do not await at every hour that time, in which (by the words of Peter the Apostle) the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up (2 Peter, 3:10), but wait, for the hour of our own death, in which the judgment of God will come to take our souls from our bodies, in which hour there will be for each a particular trial about that which we have done; we await that hour at every hour as the Lord Himself, protecting us, taught in the Gospel: 'Be ye therefore ready also, for the Son of man comes at an hour when ye think not'". (Luke 12: 40)

Similarly, the Greek Metropolitan of Toronto, Canada, is seen to clearly contradict the teaching of other Greek theologians in declaring that:

"The soul which was separated through death from the body, lives in a middle state. It undergoes the Particular Judgment (Heb. 9: 27). This means that immediately after death the soul is judged immediately! It remains after this Particular Judgment until the Final Judgment at the 2nd Coming of Christ, having a foretaste of Paradise or of Hell".

However, the last comment concerning a "foretaste" amounts to a denial of Catholic teaching that the saints actually enjoy the immediate face-to-face Beatific Vision of the Trinity in Heaven and that the wicked immediately receive the punishment of Hell.

Catholics (and the Orthodox who agree with them) know that every requiem or memorial Mass/Divine Liturgy offered for the deceased is efficacious and provides a grace-filled opportunity for everyone in attendance to be mindful that he has to "work out his own salvation in fear and trembling" (Phil. 2: 12) and to beg Christ, the Lord of Majesty and Glory, the Alpha and Omega, that the deceased may have found mercy and salvation.

The traditional Catholic teaching on the Particular Judgment, Purgatory, and the Beatific Vision in Heaven was reaffirmed dogmatically in the Reunion Council of Florence (1439) wherein the Greek and Latin Churches sought to end centuries of rupture and schism between them. After months of debate, even Mark of Ephesus, who would fiercely reject the decisions of the Council and become the leader of the anti-unionists preferring "the turban of the Ottoman Turks to the papal tiara" was obliged to admit that the issue of Purgatory was not serious enough to divide the two Churches. Some contemporary Orthodox theologians, however, have surpassed Mark of Ephesus with their diatribes concerning Purgatory. It is important again to remember that the essentials of Catholic teaching continued to hold sway among the separated Orthodox in one of their most important confessions of faith known as the Confession of Dositheos (produced by a Synod convened in Jerusalem in 1672 by its patriarch Dositheos). There one reads "as the expression of pure orthodoxy":

"We believe that the souls of those who have fallen asleep are either at rest or in torment, according to what each has wrought. Such as though involved in mortal sins have not departed in despair but have, while still living in the body, repented, though without bringing any fruits of repentance - by pouring forth tears, by afflicting themselves, by relieving the poor, and in fine by showing by their works their love towards God and their neighbor, and which the Church has from the beginning rightly called satisfaction - of these and such like souls depart into Hades [i.e., the "middle state" of Purgatory] and these endure the punishments due to their sins which they have committed."

Later, the Patriarch Dositheos retracted belief in an intermediate state between Heaven and Hell [Purgatory] and denied that temporal punishment was due to pardoned sin. To this day, contradictions of the "pure orthodoxy" confessing the existence of an immediate entrance into Heaven or Hell and an "intermediate state" where souls are purified, have become common in the various autocephalous Orthodox Churches. At a recent memorial liturgy, a Greek Orthodox priest asserted "We do not believe in Purgatory". The liturgy he was celebrating was not for the soul of the deceased, he explained, but rather for the consolation of the family members attending.

The previously noted Palamite spiritual writer, the Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafptkos in Greece, taught that neither the "good thief" nor the saints enjoy the Beatific Vision of God in the kingdom of Heaven. The departed, he taught, have to await the Second Coming and the Resurrection to enjoy heavenly beatitude. Heavenly beatitude, however, does not consist in the Beatific Vision of the Divine Essence (as Catholics believe), but rather of God's Divine Energies held to be Uncreated and really distinct from His Essence.
[It may be noted here that Palamite-influenced theologians and writers are among the most fierce critics of the Papacy and Catholic teachings.]

Regarding the state of the soul after death, the well known theologian Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, foreign secretary of the Patriarchate of Moscow (and whose musical compositions have been played at the Vatican), adds these bizarre comments in writing about the Orthodox view of "Death and Resurrection":

"What happens to souls after death? According to the common teaching of the Orthodox Church, souls do not leave the earth immediately after their departure from the body. For three days they remain close to the earth and visit the places with which they were associated. Meanwhile, the living show particular consideration to the souls of the deceased by offering memorial prayers and funeral services During these three days, the personal task of the living is to be reconciled with the departed, to forgive them and ask their forgiveness.
With the passage of three days, the souls of the departed ascend to the Judge in order to undergo their personal trial. Righteous souls are then taken by the angels and brought to the threshold of Paradise which is called 'Abraham's bosom’: there they remain waiting for the Last Judgment. Sinners, on the other hand, find themselves in 'Hell', 'in torments' (cf. Luke 16: 22-23). But the final division into the saved and condemned will actually take place at the universal Last Judgment, when 'many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt' (Dan. 12: 2). Before the Last Judgment, the righteous souls anticipate the joy of Paradise, while the souls of sinners anticipate the torments of Gehenna."

In his sermon on "Life After Death", the Russian Orthodox John Maximovitch of Shangai and San Francisco (declared an Orthodox saint) further embellishes the nature of the future life with belief in the "toll houses":

"For the course of two days the soul enjoys a relative freedom and can visit places on earth which were dear to it, but on the third day it moves into other spheres. At this time (the third day), it passes through legions of evil spirits which obstruct its path and accuse it of various sins, to which they themselves had tempted it. According to various revelations, there are twenty such obstacles, the so-called 'toll houses', at each of which one or another form of sin is tested : after passing through all of them can the soul continue its path without being immediately cast into Gehenna... Then, having successfully passed through the toll-houses and bowed down before God, the soul for the course of 37 more days visits the heavenly habitations and the abysses of Hell, not knowing yet where it will remain, and only on the 40th day is its place appointed until the resurrection of the dead. Some souls find themselves, after the 40 days, in a condition of foretasting eternal joy and blessedness, and others in fear of the eternal torments which will come in full after the Last Judgment. Until then, changes are possible in the condition of souls, especially through offering for them the Bloodless Sacrifice (commemoration of the Liturgy), and likewise other prayers."

What is evident from all the above is a clear denial of the doctrine of the Catholic Church as defined in the Ecumenical Council of Florence (1439) which repudiated false teachings spread in the East concerning Purgatory, the Particular Judgment, and the face-to-face Beatific Vision of God. There both Latin and Greek Bishops agreed:

"We define that the souls of truly penitent Christians, who die in charity before they have made satisfaction by worthy fruits of penance for sins of commission and omission, the souls of these are cleansed after death by purgatorial punishments; and in order that they may be relieved from such punishments, it is of benefit for them to have the intercession of the faithful who are living; such as Masses, prayers, alms and other pious exercises, which are customarily offered by the faithful for other faithful, according to the practice of the Church.
The souls of those who, after Baptism, incurred no stain of sin; and those souls who, after contracting such stain of sin, whether in the body or after having put off the body (as said above) have been cleansed of such sins, are received immediately into Heaven, and clearly see God Himself, in Trinity and Unity, as He is, though some more perfectly than others, according to the diversity of merits."

Many Orthodox writers today clearly profess as their "pure orthodoxy" not only the rejection of the intermediate state termed by Catholics "Purgatory" but also an outright confusion between Paradise and Heaven. As Orthodox scholar Fr. Laurent A. Cleenewerck explained in his book "His Broken Body":

"The souls of the reposed do not go to Heaven or Hell (in the sense of a final destination), they go to lower-hades or paradise-hades, a temporary intermediate state where the fullness of blessedness is yet to come."

The Romanian Orthodox theologian Fr John A McGuckin has similarly written:

"The righteous dead will be admitted into the heart of Paradise only after their final purification after the Last Day and after the resurrection of the body."
(The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture, p. 230)

Whereas Catholic doctrine on the Particular Judgment insists that the souls at death immediately (mox) enter Heaven, Purgatory, or the ever-lasting Hell of the damned (there is NO fiction OR MYTHOLOGY of "toll-houses" having to be undergone at the behest of demons or "aerial-spirits"), some prominent Orthodox theologians delay the Beatific Vision till after the Resurrection and even maintain that belief in the "toll houses" is dogma. It is true that various ancient writers including some Greek Fathers were ambiguous in expression concerning the state of souls between death and the Last Judgment or outrightly postponed the bliss of Heaven for the saved until after the Last Judgment. It is also true that the Latin tradition in the Church became more and more explicit concerning the existence of purgatorial punishments; the just receiving beatitude immediately after death; and that heavenly happiness consisted in the "face-to-face" Vision of the Holy Trinity. Clarity in doctrine that the Vision of God is given at once to the soul that dies in sanctifying (deifying) grace or has been purified from all sin, - matured in the Church gradually and culminated in the infallible dogmatic pronouncement by Pope Benedict XII in "Benedictus Deus", January 29, 1336.

CONCLUSION

It is fortunate that Graeco-Slav Orthodox theological negations of Catholic doctrine cannot be considered "official" Orthodox doctrine since there can be easily adduced other Orthodox hierarchs and theologians who contradict them and who agree with or approximate the essentials of Catholic teaching. None of the 7 Ecumenical Councils considered (by many Orthodox to be the "supreme teaching authority" for Pan-Orthodoxy) has confirmed any of the various opinions surveyed above as dogma. Catholics evaluating the variations in Eschatological teaching about the Last Things among the Orthodox, can only conclude that serious errors have stemmed from the fatal lack of adherence to the Church's Infallible teaching Magisterium headed by the successor of Peter as well as the serious failure to acknowledge the reality of a real historical and homogeneous development of doctrine that has taken place under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

 

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