Eschatology & Afterlife
8 topics
ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeApocatastasis (Universal Restoration)The teaching that in the end all rational creatures, including the demons, will be restored and punishment will come to an end. It is associated above all with Origen, and in that form it was condemned: the anathemas issued at Constantinople under Justinian and carried into the Fifth Ecumenical Council name the pre-existence of souls and the restoration together, because in Origen they belong together. The complication the Church has never hidden is that St Gregory of Nyssa uses language of universal restoration and is a saint and a Father of the Second Council. The Orthodox way through is neither to edit him nor to follow him here: what is condemned is the Origenist system, and the Church prays for all while refusing to promise what it has not been told.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeEschatology (The Last Things)What the Church confesses about the end. The Creed holds that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of his kingdom there shall be no end, and that we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Orthodoxy teaches a particular judgment at death and a general resurrection and last judgment at the Second Coming, and is deliberately reticent about the detail of what lies between them.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeGeneral ResurrectionAt the Second Coming, all the dead will be raised bodily, not merely spiritually. The resurrection body will be transformed and incorruptible (1 Corinthians 15). The whole person, body and soul, participates in either eternal communion with God (paradise) or separation from God (hell). This is why Orthodoxy insists on burial rather than cremation.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifePrayer for the DepartedThe Church prays for her dead, and has from the beginning: the departed are commemorated at every Liturgy, particles are lifted for them at the Proskomedia, and the memorial services, the Panikhida and the Trisagion for the dead, are served on the third, ninth and fortieth days and at the year's turning. Boiled wheat, kollyva, is blessed and eaten, because the grain must fall into the ground and die. Orthodoxy affirms that these prayers help the departed and does not explain how: it declines to describe a mechanism, a place of purgation, or a tariff of satisfaction, and holds that the state of the departed is not finally fixed until the Last Judgment.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeThe Second Coming of ChristOrthodox eschatology affirms Christ's visible, glorious return at the end of history. The Creed states: 'He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, whose Kingdom shall have no end.' Orthodoxy avoids detailed end-times speculation and rejects millennialism (1000-year earthly kingdom). The focus is on readiness through repentance.ImportantEschatology & AfterlifeWhy There Is No PurgatoryOrthodoxy prays for the departed and believes those prayers avail, and it has never taught a purgatory. The Latin doctrine supposes a place of temporal punishment where a debt of satisfaction still owing after forgiveness is paid off, and each of its parts is foreign to the Orthodox mind: that sin leaves a quantity of punishment to be discharged, that the discharge happens in a distinct place, and that its length can be reckoned or shortened by indulgence. Orthodoxy speaks instead of souls awaiting the Judgment in a foretaste of what is coming, helped by the prayers of the Church, and refuses to say more. St Mark of Ephesus argued exactly this at the Council of Florence and refused to sign.Eschatology & AfterlifeThe Aerial Toll HousesAn account of what the soul meets after death: a passage upward through the air in which demons bring accusations, sin by sin, and the angels who lead the soul answer with what has been repented of. Its oldest witness is St Athanasius, who tells how St Antony, caught up in prayer, saw himself led through the air while bitter and terrible beings stood in the way and demanded an account of his life. It is told most fully in the Life of St Basil the New, where the Blessed Theodora describes passing twenty toll houses, and the Church prays it at every Saturday Midnight Office in the words of the martyr Eustratius, printed below. A homily on the departure of the soul sets it out at length and was long printed in the Slavonic Psalter under the name of St Cyril of Alexandria, though it is not his; in the nineteenth century St Ignatius Brianchaninov and St Theophan the Recluse defended it, St Theophan warning that however absurd the toll houses seem to the wise of this world, they will not escape passing through them. It is also seriously contested inside the Church, and both things are true. No council has defined it, no Creed mentions it, and Orthodox theologians disagree about how far it is a vision given in the language of visions. This site records it as a strong strand of the tradition, not a dogma, and not a thing anyone is required to picture.Eschatology & AfterlifeParticular Judgment & Toll HousesAt death, the soul undergoes a particular judgment. Some Orthodox tradition describes 'aerial toll houses' (telonia): where demons accuse and angels defend the soul. This is not official dogma but a widespread teaching in patristic and hagiographic literature. The final state is determined at the Last Judgment.