What Does the Orthodox Church Believe About Hell and Purgatory?
Purgatory, a Roman Catholic practice, defines an “intermediate state” between heaven and hell in which some souls must spend time before entering heaven. Even after a sinful action is forgiven, there still remains a “temporal punishment” due to that sin which must be expiated. The idea of purgatory is based on an obviously legalistic notion that the soul must “pay what it owes” before being admitted to the full joys of heaven. Orthodoxy believes in a state of existence between the time of death and the dawning of the Last Day, but it is a place of rest quite different from the purgatory doctrine. There is an intermediate state of the soul between death and the final day of judgment, during which souls benefit from the prayers of the faithful. The Orthodox Church gives no mechanistic explanation of how these prayers benefit the departed. It simply affirms the ancient Christian teaching that such prayers are efficacious in preparing the souls of the departed for the final judgment. Ortho
