The Living Tradition An Orthodox Archive of the Church Fathers and Early Church

Theme

The last things

The resurrection of the body, and the reticence the tradition keeps about the rest.

  • Received Orthodox teachingTaught consistently and received throughout the Orthodox Church, though not necessarily formulated in a conciliar definition. This is not a claim that no Father ever wrote differently.
  • Common theological opinionWidely held among Orthodox theologians without having been defined. Not dogma, and disagreeing with it is not heresy.
  • Individual patristic opinionThe view of a particular Father that the Church has not received as its own teaching. The Fathers are not individually infallible: some speculated, some changed their minds, some were later corrected.

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The Creed confesses the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Christian hope is not the survival of a soul but the raising of the whole person, body included — which is why the Fathers who deny the goodness of the body are also the ones who get eschatology wrong.

Orthodox theology is markedly reticent about the details of the state between death and resurrection. Prayer for the departed is universal practice; systematic accounts of an intermediate state are not part of the Church's dogmatic confession, and Orthodox writers differ.

Speculation about the final restoration of all — held in some form by Gregory of Nyssa and by Isaac the Syrian — has never been received as the Church's teaching, and positions of that kind were condemned in the sixth century. The Orthodox tradition holds the hope and refuses the doctrine.

Follow this theme through the archive

  • Gregory of Nyssa

    Basil's younger brother, the most speculative of the Cappadocians, whose account of the soul's endless progress into God shaped Orthodox mystical theology.

    Father or writer

  • Isaac the Syrian

    A seventh-century ascetic writer of extraordinary tenderness, read throughout the Orthodox world — and a bishop of the Church of the East, which was not in communion with the Church that later received his writings.

    Father or writer

  • The Second Council of Constantinople

    The council that condemned the Three Chapters and clarified Chalcedon in Cyrilline terms. It issued no canons and no creed, and it was received only slowly in the West.

    Council

  • Death, judgement and the age to come

    The resurrection of the body, prayer for the dead, and the reticence the tradition keeps.

    Lesson

Sources for this page

  1. Tier C The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church Henry R. Percival (ed.); Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (series eds.) The Seven Ecumenical Councils annotated edition of conciliar texts Source record

Tiers are explained in the methodology. No page on this site has been reviewed or approved by any bishop, priest, synod or seminary.