The Orthodox are very fluid on the subject.
Theoretically Theosis can continue on after bodily repose, this is something I think is commonly believed.
That does not mean that Theosis is accomplished through punishment and terrors.
Could there be punishment involved in this process? Yes. Is that the only way? No.
Let us look at it through an analogy for a brief moment. If I was to tell you and your lovely better half that you were invited to dinner at the White House, a command performance before the Queen or a personal audience with the Pope, how would you prepare?
Should we take you out and beat you bloody and terrify you?
Or would you go down to the haberdasher, and pick out some new threads, get the wife’s hairdo touched up and pull out Grandma’s earrings and necklace?
Maybe you don’t quite fit in last years suit, some trips to the gym might be in order, and you buy a new tie in eager anticipation of the big day.
There is a lot of prep going on here, out of respect, and awe, and perhaps even love for this important person you are about to meet for the very first time.
Purgatory is like a penitentiary, a gulag, a place of punishment while awaiting trial. This is not how we always prepare ourselves to meet the King.
Can punishment be a part of the process of reconciliation and growth in holiness? Of course! Is it necessarily the way it is always done? That is too much to assume, it is too narrow an interpretation, it can be a pious opinion but not a dogma.
Perhaps I really deserve this bit of hellish treatment, perhaps you do, so be it.
For Orthodox, we believe that sins forgiven in confession are totally forgiven, there are no residual temporal punishments due. They are either indulgenced by Christ in confession or the priest will not absolve the sin and tell us why. We deserve justice and beg for mercy … when God forgives, He forgives unconditionally.
I recently read a very interest book by a French scholar about the origin of Purgatory as a doctrine (got it through the library
). It is called
The Birth of Purgatory by Jacques LeGoff, a Medeivalist. In it he traces most of the ideas which have bubbled up on the topic since Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, notes their contradictions and how the various strands of ideas evolved. He covers to a raft of visions and dreams in the tenth and eleventh centuries which helped to formulate the idea which finally became a doctrine in the west in the eleventh century.
Fascinating reading.
The dogma itself is rather vague, which helps it accommodate the wide range of folk beliefs and theories that had arisien in so many centuries. But most Roman Catholics will agree with Tradyca above, when she refers to the dogma in such terms as “
the terrible pains of purgatory”. As a theologumenon, I suppose some Orthodox could accept it, as a dogma no.
Purgatory and Theosis are in no way equivalent ideas, they meet on a tangent in one small point.
