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Do we as Catholic Byzathine believe in Purgatory? because Orthodox don't...

No

depends on what you mean by "purgatory". As a Byzantine Catholic I most certainly do believe that those who die as friends of God may need some further purification after death, so that they may be totally pure and prepared to enter into the joys and glory of heaven. I do not hold that purgatory is a place/state of terrible torments meant to "avenge" God's wrath. We and the Orthodox do pray for the departed and just how our prayer helps them remains mysterious but beautifully consoling.

I think it is important to realize that we know very little from Divine Revelation about life after death, the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns...

What we do know is that we are, most of us, not as well prepared to meet our Lord as we should be. Seeing Christ face to face and seeing our sins as He sees them must necessarily be at once both a joyful and a painful experience. Should we call this "purgatory" or something else? I don't know.

The dogmatic definition of Purgatory is a place or state where one is neither alive, nor in heaven, nor eternally condemned to hell.

As far as that definition goes, most of the Byzantines can agree such a state &/or place exists.

Fundamentally, one is supposed to believe that, through prayers of the living, and possibly other means, theosis can continue after death.

That, of course, is the current understanding of Purgatory, which is a huge step back from the full-blown definition found in the Council of Florence. I like to call it "Purgatory Lite"; as such it is far more compatible with patristic theology than its Scholastic predecessor, especially when stripped of its accessors such as "temporal punishment" and "treasury of merits". Recent statements by Pope John Paul II have further diluted the aspects of purgatory that Eastern Christians found objectionable, and what we have today is pretty close to the bare bones revelation on the Last Things:

1. The soul requires purification before being admitted into the presence of God.
2. Prayers for the deceased are efficacious.

Everything else is speculation and philosophy. Nobody forces the doctrine of purgatory on Eastern Catholics (in fact, it is pretty much reduced to a theologumenon of the Western Church in the God With Us monograph "Shown to Be Holy: An introduction to Eastern Christian Moral Thought". The approach taken there should be entirely acceptable to an Orthodox Christian.

aramis:

I don't think I'd go so far as to claim that one is not alive. If one is not alive, one has ceased to be altogether and that is something God will not do to His creatures. Paragraph 1030 of the CCC says

All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of Heaven.

The three things that constitute the soul--memory, intelligence, and will--never die, but they are purified.

In contrast, there are people who are walking around right now who are dead--they're so involved in sin (separation from God and the things of God) that they are spiritually dead, i.e., having no life.

BOB

More theologically sound would be "no longer physically alive" simply to exclude those still physically alive.

Christ is Risen!!

I seems to me that purification, whether done in this present life with the help of grace, the ascetic works the Church recommends, and our own efforts or in the next by whatever means and methods the Good Lord has in store, demands that the person be actively involved. The Desert Fathers speak of our "prefecting," rather than our being perfect, for example. That means that it is an ongoing process begun now and continuing throughout our lives.

The idea is that our growth in holiness is an ongoing process that begins now and continues throughout eternity. We will become more holy as God reveals more of Himself to us and draws us ever more perfectly into communion with Him. St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of this in From Glory to Glory, his work on this process.

But my point is that we have to be actively engaged in the process.

Maybe the comparison to what I pointed out would be that one can continue to bleach a white towel--which is not alive--but eventually the towel is destroyed by the bleaching. And what good is that? By comparison if we were dead while the process of purification was being "applied" to us, eventually there would be nothing left.

In Christ,

BOB

Wonderfully said. And who is to say that such purification is not "instantaneous" in its application? The notion of spending "time" in purgatory is a popular but misguided means of applying temporal concepts to eternal realities. At death, the soul enters eternity where all moments - past and future - are eternally present in God. The spiritual value of all the prayers of others offered for you until the end of time may benefit you at that very moment of your passing into kairos, even though in terms of chronos, such things are in the future.

One can only assume that we are commanded to offer such prayers for the repose of souls because it benefits them somehow after death.

As Eastern Christians, I think we would view purification within the context of theosis: we are to become partakers in the divine nature, a process which is ongoing and continues beyond this life. Since a creature can never become its creator or fully comprehend His nature, theosis is asymptotic--it comes ever closer, but never quite gets there. Hence we are continually being perfected, but never become perfect.

Excellent! I was just speaking about this recently...the process of theosis continuing into eternity.

This of course assumes that eternity is really nothing else than an infinite succession of moments, rather than the being of all moments at once. I'm not sure that such an understanding is necessary, or even warranted.

Peace and God bless!

Remember, however, that the definition of Purgatory found at Florence IS the teaching of the Latin Fathers, and predates Scholasticism by six to seven hundred years.

The definition of Florence may have used some Scholastic language (though I don't see anything in the Florentine language that isn't found in St. Augustine and St. Gregory the Great), but it was certainly "Patristic" in that it came down from the Fathers.

I'm not saying that it's the bottom line on Catholic teaching on the afterlife, only pointing out that it is neither particularily Scholastic, nor un-Patristic. If the Latins are to be faulted, they can only be faulted for upholding the teaching and language of the Fathers and Saints of the Latin tradition from before the Schism.

Peace and God bless!

Nothing like the medieval doctrine of purgatory is found in the Latin Fathers; it is a purely, well, medieval innovation that, in all its elaborations, says a lot more about the medieval Western imagination and Germanic legal concepts than it does about the afterlife.