Florence and the Rejection of Purgatory

At the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–39), purgatory was the first doctrine debated, and St. Mark of Ephesus answered the Latin case with two orations that remain the classic Orthodox statement on the after-death state. This file sets out the Latin doctrine of purgatorial fire in its own terms, Mark’s refutation of it, and the crucial distinction between what he rejected — a created fire and a satisfaction of debt for forgiven sins — and what he affirmed — a real intermediate state and the true efficacy of the Church’s prayer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

Purgatory as the First Issue at Florence

When the Greek and Latin delegations met at Ferrara in the summer of 1438, purgatory — not the Filioque — was the first substantive doctrine debated, taken up in committee (ten theologians a side) before the public sessions on the procession of the Spirit. Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini presented the Latin position in a written statement (cedula) on 4 June 1438; the official Greek reply, drafted with Bessarion, followed on 14 June; the exchange closed without agreement on 17 July 1438 (Bathrellos, “Love and Forgiveness versus Justice and Punishment? St. Mark of Ephesus and the Latins on Purgatory,” Journal of Theological Studies 65/1 [2014]: 78–121; the six documents of the debate critically edited by Louis Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 15, Paris, 1920). The fullest sibling treatment is in St. Mark of Ephesus: The Debate on Purgatorial Fire and, in schism-historical context, in The Great Schism: Ferrara–Florence.

A telling detail frames the whole exchange: the Greeks at first misunderstood the Latin doctrine, reading it as a form of the Origenist universal restoration (apokatastasis) — the idea that all punishment is temporary and all are finally saved — until Cesarini clarified that purgatory concerns only those who die in a state of grace, not the damned (Bathrellos 2014). The fear of apokatastasis, condemned in connection with Origenism in 553, remained a live nerve in the Orthodox resistance to any temporary purifying fire (see Origen, Nyssa, and the 553 Condemnations).

The Latin Doctrine, in Its Own Terms

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the Latin position is reported accurately and in its own terms before it is assessed. As drawn from the profession Emperor Michael VIII had made at Lyons (1274) and as Cesarini now defended it, the doctrine rested on a juridical framework (Bathrellos 2014):

Sin leaves a double liability: culpa (guilt) and reatus poenae (the debt of punishment). When God forgives the guilt and remits the eternal punishment, a debt of temporal punishment may still remain.
Souls who die in charity (in a state of grace) but with this temporal debt unpaid — without having made full satisfaction — undergo a purgatorial punishment until the debt is discharged, on the principle that divine justice requires that no fault go unpunished.
This punishment was understood to be effected by a material, created fire (corporeus ignis); and the souls in it are aided by the suffrages of the living — Masses, prayers, almsgiving — which function as substitutionary satisfaction.

This is a framework of justice, debt, and satisfaction, with a definite cleansing punishment and a material fire. Behind Cesarini stood the full apparatus of Latin scholastic theology, deployed by such theologians as the Dominican Juan de Torquemada, Master of the Sacred Palace (Bathrellos 2014). It is a coherent system — and it followed by strict deduction from premises about justice and satisfaction that the Eastern tradition had never adopted, which is why Mark’s refutation had to reach past the conclusion to the framework that generated it.

Mark’s Two Orations

St. Mark of Ephesus answered with two orations on purgatorial fire (De igne purgatorio, ed. Petit, Patrologia Orientalis 15). The First Oration, a Refutation of the Latin Chapters concerning Purgatorial Fire, rebuts Cesarini’s cedula point by point: a created purifying fire is found “neither in the Scriptures nor in the prayers… for the dead”; the proof-text 1 Corinthians 3:11–15 (“the fire shall try every man’s work”) speaks of the eschatological testing at the Last Judgment, not of an interim purgatorial fire; remission and punishment cannot coexist, so the notion of punishment still owed for forgiven sins is incoherent; and such purification as the departed need is effected by non-material means — the anguish of conscience, the fear and expectation of judgment, and above all the mercy of God moved by the prayers of the Church (Mark of Ephesus, First Oration, ed. Petit, PO 15; Bathrellos 2014).

The Second Oration is given chiefly to showing that the “fire” texts of St. Gregory of Nyssa — the strongest patristic ammunition the Latins could find for a purifying fire — do not support the Latin doctrine, since Gregory’s cleansing fire points rather toward the (condemned) universal restoration; Mark argues that these passages, if they teach what the Latins claim, must either be later interpolations or, if genuine, not to be followed against Scripture and the common mind of the Church (Bathrellos 2014; Pogodin, St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1963, which translates the orations; and Rose, The Soul After Death, 1980, appendix I, an abridged rendering). Mark’s governing principle in handling the Fathers he states plainly: “one particular doctor can err; otherwise, what is the purpose of ecumenical councils?” — the Church follows “the common teaching… and the rule of the Scriptures,” not any single Father against the rest (Mark, Orations on Purgatorial Fire, ed. Petit, PO 15).

The scriptural battleground was a small cluster of disputed texts read incompatibly by the two sides: 1 Corinthians 3:11–15 (the tested “fire” — purgatorial cleansing for the Latins, eschatological testing for Mark); Matthew 12:32 (sin “not forgiven in this age or the age to come” — implying for the Latins a state of post-mortem remission, read by Mark as a Semitic idiom for “never”); and 2 Maccabees 12:39–45 (Judas Maccabeus’ prayer for the dead — for the Latins a warrant for purgatory, for the Greeks a warrant for prayer for the dead but not for a purgatorial punishment). The disagreement was not over the texts’ authority but over their sense (Bathrellos 2014; Jorgenson, “The Debate over the Patristic Texts on Purgatory,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 30 [1986]: 309–334).

What Mark Rejected — and What He Affirmed

The single most important thing to grasp, and the thing most often missed, is that Mark did not deny an intermediate state, or the value of prayer for the dead, or purification as such. What he rejected was specific (Bathrellos 2014):

the material, created fire — “material fire cannot burn immaterial souls”;
the satisfaction framework — the idea of a debt of temporal punishment owed for sins already forgiven, since “remission and punishment can by no means exist together,” and the divine goodness “overpowers the logic of justice.”

What he affirmed is the constructive Orthodox teaching set against the Latin doctrine: a genuine intermediate state; souls not yet in their final condition; a real purification of the departed effected by God’s mercy and by the anguish and longing of the soul rather than by a created punitive fire; and the true efficacy of the prayers and Liturgies of the living for the dead (Mark of Ephesus, ed. Petit, PO 15; the positive account in St. Mark of Ephesus: The Orthodox Position Articulated). The Orthodox position is thus not the denial of purification or of prayer for the dead — which it holds with full force — but the refusal of a juridical purgatory of debt and created fire. Prayer for the dead rests on mercy, not on satisfaction; and mercy needs no purgatory (see Praying for the Departed).

The Diluted Decree and Its Trace

The purgatory debate ended without agreement in 1438, but its trace survives in the union decree itself. When Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439) finally defined purgatory, it declared that the souls of the penitent who die before making satisfaction “are cleansed after death by cleansing pains (poenae purgatoriae),” helped by the suffrages of the living — and it pointedly omitted both the word “fire” and the notion of purgatory as a place (Gill, The Council of Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, appendix; Bathrellos 2014). [Disputed: the significance of the omission. The Orthodox reading (Jorgenson, SVTQ 30 [1986]) stresses that the missing “fire” is the residue of the Greek objection — a partial Latin retreat; the Catholic reading treats the decree as a genuine Greek acceptance of purgatory, the silence on fire being prudence rather than concession. What is agreed is that “fire,” central to the Latin cedula of 1438, is absent from the definition of 1439.]

The Church’s Verdict

For Mark, no diluted formula could repair the matter, because the underlying framework of satisfaction and debt remained; he rejected the decree and the union to his death. Honesty requires adding, as the careful scholarship does, that the Greeks were not perfectly of one mind on the finer questions of the intermediate state — Bessarion, who co-drafted the Greek reply, moved toward a more accommodating view, and Gill cautions that Mark’s sharpest formulations were sharper than the general run of Byzantine opinion (Gill 1959; Bathrellos 2014). But the core Mark defended — no created fire, no juridical satisfaction, no over-definition of the mechanism — was the broadly held Eastern position, which is why the decree conceded the omission of “fire” rather than of purgation, and why the Church, rejecting the Florentine union, glorified Mark as a pillar of Orthodoxy. Per METHODOLOGY §4.1 this collection states that verdict as the Church’s own — without polemic against Rome, and with gratitude to the Catholic scholarship (Gill) that documents the very data on which the Orthodox judgment rests.

References

Bathrellos, Demetrios. “Love and Forgiveness versus Justice and Punishment? St. Mark of Ephesus and the Latins on Purgatory.” Journal of Theological Studies 65/1 (2014): 78–121.
Gill, Joseph. The Council of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. (Cited per §4.1 for the record, not its conclusions.)
Jorgenson, James. “The Debate over the Patristic Texts on Purgatory at the Council of Ferrara-Florence, 1438.” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 30/4 (1986): 309–334.
Mark of Ephesus. Orations on Purgatorial Fire (De igne purgatorio). Ed. Louis Petit, Documents relatifs au Concile de Florence. I: La question du Purgatoire à Ferrare. Patrologia Orientalis 15. Paris, 1920.
Council of Florence. Laetentur Caeli (6 July 1439). In Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. London/Washington: Sheed & Ward/Georgetown University Press, 1990.
Pogodin, Ambrose. St. Mark of Ephesus and the Florentine Union. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1963.
Rose, Seraphim. The Soul After Death, appendix I. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1980.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 3:11–15; Matthew 12:32; 2 Maccabees 12:39–45.