Why Orthodoxy

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Chapter 05 of 12 · The case for Orthodoxy

The Doctrines That Divide: Purgatory, Mary, Indulgences

Purgatory defined at Lyon and Trent, the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Assumption in 1950, the treasury of merits and indulgences — each is a dated act of Roman authority issued after the separation, each binds the conscience of Catholics under anathema, and each had to be imposed precisely because the East never accepted it. This chapter weighs each one against the record of the first millennium.

The form. This article examines the four defined dogmas that the separation made necessary for Rome to impose: Purgatory, indulgences, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption. Each was defined after 1054, each without the East, each under anathema for all the faithful. The objections are the Roman case for the definitions; the sed contra states the silence and opposition of the deposit; the determination and replies follow.

Whether the faithful are bound, under pain of anathema, to receive as divinely revealed the doctrines of Purgatory, of indulgences from a treasury of merits, of the Immaculate Conception, and of the bodily Assumption of the Mother of God.

Objections to the Orthodox position

  1. Obj. 1 — From lawful authority. These doctrines were defined by the solemn organs of the Church: the Council of Florence (1439) on Purgatory; the Council of Trent (1563) on Purgatory and indulgences; Pope Pius IX (1854) and Pius XII (1950) on the two Marian dogmas. The Church "which is the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15) cannot err in defining faith and morals, and the Spirit was not absent from any of these acts.1
  2. Obj. 2 — From the substance in the tradition. The Church has always prayed for the dead (2 Maccabees 12:43–45; the anaphoras), has always honored Mary as the all-holy Theotokos, and has celebrated her glorification from ancient times. The definitions added nothing new in substance; they made explicit, against error, what was implicit and believed. This is lawful development, of the very kind the East itself practices.2
  3. Obj. 3 — From the consensus of the faithful. The definitions rested on the sensus fidelium and the consultation of the bishops: Pius XII expressly invoked "the most ancient and constant memory" and the universal consent of the pastors and faithful; Pius IX likewise grounded the Immaculate Conception in the perpetual belief of the Church. A doctrine that the Church's own consciousness has held and the magisterium has sealed is not an imposition.3

On the contrary

Against every one of the four, the first millennium is silent — and where it is not silent, it is opposed. For Purgatory: no definition anywhere before Lyon II (1274); the soul's purification after death is asserted as dogma for the first time there, in a profession of faith imposed for political union.4 For indulgences: no "treasury of merits" before Clement VI (1343), and no doctrine whatever before the twelfth century.5 For the Immaculate Conception: the greatest Western doctors — Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure — taught against it; it was disputed in the Latin schools for six hundred years and defined only in 1854.6 For the Assumption: no explicit patristic statement anywhere; the tradition is the late Transitus literature (fourth–sixth centuries), and the 1950 definition itself builds its case on the piety of the faithful rather than on any chain of the Fathers.7 And the East — the majority of the Church's episcopate to this day — has never received any of the four as defined, and said so formally in the Encyclical of 1848.8 A doctrine that was not believed by the undivided Church, that was opposed in the West itself until the centuries of its imposition, and that is still refused by the East, cannot be "that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all" — which is the only test either church acknowledges.9

I answer that

Let the principle be stated once, because the whole article is its application: when a church requires, under anathema, a new obligatory belief, the burden is on that church to show that the undivided Church believed it. The Orthodox Church asks nothing of the convert that the Church of the Seven Councils did not confess; Rome asks the assent to definitions dated 1274, 1439, 1563, 1854, and 1950 — every one after the separation, every one without the East, every one made possible only by an authority (Chapter 2) the first millennium did not know. Consider each.

Purgatory. Rome's own texts define a place or state of purgatorial punishment and the help given the dead by suffrages (Lyon II, 1274; Florence, 1439; Trent, Session 25, 1563: "there is a purgatory, and… souls there detained are aided by the suffrages of the faithful, and chiefly by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar"). The East believes and practices nearly all of this save the frame: she prays for the departed, asks God's mercy for them, holds that souls are purified and aided by the Church's prayers — 2 Maccabees 12:43–45 and the ancient anaphoras are her charter for it. What she denies is the juridical machinery: "temporal punishment" owing after forgiveness, satisfaction, "detention," and a defined purgatorial fire. St. Mark of Ephesus wrote his Second Homily on the Purgatorial Fire against that machinery. The Confession of Dositheus (Jerusalem, 1672), Decree 18, is more precise than slogans allow: it rejects a Roman purgatory of penal fire and a treasury of satisfactions, while affirming that the departed are aided by the Church's prayers and that some souls are cleansed after death. The East is not Protestant about the dead; it is anti-scholastic about the ledger.10

Indulgences and the treasury. The remission of "temporal punishment" through the application of the "treasury of merits" was founded by Clement VI (1343) and confirmed by Trent (1563) — the machinery that provoked Luther's ninety-five theses (1517), and the doctrine whose abuse Rome never retracted, only regulated. The East never had indulgences, for the reason of Chapter 4: if sin is healed and wholly forgiven, there is no "temporal debt" for a treasury to remit; the difference is not one of spare parts but of the whole system of salvation.11

The Immaculate Conception. The dogma of 1854 (Ineffabilis Deus) — "the most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God, in view of the merits of Christ Jesus… preserved immune from all stain of original sin" — presupposes a Western doctrine of inherited guilt that the East never taught (Adam's sin, for the East, is inherited corruption, mortality, and tendency, not a moral taint transmitted to the soul), and it closes, by papal authority, a question the West itself had left open for six centuries, against the express teaching of its two greatest doctors.12 The Orthodox Church confesses the Theotokos as "more honourable than the Cherubim," all-holy, ever-virgin, the second Eve — and sees in the 1854 definition a solution to a Western problem by a Western authority imposed on a Church that had neither problem nor need of it. (The theologian will note the regress the definition purchases: if Mary was preserved by a singular privilege, the question of her parents is arrested only by privilege, not by principle.)13

The Assumption. The dogma of 1950 (Munificentissimus Deus) — "the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory" — rests, as the bull itself discloses, not on any patristic chain but on "the common consent of the teaching authority of the Church" and the piety of the faithful; the underlying tradition is the late, apocryphal Transitus literature. The Orthodox Church celebrates the Dormition of the Theotokos (August 15) and confesses her exaltation without reserve. St. John of Damascus, in his homilies on the Dormition, already says her "holy and all-blessed body was translated to heaven"; St. Gregory Palamas preaches the same bodily translation. The East's feast of the Conception of St. Anne (9 December) honors Mary's beginning without the 1854 definition. The dispute, honestly stated, is not whether Mary was glorified in the body — the East has sung that for centuries — but whether a 1950 papal definition, without the East, can make that glorification a de fide article binding under anathema.14

The pattern in all four is identical and is named honestly: dated, imposed, opposed, unnecessary. Dated — each after the separation; imposed — each by the authority in question; opposed — each against Western doctors or Eastern confession until the moment of definition; unnecessary — none of them is part of the salvation the martyrs died for. A soul on the way to God does not flee these doctrines because they are beautiful; it declines them because they are not the deposit, and because the Church that keeps the deposit unamended keeps it for the world.

Replies to the objections

  1. Reply to Obj. 1. That the definitions were lawfully issued is precisely the question; an act of the authority in dispute is not evidence for the authority. The East was present at none of these acts; Rome defined Purgatory first at a council assembled for political union (Lyon II, 1274), the Marian dogmas by papal bull, and infallibility itself by Vatican I — an authority the Church of the Seven Councils never knew (Chapter 2) and a canon of councils (Chapter 3) the East never accepted. "The pillar and ground of the truth" is the Church (1 Timothy 3:15); the Church's witness is the consensus, not the fiat; and the authority that binds must first be shown to be the Church's own.15
  2. Reply to Obj. 2. The substance is shared — which proves the East orthodox — but the definitions exceeded the substance, and that is the whole point. Prayers for the dead, the honor of Mary, the Dormition: the East holds them all, and the Church of the first millennium held them all. What Rome added was the frame — temporal punishment, treasury, preservation "from all stain of original sin" as defined, bodily Assumption as "divinely revealed" — and of the frame nothing can be shown from the deposit. Lawful explicitation guards the received faith (Chapter 1, Reply to Obj. 2); these definitions required the Church to believe what the Church of the Fathers did not, and that is addition, not explicitation.16
  3. Reply to Obj. 3. The "consensus of the faithful" was, in every case, a Western consensus, and even that was manufactured under direction. The East — the larger part of Christendom — was not consulted and did not consent; within the West, Purgatory's "always" begins with Lyon II; the Indulgence "treasury" with Clement VI; the Immaculate Conception was taught against by Aquinas and Bonaventure, and the Council of Basel (1439) could only call it "pious"; the Assumption's "always" is the aggiornamento of 1950 itself. A sensus fidelium that required a pontiff to define it, against its own greatest doctors, only generations earlier, is not the voice of the undivided Church; it is a program awaiting its decree.17

Citations for this chapter

  1. 1 Timothy 3:15 (KJV): biblegateway.com. The four acts: Lyon II (1274), Denzinger 856; Florence (1439), uoregon.edu (text); Trent, Session 25 (1563), wikisource; Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (1854), newadvent.org; Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus (1950), vatican.va.
  2. 2 Maccabees 12:43–45 (the prayers and offerings for the dead): KJV. The early cult of the Theotokos (Theotokos defined at Ephesus, 431) and the Dormition tradition are documented below (fns. 12, 14).
  3. The consensus arguments appear in the bulls themselves: Ineffabilis Deus (1854) and Munificentissimus Deus (1950), cited in fn. 1.
  4. Lyon II (1274), profession of Michael VIII, first dogmatic definition of Purgatory: Denzinger 856; Wikipedia: Second Council of Lyon; Florence repeats it (Denzinger 1304–1305) in the Decree for the Greeks: uoregon.edu.
  5. Clement VI, Unigenitus Dei Filius (1343), the treasury of merits: Denzinger 550–552; historical account: Wikipedia: Indulgence.
  6. The opposition of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure to the "preservation from the stain" and the history of the debate to 1854: Wikipedia: Immaculate Conception; Denzinger 734 (Sixtus IV, 1483).
  7. The Transitus literature and the absence of explicit patristic statement: Wikipedia: Assumption of Mary; the bull itself, vatican.va, argues from the "consent of the teaching authority" and "the sense of the faithful."
  8. Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs (1848), which rejects the innovations, including "the infallibility of the Pope," and holds the seven Ecumenical Councils' standard: Fordham Sourcebook.
  9. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium 2.5: newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm.
  10. Trent, Session 25, Decree concerning Purgatory: wikisource; Mark of Ephesus, Second Homily on the Purgatorial Fire (1439–1440): OrthodoxWiki: Mark of Ephesus. Confession of Dositheus (Synod of Jerusalem, 1672), Decree 18, on the departed: standard English in Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 2; survey: Wikipedia: Synod of Jerusalem (1672).
  11. Trent, Session 25, Decree on Indulgences: wikisource; Luther, Ninety-five Theses (1517): luther.de.
  12. Ineffabilis Deus (1854), n. on the definition: newadvent.org. The opposition of Aquinas and Bonaventure: fn. 6. On the Eastern doctrine of ancestral sin (corruption, not inherited guilt), see Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 10 (newadvent.org/fathers/2101.htm), treatise of the Eastern position.
  13. The "regress" objection is the classic Eastern criticism; for the dogmatic logic of singular privilege as the arrest of the regress, see the standard discussions; the Orthodox position is that the Theotokos is all-holy by the same grace that saves all, applied in her case with full prevenience — a glory, not a privilege-ticket.
  14. Munificentissimus Deus (1950): vatican.va. John of Damascus, three homilies on the Dormition (PG 96); Gregory Palamas, homily on the Dormition. Feast of the Conception of St. Anne (9 Dec.) in the Byzantine calendar. Survey: OrthodoxWiki: Dormition; Wikipedia: Assumption of Mary.
  15. The authority question is the subject of Chapters 2–3 of this site with full citations; the promise of indefectibility is to the Church (Chapter 3, Reply to Obj. 1).
  16. The explicitation/addition distinction: Chapter 1, Reply to Obj. 2, and Chapter 3, §Respondeo.
  17. The West-only character of the "consensus": fns. 4–7; Basel (1439) "pious" declaration: Wikipedia; the East's non-participation: fn. 8.