The question underneath the question
People who ask where heaven is are usually asking something else. They want to know what God is like, and whether the God who is called love in one breath can be the God who sends people to unending fire in the next. It is a fair question and a very old one, and the Fathers of the Church did not answer it by softening either half.
What they did instead was to shift the question from geography to relationship. Heaven and hell in this account are not two rooms in a large building, with the doors locked from the outside. They are two ways of standing in the presence of the same God, who does not change his mind about anyone, and whose love is not withdrawn from the damned.
Not a set of co-ordinates
Orthodox writers are noticeably careful about spatial language here. Fr Seraphim Rose gave a section of The Soul After Death to what he called the location of heaven and hell, and argued that they are entirely real without being places in any crude sense that a map could handle. The soul that leaves the body does not travel a measurable distance.
This carefulness is not modern embarrassment about a pre-scientific picture. It is much older than the telescope. The Church has always used the language of height and depth, of ascent and of the abyss, and has always known it was using images for something that images cannot contain. Liturgical poetry is free with such pictures precisely because nobody was expected to take out a compass.
Dropping the spatial frame does not make the subject vaguer. It makes it sharper. A place can be reached by accident or by administrative error; a relationship cannot. If what is described is a way of standing towards God, then nothing arbitrary decides it, and nothing external can be blamed for it. The teaching becomes less like a sentence passed on someone and more like a diagnosis of what he has made of himself.
One love, two experiences
The patristic move is to locate the difference in the receiver rather than in God. Scripture already speaks this way: the letter to the Hebrews says, in the wording of the King James Version, “For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), quoting Deuteronomy, and the same fire in Scripture is warmth and light and glory as often as it is destruction. What differs is what the fire meets.
St Isaac the Syrian, a seventh-century bishop of Nineveh whose Ascetical Homilies are read across the Orthodox world, states it as sharply as anyone. He teaches that those who suffer in hell are scourged by love, and that the power of love works in two ways at once, tormenting those who have set themselves against it while delighting those who have lived in accordance with it. The instrument of torment, on this reading, is not a divine anger but a divine affection that the sinner cannot bear.
Fr Lawrence Farley, summarising the Fathers on this point, uses the comparison of sunlight and blindness: the light shines on everyone equally, and what a person gets from it depends on the condition of the eye. The comparison is not original to him. It runs through the tradition, and it is why Orthodox writers so often say that the fire of hell and the light of heaven are the same fire and the same light.
Where the image comes from
The picture is drawn from a series of scenes rather than argued from first principles. Moses sees a bush that burns without being consumed. The three young men walk unharmed in the Babylonian furnace while the flame kills the men standing outside it. On Mount Tabor the disciples see an uncreated light coming out of Christ's own body, and are told to say nothing about it until later.
Worship carries the same instinct. Before communion the Church has its people pray that the Mysteries may be for healing rather than for judgment and condemnation, which only makes sense if the gift itself is one thing and its effect on the receiver is another. The bread and wine do not become two different substances for two different sorts of people. Something in the person decides how the same gift lands.
What this does not mean: universalism
It would be easy, and dishonest, to slide from here into the claim that everyone is saved in the end because the love never stops. Orthodoxy has not taught that. The Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 condemned the Origenist doctrine of the pre-existence of souls, and the wider Origenist scheme of a final restoration of all things has never been received as the teaching of the Church.
Matthew 25 keeps the same adjective for the life of the righteous and for the punishment of the others, and the Church has kept it too, without explaining it away. What Orthodoxy does hold is that the refusal is the creature's and not God's, and that the Church may pray for anyone, including those it has no grounds to hope for, because it does not know the end of any story but its own. Hope of that kind is a long way from a doctrine that all will certainly be saved.
There is a related caution about St Isaac himself. He is venerated as a saint, his Ascetical Homilies are treasured, and certain eschatological passages attributed to him have been discussed and disputed for centuries. The scourge-of-love teaching is quoted approvingly across the Orthodox world; the question of how far his other speculations may be pressed is a separate matter, and an unsettled one.
What this does not mean: a caricature of the West
Orthodox writers sometimes set this teaching against a Western picture in which God punishes sinners because his justice requires satisfaction, and the contrast is usually drawn too sharply. The legal and courtroom language of salvation is not a Western invention imposed on the Gospel. It is in Romans, it is in the Psalms, and it was used by Greek Fathers as freely as by Latin ones.
Anselm in the eleventh century, and the Reformed theologians who developed penal substitution after him, were trying to say something serious about the cost of sin and about why the cross was necessary rather than merely moving. Christians who hold that account are not describing a petty God. They are taking guilt seriously, which is a mark of moral realism and not of cruelty.
Where Orthodoxy differs is in which language it treats as primary. Its dominant grammar is medical rather than forensic: sin as a sickness that disfigures the one who has it, salvation as healing, God as the physician, hell as the condition of a person who will not be healed. Both sets of images are in Scripture. Which one governs the others changes how the whole picture looks, and that difference is worth stating plainly rather than dissolving into a claim that everyone means the same thing.
What follows in practice
If hell is love refused rather than love withheld, then the Christian life looks less like assembling a case for the defence and more like training an eye to bear light. That is what Orthodox practice is for. Fasting, confession, almsgiving, forgiving people who have not apologised, standing through long services: none of it earns anything, and all of it slowly changes what a person is able to receive.
Forgiveness deserves a line of its own here, because it is the hardest of these and the most exactly related to the teaching. A person who will not forgive is practising, in a small way, the very refusal the Fathers describe: love arrives and is not admitted. Orthodox services keep pressing the point, most obviously on the evening before Great Lent begins, when everyone in the church asks forgiveness of everyone else, face to face and by name.
It also puts a limit on religious harshness, which is the point at which this teaching bites its own believers. Someone who is doctrinally exact about the nature of divine love, and cold to the person standing next to him, has understood nothing about it. Fr Seraphim Rose, an American convert who spent his last years warning other converts about exactly this, put the priority in a sentence.
Being correct is the external side of Christianity. It's important, but not of first importance.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, talk on simplicity, 1979, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 87
A door left open
Readers from other Christian traditions will notice that this article has stated differences rather than blurred them. That is deliberate, and it is not meant as a rebuke. An account of heaven and hell that turned out to be identical to everyone else's would be of no use to anyone, and pretending otherwise would insult a reader who came here to find out what the Orthodox actually hold.
Fr Seraphim Rose, who came to Orthodoxy out of a Protestant family and never stopped writing for people like them, was asked in 1980 by a catechumen whether she could go on calling her Protestant and Roman Catholic relatives Christians. He answered at length and without evasion, holding the Orthodox claim about the Church while refusing to pronounce on anybody's soul, and he ended with a formula he credited to Fr Dimitry Dudko.
He added a parenthesis immediately afterwards, to the effect that this would carry more weight if the Orthodox themselves gave a better example. That seems the right note to end on. The teaching described here is not a threat held over anyone. It is an account of what love does when it meets a person, and an invitation to find out whether it is true.
We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 84