Two judgments, not one
Most people assume that Christianity teaches a single moment of reckoning, and are then puzzled by the Creed, which places the judgment at Christ's second coming while the Gospel seems to settle matters at the moment of death. Orthodoxy keeps both and does not treat the tension as a fault to be repaired. There is a particular judgment when a person dies, and there is the general or Last Judgment at the end of all things.
Scripture supplies both. The letter to the Hebrews says that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 shows a reckoning immediately after death, with comfort on one side of a fixed gulf and torment on the other. Matthew 25 shows all the nations gathered before the throne at the end of history. Holding these together is not a compromise between two schools; it is what the texts say.
What is decided at death
Orthodox writers describe the first period after death in concrete and sometimes startling terms. Archbishop John Maximovitch, in the homily “Life After Death” that Fr Seraphim Rose later printed as the summary chapter of his own book, teaches that on the fortieth day the soul's place is appointed until the resurrection of the dead: some in a foretaste of eternal joy, others in fear of the torments that will come in full only after the Last Judgment.
Two things in that sentence matter more than the imagery around them. The first is that something real is settled. This is a judgment, not a holding pattern, and the Church has never encouraged the idea that the dead are simply asleep and unaware. The second is that what is settled is explicitly a foretaste rather than the thing itself. Archbishop John adds in the same homily that changes in the condition of souls remain possible, above all through the offering of the Liturgy.
The imagery of those first forty days varies a good deal between sources, and Orthodox teachers differ over how literally any of it should be taken. What does not vary is the double claim: the person is conscious, and the person is already in the hands of a God who has begun to answer the life that was lived.
What waits for the resurrection
The Church confesses that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and that the dead will rise. What is promised is not the survival of a soul but the restoration of a whole human being, body included. This is why Orthodox funerals speak so insistently of the grave as a place of sleep, and why the boiled wheat brought to memorial services is explained as seed sown in the ground. A person is not a soul that happens to be using a body.
Until that day no one has received what they will finally receive. The righteous are not yet crowned and the unrepentant are not yet in full torment, because neither is yet whole. The Last Judgment is also public in a way the particular judgment is not. It is the moment at which the whole of history is laid out and the justice of God is seen rather than merely trusted, which is one reason the Church keeps a Sunday each year to think about it before Lent begins.
Why Orthodoxy holds both
If only the judgment at death were real, the resurrection would be decorative and the body would turn out not to matter, which cuts against the whole Christian confession that God took flesh and rose in it. If only the Last Judgment were real, the dead would have to be unconscious in the meantime, and the Fathers do not describe them that way. St John Cassian writes that souls after separation from the body are not idle, and already begin to foretaste what awaits them.
There is also a pastoral reason for keeping both. A single verdict at death, with nothing after it, leaves the living with nothing to do but grieve. A single verdict at the end, with nothing before it, leaves the dead as ciphers for centuries. The two-stage teaching is what makes the Church's prayer for the departed intelligible. Something has been settled, and something is still open, and the Church takes its stand in the space between.
Why the interval is not a second chance
Orthodoxy does not teach that a person who refused God in life may reconsider after death. Repentance is the work of this life and the Fathers are blunt about it. What can change in the interval is not the dead person's own will but the mercy sought for him by others, which is why such change is always spoken of as granted rather than as achieved by the deceased. The distinction is fine, and it is worth stating slowly.
Prayer for the departed, on this account, is an act of asking addressed to a God who is free. It carries no guarantee and sets no terms. The Church has never published a map of who may be helped and how far, and the saints who wrote most warmly about such prayer were also the most reticent about its limits. That reticence is deliberate. It is the difference between trusting mercy and claiming it.
The difference from purgatory
The word purgatory names a doctrine the Orthodox Church has not received, and the disagreement is narrower and more precise than it is usually reported to be. At the Council of Florence in 1438 and 1439 St Mark of Ephesus set out the Orthodox position at length. He granted that the departed are helped by prayers, by the Eucharist and by almsgiving. He denied that there is a third place, that a cleansing fire operates in the interval, and that a debt of temporal punishment remains to be discharged once sin has been forgiven.
His argument turned partly on 1 Corinthians 3:11–15, which Latin theologians read as describing a purifying fire before glory and which he read as describing the fire of the last day. Behind the exegesis lies a different instinct about what forgiveness is. Orthodoxy has been reluctant to speak of satisfaction still owed to God after pardon, preferring the language of healing. That is a real difference, held calmly; and it should be added that Roman Catholic theology has itself moved a long way from the late-medieval picture.
The toll-houses, and how Fr Seraphim Rose asked them to be read
Anyone reading further into this subject will meet the aerial toll-houses, the tradition that the soul rising after death is met and accused by demons at a series of stations. The teaching appears in Orthodox liturgical texts, in the Lives of the saints and in nineteenth-century dogmatic manuals, and Fr Seraphim Rose gave it the longest chapter in The Soul After Death. He also insisted that it must not be imagined crudely, quoting Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow to the effect that it is to be understood spiritually rather than in a coarse and sensuous way.
The imagery attached to this tradition is old and vivid: stations in the air, accusers with ledgers, tolls demanded for particular sins. Fr Seraphim spent several pages arguing against taking any of that furniture literally, and set out his own position in a single sentence that is easy to miss inside a long chapter. What he thought could not be given up was the testing itself, not the scenery around it.
Thus, of course, there are no visible 'houses' or 'booths' in the air where 'taxes' are collected
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, ch. 6 §1 (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, first edition 1980)
Why the presentation is contested
The manner of that presentation has been publicly disputed among Orthodox writers. Deacon Lev Puhalo, later Archbishop Lazar, argued at the end of the 1970s that the account as given resembles Latin purgatory. The ROCOR Synod of Bishops reviewed the controversy and found that the teaching contains nothing contrary to piety, while noting that the detailed form described in the Life of St Basil the New has no direct scriptural basis, and then prohibited further public polemic on the question in periodicals.
Fr Seraphim had in fact conceded the principle at the start of the book, in a sentence worth holding on to by anyone who writes about the afterlife at all. He distinguished the Church's teaching, which can be stated, from his own reading of particular modern reports, which he offered provisionally and expected to be argued with. A reader meeting this material for the first time is entitled to know that it is discussed, and not only repeated.
Concerning these interpretations, of course, there is room for a legitimate difference of opinion among Orthodox Christians.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, Preface (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, first edition 1980)
What the teaching changes
Doctrine of this kind is not information collected for its own sake. If something is genuinely settled at death, then the ordinary work of a Christian life — confession, forgiving people who have wronged us, almsgiving, the Eucharist — is preparation for something near rather than for a distant examination. If the last word waits for the resurrection, then no one's case is closed while the Church still prays, and despair about the dead is out of place.
Where Orthodoxy differs from other Christian accounts of these things, it differs plainly, and this article has tried not to blur that. It has also tried not to press the differences further than they go. Fr Seraphim Rose, writing in 1980 to a catechumen distressed by the harshness of some Orthodox polemics, set a limit that a parish website can reasonably keep.
The Church's practice is more eloquent than its arguments. At the kneeling prayers of Pentecost vespers it asks mercy even for those in hell, having first admitted that it does not know. Clarity about what has been handed down, and silence about what has not, is worth more than a verdict.
it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works (St. Herman Press, 2003), ch. 84