In the Byzantine Empire, death was generally not mentioned directly, preferring to use various euphemisms such as separation, leaving-by, paying off debts-paying. Byzantine thanatological conceptions go back to ancient philosophy, which presented death as the separation of the soul from the body. According to Christian eschatology, it was assumed that this separation was temporary and that the soul would be reunited with the body at the end of time. The Byzantines believed that death occurred at the command of God, who sent an angel to carry out his will. There were differing opinions as to whether the hour of death was predetermined, but it was believed that only the saints could know it in advance. The afterlife began with the naked and helpless soul coming out of the body through the mouth to be accompanied by an angel to begin a forty-day wandering, passing through publicans, during which the demons weigh its sins. At the end of the journey, the soul sees Hell and Heaven as a possible waiting place for the Last Judgment. The doctrine of the souls transmigration was completely denied in Byzantium. As in the philosophy of Neoplatonism, Eastern Christianity views death as a release for new life, and the Church Fathers Basil the Great and John Chrysostom disapproved of excessive mourning for the dead.
Byzantine death, burial rituals and ideas about the afterlife are largely based on pre-Christian ideas and customs. The pagan belief in a journey of the soul before death, for which some material aids and an attendant —the psychopomp— are necessary, underwent an outward transformation among early Christian theologians. The role of the psychopomp began to be played by angels, and the viaticum given to the dead by the sacrament of anointing with oil. Many Byzantines underwent pre-mortem tonsure in the hope of increasing their chances of salvation. The custom of preparing a special memorial meal (kutia) also stems from the pagan tradition of a meal by relatives at the grave of the deceased. It was rejected as a prejudice in the West, but preserved in the Byzantine Church. Kolivo was to be distributed on certain days after death (the 3rd, 7th or 9th, 30th or 40th), along with the recitation of appropriate prayers, because it was believed that during these days the soul passed through significant stages on its way to God. The deceased were also commemorated on the anniversary of their death and on the Sunday before the week of the Last Judgment. The Byzantines believed that the soul's fate could be influenced by prayers and donations to churches and monasteries.
Life after death in Byzantium
The Byzantines certainly believed that death was not the end. At the same time, they believed that the existence of the soul outside the body was a matter of mystical experience rather than theological study. Most early Christian writers agreed that death consisted in the separation of the conscious soul from the material body, and believers hoped to await the end of the world in a comfortable place —Bosom of Abraham— and then to rise in the flesh and see the triumph of Christ. The position of the Byzantine Church on eschatological issues was in line with Orthodox dogma and left little room for interpretation. The Nicene-Chalcedonian Creed contained the dogma of the expectation of the resurrection from the dead and the future life. Christian theologians from Hippolytus of Rome (2nd-3rd centuries) believed that the resurrection would be physical, not spiritual. In the eighth century, one of the Church Fathers, John of Damascus, in his Sacred Parallels, in the chapter On the Time of Death, asserted that souls wait in the afterlife for the time determined by God, when all will be resurrected, but not by incarnation of souls, but bodily. Because of local peculiarities, the question of the bodily resurrection was given considerable attention in Egypt. Despite the condemnation of the custom of mummification by such prominent theologians as Shenoute and Augustine of Hippo, many Egyptians wished to preserve their bodies in a secure tomb for the greater assurance of resurrection.
In the absence of precise dogmatic definitions, the Byzantines showed considerable concern about the exact form of bodily resurrection and whether relatives and friends would be able to recognize each other afterward. The problem of "recognizing soul mates" (Greek κοινος αναγνωρισμος) arose as a reaction to dualistic teachings that downplayed the role of the material world.Of heretical doctrines the Manichaeans held different opinions, but their influence in Byzantium after the seventh century was negligible, as well as the Paulicians in the eighth and ninth centuries. In Byzantium, with the essentially material character of its liturgical traditions, including iconoclasm, the view of the continuity of material existence after death and before the resurrection prevailed. The 7th century theologian Andreas of Caesarea called nonsense the idea that the resurrected body would be deprived of its organs, through which man glorified God in life, and of its sexuality. At the end of the eighth century, "angelic" and unrecognizable resurrected bodies were condemned by the monk Theodore the Studite as the Origenism heresy. A different answer to the same question was given in the 12th century by the historian and theologian Michael Glika. In his opinion, the lifelong separation of the sexes was the result of the loss of the primary sexless "angelic" state, to which one must eventually return.
With the end of the Dark Ages and the revival of interest in ancient philosophical theories, Byzantine thinkers began to take an interest in the problem of the transmigration of souls as an object of criticism. In the second half of the 9th century, Patriarch Photios refuted the teachings of the Neoplatonist Hierocles of Alexandria, who associated the soul with divine predestination. The views on metempsychosis of the philosopher John Italus, condemned by the Church in 1082, can only be roughly reconstructed. The corresponding anathematism was included in the Orthodox Synodic and was directed against those who "prefer the so-called wisdom of the foolish outward philosophers and follow their teachers and accept the reincarnation of human souls, or that they perish like wordless animals and go into nothingness, and consequently deny the resurrection, the judgment, and the final reward of life". As the Synod commentator J. Guillard points out, the anathema in such a formulation contains an obvious contradiction, since the Platonic doctrine of the transmigration of souls is incompatible with the Aristotelian theory of the destruction of the soul after death. Accordingly, it is impossible to accuse anyone of holding both approaches. According to Périclès-Pierre Joannou, Italus actually proved by logical arguments that the soul, although it continues to exist after death, does not continue its development indefinitely, but is limited by God's judgment of itself. Italus' theory was an attempt to correct Gregory of Nyssa's doctrine of the soul's infinite movement toward union with God, which the philosopher considered not to follow from the assumption of the finiteness of the time of divine judgment.Clucas L. The Trial of John Italos and the Crisis of Intellectual Values in Byzantium in the Eleventh Century. 1981. pp. 142—143. 266 p.
In the later period, the idea of the transmigration of souls apparently ceased to interest educated Byzantines, with the sole exception of the 15th-century philosopher Gemistos Plethon. The last time Byzantine theologians turned to the subject of the afterlife was as a result of disputes with Catholics at the Council of Ferraro-Florence in 1438-1439. Bishop Mark of Ephesus, a participant in the disputes with the Latins about purgatory, formulated the position of the Byzantine Church as follows: there are three categories of souls, the first of which are in Hades and have no chance of salvation, others who have already received divine grace, i.e. the saints, and others who are in the middle. The latter are the "intermediate" people who died in the Christian faith, but with minor sins for which they have not had time to repent, or with major sins for which they have repented, but have not had time to manifest the "fruits of contrition".
Evolution of ideas about the fate of the soul
Origins of the doctrine of posthumous retribution According to the German Byzantinist Hans-Georg Beck, the ideas about the afterlife are the best way to understand the religiously conditioned mentality of the Byzantines. The theme of the afterlife is reflected mainly in literature of a religious character — hagiographies, sermons, and liturgical manuals. The latter are relatively few, including Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (6th century) and Symeon of Thessalonica (15th century). Since the early 1980s, studies of Byzantine “moral” apocalypses, which for a number of reasons had not previously received serious attention, have intensified.There is an approach which suggests that only those apocalypses which prophesy the political situation of the world and deal with collective rather than individual eschatology should be considered "real" apocalypses. On the one hand, among scholars of Byzantine literature, the idea of these works as a “low genre” prevailed; on the other hand, the extremely extensive manuscript tradition did not allow for a canonical edition of the texts. The breakthrough was Eveline Patlagean's article Byzance et son autre monde. Observations sur quelques récits (1981), which showed for the first time the importance of apocryphal, including apocalyptic, texts for understanding the religious culture of the time. The doubts that arise as to whether religious literature reflects the mentality of the broader society and not only the concepts of individual theologians, Beck proposes to solve by turning to texts that, in his opinion, reflect the eschatological ideas of the masses. Accordingly, he based his analysis on descriptions in the 10th-century epic Digenes Akritas.
Many elements of Christian ideas about the afterlife, such as private judgment, purgatory as an intermediate state of the soul awaiting the Last Judgment, and the hope for the reward of vice and virtue, go back to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. The most important text here is the Book of Enoch, in the oldest part of which — dating from the 3rd century BCE, the Book of the Guardians — provides a description of the temporary holding places for souls awaiting judgment. According to the book, the souls are kept in four deep cavities (Ancient Greek κοιλώματα), divided according to the degree of righteousness. The possibility of such a division presupposes a prior classification of the dead; that is, it may be regarded as a kind of private judgment. The Book of Enoch also describes a fiery prison for fallen angels and a valley for the eternally damned, later transformed into the Christian hell. In the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, the idea of a private judgment is set forth in more detail. Compiled in Egypt at the turn of the first millennium, the text tells of a vision in which the prophet Sophonias was shown angels recording in scrolls the good and evil deeds of people. Depending on which deeds outweigh, the soul is sent either to the righteous or to Gades. The Old Testament apocalypses were known not only to early Christian authors but also much later in Byzantium. Extracts from the Book of Enoch are cited in his chronicle by George Syncellus, and the Apocalypse of Zephaniahwas used in his historical work by Patriarch Nicephorus (d. 828).