The leaders excommunicated each other, but not the communities in question.
For the Orthodox this was OK because they don't believe in purgatory, but one has to wonder if the Catholic Popes had to sit in the neather-gloom until they patch up their differences. ;O)
The Orthodox believe in a third "place" of existence besides heaven and hell. You are merely trying to divide the Body with such talk.
Regards
"The leaders excommunicated each other, but not the communities in question."
JK, this is a technicality that obscures the reality. What is excommunication if it is not a state of not communing with each other? The Orthodox have steadfastly refused to enter into communion with Catholicism until we come to complete agreement in the faith. Even after the false union of Ferrara/Florence, the records show that even those Orthodox bishops who actually signed the accord would not take communion at the Catholic mass that was served to celebrate the "union."
The problem is that the word "excommunication" has a lot of overtones and baggage to it that aren't very nice and politically correct. But given the fact that ever since the Schism, the rule in Orthodoxy has been that a member of the Latin church had to be received into Orthodoxy and renounce Latin errors in order to receive communion in an Orthodox church should tell the story as to whether the members of the communities were, in practice, excommunicated. I daresay that prior to very recent times, the same thing was required by Catholicism of any Orthodox who wanted to commune in Catholic churches.
This is not stirring up trouble, it is just stating the facts of how things really are -- not how they are in someone's theoretical construct of how Orthodoxy and Catholicism are somehow One Church. If we were One Church, we would be in communion with each other. It is fine that we have very similar objections to Protestant distinctives, but it is a very long way from that to being One Church. one Body.
"The Orthodox believe in a third "place" of existence besides heaven and hell. You are merely trying to divide the Body with such talk."
The first statement is true. We believe in a sort of "intermediate state" in which the soul is after its separation from the body. The state of separation from the body is an unnatural one, and neither the fullness of bliss and union with God nor the fullness of anguish and separation from God are complete until the body is someday resurrected and united again with the body, returning each man to his normative state.
What we do not believe is that there is any sort of fire or pain that a soul has to go through in order to be purified of unconfessed venial sins or to clean the slate from uncompleted penances for sins forgiven in confession. We believe that we know very little about this intermediate state other than the fact that for each person, the ultimate fate is decided by the basic orientation of each soul at the time of death, and that this cannot be changed after death.
We know that the souls of the departed are helped by our prayers, almsgiving in their names, commemoration at the liturgy, memorial services, etc. But how exactly they are helped and to what degree we have little or no idea. We certainly cannot quantify it and say that we have wiped the slate clean with a plenary indulgence given for something of that sort. We just don't know.
As you can see, Harley, while there are significant differences (at least to us Orthodox) between traditional Catholic ideas of purgatory and the Orthodox view of the afterlife, the beliefs that we Orthodox have are equally wrong by your Reformed lights.
You aren't dividing the Body, because there is no Body to divide at this point -- Catholicism is already in a state of error and schism from the Orthodox perspective, and Orthodoxy is in a state of schism (and really, if Catholics are honest, error) from Catholicism's perspective.
What you *are* doing, is using a faulty argument -- and I can't help but think that you are too smart a guy not to realize this. You cannot compare what happened at the Great Schism with what happened at the Protestant Reformation. After the Schism, both the Roman patriarch's church and the Church comprised of the jurisdictions of the 4 other patriarchs and other local Eastern churches remained intact, orderly, in full communion within each respective body, and continuing the same practices that each had arrived at by that point in time.
Protestantism did not result in the schism of one church from others, but rather in a state in which the Church never was at any other point in its existence -- with a radical change in belief and practice, and with ever splintering groups and denominations and ecclesiastical structures, each with its own widely varying beliefs and practices. These newly formed ecclesiastical bodies were cut free, to varying degrees, from ancient traditional understandings and beliefs, and replaced them with theoretical reconstructions of the New Testament Church.
You are approaching a valid point, because it is disingenuous for Catholics to be harshly critical of Protestants for leaving their True Church, while (nowadays, anyway) giving Orthodoxy a free pass for doing the same thing. But the whole image of bishops sitting in Purgatory until excommunications are lifted is just plain silly. From the perspective of each body, obviously the excommunication of the other was of none effect! No Catholic would believe that the Pope who did the excommunicating of the Patriarch of Constantinople on doctrinal grounds was in error for doing so.