Traditional teaching held that the souls of the blessed dead enjoy the beatific vision, direct sight of God, immediately upon death, an assurance embedded in centuries of preaching, art, and prayer for the dead. In the winter of 1331 to 1332, John XXII preached a series of sermons arguing instead that because a human being is composed of both body and soul, the full reward of seeing God cannot be granted until body and soul are reunited at the general resurrection on the Last Day. Until then, he taught, even the souls of the saints in paradise see only the humanity of Christ, not the full vision of the Godhead.
The reaction was immediate and came from the heart of the church's own theological establishment rather than from a fringe. Masters of theology at the University of Paris, the leading faculty in Western Christendom, argued publicly against the pope's position, and the Dominican friar Thomas Waleys was tried and imprisoned for preaching against it from the pulpit in Avignon itself. The French king Philip VI convened theologians to examine the question and pressed the pope to retract, treating the matter as a threat to the faith rather than an open scholarly dispute.
John XXII never fully backed down in life, continuing to hold the position was open to debate rather than settled doctrine, but on 3 December 1334, the day before he died, he issued a formal retraction affirming that souls who need no purification do see God fully immediately after death, restoring the traditional teaching his own successor, Benedict XII, would define as dogma four years later in the bull Benedictus Deus.