St. John Chrysostom, describing the hour of death, teaches: “Then we will need many prayers, many helpers, many good deeds, a great intercession from angels on the journey through the spaces of the air. If when travelling in a foreign land or a strange city we are in need of a guide, how much more necessary for us are guides and helpers to guide us past the invisible dignities and powers and world-rulers of this air, who are called persecutors and publicans and tax-collectors.”7
St. Macarius the Great writes: “When you hear that there are rivers of dragons, and mouths of lions, and the dark powers under the heavens, and fire that burns and crackles in the members, you think nothing of it, not knowing that unless you receive the earnest of the Holy Spirit (II Cor. 1:22), they hold your soul as it departs from the body, and do not suffer you to rise to heaven”8
St. Isaiah the Recluse, a 6th-century Father of the Philokalia, teaches that Christians should “daily have death before our eyes and take care how to accomplish the departure from the body and how to pass by the powers of darkness who are to meet us in the air” (Homily 5:22). “When the soul leaves the body, angels accompany it; the dark powers come out to meet it, desiring to detain it, and testing it to see if they might find something of their own in it” (Homily 17).
Again, St. Hesychius, Presbyter of Jerusalem (5th century), teaches: “The hour of death will find us, it will come, and it will be impossible to escape it. Oh, if only the prince of the world and the air who is then to meet us might find our iniquities as nothing and insignificant and might not be able to accuse us justly!” (Homily on Sobriety in the Philokalia.)
St. Gregory the Dialogist († 604), in his Homilies on the Gospel, writes: “One must reflect deeply on how frightful the hour of death will be for us, what terror the soul will then experience, what remembrance of all the evils, what forgetfulness of past happiness, what fear, and what apprehension of the Judge. Then the evil spirits will seek out in the departing soul its deeds; then they will present before its view the sins towards which they had disposed it, so as to draw their accomplice to torment. But why do we speak only of the sinful soul, when they come even to the chosen among the dying and seek out their own in them, if they have succeeded with them? Among men there was only One Who before His suffering fearlessly said: Hereafter I talk not much with you: For the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me (John 14:30)” (Homilies on the Gospels, 39, on Luke 19:42-47; Bishop Ignatius, III, p. 278).
St. Ephraim the Syrian († 373) thus describes the hour of death and the judgment at the toll-houses: “When the fearful hosts come, when the divine takers-away command the soul to be translated from the body, when they draw us away by force and lead us away to the unavoidable judgment place — then, seeing them, the poor man ... comes all into a shaking as if from an earthquake, is all in trembling.... The divine takers-away, taking the soul, ascend in the air where stand the chiefs, the authorities and world-rulers of the opposing powers. These are our accusers, the fearful publicans, registrars, tax-collectors; they meet it on the way, register, examine, and count out the sins and debts of this man — the sins of youth and old age, voluntary and involuntary, committed in deed, word, and thought. Great is the fear here, great the trembling of the poor soul, indescribable the want which it suffers then from the incalculable multitudes of its enemies surrounding it there in myriads, slandering it so as not to allow it to ascend to heaven, to dwell in the light of the living, to enter the land of life. But the holy angels, taking the soul, lead it away.”9
The Divine services of the Orthodox Church also contain many references to the toll-houses. Thus, in the Octoechos, the work of St. John Damascene (8th century), we read: “O Virgin, in the hour of my death rescue me from the hands of the demons, and the judgment, and the accusation, and the frightful testing, and the bitter toll-houses, and the fierce prince, and the eternal condemnation, O Mother of God” (Tone 4, Friday, 8th Canticle of the Canon at Matins). Again: “When my soul shall be about to be released from the bond with the flesh, intercede for me, O Sovereign Lady ... that I may pass unhindered through the princes of darkness standing in the air” (Tone 2, Saturday, Aposticha Theotokion at Matins). Bishop Ignatius cites seventeen other such examples from the Divine service books, which of course are not a complete list.
The most thorough discussion among the early Church Fathers of the doctrine of the aerial toll-houses is set forth in the Homily on the Departure of the Soul of St. Cyril of Alexandria († 444) which is always included in editions of the Slavonic Sequential Psalter (that is, the Psalter arranged for use in Divine services). Among much else in this Homily, St. Cyril says: “What fear and trembling await you, O soul, in the day of death! You will see frightful, wild, cruel, unmerciful and shameful demons, like dark Ethiopians, standing before you. The very sight of them is worse than any torment. The soul, seeing them, becomes agitated, is disturbed, troubled, seeks to hide, hastens to the angels of God. The holy angels hold the soul; passing with them through the air and rising, it encounters the toll-houses which guard the path from earth to heaven, detaining the soul and hindering it from ascending further. Each toll-house tests the sins corresponding to it; each sin, each passion has its tax collectors and testers.”
Many other Holy Fathers, before and after St. Cyril, discuss or mention the toll-houses. After quoting many of them, the above-mentioned 19th-century historian of Church dogma concludes: “Such an uninterrupted, constant, and universal usage in the Church of the teaching of the toll-houses, especially among the teachers of the 4th century, indisputably testifies that it was handed down to them from the teachers of the preceding centuries and is founded on apostolic tradition.”10
3. The Toll-Houses in Lives of Saints
The Orthodox Lives of Saints contain numerous accounts — some of them very vivid — of how the soul passes through the toll-houses after death. The most detailed account is to be found in the Life of St. Basil the New (March 26), which describes the passage through the toll-houses of Blessed Theodora, as related by her in a vision to a fellow disciple of the Saint, Gregory. In this account twenty specific toll-houses are mentioned, with the kinds of sins tested in each set forth. Bishop Ignatius quotes this account at some length (vol. III, pp. 151-58). This account already exists in an English translation, however (Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave, pp. 69-87), and it contains nothing significant that is not to be found in other Orthodox sources on the toll-houses, so we shall omit it here in order to give some of these other sources. These other sources are less detailed, but follow the same basic outline of events.
7
Homily on Patience and Gratitude, appointed to be read at Orthodox church services on the seventh Saturday of Pascha and at funeral services.
8