In the account of the Soldier Taxiotes, for example (Lives of Saints, March 28), it is related that he returned to life after six hours in the grave and told of the following experience:
“When I was dying, I saw Ethiopians who appeared before me. Their appearance was very frightful; my soul beholding them was disturbed. Then I saw two splendid youths, and my soul leaped out into their arms. We began slowly to ascend in the air to the heights, as if flying, and we reached the toll-houses that guard the ascent and detain the soul of each man. Each toll-house tested a special form of sin: one lying, another envy, another pride; each sin has its own testers in the air. And I saw that the angels held all my good deeds in a little chest; taking them out, they would compare them with my evil deeds. Thus we passed by all the toll-houses. And when, nearing the gates of heaven, we came to the toll-house of fornication, those who guard the way there detained me and presented to me all my fleshly deeds of fornication, committed from my childhood up to now. The angels who were leading me said: ‘All the bodily sins which you committed in the city, God has forgiven because you repented of them.’ To this my adversaries said to me: ‘But when you left the city, in the village you committed adultery with a farmer’s wife.’ The angels, hearing this and finding no good deed which could be measured out for my sin, left me and went away. Then the evil spirits seized me and, overwhelming me with blows, led me down to earth. The earth opened, and I was let down by narrow and foul-smelling descents into the underground prison of hell.” (The rest of this Life in English may be read in Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave, pp. 169-71.)
Bishop Ignatius quotes also other experiences of the toll-houses in the Lives of St. Eustratius the Great Martyr (4th century, Dec. 13), St. Niphon of Constantia in Cyprus, who saw many souls ascending through the toll-houses (4th century, Dec. 23), St. Symeon the fool for Christ of Emesa (6th century, July 21), St. John the Merciful, Patriarch of Alexandria (7th century, Prologue for Dec. 19), St. Symeon of Wondrous Mountain (7th century, Prologue for March 13); and St. Macarius the Great (4th century, Jan. 19).
Bishop Ignatius was unacquainted with many early Orthodox sources in the West which were never translated into Greek or Russian; but these too abound in descriptions of the toll-houses. The name of “toll-houses,” it would seem, is restricted to Eastern sources, but the reality described in Western sources is identical.
St. Columba, for example, the founder of the island monastery of Iona in Scotland († 597), many times in his life saw the battle of the demons in the air for the souls of the newly departed. St. Adamnan († 704) relates these in his Life of the Saint; here is one incident:
St. Columba called together his monks one day, telling them: “Now let us help by prayer the monks of the Abbot Comgell, drowning at this hour in the Lough of the Calf; for behold, at this moment they are warring in the air against hostile powers who try to snatch away the soul of a stranger who is drowning along with them.” Then, after prayer, he said: “Give thanks to Christ, for now the holy angels have met these holy souls, and have delivered that stranger and triumphantly rescued him from the warring demons.”11
St. Boniface, the 8th-century Anglo-Saxon “Apostle to the Germans,” relates in one of his letters the account given to him personally by a monk of the monastery at Wenlock who died and came back to life after some hours. “Angels of such pure splendor bore him up as he came forth from the body that he could not bear to gaze upon them.... ‘They carried me up,’ he said, ‘high into the air ...’ He reported further that in the space of time while he was out of the body, a greater multitude of souls left their bodies and gathered in the place where he was than he had thought to form the whole race of mankind on earth. He said also that there was a crowd of evil spirits and a glorious choir of the higher angels. And he said that the wretched spirits and the holy angels had a violent dispute concerning the souls that had come forth from their bodies, the demons bringing charges against them and aggravating the burden of their sins, the angels lightening the burden and making excuses for them.
“He heard all his own sins, which he had committed from his youth on and had failed to confess or had forgotten or had not recognized as sins, crying out against him, each in its own voice, and accusing him grievously.... Everything he had done in all the days of his life and had neglected to confess and many which he had not known to be sinful, all these were now shouted at him in terrifying words. In the same way the evil spirits, chiming in with the vices, accusing and bearing witness, naming the very times and places, brought proofs of his evil deeds.... And so, with his sins all piled up and reckoned out, those ancient enemies declared him guilty and unquestionably subject to their jurisdiction.
“ ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘the poor little virtues which I had displayed unworthily and imperfectly spoke out in my defense.... And those angelic spirits in their boundless love defended and supported me, while the virtues, greatly magnified as they were, seemed to me far greater and more excellent than could ever have been practiced by my own strength.’ ”12
4. A Modern Experience of the Toll-Houses
The reaction of a typical “enlightened” man of modern times when he personally encountered the toll-houses after his “clinical death” (which lasted for 36 hours) may be seen in the book already mentioned above, “Unbelievable for Many but Actually a True Occurrence.” “Having taken me by the arms, the angels carried me right through the wall of the ward into the street. It had already grown dark, snow was silently falling in large flakes. I saw this, but the cold and in general the difference in temperature between the room and outside I did not feel. Evidently these like phenomena lost their significance for my changed body. We began quickly to ascend. And the degree to which we had ascended, the increasingly greater became the expanse of space that was revealed before our eyes, and finally it took on such terrifyingly vast proportions that I was seized with a fear from the realization of my insignificance in comparison to this desert of infinity....
“The conception of time was absent in my mental state at this time, and I do not know how long we were moving upwards, when suddenly there was heard at first an indistinct noise, and following this, having emerged from somewhere, with shrieks and rowdy laughter, a throng of some hideous beings began rapidly to approach us.
“Evil spirits! — I suddenly comprehended and appraised with unusual rapidity that resulted from the horror I experienced at that time, a horror of a special kind and until then never before experienced by me. Evil spirits! O, how much irony, how much of the most sincere kind of laughter this would have aroused in me but a few days ago. Even a few hours ago somebody’s report, not even that he saw evil spirits with his own eyes, but only that he believed in their existence as in something fundamentally real, would have aroused a similar reaction! As was proper for an ‘educated’ man at the close of the 19th century, I understood this to mean foolish inclinations, passions in a human being, and that is why the very word itself had for me, not the significance of a name, but a term which defined a certain abstract conception. And suddenly this certain ‘abstract conception’ appeared before me as a living personification!...
11
St. Adamnan,
12