We have now seen, through numerous accounts of Holy Fathers and in Lives of Saints, that the soul after death enters immediately into the aerial realm of the under-heaven, whose characteristics we have examined in detail. We have also seen that the progress of the soul through this aerial realm, once the body has actually died and the soul is finished with earthly things, is described as an ascent through the toll-houses, where the Particular Judgment begins in order to determine the fitness of the soul to dwell in heaven. Those souls that are convicted of unrepented sins are cast down by the fallen spirits into hell; those that pass successfully through the trials of the toll-houses ascend freely, guided by angels, to heaven.
What is this heaven? Where is it? Is heaven a place? Is it “up”?
As with all matters concerning life after death, we should not ask such questions out of mere curiosity, but solely in order to understand better the teaching on this subject which the Church has handed down to us, and to escape the confusions which modern ideas and some psychic experiences can cause even in Orthodox Christians.
It so happens that the question of the “location” of heaven (and hell) is one that has been very widely misunderstood in modern times. It was only a few years ago that the Soviet dictator Krushchev was laughing at religious people who still believed in heaven — he had sent “cosmonauts” into space and they had not seen it!
No thinking Christian, of course, believes in the atheist caricature of a heaven “in the sky,” although there are some naive Protestants who would place heaven in a distant galaxy or constellation; the whole visible creation is fallen and corrupt, and there is no place in it anywhere for the invisible heaven of God, which is a spiritual and not a material reality. But many Christians, in order to escape the mockery of unbelievers and avoid even the slightest taint of any materialistic conception, have gone to an opposite extreme and declare that heaven is “nowhere.” Among Roman Catholics and Protestants there are sophisticated apologies which proclaim that heaven is “a state, not a place,” that “up” is only a metaphor, the Ascension of Christ (Luke 24:50-51, Acts 1:9-11) was not really an “ascension,” but only a change of state. The result of such apologies is that heaven and hell become very vague and indefinite conceptions, and the sense of their reality begins to disappear — with disastrous results for Christian life, because these are the very realities toward which our whole earthly life is directed.
All such apologies, according to the teaching of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, are based on the false idea of the modern philosopher Descartes that everything that is not material is “pure spirit” and is not limited by time and space. This is not the teaching of the Orthodox Church. Bishop Ignatius writes: “The fantasy of Descartes concerning the independence of spirits on space and time is a decisive absurdity. Everything that is limited is necessarily dependent on space” (vol. III, p. 312). “The numerous quotations cited above from the Divine service books and the works of the Fathers of the Orthodox Church decide with complete satisfaction the question as to where paradise and hell are located.... With what clarity the teaching of the Orthodox Eastern Church indicates that the location of paradise is in the heaven and the location of hell is in the bowels of the earth” (vol. III, pp. 308-9; the emphasis is his). Here we shall only indicate just how this teaching is to be interpreted.
It is certainly true, as Bishop Ignatius’ numerous citations indicate, that all Orthodox sources — the Holy Scripture, Divine services, Lives of Saints, writings of Holy Fathers — speak of paradise and heaven as “up” and hell as “down,” under the earth. And it is also true that since angels and souls are limited in space (as we have seen in the chapter above on “The Orthodox Doctrine of Angels”), they must always be in one definite place — whether heaven, hell, or earth. We have already quoted the teaching of St. John Damascene that “when the angels are in heaven they are not on earth, and when they are sent to earth by God they do not remain in heaven” (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II. 3, p. 206), which is only the same doctrine taught earlier by St. Basil the Great (On the Holy Spirit, ch. 23), St. Gregory the Dialogist (Morals on the Book of Job, Book II, 3), and indeed all the Orthodox Fathers.
Heaven, therefore, is certainly a place, and it is certainly up from any point on the earth, and hell is certainly down, in the bowels of the earth; but these places and their inhabitants cannot be seen by men until their spiritual eyes are opened, as we have seen earlier with regard to the aerial realm. Further, these places are not within the “coordinates” of our space-time system: an airliner does not pass “invisibly” through paradise, nor an earth satellite through the third heaven, nor can the souls waiting in hell for the Last Judgment be reached by drilling for them in the earth. They are not there, but in a different kind of space that begins right here but extends, as it were, in a different direction.
There are indications, or at least hints, of this other kind of reality even in everyday, this-worldly experience. For example, the existence of volcanos and of great heat in the center of the earth is taken by many Saints and Fathers as a direct indication of the existence of hell in the bowels of the earth.37 Of course, hell is not “material” in the sense that the lava that flows up from under the crust of the earth is material; but there does seem to be a kind of “overlapping” of the two kinds of reality — an “overlapping” that can be seen first of all in the nature of man himself, who is capable, under certain circumstance or by God’s will, of perceiving both kinds of reality even in this life. Modern scientists themselves have come to admit that they are no longer sure of the ultimate nature and boundaries of matter, nor where it leaves off and “psychic” reality begins.
Numerous incidents in the Lives of Saints show how this other kind of space “breaks into” the “normal” space of this world. Often, for example, the soul of a newly deceased man is seen rising to heaven, as when St. Benedict saw the soul of St. Germanus of Capua carried to heaven by angels in a ball of fire (St. Gregory’s Dialogues, II, 35), or the residents of Afognak saw St. Herman’s soul ascending in a pillar of fire, or the Elder Philaret of Glinsk saw the soul of St. Seraphim of Sarov ascending. The Prophet Elisha beheld the Prophet Elijah taken up in a fiery chariot into heaven (III Kings 2:11). Often, also, souls are beheld going through the toll-houses; such cases are especially numerous in the Life of St. Niphon of Constantia (Dec. 23) and St. Columba of Iona — some of the latter were quoted above in the chapter on the toll-houses. In the Life of Blessed Theophilus of Kiev, the one witness of the righteous one’s death saw how at this time “something flashed before his gaze and a current of cool air struck his face. Dimitry looked upwards in amazement and became petrified. In the cell, the ceiling began to rise and the blue sky, as if extending its arms, was preparing to receive the holy soul of the dying righteous one.”38
Beyond the general knowledge that heaven and hell are indeed “places,” but not places in this world, in our space-time system — we need not be curious. These “places” are so different from our earthly notions of “place” that we shall become hopelessly confused if we attempt to piece together a “geography” of them. Some Lives of Saints indicate clearly that “heaven” is above “paradise”; others indicate that there are at least “three heavens” — but it is not for us to define the “boundaries” of these places or to try to distinguish their characteristics. Such descriptions are given to us, in God’s Providence, in order to inspire us to struggle to reach them by a Christian life and death — but not in order to apply to them worldly categories of logic and knowledge which do not fit them. St. John Chrysostom rightly recalls us to our proper concern in studying about heaven and helclass="underline" “You ask where hell is; but why should you know it? You must know that hell exists, not where it is hidden…. In my opinion, it is somewhere outside this whole world.... Let us attempt to find out not where it is, but how to escape it” (Homilies on Romans, 31:3-4).
37
See the Life of St. Patricius of Prussa, May 19; St. Gregory’s
38
See the Life of Blessed Theophilus (Feofil), Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, N.Y., 1970, p. 125.