Such things happen in order to bring us to our senses.
Today this isn’t happening to us, but it will be.
Such people returned to life in order to finish life righteously; but will we return? God knows....
We will not read of the terrors Uekskuell experienced in trying to draw attention to himself. The world beyond the grave almost touches ours, it seems just a fraction of a millimeter away; but we don’t entirely come together. And this isn’t the only such incident....
I myself have heard of a man, who is still alive today, who experienced clinical death; people thought he was dead, but after his clinical death he told them everything they had said, and how they moved, in all details.
Man is not only this body, matter, dust; man is composed of body and soul. And the soul does not die like the body; it sees and knows everything....
Is there life after death or not? In the end, all this is taken on faith. That there is life there, we accept on faith; that there is no life there, we also accept on faith. But in order to say for sure, as the boy (mentioned above) says ... one must go there. And as long as we have not gone, some have faith, from which they rejoice and do good deeds; while others, just like the demons, believe and tremble. Unbelievers all tremble before the face of death, and no matter how many medicines there might be, no matter how long one might prolong earthly life, you still will not escape death. One can escape death only through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
APPENDIX III
Answer to a Critic
As the present book was being printed in serial form in The Orthodox Word, the editor of another Orthodox periodical began publishing a long series of attacks on the teaching of life after death set forth here (The Tlingit Herald, published by the St. Nectarios American Orthodox Church, Seattle, Washington; vol. 5, no. 6 and following issues). These attacks were directed, not only against the teaching of the present book, but also against the teaching set forth in the publications of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York (especially the issue of Orthodox Life of January-February, 1978, the booklet “Unbelievable for Many but Actually a True Occurrence,” which appeared in Orthodox Life for July-August, 1976, and the anthology Eternal Mysteries Beyond the Grave ); against the sermon of Archbishop John Maximovitch, “Life After Death,” which appeared in The Orthodox Word, 1971, no. 4, and is reprinted above in Chapter Ten of this book; against the whole teaching of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov which has inspired this book; and in general against the teaching which has been set forth in so many Orthodox sources in the past several centuries and expresses the living piety of the Orthodox faithful even today.
After reading these attacks I have not found it necessary to change anything I have written here; I have only added a few paragraphs here and there to make more clear the Orthodox teaching which, I believe, is most unfairly caricatured and misinterpreted in these attacks.
There would be no purpose in making a point-by-point reply to this critic. His Patristic citations hardly ever make the points he thinks they are making, and the only reply to them is to indicate that they have been misapplied. Thus, for example: all the quotes showing that man is composed of both soul and body (7:2, p. 26, etc.) — which no one denies — say nothing whatever against the independent activity of the soul after death, which has so much evidence in its favor as to seem quite beyond “refutation” if one trusts the Orthodox sources; the many places in Scripture and in Patristic texts where death is expressed metaphorically as a “sleep” say nothing whatever of the “literal truth” of this metaphor, which has been taught by only a very few Christian teachers over the centuries and certainly is in disagreement with the Church’s accepted teaching; etc. A collection of “proof texts” makes sense only if it actually proves an issue in dispute, not if it talks about something a little different or does not speak clearly and explicitly to the issue.
While on the one hand the critic amasses long lists of often irrelevant quotations, his more usual polemical technique is to dismiss his opponents with a sweeping statement that either has no evidence behind it at all, or else obviously contradicts a good part of the evidence. Thus, if the critic wishes to dispute the possibility of communications from people who have come back to life from the dead, he categorically declares: “These things are simply not possible” (vol. 5, no. 6, p. 25) — despite the fact that Orthodox literature contains numerous such communications; if he wants to deny that demons are seen by men after death, he proclaims: “The fathers teach no such thing” (6:12, p. 24) — despite the numerous Patristic references, for example, to the “toll-houses” encountered after death. If the critic does acknowledge the existence of evidence which disputes his point, he dismisses it with a sweeping accusation: it is all “allegories” or “moral fables” (5:6, p. 26).
The critic is also much addicted to rather cruel ad hominem arguments which attempt to discredit anyone who disagrees with him: “It is interesting that some people, together with the Latins, seem to think that the Scripture need not necessarily be conformed with” (6:12, p. 30) — this is said in a context where he has just “swept away” the teaching of Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, who, at least indirectly, is thus accused of disrespect for the Scriptures. The views of others who disagree with the critic are liable to be smeared with such unflattering epithets as “Origenistic” (6:12, p. 31) or “blasphemous” (5:6, p. 23), and the opponents themselves dismissed as having a “Platonic-Origenistic mind” or as being “under heavy Latin-Scholastic-Hellenistic influence, in a state of spiritual delusion ... or simply abysmally ignorant” (6:12, p. 39).
It may already be seen, perhaps, that the polemical level of the critic in his attacks against respected Orthodox theological authorities is not very high. But because this critic, in his own way, does seem to reflect the misconceptions of some Orthodox people who are not at home in the Orthodox literature which describes life after death, it may be useful to answer some of the objections he has to the traditional Orthodox teaching on life after death.
1. The “Contradictions” of Orthodox Literature on the Soul after Death
Despite the common opinion that the Orthodox literature on life after death is “naive” and “simple,” if one looks at it carefully one discovers that it is actually quite subtle and even “sophisticated.” Some of it, it is true, can be read by a child on his own level — as a fascinating “story” on the same level as other incidents in the Lives of Saints (which is where some of the Orthodox after-death literature is to be found). But this material has been handed down to us by the Church not because of its “story” qualities, but precisely because it is true; and indeed, a chief source of this material is the ascetic treatises of the Holy Fathers, where this teaching is presented in a very sober and straightforward manner, and not at all in “story” form. Therefore, a more “sophisticated” examination of this material can also bear fruit. We have tried to do something like this in Chapter Six above, in the section called “How to Understand the Toll-Houses,” where, following the explanations of St. Gregory the Dialogist and other Orthodox authorities who have examined these questions, we distinguished between the spiritual reality which the soul encounters after death and the figurative or interpretative devices which are sometimes used to express this spiritual reality. The Orthodox person who is at home in this kind of literature (often through having heard it from childhood) automatically reads it on his own level and interprets its images in accordance with his own spiritual understanding. “Bags of gold,” “pyres of wood,” “dwellings of gold,” and such things in the other world are not interpreted by adult readers in a literal sense, and the attempt of our critic to discredit such Orthodox sources because they contain such figurative images only reveals that he does not understand how to read these sources.