The critic has tried to take unfair advantage of the fact that the teaching of the Orthodox Church on life after death has many elements in it that are not “precisely defined” — not because the Church does not know what it thinks on this subject, but because the reality of the other world is (to state the obvious once again) quite different from this-worldly reality and does not easily lend itself to the “dogmatic” approach the critic has taken towards it. The living contact of the saints of heaven, and sometimes of other of the dead also, with the earthly Church is known in the piety and experience of Orthodox Christians and does not need to be precisely defined; but to make this want of a “precise definition” an excuse for teaching that the souls even of the saints are in a state of “repose” that prevents any “outward” contact with men on earth, surely oversteps the bounds permissible for Orthodox Christian belief.
Among the other “after-death” experiences which the theory of “soul-slumber” does away with is one universally believed in the Church from the very beginning: the descent of the dead Christ into hell. “In the grave bodily, in hell with the soul as God, in paradise with the thief, and on the Throne with the Father and the Spirit was Thou Who fillest all things, O Christ the Infinite” (Troparion of the Hours of Pascha, used as one of the secret prayers after the Cherubic Hymn at the Divine Liturgy). The earliest generation of Christians knew without a doubt that Christ, while he was “asleep” in the tomb (as stated in the Exapostilarion of Pascha, the Kontakion of Great Saturday, etc.), went and preached unto the spirits in prison (hell) (I Peter 3:19). Is this also an “allegory”? The Church’s tradition is also very strong that, even before this, St. John the Baptist “went rejoicing to declare to those in hell the good tidings of God having appeared in the flesh,” as the troparion for the feast of his Beheading states. And what was it that the three disciples saw on the Mount of Transfiguration when they beheld Moses, if it was not his soul, which appeared in quite an “outward” manner (Matt. 17:3)? This manifestation, indeed, as it were, confirms St. Paul’s hesitancy in declaring whether his own vision of heaven was “in” or “out” of the body — for Elias dwells in heaven “in” the body, having never died, while Moses is there “out of the body,” his body being in the grave; but both of them appeared at Christ’s Transfiguration. We earth-dwellers cannot even define the difference between these two states, but there is no need to; the simple description of such manifestations, as well as of experiences of the “dead” in the other world, evidently give us our best understanding of these matters, and there is no need for us to try to understand them in any way but the simple way the Church presents them to us.
The critic, apparently, has fallen into the very accusation he has made against others: he has taken an image, that of the “sleep” of death, which is universally accepted in the Church as a metaphor, and interpreted it in some way as a “literal truth.” He often does not even notice that the very sources he quotes to support his ideas are, on the contrary, the surest disproof of his theory. He quotes St. Mark of Ephesus (using our translation which first appeared in The Orthodox Word, no. 79, p. 90) that the righteous “are in heaven with the angels before God Himself, and already as if in the paradise from which Adam fell (into which the good thief entered before others) and often visit us in those temples where they are venerated, and hear those who call on them and pray for them to God....” (6:12, p. 18). If all this (which certainly involves “outward” activity) can be done by a soul that is actually “sleeping” — that is, in “a condition of inactivity in which it does not function, hear or see” (6:8-9, p. 19) — then the theory of “soul-slumber” has no real function because it explains nothing at all, and the critic only confuses the faithful by using it.
4. Are the toll-houses “imaginary”?
The critic’s greatest wrath is directed against the Orthodox ascetic teaching on the demonic toll-houses encountered by the soul after death, and one suspects that it is his desire to destroy the very concept of them that has led him into such a self-contradictory theory as that of “soul-slumber.” The language he uses to describe the toll-houses is quite categorical and rather immoderate. He speaks of the “imaginary after-death toll-houses” (6:8-9, p. 18) and calls the accounts of them in Orthodox literature “wild tales” (6:8-9, p. 24) and “tales of horror well calculated to cast the soul into despair and unbelief” (7:1, p. 33); “the toll-house myth is ... utterly alien to God and His Holy Church” (7:1, p. 23). But when he tries to describe his own understanding of the toll-houses, the result is a caricature so preposterous that one cannot believe he has even read the texts in question. For him the accounts of the toll-houses “would have us believe that satan owns ‘the road to God’s kingdom’ and can collect a tariff of those who travel on it.... The demons grant an indulgence of passage in return for the excess merits of a saint” (6:2, p. 22). The toll-houses, he thinks, describe “a wandering soul needing to be prayed to rest (as the pagans believed)”; it is an “occult concept about the journey of the soul being paid for by prayers and alms” (6:2, p. 26). He looks for “foreign influences” to explain how such a concept ever got into the Orthodox Church, and concludes (without a shred of evidence, however, apart from the same kind of vague parallels that lead anthropologists to conclude that Christianity is just another pagan “resurrection cult”) that “the toll-house myth is the direct product of the oriental astrology cults which hold that all creation is not in the care of a just and loving God” (7:1, p. 23); “these toll-houses are merely an illogical mutation of these pagan myths” (6:8-9, p. 24). He finds the toll-houses to be virtually identical with the Latin doctrine of “purgatory,” and states that “the difference between the purgatory myth and that of the aerial toll-houses is that the one gives God satisfaction by means of physical torment, while the other gives Him His needed satisfaction by means of mental torture” (6:12, p. 23).88 The account of Theodora’s passage through the toll-houses (Lives of Saints, March 26) the critic calls a “heresy-filled tale” (6:8-9, p. 24) based upon a “hallucination” (7:2, p. 14) of someone who, in Old Testament times, “would have justly been taken out and stoned” because he “was in a state of abject spiritual delusion” (6:6-7, p. 28). (Why the critic should be so angry against Theodora’s account is not clear; it is only one of many similar accounts and teaches nothing different from them — so much so that I saw no need to quote it above in the chapter on the toll-houses.)
These extreme accusations are personal opinions of the critic which certainly have no evidence behind them. One wonders why he insists on making up his own interpretation of the toll-houses and refuses to understand them as the Church has always understood them; the caricature which he is railing against has never been taught in the Orthodox Church, and one is at a loss to know from what source he has taken his preposterous interpretations.
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The comparison of the toll-houses with “purgatory” is surely far-fetched. The toll-houses are part of the Orthodox ascetic teaching and have to do solely with the “testing” of a man for the sins committed by him: they give no “satisfaction” to God and their purpose is certainly not “torture.” “Purgatory,” on the other hand, is a legalistic Latin misinterpretation of an entirely different aspect of Orthodox eschatology — the state of the souls in hell