The sermons, lectures, and books of the clergy of most Orthodox jurisdictions today on the subject of life after death show that very little has been preserved of the traditional Orthodox teaching and piety. When the other world is mentioned at all, save in the most general and abstract terms, it is usually as a subject for jokes about “St. Peter” and “pearly gates” such as are often used by worldly Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy. Among many Orthodox Christians the other world has become something far away and very hazy, with which one has no living contact and about which one can say nothing very definite at all.
The suffering Church of Russia — probably due to its sufferings as much as to its innate conservatism — has preserved the traditional Orthodox attitude towards the other world much better than other Orthodox Churches today. In the free world, it is the Russian Church Outside of Russia almost alone that continues to publish the traditional Orthodox literature on this subject, continuing the tradition of the Prologue and other pious anthologies of old Russia, and fortunate are those Orthodox Christians who have access to this literature and can accept it in simplicity and piety, avoiding the spirit of “criticism” which leads so many, especially among converts, away from the true tradition and feeling of Orthodoxy.
It need hardly be said how “old-fashioned” the world — even the Orthodox world — regards those who publish and read such literature. It has been the chief purpose of this book to make this “old-fashioned” literature understandable and accessible to today’s Orthodox Christians, who can only benefit from reading what has brought such spiritual profit to Orthodox Christian readers for many centuries.
The aim of our critic is exactly the opposite: thoroughly to discredit this literature, to dismiss it as “moral fables” or “wild tales,” and to submit the Divine services and Lives of Saints to a thorough “criticism” that will expunge all such elements in them. (See, for example, his elaborate attempt to discredit the Life of St. Basil the New because it contains descriptions of the toll-houses: Tlingit Herald, 7:2, p. 14).
Let us give this undertaking the name it deserves: it is the work of the same Western rationalism which has attacked the Orthodox Church so many times in the past and has led so many to lose the true understanding and feeling of Orthodox Christianity. In the Roman Catholic and Protestant West, this attack has been thoroughly successful, and whatever Lives of Saints are left there have indeed been expunged of supernatural elements and are often considered “moral fables.” While accusing all who oppose his teaching of “scholasticism,” the critic proves himself to be perhaps the most “scholastic” of alclass="underline" his teaching is founded not on the clear and simple texts handed down in the Church from the earliest centuries to our own, but on a series of his own “logical deductions” which require a radical reinterpretation and revision of the evident meaning of the basic Orthodox texts.
It is bad enough that the critic’s tone and language are so crude, that he makes such an evil caricature of the Orthodox teaching he is attacking, and that he is so disrespectful of many venerable Orthodox teachers — the very best of those few teachers who have kept alive the Orthodox tradition of piety to our own days. Here is what he says, for example, about the sermon “Life after Death” by Archbishop John Maximovitch (see above, page 176), a holy man and great theologian of our own days: It is “a wild tale about the soul departing and being pursued and tormented by demons.... In this tale, the faithful were told that when someone reposed, they must quickly begin to have services said for the repose of the departed soul, since the soul was in such desperate need of our prayers, and death was a matter of great terror (evidently, God was unable to move Himself to mercy or to help the pitiful soul without being prodded or awakened by the shouts and cries of mortals). This tale also included a patently blasphemous description of the repose of the Most Holy Theotokos” (6:2, p. 22). Archbishop John’s name is not mentioned here, although from the description it is precisely clear what sermon the critic is referring to; but such language shows an intolerable disrespect no matter which Orthodox authority he might be attacking!
But what is truly tragic is that the critic, by whatever means, is trying to deprive Orthodox Christians of that very thing which, even without him, is already disappearing so fast in our midst: the traditional Orthodox piety towards the other world, revealed not only in the kind of literature we read (which the critic is striving to discredit), but even more in our attitude towards the dead and what we do for them. It is obvious from the above quote that the critic, unlike Archbishop John, regards it as unimportant to pray for the reposed immediately after death, and indeed thinks that the soul does not need and cannot be benefitted by our “shouts and cries”! Indeed, the critic specifically states that “the things we ask on behalf of the reposed are only proclamations of what they are going to receive anyway” (7:3, p. 27) and have no effect on their eternal lot, not seeing that by this teaching he is not only contradicting the Holy Fathers but is also removing the chief motive which impels people to pray for the dead at all.
How heartless to the dead! How cruel to the living! How un-Orthodox a teaching! Surely those who pray for the dead do not in the least understand their prayers as “magical incantations” (7:3, p. 23) or as “bribes or magical means of forcing God to be merciful” (Ibid., p. 26), as the critic so cruelly states, but pray with good faith (just as in prayers for anything else) that God will indeed in His mercy grant what is asked. The “synergy” of God’s will and our prayers cannot be understood by the narrow, truly worse than “scholastic” logic which the critic employs.
Those who still live by the traditional Orthodox sources are a dwindling minority today. What is needed are more helps to the understanding of this traditional piety, not an undermining and caricaturing of it and disrespect for those who teach it.
The anti-Orthodox teaching on life after death of this critic is all the more dangerous in that it appeals to a very subtle passion of contemporary mankind. The Orthodox teaching on life after death is rather severe and demands a very sober response on our part, full of the fear of God. But mankind today is very pampered and self-centered and would rather not hear of such stern realities as judgment and accountability for sins. One can be much more “comfortable” with an exalted teaching of “hesychasm” that tells us that God is not “really” as stern as the Orthodox ascetic tradition has described Him, that we “really” need have no fear of death and the judgment it brings, that if only we occupy ourselves with exalted spiritual ideas like those in the Philokalia (dismissing as “allegories” all the passages on the toll-houses) we will be “safe” under a “loving God” who will not demand an accounting of all our sins, even those forgotten or unrecognized.... The end of these exalted reflections is a state not far different from that of those “charismatics” and others who feel themselves already assured of salvation, or of those who follow the occult teaching that states there is nothing to fear in death.
The true Orthodox teaching on life after death, on the other hand, fills one precisely with the fear of God and the inspiration to struggle for the Kingdom of Heaven against all the unseen enemies who oppose our path. All Orthodox Christians are called to this struggle, and it is a cruel injustice to them to dilute the Orthodox teaching to make them more “comfortable.” Let each one read the Orthodox texts most suited to the spiritual level at which he presently finds himself; but let no one tell him that he can dismiss as “fables” the texts he may find “uncomfortable.” Fashions and opinions among men may change, but the Orthodox tradition remains ever the same, no matter how few may follow it. May we ever be its faithful children!