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  • The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church
  • Stephen J. Shoemaker
The Departure of the Soul According to the Teaching of the Orthodox Church. Florence, AZ: St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2016. 1112 pp.

The monks of St. Anthony's Monastery have recently published a beautiful and intriguing, if also deeply problematic, volume on the fate of the soul after death. Weighing in (literally) at more than 1,000 pages, the book compiles opinions from a number of Orthodox writers regarding the soul's experience after its departure from the body, along with lavish reproductions of icons and other objects in over 200 color plates. Unfortunately, however, this compendium is a fundamentalist effort designed to mislead readers concerning the teaching of the Orthodox church. The book's primary agenda is to advance the notion of aerial toll houses, through which the soul must pass after death, as an essential component of the Orthodox faith. Yet this claim is an error, despite the alleged mass of evidence that the monks have assembled and the copious academic and ecclesiastical endorsements (many of which, I understand, were obtained without full disclosure of exactly what was being endorsed).

The debate over toll houses has been a lively topic in modern Orthodoxy, owing especially to the propagation of this idea in the later twentieth century by Seraphim Rose and others in his circle. Simply put, this book seeks to demonstrate that the Orthodox church has uncompromisingly professed a doctrine that the individual soul, following its departure from the body, must pass through some twenty or so toll houses staffed by demons. These demons will charge each soul with certain sins, and if the soul is found guilty of such unconfessed sins, the demons will not allow passage but will instead drag it away into hell. It is true that certain authorities of the Orthodox tradition have advocated such a view, but one must note that these are overwhelmingly from the second millennium. Such a doctrine was almost unknown during the first millennium, and even during the second, it remains but one vision of the fate of the soul among other alternatives. Accordingly, I propose, we should look to the Vincentian canon in order to evaluate the monks' contention.

"Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est: what has been believed [End Page 109] everywhere, always, and by all." At the beginning of the fifh century, St. Vincent of Lérins laid down this maxim as a standard that could reliably distinguish truth from falsehood in the tradition of the catholic faith. Although St. Vincent's principle for determining the orthodox faith has been especially revered among Christians in the West, its logic is certainly no less applicable for eastern Christians (who, after all, commemorate St. Vincent on 24 May). Belief in aerial toll houses, quite frankly, fails spectacularly to pass this test. It is almost completely unknown during the first Christian millennium, at least among the orthodox writers of the undivided church. The idea of aerial toll houses was quite popular, however, as others have noted, among "gnostic" Christians during the second and third centuries, when belief in such toll houses seems to have been one of the main principles dividing these gnostics from orthodox Christians. Otherwise, there is only a single reference to the toll houses in St. Athansius' Life of Anthony, where Anthony is said to advance this position, and there is a homily on the departure of the soul attributed to Cyril of Alexandria that describes the toll houses, but the homily's attribution is widely regarded as spurious. A couple of pious tales attributed to a certain Macarius and Anastasius of Sinai mention them as well.

I think it is hard to dispute that a single mention in the Life of Anthony, similar references in two pious tales from Egypt, and a more extended discussion of the toll houses in a later homily falsely ascribed to Cyril of Alexandria fails dramatically to meet Vincent's criteria for orthodoxy. In the first millennium, as far as we can tell, belief in the aerial toll houses was limited to a few individuals, in Egypt...

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