Where most readers meet the phrase
The aerial toll-houses usually arrive in a reader's life sideways: a footnote in a book on prayer, a phrase in a funeral hymn, an argument overheard online. The picture that forms is of a customs post in the sky where a soul is stopped twenty times over and made to settle accounts. That picture is not what Orthodox writers mean, and the best of them spend as much time dismantling it as defending the teaching itself.
This article tries to do three things: say where the teaching is actually found, say what it asserts once the imagery is set aside, and report honestly that the way it has been presented is a matter on which Orthodox theologians have disagreed in public. None of those three can be dropped without misleading somebody.
Where the teaching is found
It is not a fringe survival. Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, the nineteenth-century Russian writer who is the chief modern authority behind Fr. Seraphim's treatment, took it to be the teaching of the Church and read St Paul's words about wrestling against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12, RSV) as referring to it. His own case was built mostly out of older material rather than argument, and the material falls into three groups that are worth telling apart before anyone joins an argument about them.
- Liturgical texts. The Canon on the Departure of the Soul, read at an Orthodox deathbed, asks that the dying may pass unhindered by the prince of the air. Related references occur in the Octoechos of St John Damascene.
- Lives of Saints. St Athanasius the Great describes the demons opposing St Anthony as he was raised up; the long and much-argued account of the Blessed Theodora appears in the Life of St Basil the New.
- Dogmatic manuals. Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, Archpriest N. Malinovsky and, in the twentieth century, Archimandrite Justin Popovic all treat the toll-houses within the standard exposition of the particular judgment.
The imagery is imagery
The most useful page Fr. Seraphim wrote on the subject is the one where he takes the picture apart. He quotes Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, who had insisted that the toll-houses must be pictured not in a sense that is crude and sensuous but, so far as we are able, in a spiritual sense, and who warned against being tied down to details that vary from account to account. Macarius in turn was repeating an instruction given to St Macarius of Alexandria: take earthly things here as the weakest possible depiction of heavenly things.
Working from that rule, Fr. Seraphim disposes of the furniture one item at a time. The scrolls on which sins are said to be written, the scales on which virtues are weighed, the gold with which debts are paid: all of these, he says, are figurative or interpretive devices for a spiritual reality. Where the Blessed Theodora is described as having her debts settled from a bag of gold, he adds that nothing is meant by it except the prayers of the Church, and in particular the prayers of her spiritual father, put into metaphor. About the central image itself he is blunter still.
Thus, of course, there are no visible 'houses' or 'booths' in the air where 'taxes' are collected
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, ch. 6 §1 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009 printing)
What is left once the imagery is set aside
Something is left, and Fr. Seraphim is equally clear about that. He does not treat the toll-houses as a pious fiction that dissolves under analysis. In Orthodox dogmatic theology the testing belongs to the particular judgment, the reckoning that follows death and holds until the Last Judgment at the end of the world; it is an encounter, not an accountancy.
Bishop Theophan the Recluse put the moral sense of it as a homely question. What do the accusers look for in those who pass? Whether the soul still has any of their goods in it, which is to say the passions. Where there is nothing of theirs, there is nothing for them to detain.
Since this is often assumed to be an exotically Eastern idea, it is worth adding that Fr. Seraphim cites the Protestant evangelist Billy Graham arriving at a strikingly similar picture from Scripture alone, working from the description of the devil as the prince of the power of the air in Ephesians 2:2. He quotes him with approval and without hedging. Strip the imagery away, then, and a single sentence carries what Fr. Seraphim thought remained.
What is certain is that there is a testing by demons, who appear in a frightful but human form
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, ch. 6 §1 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009 printing)
The disagreement, stated fairly
Between 1979 and 1981 this teaching became the subject of a public quarrel in the Russian Church Outside Russia. Deacon Lev Puhalo, later Archbishop Lazar, attacked the presentation in The Soul After Death in a serialised critique, arguing that the toll-houses as commonly described come too close to the Latin doctrine of purgatory, and holding a view of the disembodied soul on which it could not undergo such a testing at all: without the body, he wrote, the soul cannot speak, nor remember, nor discern, nor think.
Fr. Seraphim replied in an appendix to his own book and did not withdraw anything. His concern ran in the opposite direction: that a rationalist habit of reading, impatient with the different levels of meaning in patristic and hagiographical texts, was quietly dissolving a tradition it had not understood. Both men were arguing in good faith about something real, and readers who want to judge between them should read them rather than read about them.
Neither position is the parish's to impose on a visitor. What can be said is that the disagreement was about the manner and the framework of the presentation, not about whether the Church has such texts, since she plainly does, in her own funeral books.
What the Synod of Bishops actually said
The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia examined the controversy on 19 November / 2 December 1980, with Bishop Gregory Grabbe preparing the theological review. The findings are on record and are more careful than either party's supporters usually report.
On the critic's side, the bishops rejected the account of the soul as unable to see, hear or be judged apart from the body, observing that the Church has never taught this. Then they did something both sides have since found inconvenient: they ordered the controversy stopped in the periodicals, on both sides, on the grounds that acrid polemic without mutual love turns a deliberation into an argument about words and confuses readers not yet established in the faith. Deacon Lev was additionally forbidden to lecture in parishes until he gave a satisfactory undertaking.
As to the teaching itself, the Synod granted that no one can establish the toll-houses dogmatically in the precise form described in the vision recounted in the Life of St Basil the New, since Scripture gives no direct indication of it. In the same paragraph it affirmed that the tradition has been preserved from deep antiquity with varying details, that it is cited in all the dogmatic manuals, and, in the phrase that has been quoted ever since, that it
contains nothing that is contrary to piety
Synod of Bishops, Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, minutes of 2 December 1980, in Orthodox Life vol. 31 no. 1 (1981), pp. 23-37
Neither settled consensus nor discredited
It would be dishonest to describe the toll-houses as an agreed doctrine that every Orthodox theologian expounds in the same way. It would be equally dishonest to describe them as a discredited medieval accretion, since they sit in the service books that are used at every Orthodox deathbed and in the dogmatic manuals the bishops cited. The accurate statement is narrower and duller than either slogan: the tradition is old, widely attested, liturgically embedded, judged by a synod of bishops to contain nothing contrary to piety, and variously presented by writers who disagree about how much weight the detail will bear.
Fr. Seraphim himself, in the preface to the same book, wrote that his interpretations left room for legitimate difference of opinion among Orthodox Christians. He meant it chiefly of his readings of modern near-death reports, but the reserve is characteristic of the whole work, and it is the right temperature for this subject.
How the Fathers say such images should be read
Bishop Theophan the Recluse left the best rule of reading. Asked whether visions of this kind present things exactly as they are, he answered that the images represent the reality but are not the reality itself, which is spiritual and has nothing fleshly in it; our words are coarse and bound to the senses. He pointed to St Paul, caught up into heaven and reporting only that what he heard there could not be told (2 Corinthians 12:4).
Read that way, the toll-houses stop being a tariff table and become something recognisable. They say that a life leaves marks; that the things which had a hold on us do not politely release us at the graveside; and that a soul goes out to be met, not filed. That is a sober thought rather than a lurid one, and the Church surrounds it with prayer rather than with speculation.
What the teaching is for
Notice what Orthodox practice does with this material. It does not build a system on it. It reads the Canon at the bedside, asks the Mother of God for a passage unhindered by the prince of the air, buries the body with hymns about the mercy of God, and then keeps praying: on the third day, the ninth, the fortieth, the anniversary. The toll-houses are a reason for intercession, never a reason for a verdict. No Orthodox priest will tell a widow where her husband is.
If you have come to this from a tradition that keeps close to the plain sense of Scripture, some of the above will sound like a great deal of scaffolding around a few verses. That is a fair reaction, and the underlying difference is a real one rather than a misunderstanding. Orthodoxy receives its funeral hymns, its Lives of Saints and its dogmatic manuals as part of how the faith is handed on, not merely as devotional literature written around the Bible.
Where the two accounts differ, then, they differ, and pretending otherwise would be no kindness to anybody. What is worth noticing is that the practical shape of the thing is something almost any Christian would recognise at once. It comes down to praying for the people you have lost, refusing to say more about them than you actually know, and leaving the rest with God, which is roughly where the Church has been content to leave it for a very long time.