A question the Church answers with care
Someone dies, and the question arrives long before the funeral arrangements are settled. Where is she now? Can she hear anything? Is there still something to be done for her? Orthodox Christianity does answer those questions, and it answers them in more detail than many Christians expect. The detail, though, comes with a warning attached, and the warning belongs to the teaching rather than serving as an apology for it. What the Church hands on about the soul's first days is a description, not a diagram.
The fullest presentation of that description in English is a book by a Californian convert, Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), published in 1980 under the title The Soul After Death. He was not inventing material. His stated purpose was to put older sources back within reach of ordinary readers, and much of the book is quotation from the Fathers, from funeral hymns and from the Lives of Saints rather than argument of his own.
Each chapter of this book attempts to point to the Patristic and hagiographical sources which contain this teaching.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, Preface (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009 printing)
The parting of soul and body
Death, in Orthodox teaching, is a separation rather than an ending. The body is laid down and the soul continues. Scripture puts the plain fact briefly: it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27, RSV). Orthodoxy has never treated the body as a shell to be discarded, which is why the funeral rites handle it with such obvious tenderness, and why the Creed ends by looking for the resurrection of the dead rather than for the survival of a disembodied self.
Nor does the soul fall asleep. The Church has consistently refused the idea that the dead are unconscious until the end, and the book gathers the older testimony on the point, including St John Cassian, who argued against exactly that opinion in the fifth century, and St Abba Dorotheus, who taught that the soul remembers more clearly after leaving the body, not less. Our Lord's own account of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) shows both men aware, speaking and remembering.
So the first thing Orthodoxy says about the soul after death is not frightening at all. The person is still a person. Bishop Theophan the Recluse, writing to a dying woman, told her plainly that her body would die but that she would go over into a different world alive, remembering herself and recognising everything around her.
The first two days
The best-known Orthodox summary of what follows is a short article called Life After Death, written by Archbishop John Maximovitch a year before his own repose in 1966. Fr. Seraphim printed it in full as the final chapter of his book, in italics, with patristic texts set between the paragraphs. The words of that summary are Archbishop John's, and they should be credited to him rather than to Fr. Seraphim.
Archbishop John writes that for the course of two days the soul has a relative freedom and can visit the places on earth that were dear to it, and that on the third day it moves into other spheres. Behind this stands a much older text: the instruction given in the fourth century to St Macarius of Alexandria, which explains why the Church commemorates the dead on the third day and describes the soul spending two days near its body and its familiar places, in the company of the angels.
The funeral service carries the same picture in the form of a lament. St John Damascene writes there of the soul parted from the body and unable to make itself understood, raising its eyes to the angels and stretching out its hands to men, and finding no one. That hymn is sung over an open coffin in front of the family. It is meant to prompt prayer, not dread.
The third day
On the third day, in this account, the soul is commanded to ascend and worship God, in imitation of the Lord's own rising on the third day. On the way it meets what the tradition calls the aerial toll-houses: a testing in which the fallen spirits bring forward the sins they had tempted the soul to commit, while the angels answer for it. Archbishop John calls the third day terrible for the departed, and says that this is exactly why prayer is needed then.
That element of the teaching has its own long history and its own controversy, and it deserves separate treatment; we have set it out in a companion article. Two things are worth saying here. The first is that the imagery of houses, booths, scales and payments is imagery, and Fr. Seraphim said so in the plainest terms he could manage. The second is that the numbers and stages form a general rule rather than a law: in his commentary around Archbishop John's text he notes that saints, being unattached to earthly places, often begin their ascent immediately, and that many recorded cases simply do not follow the pattern.
The ninth day and the fortieth
After the testing, according to the same fourth-century source, the soul is shown the dwellings of the blessed until the ninth day, and then for the remainder of the forty days the places of suffering, before a place is appointed for it on the fortieth day where it will await the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment. The ninth-day commemoration is also associated in Orthodox writers with the nine ranks of angels.
Archbishop John is careful about what this settles and what it leaves open. Some souls, he writes, are in a condition of foretasting joy and others in fear of the torments to come, but the full measure of either waits until the Last Judgment, and until then the condition of souls can still change, above all through the offering of the Liturgy and through prayer. The longest treatment of this in the book is not Fr. Seraphim's own either: it is an appendix giving the teaching of St Mark of Ephesus, who argued the point against the Latins at the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century.
Why the Church keeps these days
Ask an Orthodox family in Singapore what they are doing on the fortieth day after a death and the answer will be simple: they are praying, and they have asked the priest to serve. The three days, the nine days, the forty days and then the anniversary are the skeleton of a practice, not a timetable published for curiosity's sake. They exist so that grief has somewhere to go and so that love has something to do.
This is the point at which the Orthodox account differs most visibly from what many other Christians hold, and it is better to say so plainly than to blur it. A great many sincere Christians believe that nothing can now be done for the dead, and that prayer for them either presumes on God or implies a second chance. Orthodoxy has prayed for its dead from the beginning, understands those prayers as an act of love within one Body that death has not divided, and does not claim to know their effect in any individual case.
What the Church actually prays
It is worth reading the actual texts rather than relying on summaries of them, because the prayers are noticeably more modest than the descriptions. They ask; they do not pronounce. The Church's services for the departed are public, printed and available to anyone who wants to see what is said over an Orthodox coffin.
- The Canon on the Departure of the Soul, read by a priest at the bedside of the dying, which asks the Mother of God for a passage unhindered by the prince of the air.
- The funeral service itself, which is largely a set of hymns by St John Damascene on the brevity of life and the mercy of God.
- The panikhida, the short memorial service served on the third, ninth and fortieth days, at the anniversary, and on the memorial Saturdays of the year.
- The commemoration of names at the Divine Liturgy, which Orthodox writers treat as the most powerful of all prayers for the departed.
- The repeated petition of all these services: rest for the departed, forgiveness of every transgression, and a place of light, a place of green pasture, a place of repose.
A model, not a map
Every serious Orthodox treatment of this material says, at some point, that we have been told less than we would like. When the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia examined a dispute about these questions in 1980, its resolution began by observing that it has not pleased God to reveal much beyond this: that the blessedness of a soul depends on how truly Christian a life has been, and its suffering on the degree of sin. Adding conjecture to that, the bishops said, is not useful for salvation.
Fr. Seraphim wrote in the same spirit about his own work. In the preface to The Soul After Death he distinguished the Church's teaching, which can be stated, from his own readings of particular modern reports, which he offered provisionally.
Concerning these interpretations, of course, there is room for a legitimate difference of opinion among Orthodox Christians.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, Preface (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2009 printing)
If you have come to this from another tradition
Readers from evangelical and non-denominational backgrounds often find this material strange in two directions at once. It is more concrete than they expected about what the soul undergoes, and less confident than they expected about who ends where. Both impressions are accurate. Orthodoxy has kept a detailed inherited description and has also kept a firm refusal to publish verdicts on individuals, and it does not experience those two habits as being in tension.
Fr. Seraphim's own mother and father were Protestants, and his counsel to converts was to remain at peace with their families rather than to score points off them. If you want to test any of this, the honest way is not to argue about the forty days but to come and stand through a panikhida and listen to what is actually asked for. The door of the church in Kovan is open, and nobody will ask you to agree with anything before you come in.