The worship of the Church is very important. "The law of faith is the law of worship," goes the old saying. The Liturgy, Matins, Vespers, etc. are the basic source of Orthodox teaching. The revealed truth, as expressed by the Scriptures, the fathers and all the Saints, is found in them, because we pray what we believe. Worship is essential to piety. Thus, the Faith of the Church, including her beliefs concerning death, are found everywhere in her sacred rites, most especially in the liturgical Offices relating to the parting of soul and body.

As we have already seen, if Fr Seraphim does not merely extract a paragraph, a sentence or a phrase from its context for the sake of his theory, he renders them to fit his argument; or, what is the same thing, he puts Brianchaninov's translation into English. Wherever we look, he is guilty of considerable mischief and dishonesty with words and their meaning.(1)

Let us take an example from the funeral services of the Church. Here is Fr Seraphim's personal version of Canticle 4, Office of the Parting of the Soul from the Body:

As I depart from earth, vouchsafe me to pass unhindered by the prince of the air, the persecutor, the tormenter, he who stands on the frightful paths and is their unjust interrogator.(2)

Here is the Hapgood translation:

O Conqueror and Tormentor of the fierce Prince of the air, O Guardian of the dread path and Searcher of these vain words, help Thou me to pass unhindered, as I depart from earth.

The words of both translations are directed to Christ; both suggest an impediment to the soul's departure. What is it? The devil? But he has been conquered and, if we believe the Scriptures and the fathers, the righteous soul is carried directly to Abraham's bosom. And if we recall the toll-house theory, it is with the righteous that the "tax-collectors" are concerned. The "aerial spirits" seek to find some fault in them by which they might "drag" the elect into hell.

What, then, is the "dread path"? The gauntlet of demons, as Fr Seraphim insists? Listen to Stanza 8 of the Burial of Laymen:

Today is the soul severed from the body, and translated to the world eternal; for it sets out upon a path which it has never trod, and goeth to the Judge Who respecteth no person; where the angelic Hosts stand round about (Tone 8).

The path is dreadful because it is the unknown - a path which it has never trod, a path which finally ends before the aweful Judgment Seat of Christ.

Remembering that rites of the Orthodox Church are as much poetry as they are theology, one understands the "impediment" to be our sins. The "path" is the unique experience of the frightened soul, which has never before existed without its body, and which is now being deprived of the fullness of "personhood" by being separated from the body.

Thus, prayers for the dead call upon God to forgive the sins of His children and, therefore, deliverance from "bitter torment" (Burial of Laymen, Cant. 7). The "bitter torment" is not only the "flames" of Hades, but "the burning of fierce Gehenna" (Cant. 10, Office of Parting). "Therefore, at this time prepare eternal bliss for those who slumber in the hope of the resurrection, forgiving them their trespasses through Thy bounty... (Meat-Fare Saturday, Aposticha of Vespers, Tone 6).

In the Vespers for Meat-Fare Saturday (Stichoi, Tone 8) the Church prays:

O Saviour, Who didst purchase us with Thy blood, and delivered us by Thy death from bitter death, and granted us everlasting life by Thy resurrection, grant rest, O Lord, to all who slumber in true worship... Wherefore, we beseech Thee ceaselessly that we may rest in Thy tabernacles, in the bosom of Abraham, even Thy servants who have worshipped Thee in purity from the days of Adam... In the "tabernacles of God," the soul will abide "until the final Resurrection" (Canticle, 9 Office for the Parting of the Soul).

The righteous "rest" in "a heavenly abiding-place, a meed of Thy gifts, granting him redemption for his sins" (Ibid., Cant. 5).

There is no mention of toll-houses in the Church Services, no matter how Fr Seraphim would twist their words. Even if the text intimated their existence, sound theology should have compelled Fr Seraphim to draw some other conclusion. Toll-houses do not exist, if only because they are unnecessary. Once we understand the meaning of salvation, the reasons become more than obvious.

Salvation means two things: union with God and escape from the devil who holds the power of death (Hb.2:14). The funeral offices consistently repeat these themes. Therefore, we hear the Church reproach the devil, seeking God's forgiveness for the sins of the departed, while petitioning Him to receive His children who have "fallen asleep." She implores Him that they escape the "flames of hades" and "the condemnation of Gehenna" (Final Prayer of Parting).

Christ has "trampled down death by His Death" and stripped the devil of all his power. He has no claim on us. The Lord has paid the ransom to the grave. As the Gospel says, "the Son of man is come... to give His life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). The devil may taunt and tempt us now; and he may slander us at the hour of death and at the Judgment Seat, but the souls of the righteous are in the Hand of God (Wis. 3:1).

Our salvation depends on true faith in Christ. We do not escape the torment of hades and Gehenna without grace. For by grace are you saved through faith, St Paul affirms (Eph. 2:8). By Baptism, we belong to Christ, by the Eucharist nourished, by faith perfected. Who, then, shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect? the Apostle asks the church at Rome. It is God Who justifies. Who is it that condemns? It is Christ Who died, yea rather, that is risen again, Who is even now at the right hand of God, and makes intercession for us (Rom. 8:33).

Let us now consider the "testimony" of St Mark, Bishop of Ephesus which Fr Seraphim found so essential to his defense of the toll-house theory.(3) We will also use the English translation from The Soul After Death.(4)

St Mark teaches that those who reposed in faith are helped by Liturgies, prayers, almsgiving performed in their behalf, a custom, he says, "which has been in force since antiquity" (e.g., 2Macc.12:44-45). The Church has also received the truth that even the souls suffering in hades may be alleviated a little. Although the prayers of the Faithful may move God to forgive the sins of the reposed,(5) we must not think that His action takes the form of a "purgatorial fire."

We entreat God, St Mark continues, that He will deliver the souls in hades from eternal torment, "and not from any other torment or fire apart from those torments and that flame which has been proclaimed to be forever" (Hom. I, 2). Clearly, if remission of sin were achieved by mere prayer, or simply by the divine Love, there would be no need for cleansing or punishment. There is more to it.

"We affirm," St Mark writes at the beginning of the Second Homily on The Purgatorial Fires, "that neither the righteous has received the fullness of their lot....nor have sinners, after death, been led away to the eternal punishment in which they shall be tormented eternally." Rather, both are in "places" proper to them. The righteous dwell in "heaven," "in absolute repose and free," "already as if in the paradise from which Adam fell." Likewise the damned abide in a "place" which is a preview of the unending darkness and pain to come.

Even "the devil and his angels" do not yet endure the fire of Gehenna, as Matthew's vision of the Last Judgment (Mt.25:1-46) confirms. The Lord then proclaims to the wicked, Depart from me, you accursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. Observe the word prepared, says St Mark. If "prepared," Gehenna has not "been given;" likewise, if the righteous inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world, clearly the saved do not yet people the Kingdom of God.

But there is another reason that no soul enters either Gehenna or the Kingdom until the Judgment. As already mentioned, the soul did not become righteous or wicked alone. It acted with the body. No person is body alone, nor soul alone; but the unity of both. "Do you not see," asks St Mark, "that before we stand in front of the Judgment Seat and before the time when we shall all appear gathered together, none shall receive except that which he has done through the body?" (Ibid., 2).

Thus, until the time that body and soul are reunited, the soul dwells where its earthly life has led it. The abode of the dead is not a "place" - whether above the earth or below it. The abode of the saved and the damned is "noetic" or "spiritual." It is better called "the Place of God."

For John the Damascene says in his thirteenth Theological Chapter entitled `On the Place of God': "The place of God is said to be that which has or, he who has a greater share in His energy and grace" (loc. cit.).

"Energy and grace" - Fr Seraphim makes no mention of them. Those who welcome it by virtue of their love for God, are comforted by the Presence of God, that is, through Energy of His Grace. Those who reject or ignore God's Word, in this interim period, the Particular Judgment, receive the same Energy. The greater the sinfulness, the hotter the "flame" of "nethermost hades." The greater the holiness of the soul, the closer it is to God, the greater Abraham's consolation.

But whether the one or the other, all is the action of God's Grace: the Grace of perfection brings joy to the believing soul, the Grace of rebuke fills the profane soul with sadness. The same Uncreated Energies of God pour Light upon the first, darkness upon the second.

The intermediary conditions are, using the term in its broadest sense, hades. Beginning with Adam, it is the natural abode of the departed. Those who died before the Resurrection of Christ, heard John the Baptizer when he entered hades to prepare its inhabitants for the coming of the Lord; and when He descended into hades, those who believed His Gospel came out of its depths.

"Death" is another word for "hades" in Matthew 16:18 - and the gates of hades (death) shall not prevail against it (the Church). "Death" has been overcome and hades is powerless to hold those who have reposed in Christ. Yet, "darkest hades" detains the unbelievers until their bodies are resurrected, and the soul with its body stands before the Judgment Seat to hear the verdict of Christ; likewise the righteous leave Abraham's Bosom for the "resurrection unto salvation."

The righteous include the Saints who, as some of the fathers says, are scattered throughout the many heavens close to the Throne of God. Here is their Particular Judgment, their Abraham's Bosom (which, in a sense, is part of hades), from where they come to rejoin their bodies and to hear Christ welcome them into His eternal Kingdom.

The saved are wholly deified, partakers of the divine Nature (2Pet.1:4): body and soul become forever immortal, sinless, without aging or sickness (incorruptible). The elect enter the Age to Come, a transfigured world, which eye has not seen; nor ear heard, a life of eternal communion with the Holy Trinity.

St Gregory of Nyssa tells us that, in the Age to Come, the perfection of the saved will not cease. The process of becoming God-like (deification), begun at Baptism, will continue throughout eternity. We shall become more and more like God - "the Good," as St Gregory sometimes called Him.

Our perfection begins in this life, grows in the Particular Judgment (Abraham's Bosom) as our sins are forgiven, and, in the Kingdom of God, Paradise, Heaven, our beings will become increasingly divine, a condition without end, beyond our imagination. All of this is the action of God's Uncreated Energies, His Grace and Light.

Fr Seraphim never understood the place of Grace in the Orthodox religion. His toll-house theory proves it. If salvation is becoming like God through Grace; and if this process of salvation or deification begins in the Church, continues into the next life, what possible role can toll-houses play in God's Plan? How shall the devil and his demons judge His elect? Can they condemn God's Own (1 Pet.2:9)? Can they condemn us? Can they purge our sins? No, all these things are the action of God's Grace.

As the saved shall enter the Kingdom of God, the damned, body and soul, shall go away into everlasting fire, where, becoming ever more demonic, hating God, they are burned by the very Love with which He loves them.(6) The devil, whom they join in Gehenna, has already played his part in their destiny while on earth. In any case, the wicked do not pass through the toll-houses, if we believe Fr Seraphim, only those souls in their ascent to heaven. The Gnostic toll-houses are superfluous.

1. The Hapgood translation will be our general source.

2. The Soul After Death, p. 194.

3. One may question his choice of St Mark. As Fr Seraphim admits, "It should be noted that St Mark's writings concern primarily the specific point of the state of souls after death, and barely touch on the history of the events that occur to the soul immediately after death." In other words, if St Mark does not discuss the toll-houses, it is not, according to Fr Rose, because he disbelieves in their existence, but because they were "not under discussion at Florence" (Ibid., p. 206). The appeal to St Mark has the hidden purpose of deflecting criticism of the toll-houses, but also showing that the theory is not the equivalent of purgatory, a not uncommon observation of reviewers.

4. It is in fact an English translation (Ibid., pp. 207-220) of the Russian translation of Archimandrite Amvrossy Pogodin's St Mark of Ephesus and the Council of Florence, Jordanville, NY, 1963, pp. 58-73. Archbishop Lazar also quotes from St Mark's Refutation of Latin Chapters Concerning the Purgatorial Fires (The Soul, the Body and Death, pp. 117-120). He extends Rose's quote to include portions of St Mark's treatise which Fr Seraphim purposely chose not to use, because they actually refute his position. The Greek text (Oratio de igne purgatorio) is found in volume 15 of Patrologia Orientalia (ed. by R. Graffin & F. Nau), Paris, 1903 -.

5. We must be extremely careful with our understanding of this. One could arrive at the conclusion that the faithful are more moral and righteous than God is they are able to forgive more quickly than He, and even overcome their fear of Him in order to shame Him into forgiving also, through their prayers. We must exercise great caution and spiritual awareness in the way we understand such things.

6. See Dr Alexandre Kalomiros, "The River of Fire," St Nectarios Orthodox Conference (22-25 July), Seattle, 1980, 103-131.