The first major exposition of this tradition in modern times was Bishop

Ignatius Brianchaninov’s Essay on Death in the third volume of his Collected

Works. (Later, he added a “Reply” to the objections of a certain priest called Matveevsky. See Polnoe Zhizneopisanie Svititelia Ignatia Kavkazkogo, Moscow, 2002, pp. 450-488 (in Russian).) St. Barsanuphius of Optina called this Essay “indispensable” in its genre”. (Victor Afanasiev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, p. 736).  In recent years this teaching has been challenged by OCA Archbishop Lazarus (Puhalo) (“The Soul, The Body and Death”, Orthodoxy Canada, vols. 6-7 (1979-80).) Although refuted both by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose (The Soul after Death, Platina, 1980, 2004) and by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (“Extract from the Minutes of the Session of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia”, Orthodox Life, vol. 31, no. 1, January-February, 1981, pp. 23-27), Puhalo’s thesis continues to be received doctrine in HOCNA and elsewhere, and elicits passionate support on Orthodox list-forums. It may be useful, therefore, to review some of the major arguments.

The idea that the toll-house teaching is Gnostic is refuted by the support

given it by many Holy Fathers. A very large body of evidence in favour of the

toll-houses from scriptural, patristic, hagiographical and liturgical sources

was amassed by Rose in the book alluded to above. According to Puhalo,

however, many of these sources are either apocryphal (e.g. St. Cyril of

Alexandria’s Homily on the Departure of the Soul from the Body) or influenced by

Egyptian Gnostic ideas (e.g. the Homilies of St. Macarius the Great, quoted

above) or the products of western heretical concepts concerning Divine justice,

purgatory, etc. (e.g. the stories in St. Gregory the Great’s Dialogues or the

Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People).

Since the present writer is not competent to discuss questions of textual

authenticity, the rest of this article will be based on authorities and writings

whose authenticity has never been questioned - in Orthodox circles, at any

rate.

St. Athanasius the Great writes in his Life of Saint Anthony that one night

the saint received “a call from on high, saying, ‘Anthony! Rise, go out and

look!’ He went out therefore – he knew which calls to heed – and, looking up,

saw a towering figure, unsightly and frightening, standing and reaching to

the clouds; further, certain beings ascending as though on wings. The former

was stretching out his hands; some of the latter were stopped by him, while

others flew over him and, having come through, rose without further trouble.

At such as these the monster gnashed with his teeth, but exulted over those

who fell. Forthwith a voice addressed itself to Anthony, ‘Understand the

vision!’ His understanding opened up, and he realized that it was the passing

of souls and that the monster standing there was the enemy, the envier of the

faithful. Those answerable to him he lays hold of and keeps them from

passing through, but those whom he failed to win over he cannot master as

they pass out of his range. Here again, having seen this and taking it as a

reminder, he struggled the more to advance from day to day in the things that

Anthony’s disciple, Abba Ammonas, spoke of the power of the Holy Spirit

enabling us to pass all “the powers of the air” (Ephesians 2.2) after death: “For

this is the power which He gives to me here; it is this, again, which guides

men into that rest, until he shall have passed all the ‘powers of the air’. For

there are forces at work in the air which hinder men, preventing them from

The theologian Nikolaos P. Vasileiades writes: “After his death poor man

Lazarus ‘was received up by the angels’ (Luke 16.22). Angels, however,

accompany not only the souls of the just, but also those of evil men, as the

divine Chrysostom comments, basing his words on what God said to the

foolish rich man: ‘Fool, this night will they require thy soul from thee’ (Luke

12.20). So while good angels accompanied the soul of Lazarus, the soul of the

foolish rich man ‘was required by certain terrible powers who had probably

been sent for this reason. And the one (the rich man) they led away ‘as a

prisoner’ from the present life, but Lazarus ‘they escorted as one who had

been crowned’. St. Justin the philosopher and martyr, interpreting the word of

the psalm, ‘Rescue my soul from the sword, and this only-begotten one of

mine from the hand of the dog; save me from the mouth of the lion’ (Psalm

21.21-22), comments: By this we are taught how we also should seek the same

from God when we approach our departure from this life. For God alone can

“Basil the Great relates that the holy martyr Gordius (whose memory is

celebrated on January 3 rd) went to martyrdom not as if he was about to meet

the public, but as if he was about to hand himself over into the hands of

angels who immediately, since they received him as ‘newly slaughtered’,

would convey him to ‘the blessed life’ like the poor man Lazarus. In another

place, the holy Father, with reasons (at that time men used to be baptized at a

great age), said: Let no one deceive himself with lying and empty words

(Ephesians 5.6); for the catastrophe will come suddenly upon him (I

Thessalonians 5.3); it will come like a tempest. There will come ‘a sullen

angel’ who will lead away your soul which will have been bound by its sins;

and your soul will then turn within itself and groan silently, for the further

reason, moreover, that the organ of lamentation (the body) will have been cut

off from it. O how you will wail for yourself at that hour of death! How you

will groan!

“The Lord’s words: ‘The ruler of the world cometh, and has nothing in Me’

(John 14.3) are interpreted by St. Basil as follows: Satan comes, who has power

over men who live far from God. But in Me he will find nothing of his own

that might give him power or any right over Me. And the luminary of

Caesarea adds: The sinless Lord said that the devil would not find anything in

Him which would give him power over Him; for man, however, it is

sufficient if he can be so bold as to say at the hour of his death that the ruler of

this world comes and will in me only a few and small sins. The same Father

says in another place that the evil spirits watch the departure of the soul more

vigilantly and attentively than ever enemies have watched a besieged city or

thieves a treasury. St. Chrysostom calls ‘customs-officers’ those ‘threatening

angels and abusive powers’ of terrible appearance, meeting whom the soul is

seized with trembling; and in another place he says that these ‘persecutors are

“In that temporary state [between the death of the body and the Last

Judgement] the just live under different conditions from the sinners.

According to St. Gregory the Theologian, every ‘beautiful and God-loving’

soul has scarcely been parted from the body when it experiences a

‘wonderful’ inner happiness because of all the good things that await it in

endless eternity. For this reason ‘it rejoices’ and goes forward redeemed,

forgiven and purified ‘to its Master’ since it has left the present life which was

like an unbearable prison. On the other hand, the souls of the sinners are

drawn ‘to the left by avenging angels by force in a bound state until they are

near gehenna’. From there, as they face ‘the terrible sight of the fire’ of

punishment, they tremble in expectation ‘of the coming judgement’ and are

already punished ‘in effect’ (St. Hippolytus). For the whole time that they are

separated from their bodies they are not separated from the passions which

had dominion over them on earth, but they bear with them their tendency to

sin. For that reason their suffering is the more painful (St. Gregory of

Visions of the passage through the toll-houses are common also in the

Coming to our own age, we have mentioned the witness of the holy

Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov and Elder Barsanuphius of Optina. Still closer

to our time is St. John Maximovich (+1966), who writes: “Many appearances

of the dead have given us to know in part what happens with the soul when it

leaves the body. When it no longer sees with its bodily eyes, its spiritual

vision is opened. This frequently occurs even before actual death; while

seeing and even conversing with those around them, the dying see that which

others do not. Leaving the body, the soul finds itself among other spirits,

good and evil. Usually it strives towards those which are more akin to it, but

if while still in the body it was under the influence of certain spirits, it remains

dependent upon them when it leaves the body, no matter how unpleasant

“For two days the soul enjoys relative freedom and can visit its favourite

places on earth, but on the third day it makes its way towards other realms.

At this time it passes through a horde of wicked spirits, who obstruct its path

and accuse the soul of various sins by which they themselves had deceived it.

According to revelations, there are twenty such barriers, so-called ‘tollhouses’.

At each stop the soul is tested as to a particular sin. Passing through

one, the soul comes upon the next, and only after successfully passing

through them all can the soul continue its way, and not be thrown

straightway into hell. These demons and their trials are so horrendous that

the Mother of God herself, when informed by Archangel Gabriel of her

imminent repose, entreated her Son to deliver her from those demons and, in

fulfillment of her prayer, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself appeared from

Heaven to take the soul of His Most Pure Mother and carry it up to Heaven.

“Once having safely passed through the toll-houses and having bowed

down before God, the soul spends the next thirty-seven days visiting the

heavenly habitations and the chasms of hades, not knowing where it will find

itself, and only on the fortieth day is it assigned its place of waiting until the

resurrection of the dead. Some souls find themselves with a foretaste of

eternal joy and blessedness, while others – in fear of eternal torments, which

will begin in earnest after the Dread Judgement. Until that time, changes in

the state of the soul are still possible, especially through offering for their sake

the Bloodless Sacrifice (commemoration at the Divine Liturgy), and likewise

Descriptions of the passage of souls through the toll-houses are to be found

in the Orthodox literature of many ages and nations. Such universality is in

Puhalo also argues that the toll-house tradition is heretical on the grounds

that it implies that the judgement of souls after death is not God’s but the

demons’. Moreover, it is very close, he claims, to the papist doctrine of

purgatory. For “the difference between the purgatory myth and that of the

aerial toll-houses is that the one gives God satisfaction by means of physical

torment, while the other gives Him His needed satisfaction by means of

To discuss the role of justice and its satisfaction would take us too far from

the subject of the toll-houses. Therefore suffice it to say that while all judgement of souls is in the hands of God, He often uses created beings as the instruments of His

justice, just as a judge might use lawyers for the prosecution and defence, or a

king might use an executioner. Thus we think of the avenging Angel who

slew all the first-born of Egypt, and of the Archangel Michael’s destruction of

the 185,000 warriors of Sennacherib. And it is not only good angels who carry

out His will in this way: the other plagues of Egypt were “a mission

performed by evil angels” (Psalm 77.53). We are not tempted to think, in these

cases, that God has lost control: He is simply executing His will through

Similarly, we should not think that God is not carrying out His own

judgement when he allows the soul to be tested at the toll-houses. Here God is

revealing His judgement on a soul through the agency, on the one hand, of

demons, who, like counsel for the prosecution, bring up all the evil things that

the soul has thought or done, and, on the other hand, of the good angels, who,

like counsel for the defence, bring up its good deeds. Moreover, insofar as it is

the good angels who encourage men to good deeds, and the demons who

incite them to evil, this procedure actually reveals to the soul the hidden

Thus there is no contradiction, contrary to Puhalo’s assertion, between the

demons’ testing souls at the toll-houses and the final judgement of sinners

being delivered by God Himself, Who “cuts them off from the Holy Spirit”.

Of course, God has no need for a detailed examination of our thoughts and

deeds; it is we who, in accordance with His justice, are required to come to a

full consciousness of them. For the Lord Himself said: “Every idle word that

men shall speak, they shall give an account of in the day of judgement”

(Matthew 12.36). Sinners who fail the searching test of their conscience at the

toll-houses are indeed cut off from the Holy Spirit, and their souls are “cast

into prison” (Matthew 5.25), the prison of hades, of spiritual darkness and

excommunication from God, until the final judgement of soul and body

together on the last day. Thus while angels accuse and excuse, it is God alone

who delivers the final verdict; He alone decides the soul’s destiny.

Moreover, in His mercy God often “tips the balance” in favour of the sinner when the demons appear to have won the case. Thus in the Life of St. Niphon, Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, we read: “With his clairvoyant eyes the Saint saw also the souls of men after their departure from the body. Once, standing at prayer in the church of St. Anastasia, he raised his eyes to heaven and saw the heavens opened and many angels, of whom some were descending to earth, and others were ascending bearing to heaven many human souls. And he saw two angels ascending, carrying someone’s soul. And when they came near the toll-house of fornication, the demonic taxcollectors

came out and said with anger: ‘This is our soul; how do you dare to carry him past us?’ The angels replied: ‘What kind of sign do you have on this soul, that you consider it yours?’ The demons said: ‘It defiled itself before death with sin, not only natural ones but even unnatural ones; besides that, it judged its neighbour and died without repentance. What do you say to that?’

‘We will not believe,’ said the angels, ‘either you or your father the devil, until

we ask the guardian angel of this soul.’ And when they asked him, he said: ‘It

is true that this soul sinned much, but when it got sick it began to weep and

confess its sin before God; and if God has forgiven it, He knows why: He has

the authority. Glory be to His righteous judgement!’ Then the angels, having

put the demons to shame, entered the heavenly gates with that soul. Then the

blessed one saw the angels carrying yet another soul, and the demons ran out

to them and cried out: ‘Why are you carrying souls without knowing them?

For example, you are carrying this one, who is a lover of money, a bearer of

malice, and an outlaw.’ The angels replied: ‘We well know that it did all these

things, but it wept and lamented, confessed its sins, and gave alms; for this

God has forgiven it.’ But the demons began to say: ‘If even this soul is worthy

of God’s mercy, then take and carry away the sinners from the whole world.

Why should we be labouring?’ To this the angels replied: ‘All sinners who

confess their sins with humility and tears receive forgiveness by God’s mercy;

This shows, on the one hand, that the demons are essentially powerless,

and on the other, that such authority as they possess over souls is ceded to

them by the souls themselves when they willingly follow their enticements.

For the Lord said: “He who sins is the servant of sin” (John 8.34), and

therefore of him who is the origin and instigator of sin, the devil. If the

demons have power even in this life over those who willingly follow their

suggestions, what reason have we for believing that these souls do not

continue in bondage after their departure from the body? However, if we

resist sin and the devil in this life, they will have no power over us in the next.

For, as St. Anthony says: “If the demons had no power even over the swine,

much less have they any over men formed in the image of God. So then we

The Toll-Houses and Purgatory

But if the judgement of souls after death is not in any real sense a

judgement by the devil, as opposed to God, much less is it a purging of souls

in the papist sense. At most, the fear experienced on passing through the tollhouses

can to some extent purify the soul. That this is admitted by the

Orthodox Church is shown by the following reply of St. Mark of Ephesus to

the Roman cardinals on purgatory: “At the beginning of your report you

speak thus: ‘If those who truly repent have departed this life in love (towards

God) before they were able to give satisfaction by means of worthy fruits for

their transgressions or offences, their souls are cleansed after death by means

of purgatorial sufferings; but for the easing (or ‘deliverance’) of them from

these sufferings they are aided by the help which is shown them on the part

of the faithful who are alive, as for example: prayers, Liturgies, almsgiving,

“To this we answer the following: of the fact that those reposed in faith are

without doubt helped by the Liturgies and prayers and almsgiving performed

for them, and that this custom has been in force since antiquity, there is the

testimony of many and various utterances of the Teachers, both Latin and

Greek, spoken and written at various times and in various places. But that

souls are delivered thanks to a certain purgatorial suffering and temporal fire

which possesses such (a purgatorial) power and has the character of a help –

this we do not find either in the Scriptures or in the prayers and hymns for the

dead, for in the words of the Teachers. But we have received that even the

souls which are held in hell and are already given over to eternal torments,

whether in actual fact and experience or in hopeless expectation of such, can

be aided and given a certain small help, although not in the sense of

completely loosing them from torment or giving hope for a final deliverance.

And this is shown from the words of the great Macarius the Egyptian ascetic

who, finding a skull in the desert, was instructed by it concerning this by the

action of Divine power. And Basil the Great, in the prayers read at Pentecost

writes literally the following: ‘Who also, on this all-perfect and saving feast,

art graciously pleased to accept propitiatory prayers for those who are

imprisoned in hell, granting us a great hope of improvement for those who

are imprisoned from the defilements which have imprisoned them, and that

Thou wilt send down Thy consolation’ (Third Kneeling Prayer at Vespers).

“But if souls have departed this life in faith and love, while nevertheless

carrying away with themselves certain faults, whether small ones over which

they have not repented at all, or great ones for which – even though they have

repented over them – they did not undertake to show fruits of repentance:

such souls, we believe, must be cleansed from this kind of sins, but not by

means of some purgatorial fire or a definite punishment in some place (for

this, as we have said, has not at all been handed down to us). But some must

be cleansed in the very departure from the body, thanks only to fear, as St.

Gregory the Dialogist literally shows; while others must be cleansed after the

departure from the body, either while remaining in the same earthly place,

before they come to worship God and are honoured with the lot of the blessed,

or – if their sins were more serious and bind them for a longer duration – they

are kept in hell, but not in order to remain forever in fire and torment, but as

“All such ones, we affirm, are helped by the prayers and Liturgies

performed for them, with the cooperation of the Divine goodness and love for

mankind. This Divine cooperation immediately disdains and remits some sins,

those committed out of human weakness, as Dionysius the Great (the

Areopagite) says in Reflections on the Mystery of those Reposed in the Faith (in The

Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, VII, 7); while other sins, after a certain time, by

righteous judgements it either likewise releases and forgives – and that

completely – or lightens the responsibility for them until that final Judgement.

And therefore we see not necessity whatever for any other punishment or for

a cleansing fire; for some are cleansed by fear, while others are devoured by

the gnawings of conscience with more torment than any fire, and still others

are cleansed by the very terror before the Divine glory and the uncertainty as

to what the future will be. And that this is much more tormenting and

punishing than anything else, experience itself shows…” (St. Mark of Ephesus, “First Homily on Purgatorial Fire”, The Orthodox Word, March-April, 1978)

Thus while St. Mark rejected the idea of a purging by fire as the cardinals

understood it, he definitely accepted the notion of a purging by fear and the

gnawings of conscience. Now the experience of the soul after death which

Orthodox writers describe by means of the toll-house metaphor is certainly an

experience which includes fear and the gnawings of conscience. We may

therefore conclude that there is nothing heretical in the notion of the tollhouses

– provided we remember that it is a metaphor and not a literal

A third set of objections raised by Puhalo is based on the teaching that the

soul when separated from the body cannot, by its nature, have such

experiences as are attributed to it by the Orthodox teaching. For “the notion

that the soul can exit the body, move about, have experiences, receive visions,

revelations, wander from place to place, make progress or be examined and

judged without the body, is essentially Origenistic, and is derived from the

philosophies of the pagan religions of Greece and elsewhere… Old Testament

anthropology, like that of the New Testament, never conceived of an

immortal soul inhabiting a moral body from which it might be liberated, but

always conceived a simple, non-dualistic anthropology of a single,

The question arises: why should not the experiences that the Orthodox

teaching attributes to the soul after death be accounted as “spiritual

sensations”? We have seen, for example, that according to St. Basil the

indolent soul after death “groans silently” because “the organ of lamentation

(the body) will have been cut off from it”. So while it cannot lament in the

way it did before, the soul still laments – in a disincarnate, bodiless way.

Similarly, it sees without eyes and hears without ears. These “spiritual”

experiences are certainly different from their analogues in the sensual world,

The difference between the spiritual and sensual senses is well illustrated

by the following: “they used to tell a story of a certain great old man, and say

that when he was traveling along a road two angels cleaved to him and

journeyed with him, one on his right hand and the other on his left. And as

they were going along they found lying on the road a dead body which stank,

and the old man closed his nostrils because of the evil smell, and the angels

did the same. Now after they had gone on a little farther, the old man said

unto them, ‘Do ye also smell as we do?’ And they said unto him, ‘No, but

because of thee we closed our nostrils. For it is not for us to smell the

rottenness of this world, but we do smell the souls which stink of sin, because

It is not only angels who have these spiritual senses: to the degree that a

man is purified he may also see, hear and smell spiritually even while in the

body: “It came to pass that when the old man [St. Pachomius the Great] had

said these thing to the brethren, the door-keeper came to him and said:

‘Certain travelers, who are men of importance, have come hither, and they

wish to meet thee.’ And he said: ‘Call them hither.’ And when they had seen

all the brotherhood, and had gone round all the cells of the brethren they

wanted to hold converse with him by themselves. Now when they had taken

their seats in a secluded chamber, there came unto the old man a strong smell

of uncleanness though he thought that it must arise from them because he

was speaking with them face to face; and he was not able to learn the cause of

the same by the supplication which [he made] to God, for he perceived that

that their speech was fruitful [of thought] and that their minds were familiar

with the Scriptures, but he was not acquainted with their intellectual uncleanness. Then, after he had spoken unto them many things out of the Divine Books, and the season of the ninth hour had drawn nigh meanwhile, they rose up that they might come to their own place, and Rabba entreated them to partake of some food there but they did not accept [his petition, saying] that they were in duty bound to arrive home before sunset; so they

“And Abba, in order to learn the cause of the uncleanness of these men,

went into his cell, and prayed to God; and he knew straightway that it was

the doctrine of wickedness which arose from their souls and pursued these

men, and having overtaken them, he said unto them, ‘Do ye call that which is

written in the works of Origen heresy?’ And when they had heard the

question they denied and said that they did not. Then the holy man said unto

them, ‘Behold, I take you to witness before God, that every man who readeth

and accepteth the work of Origen, shall certainly arrive in the fire of Sheol,

and his inheritance shall be everlasting darkness. That which I know from

God I have made you to be witnesses of, and I am therefore not condemned

by God on this account, and ye yourselves know about it. Behold, I have

made you hear the truth. And if ye believe me, and if ye wish to gratify God,

take all the writings of Origen and cast them into the fire; and never seek to

read them again.’ And when Abba Pachomius had said these things he left

Spiritual beings not only smell the spiritual condition of souls: they also see

them – and their appearance depends on their spiritual state. Thus St. John

the Baptist once appeared to St. Diadochus of Photike, and said that “neither

the angels nor the soul can be seen” by the bodily senses insofar as they are

“beings which do not have a shape”. However, he went on, “one must know

that they have a visible aspect, a beauty and a spiritual limitation, so that the

splendour of their thoughts is their form and their beauty. That is why, when

the soul has beautiful thoughts, it is all illumined and visible in all its parts,

When the soul is separated from the body, it loses the use of its bodily

senses, but by no means the use of its spiritual senses. On the contrary, they

revive. For, as St. John Maximovich says, “When it [the soul] no longer sees

with its bodily eyes, its spiritual vision is opened.” Again, St. John

Chrysostom writes: “Do not say to me, ‘He who has died does not hear, does

not speak, does not see, does not feel, since neither does a man who sleeps.’ If

it is necessary to say something wondrous, the soul of a sleeping man

somehow sleeps, but not so with him who has died, for [his soul] has

Not only is the soul the opposite of unconscious and unfeeling when it

departs from the body: its sinful passions reveal themselves in all their hidden

strength. “For the soul,” writes St. Dorotheus of Gaza, “wars against this body

with the passions and is comforted, eats, drinks, sleeps, talks to and meets up

with friends. But when it leaves the body it is left alone with the passions. It is

tormented by them, at odds with them, incensed at being troubled by them

and savaged by them… Do you want an example of what I am saying to you?

Let one of you come and let me lock him up in a dark cell, and for no more

than three days let him not eat nor drink, nor sleep, not meet anyone, not

singing hymns or praying, not even desiring God, and you will see what the

passions make of him. And that while he is still in this life. How much more

so when the soul has left the body and is delivered to the passions and will

It follows that the ancient heresy of “soul-sleep”, which is here revived in a

modern form by Puhalo in his polemic against the toll-houses, is false: the

soul in its disincarnate form can indeed spiritually perceive angels and

The doctrine of the toll-houses, of the particular judgement of souls after

death, is indeed a fearful doctrine. But it is a true and salutary and Orthodox

one. Let us therefore gather this saving fear into our souls, in accordance with