The Soul After Death
"Perhaps no aspect of Orthodox eschatology has been so misunderstood as this phenomenon of the aerial toll-houses… The modern rationalistic over-emphasis on the “literal” meaning of texts and a “realistic” or this-worldly understanding of the events described in Scripture and in the Lives of Saints – have tended to obscure or even blot out entirely the spiritual meanings and spiritual experiences which are often primary in Orthodox sources…"
"Thus, of course, there are no visible “houses” or “booths” in the air where “taxes” are collected, and where there is mention of “scrolls” or writing implements whereby sins are recorded, or “scales” by which virtues are weighed, or “gold” by which “debts” are paid – in all such cases we may properly understand these images to be figurative or interpretive devices used to express the spiritual reality which the soul faces at that time. Whether the soul actually sees these images at the time, due to its lifelong habit of seeing spiritual reality only through bodily forms, or later can remember the experience only by use of such images, or simply finds it impossible to express what it has experienced in any other way – this is all a very secondary question which does not seem to have been important to the Holy Fathers and writers of saints’ lives who have recorded such experiences."
"Accept earthly things here as the weakest kind of depiction of heavenly things.' One must picture the toll-houses not in a sense that is crude and sensuous, but - as far as possible for us - in a spiritual sense, and not be tied down to details which, in the various writers and various accounts of the Church herself, are presented in various ways, even though the basic idea of the toll-houses is one and the same"
"in all such cases we may properly understand these images to be figurative or interpretive devices used to express the spiritual reality which the soul faces at that time."
