The Aerial Toll Houses

An account of what the soul meets after death: a passage upward through the air in which demons bring accusations, sin by sin, and the angels who lead the soul answer with what has been repented of. Its oldest witness is St Athanasius, who tells how St Antony, caught up in prayer, saw himself led through the air while bitter and terrible beings stood in the way and demanded an account of his life. It is told most fully in the Life of St Basil the New, where the Blessed Theodora describes passing twenty toll houses, and the Church prays it at every Saturday Midnight Office in the words of the martyr Eustratius, printed below. A homily on the departure of the soul sets it out at length and was long printed in the Slavonic Psalter under the name of St Cyril of Alexandria, though it is not his; in the nineteenth century St Ignatius Brianchaninov and St Theophan the Recluse defended it, St Theophan warning that however absurd the toll houses seem to the wise of this world, they will not escape passing through them. It is also seriously contested inside the Church, and both things are true. No council has defined it, no Creed mentions it, and Orthodox theologians disagree about how far it is a vision given in the language of visions. This site records it as a strong strand of the tradition, not a dogma, and not a thing anyone is required to picture.