Fr. Seraphim Rose - The Soul After Death

An angel carrying the soul of St. Artemius of Verkola to heaven.
Detail of a 17th-century icon from Moscow/Yaroslavl, depicting St. Artemius with scenes from his life.

Contents

Preface

T HE AIM of the present book is two-fold: first, to give an explanation, in terms of the Orthodox Christian doctrine of life after death, of the present-day after-death experiences that have caused such interest in some religious and scientific circles; and second, to present the basic sources and texts which contain the Orthodox teaching on life after death. If the Orthodox teaching is so little understood today, it is largely because these texts have been so neglected and have become so unfashionable in our enlightened times; and our attempt has been to make these texts more understandable and accessible to present-day readers. Needless to say, they constitute a reading material infinitely more profound and more profitable than the popular after-death books of our day, which, even when they are not merely sensational, simply cannot go much below the spectacular surface of todays experiences for want of a coherent and true teaching on the whole subject of life after death.

The Orthodox teaching presented in this book will doubtless be criticized by some as being too simple or even naive for a 20th-century man to believe. It should therefore be emphasized that this teaching is not that of a few isolated or untypical teachers in the Orthodox Church, but is the teaching which the Orthodox Church of Christ has handed down from her very beginning, which is expressed in countless Patristic writings and Lives of Saints and in the Divine services of the Orthodox Church, and which has been taught uninterruptedly in the Church even down to our own day. The simplicity of this teaching is the simplicity of truth itself, which whether it is expressed in this or in other teachings of the Church comes as a refreshing fountain of clarity in the midst of the dark confusion caused in modern minds by the various errors and empty speculations of recent centuries. Each chapter of this book attempts to point to the Patristic and hagiographical sources which contain this teaching.

The chief inspiration for the writing of this book has been a 19th-century Russian Orthodox Father, Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, who was perhaps the first great Orthodox theologian to face squarely the very problem which has become so acute in our own days: how to preserve the authentic Christian tradition and teaching in a world that has become entirely foreign to Orthodoxy and strives either to overthrow and dismiss it or else reinterpret it so that it can be made compatible with a worldly way of life and thinking. Acutely aware of the Roman Catholic and other Western influences which were striving to modernize Orthodoxy even in his days, Bishop Ignatius prepared for the defense of Orthodoxy both by delving deeply into the authentic Orthodox sources (whose teaching he absorbed in some of the best Orthodox monastic centers of his time) and by familiarizing himself also with the scientific and literary culture of his century (he attended an engineering school, not a theological seminary). Armed thus with a knowledge both of Orthodox theology and of secular knowledge, he devoted his life to the defense of authentic Orthodoxy and to an exposure of the modern deviation from it. It is no exaggeration to say that no other Orthodox country in the 19th century possessed such a defender of Orthodoxy against the temptations and errors of modern times; his only rival, perhaps, was his fellow-countryman, Bishop Theophan the Recluse, who did much the same thing on a less sophisticated level.

One volume of Bishop Ignatius Collected Works