“A good local pub has much in common with a church, except
that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.” There’s quite a stretch
between the Wiliam Bake who wrote that and the ascetic monk and theologian
Dorotheos of Gaza (c.506-565), recognized as a saint of the Eastern Orthodox
and Catholic churches, who gave instruction on the need to eliminate passion and
the virtues of meekness. Yet they are in agreement on something every human needs to know:
when you die, you step into your imagination.
In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake
said it like this: “The world of imagination is the world of eternity, It is
the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated
[i.e. mortal] body.”
Dorotheos had to step carefully, because
he willingly bound himself to church doctrine, which held that the important
decisions about the post-mortem fate of the soul would come when it was roused
at the Last Judgment. But the monk was convinced that in the period between death
and Judgment, the soul was not merely asleep, or seemingly dead. It was having experiences,
and the shape and nature of those experiences was determined by memory and
imagination.
In a sermon on the “Fear of the
Punishment to Come”, Dorotheos declared that the thoughts and images to which
the soul was attached in life will become its new reality after death. Memories
and images will have more power than they did during physical life – for
one thing, because you can’t get away with them by jumping ack into your body. Desires
and fears you tried to ignore, fantasies that did not play out in the world,
will now come after you, capable of taking on entirely palpable shapes,
gathering terrific force and intensity. You won’t be able to escape the products
of your imagination. Because you have no place to go outside it. [1]
It is probably not a good idea to let your imagination get stuck within the astral
geography developed in medieval times by the Eastern Orthodox church. An
influential tenth-century hagiography, The Life of Saint Basil the
Younger by Gregory of Thrace, opens with a vivid description of twenty
"aerial toll houses" where the departed have to deal with demonic
customs officials on the ladder to heaven. The demons use all their craft and
brute force to shove the traveling soul down to hell through the rungs.
There was an alleged eyewitness account of how this operates: a
visitation by a deceased female servant, Theodora, who appeared to Gregory, a
pious layman, after he prayed to know what had happened to her. She described
how demons of the middle air stop traveling souls and grill them and
inspect them to find out whether they contain some part of a sin embodied by
the demon. If the demon finds something of himself in you, you are bound for Hades.
This setup was reminiscent of some of the burdens of ordinary life, where tax collectors
and border guards held up travelers and shook them down for money.
Huge murals depicting Theodora's
trials are on the walls of the Bucovina monasteries in Romania. The version
here is from a Russian print created in the mid-nineteenth century.
1.Dorotheos of Gaza, Discourses and Sayings trans. E. P. Wheeler ([Kalamazoo, Michigan: Liturgical Press, 1977), pp. 183–86.Nicholas Constas attempts a paraphrase in an excellent essay that I used as a starting block. See "'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature”. Dumbarton Oaks Papers vol. 55 (2001), p.100.
Illustration: Toll Houses Ahead
