Reasons not to be Eastern Orthodox #237: "Aerial Toll Houses"

I said that the "aerial toll houses" legend assumes a prescientific, Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology. If the whole history of philosophy and science (including the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein) is of no consequence to you, nothing I have to say on the matter will make any difference. Your statements come across as dogmatic and uninformed, to put it mildly.

 

The aerial toll houses are an image. No one believes that there are toll booths in the sky. The idea is that demons confront the soul of the departed, if they have any sins they have not repented of, and in such cases, they cart the soul off to hades. There is nothing in modern science that has disproven this, any more than modern science has disproven that God exists, or that men have souls.

 

This would all be much easier if there were a clear, unambiguous, undisputed Orthodox authority you could point to, that could resolve the question to everyone's satisfaction (which, so far, you haven't done).

 

Then why are they called aerial toll-houses? The sources you cited for this view (from around 700-1100 AD) all presented it as a specifically aerial experience, in the atmospheric air above us.

It fits the general Eastern Orthodox picture that I knew of, like around the image of 'the night before christmas' where the sky is filled with forked black figures flying around, stealing children and causing mischief. The aerial dimension is something that has a strong presence in Eastern Orthodox culture. Even you had invoked Satan as The Lord of the Air, as a possible scriptural support for your view.

So I believe it is inescapable, that if we accept toll houses, that they will be aerial toll-houses.

But only temporarily, right? Because Christ could later judge us in some other way? I still don't understand how we should reconcile these demons' judgments with God's own actual judgment of his children.

 

This would be much easier if you specified what question you were trying to resolve here. But if you are trying to resolve how demons and angels interacting with a departed soul can be reconciled with modern science, tell me how the existence of the human soul or God can be reconciled with it, and you will have your answer, because science has not developed a scope that can peer into the spiritual realm, or weigh or measure a spirit.

 

That's a bit like asking if God the Father is not a man, how can he be a Father? When we speak about spiritual realities that are beyond our normal human experience, we use images drawn from our human experience to give us some idea of what we are talking about, but the image is not the reality. We say, for example, that Christ ransomed us, but we don't believe that he handed over payment to the devil. Ransom is a human image, used to provide us with some insight into what Christ did for us, but if you push an image beyond the intended point, it breaks down.

And of when we speak of aerial toll-houses... it is the toll-house part that is the image. The aerial part is simply the reality.

As I asked previously, but was given no answer, what do you suppose St. Paul meant when he spoke of the devil as the prince and power of the air?

 

I think my question was clear enough. There's no need to be evasive. Historic Anglicanism considers itself to be based upon the teachings of the Fathers, as those teachings have been defined by the Creeds and Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. You have stated repeatedly that these same Fathers not only taught the "aerial toll houses" legend, but in such a way that their intent was to identify the legend with the Faith of the Church proper. The early conciliar decrees are quite clear on, e.g., the eternity of the Trinity, and the two natures of Christ. What early authoritative statement can you refer to, that clearly and unambiguously teaches that Christians must accept the "aerial toll houses" legend as part of the Faith?

 

I think I have demonstrated that the Fathers taught it, and have pointed you to a 1111 page tome full of examples of the same. The doctrine of the Trinity was not part of the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, prior to there being some controversy that necessitated them being addressed in such a manner. The Church has never suggested that only those things spelled out in Ecumenical decrees are worthy of belief or important. St. Basil the Great, in fact, in defending the personhood of the Holy Spirit, appealed to the vast body of universally received Traditions to support that doctrine, and among those Traditions, he cited praying while facing east, making the sign of the Cross, and baptism by triple immersion. There is no Creed or Ecumenical decree on making the sign of the Cross, but there are few things that are more clearly universal in the Tradition of the Church.

And if you are going to toss out other elements of the universal Christian Tradition, why should you care what Ecumenical decrees say anyway? We only know to accept them because the Tradition of the Church tells us we should.

 

Simply producing lists of quotations doesn't resolve anything, certainly not the question of the authority of those statements. Quantity doesn't equal quality. What you are in effect saying is that the way we find out what belongs to "the Tradition", is to consult "the Tradition". The reasoning is circular.

 

That's the difference between eastern and western philosophy. In the west, our understanding of redemption is precise and literal. So that when we speak of substitutionary atonement, we do believe that yes, Christ literally took our sins on himself, so that we could be sinless with him. It's not a figure of speech but a precise description of reality. And we could talk about atonement, it seems that most of the (patristic) church fathers invoked the penal substitution rather than the ransom theory, but that's another topic. Long story short, in the Western theological discourse we do indeed expect a precise account of everything which theology attempts to cover. The sacraments, grace, atonement. And with these toll houses, the Western mind will expect a pretty substantial account of what this actually is, how it works, how it fits with Christ's judgment.

Christ's judgment is the huge elephant in this room, isn't it? If we accept toll houses, then we have a conflict, the demons judging us vs. Christ judging us. You know they're not compatible, yet you won't deny the one or the other; they fit together 'somehow' and we don't need to ask any more than that.

In the Eastern theological mindset, I have often encountered this reluctance to be precise, to allow human discourse to give a substantial account of the things being discussed. There's a strange preference for unreason, or illogic, in the Eastern discourse. But in the West we would absolutely ask for a consistent, coherent, logical account of this theory before it could be accepted.

I don't have the commentaries at hand, so I don't have a good answer on this. But 100% of their interpretations deal with some other explanation than the toll houses. Because if the fathers and theologians interpreted this central passage as indicative of toll houses, that would be explosive in the Christian world. From the lack of explosion, I know they didn't explain it that way. It meant something else to all of them.

 

When you find it throughout the Fathers of the Church (which you do), and you find it in the universally received Liturgical Tradition of the Church (which you do), it is universal.

 

You find the same precision in the Orthodox Church on these issues that you find in Scripture. And no one has ever suggested that the particular judgment either is a substitute for the final judgment, or that angels and demons are allowed to do anything outside of God's will. As the Scriptures make clear, even the demons are subject to God, and can only do what they are allowed by God to do.

As I have repeatedly stated, the toll house image is but one way of speaking about a broader reality, which is found in Scripture, and given your Empiricist approach to angels and demons, I rather doubt you could offer an interpretation of Ephesians 2:2 that would make any real sense of the text. Clearly the passage is saying that the demons abide in the aerial realm, and in fact that the devil is prince and power thereof. This is the very point you seem to think that science makes nonsense of.

 

Also, who was the ransom paid to? Christ Himself invoked the image of "ransom". We do not find him speaking of penal substitution (though I have no problem with that facet of our salvation either), and so you cannot blow off one expression (which Christ actually used) and use *instead* another (which he did not use).

 

Again, I'm talking about the authority of those statements. You keep trying to make it about mere numbers. There were all kinds of erroneous beliefs about the world during that age, which had no obvious religious significance and which the Fathers, being drawn from that culture, would have found it impossible to avoid: beliefs like geocentrism, that the inhabited part of the world was at the top of the globe, spontaneous generation, etc. Those were just common notions of the day. Would the universal belief of the Fathers on such matters make them part of the Faith of the Church also?

 

It is not a matter of numbers, it is a matter of universal reception, and when you find this belief expressed throughout the services, in texts used by the entire Church, that means it is a universal Tradition. Lex orandi, lex credendi. And as a matter of fact, contrary to your empiricist assertions, science has nothing to say about angels, demons, or what happens to the soul at death, because science can only address the empirical, and these are realities that are beyond the empirical.

 

So, would "in texts used by the entire Church" include those historically used by Roman Catholics? Anglicans? Lutherans?

 

No. On that point, I would refer you to St. Cyprian of Carthage's Treatise on the Unity of the Church. The branch-theory of the Church is a novel idea.

But in the preschismatic Latin liturgical tradition, I am quite sure you find the same thing. I know you find in the lives of western saints, and in the writings of western Fathers, and so it would be odd if it was not found in their services.

 

What makes St. Cyprian's Treatise on the Unity of the Church relevant as an authority? (I never said a word about the Branch Theory.) It sounds like you're saying that the Church defines Tradition, and that Tradition defines the Church. There's that pesky circularity again.

 

Canon 2 of the 6th Ecumenical Council.

 

There were no canons from the 6th Ecumenical Council. You must be referring to the canons from the Council of Trullo (and indeed the 2nd canon mentions Cyprian, though not the particular text in question). Those were never accepted in the West, as I'm sure you are aware. This makes me seriously wonder about the cogency of the rest of the "evidence" you claim to have assembled.

So again, your position is that the Church defines Tradition and Tradition defines the Church, which is both circular, and authoritarian.