The Soul After Death

1. What do Today’s Experiences “Prove”?

Thus we have seen that the “after-death” and “out-of-body” experiences which are so much under discussion today are quite distinct from the genuine experiences of the other world which have been manifested over the centuries in the lives of God-pleasing men and women. Further, the contemporary experiences have been so emphasized and have become so “fashionable” in recent years not because they are actually “new” (there were whole collections of similar experiences in 19th-century England and America), nor necessarily because they have been occurring with more frequency in these years, but chiefly because the public mind in the Western world, and especially in America, was “ready” for them. The public interest seems to be part of a widespread reaction against 20th-century materialism and unbelief, a sign of a more widespread interest in religion. Here we shall ask what the significance of this new “religious” interest might be.

But first, let us state once more what these experiences “prove” about the truth of religion. Most investigators seem to agree with Dr. Moody that the experiences do not corroborate the “conventional” Christian view of heaven (Life after Life, pp. 70, 98); even the experiences of those who think they saw heaven do not hold up when compared with authentic visions of heaven in the past; even the experiences of hell are more “hints” than any kind of proof of the actual existence of hell.

One must therefore qualify as exaggerated the statement of Dr. Kubler-Ross that contemporary “after-death” research “will confirm what we have been taught for two thousand years — that there is life after death,” and that it will help us “to know, rather than to believe” this (Foreword to Life after Life, pp. 7-8). Actually, these experiences may be said to “prove” no more than a minimum doctrine of the bare survival of the human soul outside the body, and of the bare existence of a non-material reality, while giving decisively no information on the further state or even existence of the soul after the first few minutes of “death,” nor of the ultimate nature of the non-material realm. From this point of view the contemporary experiences are much less satisfactory than the accounts given over the centuries in Lives of Saints and other Christian sources; we know much more from these latter sources — provided, of course, that we trust those who have given this information to the same degree that the contemporary researchers trust those whom they have interviewed. But even so, our basic attitude towards the other world still remains one of belief rather than knowledge; we may know with reasonable certainty that there is “something” after death — but exactly what it is, we believe rather than know.

Further, that which Dr. Kubler-Ross and others of like mind think they know about life after death, based on “after-death” experiences, is in open contradiction to what Orthodox Christians believe about it, based on revealed Christian teaching and also on “after-death” experiences in Orthodox literature. The Christian after-death experiences all affirm the existence of heaven, hell, and judgment, of the need for repentance, struggle, and fear of losing one’s soul eternally; while the contemporary experiences, like those of shamans, pagan initiates, and mediums, seem to point to a “summerland” of pleasant experiences in the “other world,” where there is no judgment but only “growth,” and death is not to be feared but only welcomed as a “friend” that introduces one to the pleasures of “life after death.”

We have already discussed in earlier chapters the reason for the difference in these two experiences: the Christian experience is of the genuinely other world of heaven and hell, while the spiritistic experience is only of the aerial part of this world, the “astral plane” of the fallen spirits. Today’s experiences clearly belong to the latter category — but we could not know this unless we accepted (on faith) the Christian revelation of the nature of the other world. Similarly, if Dr. Kubler-Ross and other researchers accept (or are sympathetic to) a non-Christian interpretation of these experiences, it is not because today’s experiences prove this interpretation, but because these researchers themselves already have faith in a non-Christian interpretation of them.

The significance of today’s experiences, therefore, lies in the fact that they are becoming widely known at just the right time to serve as a “confirmation” of a non-Christian view of life after death; they are being used as part of a non-Christian religious movement. Let us look now more closely at the nature of this religious movement.

2. The Connection with Occultism

Over and over again, in the investigators of “after-death” experiences, one may see a more or less evident connection with occult ideas and practices. Here we may define “occult” (which literally refers to what is “hidden”) as pertaining to any contacts of men with unseen spirits and powers in a way forbidden by God’s revelation (see Leviticus 19:31, 20:6, etc.). This contact may be sought by men (as in spiritistic seances) or instigated by the fallen spirits (when they appear spontaneously to men). The opposite of “occult” is “spiritual” or “religious,” which terms refer to that contact with God and His angels and saints which is permitted by God: prayer on man’s part, and true, grace-giving manifestations of God, angels, and saints on the other.

As an example of this occult connection, Dr. Hans Holzer (Beyond This Life, Pinnacle Books, Los Angeles, 1977) finds the significance of “after-death” experiences to lie in their opening men up to communication with the dead, and he finds them to give the same kind of messages as those provided by the “dead” at spiritistic seances. Dr. Moody, and indeed very many of today’s researchers, as we have seen, look to occult texts such as the writings of Swedenborg and the Tibetan Book of the Dead to explain today’s experiences. Robert Crookall, perhaps the most scientific investigator in this field, uses the communications of mediums as one of his primary sources of information on the “other world.” Robert Monroe and others involved in “out-of-body” experiences are open practitioners of occult experimentation, even to the extent of receiving guidance and advice from the “discarnate entities” they encounter.

Most symptomatic of all these investigators, perhaps, is the woman who has become the leading spokesman for the new attitude towards death which is emerging from today’s “after-death” experiences: Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

No Christian, surely, can fail to sympathize with the cause which Dr. Kubler-Ross has chosen to champion: a humane and helpful attitude towards the dying, in contrast with the cold, helpless, and often fearful attitude which has often prevailed not only among doctors and nurses in hospitals, but even among clergymen who are supposed to have the “answer” to the questions raised by the fact of death. Since the publication of her book On Death and Dying (Macmillan Publishing Co., New York) in 1969, the whole subject of death has become much less a “taboo” one among medical professionals, helping also to create an intellectual atmosphere favorable to the discussion of what happens after death — a discussion which was set off in turn by the publication of Dr. Moody’s first book in 1975. It is no accident that so many of the present books on life after death are accompanied by prefaces or at least brief comments by Dr. Kubler- Ross.

To be sure, anyone who accepts the traditional Christian view of life as a testing-ground for eternity, and death as the entrance into eternal blessedness or eternal misery, according to one’s faith and life on earth — will find her book discouraging. To have a humane attitude toward a dying person, to help him “prepare” for death, without placing faith in Christ and hope of salvation in the first place — is, when all is said and done, to remain in the same dreary realm of “humanism” to which mankind has been reduced by modern unbelief. The experience of dying can be made more pleasant than it usually is in today’s hospitals; but if there is no knowledge of what comes after death, or that there is anything after death, the work of people like Kubler-Ross is reduced to the level of giving harmless colored pills to the incurably ill to make them at least feel that “something is being done.”

In the course of her research, however (although she did not mention it in her first book), Dr. Kubler-Ross has indeed come across evidence that there is something after death. Although she has not yet published her own book of “after-death” experiences, she has made clear in her frequent lectures and interviews that she has seen enough to know for certain that there is life after death.

The chief source of her “knowledge” of this is, however, not the “after-death” experiences of others, but her own rather startling experiences with “spirits.” Her first such experience occurred in her office at the University of Chicago in 1967, when she was discouraged and thinking of giving up her newly begun research in death and dying. A woman came to her office and introduced herself as a patient who had died ten months before; Kubler-Ross was skeptical, but relates how she was finally persuaded by the “ghost”: “She said she knew I was considering giving up my work with dying patients and that she came to tell me not to give it up.... I reached out to touch her. I was reality-testing. I was a scientist, a psychiatrist, and I didn’t believe in such things.” She finally persuaded the “ghost” to write a note, and a later handwriting analysis confirmed that it was the handwriting of the deceased patient. Dr. Kubler-Ross states that this incident “came at a cross-roads where I would have made the wrong decision if I hadn’t listened to her.”47 The dead never appear thus so matter-of- factly among the living; this “other-worldly” visitation, if genuine, could only have been that of a fallen spirit out to deceive his victim. For such a spirit, the perfect imitation of human handwriting is an easy thing.

Later, Dr. Kubler-Ross’ contacts with the “spirit-world” became much more intimate. In 1978, before an enthralled audience of 2200 in Ashland, Oregon, she related how she was first brought into contact with her “spirit guides.” A spiritistic-type assembly was rather mysteriously arranged for her, evidently in southern California, with 75 people singing together in order to “raise the necessary energy to create this event. I was moved and touched that they would do that for me. Not more than two minutes later, I saw huge feet in front of me. There was an immense man standing in front of me.” This “man” told her that she was to be a teacher and needed this firsthand experience to give her strength and courage for her work. “About a half-minute later, another person literally materialized about 1/2 inch from my feet.... I understood that he was my guardian angel.... He called me Isabelle, and he asked me if I remembered how, 2000 years ago, we both had worked with the Christ.” Later a third “angel” appeared in order to teach her more about “joy.” “My experience of these guides has been one of the greatest kind, of totally unconditional love. And I just want to tell you that we are never alone. Each of us has a guardian angel who is never more than two feet away from us at any time. And we can call on these beings. They will help us.”48

At a holistic health conference in San Francisco in September, 1976, Dr. Kubler-Ross shared with an audience of 2300 physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals a “profound mystical experience” that had occurred to her only the night before. (This experience is apparently the same one she described in Ashland.) “Last night, I was visited by Salem, my spirit guide, and two of his companions, Anka and Willie. They were with us until three o’clock in the morning. We talked, laughed and sang together. They spoke and touched me with the most incredible love and tenderness imaginable. This was the highlight of my life.” In the audience, “as she concluded, there was a momentary silence and then the mass of people rose as one in tribute. Most of the audience, largely physicians and other health care professionals, was seemingly moved to tears.”49

It is well known in occult circles that “spirit guides” (who, of course, are the fallen spirits of the aerial realm) do not manifest themselves so readily unless a person is rather advanced in mediumistic receptivity. But perhaps even more striking than Dr. Kubler-Ross’ involvement with “familiar spirits” is the enthusiastic response her accounts of this involvement produce on audiences composed, not of occultists and mediums, but of ordinary middle-class and professional people. Surely this is one of the religious “signs of the times”: men have become receptive to contacts with the “spirit world” and are ready to accept the occult explanation of these contacts which contradict Christian truth.

Quite recently, extensive publicity has been given to scandals at Dr. Kubler- Ross’ newly established retreat in southern California, “Shanti Nilaya.” According to these accounts, many of the “workshops” at Shanti Nilaya are centered on old-fashioned mediumistic seances, and a number of former participants have declared that the seances are fraudulent.50 It may be that there is more wishful thinking than reality in Dr. Kubler-Ross’ “spirit contacts”; but this does not affect the teaching which she and others are giving about life after death.

3. The Occult Teaching of Today’s Investigators

The teaching on life after death of Dr. Kubler-Ross and other investigators of “after-death” experiences today may be summarized in a few points. Dr. Kubler-Ross, it should be noted, expresses these points with the certainty of someone who thinks she has had immediate experience of the “other world”; but scientists like Dr. Moody, while much more cautious and tentative in tone, cannot help but promote the same teaching. This is the teaching on life after death that has entered the air of the late 20th century and seems unaccountably “natural” to all students of it who do not have a firm grasp on any other teaching.

(1) Death is not to be feared. Dr. Moody writes: “In some form or other, almost every person has expressed to me the thought that he is no longer afraid of death” (Life after Life, p. 68). Dr. Kubler-Ross relates: “Recorded histories reveal that dying is painful but death itself ... is a totally peaceful experience, free of pain and fear. Everyone, without exception, describes a feeling of equanimity and wholeness.”51 One may see here the basic trust in one’s psychic experiences that characterizes all who are deceived by the fallen spirits. There is nothing whatever in today’s “after-death” experiences to indicate that death itself will be merely a repetition of them, and that not for a few minutes only, but permanently; this trust of pleasant psychic experiences is part of the religious spirit that is now in the air, and it produces a false sense of well-being that is fatal to spiritual life.

(2) There is no judgment to come, and no hell. Dr. Moody reports, on the basis of his interviews, that “in most cases, the reward-punishment model of the afterlife is abandoned and disavowed, even by many who had been accustomed to thinking in those terms. They found, much to their amazement, that even when their most apparently awful and sinful deeds were made manifest before the being of light, the being responded not with anger and rage, but rather only with understanding, and even with humor” (Life after Life, p. 70). Dr. Kubler- Ross observes of her interviewees, in a more doctrinaire tone: “All have a sense of ‘wholeness.’ God is not judgmental; man is” (Kemf, p. 52). It does not seem even to occur to such investigators that this absence of judgment in “after-death” experiences might be a misleading first impression, or that the first few minutes of death are not the place for judgment; they are merely interpreting the experiences in accordance with the religious spirit of the times, which does not wish to believe in judgment and hell.

(3) Death is not as unique and final an experience as Christian doctrine has described it, but is rather only a harmless transition to a “higher state of consciousness.” Dr. Kubler-Ross thus defines it: “Death is simply a shedding of the physical body, like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon. It is a transition into a higher state of consciousness, where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, to be able to grow, and the only thing you lose is something that you don’t need anymore, and that is your physical body. It’s like putting away your winter coat when spring comes ... and that’s what death is about” (Kemf, p. 50). We shall state below how this contrasts with the true Christian teaching.

(4) The purpose of life on earth, and of life after death, is not the eternal salvation of one’s soul, but an unlimited process of “growth” in “love” and “understanding” and “self-realization.” Dr. Moody finds that “many seemed to have returned with a new model and a new understanding of the world beyond — a vision which features not unilateral judgement, but rather cooperative development towards the ultimate end of self-realization. According to these new views, development of the soul, especially in the spiritual faculties of love and knowledge, does not stop upon death. Rather it continues on the other side, perhaps eternally....” (Life after Life, p. 70). Such an occult view of life and death does not come from the fragmentary experiences being publicized today; rather, it comes from the occult philosophy that is in the air today.

(5) “After-death” and “out-of-body” experiences are themselves a preparation for life after death. The traditional Christian preparation for eternal life (faith, repentance, participating in the Sacraments, spiritual struggle) is of little importance compared with the increased “love” and “understanding” which are inspired by “after-death” experiences; and specifically (as in the recent program worked out by Kubler-Ross and Robert Monroe) one can train terminally-ill persons in “out-of-body” experiences “so that the persons will quickly gain a perception of what awaits them on the Other Side when they die” (Wheeler, Journey to the Other Side, p. 92). One of Dr. Moody’s interviewees states categorically: “The reason why I’m not afraid to die is that I know where I’m going when I leave here, because I’ve been there before” (Life after Life, p. 69). What a tragic and ill-founded optimism!

Every one of these five points is part of the teaching of 19th-century Spiritualism as revealed at that time by the “spirits” themselves through mediums. It is a teaching literally devised by demons with the single clear intention of overthrowing the traditional Christian teaching on life after death and changing mankind’s whole outlook on religion. The occult philosophy that almost invariably accompanies and colors today’s “after-death” experiences is simply a filtering down to the popular level of the esoteric Spiritism of the Victorian age; it is a symptom of the evaporation of genuine Christian views from the minds of the masses of the Western world. The “after-death” experience itself, one may say, is incidental to the occult philosophy that is being spread through it; the experience promotes the philosophy not because its content as such is occult, but because the basic Christian safeguards and teaching that once protected men from such a foreign philosophy have now largely been removed, and virtually any experience of the “other world” will now be used for promoting occultism. In the 19th century only a few freethinkers and unchurched people believed in this occult philosophy; but now it is so much in the air that anyone who does not have a conscious philosophy of his own is drawn to accept it quite “naturally.”

4. The “Message” of Today’s “After-Death” Experiences

But why, finally, are “after-death” experiences so much “in the air” today, and what is their meaning as part of the “spirit of the times”? The most obvious reason for the increased discussion of these experiences today is the invention in recent years of new techniques for resuscitating the “clinically dead,” which have made such experiences more commonly reported than ever before. This explanation, to be sure, does help to account for the quantitative increase of “after-death” reports, but it is too superficial to account for the spiritual impact of these experiences on mankind and the changing view of life after death which they are helping to cause.

A deeper explanation is to be found in the increasing openness and sensitivity of men to “spiritual” and “psychic” experiences in general, under the greatly increased influence of occult ideas on the one hand, and on the other hand the waning both of humanistic materialism and of Christian faith. Mankind is coming once more to an acceptance of the possibility of contact with “another world.”

Further, this “other world” itself seems to be opening itself up more to a mankind that is eager to experience it. The “occult explosion” of recent years has been produced by — and in turn has helped to produce — a spectacular increase in actual “paranormal” experiences of all kinds. “After-death” experiences are at one end of the spectrum of these experiences, involving little or no conscious will to contact the “other world”; the activities of contemporary witchcraft and satanism are at the other end of the spectrum, involving a conscious attempt to contact and even serve the powers of the “other world”; and the myriad varieties of today’s psychic experiences, from the “spoon-bending” of Uri Geller and parapsychological experiments in “out-of-body” travel and the like, to contact with and abductions by “UFO” beings — fall somewhere in between these extremes. Significantly, a large number of these “paranormal” experiences have been occurring to “Christians,” and one kind of these experiences (“charismatic” ones) is widely accepted as a genuinely Christian phenomenon.52 In actuality, however, the “Christian” involvement in all such experiences is only a striking indication of the extent to which the Christian awareness of occult experience has been lost in our times.

One of the foremost authentic mediums of the 20th century, the late Arthur Ford — whose increase in respectability among “Christians” and unbelieving humanists alike is itself one of the “signs of the times” — has given a revealing hint as to what the increasing acceptance of and susceptibility to occult experiences means: “The day of the professional medium is about over. We’ve been useful as guinea pigs. Through us, scientists have learned something about the conditions necessary for it (contact with the ‘spirit world’) to happen.”53 That is: the occult experience hitherto restricted to a few “initiates” has now become accessible to thousands of ordinary people. Of course, it is not chiefly science that has brought this about, but mankind’s increasing estrangement from Christianity and its thirst for new “religious experiences.” Fifty or seventy-five years ago, only mediums and cultists on the fringes of society had contact with “spirit guides,” cultivated “out-of-body” experiences, or “spoke in tongues”; today these experiences have become relatively common and are accepted as ordinary on all levels of society.

This marked increase in “other worldly” experiences today is doubtless one of the signs of the approaching end of this world. St. Gregory the Great, after describing various visions and experiences of life after death in his Dialogues, remarks that “the spiritual world is moving closer to us, manifesting itself through visions and revelations.... As the present world approaches its end, the world of eternity looms nearer.... The end of the world merges with the beginning of eternal life” (Dialogues IV, 43, p. 251).

St. Gregory adds, however, that through these visions and revelations (which are much more common in our time than they were in his) we still see the truths of the future life imperfectly, because the light is still “dim and pale, like the light of the sun in the early hours of the day just before dawn.” How true this is of today’s “after-death” experiences! Never before has mankind been given such striking and clear proofs — or at least “hints” — that there is another world, that life does not end with the death of the body, that there is a soul that survives death and is indeed more conscious and alive after death. For a person with a clear grasp of Christian doctrine, today’s “after-death” experiences can only be a striking confirmation of the Christian teaching on the state of the soul immediately after death; and even today’s occult experiences can only confirm for him the existence and nature of the aerial realm of fallen spirits.

But for the rest of mankind, including most of that part that still calls itself Christian, today’s experiences, far from confirming the truths of Christianity are proving to be a subtle pointer to deception and false teaching, a preparation for the coming reign of Antichrist. Truly, even those who return from the “dead” today cannot persuade mankind to repent: If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead (Luke 16:31). In the end, it is only those who are faithful to “Moses and the Prophets” — that is, to the fullness of revealed truth — who are able to understand the true meaning of today’s experiences. What the rest of mankind learns from these experiences is not repentance and the closeness of God’s judgment — but a strange, enticing new gospel of pleasant “other-worldly” experience and the abolition of something which God has set up for the awakening of man to the reality of the true other world of heaven and hell: the fear of death.

Arthur Ford makes quite clear that the whole mission of mediums like himself has been “to use whatever special talents given me to remove for all time the fear of the death passage from earth minds.”54 This is the message of Dr. Kubler-Ross also, and it is the “scientific” conclusion of researchers like Dr. Moody: the “other world” is pleasant, one need not fear to enter it. Two centuries ago Emanuel Swedenborg summed up the “spirituality” of those who believe like this: “I have been permitted to enjoy not only the pleasures of the body and the senses, like those who live in the world, but I have also been permitted to enjoy such delights and felicities of life as, I believe, no persons in the whole world ever before enjoyed, which were greater and more exquisite than any person could imagine and believe.... Believe me, if I knew that the Lord would call me to Himself tomorrow, I would summon the musicians today, in order to be once more really gay in this world.” When he foretold the date of his death to his landlady, he was as pleased “as if he was going to have a holiday, to go to some merry-making.”55

We shall contrast this attitude now with the true Christian attitude towards death over the centuries. Here we shall see how perilous it is for a soul to have no discernment with regard to “spiritual experiences,” to cast aside the safeguards of Christian teaching!

5. The Christian Attitude Towards Death

The occult teaching on life after death, although it ends so far from the truth of things, does begin with an undoubted Christian truth: the death of the body is not the end of human life, but only the beginning of a new condition for the human personality, which continues its existence apart from the body. Death, which was not made by God but was brought into the creation by Adam’s sin in Paradise, is the most striking form in which man faces the fallenness of his nature. A person’s fate for eternity depends largely on how he regards his own death and how he prepares for it.

The true Christian attitude towards death has in it elements both of fear and uncertainty, just those emotions which occultism wishes to abolish. However, in the Christian attitude there is nothing of the abject fear which can be present in those who die with no hope of eternal life, and a Christian with his conscience at peace approaches death calmly and, according to God’s grace, even with a certain sense of assurance. Let us look at the Christian death of several of the great monastic Saints of 5th-century Egypt.

“When the time came for the repose of St. Agatho, he spent three days in profound heedfulness to himself, conversing with no one. The brethren asked him: ‘Abba Agatho, where are you?’ ‘I am standing before the judgment of Christ,’ he answered. The brethren said: ‘Are even you afraid, Father?’ He replied: ‘I have striven according to my strength to keep God’s commandments, but I am a man, and how do I know that my deeds have been pleasing to God?’ The brethren asked: ‘Do you really have no hope in your way of life, which was in accordance with the will of God?’ ‘I cannot have such hope,’ he replied, ‘because one thing is the judgment of man, and another is the judgment of God.’ They wished to ask him yet more, but he told them: ‘Show love to me, and do not speak with me now, for I am not free.’ And he died with joy. ‘We saw him rejoicing,’ his disciples related, ‘as if he were meeting and greeting dear friends.’ ”56

Even great saints who die in the midst of obvious signs of God’s grace retain a sobering humility about their own salvation. “When the time came for the great Sisoes to die, his face became illuminated and he said to the Fathers who were sitting with him: ‘Here Abba Anthony has come.’ After being silent for a little, he said: ‘Here the choir of the prophets has come.’ Then he became yet brighter and said: ‘Here the choir of apostles has come.’ And again, his face became twice as shining; he began to speak with someone. The Elders asked him to say with whom he was speaking. He replied: ‘The angels have come to take me, but I am imploring them to leave me a short time for repentance.’ The Elders said to him: ‘Father, you have no need for repentance.’ He replied to them: ‘In truth, I do not know whether I have even placed a beginning of repentance.’ But everyone knew that he was perfect. Thus spoke and felt a true Christian, despite the fact that during his lifetime he had raised the dead at his mere word and was filled with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And again his face shone yet more: it shone like the sun. All were afraid. He said to them: ‘Behold, the Lord has come and uttered: “Bring me the chosen vessel from the desert.” ’ With these words he sent forth his spirit. Lightning was seen, and the room was filled with fragrance” (Patericon of Scetis, Bishop Ignatius, vol. III, p. 110).

How different this profound and sober Christian attitude is when compared with the superficial attitude of some non-Orthodox Christians today who think they are already “saved” and will not even undergo the judgment of all men, and therefore have nothing to fear in death. Such an attitude, very widespread among present-day Protestants, is actually not too far from the occult idea that death is not to be feared because there is no damnation; certainly, even though inadvertently, it has helped give rise to the latter attitude. Blessed Theophylactus of Bulgaria, in his 11th-century commentary on the Gospels, wrote of such ones: “Many deceive themselves with a vain hope; they think that they will receive the Kingdom of Heaven and will unite themselves to the choir of those reposing in the height of virtues, having exalted fancies of themselves in their hearts.... Many are called, because God calls many, indeed everyone; but few are chosen, few are saved, few are worthy of God’s choosing” (Commentary on Matt. 22:14).

The similarity between occult philosophy and the common Protestant view is perhaps the chief reason why the attempts of some Evangelical Protestants (see Bibliography) to criticize today’s “after-death” experiences from the point of view of “Biblical Christianity” has been so unsuccessful. These critics themselves have lost so much of the traditional Christian teaching on life after death, the aerial realm, and the activities and deceptions of demons, that their criticisms are often vague and arbitrary; and their discernment in this realm is often no better than that of the secular researchers and causes them also to be taken in by deceptive “Christian” or “Biblical” experiences in the aerial realm.

The true Christian attitude towards death is based upon an awareness of the critical differences between this life and the next. Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow has summed up the Scriptural and Patristic teaching on this point in these words: “Death is the boundary at which the time of struggles ends for man and the time of recompense begins, so that after death neither repentance nor correction of life is possible for us. Christ the Saviour expressed this truth in His parable of the rich man and Lazarus, from which it is clear that both the one and the other immediately after death received their recompense, and the rich man, no matter how much he was tormented in hell, could not be delivered from his sufferings through repentance (Luke 16:26).”57

Death, therefore, is precisely the reality that awakens one to the difference between this world and the next and inspires one to undertake the life of repentance and cleansing while this precious time is given to us. When St. Abba Dorotheus was asked by a certain brother why he spent his time carelessly in his cell, he replied: “Because you have not understood either the awaited repose or the future torment. If you knew them as you should, you would endure and not grow weak even though your cell should be filled with worms and you would be standing among them up to your neck.”58

Similarly, St. Seraphim of Sarov, in our own modern times, taught: “Oh, if only you could know what joy, what sweetness await the souls of the righteous in heaven, then you would be determined in this temporal life to endure any sorrow, persecution, and calumny with gratitude. If this very cell of ours were full of worms, and if these worms were to eat our flesh throughout our whole temporal life, then with utmost desire we should consent to it, only not to be deprived of that heavenly joy which God has prepared for those who love Him.”59

The fearlessness of occultists and Protestants alike before death is the direct result of their lack of awareness of what awaits them in the future life and of what can be done now to prepare for it. For this reason, true experiences or visions of life after death generally have the effect of shaking one to the depths of one’s being and (if one has not been leading a zealous Christian life) of changing his whole life to make preparation for the life to come. When St. Athanasius of the Kiev Caves died and came back to life after two days, his fellow monks “were terrified seeing him come back to life; then they began to ask how he had come back to life, and what he had seen and heard while he had been apart from the body. To all questions he answered only with the words: ‘Save yourselves!’ And when the brethren insistently asked him to tell them something profitable, he gave as his testament to them obedience and ceaseless repentance. Right after this Athanasius closed himself up in a cave, remained in it without leaving for twelve years, spending day and night in unceasing tears, eating a little bread and water every other day, and conversing with no one during all this time. When the hour of his death came, he repeated to the assembled brethren his instruction on obedience and repentance, and died with peace in the Lord.”60

Similarly, in the West, Venerable Bede relates how the man of Northumbria, after being dead one whole night, came back to life and said: “I have truly risen from the grasp of death, and I am allowed to live among men again. But henceforth I must not live as I used to, and must adopt a very different way of life.” He gave away all his possessions and retired to a monastery. Later he related that he had seen both heaven and hell, but “this man of God would not discuss these and other things that he had seen with any apathetic or careless- living people, but only with those who were haunted by fear of punishment or gladdened by the hope of eternal joys, and were willing to take his words to heart and grow in holiness.”61

Even in our own modern times, the author of “Unbelievable for Many” was so shaken by his true experience of the other world that he entirely changed his life, became a monk, and wrote his account of his experiences in order to awaken others like himself who were living in the false security of unbelief about the next life.

Such experiences are numerous in Lives of Saints and other Orthodox sources, and they stand in sharp contrast to the experiences of people today who have seen “heaven” and the “other world” and yet remain in the false security that they are already “prepared” for life after death and that death itself is nothing to be feared.

The place of the remembrance of death in Christian life may be seen in the manual of Christian struggle, The Ladder of St. John (whose Sixth Step is devoted specifically to this): “As of all foods bread is the most essential, so the thought of death is the most necessary of all works.... It is impossible to spend

the present day devoutly unless we regard it as the last of our whole life” (Step 6:4, 24). The Scripture well states: In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin (Sirach 7:36). The great St. Barsanuphius of Gaza gave as his advice to a brother: “Let your thoughts be strengthened with the remembrance of death, the hour of which is not known to any man. Let us strive to do good before we depart from this life — for we do not know on what day we shall be called — lest we turn out to be unprepared and remain outside the bridal chamber with the five foolish virgins” (St. Barsanuphius, Answer 799).

The great Abba Pimen, when he heard of the death of St. Arsenius the Great of Egypt, said: “Blessed is Arsenius! You wept over yourself for the course of earthly life! If we do not weep over ourselves here, we shall weep eternally. It is not possible to escape weeping: either here, voluntarily, or there, in torments, involuntarily” (Patericon of Scetis, in Bishop Ignatius, vol. III, p. 108).

Only a person with this sober Christian outlook on life can dare to say, with the Apostle Paul, that he has a desire to depart, and to be with Christ (Phil. 1:23). Only he who has lived the Christian life of struggle, repentance, and weeping over one’s sins, can say with St. Ambrose of Milan: “The foolish are afraid of death as the greatest of evils, but wise men seek it as a rest after their toils and as the end of evils.”62

Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov concludes his celebrated “Homily on Death” with words that can stand for us also, a hundred years later, as a call to return to the one and only true Christian attitude towards death, putting away all rosy illusions of our present spiritual state as well as all false hopes for the future life:

“Let us arouse in ourselves the remembrance of death by visiting cemeteries, visiting the sick, being present at the death and burial of our close ones, by frequently examining and renewing in our memories various contemporary deaths which we have heard of or seen.... Having understood the shortness of our earthly life and the vanity of all earthly acquisitions and advantages; having understood the frightful future that awaits those who have disdained the Redeemer and redemption and have offered themselves entirely as a sacrifice to sin and corruption — let us turn our mental eyes away from their steady gazing at the deceptive and enchanting beauty of the world which easily catches the weak human heart and forces it to love and serve it; let us turn them to the fearful but saving spectacle of the death that awaits us. Let us weep over ourselves while there is time; let us wash, let us cleanse with tears and confession our sins which are written in the books of the Sovereign of the world. Let us acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit — this seal, this sign of election and salvation; it is indispensable for a free passage through the spaces of the air and for entrance into the heavenly gates and mansions.... O ye who have been banished from Paradise! It is not for enjoyments, not for festivity, not for playing that we find ourselves on earth — but in order that by faith, repentance, and the Cross we might kill the death which has killed us and restore to ourselves the lost Paradise! May the merciful Lord grant the readers of this Homily, and him who has composed it, to remember death during this earthly life, and by the remembrance of it, by the mortification of oneself to everything vain, and by a life lived for eternity, to banish from oneself the fierceness of death when its hour shall come, and through it to enter into the blessed, eternal, true life. Amen” (Vol. III, pp. 181-83).