The answers to the questions you've been looking for …
Man is mortal … And this is a guarantee that absolutely every person in his life thinks about his future death and decides for himself whether anything awaits him there - behind the grave.
Often, the answers to the question that a person determines to be true for himself in relation to his future life also determines how he will live the current period measured by God for him.
The nine questions of Orthodox Christians about the phenomenon of death and the subsequent afterlife were very well answered by Professor of the Moscow Theological Academy Alexei Ilyich Osipov, whose words we publish today:
1. What is death?
Oh, if anyone could answer that! I remember from my childhood, at our house above the door to the room there was a painting "This no one will escape", which depicted her, bony with a scythe. It was both interesting and scary. But even then, this uncomplicated plot laid in the child's subconscious the most important questions for a person: what is death, why do I live?
How does Christianity respond to them? It speaks of a two-part human being. Its most important part, subtly material, as our Hierarchs Ignatius (Brianchaninov) and Theophan the Recluse (who recognized this at the end of life) write about it, is the soul, which has three levels. The highest level inherent only in man is spirit (or mind), the bearer of self-consciousness, personality. He is immortal. The other two levels - the feeling and the plant-nourishing - are common with the animal and plant world and are often together with the body called the flesh, or the soul body, as the Apostle Paul wrote: There is a spiritual body, there is a body and a spiritual (1 Corinthians 15: 42-44) … This mental body, or flesh, dies and decomposes along with the biological body. Death is a gap between spirit and flesh, or, more simply, between soul and body. And only the belief in immortality gives a full answer to the question:why do I live? Dostoevsky especially emphasized the importance for a person of faith in immortality: "Only with faith in his immortality can a person comprehend his entire rational goal on earth."
Promotional video:
2. What happens to the soul of a person in the first forty days after death?
After the death of the flesh, the soul of a person passes into the world of eternity. But the category of eternity is indefinable in terms of time, it refers to those simple things about which the ancient Greek philosopher Plato wrote that “simple things defy definition”. Therefore, the church tradition is forced to answer this question in language in relation to our consciousness, immersed in the flow of time. In church tradition there is an interesting answer from the angel of St. Macarius of Alexandria (IV c.) About what is happening to the soul these days: “… for two days, the soul is allowed, along with the angels with it, to walk on the earth where it wants … like a bird, looking for a nest for itself … day … every Christian soul ascend to heaven to worship the God of all.
After that, He is commanded to show the soul … the beauty of paradise. The soul considers all this for six days … Upon examination … it is again ascended by the angels to worship God.
After the second worship, the Lord of all commands to take the soul to hell and show it the places of torment there … The soul rushes through these various places of torment for thirty days … On the fortieth day it again ascends to worship God; and then the Judge determines a place that is appropriate for her in her affairs."
These days, the soul, as it were, passes exams for good and evil. And they, of course, can be handed over in different ways.
3. Ordeals - what are they, and why are they called that?
The word "mytnya" means the place where the duty was collected, taxes and fines were taken. In church language, the word "ordeal" is used to express a kind of investigation carried out from the ninth to the fortieth day after the death of a person on the work of his earthly life.
Ordeals are usually called twenty. They are distributed according to passions, each of which includes many corresponding sins.
In the life, for example, of St. Basil the New, Blessed Theodora tells about them in the following order:
1) idle talk and foul language, 2) a lie, 3) condemnation and slander, 4) gluttony and drunkenness, 5) laziness, 6) theft, 7) avarice and avarice, 8) covetousness (bribery, flattery), 9) untruth and vanity, 10) envy, 11) pride, 12) anger
13) rancor
14) robbery (beatings, stress, fights …), 15) witchcraft (magic, occultism, spiritualism, fortune telling …), 16) fornication, 17) adultery, 18) sodomy, 19) idolatry and heresy, 20) mercy, cruelty.
All these ordeals are described in the life in vivid images and expressions, which are often taken for reality itself, giving rise to distorted ideas not only about ordeals, but also about heaven and hell, about spiritual life and salvation, about God Himself. That is why schema-abbot John of Valaam wrote: “Although our Orthodox Church has accepted the story of Theodora's ordeals, this is a private human vision, not Holy Scripture. Delve deeper into the Holy Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles. " And Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) explains: “It is clear to everyone, except for children, that the concept of“ordeal”cannot be taken in the literal sense; it is a metaphor that the Eastern Fathers thought was appropriate to describe the reality that the soul encounters after death … But the stories themselves are not "allegories" or "fables", but true stories about personal experience,set out in the language most convenient for the narrator … In Orthodox stories about ordeals there is neither paganism, nor occultism, nor "Eastern astrology", nor "purgatory."
On the reason for such an inadequate description of that world, St. John Chrysostom notes that "it is said so in order to bring the subject closer to the understanding of more gross people."
In this regard, Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow (XIX century) warns: "… one must firmly remember the instruction that the angel gave to the Monk Macarius of Alexandria … about the ordeals:" here take earthly things for the weakest image of heavenly things. " It is necessary to represent the ordeals not in the gross, sensual sense, but as much as possible for us in the spiritual sense, and not get attached to the particulars that different writers and in different legends of the Church herself, with the unity of the main idea of the ordeals, are different.
An interesting explanation of what is happening during the ordeals is offered by St. Theophan (Govorov): “… the ordeals seem to be something terrible; and it is very possible that demons, instead of terrible, represent something lovely. Seductively charming, in all kinds of passions, they present to the passing soul one after another. When passions are driven out of the heart, in the continuation of earthly life, and the virtues opposite to them are implanted, then no matter what you imagine, the soul, which has no sympathy for that, will pass that, turning away from it with disgust. And when the heart is not cleansed, then to which passion it most sympathizes, the soul rushes there. Demons take her like friends, and then they already know what to do with it … the soul itself rushes to hell."
But the ordeal is not something inevitable. They passed (according to the word of Christ: now you will be with Me in Paradise - Lk 23:43) The prudent robber, the souls of the saints ascended to heaven in the same way. And any Christian living according to his conscience and sincerely repenting is freed thanks to the Sacrifice of Christ, from this "exam." For the Lord Himself said: He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me will not come into judgment (John 5:24).
4. Why pray for the dead?
The apostle Paul wrote amazing words: you are the body of Christ, and individually you are members. Therefore, if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; whether one member is glorified, all the members rejoice with it (1 Cor. 12:27, 26). All believers, it turns out, constitute one living organism, and not a bag of peas, in which the peas push against each other, and even painfully hit each other. Christians are cells (living, half-alive, half-dead) in the Body of Christ. And all humanity is one body. But just as every change in the state of an individual organ or cell responds to the whole organism and to any of its cells, so in human society. This is the universal law of our being, which opens the veil over the secret of prayers for the dead.
Prayer according to its action is the door for the entry into the soul of the grace of Christ. Therefore, a prayer performed with attention and reverence (and not by reading it senselessly), purifying the person praying himself, has a healing effect on the deceased. But one external form of commemoration, even a liturgical one, without the prayer of the person praying, without his life according to the commandments, is nothing more than self-deception and leaves the deceased without help. Saint Theophanes frankly wrote about this: “If none [of those close to him] sighs from the heart, then the prayer service will crackle, but there will be no prayer for the sick. The same is the proskomidia, the same is the mass … It does not come to the mind of those who serve a prayer to cheer in their souls before the Lord for those who are commemorated at the prayer service … And where can they get sick of everyone ?!"
Prayer is especially effective when it is paired with exploit. The Lord replied to the disciples who were unable to drive out the demon: This kind is driven out only by prayer and fasting (Matt 17:21). By this, He pointed to the spiritual law, according to which the liberation of a person from slavery to passions and demons requires not only prayer, but also fasting, that is, the feat of both body and soul. Saint Isaac the Syrian wrote about this: "Any prayer in which the body did not bother and the heart did not grieve is imputed as one with the premature fetus of the womb, because such a prayer does not have a soul in it." That is, the effectiveness of prayer for the deceased is directly determined by the degree of sacrifice and the struggle with his sins of the person praying, the degree of purity of his cell. Such a prayer can save a loved one. For this, in order to change the posthumous state of a person,it is done by the Church from the very beginning of its existence!
5. What is God's judgment, can one be justified on it?
Are you asking about the Last Judgment, which is often called the Last Judgment?
This is the last act in the history of mankind, opening the beginning of his eternal life. It will follow the general resurrection, in which there will be a restoration of the entire spiritual-bodily nature of man, including the fullness of will, and, consequently, the possibility of the final self-determination of man - to be with God or to leave Him forever. For this reason, the Last Judgment is called the Last Judgment.
But Christ at this judgment will not be the Greek Themis - the blindfolded goddess of justice. On the contrary, the moral greatness of His feat of the Cross, His unchanging love, will be revealed in all power and evidence to every person. Therefore, having the sad experience of earthly life and its "happiness" without God, the experience of "examinations" in ordeals, it is difficult to assume that all this would not touch, or rather, not shake the hearts of resurrected people and did not determine the positive choice of fallen mankind. Many Church Fathers, at least, were convinced of this: Athanasius the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Amphilochius of Iconium, Ephraim the Syrian, Isaac the Syrian and others. They wrote about the same thing that we hear on Holy Saturday: "Hell reigns, but does not last forever over the human race."This idea is repeated in many liturgical tests of the Orthodox Church.
But, perhaps, there will be those whose hardening will become the essence of their spirit, and the darkness of hell - the atmosphere of their life. God will not violate their freedom either. For hell, according to the thought of the Monk Macarius of Egypt, is "in the depths of the human heart." Therefore, the doors of hell can be locked only from within by its very inhabitants, and not sealed by the Archangel Michael with seven seals, so that no one can get out of there.
I write about this in sufficient detail in my book "From Time to Eternity: The Afterlife of the Soul".
6. What is the paradise in which the survivors will be?
What would you answer to the question: what is seven-dimensional space? Picasso, for example, tried to draw a violin in four-dimensional space and the result was gibberish. So all attempts to depict heaven (and hell) will always be the same Picasso violin. Only one thing is truly known about paradise: the eyes did not see, the ear did not hear, and that did not come to the heart of man that God prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor. 2: 9). But this is the most general characteristic of paradise in the transmission of our three-dimensional language. And in essence, all his descriptions are only the weakest images of heavenly things.
We can only add that it won't be boring there. As lovers can endlessly communicate with each other, so to an immeasurably greater extent those who are saved in paradise will be in eternal joy, pleasure, happiness. For God is Love!
7. What is the hell that the lost go to?
Thank God, I don’t know him yet and don’t want to know him, because in the biblical language, knowledge means union with the knowable. But I heard that hell is very bad, and that it is also “in the depths of the human heart” if there is no paradise in it.
A serious question is connected with hell: are hellish torments finite or endless? Its complexity lies not only in the fact that that world is closed from us by an impenetrable veil, but also in the impossibility of expressing the concept of eternity in our language. We know, of course, that eternity is not an infinite duration of time. But how is this to be understood?
The problem is further complicated by the fact that the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Fathers, liturgical texts speak of both eternity and the finality of the torment of unrepentant sinners. At the same time, the Church at its councils never condemned any of the Fathers, either one or the other point of view. Thus, she left this question open, pointing out its secret.
Therefore, Berdyaev was right when he said that the problem of hell "is an ultimate mystery that does not lend itself to rationalization."
Of course, it is difficult not to pay attention to the thought of St. Isaac the Syrian:
“If a person says that only in order for His longsuffering to be manifested, He reconciles with them [sinners] here, in order to mercilessly torment them there - such a person thinks inexpressibly blasphemous about God… Such… slanders Him.” But he also warns: "Let us beware in our souls, beloved, and we will understand that although Gehenna is subject to limitation, the taste of being in it is very terrible, and beyond our knowledge is the degree of suffering in it."
But one thing is certain. Since God is love and wisdom, it is obvious that for each person eternity will correspond to his spiritual state, his free self-determination, that is, it will be the best for him.
8. Can the posthumous fate of a person change?
If there was no change in the spiritual state of the soul, then the Church would not have called from the very beginning of its existence to pray for the dead.
9. What is a general resurrection?
It is the resurrection of all mankind to eternal life. In the follow-up to Matins on Good Friday, we hear: "Deliver everyone from the bonds of mortals by Thy resurrection." The teaching about this is the most important in the Christian religion, for only it justifies the meaning of a person's life and all his activities. The Apostle Paul even writes like this: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith is also in vain. And if in this only life we hope in Christ, then we are more miserable than all men (1 Cor. 15: 13-14, 19). He also tells how it will happen: suddenly, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet; for he will sound the trumpet, and the dead will rise incorrupt, but we will be changed (1 Corinthians 15:52).
And this is what Saint Isaac the Syrian writes in his famous “Words of the Ascetics” about the power of the resurrection: “The sinner is not able to imagine the grace of his resurrection. Where is Gehenna that could make us sad? Where is the torment that fears us in many ways and overcomes the joy of His love? And what is Gehenna before the grace of His resurrection, when He will raise us up from Hell, make this corruptible put on incorruption, and raise the one who has fallen into Hell in glory? … There is reward for sinners, and instead of righteous reward He rewards them by resurrection; and instead of corruption of bodies that have trampled his law, he clothe them with the perfect glory of incorruption. This mercy - to resurrect us after we have sinned, is higher than mercy - to bring us into existence when we did not exist."
