Aerial Toll House
Aerial toll houses refers to a teaching held by many Eastern Orthodox Saints and Eastern Orthodox Christians, about the immediate state of the soul after death. According to this doctrine, "following a person's death the soul leaves the body, and is escorted to God by angels. During this journey the soul passes through an aerial realm, which is inhabited by wicked spirits (Eph 6:12). The soul encounters these demons at various points referred to as 'toll-houses' where the demons then attempt to accuse it of sin and, if possible, drag the soul into hell."
This teaching is extensively alluded to in hagiographical and other spiritual texts of the church, though it has never been formally promulgated by any ecumenical council and so remains in the realm of "theologoumena", or private theological opinion (as opposed to doctrines formally proclaimed by a church council). Many Orthodox saints and theologians have openly endorsed it, while some bishops and theologians have condemned it as heretical and gnostic in origin.
Read more about Aerial Toll House: The Toll-house Teaching, Controversy
Famous quotes containing the words aerial, toll and/or house:
“But with some small portion of real genius and a warm imagination, an author surely may be permitted a little to expand his wings and to wander in the aerial fields of fancy, provided ... that he soar not to such dangerous heights, from whence unplumed he may fall to the ground disgraced, if not disabled from ever rising anymore.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Most books belong to the house and street only, and in the fields their leaves feel very thin. They are bare and obvious, and have no halo nor haze about them. Nature lies far and fair behind them all. But this, as it proceeds from, so it addresses, what is deepest and most abiding in man. It belongs to the noontide of the day, the midsummer of the year, and after the snows have melted, and the waters evaporated in the spring, still its truth speaks freshly to our experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)