Tag Archives: Seraphim Rose

Seraphim Rose and David Bentley Hart

by Christopher Howell

One might not expect Seraphim Rose and David Bentley Hart to agree on much, but they do share one crucial perspective: that modernity is essentially nihilistic. However, while their diagnoses of modernity may be similar, their prescriptions are diametrically opposed. To stem the tide of modernity’s nihilistic encroachments, Rose rejected ecumenism as a modernist heresy, and he later promoted a patristic style of young Earth creationism against evolutionary biology. Hart, on the other hand, promotes instead ecumenical unity and the importance of creation as a philosophical and theological doctrine, not a historical event per se, that can be harmonized with science (provided science is rescued from its tendency to reductionism). Such distinct responses highlight the degree of variability within the American subspecies of Eastern Orthodoxy.

In Rose’s view, nihilism is the “root of the revolution of the modern age,” and this nihilism is not just a lack of faith but rather an active belief in nothingness: “No man…lives without a god,” and the god of the nihilist is “nihil, nothingness itself” (Rose 2001, 68-70). It begins with the rejection of God but manifests itself in four modern schools of thought: liberalism, realism, vitalism, and destruction. His clearest critique is on liberalism, which he describes as a more urbane nihilism—tempting, but ultimately flawed, because it cannot evade its own fundamental problem: its inability to justify its own existence (Rose 2001, 33). Likewise, Hart has written that the modern predicament is to “believe in nothing,” which he clarifies is not a faith in just anything, but rather “in the nothing, or in nothingness as such” (Hart 2009, 1-2). Hart shares Rose’s view that contemporary political liberalism is a “soporific nihilism,” but his discussion traces a different intellectual genealogy (Hart 2017, 323). Continue reading

Aerial Toll Houses, Provisional Judgment, and the Orthodox Faith

by Stephen J. Shoemaker  |  ελληνικά  |  ру́сский

quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est
–St. Vincent of Lérins (d. 445)

The monks of St. Anthony’s Monastery have recently published a beautiful and intriguing, if also deeply problematic, volume on the fate of the soul after death. Weighing in (literally) at more than 1,000 pages, the book compiles opinions from a number of Orthodox writers regarding the soul’s experience after its departure from the body, along with lavish reproductions of icons and other objects in over 200 color plates. Unfortunately, however, this compendium is a fundamentalist effort designed to mislead readers concerning the teaching of the Orthodox Church. The book’s primary agenda is to advance the notion of aerial toll houses, through which the soul must pass after death, as an essential component of the Orthodox Faith. Yet this claim is an error, despite the alleged mass of evidence that the monks have assembled and the copious academic and ecclesiastical endorsements (many of which, I understand, were obtained without full disclosure of exactly what was being endorsed).

The debate over toll houses has been a lively topic in modern Orthodoxy, owing especially to the propagation of this idea in during the later twentieth century by Seraphim Rose and others in his circle. Simply put, this book seeks to demonstrate that the Orthodox Church has uncompromisingly professed a doctrine that the individual soul, following its departure from the body, must pass through some twenty or so toll houses staffed by demons. These demons will charge each soul with certain sins, and if the soul is found guilty of such unconfessed sins, the demons will not allow passage but will instead drag it away into hell. Continue Reading…