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If the number of those who, having lovingly inscribed the name of God’s servant Hieromonk Seraphim in their memorial books for the departed and offered memorial services for him, now with equal zeal—from the nineteenth of July onward—have begun and will certainly not cease to offer supplicatory services to him, praying not for him but asking for his prayers on their own behalf, must be counted in the millions; then surely there are not a few who neither knew nor wished to know the name of Seraphim of Sarov before, and on the nineteenth of July took no prayerful part in the Sarov celebration, and do not pray to Saint Seraphim now and will not pray to him in the future, leaving this holy work in all its forms to those they regard as blindly believing superstitious people deceived by the clergy. Such, unfortunately, are those among our so-called intelligentsia who express the entirety of their enlightened faith through a rationalistic attitude toward it, and who, echoing their beloved western Protestants, call prayer for the departed useless and prayer to the saints positively immoral—and who consider both generally irrational. Proud of their reason, which they esteem more highly than the voice of the Universal Church, and boasting that they regard only the Bible, interpreted and understood according to their own reason, as the source of their faith, these people fail to notice that in their rejection of both kinds of prayer they fall into open contradiction not only with the Church’s tradition, which they reject, but with the Bible itself and—what should be especially significant to them—with reason itself, in whose name they ostensibly protest; for both kinds of prayer are directly commanded in the word of God and logically presupposed with necessity by sound human reason.

Concerning the prayers of the saints to God on our behalf, and consequently concerning our prayer to the saints, there is testimony even in the Old Testament portion of the Bible. Judas Maccabeus, urging his countrymen to battle against the enemies of the homeland, pointed to the prayerful intercession of the former high priest Onias, whom he had seen in a vision praying for all the Jewish people (2Mac 15:12-16 cf. 1 Chr. 29:18; Dan. 3:35; Ps. 131:10 and many others). In the New Testament, Saint John the Theologian in his Revelation testifies that he saw how one of the angels—whom another apostle (Paul) in general terms calls those sent by God to minister to men (Heb. 1:14), and whom the Lord Jesus Christ himself calls guardians and intercessors before God for the little ones (Matt. 18:10, Act 12:7-12,27:23-24) — stood before the altar of God, holding a golden censer; and there was given to him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, ascended before God from the angel’s hand (Rev. 8:3–4). In direct correspondence with these testimonies stand beyond all doubt all those passages of the Bible in which it is related how God himself commands people to seek the prayers of the righteous on their behalf (thus, for example, God commanded Abimelech to seek Abraham’s prayers: Gen. 20:7–17; and Job’s friends to seek the prayers of that righteous man: Job 42:8–10 and others). And by means of the prayers of the latter, God sends his mercies upon them (Exod. 32:11–14; 1Sam 7:8-9,12:23; James 5:17–18).

It is true that in the cited cases the speech concerns the prayers of the righteous during their earthly life; but our God, as the Lord Jesus Christ himself said, is not the God of the dead but of the living—before his face all are alive (Matt. 22:32), and the nature of love, which lies at the foundation of prayer, is such that it never fails (1 Cor. 13:8). Therefore, if the righteous, during their earthly life, guided by love and empowered by the grace bestowed upon them by God, could and can benefit people through their prayers, is it not all the more possible for them after their departure from this world? “The bonds by which the Savior united believers”—let us say it in the words of our first hierarch—“are so strong that even death itself cannot sever them… If it is true that they, even beyond the grave, remain in union with Christ, then it is also true that they stand in connection with us who live on earth. Our saints are not dead beings, but living ones. And if they continue to live, then they continue to love us. Great was the love of God’s holy ones during their lifetime for their brothers, and the holier they were, the more they prayed and labored for them. And now, when the Lord has called them to himself, can it be that this love must be forever extinguished in their souls? Can it be that they are able to forget the Church of the Savior, from whose very bosom they themselves came forth? No. They would sooner cease to live than cease to share in our destiny.” This is why the holy apostles—who, even on earth, prayed for their very enemies (Acts 7:60) and were ready to give not only their temporal lives but their very salvation for their brothers (Rom. 9:1–3)—boldly declared that even after their own departure they would not cease to remember them and care for them (2 Pet. 1:15) and so forth.

There is not much, yet still one can find in the Bible evidence for prayer for the departed as well. Thus, according to the testimony of that same Second Book of Maccabees, Judas Maccabeus offered sacrifice for soldiers who had died in the sin of taking plunder from idolatrous offerings (2Mac 12:39-45); Jesus Son of Sirach says: “Let your generosity extend to all the living, and do not withhold kindness from the dead” (Sir. 7:36). As for why “the all-penetrating wisdom of God does not proclaim loudly enough in divine revelation the commandment to pray for the departed,” Metropolitan Filaret in one of his sermons (vol. 3, p. 212) says that it may be “in order that, relying on this assistance, those who are living might not grow slothful in working out their salvation with fear before bodily death. But when he does not forbid this kind of prayer, does not this signify that he still permits one to cast, though not always a decisively reliable, yet sometimes and perhaps frequently a well-timed rope, to those souls that have broken away from the shore of temporal life but have not yet reached the eternal harbor, who between bodily death and the last universal judgment of Christ are tossed above the abyss—now rising by faith, now sinking by deeds inconsistent with it, now being raised up by grace, now drawn down by the remnants of corrupted nature, now caught up in divine longing, now entangled in the still not entirely shed garment of earthly thoughts.”

Thus the holy Bible, to which unbelievers appeal in support of their rejection of prayers for the departed and to the saints, stands not with them but with those who both before the nineteenth of July assiduously prayed for the repose of the soul of the reposed Hieromonk Seraphim, and who now with special zeal ask for his prayers on their behalf. And sound human reason also stands with them, in justification of their prayerful attitude toward the Venerable One; for neither can it deny the incontrovertible truth of the divinely revealed teaching held by the Orthodox Church regarding the prayerful communion between the living and the departed.

“The human race,” says one Orthodox theologian, “is a single whole: it is like a forest that has grown from one trunk. God has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth (Acts 17:26). This is one family, one kindred, where each member is bound to all the rest by thousands of visible and invisible ties. We benefit from what our forebears have left us. Acting in one way or another upon the family and those around him, a person acts upon even the most distant members of the whole society, because society is a single body whose members are individual families. This is not all—the interaction extends further: whole nations too are known members of one great family of the human race, and therefore they inevitably act upon one another, just as families act upon societies and individuals upon families. And no walls can shield one from this influence, which, like the air, penetrates everywhere through a medium invisible to the eye.” This interaction of souls is not denied even by the best representatives of empirical science, such as Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, Henry Drummond, Charles Secretan, Guyau, Bourget and others. Everyone has surely noticed that in shared life, or under the influence of a strongly aroused feeling of love or hatred, or at the extreme tension of the will, the thought or feeling of one person influences another and is guessed without words.

But by what means does this interaction take place? In the view of the materialists, it is a simple collision of brain matter. “Our neuro-cerebral system, receiving from without the lower forms of energy—such as light, heat, chemical effects, and so on—transforms them into energy of a higher order, which forms the basis of psychic processes. If this is true, then psychic energy is equal to light energy, electrical energy, and so on, and can act not only within the human organism itself but can also spread into the surrounding medium. Taking this hypothesis as their point of departure and establishing an analogy between steel wires and our nerves, these thinkers find it possible for one working brain to exert influence upon another, and acknowledge the direct transmission of psychic waves or rays over a distance. It is known that the state of the nerves must thus be reflected in the state of the surrounding world-ether, and the state of the ether must in turn act upon the nerves of other persons.” But this materialistic explanation of psychic interaction cannot be recognized as adequate, since it wholly fails to explain the interaction of a material atom upon the spirit. “The materialistic explanation,” says Professor Glagolev, “explains nothing; the action of one ether atom upon another through contact is just as incomprehensible as action through a void; and the chief point—it is incomprehensible how the last material atom acts upon the spirit. Here one cannot speak either of void or of fullness, since it turns out that the spatial acts upon the non-spatial. The possibility of such action necessarily forces one to presuppose also the possibility of action of the non-spatial upon the non-spatial—of spirit upon spirit. Toward recognition of such immediate interaction of souls we are also obligated by our moral sense. Only by recognizing the immediate interaction of souls does our unity with our neighbors become comprehensible. Only admitting such interaction can explain for us the moral influence which the Venerable Seraphim, the Sarov ascetic, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, Saint Theophan the Recluse, the well-known Kronstadt Archpriest Father I. I. Sergiev, Elder Ambrose of Optina, and many other bearers of truly Christian love have exerted and continue to exert upon people of pure heart. But if the law of immediate action of souls must be acknowledged, then the interrelationship between the earthly and the heavenly Church, expressed in the prayers of the members of the former and in the influence of those members of the latter who have attained Christian spiritual perfection upon those belonging to the Church militant, must necessarily also be acknowledged.” It is worthy of note that the holy Apostle Paul, unfolding the divinely revealed teaching about the Church of Christ in its practical application to life, appeals to that same law of interaction—as the law of life—about which, on the basis of inner and outer experience, science also speaks. He calls the Church of Christ, whose composition, by his own words, includes both the living and the departed and even angels (Eph 1:10,20-22, cf. Eph. 12:22–23), a body whose head is Christ (Col. 1:18). Just as in a living body there are various members—visible and invisible, strong and weak—and all of them are alive and live themselves and contribute to the life of the whole body through constant interaction, serving and helping one another; so too in the Church of Christ all her members, differing in their dignity and significance, cannot each live on their own without interrelationship with others, and must serve one another with the gift of the Holy Spirit received from God (1 Cor. 12:10–30). The holy apostle also points to the path toward this mutual communion—that path is love (1 Cor. 13:1–6), which lies at the foundation of every prayer.

The belief that the dead do not break off their connection with the living and help them in their affairs, and on the other hand that the prayer of the living for the departed is of benefit to the latter, may be said to be as if innate in the human race; and therefore in all pagan religions there exist both prayers for the dead and the veneration of them. The forms in which this belief finds expression in pagan religions are sometimes very crude and distorted, which is entirely understandable, since those religions themselves are a corruption of the original true religion. What matters to us is the fact of the existence of this belief, which cannot be denied even by those who rise up against the Orthodox teaching about prayers for the dead and the invocation of saints in prayer; for many of the most recent western scholars, who serve as unshakeable authority for such persons, attempt to derive the very idea of God from the pagan cult of ancestor veneration—so widespread is this cult—and many of those who on borrowed authority deny prayers for the dead and the invocation of saints do not refuse to participate even in spiritualistic activities, the foundation of which is a more degraded distortion than paganism of the thought that interaction between the living and the departed is possible.

And in vain do such people appeal to the fact that, according to the teaching of God’s word, each person’s fate beyond the grave depends on his personal spiritual and moral condition during earthly life—on his personal faith and personal deeds—and that there is but one mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus. It is indeed true that a person’s personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by his holy apostles, is the necessary condition on the human side for his salvation, and that whoever does not have this faith—who consciously and obstinately rejects it—shall be condemned, by the word of the Lord himself (Mark 16:16). But from this it does not follow that prayer for the departed is useless; otherwise, prayer for the living must also be declared useless and therefore inappropriate—indeed every prayer, not only for one’s brothers but for oneself—and yet it is so clearly and so insistently commanded to us by God’s word. If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, says the holy apostle of love, let him pray, and God will give life to him—that is, to the one who commits a sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that one should pray for that (1 John 5:16). From these words of the holy apostle of love it follows with logical necessity that prayer can be useless and therefore inappropriate only for those who commit the sin leading to death, which, by the word of that same apostle, consists in conscious and obstinate resistance to the apostolically proclaimed faith in Christ Jesus incarnate for our salvation (1Jn 4:1-3,2:27; cf. Matt. 12:32). And whoever does not commit this sin can neither refrain from praying himself nor refuse to receive others’ prayers on his behalf; because the faith in Christ Jesus that saves a person is inseparable from love, of which prayer is the expression. This prayer would contradict faith in Christ Jesus as the sole mediator between God and man only if it were offered not in Christ’s name and, so to speak, apart from him. Christ Jesus is the one mediator between God and men, but from this it does not follow that there can be no other intercessors in his name. “Just as”—says Stefan Yavorsky in his “Rock of Faith”—“the oneness of the Heavenly Father does not do away with earthly fathers, nor the oneness of Christ the instructor and teacher do away with earthly instructors and teachers, nor the oneness of Christ’s holiness and lordship take away holiness from the rest of the saints and lordship from earthly lords; so neither does the oneness of Christ the Mediator do away with other intercessors; only the manner and degree of mediation differs. For Christ is the mediator by way of preeminence, as has been said; whereas the saints are mediators of a lower and more remote degree from Christ. Christ is the mediator of redemption and of sonship’s prayer to the Father; the saints are mediators of friendly petition alone, according to the words of the Psalter: ‘How precious to me are your friends, O God’ (Ps. 138:17).”

Thus, contrary to the crafty reasonings of the opponents of the celebration that has just taken place, both by the teaching of God’s word and by the considerations of sound reason, Orthodox Russian people had full right even before the nineteenth of July to pray for the repose of the soul of the reposed servant of God Hieromonk Seraphim, and from the nineteenth of July they have that same right to address him—now already as a saint and a holy one of God—with prayers on their own behalf.