HistoricalChristian.Faith

Epiphanius of Salamis on purgatory and prayer for the dead

Dates: c. 375 · Wikipedia
Summary: Cataloguing the heresy of Aerius — who held that praying for the dead is pointless — Epiphanius defends the naming of and prayer for the departed as the established, useful, apostolic practice of the Church, "useful" even if it "does not force back the whole of guilty charges laid to them."

Claims & evidence

Naming and praying for the dead is the Church's established, useful practice

As to mentioning the names of the dead, how is there anything very useful in that? What is more timely or more excellent than that those who are still here should believe that the departed do live, and that they have not retreated into nothingness, but that they exist and are alive with the Master? … Useful too is the prayer fashioned on their behalf, even if it does not force back the whole of guilty charges laid to them. And it is useful also, because in this world we often stumble either voluntarily or involuntarily, and thus it is a reminder to do better.

— Panarion 75 (Against the Aerians), §8 (Frank Williams trans.), source. Epiphanius answers Aerius's objection — that prayer for the dead is useless — by arguing that the practice both confesses the survival of the departed and genuinely benefits them. The qualification that the prayer "does not force back the whole of guilty charges laid to them" is significant: it presumes that some charges remain against the saved dead, charges the Church's intercession addresses. This couples prayer for the dead to a notion of remaining post-mortem liability, a building-block of the purgatory doctrine.

Notes

• Aerius (Panarion 75) is the named counter-witness: he rejected prayer and offering for the dead as pointless — "if the prayer of the people here has benefited the people there, no one should practice piety or perform good works" (75.3.5) — a moral-hazard argument that anticipates the Reformation's. Epiphanius treats this rejection as a heresy and answers that the practice is "useful." Whether the practice was genuinely uncontested in antiquity, and whether (as is sometimes said) Arius too denied it, is weighed on the prayer-for-the-dead-uncontested argument (assessment: sound — Aerius is the one securely-attested denier, catalogued as a heretic against "world-wide agreement").
• The clause "even if it does not force back the whole of guilty charges laid to them" presupposes a state of the saved dead in which sins or penalties remain to be remitted — the conceptual space later doctrine fills with purgatory. Compare the the cleansing-fire argument and Cyprian's oblation-for-the-dead witness on the purgatory timeline.
• The text is quoted from Frank Williams's standard English translation of the Panarion (Brill); the wording above matches that edition. Other renderings of §8 read "even if it does not cut off all of [the] sins," reflecting the same Greek.