By Samuel Maresius, French Protestant Theologian, (1599-1673)
Translated
1. Solomon in the Song of Songs 8:6 testifies that love is stronger than death, so it is not surprising if the love we show to the living is not immediately extinguished by their death. Therefore, to grieve the dead is human, indeed, it would be inhuman not to be touched by any longing for them. Christ himself wished to bewail Lazarus with tears and lamentation, whom he had loved especially; and although “the care of the funeral, the condition of the burial, the pomp of the funeral rites and the like are more consolations for the living than aids to the dead,” as Augustine rightly and truly declares in, On Care for the Dead, chapter 2, nevertheless, he would be reckoned a misanthrope and to have lost his humanity who neglected such offices of kindness and showed no signs of love toward the deceased. Whether, however, prayers and what are commonly called suffrages for the dead should be used among these duties is not undeservedly asked.
2. The matter will be decided for the affirmative if one attends to the practice of today’s Jews, who have a book called Mazor or Machzor, containing among various other things, the Office for the Dead, although God prescribed nothing of the sort in their law. In imitation of them the opinion favoring such practices is also pleasing to the Papists, for from this Diana, as once to Demetrius at Ephesus, a very abundant profit, and they urge the necessity of these prayers under the pretext of Purgatory, in which the souls of the dead are miserably tormented by the very same fire of Gehenna by which the damned are burned, until they are freed from that foul condition by the aid of the living. And so, it has a worthy lid on the dish. We, however, rightly deny that prayers are to be said for the dead or that such offices should exist. We do not now expressly discuss Purgatory itself but only wish to recall for examination those prayers which are made by the Papists.
3. First, then, since every prayer, according to James 1:6, must be made in faith, and the rule and measure of faith is the word of God, Romans 10:17, from this we should conclude that such prayers are pleasing and acceptable to God; but concerning prayers for the dead there is profound silence throughout Scripture. French Cardinal Perronius himself acknowledges this, (Reply to the King of Great Britain, book 4, chap. 8, third insert). The ancients also recognized this, who either used or defended that very rite, albeit with very different scope. Tertullian counted “offerings for the dead” (On Military Service) among those observances which “without the instrument of any Scripture, by the title of mere tradition, thence vindicated by the patronage of custom.” He says, “If you demand a law of Scripture for these and other such disciplines, no law will be produced to you; custom is the author, confirms and enjoins observance.” Likewise, Epiphanius, against the heresy of Aëtius, chapter 75, acknowledges that there is not a command of a father there, but only a regulation of a mother, namely an institution of the Church, which ought not rashly to be dissolved.
4. But if prayers for the relief of the dead in Purgatory were to rely on any testimony of Scripture, the discerning Jesuits would doubtless have noticed it, nor would Peter Cotton, the leading member of that order, have needed to set as questions to be inquired by the devil in the exorcism of Adrienne Fraxinea that he should discover from the devil in what place of Scripture “Purgatory and the invocation of the Saints” could be most clearly proved. The matter, we say, is well known and told throughout all Gaul, and is recounted by the most learned Thuanus in his History of his Times, book 132. Now since religion for us is to not believe beyond what is written, 1 Cor. 4:6 — and, to quote Basil in his Sermon on Faith, it is manifest a fall of faith and a clear vice of pride either to reject something that Scripture has, or to introduce anything that is not written — we rightly consider such prayers, of which nothing is found written in the Testament of God, should be omitted.
5. Moreover, not only is there nothing in Scripture that commends such prayers, but there are many things that oppose them. We read of the tears and lamentations of the saints over the dead — as of the patriarchs over the death of Jacob, of David over Saul and Jonathan, of the same over Absalom, Abner, and the son he had by Bathsheba — but we do not read of their prayers and sacrifices or suffrages for the dead. Indeed, when his little son was ill, David fasted and prayed, and when the child died, having been left with the sackcloth, he abstained from continuing the fast and prayers, and he put away all sorrow and care for the dead from his heart, as appears from 2 Samuel 12:22–23. For it was clear to him that the dead have no part in anything that is done under the sun, as Solomon states in Ecclesiastes 9:6, whose words Lyra thus interprets: that the dead have no share “in the suffrages which the living make for the deceased because they avail them nothing.”
6. What is more, God prescribed no sacrifices for the dead, among so many sacrifices prescribed under the Law; indeed, He seriously commanded the Israelites to refrain from all immoderate mourning for the dead, and from the superstitious rites of the Gentiles, by which they were wont to [allegedly] aid the departed, especially through vows. Paul’s exhortation in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 likewise pertains to this, whereby he forbids immoderate mourning at the death of those near to us, particularly like those who have no hope. For we ought to hope that they are well, according to God’s promises, therefore, they ought not to be bewailed beyond measure. Bellarmine himself, in book 2, On Purgatory, chapter 15, acknowledges that in proposing Paul’s consolations to the faithful in the death of relatives especially by mentioning Purgatory, it was primarily to counter the torment of Purgatory, for which the living’s prayers could [allegedly] provide assistance. However, Christ Himself in the Gospel earnestly calls us back from such rites in the person of him to whom he said, “Let the dead bury their dead; but go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
7. Moreover, since Scripture divides all men into only two classes, sheep and goats, the good and the evil (Matt. 25:32), some of whom walk the broad way and others enter by the narrow (Matt. 7:13), and death is for all “the last boundary of things,” so that immediately upon death the judgment of each one takes place (Heb. 9:27) — whence death itself was called δάνος in Macedonian speech, perhaps from the Hebrew dan, meaning judgment — and “whichever tree falls, there it shall lie” (Eccl. 11:3), exemplified by the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:22–23), each being received at once to his place by death, a narrative which, if Justin is to be believed (or at least in his “Questions and Answers,” question 60), holds this doctrine: “after the separation of the soul from the body, by no providence or care can men obtain any help,” — we do not see how in any way the prayers and suffrages of the living can be of benefit to the dead.
8. And what of the reprobate and damned who already suffer punishments in Hell? The Papists do not wish this for them, for they do not even pray for infants who die before baptism — whom they think are cast into Limbo to the punishment of eternal loss, from which there is no redemption. Nor can Bellarmine be pleased with the story in his second book on Purgatory, chapter 8, the fable of Damascene, about the soul of a certain Falconilla recalled from Orcus, the god of the underworld, by the prayers of St. Thecla; and of Trajan, likewise delivered from Hell by the prayers of Gregory. For indeed, “easy is the descent to Hell, but to retrace the steps and return to upper air — that is a laborious task.” Yet the very prayers of the Papists sometimes seem to be offered for those who are either in Hell or in a slippery state and in imminent danger of falling into Tartarus; for after the Mass for the Dead, this is the Offertory: “Deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of Hell and from the deep pit; deliver them from the mouth of the lion, and let not Tartarus swallow them.” Bellarmine is strangely perplexed about the meaning of these words and has nothing certain to assert about them (book 2, On Purgatory, chap. 5).
9. But what of the elect and pious, who “have gone before us with the sign of faith, and sleep the sleep of peace,” as the Canon of the Mass puts it? At death they have reached the goal and obtained the prize, and when they cease to be Travelers they become those Received; for between these two states no intermediate sharing or denial of the ultimate things can be given for the pious. What the Thief on the cross obtained, when Christ said to him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” Luke 23:43, happens to all other pious ones who commit their spirits into the hands of the Lord: When this tent is destroyed they attain the heavenly dwelling and are received to Christ, 2 Cor. 5:1–2; Phil. 1:23. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors,” Rev. 14:13: words to be understood not “of martyrs only,” but “of all the pious and faithful,” and which do not allow the Roman Church’s “Office for the Dead” to be brought to that place, as Ribera denies. Moreover, it is not appropriate to pray for the blessed and those consummated in Christ, since for this reason Augustine rightly said the oft-quoted line, “He does the martyr an injury who prays for him.”
10. Since even from the hypotheses of the Papists these prayers for the dead, which rest upon the doctrine of Purgatory, are a merely human fiction, and French scholar Claudius Salmasius was right to say in Epist. Simplicius Verinus, p. 44, that it is “a comment of a heretical man” (that is, of Origen) “derived from the philosophy of the Gentiles,” — to which I assert that nothing was answered by the pseudo Justus Pacius in his plainly unfair “Examination,” no. 105, except abuse and shameless mouthings; and since that cannot stand before the word of God, any more than Dagon the idol could stand before the ark, these things must also collapse; — but that we may not seem to make the comparison equal with the Papists, who, to prove Purgatory, bring forth prayers for the dead, and who, in order to establish Purgatory, urge these very practices, let us now overturn this truly superstitious rite employed in honoring the memory of the dead on their deathbeds from their own opinions themselves, and with the feathers of that little horn stick into its eyes: for then Papistical errors are most powerfully destroyed, when what they teach in that Communion is plainly seen to be mutually inconsistent; “No one who disagrees with him will suit him.”
11. First: therefore, prayers of this kind, by the peculiar word “suffragia” [i.e., “votes,” which now has the meaning of intercessory prayers for the dead) as they are called, very catachrestically, since the Classical authors by that name denote it as the votes of those who have jointly either to judge something or to elect; whence Cicero, Concerning the Laws on Suffrage: “It is better that votes in appointing a magistrate or even in judging a defendant be cast openly.” Moreover, besides the fact that our opponents have nothing certain about the number of suffrages [necessary to be prayed] for the dead, Bellarmine enumerates three (book 2, On Purgatory, chap. 16). Jesuit Giles de Coninck gives four (Disp. 11, On the Uncertainty of the Sacred, Dubio 7), and it is even not known among the same what it is to help the deceased by way of a suffrage, about which various opinions exist in Dutch philologist Erycius Puteanus (quest. 5 part 2, On the Uncertainty of Indulgences, Dubio 3). And since they do not allow the merits and righteousness of Christ to be imputed for our formal justification before God, Bellarmine, (book 2, On justification, ch. 7), unrighteously decrees that the merits and suffrages of the living are imputed to the dead for their discharge.
12. Then, likewise, Dominican theologian Dominic de Soto, (book 4, On the Sentences, dist. 45, q. 3, art. 2), cited by Bellarmine in book 2, On Purgatory, ch. 15, denies that saints reigning in heaven pray for souls that are in Purgatory. Perhaps he fears that those most holy and most efficacious prayers would immediately exhaust Purgatory. But if the saints do [allegedly] pray for them, even though they are perfected in charity, why should we be obliged to perform this duty? Bellarmine himself determined that these suffrages benefit neither the blessed nor the damned, but only those who dwell in Purgatory (ibid., ch. 18). Coninck concurs (V. S. dub. 8). Now since in the end we have nothing certain about whether any particular dead person is [allegedly] in Purgatory or not, it follows that those suffrages cannot be performed for anyone in particular, much less continued for many years for this one or that one, when there are privileged altars where a single Mass celebrated will already have freed him long ago, or when the efficacy of the sacraments by the work performed has so availed that he departed free from every sin, contrite, confessed, absolved, anointed with the oil of the sick, or has already fulfilled the time allotted to him in Purgatory.
13. Moreover, they want the time each soul spends in Purgatory to be divinely fixed; and Dominic de Soto, cited by Bellarmine (book 2, On Purgatory, ch. 9), holds that it will not last for anyone beyond ten years. Bellarmine, however, argues to the contrary from the custom of his Church, which celebrates anniversary masses for the dead who died a hundred or two hundred years ago, when he could have added papal indulgences for thirty and forty thousand years; Nor is the soul allowed to leave before the fixed time expires unless the last quarter has been fully paid. Such is the fairly consistent opinion of all the Pontiffs. Now, since by the immutable justice of God, whose decree the Merit, Satisfaction, Intercession of Christ could not overturn, those souls are to be tortured until they have been duly purified, [the obvious conclusion is that] all our prayers for them will be in vain. Miserable also is the case of those who either had no friends or whose friends were hard-hearted, leaving no one to pray for them, nor annual revenues by which the prayers of the Church might be provided for them. For common aid, when it must be distributed among so many, can bring little comfort to individuals.
14. Those who pray for a martyr commit an injury—whose prayers we ought rather commit to ourselves —is often on the lips of the Pontiffs, citing Augustine (Sermon 17, On the Words of the Apostles). But Bellarmine, against Thomas, maintains (book 2, On Purgatory, ch. 15) that we may be purified by the prayers of those [martyrs] who are in Purgatory and that they can pray and obtain graces for us. He allows they can be invoked by us, at least extraordinarily. Therefore, it would be an injury to pray for them. Among other arguments by which our opponents impugn the certainty of salvation, this is not the least; because if that is granted, prayers would be superfluous. Now they assert that souls in Purgatory are certain of their salvation; thus Bellarmine (book 2, On Purgatory, ch. 4). Therefore, our prayers for them are in vain.
15. But if such prayers for the dead are repugnant to the Word of God and to the hope which we ought to form concerning the state of the pious after death, and contrary even to the assertions of the Papists themselves, how much more must this be said of the other kinds of suffrages used for them? Such is the false sacrifice of the Mass which benefits the dead as much as the living; such are the indulgences of the Popes who extend with munificence the power of the keys of loosing on earth, as well as the underworld; but these gifts are conferred upon those who “stretch forth assisting hands,” nor “can the poor be consoled,” as the canonists say, “because they are not there.” Such penitential works which survivors impose on themselves for the relief of the dead, intending, of course, to transfer to themselves part of the labors which they must endure; although if the things that are told about the pains of Purgatory are true, in which, according to the vision of some priest, souls fixed to spits are thrust into the fire, torturers pouring fat dripping from it upon them, and according to Bellarmine (book 2, On Purgatory, ch. 6) they are tortured in the same place and by the same fire as the damned, and the difference between the fire of Purgatory and the damned is as great as between glowing embers and the breath of a human mouth — which is at times a trifle — so that the penitential works of the living will be as effective mitigating those pains as a light touch of a wet finger would have benefited the burning Epulon in Gehenna.
16. Let us be silent about that insolent pride of those who, by their penitential works, (of which someone said with Isaiah, chapter 1: “Who hath required this at your hands?” For by this name come Stations of the Cross, flagellations, pilgrimages, hair-shirts, the circular prayers of the Rosary, and similar trifles), dare to ascribe what they deny to the satisfactions of Christ; for if these things could not prevent the pious and faithful from undergoing the torments of Purgatory, by what right can they free the souls of the pious by them? What is more absurd than to wish to make satisfaction for others by those who cannot for make satisfaction for themselves? “I myself am nearest to me,” says that man in the Comedy, so why do you think you can bring relief to others, if you can’t even help yourself? If the satisfaction of Christ for us is full and perfect, why do you wish to sew your rags to His royal cloth? If it is lacking and imperfect, who will dare to supply what is wanting since Apelles’ paintings remained imperfect for the simple reason that no painter dared to lay his hand upon the works of that man? And what need is there of penitential works when the endowments of the Church and the oblations of Masses can do more here than all other remedies; for “money can do all things even before God,” as Marcus de Bonnyers, Jesuit, has it (chap. 2 of the little French book, On the Means of Helping Souls which are in Purgatory); but about these things elsewhere. Now we only deal with prayers for the dead.
17. While the Papists endeavor to defend these things from Scripture, Antiquity opposes them, acknowledging this custom as lacking the support of the Scriptures, as we showed above § 3. Mutual prayers, to which Scripture urges us, are duties to be exchanged among the living, not to be extended to the dead who, being delivered from the dangers of this life, are no longer subject to sin or to temptations. To be baptized for the dead (1 Cor. 15:22) is not, as Bellarmine wrongly asserts, (book 1, On Purgatory, ch. 6), “to do penance for the dead,” for nothing more absurd can be imagined, or to torture and mortify oneself for them; for that has been shown above to be foreign to the duty of Christians; but rather it is to receive the sacrament of baptism in the hope of resurrection on behalf of the dead, since formerly Christians assembled in cemeteries for their sacred rites, which is gathered from Eusebius (book 6, ch. 13; book 7, ch. 9; book 9, ch. 2), or rather to receive baptism when about to die. That many delayed their baptism until the point of death is a matter well known from ecclesiastical history, hence the name “Clinicicorum” [i.e., ‘of the sickbed’]. For this was an argument of future resurrection. “While the sacrament of baptism is administered to the body,” says Tertullian, “the body is consecrated to immortality.” This interpretation, simple and most full, is followed by Cornelius à Lapide, Jesuit, and John à Gorcum “on that passage.”
18. Bellarmine would not have dragged Genesis 23:3 into this had he any scruples, for there is a difference between providing a funeral and praying for the dead. Moreover, the text itself contains nothing else than Abraham rose up from beside his dead [wife]. Likewise, the fact that the Patriarchs desired their bones to be carried out of Egypt into the land of promise did not pertain to their becoming sharers in sacrifices to be offered to God, as Bellarmine supposes (book 1, On Purgatory, ch. 3), for in former times there were no instituted sacrifices for the dead; but only that they might recall their souls from Egypt and renounce communion with idolaters even in death. Cornelius à Lapide brings many reasons for this vow in Gen. ch. 47, but he does not mention this one. Fasts and lamentations that are read in Scripture on account of the dead—like the mourning of the Gileadites for Saul, of David for Saul and for Jonathan, and also for Abner—were testimonies of grief and sadness at their death, not prayers or suffrages for them. There exists a funeral song composed by David for Saul and Jonathan (2 Sam. 1) in which there is not the slightest trace of prayers for them; moreover Saul, impious and dead in mortal sin, whose soul, as Bellarmine asserts (book 2, On Purgatory, ch. 6), was destined to descend into Gehenna, and was not among those for whom it would be lawful to pray.
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27. Here, then, seems to have been a progression of error. When the names of the martyrs were publicly recited for the sake of honor, so that others might be thereby incited to pursue martyrdom, the other faithful came to think that they should become participants in the same honor. Both are evident from Cyprian: concerning the martyrs, he says (book 4, Epistle 5), “We always offer sacrifices for them”; concerning others (book 1, Epistle 9) he forbids “that any offering be made for his repose, or that any supplication in his name be frequented in the Church” by one who had appointed a presbyter as guardian in his will; and Chrysostom in Acts 12 sufficiently shows that there was equality of condition in that honor: “An offering is made,” he says, “for the martyrs and for all the dead.” The reason that this honor was either coveted by all or communicated to them was the custom of honoring the dead which Christians had become accustomed to among the Gentiles; this was fostered by preconceived opinions, either about a twofold resurrection or about the exclusion of souls from the vision of God before the day of judgment. Fear of the final conflagration also came in, by which all [would be consumed], Ambrose declares in Psalm 37, except the Blessed Virgin herself.
28. But when the matter was more thoroughly examined, Augustine’s reasons were not sufficient to maintain that custom to such an extent that it should be defended at all costs; deeming it dangerous to assail a practice already received and confirmed in manners, and alarmed by the example of Aerius who had suffered for that reason, he first denied that prayers should be offered for the martyrs. Then he suspected that those customary prayers might benefit those who were of middle condition, neither desperately wicked nor perfectly good. Although this opinion was very doubtful among the ancients, it was eagerly seized upon by those who, preying on the superstition and anxieties of the common people, gained enormous riches for themselves from such suffrages. For this is that “Pactolus” which carries away such a supply of gold. This is that alchemy by which the Pontiffs change the lead of their bulls into gold. Thus, it was not in the beginning.
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