It's October! And a new year on Mars...
The position of Orthodox Christianity, in history, has held that natural processes and the movements of the planets are driven by angels. In the past few hundred years, scientists - with mathematicians' help - have dispossessed most of our universe. Some questions remain, yes. But increasingly beyond the purview of, say, the accretion of our Milky Way galaxy.
Modern Orthodoxy seems to be arguing that, yeah, we were a bunch of superstitious ignorants up to Epiphanius and John Damascene. But you can totally follow us when we do necromancies!!
Unlike the veneration for the angel of planet Malacandra, or maybe for the angel who is that planet; necromancy is contradictory in the Bible. On the one hand it's forbidden. On the other hand, as Alex Sorin points out, you can call upon the Sancti for intercession; and the saints are not restricted to the angelic movers of wind and planet, but include also (certain of) the dead. Somewhere in between: king Saul, then barred from asking intercession himself, once called upon a woman in Endor who might bring up a saint on his behalf. That differs from a sinner begging a nun at Agnes' convent to pray for him because... because.
Catacombs and tombs tend to survive the ages and, indeed, Christians could be found down there doing veneration - and begging intercession - from very early years. So Sorin wins on points. The intercession of saints has existed from the earliest days, and extended to dead humans from scarcely-later days. For "great apostasy" restorationists, this happened (I think) too early to extricate from Christianity as the first authors intended. Note that the most notorious restorationist sect, the LDS, goes as far as to post their dead righteous to rule over exoplanets.
Some Christians did attempt to eject necromancy from the faith. Vigilantius is here noted. Jerome had taken him to school, as mah boi does.
To invoke practical necessity, as Gavin Ortlund might, I sometimes dispute Jerome. Jerome was one who preferred the dead to the living. That can be a problem.
I propose here that it is not a problem at base; there is indeed wisdom to be had from the departed, if not from the process of departing. Here I think practical necessity supports Jerome. So - perhaps Sorin could have stopped there.
