How Afterlife Issues Affect Claims About Prayer To Saints

People often overlook some of the evidence that's relevant to evaluating prayer to saints. After praying to saints became popular (with ongoing opposition), other issues continued to prevent some people from accepting it and led others to accept significantly different forms of it. In a book about the cult of the saints, Matthew Dal Santo discusses how differing views of the afterlife led to what he calls "radical" and "profound" differences in how people viewed prayer to saints (Debating The Saints' Cult In The Age Of Gregory The Great [United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012], 308, 315). A belief in soul sleep could prevent one person from believing in prayer to saints and lead another person to believe in it, but in a significantly different form than what's advocated by, say, modern Roman Catholics or modern Eastern Orthodox. Or think of purgatory. There are connections between purgatory and Catholic views of prayer to saints, what saints are doing in heaven, and such. Think of prayers to saints that ask them to help those in purgatory or purgatorial apparitions that supposedly referred to the saints' intercession for those in purgatory, for example. But many pre-Reformation sources rejected purgatory. Go here for a post that quotes some of Dal Santo's comments on the diversity of afterlife views held by pre-Reformation sources, including for hundreds of years after prayer to saints became popular.