Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 9.djvu/292

 UHBO

257

UMBO

undoubtedly the general tradition Ixsfore St. Augut^ tine's time.

^2) Teadnng qf Sainl Auausline. — ^In his earlier wntmgs St. Augustine himself agrees with the com- mon teaditimi. This in De libero arbitrio" (III, in P. L.y XXXIIy 1304), written several years before the Ptolaglan controversy, discussing the fate of unbap- tiied infants after death, he writes: " It is superfluous to inquire about the merits of one who has not any merits. For one need not hesitate to hold that hfe may be neutral as between good conduct and sin, and that as between reward and punishment there may be a neutral sentence of the judge." But even before the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy St. Augus- tine had already abandoned the lenient traditional view, and in the course of the controversy he himself 0(mdemned, and persuaded the Council of Carthage (418) to condemn, the substantially identical Pelagian teaching affirming the existence .of an intermediate place, or of any place anywhere at all (idlus alicubi locus), in which children who pass out of this life un- baptised live in happiness" (Denzinger, 102). This means that St. Augustine and the African Fathers believed that unbaptised infants share in the common positive misery of the damned, and the very most that St. Augustine concedps is that their punishment is the mildest of all, so mild indeed that one may not say that for them non-existence would be preferable to exist- ence in such a state ("De peccat. mcritis", I, xxi, in P. L., XLIV. 120; "Contra Jul.", V, 44, ibid., 809; etc.). But this Augustinian teaching was an innova- tion in its day, and the historyr of subsequent Catholic speculation on this subject is taken up chiefly with tne reaction which has ended in a return to the pre- Augustinian tradition.

(c) Poarr-AuGUSTiNiAN Teachinq. — ^After enjoying several centuries of undisputed supremacy, St. Augus- tine's teaching on original sin was first successfully challenged by St. Anselm (d. 1109), who maintained that it was not concupiscence, but the privation of orifldnal justice, that constituted the essence of the in- herited sin (" De conceptu virginal! " in P. L., CLVIII, 431-64). On the special question, however, of the punishment of original sin after death, St. Anselm was at one with St. Augustine in holding that unbaptized children share in the positive sufferings of the damned (ibid., 457-61); and Abelard was the first to rebel against the severity of the Augustinian tradition on this point. Accoixling to him there was no guilt (eulpdy, but only punishment (paina), in the proper notion of original sm; and although this doctrine was rightly condemned by the Council of Soissons in 1140 (Dens., 376), his teaching, which rejected material torment (jxina senatts) and retained only the pain of loss (pama damni) as the eternal punishment of original sin (" Comm. in Rom." in P. L., CLXXVIII, 870), was not only not condemned but was generally accepted and improved upon by the Scholastics. Peter Lombard, the Master of the Sentences, popular- ized it ("Sent.", II, xxxiii, 6, in P.L., CXCII, 730), and it acquired a certain degree of official authority from the letter of Innocent III to the Archbishop of Aries, which soon found its way into the "Corpus Juris ". Pope Innocent's teaching is to the effect tnat those dying with only original sin on their souls will suffer "no other pain, whether from material fire or from the worm of conscience, except the pain of being deprived forever of the vision of God " (" Corp. Juris ", D^sret. 1. Ill, tit. xlii, c. iii — Majores), It should be noted, however, that this pcena damni incurred for origimd sin impHed, with Abelard and most of the eu^ Scholastics, a certain degree of spiritual torment, and that St. Thomas was the first great teacher who broke away completely from the Augustinian tradi- tion on this subject, and reljdng on the principle, de- rived through the Pseudo-Dionysius from the Greek Falhen, that human nature as such with all its powers IX.— 17

ami rights was uiiaffected by the Fall {^tuod nahuratid ttianent irUegra), umintnincil, at least virtually, what the great majority of later Catholic theologians have expressly taught, that the limbus infantium is a place or state of perfect natural happiness.

No reason can be given — so argued the Angelic Doctor — ^for exempting unbaptized children from the material tonncnts of hell {pcsna senstu) that does not hold good, even a fortiori, for exempting them also from internal spiritual suffering (pcena damni in the subjective sense), since the latter in reality is the more grievous penalty, and is more opposed to the mitissima mena which St. Augustine was willing to admit CDe Malo, y, art. iii). Hence he expressly denies tnat they suffer any " interior affliction ", in other words that they experience any pain of loss (nihil omnino dolebunt de carentia visionU divimB — " In Sent.", II, 33, q. ii, a. 2). At first (" In Sent.", loc. cit.) St. Thomas held this absence of subjective suffering to be con^ patible with a consciousness of objective loss or priva- tion, the resi gnat ion of such souls to the ways of God's providence being so perfect that a knowlecfge of what they had lost through no fault of their own does not interfere with the full enjoyment of the natural goods they possess. Afterwards, however, he adopt^ the much simpler ps>'chological explanation which denies that these souls have any knowledge of the super- natural destiny they have missed, this knowledge being itself supernatural, and as such not included in what is naturally due to the separated soul (De Malo, loc. cit.). It should be added that in St. Thomas's view the limbus infantium Ls not a mere negative state of immunitv from suffering and sorrow, but a state of positive happiness in which the soul is united to God by a knowledge and love of Him proportionate to nature's capacity.

The teaching of St. Thomas was received in the Schools, almost without opposition, down to the Reformation porioil. The very few theologians who, ^nth Gregory of Rimini, stood out for the severe Augus- tinian view, were commonly designated by the oppro- brious name of tortores infantium (see the brief list in Noris, "Vind. August.", HI, v, in P. L., XLVII, 651 sqq.). Some writers, like Savonarola (De triumpho crucis. III, 9) and Catharinus (De statu parvulorum sine bapt. decedentium), added certain details to the current teaching — for example that the souls of un- baptized children will ht united to glorious bodies at the Resurrection, and that the renovated earth of which St. Peter speaks (II Pet., iii, 13) will he their happy dwelling-place for eternity. At the Reforma- tion, Protestants generally, but more especially, the Calvinists, in reviving Augustinian teaching, added to its original harshness, and the Jansenists followed on the same line^. This reacted in two ways on Catholic opinion, first by compelling attention to the true historical situation, which the Scholastics had under- stood very imperfectly, and second by stimulating an all-round opposition to Augustinian severity regard- ing the effects of original sin; and the immediate re- sult was to set up two Catliolic parties, one of whom either rejected St. Thomas to follow the authority of St. Augustine or vainly tried to rt»coiicile the two, while the other remained faithful to the Greek Fathers and St. Thomas. The latter party, after a fairly pro- longed struggle, lias certainly the balance of success on its side.

Besides the professed advocates of Augustinianism, the principal theologians who belonged to the first party were Bcllannine, Petavius, and Bossuet, and the chief ground of their opposition to the previously prevalent Scholastic view was that its acceptance seemed to compromise the very principle of the author- ity of tradition. As students of history, they felt bound to admit that, in excluding unbaptized children from any place or state even of natural happiness and condemning them to the hre of hell, St. Avi^\sl^^5k&^^2QS^

1