If the general consent of a whole age as expressed by its chief writers, including the leading bishops of Rome, and by its synodical decrees, is able to determine a doctrine, certainly the Patristic Church transmitted to the Middle Ages as de fide that infants dying unbaptized (with the exception only of those who suffer martyrdom) are not only excluded from heaven but doomed to hell. Accordingly the mediæval synods so define. The second Council of Lyons and the Council of Florence declare that “the souls of those who pass away in mortal sin or in original sin alone descend immediately to hell, to be punished, however, with unequal penalties.” On the maxim that gradus non mutant speciem we must adjudge Petavius1 unanswerable, when he argues that this deliverance determines the punishment of unbaptized infants to be the same in kind (in the same hell) with that of adults in mortal sin: “So infants are tormented with unequal tortures of fire, but are tormented nevertheless.”
Nevertheless scholastic thought on the subject was characterized by a successful effort to mollify the harshness of the Church-doctrine, under the impulse of the prevalent semi-Pelagian conception of original sin. The whole troup of schoolmen unite in distinguishing between pœna damni and pœna sensus, and in assigning to infants dying unbaptized only the former—i.e., the loss of heaven and of the beatific vision—and not the latter—i.e., positive torment. They differ among themselves only as to whether this pœna damni, which alone is the lot of infants, is accompanied by a painful sense of the loss (as Lombard held), or is so negative as to involve no pain at all, either external or internal (as Aquinas argued). So complete a victory was won by this mollification that perhaps only a single theologian of eminence can be pointed to who ventured still to teach the doctrine of Augustine and Gregory—Gregory Ariminensis thence called tortor infantum; and Hurter reminds us that even he did not dare to teach it definitively, but only submitted it to the judgment of his readers.2 Dante, whom Andrew Seth not unjustly calls “by far the greatest disciple of Aquinas,” has enshrined in his immortal poem the leading conception of his day, when he pictures the “young children innocent, whom Death’s sharp teeth have snatched ere yet they were freed from the sin with which our birth is blent,” as imprisoned within the brink of hell, “where the first circle girds the abyss of dread,” in a place where “there is no sharp agony” but “dark shadows only,” and whence “no other plaint rises than that of sighs which from the sorrow without pain arise.”3 The novel doctrine attained papal authority by a decree of Innocent III. (c. 1200), who determined “the penalty of original sin to be the lack of the vision of God, but the penalty of actual sin to be the torments of eternal hell.
A more timid effort was also made in this period to modify the inherited doctrine by the application to it of a development of the baptism of intention. This tendency first appears in Hincmar of Rheims († 882), who, in a particularly hard case of interdict on a whole diocese, expresses the hope that “the faith and godly desire of the parents and godfathers” of the infants that had thus died unbaptized, “who in sincerity desired baptism for them but obtained it not, may profit them by the gift of Him whose Spirit (which gives regeneration) breathes where it pleases.” It is doubtful, however, whether he would have extended this lofty doctrine to any less stringent case.4 Certainly no similar teaching is met with in the Church, except with reference to the peculiarly hard case of still-born infants of Christian parents. The schoolmen (e.g., Alexander Hales and Thomas Aquinas) admitted a doubt whether God may not have ways of saving such unknown to us. John Gerson, in a sermon before the Council of Constance, presses the inference more boldly.5 God, he declared, has not so tied the mercy of His salvation to common laws and sacraments, but that without prejudice to His law He can sanctify children not yet born, by the baptism of His grace or the power of the Holy Ghost. Hence, he exhorts expectant parents to pray that if the infant is to die before attaining baptism, the Lord may sanctify it; and who knows, he says, but that the Lord may hear them? He adds, however, that he only intends to suggest that all hope is not taken away; for there is no certainty without a revelation. Gabriel Biel († 1495) followed in Gerson’s footsteps,6 holding it to be accordant with God’s mercy to seek out some remedy for such infants. This teaching remained, however, without effect on the Church-dogma, although something similar to it was, among men who served God in the way then called heresy, foreshadowing an even better to come. John Wycliffe († 1384) had already with like caution expressed his unwillingness to pronounce damned such infants as were intended for baptism by their parents, if they failed to receive that sacrament in fact; though he could not, on the other hand, assert that they were saved.7 His followers were less cautious, whether in England or Bohemia; and in this, too, they approved themselves heralds of a brighter day.
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Footnotes
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Petavius, Dog. Theol., ed. Paris, 1865, ii., 59 sq. ↩
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Hurter, Theolog. Dogmat. Compend., 1878, iii., p. 516: Tract. x., cap. iii., § 729. Wycliffe must be added; but he stands out of the mass. ↩
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Hell, iv., 23 sq.; Purgatory, vii., 25 sq.; Heaven, xxxii., 76 sq. (Plumptre’s translation). ↩
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Cf. Wall, op. cit., p. 371. ↩
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Sermon, De Nat. Mar. Virg., consid. 2, col. 33. ↩
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In iv., Sect. iv., p. 11. ↩
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Cf. Wall, as above. ↩