The Commission Has Spoken
How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats
did it take to change a light panel?
We’ll have a sub-committee meeting
and get back to you with an estimate.”
Peter F. Hamilton
“Let’s form a committee tasked with exploring
why committees are so ineffective.
Then we’ll stand-back and watch it
argue and self-destruct.”
Ryan Lilly
Because it happened in committee, very few believing Christians even noticed.
But…
If – way out in the countryside, away from all traffic and big city noises – you are very, very quiet, you can hear...
The sounds.
The soulful sounds…
Dante (1265-1321) continually ripping up his chapter on the first circle of Hell from Inferno.
And St. Augustine (354-430) still spinning in his grave.
The cause of their angst?
Limbo.
Limbo is not more!
In fact, Limbo evaporated!
Except, maybe, after too many drinks at a rowdy wedding.
For Dante, Limbo is the first and largest of the nine circles of Hell – the eternal abode of the virtuous pagans and infants who died before baptism.
“they did not sin; and yet, though they have merits,
that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism,
the portal of the faith that you embrace.” (Inf. 4.34-6)
Dante makes specific mention of several figures - Socrates and Plato, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Euclid and Diogenes among them – who are in Hell but not among the ranks of the damned.
Often derided as “a theologian’s answer to a question for which there is no answer,” the final end of unbaptized infants – and, by extension, adults – was “resolved” by Augustine of Hippo (354-450), who uncompromisingly declared “Let no one promise infants who have not been baptized a sort of middle place of happiness between damnation and Heaven.” [“The Soul and Its Origin”] Augustine’s position ultimately resulted in the declaration of the Ecumenical Council of Florence (1431-1439): “The souls of those who die in actual mortal sin, or only in Original Sin, immediately descent into Hell,” a position that echoed the Second Council of Lyons (1272–1274).
His position seems particularly harsh, especially given that – at seventeen and long before his conversion to Christianity – Augustine fathered Adeodatus early in his relationship with his concubine of thirteen years. While Augustine never named her, others referred to her as “Floria.” In his Confessions, Augustine wrote,
"It was a sweet thing to be loved, and more sweet still when I was able to enjoy the body of a woman."
"I came to Carthage, and all around me in my ears were the activities of impure loves. I was not yet in love, but I loved the idea of love."
"In those days I lived with a woman, not my lawful wife but a woman whom I had chosen for no special reason but that my restless passions had alighted on her."
In Fourth Century North Africa, concubinage was an acknowledged relationship that protected a woman’s reputation - she was not a prostitute – and a man from being charged with “carnal knowledge.” The relationship was distinguished from a formal marriage only by certain legal restrictions and was marked by the informality of its beginning and the possibility of voluntary dissolution. Moreover, it was a reflection of the rigid class system of the late Roman empire. It is also possible that Floria was a former slave and Augustine, a Roman citizen, would not have been able to marry her. Augustine wrote, “But she was the only one and I was faithful to her.”
In his Confessions, Augustine indicates that there was an unwillingness – presumably on his part – to have children, giving rise to speculation that some form of birth control was practiced during the final ten-plus years of the relationship. (Horror of horrors! A saint practiced birth control!)
It appears that, eventually (and under pressure from his mother, Monica, who aspired to higher office and social positions for her son), Floria was dispatched back to North Africa, after having faithfully accompanied Augustine and their son to Rome and Milan, and “after having made a vow to you [God] that she would never go to bed with another man…” (Confessions) "When they took from my side her with whom I had slept for so long, my heart was torn at the place where it stuck to her, and the wound was bleeding.....My heart, which clung to her, was broken and wounded and dropping blood,” he wrote in his autobiography.
In 380, Roman emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the only legitimate religion of the empire. At about the same time, Augustine assumed teaching positions in Milan and in 386, at age 31, converted to Christianity, according to him after hearing a voice direct him “take up and read” and opening St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 13:13-14:
“Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts there.”
Augustine and Adeodatus were baptized in Milan in April 387; four years late he was ordained a priest in Hippo (now Annaba) in Algeria and eventually he became the seminal and most influential theologian in Christian history.
Adeodatus died in 390 – barely three years after his and his father’s baptism and before reaching his eighteenth birthday - at the same age as his father when Adeodatus was born. Augustine described his son with such admiration and awe – praising his intellect and philosophic curiosity and discoursing on the intellectual dialogues shared by father and son - that it is difficult to appreciate his willingness to condemn unbaptized children to damnation. But he did:
“Let no one promise infants who have not been baptized a sort of middle place of happiness between damnation and Heaven, for this is what the Pelagian heresy promised them.” (“The Soul and Its Origin”).
Augustine’s contemporary, Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390) contended that infants dying without baptism would spend eternity on the fringes – on the “hem” – of Heaven in a state akin to eternal earthly-like pleasure.
“It will happen, I believe . . . that those last mentioned [infants dying without baptism] will neither be admitted by the just judge to the glory of Heaven nor condemned to suffer punishment, since, though unsealed [by baptism], they are not wicked.”
Others would open residence to faithful Jews, especially the prophets and patriarchs, who, like unbaptized infants, would pass eternity on the edge of Heaven.
Somewhere around 1300, the now disappeared Limbo received its name from the Latin “limbus” for “hem” or “edge” and, eventually, residency was opened to others – faithful Jews, especially the prophets and patriarch, who lived before the time of Jesus.
[Ancestrally speaking, the existence of Limbo was a favorite form of self-soothing and (hopefully) well-intentioned comforting for Irish Catholics (and not a few others) when speaking of infants who had died shortly after birth: “At least they’re in Limbo, you know.”]
And the list of “theologians” – Tertullian, Ambrose, Peter Lombard, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Bellarmine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera - who debated the existence and nature of Limbo continued until July 2007, when the Roman Catholic Church’s International Theological Commission released the 18,470-word document “The Hope of Salvation For Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized.”
Significantly, the Commission’s document was release with the approval of and during the pontificate (2005-2913) of Pope Benedict XVI – the formidable, traditionalist and conservative Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
In a quintessentially political move, the document notes that Limbo “never entered into the dogmatic definitions of the Magisterium [teaching authority of the Church], even if that same Magisterium did at times mention the theory in its ordinary teaching up until the Second Vatican Council [1962-1965].” It’s a theological blah-blah-blah way of saying “the Church can never be wrong.” Nonetheless, some have argued that Benedict’s approval of the document reflected the greatest change in Church teaching since Vatican II.
Strictly speaking, the Commission was only willing to affirm that there are "strong grounds for hope that God will save infants when we have not been able to do for them what we would have wished to do, namely, to baptize them into the faith and life of the Church."
And now, to 2023.
Gregory of Nazianzus believed. He had no proof.
Augustine condemned, proclaimed and wrote without proof.
Even the Theological Commission could only speak of “theory” and “hope.” It has no proof!
In many ways Augustine et al, even the commission, are philosophical (probably not intellectual) cousins of America’s conservative and evangelical Christians and their political comrades who poo-poo Evolution with the mock “Who was there to see it? Show us the proof.”
Yet, these same posses, like Augustine, insist that the world must believe what they believe. Specifically, the world must believe “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (Genesis 1:27).”
Why must we believe that?
The first chapter of Genesis was composed somewhere around 1450-1400 BC – 3400 years ago. Modern man evolved - Yes! We wrote EVOLVED – approximately 200,000 years and the earliest writing – Sumerian script on clay tablets with reed or wooden styluses – began about 3,400 BC.
While tradition holds that Moses authored Genesis, rabbinical Judaism calculated his lifespan to be between 1391 and 1271 BC and St. Jerome, who translated the Scriptures from Hebrew (and some Greek) to Latin – the Vulgate (or vulgar language of the populace) - placed Moses in the 16th Century BC.
No matter how you calculate it, no one was there to “witness” or “see” “male and female he created them” or record the testimony of witnesses.
At best, “male and female he created them” is a belief of some people. It is without scientific proof and without witnesses.
At worst, it is a cudgel used by some to bludgeon others.
It is time to eliminate – to remove - “male and female he created them” and “God created Adam and Eve” from all political discourse.