Limbo Lost

South of Purgatory, nestled safely in the imagination of luminous figures such as St. Gregory of Nazianzus, stood the abode of unbaptized children.  Over time (not necessarily a positive quantity), the unborn were granted citizenship with their fellow unbaptized.  The land was christened limbus infantium, being the permanent state of those who died without baptism yet without grave personal sin.  However, explicit references for this, either by Greek or Latin Fathers, are rare.

Life was pleasant in Limbo.  It would have been a virtual paradise except that it wasn’t.  For without Baptism, one cannot enjoy the beatific vision, like the unbaptized Angels do, well the good ones anyway.  Yet, there was no punishment.  Elaborating on being excluded from the beatific vision, St. Gregory said “For from the fact that one does not merit punishment it does not follow that one is worthy of being honored.”¹

Limbo was thus Paradise Found, just not found completely.  But then fortunes turned.  St. Augustine decided it would be better if the unbaptized suffered for not being baptized.  Namely, they “share in the common positive misery of the damned” that stems from being rejected from the beatific vision.  Yet, “their punishment is… so mild indeed that one may not say that for them non-existence would be preferable to existence in such a state.”  [Note: if being subjected to double negatives was worse than limbus infantium was never examined by the African Fathers.]

Negatives aside, this torture went on unabated for centuries.  There was even talk of moving Limbo to West of Hell.  But then succor came from the Schoolmen, first the technical point from St. Anselm: privation of original justice constitutes the essence of inherited sin.  Next, Abelard reduced the severity by removing the guilt but retaining the punishment (which was condemned), and so on. 

Finally, using Pseudo-Dionysius’ principle that “human nature as such with all its powers and rights was unaffected by the Fall,” St. Thomas discovered that Limbo was perfect natural happiness!  Kind of like it originally was a millennia earlier.  In the interest of time (decidedly a non-zero quantity here), the next millennia will be bypassed for the moment, although not much changed until the last century.

Then unexplicably, a potentiality was inexplicably actualized: Limbo could no longer be found on the map.  Some conjecture the anti-Scholasticism of the Nouvelle Theologie was the cause.  Others suspected it came from the living members of the Universal Salvation Society, who only plot one terminus.  Others still, wondered if Limbo was just too darn hard to spell.  Whatever the cause, Limbo was deprecated to a conspiracy theory.

But theologians are stubborn things, generally believed to be more stubborn than facts themselves.  So Limbo lived on in the dark corners of inconveniently solved theological problems.  Now, one might deduce from the preceding tone that the subsequent serious exposition of Limbo will not be in a positive light.  Consistency would demand that.  And in as much as consistency is the hobgoblins of little minds, you are at the right place.

 

The main point to be demonstrated is that Limbo is theologically unnecessary.  Let us begin in the middle.  Tautologically, St. Augustine noted: “It is superfluous to inquire about the merits of one who has not any merit” – unless one likes going in circles.

Now, suffering injustice can be meritorious if within the state of grace; and before original sin, there was original justice, which is the state of grace.  Therefore, God, who exists in the infinitely perfect progressive tense (a.k.a. outside of time), can apply the merit accrued by suffering the injustice afflicted by the material evil of a world corrupted by original sin to unborn children, etc, who are judged outside of their original sin, thus providing a baptism of anti-injustice.

Specifically, embedded in the singularity of Creation is the economy of salvation.  This ordering could include a provision that non-comprehended experiences are judged before the person is conceived, thus before contracting original sin.  Certainly, it is superfluous to inquire about the timing of judging non-comprehended experiences since non-comprehension is non-time related.  Okay, that is pushing it because experience is time-related, but there is a non-time-related experience here; namely, the non-experience of the life denied to them.  Or more poignantly and accurately, the life robbed from them.

Genesis records how the serpent tricked Eve and thus effectively Adam.  The effects of original sin do flow from Adam.  But originally, the first pair had the right to life, which was partly stolen from them.  While this was due to their sinful consent, it still remains grand theft larceny.  The Devil was instrumental in robbing them of the original ordering – leaving a life after the Fall that was greatly wounded; albeit original sin is now ubiquitously considered to be an urban myth.

But from the perspective of East of Eden, all miscarriages and early deaths are physical evils indirectly caused by Satan.  These are thus grave injustices suffered by children through no fault of their own.  This follows from the quite reasonable conjecture that God made a promise, a covenant with humanity, an irrevocable offer to everyone to be united with Him.  Accordingly, these physical evils are injustices, permitted by God, and not just merely random misfortunes in a fallen world.

Limbo is (predominately) based on the strict necessity of Baptism.  The Church has always upheld that absolute sense (mostly), but hasn’t been as strict as to what constitutes Baptism: the baptism of desire and martyrdom are the two non-Sacramental exceptions – though nothing prevents adding a third.

The primary and overriding Catholic Dogma is that God has the power to do whatever He wills.  This has the sole limit that willing must be willable, generally expressed as something being non-contradictory.  Of course, willing must be internally consistent with other acts of Will (e.g. dogmas).  Though as God is purely simple, the Blessed Trinity has made only one choice regarding the created order that encompasses everything.

Limbo is a possibility.  But so is predestination to Heaven for those who suffered the injustice of being robbed of a life.  So what should a Catholic believe?  The usual old answer was neatly expressed in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910):

 

The question therefore arises as to what, in the absence of a clear positive revelation on the subject, we ought in conformity with Catholic principles to believe regarding the eternal lot of such persons. Now it may confidently be said that, as the result of centuries of speculation on the subject, we ought to believe that these souls enjoy and will eternally enjoy a state of perfect natural happiness; and this is what Catholics usually mean when they speak of the limbus infantium, the “children's limbo.”

 

But there was a change in attitude.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) doesn’t even mention Limbo.  But the Necessity of Baptism section covers “Children who have died without Baptism.”²  Based on Our Lord's words "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them”³ and the great mercy of God, the Catechism declares these “allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism.”

The International Theological Commission (ITC) is an advisory body, primarily to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith⁴.  In 2007, it released a document entitled “The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptized.”  This is a fairly comprehensive document that first traces the history before launching into the modern response to the question.  It would well serve anyone wishing to learn more details and the backing references.

However, it did not envision justice and injustice melded together as presented here.  Namely, the justice demanded by God because of Original Sin and the injustice injected via the physical evil caused by the application of that same justice to those who were not the cause of the judgment.

Since justice being unjust from its application implies its application is unjust (which equates to God being unjust), this statement is contradictory until recalling that God’s justice is only fully realized in eternity.  Within the full picture, justice is provided for the victims of injustice by rectifying the temporal injustice in eternity.

The converse is worth stating.  For if suffering injustice isn’t credited as merit, together with 1) children are not judged from the sins of their parents (Ezechiel 18:20), 2) God wills that all men be saved and 3) Limbo exists, then God must be injustice since suffering injustice without a cause is unjust, right?  Finally, to keep things cooking, it is important to recall the Fall impacted not only man, but all of creation as it too groans for its redemption.⁵

Now, while covering the Church teachings that must be safeguarded, the ITC document cites Pope Innocent III’s doctrine that “those who die in original sin are deprived of the beatific vision.”⁶  The ITC then astutely inquires: “What we may ask and are asking is whether infants who die without Baptism necessarily die in original sin, without a divine remedy.”  It goes on to give three ways how those who die as such “may perhaps be united to Christ.”⁷

The first way, and the closest to this essay’s theory, is “Broadly, we may discern in those infants who themselves suffer and die a saving conformity to Christ in his own death, and a companionship with him.”⁸  Broadly, these are the same but ultimately only similar.  Every respectable patent examiner would allow this essay’s primary thesis as an independent claim because the merit discovered is novel and non-trivial, and has no prior art [evidently up through 2007].

Delaying coverage of the second, the third way proposes a purely gratuitous gift that "We may perhaps compare this to God's unmerited gift to Mary at her Immaculate Conception, by which he simply acted to give her in advance the grace of salvation in Christ. ”⁹  Here, the issue of merit is resolved by rendering it unnecessary.

While the ITC didn’t attempt a solution outside of offering hope, meritorious suffering of injustice does provide the substance suitable for a theological framework to adequately solve the problem.  However, the ITC did provide supporting arguments, repeatedly and extensively, for this essay’s conjecture that “God made a promise” that offers everyone the possibility to be united with Him.

The ITC notes that Limbo “remains a possible theological opinion”¹⁰ but also points out its difficulties.  Meritorious suffering of injustice is a solution that eliminates the basis for the torturous theory of Limbo.  To close this section, the ITC document’s ending will be echoed with one adaption in bold:

 

“Rather, as we want to reaffirm in conclusion, meritoriously suffered injustice provides stronger¹¹ 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.”¹²

 

The second way listed by the ITC regards “Some of the infants who suffer and die do so as victims of violence”¹³ and goes on to cite the analogy with the Holy Innocents.  For the present thesis, salvation is independent of the manner of death.  But the degree of merit from a violent death would generally be considered as substantially larger.  Moreover and significantly, the conceptual step from abortion to martyrdom is quite small.

In yesteryears, abortion was somewhat of a random act of violence stemming from any number of selfish motives, albeit it was also institutionalized to some degree.  But today, there is a much stronger coherent force at work.  While the same motives are still in play, there is now a ferocious orchestration driving the murders; a global force that increasingly is becoming more open.

This is no secret.  Nevertheless, while the force’s nature can be determined independently, it was succinctly expressed by Sister Lucia of Fatima.  This pivotal revelation has been cited multiple times on this site, whose source evidently is the Virgin Mother.

 

"The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family...  anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue."

 

As usual, the final objective of this “decisive issue" is the destruction of mankind with a focus on the Catholic Church.  But now, it is more directly embedded with a very particular mode.  Abortion strikes at the fruit of marriage, which is the primary end of marriage¹⁴.  This insidious attack is aimed at Christ's Bride by reincarnating the betrayal of Adam and Eve over and over again with each abortion.

However, closer examination reveals the attack’s foundation is the denial of the ontological nature of truth¹⁵.  Thus, it is an attack on Truth, not to mention the Way and the Life.  The implication is clear: for as much as possible, “abortion” is aimed at killing Christ.  Satan, through Herod, was the effective cause of that murder attempt: the Holy Innocents were those caught in the crossfire.  Today, slaughtering unborn children is as close as the Devil can get to the Bridegroom.

The central relation here is that Satan hates God.  The Devil therefore hates everything created by God, especially mankind.  Equating abortion with martyrdom is thus not only reasonable but arguably necessary when the underpinnings are properly understood.  From this perspective, the victims of abortion can analogously be seen as companion martyrs of the Holy Innocents.

While reducing to numbers obscures the horror of abortion, it remains worth mentioning.  Just taking rough numbers for the United States, the tally is some 20 million doctor-inflicted deaths in the last twenty years (now largely via prescription and this ignores the discarded/frozen embryos from IVF).  But this pales in comparison with abortifacients with the bizarre but now familiar phenomenon of migratory fish¹⁶ that fly south every fall after college-aged young women return to campus.

The abortifacient effect of contraceptives is difficult to estimate.  But a factor of 10 is reasonably accurate for here, which translates to 200 million mother-inflicted deaths in the USA over the same period.  Taking a quarter as Church members, 50 million unborn Catholic children have been added to the Holy Innocents, so to speak.

However, the 10s of millions of fathers and mothers are not so innocent.  Polling indicates that Catholics are indistinguishable from the general population regarding artificial contraception usage.  This closely matches the percentage of Catholics who say the Church should allow it. 

Birth is the motion of a living child from the inside to the outside of the mother’s womb – regardless of what the inside/outside challenged may say.  And human life is exactly that, no matter how tiny, and no matter how loud the demonic shouts roar.  But this is straying from the question of Limbo, though it does highlight the magnitude and import.

 

Merit from suffering injustice isn’t really a novelty but rather an extension.  The universal experience of man is a life within the fallen world together with countless injustices arising from countless sins of countless sorts in countless combinations.  This is the common fodder for the working out of one’s salvation.

Meritoriously Suffered Injustice (MSI™) extends the same suffering to the unborn, etc for individuals who cannot make moral choices in their present stage of development.  This extension, a contraction if you will, operates at the very beginning of life.  Here, the rules are, and must be, very different from the ordinary theological perspective.

To examine this state, let us first ask if Limbo is a real possibility or a pending heresy.  1 Timothy 2:4 reads “Who [God] will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”  This implies God wills the unborn to be saved and thus enjoy the beatific vision.  Since God wills this, He must provide the means for its accomplishment.

The stumbling block from antiquity is the will requires the intellect.  But here, the only act of will can be God’s because of the near non-intelligence of the unborn.  However, God has established that human nature desires the good, which ultimately is the desire for God Himself.  In other words, humans intrinsically desire salvation.  As Salvation is the Will of God, and the only thing that can thwart it doesn’t exist (the will¹⁷ of the unborn), it immediately follows the unborn are predestined to Heaven.

With the dots connected, let’s now cross the t’s.  Dr. Ludwig Ott phrased the pertinent doctrine as “Despite men’s sins God truly and earnestly desires the salvation of all men.”¹⁸  He gave the theological grade for this as “Sent. Fidei proxima,” which denotes its close connection to the Faith.  Though immediately, Ott added: “That God desires the salvation, not only of the predestined, but at least of all the faithful, is formally defined.”

Regarding the unborn, the Church has not made a dogmatic definition.  Yet, the Church has the power to define the “all” from 1 Timothy 2:4 means exactly all.  The exclusiveness of being saved or damned is more complicated.  Heaven and Hell are the only two ends defined, but Limbo could be construed as Hell without punishment outside of exclusion from the beatific vision.

Regarding the afterlife as revealed in the Old Testament, the early Biblical books are ambiguous and undeveloped.  But the passages in the later books could definitively be interpreted as referring to Heaven and Hell, or the temporary state of Purgatory.  These are all internally consistent and essentially flow one from another.

Another consideration is Amos 3:7 – “For the Lord God doth nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets.”  Jesus is quite adamant about separating “the sheep from the goats”¹⁹ with the Final Judgment always expressed as the separation into numerically two ends: Heaven and Hell.  It is sheer invention to posit a third.  Can Limbo really be construed as Hell without the fires of Hell, or is that a radical difference in kind that categorizes into a third end?

Related, is perfect natural happiness actually a contradiction in terms?  Natural denotes without the supernatural.  Human nature is incomplete without life in God, namely imperfect.  Developing these considerations leads to the possibility of Limbo being Heaven without the beatific vision, and indeed, an entire spectrum of possible Limbos²⁰.

The Catholic Church has not defined that God wills ALL men to be saved, in part, because of the Limbo issue.  The present ambiguous stance partially stems from St. Gregory’s objection that “worthy of being honored” requires merit, an objection that MSI answers.

Considering Divine Providence as a closed system orientated to an end, the unborn were considered by the omnipotent God, who freely chose (predestined) their fate.  As God is not strictly bound by the sacramental system, the theoretical difficulty revolves around merit, which theologians set down with seven conditions. 

The last three are the person must be in the state of pilgrimage, in the state of grace and God must accept the good work as meritorious.  The tricky one is being in the state of grace.  For MSI, this was satisfied by treating the life never experienced as a non-temporal object judged outside of time despite its preclusion being executed in time.  Namely, the loss is suffered in a state of grace as it occurs before conception (before the soul is created), which is outside of time since the Creator is outside of creation.

The other four conditions are the work “must be morally good, morally free, done with the assistance of actual grace, and inspired by a supernatural motive.”  These presuppose a moral agent with an acting rational soul.  The difficulty here is with acting.  Assuming souls are created as clean slates without intellectual activity (without infused knowledge), can there be anything voluntary in accepting the suffering of said injustice?

St. Thomas concluded that irrational animals are capable of the imperfect voluntary.  Their knowledge is imperfect as it “consists in mere apprehension of the end, without knowing it under the aspect of end, or the relationship of an act to the end… [which] leads to the imperfect voluntary; inasmuch as the agent apprehends the end, but does not deliberate, and is moved to the end at once.”²¹

As stated above, human nature (which doesn’t change and must be present from the beginning) intrinsically desires the good, namely God.  It thus follows from a nascent knowing of their final end (life in God) that they would be "moved to the end at once” with an imperfect voluntary act.

Now, one may object this is a lot of gymnastics for something that leaves unanswered how original sin is removed.  But the point is MSI is a sound concept that God could have established as reality by supplying whatever is necessary.  Its absence from revelation is no surprise since Jesus didn’t preach to the unborn²².

 

Most surely Yes in terms of biology.  But is the soul also infused at natural conception?  Pope Pius IX carefully skirted that question in the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  There, “in the first instance of her conception” means at the first moment of Her animation wherein the soul is infused into the body, whenever that happened.

The latest from the CDF (2008) notes that “the reality of the human being for the entire span of life, both before and after birth, does not allow us to posit either a change in nature or a gradation in moral value ” and thus concludes that “The human embryo has, therefore, from the very beginning, the dignity proper to a person.”  Yet, it avoids the timing question of when an embryo technically becomes a human person: a body with a soul.

This is a minor technical point that doesn’t prevent a declaration that the unborn are predestined to Heaven.  It only would impact the wording.  But let us finish with our conclusion.

While declaring exactly two ends (Heaven and Hell) is apparently definable, it is not clear whether declaring the unborn are predestined is.  Moreover, this issue is apparently non-definable²³.  There is an infinite abyss between the Creator and creature whereby God’s relation to man is always gratuitous, starting with creating Adam and Eve in original justice.

Regarding merit, God’s reward for a good work stems from a gratuitous promise wherein “He owes the promised reward, not in justice or equity, but solely because He has freely bound himself, i.e., because of His own attributes of veracity and fidelity.”²⁴  This is related to man’s capacity to merit derives “solely from the infinite treasure of merits which Christ gained for us.”

The outstanding question is whether God made such a promise to the unborn.  Sorry, no spoilers.  Nevertheless, isn’t it unimaginable that God, whose greatest attribute is Goodness²⁵, would spurn these little ones – endowed with an immortal soul, given a nature St. Augustine said is restless until it rests in Him, but destined to be excluded from supernatural life because the only opportunity given to their fleeting bodily existence was death?

Taking Revelation as a whole, the opposite is more conforming to Scripture as seen in verses such as the one already cited: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God."

On the other hand, private revelation has indicated otherwise.  For example, the existence of Limbo was affirmed at Tre Fontane, Italy (1947).  Here, the Virgin of Revelation spoke of “a heavenly plan… [that] involves the conversion of a heretic…  [where by] the soul from Limbo that was chosen, through this conversion will be immediately brought before my Son and me, into the Divine Throne.”²⁶

This is private revelation, which tends to express things in the general understanding of the period, and whose purpose is stirring men to conversion, and as expressed here “to love”.  Yet, it is explicit on this point.  Moreover, the very long message given to Bruno Cornacchiola was written down later the same day with dictation quality: “as if on a tape recorder – the message would pause and go back over the apparent details, if he could not keep up with the dictation.”²⁷  However, that version is currently lost²⁸ so the published version is based on his memory alone.  On the other hand, Medjugorje has said the opposite²⁹.

Doctrinal questions cannot be settled by private revelation, even for Tre Fontane whose local ordinary was Pope Pius XII – whose connection with the apparition lends greatly to its authenticity, not to mention Pope John Paul II.  But this message highlights the possibility that Limbo could be more complex: the “heavenly plan,” MSI and other means could reduce the number in Limbo, but not for everyone.  However, the gratuitous nature of salvation and the unfathomable Wisdom of God leaves the Limbo question for our tiny human minds, well, in limbo…