Augustine, Dante and Original Guilt

In every translation of Inferno that I am aware of Dante describes the crowd of limbo as being a place full of the sighs of those who died without Baptism an in his account he includes the sounds of infants.

What sort of person might confine babies to Hell is the question you might ask as you read that passage. It's a good question to ask and the answer as best as I can tell you is that it all comes back to Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine was a North African Bishop and one of the people responsible for converting Ciccero's teaching on "Just Wars" into the framework of Christian Theology. Before Augustine and for a time afterward the official teaching of the Church on war was that Christians can not participate, no exceptions. There were strict rules determining the ability of Christians who did fight to return to the worship life of their faith and many people were ex-communicated who left their faith to fight in battle.

By Dante's time this had totally changed and the official position of the Church was (as it is today) one of Just War. There are conditions which make a war "just" as opposed to "unjust" but as history and the teachings of bishops have shown they are flexible to put it charitably.

Anyway that's a tangent, another Augustinian Gem is the theory of Original Guilt

Original Guilt proposes that we not only share in the outcome of the Fall but we share the guilt of Adam and Eve right from our births and therfore if we are not baptised we are not absolved of this guilt and thus saved from damnation. One of the truly obscene outcomes of holding this belief is that anyone including unborn and newborn babies are guilty of the sin of Adam and if they die before they're baptised they would go to Hell.

Dante tries to reconcile this horrible idea with the notion of Limbo. Since an infant couldn't have sinned in any way other than the Augustinian way there's no punishment but Limbo.

Personally I think that the Eastern Orthodox churches had the right idea to declare that Augustine is not a Saint. Yes he's a Doctor of the church, his theology is widely read and mostly accepted, it forms a base of all the Christian denominations including the mainline Protestant ones (Martin Luther was an Augustinian Monk) but he's not a Saint. He's considered Blessed which has it's own signifficance and is sor of like being almost a Saint but not quite. The Western Churches never really jived with this and When the Pope declared Augustine to be a fully fledged Saint it sort of stuck on this end of the Schism.

I wish more thinking Christians would read Augustine and make their own decisions.

Despite all of the bile I could spit at his philosophy and his, at times, perverse theologies I do have an affection for his book Confessions. It's a really good and inspiring read and as far as spiritual autobiographies go I think it's a classic for a reason.