Writing on Augustine’s view of the fate of unbaptized children and its relationship to the then-developing doctrine of Original Sin, John Canon McCarthy of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth (my alma mater), wrote the following:
It is true, as our correspondent notes, that St. Augustine held the view that children who die without Baptism suffer some positive pain of sense in the next life. This doctrine is expressed by him not merely in De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione (i. 16), the source cited in the query, but also in very many other passages throughout his works. S. Augustine flatly rejected, on more than one occasion, the theory that there existed, between heaven and hell, an intermediate state or place where unbaptized children enjoy a natural happiness. Children who die with the guilt of original sin upon their souls cannot go to heaven. The only tenable alternative, for St. Augustine, is that they go to hell and there, in common with its other denizens, endure positive punishment. It is admitted that in the case of unbaptized children this punishment will be of the mildest possible kind (damnatio levissima or mitissima).
In the pre-Augustine theological writings there are singularly few references which give any definite teaching on the fate of unbaptized children. There are, however, sufficient references to indicate that St. Augustine’s view represented a break-away from the generally accepted position. ‘It is clear from that precedes that St. Augustine was an innovator, and that he sacrificed tradition to the logic of an indefensible private system’ (cf. Torner, art. ‘Lot of Those Dying in Sin,’ Irish Theological Quarterly, July 1909, p. 317). Yet the new teaching found almost immediate favour and was repeated by the subsequent writers. It was accepted and ‘canonized’ by the Council of Carthage and remained unchallenged for centuries. By the twelfth century some writers had begun to teach a milder doctrine. Unbaptized children, those theologians said, suffer the pain of loss but not any pain of sense. This milder view was popularized by Peter Lombard. St. Thomas went a step farther and taught that unbaptized children so not suffer any pain whatsoever but enjoy, in some degree, positive natural happiness. This teaching set the headline for the vast majority of subsequent writers. Yet there were not wanting theologians, particularly in the post-Reformation period, who harked back to and defended the view of St. Augustine. Many of these theologians, such as St. Robert Bellarmine, felt impelled to defend the Augustinian doctrine by reason of its wide, and apparently official, acceptance in earlier times. They were in a difficulty. They would gladly have seized upon any suggestion or indication, that St. Augustine had changed his mind and had later adopted a milder view. They do not mention this line of escape. And their silence on the point is, in the circumstances, eloquent and sufficient proof that there is no evidence that St. Augustine had mitigated his doctrine.
Yet it has been asserted that he did so. Mazzella, for instance, writes:
Plures inter Patres Latinos asseruisse videntur parvulos sine baptismo decedentes puniendos esse poena sensus licet mitissima. Praesertim vero in hac fuit sententia S. Augustinus, qui tamen postea incertus de ea factus scripsit: 'Respondetur . . . superfluo quaeri de meritis ejus qui nihil meruerit. Non enim metuendum est, ne vita esse potuerit media quaedam inter recte factum atque peccatum: et sententia judicis media esse non possit inter praemium atque supplicium.’
This quotation from St. Augustine is to be found in his De Libero Arbitrio—a work begun by the author while still a layman and completed by the year 395. In the passage quoted St. Augustine, like St. Gregory Nazianzen in the east, does defend the existence between heaven and hell of an intermediate state for unbaptized children. But he soon changed his mind on the question—and very definitely and completely. We have mentioned above that elsewhere St. Augustine categorially denied the existence of this intermediate state. One writer describes his attitude to the earlier opinion as one of the detestation—‘ea opinio quam veluti paradoxum detestatus est.’ And it has been noted that St. Augustine’s doctrine rejecting the intermediate state was incorporated in the canons of the Council of Carthage. This statements in which he repudiates the existence of this state and in which he clearly declares his teaching that unbaptized children suffer positive punishment (though of the mildest kind) in hell are contained in works all of which are later, some of them much later than De Libero Arbitrio. Thus Mazzella is guilty of a complete misrepresentation of the historical sequence when, in introducing a text from De Libero Arbitrio, he writes: ‘Qui tamen postea inertus de ea factus scripsit . . . ‘ St. Augustine did, indeed, change his mind on this question of the fate of the unbaptized infants. But the change was from the more lenient pre-Augustinian teaching to the strict view rightly associated with his name—because, having once adopted it, he never seems afterwards to have departed from it or mitigated its harshness. Tixeront sums up the Augustinian position in the following words: ‘A last consequence of original sin . . . is the damnation of these children who die without Baptism.’ In the De Libero Arbitrio St. Augustine had first surmised that there was for them an intermediate state that would be one neither of reward nor of punishment. But soon, considering that those children were not sinless, he concluded that they must share the common fate of mankind. Since there is no intermediate state between heaven and hell, and since they were excluded from heaven they had to be consigned to the fire everlasting . . . Moreover, it is well known that according to the Saint, unbaptized children suffered in hell in a positive pain, but omnium mitissima. And Toner writes: ‘Not a few modern theologians simply ignore the difficulty or try in various ways to avoid facing it squarely and candidly. Thus some, in open defiance of history, say that St. Augustine retracted his severer teaching, appealing for proof to the text . . . from the De Libero Arbitrio—one of his earliest works!’ (John Canon McCarthy, Problems in Theology, volume 1: The Sacraments [Dublin: Browne and Nolan Limited, 1956], 22-24, emphasis in bold added)
