HistoricalChristian.Faith

The condemnation of unbaptised infants as an objection to creationism

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the difficulty is real and was never met on the terms its author set. If God makes each soul new and blameless, and an infant dying unbaptised is nevertheless truly condemned, then God has attached a guiltless creature of His own immediate making to a doom it had no part in incurring. The scholastic answer — that guilt is contracted not by the soul's origin but by its union with a nature descended from Adam — is coherent, is the majority position, and defeats the sharpest form of the charge; but it purchases the soul's innocence at its origin by making the union itself the instrument of condemnation, which relocates the problem rather than dissolving it. And the whole argument stands or falls with a premise many Christians now deny, that the infant is condemned at all. Neither side is decisive. · advanced by Augustine of Hippo

The claim

I ask where can the soul, even of an infant snatched away by death, have contracted the guilt which, unless the grace of Christ has come to the rescue by that sacrament of baptism which is administered even to infants, involves it in condemnation?

— Augustine, Letter 166 (to Jerome), ch. iii §6, source (a.d. 415). The claim weighed here is that creationism — God making each soul afresh — cannot be reconciled with the church's practice and doctrine concerning infants who die without baptism, and that this counts as evidence against it.¹

Who advances it

Augustine, and essentially Augustine alone in antiquity — but he advanced it for thirty years and it is the single reason he never became a creationist. He put it to Jerome in 415 in a letter so long it circulated as a treatise, carried east by the priest Orosius, having first set out plainly what he did and did not believe about the soul; Jerome, whose own view was creationist, never answered it.² Four years later, arguing against Vincentius Victor, he made it a formal condition: anyone who wishes to maintain that souls are breathed in newly rather than derived from the parents may do so, provided he does not affirm “that souls become sinful by another's original sin,” nor “that infants who died unbaptized can possibly reach eternal life,” nor that souls sinned somewhere before their incarnation. Those are the horns. Creationism, as Augustine saw it, had to take one of them.³ It is worth being exact about what he is not saying: he never claims creationism is false. He claims he cannot see how it is true, and offers to be shown.⁴

The evidence for

The dilemma is valid on its premises. Take the two doctrines Augustine held as fixed: that the soul is what bears guilt, and that an infant dying without baptism is genuinely lost. Now add creationism. The soul in question was made by God, directly, moments before, out of nothing, with no history and no act of its own. Either it is guilty — in which case God made a guilty soul, or made a blameless one and then imputed to it a sin committed by another — or it is not guilty, in which case the church's insistence on baptizing infants for the remission of sin is unintelligible and its judgment about those who die unbaptized is unjust. There is no third option that leaves all three commitments standing.

Traducianism, whatever its own troubles, answers this one cleanly. That is the argument's real force. If the soul descends from Adam's soul as the body descends from his body, the infant is not an innocent stranger arraigned for someone else's crime; it is a portion of the offending stock, guilty in the way a branch is diseased because the root is. Tertullian's image of the soul as a sprout “derived from Adam as its root” is doing precisely this work. Augustine is not being obtuse in finding that easier: on traducianism, inherited guilt needs no extra machinery, because the thing that sinned and the thing that is guilty are continuous.⁵

Nobody produced the answer he asked for, in his lifetime or for centuries. Jerome, asked directly, changed the subject. Rufinus had already declined the whole question. Cassian and Gennadius asserted creationism without engaging the objection at all, and Gennadius's canon simply rules out the alternative. An objection that the winning side never troubled to answer is not thereby refuted.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The logic, the diagnosis of why traducianism is the easier fit, and the historical observation that the Latin settlement was reached by assertion rather than by argument on this point. Also this: Augustine's own conclusion from the dilemma was not that creationism is false but that he did not know — “it is, indeed, better for a man to confess his ignorance of what he knows nothing about, than either to run into heresy which has been already condemned, or to found some new heresy” — and that is the modest conclusion the argument actually licenses.⁶

The answer exists, and it is not a dodge. The scholastic reply denies the step from “God made this soul directly” to “this soul is a stranger to Adam.” What descends from Adam is a nature, and the human nature that the semen transmits is the nature of a person, body and soul together. Aquinas is precise about the division of labour: original sin was in Adam “as in its principal cause”; it is in the bodily semen “as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature is transmitted to the child”; but “original sin can nowise be in the flesh as its subject, but only in the soul.” The soul is therefore not created guilty and not made guilty by fiat; it becomes the subject of a defect belonging to the nature it is created to inform. On the same reasoning he can say that a man's soul “was in Adam, in respect of his seminal power, not indeed as in its effective principle, but as in a dispositive principle: because the bodily semen, which is transmitted from Adam, does not of its own power produce the rational soul, but disposes the matter for it.” That is a real answer to Augustine's question, arrived at by taking creationism and inherited guilt seriously together.⁷

But it does not make the difficulty vanish. The reply secures the soul's innocence at the moment of its making, and then locates the transmission of guilt in the act by which God unites that innocent soul to Adamic flesh — an act which is, on creationism, God's own. Augustine's complaint was never that the mechanism was unstateable; it was that it makes God the proximate agent of the arrangement whereby a blameless soul incurs condemnation. The scholastic account states the mechanism admirably and leaves that feature exactly where it was. It answers “how can this be?” without answering “how can this be just?”, which is the question Augustine was asking.

The argument's force is hostage to a premise it does not defend. This cuts the other way, and harder. Everything depends on the claim that an infant dying unbaptised is genuinely condemned. Augustine held it — and held it in a strong form, as the third of the four things a creationist may not deny. But the tradition that followed him spent centuries softening it: first to the mildest of punishments, then to the limbo of infants, a state of natural happiness without the vision of God, and in modern Catholic teaching to an explicit hope entrusted to God's mercy. Protestant traditions largely rejected the premise outright. As the premise weakens, so does the objection — not because anyone answered it, but because one of the propositions it played off against was let go. An argument this dependent on a contested doctrine cannot be scored more highly than that doctrine.⁸

And it is an objection, not a proof of the rival. Even at full strength it shows that creationism sits badly with a particular account of inherited guilt. It does not show that traducianism is true, and traducianism carries its own bill — the soul's corporeality, which Aquinas took to be fatal, and which Augustine himself would not accept. Augustine declined to move for exactly that reason. The argument, honestly stated, licenses agnosticism, not the other side.⁹

Assessment

Contested. The objection is genuine, well-posed, and was never met in the terms its author set; it is the reason the West's most formidable theologian refused for thirty years to hold the view the West then adopted, and the reason he made his acceptance of it conditional. Against that, the answer eventually given is coherent, is held by the great majority, and blocks the sharpest version of the charge by denying that a directly created soul is thereby a stranger to Adam's nature. What it does not do is remove the feature Augustine objected to. Weighed by the standards of the doctrine of original sin as Augustine held it, the objection stands; weighed by the metaphysics of nature and person the scholastics worked out, it is answered; and weighed against any theology that does not condemn the unbaptised infant, it barely arises. That is a real dispute with no clear winner, and it turns on which of two other doctrines one takes as fixed. Note what is not in doubt: the argument tells against creationism only as a difficulty to be met, never as a demonstration of the propagation of souls, and Augustine — who framed it — drew no stronger conclusion from it than that he did not know.¹⁰

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