The problem was not handled in any explicit manner by the Council of Trent, though there was some preliminary discussion about the punishment of original sin in the next life.įrom Trent to Pistoia. Thomas Aquinas freed the doctrine of the idea that unbaptized infants suffer from any pain of sense indeed, he held that, though deprived of the Beatific Vision, they enjoy a natural bliss. The scholastics of the 12th century departed from Augustine's viewpoint. Subsequent theologians distinguished between a pain affecting one's senses (the pain of sense), and the pain caused by the absence of the perfect joy of the Beatific Vision (the pain of loss). Augustine thought that unbaptized infants went to hell, although he conceded that, due to their lack of personal responsibility and guilt for original sin, the pains of hell were in some way diminished for them. In the patristic era there was apparently little concern with the problem of infants dying without baptism. The same difficulty is addressed today more generally in the question of the possibility of salvation for the adult non-Christian. The "limbo of the fathers" explained how the righteous who died before Christ's death could attain salvation, while maintaining that their salvation depended upon and was effected by Christ's death. Jesus' experience of a true human death included his entering this realm of the dead, but his descent there redeemed the just and brought them to salvation. This is the limbo (the Hebrew Sheol, the Greek Hades ) referred to in the Apostles' Creed -the "hell" into which Christ descended after his crucifixion. They could not enter heaven even though righteous, however, because of Adam and Eve's sin. Inhabiting the "limbo of the fathers" (our ancestors in the faith) are those who led a righteous life before Jesus' earthly existence and death. Since the time of Thomas Aquinas theologians have used the term to designate the state and place either of those souls who did not merit hell and its eternal punishments but could not enter heaven before the Redemption (the limbo of the fathers') or of those souls who are eternally excluded from the beatific vision because of original sin alone (the children's Limbo).
The word is not employed by the Fathers, nor does it appear in Scripture. A word derived from the Latin limbus, literally meaning the "hem or border" as of a garment.
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