Suffer the Children: Children in the Early Christian Centuries

Through late Antiquity, as Christianity reconfigured the Roman Empire, abandonment of children, mostly through exposure, remained a common practice, though officially condemned by the fourth century. Survivors of these practices likely entered the “slave populations” (Harris, pp. 1-22). Most families abandoned at least one of their offspring, according to Boswell (pp. 135, 163-169), who estimates abandonment rates between 20 percent and 40 percent. Accordingly, most psychohistorians agree with Lloyd deMause’s designating parenting in this period as the Abandonment Mode of childrearing (deMause, 1982, pp. 30-36).

Conversely, it has been pointed out that a majority of these children were wanted or at least accepted. As classical ideals of socializing children for polis or Empire were reshaped by an otherworldly morality, children experienced their world differently.

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Living in the Greek East of the latter fourth century and undeterred by the limitations of his celibacy, St. John Chrysostom freely advised on childrearing and became a pivotal figure in adapting older ideals of military glory and worldly success to emergent paradigms (Leyerle, p. 268). Addressing well-to-do families, Chrysostom laid out a regimen of measured indulgence. A child should be deliberately provoked by tutors or servants in order to master his temper and avoid abusing his own class later on as civic or military careers were pursued. Physical discipline should be applied sparingly, lest the child grow accustomed and lose his fear (Leyerle, p. 256). Like threats of eternal damnation, the switch performs best as a warning. As a “third parent,” (Wood) the pedagogue assumed a primary role in regulating behavior, although Leyerle notes that fathers and tutors alike interceded on the child’s behalf for moderate treatment (p. 256). Yet while beatings were accepted, Chrysostom advises, “let us kiss and put our arms around” the fractious child: let us “show our affection… and mold him,” as “God manages the world through the fear of hell and the assurance of the kingdom” (Leyerle, p. 261).

Along with threatened and actual beatings, authorities used catechisms and sacraments, scriptures and clergy, to prepare offspring for the next world. However strict or lenient, this spiritual socializing was a daunting task made more arduous by a uniquely child-centered religion. “Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter heaven” (Holy Bible, Matthew 18:3), and “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Holy Bible, Mark 10:14-5) were admonitions that boggled the ecclesiastical mind and stirred numerous theological debates. How could children, lacking reason and being weak of will, be held up as guides to salvation? Like the rest of humanity, children were implicated in Adam’s fall and thus born into original sin. Yet at least scripturally, they were singled out for special treatment: better a “millstone be hanged around his neck, and he [be] cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones” (Holy Bible, Luke 17:2).

By Adam’s fall, they were heirs of sin; by God’s grace, they were heirs of heaven. St. Augustine’s image of the infant’s fierce competition for oral supplies at the maternal breast proves “it is not the infant’s will that is harmless, but his weakness of limbs” (Confessions, p. 49). Yet as this foreshadowing of Freud’s drive theory also reveals, the Augustinian child is an active player from day one. However impaired by original sin, his free will and language capacity are exercised for lying as well as truth-telling, and as the saint’s confessions of his wayward youth confirm, the innocence of children, the Gospels notwithstanding, is a myth, but an enduring one (Wills, p. 123).

Equivocally viewed as fallen and idealized as innocent, the child and the theologian interpenetrated especially in the primary ritual of faith. Baptism not only removed original sin and opened the gates to eternal bliss but revamped traditional initiation rituals. The water and the concave baptismal font “become a reverential womb for the second birth” so that those who “descend into it may be fashioned afresh by the grace of the Holy spirit and born again into a new and virtuous human nature” (Theodore of Mopsuetia, quoted in Finn, The Liturgy of Baptism, p. 156). The font/waters motifs represented the tomb and death as well as a reenactment of the crucifixion,

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burial, and resurrection via the virginal womb of Holy Mother Church (Finn, pp. 158, 164). Drawing on Paul’s heavenly-adoption theme, Chrysostom held that the baptized alone “have been enrolled as citizens of another state, the heavenly Jerusalem” (Finn, p. 40).

Baptism is also emotionally overdetermined as sacred nuptials: a “spiritual marriage in which Christ is the bridegroom and the ‘baptisand’ is the bride” (Finn, p. 165). Preeminently, the ceremony as purified marriage and rebirth would undo the onus of being conceived in evil and born in sin (Saint Augustine’s position in Wills, p. 46). For Augustine, this means that “original sin and spiritual concupiscence are handed down from generation to generation by means of propagation” (Rigby, p. 115). More precisely, “children are born infected with the lust which was biologically necessary for their conception” (Clark, p. 60). The sin-virus was transmitted by sexual activity. Despite Augustine’s later revisions and more desexualized versions from medieval scholastics, childhood in the Christian era not only enters theology but children are deeply implicated in parents’ sex lives, including their sexual fantasies and feelings of guilt. In other respects, parents cherished their children as innocent of lust and ignorant of death (Wood, p. 251).

While such dualist attitudes often impacted covertly on children, the culture overtly focused on baptism’s proper timing. Defying his mother’s practice, Augustine favored infant baptism. Pelagius, who drew the ire of Augustine and Jerome, was less enthusiastic about infant baptism because it preempted free choice (Rees, p. 15). But with the status of baptized children privileged, their behavior would logically be more closely scrutinized than the unbaptized.

Moreover, as all children are prone to temptation, their manifest immaturity undermined ideals of innocence, and in most struggling households theological niceties did little to alter the basic perception that, whatever their ultimate destiny, children in the here and now posed additional hungry mouths to feed. Requiring child labor and apprenticeship, early economies may have cut short childhood but did not disregard children per se as held by Ariès in Centuries of Childhood (Wood, pp. 81-2). No doubt abused and treated inconsistently, children were never invisible or mere adults-in-progress. The demands for sweat-of-the-brow labor encroached on abiding family ties and undermined religious ideologies of innocence and purity. A more moderate solution than composing martyrologies of fallen youth was the cloistering of selected children as a means of perpetuating ideals of purity by handing over the young to God. Oblation became abandonment on a higher level.

It is instructive to see how the often incongruous images of children as vehicles of sinfulness and vessels of innocence were played out during the rise of monasticism in Carolingian Europe. Believing that “God reveals his truth to the simple and the innocent,” St. Benedict involved the whole monastic community, children and adults alike, in decision-making, though children were not expected to preach until thirteen (De Jong, p. 136). Yet while minors were assigned the “role of innocent and pure mediators in sacred affairs,” even in interpreting Scripture, their misbehaviors were “chastised with severe fasts and sharp blows,” i.e., whippings (De Jong, p. 137; Wood, p. 86). Though not preventing child-abuse, the cloistered life served as the most effective means to protect and preserve “childlike purity,” and the earlier they could be separated from worldly temptations the better their prospects for perfection (De Jong, p. 137). Thus reconstituted, childhood is no longer a purely time-bound period nor yet the cult of later centuries, but rather an ideal spiritual state to be preserved through celibates who embody the Gospels’ child-imagery into adulthood.

It is uncertain how far the conditions of children were affected by religious discourses which only obliquely invoke actual children, but they were very much on theologians’ minds. The Holy Innocents slaughtered by Satan’s stand-in, Herod, achieved martyrdom and clearly deserved salvation, especially as their innocence was associated with the Savior’s birth and their death with his future sacrifice. While to simply ignore them would be a “cruel injustice to children,” the mental gymnastics rationalizing their slaughter went to extremes (Wood, p. 74). Augustine, who endured his schoolmasters’ beatings with his parents’ eager approval and yet engaged his own son in Platonic dialogues, recognized the dilemma but remained a hardliner.

By his house-rules, the unbaptized languished in the outer precincts of Hell and would have remained there for all eternity had not medieval scho-

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lastics like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas mindful of the “pre-Christian just” residing in “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22) taken a page from the Pelagians and installed a children’s Limbo (McBrien, p. 1178). However, this was a Pyrrhic victory for a buoyant reform movement that stressed the “goodness of creation” (Elizabeth Clark, p. 210, n. 123), placed a premium on free will, and minimized humanity’s sinful inheritance–only in the end to be branded heretics. Infant baptism was allowed by Pelagians, not in order to remove hereditary sin, but to enlist children into the “communion of the blessed” (E. Clark, p. 211). For them, baptism “creates a new human being who is capable, with effort, to lead a life without sin” (E. Clark, p. 211). With his no-fault faith, Pelagius harbored doubts but little concern over the fate of unbaptized children because he projected a vision of a less punitive and more benevolent paternal deity who allotted his children their own space in which to choose their destiny (Rees, p. 13; Clark, pp. 208-10). In these respects, he emerges as a Jean-Jacques Rousseau before his time.

Despite Augustinian influences, the Holy Innocents dilemma persisted. In a reparative gesture, they were provided a feast on the fourth day after Christmas and by reason of their martyrdom were considered eventual candidates for heaven. Dante reifies these concerns by establishing Limbo as a bucolic refuge for the Slaughtered Innocents and the just pagans. Though allocated to the first circle of Hell, these souls are spared punishment, their only pain consisting in not beholding the face of God.

The Holy Innocents embodied not only instabilities within orthodoxy but underscored ambiguous attitudes toward children pervading the Christian era. Maintaining a select group in Limbo highlighted issues of membership and salvation, kept alive questions of mercy and compassion, and offered a safety valve from airtight orthodoxy. For many centuries, Limbo provided a means of abiding the undecidable and allowing the unknowable to appear known. But in late 2005 the Church concluded that it had outlived its purpose and in effect posted a “This Property Is Condemned” sign on the apparently long-since evacuated premises. With the second Vatican Council a broader and more generous definition of baptism, incorporating baptism of blood and baptism of desire, had already taken care of the hapless refugees in their crowded holding pen (McBrien, p. 1179).

So would round to a close this inquiry were it would not for one further awkward detail. It is far from clear that the Innocents’ slaughter, whose sole source is Matthew 2:16, ever actually occurred. Later casualty estimates ranged from 10 or 12 to 144,000, but the lack of corroborative data has prompted even so conservative a source as the New Catholic Encyclopedia to consign it to such grafted on “midrashic elements” as the Star of Bethlehem, the Magi who figure in the Herod story, and logically the Flight into Egypt (Joyce, p. 532). More bluntly, Michael Grant concludes, “the story is invented” (Grant, pp. 228-9). The story’s veracity then would not be literal but fitted to a symbolic system constructed from theological metaphors for didactic purposes. Yet despite providing a respectable cover for skeptics, a figurative reading cannot account for the tenacity of this pseudo-history. Other explanations may thus be considered. Such ahistorical religious constructions may be sustained by wishful contents. These would likely be enlisted to perform emotional tasks within fantasy-systems and, being widely held, would converge into historical group fantasies. Some may insist that religious faith itself is an elaborate group-fantasy system, but the present focus is narrower and less contentious. In purely literary terms, the story offers staples of symmetry, logic, and irony in balancing off the Savior’s birth with the wholesale slaughter of uncounted other children, of Rachel’s inconsolable grief for her lost children counterpoised with the Virgin Mary’s bliss in the manger, with the Magi’s worship of the infant king’s initiating a life-giving community of the blessed being played off against the evil king Herod’s instigating death and disorder. At a deeper level the two events do interlock on suffering and appeal to the imagination as contrasting hues heighten each other. The darker implication of these contrasting affinities–that somehow the birth of the one set in motion the deaths of the others–remains a mystery that eludes the ever-widening umbrella of baptism’s availability and will survive the termination of Limbo.

The many depictions of this slaughter-typically juxtaposed with a peaceful Nativity-are grouped by culture critics with the pornography of violence common in medieval and Renaissance art (deMause, 2002, pp. 411-416). These include the way

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of the cross and the more graphic crucifixions, along with the martyred saints like Sebastian, whose flesh is festooned with arrows, and Agatha, whose breasts are severed. Somewhat akin to the tempestuous scenes of the Rape of the Sabine Women, Herod’s soldiers combine violence against blameless women with the piercing and dismembering of their helpless infants. St. Prudentius’s fifth century verses set the tone early on: “the torturer draws/His cruel sword and thrusts the blade/Into the tender forms,/ Bereaving them of budding life.” He can hardly find “sufficient space/To hold the deadly gaping wound:/ The blade is wider than the throat.” An infant “head is dashed against a stone/And milk-white brains are scattered round.” Then another scene is evoked: “Alone among so many slain,/Unharmed and safe, the Christ Child lives” (Poems of Prudentius, pp. 88-9). Depending on perspective, the poetic contrast either heightens or lessens the gratuitous carnage. With Herod’s cruel command to “Search out the bosom of each nurse,/And even at the mothers’ breasts/Let blades be red with infant gore,” Prudentius depicts the spectacle with an almost perverse relish. However, viewed in its own terms outside a discredited historical context, the scene suggests multiple traumas. We cannot avoid noting the invasive weaponry of male aggressors wreaking havoc on the maternal dyad as conveying the emotional fallout of violent primal-scene fantasy stemming from the child’s exposure to adult sexuality. This staple of psychoanalytic interpretation is germane but too patent. Probing beneath that violent oedipal drama, we encounter more pertinent pre-oedipal contents. The pervasive imagery of infants being forcibly wrenched from their nurses by anonymous forces beyond anyone’s control may point to an underlying trauma whose powerful and more primitive emotional force carried its own meanings.

If not a historical event then the Innocents’ slaughter may be a psychological one: an enactment of precipitous maternal loss, of being wrenched from the biological mother and abandoned to a strange wet nurse or a series of surrogates, of being shunted aside and precipitously weaned due to the arrival of a new sibling. Such violent severance suggests a nuclear trauma with multiple fallouts. Some of the rage toward caregivers may then be displaced onto the avengers as delegates. Maternal figures are also implicated in the crime and forced to suffer Separation as savage sundering is certainly a key theme, but there may be another equally potent one. The assault on helpless undefended young bodies may be displaced memories of actual beatings administered by designated adults.

Firm data are lacking, but physical child abuse was so unexceptional in these centuries as to be normative. St. Jerome recalls the terror of being “dragged from his grandmother’s arms” and handed over to a ruthless “schoolmaster with a reputation for beating” (Kelly, p. 8). Prudentius curtly notes his first years were spent weeping under the “crack of the rod” (Preface to Poems of Prudentius, p. 3). Augustine was notoriously whipped by his tutors under his parents’ approving eye, but very few others managed to write down such humiliations. Many who suffered these traumas would emerge with a split and fragmented self-core consonant with the chaotic scene of slaughter. One can only speculate whether Pelagius, emanating from the Celtic fringe to the north, was spared the harsh discipline of the times. He may have avoided the cultural practice of wet nursing and enjoyed good-enough maternal care—to which his generous proportions may or may not bear witness. If so, in the evolution of childhood, his was a voice crying in the wilderness. Finally, there is the problem of the Innocents’ slaughter as collateral damage from the Savior’s birth. Whether that birth was a cause or a necessary condition for the horrific if imagined crime spree, the lives of the Christ child and of the other Bethlehem babes are bound together. It may be that the prospect of a divinely conceived and immaculately born babe who is worshipped by kings while merely lying in his cradle aroused too many discordant feelings for direct expression among those who were enduring the many trials and tribulations of an actual childhood. Intolerable feelings of envy and resentment not being suitable for that momentous intersection of time and eternity, ambivalence is ruled out. The only recourse is to the splitting of emotional experience and perceiving the world as good and evil opposites. Perhaps repressed fantasies of revenge are gratified via the scourging and the stages of the cross, events that were regularly enacted and portrayed with searing detail in sermon and fresco.

In addition, Leo Steinberg extrapolates from Max Ernst’s painting of The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus to an anti-Jesus tradition dating from the Apocryphal Gospels and resurfacing in fourteenth

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century Scottish folk songs. Here is a Jesus “conceited and malicious,” misusing his miraculous powers and getting spanked for drowning playmates who taunt him as a Jew (Steinberg, p. 85). Among the many layers of the recently disclosed Gospel of Judas, a version of mutual implication between victim and criminal recuperates the latter’s reputation; Judas may represent the other sibling passed over for the favorite. Ambivalent undercurrents may survive today in reports of Nativity crèches routinely being raided. Locally, an infant Jesus was kidnapped from a crèche and placed upside-down on an Interstate median strip; the figure’s rescuers were celebrated as good shepherds working a miracle. Also, uncannily close to the feast-day of the Holy Innocents in 2005, four New Jersey teenagers were reported to have stolen twenty-seven baby Jesuses from outside churches and homes. The youths were apparently bored, i.e., left out of the holiday excitement, and were preparing a baby Jesus burning party. These innocent Savior dolls would bypass Limbo and be sent straight to hell.

In sum, the construct of a children’s Limbo for the unbaptized serves as the locus for unresolved emotional conflicts and childhood traumas centering on separation and abuse. They gain conscious representation and survive through dubious historical displacements, but they can neither be assimilated into the hierarchical framework nor safely repressed and laid to rest.

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[Editor’s Note: Until 11/1/06 we welcome comments of 300-2,000 words on Dervin’s article to be published in our December issue.]