The Suffering of Children Through the Ages

It is good to have the chance to comment on Dan Dervin’s essay. My specialty of American history may be far from late Roman antiquity and medieval Europe, but for any historian interested in psychology the importance of childhood looms all the larger the younger the age of the child–right back to the “trauma of birth” (and perhaps even before birth). I was sorry to learn from Professor Dervin’s essay that child-rearing in the Roman Empire was often brutal: little wonder that gladiatorial contests fascinated Rome’s masses. As Professor Dervin says, “Many who suffered these traumas would emerge with a split and fragmented self-core consonant with the chaotic scene of slaughter” (p. 85).

It came to my attention that even the “Third Rome” of Moscow wasn’t altogether different. While reading a life-guidance book by a Russian Orthodox abbot of the mid-1800s, I was saddened to learn of parents being told to break the spirit of little boys through whippings. Happily, by that time Charles Dickens’ tales of childhood misery were spreading empathy among millions of readers, fostering more respect for children’s sensibilities.

Thanks to the straightforward first half of

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Dan Dervin’s essay, I am now better informed. Regarding its second half, where Dervin describes early Christian theologians’ attitudes toward childhood and speculates about what influenced those attitudes (such as the doctrine of original sin), I’m not well qualified to comment. When Professor Dervin reaches the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, I felt that, yes, it’s interesting to find Jesus’ incarnation immediately followed (according to the Gospel of Matthew) by one of the bloodiest deeds in the New Testament–and it’s also interesting that early Christian theologians had trouble figuring out the eternal fate of the souls of those unbaptized infants so undeservedly slaughtered. Eventually, says Dervin, their souls were assigned to a “children’s Limbo” invented especially for them.

That far, Professor Dervin’s article seems useful. But I fail to follow his point when he then speculates that, since “somehow the birth of the one [Jesus] set in motion the deaths of the others,” there remains “a darker implication” embedded in the Slaughter story (p. 84). For one thing, Dervin doubts any such Slaughter of the Innocents ever occurred. He calls it “pseudo-history” but suggests that it has, in his words, another sort of “veracity” and invites us to think of it as part of a group-fantasy system. Via further conjectures he finally hypothesizes that “envy and resentment” of the Christ child’s perfection and good fortune “aroused too many discordant feelings for direct expression among those who were enduring the many trials and tribulations of an actual childhood,” and so, motivated presumably subliminally, they sullied Jesus’ birth by also giving the Slaughter of the Innocents major coverage: “The assault on helpless undefended young bodies may be displaced memories of actual beatings administered by designated adults” (p. 85). Dervin adds that “perhaps repressed fantasies of revenge are gratified via the scourging and the stages of the cross” that Jesus suffered later. Admittedly, major coverage of the Slaughter of the Innocents did occur in Christian exegesis. That’s documented not only in Dervin’s essay but in chapter six of Rudolph Binion’s recent book Past Impersonal (2005), which was reviewed in the last issue of this journal. But that major exegetic coverage was not motivated by psychological drives. It was motivated by theological Christian conventions centering in the twin concept of prefiguration and fulfillment. (On details, including when those conventions finally ended, see Binion, pp. 96-115.)

My point is that Christian cogitation about the Slaughter of the Innocents probably had little to do with ancient or medieval brutality toward children. Granted, Christian artists too worked the Slaughter quite heavily, but does that tell us anything more psychologically profound than TV ratings tell us today?

I’d also like to mention something possibly as damaging to children as brutality: the lack of parental attention. Percentages of infant abandonment in today’s United States are tiny compared to the twenty to forty percent estimated for the Roman Empire (p. 81), but beyond having parents, children also crave their attention. Dan Dervin speculates that in ancient and medieval times, “demands for sweat-of-the-brow labor from children encroached on abiding family ties” (p. 83), but I personally view parents’ demands for their children’s labor quite differently. Again, I’m no specialist on ancient or medieval times, but I think of children’s labor in pre-industrial times as mostly fostering family ties, not encroaching on them. In the United States until about 130 years ago, most children were actively being mentored on a daily basis by their same-sex parent. Children contributed to their families’ well-being by helping their parents do useful work. In millions of U.S. households today, girls often still help alongside their mothers, but almost all boys in the U.S. are now deprived of helping alongside their fathers. What had mainly provided boys with their fathers’ mentoring attention was family farming and work in small shops. Nothing subsequently has replaced the social enrichment that happened through father-son relationships in those small-scale venues. To quote Dwight Eisenhower, “I often think today of what an impact could be made if children believed they were contributing to a family’s essential survival and happiness. In the transformation from a rural to an urban society, children are—though they might not agree—robbed of the opportunity to do genuinely responsible work” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967], p. 33).

So, in retrospect, maybe the Roman Empire and all other pre-industrial societies did practice something beneficial to their children, something we today don’t provide ours. Above I quoted Dan Dervin on the “split and fragmented self-core” that

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brutality plausibly left within ancient Roman children. For unbrutalized but also unmentored U.S. children of today, the “self-core” may be intact but muffled. After all, parents are infants’ primary reality. Perhaps our sense of our own reality never completely escapes our specific relationship with our parents. There’s no need to know which is worse for children—being hurt by parents or being unable to help them. Both are best avoided.

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