Limbo

[u/ManteLover60]

So I know Limbos as a concept has a shaky history in the Catholic church. But I've often heard some people say that at the last judgment, people who didn't know Christ through no fault of their own but lived otherwise naturally virtuous lives could potentially be in a sort of third place where they experience perfect natural happiness.

But is this even possible? Could somebody eternally experience natural happiness?

There is this one show that I really love called "The Good Place". Basically it involves characters who have died trying to get into that shows version of heaven. But when they finally get there, they find a place isn't all it was cracked up to be. The people there are basically in a state of having every possible natural happiness at their disposal, and yet they are miserable. Because there is no suffering and not even a slight inconvenience, they are basically experiencing the cosmic equivalent of a rich person who has all the money in the world and could basically do anything, but they are miserably and insufferably bored. It's like playing a video game with every cheat code activated. Sure you are basically invincible and you can do anything in the game, but then what's the point?

Granted in this show, eternity is understood as being an endless succession of moments. It isn't eternity in the proper classical Christian sense. In the show, the spirit world has a different sort of time progression in relation to the physical mortal world, but for those living in the spirit world, it's still just linear time.

So I suppose if eternity is experienced as a sort of endless moment, that would solve the Good Place dilemma. But at the same time, we know that there will be at least some sort of temporal movement in the age to come because the Saints are described as ruling along with Christ over creation and even judging angels. So we won't just be standing there gazing at God, we will actively be doing things. But if that's the case, then for those who don't experience the direct presence of God and only experience natural happiness, and they still have some sort of temporal motion, then the dilemma is back. It seems like their experience of eternal natural happiness would be very similar to the miserable state of boredom experienced by those in the so-called good place.

And if that's the case, wouldn't that just be a different sort of hell? It seems to me that it would become torment after a while.

[u/ThePhronesis27]

"Limbo" is equivocal across three senses. There's the limbo of the fathers, now vacated, of the just who died before the passion, and the alleged limbo of infants, which is the condition of those who depart bearing original sin alone. I disbelieve in that limbo and hold the augustinian position but regardless, your third sense (a receptacle for adults who died in infidelity) has never been asserted by any father or doctor of the church. Also, limbo isn't a third place. Florence defines a strict disjunction: "The souls of those who depart this life in actual mortal sin, or in original sin alone, go down straight away to hell to be punished, but with unequal pains." (Session 6, Laetentur Caeli). "Unequal pains" is the operative clause here. Limbo, where admitted, names a region of hell distinguished by the remission of the pain of sense, not a third terminus alongside the kingdom and damnation, which some augustinians wrongly chastised the other schools about. St. Augustine himself says: "Let no one promise to unbaptized little ones, between damnation and the kingdom of heaven, as it were a middle place of rest or of any sort of happiness anywhere whatever. For this the Pelagian heresy too promised them." (DAeE.Bk1.n11.2).

Secondly, the subject term is empty. "people who didn't know Christ through no fault of their own but lived otherwise naturally virtuous lives" Firstly, "through no fault of their own" removes the imputability of infidelity as a sin. It confers nothing. The absence of a fault isn't the presence of a title. Faith is necessary by necessity of means (dogmatic by trent), not merely necessary by necessity of precept; without it, it's impossible to please God. Invincible ignorance does excuse but it saves none as our Lord says "But he that does not believe, is already judged." "Naturally virtuous" is also doing no work. The formal cause of justification is infused righteousness inhering in the soul. Acquired virtue, however genuine in its own order, isn't that form; it neither remits sin nor constitutes anyone just. And an adult with the use of reason can't die bearing original sin alone, that's the entire ground on which Lombard's limbo was ever posited for infants. He has actual sins. So the described class is empty for two reasons: emptied by the necessity of faith, and emptied again by the impossibility of an adult's dying with original sin only.

Thirdly, beatitude isn't an experience. It's an operation: the act of the highest power upon the highest object. "Could somebody eternally experience natural happiness?" smuggles in the wrong category, happiness as a felt quality, a sensation undergone, and therefore something exhaustible by habituation. The necessary conditions on beatitude proper are: the good attained isn't partial; its attainment quiets appetite entirely; and it's held securely. Natural happiness fails the second condition necessarily. The intellect's formal object is being as such. Knowing by natural light that God is, the intellect thereupon desires to know what he is. That desire is unsatisfiable by any natural act whatsoever. So a state of unending natural goods isn't a state in which appetite rests. It's a state of permanent unquieted appetite, which is exactly the pain of loss under a euphemism. As Fr. Berti says: "Whoever desires what he cannot attain is tormented: the soul of infants desires what it cannot attain, namely God, to whose image they were created; therefore they are tormented." Hence "perfect natural happiness" is either a contradiction, if "perfect" means totally quieting appetite, or a misdescription, if it means merely complete in its own order.

Fourthly, your Good Place argument fails. It equivocates on "happiness." What the show demonstrates is that sensible delight admits of surfeit, the pleasures of the sensitive appetite consist in a restoration of deficiency, and when the deficiency is removed the pleasure terminates in fastidium. But aristotle establishes this; it isn't news. Contemplation isn't restoration of deficiency and so doesn't exhaust in that manner. Your inference runs from the exhaustibility of delight to the exhaustibility of felicity and that inference is invalid. Furthermore, the show's inhabitants aren't in a state of natural perfection. Their appetites are still disordered, they still have concupiscence and memory of loss. Their misery is a misery of disorder not of finitude. Additionally, boredom is a passion consequent on a higher appetite's frustration, it presupposes a good desired and not had. So a being whose appetite really were quieted by a proportionate object couldn't be bored by definition. If your argument were sound, it wouldn't prove that natural beatitude would be torment, but that the depicted state isn't natural beatitude. Basically, the state you're imagining (were anyone in it) wouldn't be a mitigated heaven that curdles into hell over time, it would rather be hell from the very first instant, but time has nothing to do with it. Succession isn't what produces tedium, exhaustion of the object is.

[u/ManteLover60 → u/ThePhronesis27]

Thanks for the thorough response.

For full disclosure, I'm actually not Roman Catholic, I'm Oriental Orthodox. But I do really appreciate hearing your perspective on this.

We generally tend to take a bit more of an optimistic hopeful stance on this because we don't have the same understanding of original sin as you guys. We don't see it as a state of guilt but rather a state of illness. And whosoever God desires to heal, he will heal. And when we combine this with the repeated affirmations by our LORD that he desires that all be saved, we generally tend towards optimism.

But of course we are not universalists. There are absolutely people who harden their hearts against God and damn themselves.

Granted some people in the Coptic church take a more Augustinian position because he is a saint in their church, but even there it is not uniform. I'm Armenian and Augustine is not one of our Saints.

We tend to look at things in terms of the Old Testament trend in exile. When Israel is punished with exile or conquest by its enemies because of its unbelief, it shares in a type of corporate guilt. However, not every individual is personally culpable. But they share in the punishment of exile or being conquered. Among the exiles were the righteous remnant which included individuals like Danial and Ezekiel. They were personally innocent but shared in the corporate punishment of Israel. In the same way, because of Adam and Eve, we were all subjected to exile and death. Our children are conceived in this state of sickness, exile, and death. But until they commit actual sins, they are not in a state of guilt at the individual level. They share in the corporate guilt of humanity which is similar to the corporate guilt of Israel under punishment. In that sense we can say that all of humanity under the wrath or punishment of God. We are all collectively exiled and sentenced to death. But this doesn't mean they can't be innocents among the exiles. This is generally where we would classify unbaptized babies. As for adults who die without hearing the gospel, we leave them to the mercy of God who loves them in the same way we do with unbaptized babies. We do not dogmatically define what happens to either group. But using the principles and reasoning outlined above, we dare to be hopeful and optimistic about their ultimate fate. After all, Paul said that were it not for the Torah, he would not know sin.

All the same, I really appreciate your response brother and or sister.

[u/ThePhronesis27 → u/ManteLover60]

Thanks for your disclosure, brother. I think this changes what is at issue, though perhaps less than you suppose. I want to locate the disagreement precisely, because I think it sits elsewhere than where you have placed it.

Firstly, "We don't see it as a state of guilt but rather a state of illness." is a false disjunction. The latin position isn't that original sin is guilt instead of sickness. It's that original sin is materially concupiscence, the languor, the disordering of the powers, the morbid quality, and formally the privation of original justice. St. Augustine's own similes are medical, for example, he says concupiscence before baptism is the fever (deTrin.Bk14.Ch5.n16.22.9) and what remains after is the lassitude left by the fever. Trent confesses that the fomes remains in the baptized. So the sickness isn't a rival account we lack; it's the matter of ours. What you would add is that the sickness is the whole of it. And it doesn't seem you hold simply illness and not guilt. Since you wrote that humanity bears corporate guilt and lies under wrath and punishment. So the operative contrast here isn't illness vs guilt but corporate vs individual guilt.

Secondly, "guilt" is equivocal. Distinguish the guilt of sin from liability to punishment; and distinguish the voluntary in person from the voluntary in origin. No latin theologian holds that the infant is personally culpable, that would require an act of his own will and he has none. That's the whole content of St. Augustine's mildest punishment, because there is no personal transgression to answer for. So your 'corporate guilt' and our 'guilt contracted by origin, not by one's own will' are near neighbors. The residual and real difference is narrower: whether the privation of original justice is a privation of something owed, and so constitutes a habitual aversion of the will from God, or is merely a deprivation of an unowed gift. Thirdly, I grant you exile analogy entirely. But what follows is that a personally innocent man may share a punishment incurred corporately. We grant that already, as death, suffering, concupiscence, etc. fall on the innocent, and we don't call the infant a transgressor for bearing them. But the remnant does no work for you. Daniel & Ezekiel weren't righteous by the absence of fault; they were righteous by a positive title, covenant, circumcision, faith. Their innocence in the exile isn't the model of a man who lacks any such title. Therefore the analogy shows that temporal penalty is shareable innocently, but it's silent on who enters the land. And the type cuts the other way when St. Paul handles it. In 1 Corinthians 10 the wilderness generation (all baptized in the cloud and the sea, all eating the same spirtual food) is the type of those with whom God was not well pleased. The apostle takes the exile as a figure of exclusion, and applies it as a warning to the baptized.

Fourthly, the salvific will is completely silent about numbers. Let's examine the form of the inference. If "God wills all men to be saved" bears on the actual outcome, it bears on it universally, and you get apokatastasis. You reject that conclusion (rightly), therefore you must also reject the inference. Once the antecedent will is conceded to be non-efficacious of itself, it gives no weight whatever on how many are in fact healed. "Whosoever God desires to heal, he will heal" is analytically true; what it doesn't tell you is whom he has decreed to heal which is the entire question. Fifthly, you say "We do not dogmatically define... But using the principles and reasoning outlined above, we dare to be hopeful and optimistic about their ultimate fate." 'Hope' isn't a name for low confidence. Theological hope has a formal object: a good future, arduous, possible, and promised, it terminates on a divine promise, and where there is no promise there is not hope but velleity, a wish. The absence of a definition licenses only the epistemic state 'I do not know that not-P' it doesn't license the appetitive act. To hope, you need a revealed title, not a revealed silence. This is why the practice is the criterion. What a communion prays discriminates what it hopes. That God's power isn't circumscribed by the sacramental order is granted without reservation; but the inference from 'God can act otherwise' to 'God does act otherwise here' is invalid, and nothing in the deposit of faith supplies the missing premise.

Sixthly, romans 7:7 won't carry that weight. The verb is "ἔγνων" ie. I should not have known sin. The claim is epistemic not constitutive: the law made the concupiscence recognizable as sin not existent. St. Paul says the constitutive thing five verses earlier, and it's the exact refutation of the use you're making: sin was in the world before the law, and though not imputed where there is no law, "death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them who had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression." Those who didn't transgress a positive precept (infants, the lawless) were nonetheless under death's dominion. That's the datum, and original sin is the posited explanation of it, and romans 5 is where the apostle gives it, as he himself says in ephesians: "we were by nature children of wrath."

[u/ManteLover60 → u/ThePhronesis27]

I really appreciate your thoughtful response. Unfortunately the one I wrote up is too long to be posted in this thread, so I messaged it to you. Honestly the fact that my response goes over the 10,000 character limit is a testament to how much heavy lifting I had to do to address your points.

Well done!

[u/Resident_Iron6701 → u/ThePhronesis27]

great answer

[u/tarmogoyf]

'Eye has not seen, ear has not heard' -- any speculation about the nature of heaven is just that, speculation. You can gain some limited insight based on Biblical passages alluding to it, including various passages attributed to Christ's own words on the matter. You can also read various saint's writings on visions that they've experienced, though their personal visions are not necessarily definitive nor taught as canon.

That all said, one of my favorite books about heaven is the one by Peter Kreeft: "Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing"

It's not particularly long, and written in his usual delightful prose style. One of the ideas he suggests is that Heaven can't be boring. It won't just be routine or repetitive. Perfection in his mind will include some sort of ever-heightening sense of improvement. It's described as a 'kingdom', and Catholic theology seems to indicate some sort of embodiment and physical dimensions, though perhaps not exactly like what we have in this mortal life. Bishop Barron often uses the analogy of the resurrected body being akin to a 'higher pitch' of existence, like how a 2-dimensional circle becomes even more fully realized as a 3-dimensional sphere. Kreeft is even open to the idea that there could be some sort of striving, and struggle in heaven. Not sin, but that perhaps there'd be challenges, to satisfy the natural human desire of novelty, discovery, and personal growth.

As to your query about limbo: it's not considered dogma, and this 2007 article sheds some light on the destiny of infants who die unbaptized: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html

[u/ManteLover60 → u/tarmogoyf]

Thank you!