(NOTE: The electronic text obtained from The Electronic Bible Society was
not completely corrected. EWTN has corrected all discovered errors. If you
find errors or omissions in the text, please notify [email protected].)


ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA

ON INFANTS' EARLY DEATHS

[Translated by the Rev. William Moore, M.A., Rector of Appleton, Late
Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.]


   Every essayist and every pamphleteer will have you, most Excellent, to
display his eloquence upon; your wondrous qualities will be a broad race-
course wherein he may expatiate. A noble and suggestive subject in able
hands has indeed a way of making a grander style, lifting it to the height
of the great reality. We, however, like an aged horse, will remain outside
this proposed race-course, only turning the ear to listen for the contest
waged in celebrating your praises, if the sound of any literary car
careering in full swing through such wonders may reach us. But though old
age may compel a horse to remain away from the race, it may often happen
that the din of the trampling racers rouses him into excitement, that he
lifts his head with eager looks, that he shows his spirit in his
breathings, and prances and paws the ground frequently, though this
eagerness is all that is left to him, and time has sapped his powers of
going. In the same way our pen remains outside the combat, and age compels
it to yield the course to the professors who flourish now; nevertheless its
eagerness to join the contest about you survives, and that it can still
evince, even though these stylists who flourish now are at the height of
their powers(2). But none of this display of my enthusiasm for you has
anything to do with sounding your own praises: no style, however nervous
and well-balanced, would easily succeed there; so that any one, who
attempted to describe that embarrassing yet harmonious mixture of opposites
in your character, would inevitably be left far behind your real worth.
Nature, indeed, by throwing out the shade of the eyelashes before the
glaring rays, brings to the eyes themselves a weaker light, and so the
sunlight becomes tolerable to us, mingling as it does, in quantities
proportionate to our need, with the shadows which the lashes cast. Just so
the grandeur and the greatness of your character, tempered by your modesty
and humbleness of mind, instead of blinding the beholder's eye, makes the
sight on the contrary a pleasurable one; wherein this humbleness of mind
does not occasion the splendour of the greatness to be dimmed, and its
latent force to be overlooked; but the one is to be noticed in the other,
the humility of your character in its elevation, and the grandeur reversely
in the lowliness. Others must describe all this; and extol, besides, the
many-sightedness of your mind. Your intellectual eyes are indeed as
numerous, it may perhaps be said, as the hairs of the head; their keen
unerring gaze is on everything alike; the distant is foreseen; the near is
not unnoticed; they do not wait for experience to teach expedience; they
see with Hope's insight, or else with that of Memory; they scan the present
all over; first on one thing, then on another, but without confusing them,
your mind works with the same energy and with the amount of attention that
is required. Another, too, must record his admiration of the way in which
poverty is made rich by you; if indeed any one is to be found in this age
of ours who will make that a subject of praise and wonder. Yet surely now,
if never before, the love of poverty will through you abound, and your
ingotten wealth(3) will be envied above the ingots of Croesus. For whom has
sea and land, with all the dower of their natural produce, enriched, as thy
rejection of worldly abundance has enriched thee? They wipe the stain from
steel and so make it shine like silver: so has the gleam of thy life grown
brighter, ever carefully cleansed from the rust of wealth. We leave that to
those who can enlarge upon it, and also upon your excellent knowledge of
the things in which it is more glorious to gain than to abstain from gain.
Grant me, however, leave to say, that you do not despise all acquisitions;
that there are some which, though none of your predecessors has been able
to clutch, yet you and you alone have seized with both your hands; for,
instead of dresses and slaves and money, you have and hold the very souls
of men, and store them in the treasure-house of your love. The essayists
and pamphleteers, whose glory comes from such laudations, will go into
these matters. But our pen, veteran as it now is, is to rouse itself only
so far as to go at a foot's pace through the problem which your wisdom has
proposed; namely, this--what we are to think of those who are taken
prematurely, the moment of whose birth almost coincides with that of their
death. The cultured heathen Plato spoke, in the person of one who had come
to life again(4), much philosophy about the judgment courts in that other
world; but he has left this other question a mystery, as ostensibly too
great for human conjecture to be employed upon. If, then, there is anything
in these lucubrations of ours that is of a nature to clear up the
obscurities of this question, you will doubtless welcome the new account of
it if otherwise, you will at all events excuse this in old age, and accept,
if nothing else, our wish to afford you some degree of pleasure. History(5)
says that Xerxes, that great prince who had made almost every land under
the sun into one vast camp, and roused with his own designs the whole
world, when he was marching against the Greeks received with delight a poor
man's gift; and that gift was water, and that not in a jar, but carried in
the hollow of the palm of his hand. So do you, of your innate generosity,
follow his example; to him the will made the gift, and our gift may be
found in itself but a poor watery thing. In the case of the wonders in the
heavens, a man sees their beauty equally, whether he is trained to watch
them, or whether he gazes upwards with an unscientific eye; but the feeling
towards them is not the same in the man who comes from philosophy to their
contemplation, and in him who has only his senses of perception to commit
them to; the latter may be pleased with the sunlight, or deem the beauty of
stars worthy of his wonder, or have watched the stages of the moon's course
throughout the month; but the former, who has the soul-insight, and whose
training has enlightened him so as to comprehend the phenomena of the
heavens, leaves unnoticed all these things which delight the senses of the
more unthinking, and looks at the harmony of the whole, inspecting the
concert which results even from opposite movements in the circular
revolutions; how the inner circles of these turn the contrary way to that
in which the fixed stars are carried round(6); how those of the heavenly
bodies to be observed in these inner circles are variously grouped in their
approachments and divergements, their disappearances behind each other and
their flank movements, and yet effect always precisely in the same way that
notable and never-ending harmony; of which those are conscious who do not
overlook the position of the tiniest star, and whose minds, by training
domiciled above, pay equal attention to them all. In the same way do you, a
precious life to me, watch the Divine economy; leaving those objects which
unceasingly occupy the minds of the crowd, wealth, I mean, and luxury(7)
and vainglory--things which like sunbeams flashing in their faces dazzle
the unthinking--you will not pass without inquiry the seemingly most
trivial questions in the world; for you do most carefully scrutinize the
inequalities in human lives; not only with regard to wealth and penury, and
the differences of position and descent (for you know that they are as
nothing, and that they owe their existence not to any intrinsic reality,
but to the foolish estimate of those who are struck with nonentities, as if
they were actual things; and that if one were only to abstract from
somebody who glitters with glory the blind adoration(8) of those who gaze
at him, nothing would be left him after all the inflated pride which elates
him, even though the whole mass of the world's riches were buried in his
cellars), but it is one of your anxieties to know, amongst the other
intentions of each detail of the Divine government, wherefore it is that,
while the life of one is lengthened into old age, another has only so far a
portion of it as to breathe the air with one gasp, and die. If nothing in
this world happens without God, but all is linked tO the Divine will, and
if the Deity is skilful and prudential, then it follows necessarily that
there is some plan in these things bearing the mark of His wisdom, and at
the same time of His providential care. A blind unmeaning occurrence can
never be the work of God; for it is the property of God, as the Scripture
says(9), to "make all things in wisdom." What wisdom, then, can we trace in
the following? A human being enters on the scene of life, draws in the air,
beginning the process of living with a cry of pain, pays the tribute of a
tear to Nature(1), just tastes life's sorrows, before any of its sweets
have been his, before his feelings have gained any strength; still loose in
all his joints, tender, pulpy, unset; in a word, before he is even human
(if the gift of reason is man's peculiarity, and he has never had it in
him), such an one, with no advantage over the embryo in the womb except
that he has seen the air, so short-lived, dies and goes to pieces again;
being either exposed or suffocated, or else of his own accord ceasing to
live from weakness. What are we to think about him? How are we to feel
about such deaths? Will a soul such as that behold its Judge? Will it stand
with the rest before the tribunal? Will it undergo its trial for deeds done
in life? Will it receive the just recompense by being purged, according to
the Gospel utterances, in fire, or refreshed with the dew of blessing(2)?
But I do not see how we can imagine that, in the case of such a soul. The
word "retribution "implies that something must have been previously given;
but he who has not lived at all has been deprived of the material from
which to give anything. There being, then, no retribution, there is neither
good nor evil left to expect. "Retribution" purports to be the paying back
of one of these two qualities; but that which is to be found neither in the
category of good nor that of bad is in no category at all; for this
antithesis between good and bad is an opposition that admits no middle; and
neither will come to him who has not made a beginning with either of them.
What therefore falls under neither of these heads may be said not even to
have existed. But if some one says that such a life does not only exist,
but exists as one of the good ones, and that God gives, though He does not
repay, what is good to such, we may ask what sort of reason he advances for
this partiality; how is justice apparent in such a view; how will he prove
his idea in concordance with the utterances in the Gospels? There (the
Master) says, the acquisition of the Kingdom comes to those who are deemed
worthy of it, as a matter of exchange. "When ye have done such and such
things, then it is fight that ye get the Kingdom as a reward." But in this
case there is no act of doing or of willing beforehand, and so what
occasion is there for saying that these will receive from God any expected
recompense? If one unreservedly accepts a statement such as that, to the
effect that any so passing into life will necessarily be classed amongst
the good, it will dawn upon him then that not partaking in life at all will
be a happier state than living, seeing that in the one case the enjoyment
of good is placed beyond a doubt even with barbarian parentage, or a
conception from a union not legitimate; but he who has lived the span
ordinarily possible to Nature gets the pollution of evil necessarily
mingled more or less with his life, or, if he is to be quite outside this
contagion, it will be at the price of much painful effort. For virtue is
achieved by its seekers not without a struggle; nor is abstinence from the
paths of pleasure a painless process to human nature. So that one of two
probations must be the inevitable fate of him who has had the longer lease
of life; either to combat here on Virtue's toilsome field, or to suffer
there the painful recompense of a life of evil. But in the case of infants
prematurely dying there is nothing of that sort; but they pass to the
blessed lot at once, if those who take this view of the matter speak true.
It follows also necessarily from this that a state of unreason is
preferable to having reason, and virtue will thereby be revealed as of no
value: if he who has never possessed it suffers no loss, so, as regards the
enjoyment of blessedness, the labour to acquire it will be useless folly;
the unthinking condition will be the one that comes out best from God's
judgment. For these and such-like reasons you bid me sift the matter, with
a view to our getting, by dint of a closely-reasoned inquiry, some firm
ground on which to rest our thoughts about it.

   For my part, in view of the difficulties of the subject proposed, I
think the exclamation of the Apostle very suitable to the present case,
just as he uttered it over unfathomable questions: "O the depth of the
riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His
judgments, and His ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of
the Lord(3)?" But seeing on the other hand that that Apostle declares it to
be a peculiarity of him that is spiritual to "judge all things(4)," and
commends those who have been "enriched(5)" by the Divine grace "in all
utterance and in all knowledge," I venture to assert that it is not right
to omit the examination which is within the range of our ability, nor to
leave the question here raised without making any inquiries, or having any
ideas about it; lest, like the actual subject of our proposed discussion,
this essay should have an ineffectual ending, spoilt before its maturity by
the fatal indolence of those who will not nerve themselves to search out
the truth, like a new-born infant ere it sees the light and acquires any
strength. I assert, too, that it is not well at once to confront and meet
objections, as if we were pleading in court, but to introduce a certain
order into the discussion and to lead the view on from one point to
another. What, then, should this order be? First, we want to know the
whence of human nature, and the wherefore of its ever having come into
existence. If we hit the answer to these questions, we shall not fail in
getting the required explanation. Now, that everything that exists, after
God, in the intellectual or sensible world of beings owes that existence to
Him, is a proposition which it is superfluous to prove; no one, with
however little insight into the truth of things, would gainsay it. For
every one agrees that the Universe is linked to one First Cause; that
nothing in it owes its existence to itself, so as to be its own origin and
cause; but that there is on the other hand a single uncreate eternal
Essence, the same for ever, which transcends all our ideas of distance,
conceived of as without increase or decrease, and beyond the scope of any
definition; and that time and space with all their consequences, and
anything previous to these that thought can grasp in the intelligible
supramundane world, are all the productions of this Essence. Well, then, we
affirm that human nature is one of these productions; and a word of the
inspired Teaching helps us in this, which declares that when God had
brought all things else upon the scene of life, man was exhibited upon the
earth, a mixture from Divine sources, the godlike intellectual essence
being in him united with the several portions of earthly elements
contributed towards his formation, and that he was fashioned by his Maker
to be the incarnate likeness of Divine transcendent Power. It would be
better however to quote the very words: "And God created man, in the image
of God created He him(6)." Now the reason of the making of this animate
being has been given by certain writers previous to us as follows. The
whole creation is divided into two parts; that "which is seen," and that
"which is not seen," to use the Apostle's words (the second meaning the
intelligible and immaterial, the first, the sensible and material); and
being thus divided, the angelic and spiritual natures, which are among "the
things not seen," reside in places above the world, and above the heavens,
because such a residence is in correspondence with their constitution; for
an intellectual nature is a fine, clear, unencumbered, agile kind of thing,
and a heavenly body is fine and light, and perpetually moving, and the
earth on the contrary, which stands last in the list of things sensible,
can never be an adequate and congenial spot for creatures intellectual to
sojourn in. For what correspondence can there possibly be between that
which is light and buoyant, on the one hand, and that which is heavy and
gravitating on the other? Well, in order that the earth may not be
completely devoid of the local indwelling of the intellectual and the
immaterial, man (these writers tell us) was fashioned by the Supreme
forethought, and his earthy parts moulded over the intellectual and godlike
essence of his soul; and so this amalgamation with that which has material
weight enables the soul to live on this element of earth, which possesses a
certain bond of kindred with the substance of the flesh. The design of all
that is being born(7), then, is that the Power which is above both the
heavenly and the earthly universe may in all parts of the creation be
glorified by means of intellectual natures, conspiring to the same end by
virtue of the same faculty in operation in all, I mean that of looking upon
God. But this operation of looking upon God is nothing less than the life-
nourishment appropriate, as like to like, to an intellectual nature. For
just as these bodies, earthy as they are, are preserved by nourishment that
is earthy, and we detect in them all alike, whether brute or reasoning, the
operations of a material kind of vitality, so it is right to assume that
there is an intellectual life-nourishment as well, by which such natures(8)
are maintained in existence. But if bodily food, coming and going as it
does in circulation, nevertheless imparts a certain amount of vital energy
to those who get it, how much more does the partaking of the real thing,
always remaining and always the same, preserve the eater in existence? If,
then, this is the life-nourishment of an intellectual nature, namely, to
have a part in God, this part will not be gained by that which is of an
opposite quality; the would-be partaker must m some degree be akin to that
which is to be partaken of. The eye enjoys the light by virtue of having
light within itself to seize its kindred light, and the finger or any other
limb cannot effect the act of vision because none of this natural light is
organized in any of them. The same necessity requires that in our partaking
of God there should be some kinship in the constitution of the partaker
with that which is partaken of. Therefore, as the Scripture says, man was
made in the image of God; that like, I take it, might be able to see like;
and to see God is, as was said above, the life of the soul. But seeing that
ignorance of the true good is like a mist that obscures the visual keenness
of the soul, and that when that mist grows denser a cloud is formed so
thick that Truth's ray cannot pierce through these depths of ignorance, it
follows further that with the total deprivation of the light the soul's
life ceases altogether; for we have said that the real life of the soul is
acted out in partaking of the Good; but when ignorance hinders this
apprehension of God, the soul which thus ceases to partake of God, ceases
also to live. But no one can force us to give the family history(9) of this
ignorance, asking whence and from what father it is; let him be given to
understand from the word itself that "ignorance" and "knowledge" indicate
one of the relations of the soul;(1) but no relation, whether expressed or
not, conveys the idea of substance; a relation and a substance are quite of
different descriptions. If, then, knowledge is not a substance, but a
perfected(2) operation of the soul, it must be conceded that ignorance must
be much farther removed still from anything in the way of substance; but
that which is not in that way does not exist at all; and so it would be
useless to trouble ourselves about where it comes from. Now seeing that the
Word(3) declares that the living in God is the life of the soul, and seeing
that this living is knowledge according to each man's ability, and that
ignorance does not imply the reality of anything, but is only the negation
of the operation of knowing, and seeing that upon this partaking in God
being no longer effected there follows at once the cancelling of the soul's
life, which is the worst of evils,--because of all this the Producer of all
Good would work in us the cure of such an evil. A cure is a good thing, but
one who does not look to the evangelic mystery would still be ignorant of
the manner of the cure. We have shown that alienation from God, Who is the
Life, is an evil; the cure, then, of this infirmity is, again to be made
friends with God, and so to be in life once more. When such a life, then,
is always held up in hope before humanity, it cannot be said that the
winning of this life is absolutely a reward of a good life, and that the
contrary is a punishment (of a bad one); but what we insist on resembles
the case of the eyes. We do not say that one who has clear eyesight is
rewarded as with a prize by being able to perceive the objects of sight;
nor on the other hand that he who has diseased eyes experiences a failure
of optic activity as the result of some penal sentence. With the eye in a
natural state sight follows necessarily; with it vitiated by disease
failure of sight as necessarily follows. In the same way the life of
blessedness is as a familiar second nature to those who have kept clear the
senses of the soul; but when the blinding stream of ignorance prevents our
partaking in the real light, then it necessarily follows that we miss that,
the enjoyment of which we declare to be the life of the partaker.

   Now that we have laid down these premisses, it is time to examine in
the light of them the question proposed to us. It was somewhat of this
kind. "If the recompense of blessedness is assigned according to the
principles of justice, in what class shall he be placed who has died in
infancy without having laid in this life any foundation, good or bad,
whereby any return according to his deserts may be given him?" To this we
shall make answer, with our eye fixed upon the consequences of that which
we have already laid down, that this happiness in the future, while it is
in its essence a heritage of humanity, may at the same time be called in
one sense a recompense; and we will make clear our meaning by the same
instance as before. Let us suppose two persons suffering  from an affection
of the eyes; and that the one surrenders himself most diligently to the
process of being cured, and undergoes all that Medicine can apply to him,
however painful it may be; and that the other indulges without restraint in
baths(4) and wine-drinking, and listens to no advice whatever of his doctor
as to the healing of his eyes. Well, when we look to the end of each of
these we say that each duly receives in requital the fruits Of his choice,
the one in deprivation of the light, the other in its enjoyment; by a
misuse of the word we do actually call trial which necessarily follows, a
recompense. We may speak, then, in this way also as regards this question
of the infants: we may say that the enjoyment of that future life does
indeed belong of right to the human being, but that, seeing the plague of
ignorance has seized almost all now living in the flesh, he who has purged
himself of it by means of the necessary courses of treatment receives the
due reward of his diligence, when he enters on the life that is truly
natural; while he who refuses Virtue's purgatives and renders that plague
of ignorance, through the pleasures he has been entrapped by, difficult in
his case to cure, gets himself into an unnatural state, and so is estranged
from the truly natural life, and has no share in the existence which of
right belongs to us and is congenial to us. Whereas the innocent babe has
no such plague before its soul's eyes obscuring(5) its measure of light,
and so it continues to exist in that natural life; it does not need the
soundness which comes from purgation, because it never admitted the plague
into its soul at all. Further, the present life appears to me to offer a
sort of analogy to the future life we hope for, and to be intimately
connected with it, thus; the tenderest infancy is suckled and reared with
milk from the breast; then another sort of food appropriate to the subject
of this fostering, and intimately adapted to his needs, succeeds, until at
last he arrives at full growth. And so I think, in quantities continually
adapted to it, in a sort of regular progress, the soul partakes of that
truly natural life; according to its capacity and its power it receives a
measure of the delights of the Blessed state; indeed we learn as much from
Paul, who had a different sort of food for him who was already grown in
virtue and for the imperfect "babe." For to the last he says, "I have fed
you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear
it(6).'' But to those who have grown to the full measure of intellectual
maturity he says, "But strong meat belongeth to those that are of full age,
even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised....(7)" Now it
is not right to say that the man and the infant are in a similar state
however free both may be from any contact of disease (for how can those who
do not partake of exactly the same things be in an equal state of
enjoyment?); on the contrary, though the absence of any affliction from
disease may be predicated of both alike as long as both are out of the
reach of its influence, yet, when we come to the matter of delights, there
is no likeness in the enjoyment, though the percipients are in the same
condition. For the man there is a natural delight in discussions, and in
the management of affairs, and in the honourable discharge of the duties of
an office, and in being distinguished for acts of help to the needy; in
living, it may be, with a wife whom he  loves, and ruling his household;
and in all those amusements to be found in this life in the way of pastime,
in musical pieces and theatrical spectacles, in the chase, in bathing, in
gymnastics, in the mirth of banquets, and anything else of that sort. For
the infant, on the contrary, there is a natural delight in its milk, and in
its nurse's arms, and in gentle rocking that induces and then sweetens its
slumber. Any happiness beyond this the tenderness of its years naturally
prevents it from feeling. In the same manner those who in their life here
have nourished the forces of their souls by a course of virtue, and have,
to use the Apostle's words, had the "senses" of their minds "exercised,"
will, if they are translated to that life beyond, which is out of the body,
proportionately to the condition and the powers they have attained
participate in that divine delight; they will have more or they will have
less of its riches according to the capacity acquired. But the soul that
has never felt the taste of virtue, while it may indeed remain perfectly
free from the sufferings which flow from wickedness having never caught the
disease of evil at all, does nevertheless in the first instance s partake
only so far in that life beyond (which consists, according to our previous
definition, in the knowing and being in God) as this nursling can receive;
until the time comes that it has thriven on the contemplation of the truly
Existent as on a congenial diet, and, becoming capable of receiving more,
takes at will more from that abundant supply of the truly Existent which is
offered.

   Having, then, all these considerations in our view, we hold that the
soul of him who has reached every virtue in his course, and the soul of him
whose portion of life has been simply nothing, are equally out of the reach
of those sufferings which flow from wickedness. Nevertheless we do not
conceive of the employment of their lives as on the same level at all. The
one has heard those heavenly announcements, by which, in the words of the
Prophet, "the glory of God is declared(9)," and, travelling through
creation, has been led to the apprehension of a Master of the creation; he
has taken the true Wisdom for his teacher, that Wisdom which the spectacle
of the Universe suggests; and when he observed the beauty of this material
sunlight he had grasped by analogy the beauty of the real sunlight(1); he
saw in the solid firmness of this earth the unchangeableness of its
Creator; when he perceived the immensity of the heavens he was led on the
road towards the vast Infinity of that Power which encompasses the
Universe; when he saw the rays of the sun reaching from such sublimities
even to ourselves he began to believe, by the means of such phenomena, that
the activities of the Divine Intelligence did not fail to descend from the
heights of Deity even to each one of us; for if a single luminary can
occupy everything alike that lies beneath it with the force of light, and,
more than that, can, while lending itself to all who can use it, still
remain self-centred and undissipated, how much more shall the Creator of
that luminary become "all in all," as the Apostle speaks, and come into
each with such a measure of Himself as each subject of His influence can
receive! Nay, look only at an ear of corn, at the germinating of some
plant, at a ripe bunch of grapes, at the beauty of early autumn, whether in
fruit or flower, at the grass springing unbidden, at the mountain reaching
up with its summit to the height of the ether, at the springs on its slopes
bursting from those swelling breasts, and running in rivers through the
glens, at the sea receiving those streams from every direction and yet
remaining within its limits, with waves edged by the stretches of beach and
never stepping beyond those fixed boundaries of continent: look at these
and such-like sights, and how can the eye of reason fail to find in them
all that our education for Realities requires? Has a man who looks at such
spectacles procured for himself only a slight power for the enjoyment of
those delights beyond? Not to speak of the studies which sharpen the mind
towards moral excellence geometry, I mean, and astronomy, and the knowledge
of the truth that the science of numbers gives, and every method that
furnishes a proof of the unknown and a conviction of the known, and, before
all these, the philosophy contained in the inspired Writings, which affords
a complete purification to those who educate themselves thereby in the
mysteries of God. But the man who has acquired the knowledge of none of
these things and has not even been conducted by the material cosmos to the
perception of the beauties above it, and passes through life with his mind
in a kind of tender, unformed, and untrained state, he is not the man that
is likely to be placed amongst the same surroundings as our argument has
indicated that other man, before spoken of, to be placed; so that, in this
view, it can no longer be maintained that, in the two supposed and
completely opposite cases, the one who has taken no part in life is more
blessed than the one who has taken a noble part in it. Certainly, in
comparison with one who has lived all his life in sin, not only the
innocent babe but even one who has never come into the world at all will be
blessed. We learn as much too in the case of Judas, from the sentence
pronounced upon him in the Gospels(2); namely, that when we think of such
men, that which never existed is to be preferred to that which has existed
in such sin. For, as to the latter, on account of the depth of the
ingrained evil, the chastisement in the way of purgation will be extended
into infinity(3); but as for what has never existed, how can any torment
touch it?--However, notwithstanding that, the man who institutes a
comparison between the infantine immature life and that of perfect virtue,
must himself be pronounced immature for so judging of realities. Do you,
then, in consequence of this, ask the reason why so and so, quite tender in
age, is quietly taken away from amongst the living? Do you ask what the
Divine wisdom contemplates in this? Well, if you are thinking of all those
infants who are proofs of illicit connections, and so are made away with by
their parents, you are not justified in calling to account, for such
wickedness, that God Who will surely bring to judgment the unholy deeds
done in this way. In the case, on the other hand, of any infant who, though
his parents have nurtured him, and have with nursing and supplication spent
earnest care upon him, nevertheless does not continue in this world, but
succumbs to a sickness even unto death, which is unmistakably the sole
cause of it, we venture upon the following considerations. It is a sign of
the perfection of God's providence, that He not only heals maladies(4) that
have come into existence, but also provides that some should be never mixed
up at all in the things which He has forbidden; it is reasonable, that is,
to expect that He Who knows the future equally with the past should check
the advance of an infant to complete maturity, in order that the evil may
not be developed which His foreknowledge has detected in his future life,
and in order that a lifetime granted to one whose evil dispositions will be
lifelong may not become the actual material for his vice. We shall better
explain what we are thinking of by an illustration. Suppose a banquet of
very varied abundance, prepared for a certain number of guests, and let the
chair be taken by one of their number who is gifted to know accurately the
peculiarities of constitution in each of them, and what food is best
adapted to each temperament, what is harmful and unsuitable; in addition to
this let him be entrusted with a sort of absolute authority over them,
whether to allow as he pleases so and so to remain at the board or to expel
so and so, and to take every precaution that each should address himself to
the viands most suited to his constitution, so that the invalid should not
kill himself by adding the fuel of what he was eating to his ailment, while
the guest in robuster health should not make himself ill with things not
good for him s and fall into discomfort from over-feeding(6). Suppose,
amongst these, one of those inclined to drink is conducted out in the
middle of the banquet or even at the very beginning of it; or let him
remain to the very end, it all depending on the way that the president can
secure that perfect order shall prevail, if possible, at the board
throughout, and that the evil sights of surfeiting, tippling, and tipsiness
shall be absent. It is just so, then, as when that individual is not very
pleased at being torn away from all the savoury dainties and deprived of
his favourite liquors, but is inclined to charge the president with want of
justice and judgment, as having turned him away from the feast for envy,
and not for any forethought for him; but if he were to catch a sight of
those who were already beginning to misbehave themselves, from the long
continuance of their drinking, in the way of vomitings and putting their
heads on the table and unseemly talk, he would perhaps feel grateful to him
for having removed him, before he got into such a condition, from a deep
debauch. If our illustration(7) is understood, we can easily apply the rule
which it contains to the question before us. What, then, was that question?
Why does God, when fathers endeavour their utmost to preserve a successor
to their line, often let the son and heir be snatched away in earliest
infancy(8)? To those who ask this, we shall reply with the illustration of
the banquet; namely, that Life's board is as it were crowded with a vast
abundance and variety of dainties; and it must, please, be noticed that,
true to the practice of gastronomy, all its dishes are not sweetened with
the honey of enjoyment, but in some cases an existence has a taste of some
especially harsh mischances(9) given to it: just as experts in the arts of
catering desire how they may excite the appetites of the guests with sharp,
or briny, or astringent dishes. Life, I say, is not in all its
circumstances as sweet as honey; there are circumstances in it in which
mere brine is the only relish, or into which an astringent, or vinegary, or
sharp pungent flavour has so insinuated itself, that the rich sauce becomes
very difficult to taste: the cups of Temptation, too, are filled with all
sorts of beverages; some by the error of pride(1) produce the vice of
inflated vanity; others lure on those who drain them to some deed of
rashness; whilst in other cases they excite a vomiting in which all the
ill-gotten acquisitions of years are with shame surrendered(2). Therefore,
to prevent one who has indulged in the carousals to an improper extent from
lingering over so profusely furnished a table, he is early taken from the
number of the banqueters, and thereby secures an escape out of those evils
which unmeasured indulgence procures for gluttons. This is that achievement
of a perfect Providence which I spoke of; namely, not only to heal evils
that have been committed, but also to forestall them before they have been
committed; and this, we suspect, is the cause of the deaths of new-born
infants. He Who does all things upon a Plan withdraws the materials for
evil in His love to the individual, and, to a character whose marks His
Foreknowledge has read, grants no time to display by a pre-eminence in
actual vice what it is when its propensity to evil gets free play. Often,
too, the Arranger of this Feast of Life exposes by such-like dispensations
the cunning device of the "constraining cause" of money-loving(3), so that
this vice comes to the light bared of all specious pretexts, and no longer
obscured by any misleading screen(4). For most declare that they give play
s to their cravings for more, in order that they may make their offspring
all the richer; but that their vice belongs to their nature, and is not
caused by any external necessity, is proved by that inexcusable avarice
which is observed in childless persons. Many who have no heir, nor any hope
of one, for the great wealth which they have laboriously gained, rear a
countless brood within themselves of wants instead of children, and they
are left without a channel into which to convey this incurable disease,
though they cannot find an excuse in any necessity for this failing(6). But
take the case of some who, during their sojourn in life, have been fierce
and domineering in disposition, slaves to every kind of lust, passionate to
madness, refraining from no act even of the most desperate wickedness,
robbers and murderers, traitors to their country, and, more execrable
still, patricides, mother-killers, child-murderers, mad after unnatural
intercourse; suppose such characters grow old in this wickedness; how, some
one may ask, does this harmonize with the result of our previous
investigations? If that which is taken away before its time in order that
it may not continuously glut itself, according to our illustration of the
banquet, with Life's indulgences, is providentially removed from that
carouse, what is the special design in so and so, who is of that
disposition, being allowed to continue his revels(7) to old age, steeping
both himself and his boon companions in the noxious fumes of his
debauchery? In fine, you will ask, wherefore does God in His Providence
withdraw one from life before his character can be perfected in evil, and
leave another to grow to be such a monster that it had been better for him
if he had never been born? In answer to this we will give, to those who are
inclined to receive it favourably, a reason such as follows: viz. that
oftentimes the existence of those whose life has been a good one operates
to the advantage of their offspring; and there are hundreds of passages
testifying to this in the inspired Writings, which clearly teach us that
the tender care shown by God to those who have deserved it is shared in by
their successors, and that even to have been an obstruction, in the path to
wickedness, to any one who is sure to live wickedly, is a good result(8).
But seeing that our Reason in this matter has to grope in the dark, clearly
no one can complain if its conjecturing leads our mind to a variety of
conclusions. Well, then, not only one might pronounce that God, in kindness
to the Founders of some Family, withdraws a member of it who is going to
live a bad life from that bad life, but, even if there is no antecedent
such as this in the case of some early deaths, it is not unreasonable to
conjecture that they would have plunged into a vicious life with a more
desperate vehemence than any of those who have actually become notorious
for their wickedness. That nothing happens without God we know from many
sources; and, reversely, that God's dispensations have no element of chance
and confusion in them every one will allow, who realizes that God is
Reason, and Wisdom, and Perfect Goodness, and Truth, and could not admit of
that which is not good and not consistent with His Truth(9). Whether, then,
the early deaths of infants are to be attributed to the aforesaid causes,
or whether there is some further cause of them beyond these, it befits us
to acknowledge that these things happen for the best. I have another reason
also to give which I have learnt from the wisdom of an Apostle; a reason,
that is, why some of those who have been distinguished for their wickedness
have been suffered to live on in their self-chosen course. Having expanded
a thought of this kind at some length in his argument to the Romans(1), and
having retorted upon himself with the counter-conclusion, which thence
necessarily follows, that the sinner could no longer be justly blamed, if
his sinning is a dispensation of God, and that he would not have existed at
all, if it had been contrary to the wishes of Him Who has the world in His
power, the Apostle meets this conclusion and solves this counter-plea by
means of a still deeper view of things. He tells us that God, in rendering
to every one his due, sometimes even grants a scope to wickedness for good
in the end. Therefore He allowed the King of Egypt, for example, to be born
and to grow up such as he was; the intention was that Israel, that great
nation exceeding all calculation by numbers, might be instructed by his
disaster. God's omnipotence is to be recognized in every direction; it has
strength to bless the deserving; it is not inadequate to the punishment of
wickedness(2); and so, as the complete removal of that peculiar people out
of Egypt was necessary in order to prevent their receiving any infection
from the sins of Egypt in a misguided way of living, therefore that God-
defying and infamous Pharaoh rose and reached his maturity in the lifetime
of the very people who were to be benefited, so that Israel might acquire a
just knowledge of the two-fold energy of God, working as it did in either
direction; the more beneficent they learnt in their own persons, the
sterner by seeing it exercised upon those who were being scourged for their
wickedness; for in His consummate wisdom God can mould even evil into co-
operation with good. The artisan (if the Apostle's argument may be
confirmed by any words of ours)--the artisan who by his skill has to
fashion iron to some instrument for daily use, has need not only of that
which owing to its natural ductility lends itself to his art, but, be the
iron never so hard, be it never so difficult to soften it in the fire, be
it even impossible owing to its adamantine resistance to mould it into any
useful implement, his art requires the co-operation even of this; he will
use it for an anvil, upon which the soft workable iron may be beaten and
formed into something useful. But some one will say, "It is not all who
thus reap in this life the fruits of their wickedness, any more than all
those whose lives have been virtuous profit while living by their virtuous
endeavours; what then, I ask, is the advantage of their existence in the
case of these who live to the end unpunished?" I will bring forward to meet
this question of yours a reason which transcends all human arguments.
Somewhere in his utterances the great David declares that some portion of
the blessedness of the virtuous will consist in this; in contemplating side
by side with their own felicity the perdition of the reprobate. He says,
"The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his
hands in the blood of the ungodly(3)"; not indeed as rejoicing over the
torments of those sufferers, but as then most completely realizing the
extent of the well-earned rewards of virtue. He signifies by those words
that it will be an addition to the felicity of the virtuous and an
intensification of it, to have its contrary set against it. In saying that
"he washes his hands in the blood of the ungodly" he would convey the
thought that "the cleanness of his own acting in life is plainly declared
in the perdition of the ungodly." For the expression "wash" represents the
idea of cleanness; but no one is washed, but is rather defiled, in blood;
whereby it is clear that it is a comparison with the harsher forms of
punishment that puts in a clearer light the blessedness of virtue. We must
now summarize our argument, in order that the thoughts which we have
expanded may be more easily retained in the memory. The premature deaths of
infants have nothing in them to suggest the thought that one who so
terminates his life is subject to some grievous misfortune, any more than
they are to be put on a level with the deaths of those who have purified
themselves in this life by every kind of virtue; the more far-seeing
Providence of God curtails the immensity of sins in the case of those whose
lives are going to be so evil. That some of the wicked have lived on(4)
does not upset this reason which we have rendered; for the evil was in
their case hindered in kindness to their parents; whereas, in the case of
those whose parents have never imparted to them any power of calling upon
God, such a form of the Divine kindness(5), which accompanies such a power,
is not transmitted to their own children; otherwise the infant now
prevented by death from growing up wicked would have exhibited a far more
desperate wickedness than the most notorious sinners, seeing that it would
have been unhindered. Even granting that some have climbed to the topmost
pinnacle of crime, the Apostolic view supplies a comforting answer to the
question; for He Who does everything with Wisdom knows how to effect by
means of evil some good. Still further, if some occupy a pre-eminence in
crime, and yet for all that have never been a metal, to use our former
illustration, that God's skill has used for any good, this is a case which
constitutes an addition to the happiness of the good, as the Prophet's
words suggest; it may be reckoned as not a slight element in that
happiness, nor, on the other hand, as one unworthy of God's providing.


Taken from "The Early Church Fathers and Other Works" originally published
by Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. in English in Edinburgh, Scotland, beginning in
1867. (LNPF II/V, Schaff and Wace). The digital version is by The
Electronic
Bible Society, P.O. Box 701356, Dallas, TX 75370, 214-407-WORD.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
  The electronic form of this document is copyrighted.
  Copyright (c) Eternal Word Television Network 1996.
  Provided courtesy of:

       EWTN On-Line Services
       PO Box 3610
       Manassas, VA 20108
       Voice: 703-791-2576
       Fax: 703-791-4250
       Data: 703-791-4336
       FTP: ftp.ewtn.com
       Telnet: ewtn.com
       WWW: http://www.ewtn.com.
       Email address: [email protected]

-------------------------------------------------------------------

You are viewing proxied material from gopher.ratthing.com. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.