Wholly Innocence

(however belated this post may be) The feast of the Holy Innocents celebrates the deaths of Bethlehem’s young boys at the hands of Herod’s army. They are remembered as victims of events foretold by the prophets and allowed by God, as well as martyrs. Though there is no doubt they are innocent – having committed no crime – the name does beg the question of the innocence of children in general. Is it possible for a small child, two years old and under, to sin?

I think the natural reaction is to say no. I mean, come on, babies are the epitome of innocence. Totally pure, they’d go straight to heaven when they died; no purgatory, no limbo and no hell.

(Shortly after the ‘doctrine’ of limbo was formally shelved, I was at a mission lead by Fr. Dowd where someone asked about what happens to un-baptized babies who die, whether by natural causes or otherwise. His answer was that surely, a God Who forgives our sins, surely that God has a place in His kingdom for the little ones. Whether there is or isn’t anything to forgive isn’t clear. What’s clear is that, in the face of God’s unmerited grace, being baptized into the Church determines nothing.)

But, then again, if they have no need of forgiveness – are completely innocent and free of sin – how can they be human? We’re all touched by the deficient cause, un-formed by original sin. Where that sin came from is irrelevant: what matters is that this is the way we are from the beginning to the ending of our lives. It can’t possibly be something we acquire, because then it wouldn’t be part of our nature and we would, at least for a time, be able not to sin.

But is having sin the same as sinning? I don’t know…is having life the same as living?

St. Augustine thinks of sin as wrongly directed passions. In effect, it’s turning away from God. Although we distinguish the gravity of a particular sin based on one’s consciousness and intent, I don’t think it can ever get to the point where you can say sin has not occurred. (Although…I could be completely wrong about that. I do struggle with questions about who sinned where, so maybe my opinion should be discounted.)

When someone who knows nothing about God or His existence murders a person, it doesn’t stop being a sin because he wasn’t consciously turning away from God. I think that you can turn away without knowing it, and that this turning both constitutes and is the effect of sin.

If a person’s life, and their relationship with God, begins at conception, it must be possible to actually sin from that moment onward. In fact, as I (and probably lots of others, too) well know, it takes a conscious effort to stop committing particular sins. After the Fall, our nature is vitiated so that we are always sinning and always turning away, and are always in need of forgiveness. Well, not always always, but you know what I mean. The necessary conclusion is that babies and children can – and do – sin.

Since we accept the Holy Innocents as martyrs, it would be a little awkward anyway to say that they are not capable of any degree of self-determination. After all, you can’t go around slaughtering people for the sake of the Gospel, or in order to destroy it, and call them martyrs. For one thing, they have absolutely no say in the matter and might not, in fact, regard their own deaths as glorious. For another, their deaths have absolutely nothing to do with the Gospel. Jesus did not say, ‘and thou shalt be fanatics, rampaging and killing in my Name.’ I seem to remember it being more along the lines of ‘thou shalt be persecuted for the sake of my Name, and also giving up your life for my sake guarantees an excellent future.’ Or something.

Jesus is the Gospel, and the entirety of his life is the Gospel narrative. The Holy Innocents are part of the Gospel because part of Jesus’ Messiahhood is persecution, both of himself and in his Name. Within this framework, the deaths of the Holy Innocents are martyrdoms because they testify to that Message, but only if we assume that at some level the children were accepting of their deaths. While they obviously had no choice in the fact that they died, there must have been a moment, however brief or intangible, where a conscious attitude toward that death was taken. Presumably, as is true for all martyrs, God’s grace made that state of mind - that choice - possible. Otherwise, they could not have made a sacrifice that brought glory to God.

I guess the point to all this pointless chatter of mine is to say that if they were conscious enough to have feelings and thoughts about their deaths, some degree of choice making sin possible must also have been present. And, really, I don’t see why we should have a problem saying that, even though it seems intuitively wrong. No person can ever be fully without sin. The point of the Gospel is that we come to God in love and not in innocence, and that God’s unmerited forgiveness imparts a holiness that no life could ever have on its own, however long or short, however lived or died.