Limbo

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This article is about the theological concept. For other uses of the term, see Limbo (disambiguation).

In Roman Catholicism, there are two categories of limbo. The Limbo of the Fathers was where the souls of ancient righteous people went before Jesus Christ made it possible for them to enter Heaven. The word limbo has also been used to refer to Limbo of Children, the thought of a permanent status of the unbaptized who die in infancy, without having committed any personal sins, but without having been freed from original sin. Limbo of the Children is a theological speculation that has never received official Church approval.

Limbo comes from the latin limbus meaning a hem or an edge or a boundary.

Limbo of the Fathers

"Jesus in Limbo" by Domenico Beccafumi

The concept of the limbo of the fathers (limbus patrum) is that people who lived good lives but died before Jesus' Resurrection did not go to heaven, but rather had to wait for Christ to open heaven's gates. This concept of limbo affirms that one can get into heaven only through Jesus Christ but does not portray Moses, etc., as being punished eternally in hell.

The term Limbo does not appear in the Bible, nor is the concept spelled out. Roman Catholics take the term bosom of Abraham, which appears in Luke's story of Lazarus and Dives, to refer to limbo. The bosom of Abraham represents the blissful state where the righteous dead await Judgment Day. As such, this concept corresponds closely to the concept of limbo of the fathers in that it is neither Heaven nor Hell and the people there are waiting to enter paradise.

Jesus told the "good thief" that the two of them would be together "this day" in "paradise," (Luke 23:43) but between the Resurrection and the Ascension, Jesus told his followers that he has "not yet ascended to the Father" (John 20:17). A possible resolution to this apparent contradiction lies in the fact that Jesus' statement to the thief can be understood in two different ways, depending on where you place the comma (which was not present in the original manuscripts): either "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise" or "Truly I say to you today, you shall be with Me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43, NASB). The latter interpretation would be consistent with Jesus's subsequent statement to his followers. By this reading, the good thief waited in limbo until the Resurrection made it possible for him to enter heaven. The Greek Fathers however, who did not accept the concept of limbo, did not see a contradiction in these two statements, and read John 20:17 as a reference to the Ascension of Jesus.

Jesus is also described as preaching to "the spirits in prison" (1 Pet 3:19). Medieval drama sometimes portrayed Christ leading a dramatic assault — The Harrowing of Hell — during the three days between the Crucifixion and the resurrection. In this assault, Jesus freed the souls of the just and escorted them triumphantly into heaven. This imagery is still used in the Eastern Orthodox Church's Holy Saturday liturgy (between Good Friday and Pascha).

Limbo of Children

Many Roman Catholic theologians believe that unbaptized children, as well as others lacking the use of reason, go to "the limbo of children" (limbus infantium or limbus puerorum) after death. The Church, however, does not teach this concept as doctrine.

If heaven is a state of supernatural happiness and a union with God, and hell is a state of torture and a separation from God, then limbo is a sort of intermediate state, in which souls are denied the beatific vision, but saved from the torment of hell, according to speculations by many eminent Roman Catholic theologians. Saint Thomas Aquinas described the limbo of children as an eternal state of natural joy, untempered by any sense of loss at how much greater their joy might have been had they been baptized. He argued that this was a reward of natural happiness for natural virtue; a reward of supernatural happiness for merely natural virtue would be inappropriate since, due to original sin, unbaptized children lack the necessary supernatural grace.

The foundational importance of the sacrament of baptism (using water) or the non-sacramental baptism of desire or baptism of blood in Roman Catholic theology gives rise to the argument that the unbaptized are not eligible for entry into heaven, because the original sin of human nature precludes the unbaptized from the beatific vision enjoyed by the souls in heaven.

Since infants are incapable of either professing their faith or performing acts of Christian charity, the only known means through which they might receive the grace of justification required for salvation is through water baptism (or baptism of blood, as in the case of the martyred Holy Innocents). If, for whatever reason, an infant dies unbaptized (see infant baptism), there is a question about whether such children can be saved. Early Church writers, notably St. Augustine, considered that unbaptized infants were excluded from heaven, and thus went to hell. As noted above, later theologians suggested that such children, being innocent of any personal sins, might go to a state of limbo outside heaven, but without the suffering of hell, enjoying a state of perfect natural happiness.

Subsequent development on the lot of unbaptized children

The necessity of baptism was defined by a general council of the church, the Council of Florence, Session 11 (Bull Cantate Domino), Feb 4, 1442, and had earlier been affirmed at the local Council of Carthage 417 C.E. John Wyclif's attack on the necessity of infant baptism had been condemned by another general council, the Council of Constance, Session 15, July 6, 1415 C.E. However, the Council of Trent, Session 6, 1547 taught that either baptism or desire for baptism is necessary for salvation, so it is possible to be saved without receiving the actual sacrament of baptism.

If adults could effectively be baptised through a desire for the sacrament (supposing they died before it was actually administered), perhaps sacramentally unbaptised infants too might be saved by some waterless equivalent of ordinary baptism. While infants would not themselves be capable of a desire for the sacrament of baptism, perhaps the desire for their baptism by the adults who were responsible for their religious upbringing (or by the Church in general) would suffice to grant such children a baptism of desire. One major sixteenth-century theologian, Cajetan, suggested that infants dying in the womb before birth, and so before ordinary sacramental baptism could be administered, might be saved through their mother's wish for their baptism. Thus, there was no consensus that the Council of Florence had excluded salvation of infants by such an extra-sacramental equivalents of baptism; and attempts to have Cajetan's theory (that infants dead in the womb can be saved without the sacrament of baptism) condemned as heretical were rejected by the Council of Trent.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries individual theologians (Bianchi in 1768, H. Klee in 1835, Caron in 1855, H. Schell in 1893) continued to formulate theories of how children who died unbaptised might still be saved. By 1952 a theologian such as Ludwig Ott could, in a widely used and well-regarded manual, openly teach the possibility that children who die unbaptised might be saved for heaven - though he still represented their going to limbo as the commonly taught opinion. Even before Vatican II, theologians were widely and freely investigating alternatives to limbo - even if ordinary Catholics had not yet heard of such theories. When in 1984, Joseph Ratzinger, then Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, announced in The Ratzinger Report that as a private theologian he rejected the claim that children who die unbaptised cannot attain salvation, he was speaking for many academic theologians of his background and pre-conciliar training. Thus by 1992 the Catechism of the Catholic Church could express the hope that children who die unbaptised might still be saved:

CCC #1261 states:

As regards children who have died without baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God, who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children, which caused him to say, 'Let the children come to me, do not hinder them' [Mark 10:14, cf. 1 Tim. 2:4], allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy baptism.

The International Theological Commission was asked by Pope John Paul II to consider the question of the fate of unbaptized babies. Under Pope Benedict XVI, the Commission is expected to recommend in their report that the doctrine that all children who die do so “in the hope of eternal salvation” be formally adopted, thus rejecting the theological hypothesis of Limbo. The report was to be published towards the end of 2006, but is still unpublished as of January 2007.

Limbo in other denominations and religions

The Limbo of Children is a Roman Catholic concept; Protestant and Orthodox denominations do not accept it .

Martin Luther, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, and others have taught that the dead are unconscious (or even nonexistent), awaiting their destiny on Judgment Day. Since the dead, in this view, are neither rewarded nor punished (yet), that state is similar to limbo.

The Zoroastrian concept of hamistagan is similar to limbo. Hamistagan is a neutral state in which a soul that was neither good nor evil awaits Judgment Day.

Discordianism considers Limbo to be the dwelling place of the goddess Eris.

Limbo in literature

In the Divine Comedy, Dante depicts Limbo as the first circle of Hell, located beyond the river Acheron but before the judgment seat of Minos. The virtuous pagans of classical history and mythology inhabit a brightly lit and beautiful — but somber — castle which is seemingly a medievalized version of Elysium. In the same work, a semi-infernal region, above Limbo on the other side of Acheron, but inside the Gate of Hell, also exists — it is the "vestibule" of Hell and houses so-called "neutralists" or "opportunists," who devoted their lives neither to good nor to evil; its residents include those angels who did not fight at all in the war that resulted in the expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven, and also Celestine V, one of the few Popes in Vatican history to have abdicated (interestingly, however, Celestine was later canonized and is now known as St. Peter Celestine).

Limbo as a colloquialism

Taken from the original meaning, in colloquial speech, "limbo" is any status where a person or project is held up, and nothing can be done until another action happens. For example, a construction project might be described as "in limbo" if political considerations delay its permit.

A "legal limbo" may occur when varying laws or court rulings leave a person without recourse. For example, a person may earn "too much" to receive public assistance from the government, but not enough to actually pay for basic necessities. Likewise, various parties in a dispute may be pointing blame at each other, rather than fixing the problem, and leaving the person or group suffering from the problem to continue to suffer in limbo.

The Amstrad PCW's bundled word processing software, LocoScript, used the term "in limbo" to refer to files which had been deleted but which could still be restored, a concept similar to that later implemented by the Trash in the Apple Macintosh and the Recycle Bin in Microsoft Windows 95. On the PCW, the files "in limbo" were marked as belonging to CP/M Plus users 8 to 15. These files were deleted automatically when the space they occupied was needed. It could therefore be dangerous to access a disk containing files created with CP/M Plus using LocoScript, since LocoScript could decide to delete anything in users 8 to 15.

In the licensing of houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), properties registered under a previous scheme, but would not be licensable under mandatory arrangements, would go into a state of limbo when they expire, until the status of any potential additional licensing scheme is fully resolved.

See Also

• Purgatory
• Heaven
• Hell

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913. (Limbo)
• Clarke, Hilary, "Now it's the turn of limbo to be cast into oblivion", Electronic Telegraph, November 30th, 2005.
• Dyer, , "The existence of Limbo: a common doctrine from which it would be rash to depart...", These Last Days Ministries, December 28, 2005.
• Fisher, Ian, "Limbo, an Afterlife Tradition, May Be Doomed by the Vatican", The New York Times, December 28th, 2005.
• Goodman, Donald. Thomistic Salvation: A Layman's Guide. Goretti Publications. 
• Harrison, Brian, "Could Limbo Be 'Abolished'?", Seattle Catholic, December 7, 2005.
• Hooper, John, "Babies to be freed from limbo", The Guardian, November 30th, 2005.
• McGinty, Stephen, "Pope to abandon idea unbaptised babies suspended forever in limbo", The Scotsman, November 30th, 2005.
• Miller, Robert T., "Limbo and the Will of God", First Things, October 17, 2006.
• Owen, Richard, "Limbo consigned to history books", Times Online, November 30th, 2005.
• Sparks, Thomas, "Unbaptized Infants Suffer Fire and Limbo is a Heretical Pelagian Fable".
• Wooden, Cindy, "Closing the doors of limbo: Theologians say it was hypothesis", Catholic News Service, December 2, 2005.

Notes

cs:Limbus de:Limbus (Theologie) es:Limbo de los niños it:Limbo he:לימבו nl:Voorgeborchte no:Limbo pl:Otchłań pt:Limbo (religião) sl:Predpekel sv:Limbo (religion) zh:靈薄獄 fr:Limbes

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