Single Question. Whether only the Lack of the Divine Vision is Due as Punishment for Original Sin

1. Concerning the thirty third distinction I aska whether only lack of divine vision is due as punishment for original sin.

a. a[Interpolation] Concerning the thirty third distinction where the Master deals with the punishment for original sin, the question is asked:

2. That it is not:

Augustine [Fulgentius] On the Faith to Peter ch.27 n.70, “Hold most firmly and do not at all doubt that children who depart this life without the sacrament of baptism are to be punished with the penalty of eternal fire     etc .”

3. Further, the [unbaptized] children will have bodies capable of suffering, because their bodies will not be glorious; so they will be able to undergo the active power of something present to them; therefore      the active power of fire. Or if you say that they will be preserved so that fire cannot act on them, they seem at any rate capable of suffering interior pain, namely hunger and thirst, and so of suffering the pain of sense.

4. Further, the kindling will not be extinguished in them; therefore they will be able to have in accord with it inordinate lusts; so they will be able to have immediate desires for delightful things and to be sad because of the removal or absence of them and so to suffer interior pain.

5. Further, they will have the use of reason and will know their own nature; so they will be able to know they are ordered to blessedness; and since all who have an appetite so ordered (according to Augustine On the Trinity 13.5) will be able naturally to desire to attain the end to which they are ordered; therefore they will be able to be saddened by the certainty of lacking the end desired.

6. Further, someone in a state of pure nature would suffer this loss [sc. the loss of the blessedness of the beatific vision]; so someone who has the disorder of guilt [sc. original sin], since he has an evil that the former does not have, should have a punishment that the former does not have (otherwise some guilt would be unpunished), and so his punishment should not be this loss alone but something else.

7. The opposite is maintained by the Master in the text (“They will not feel,” he says, “the punishment of material fire or of the worm of conscience, but will perpetually lack the vision of God”), and Augustine Enchiridion ch.23 n.93 (“A most mild punishment, certainly, will they suffer who have added nothing to the original sin that they contracted”).

I. To the Question

8. It seems to be the opinion of the masters here that those damned for original sin alone will have no punishment of exterior sense, to wit fire, because they had no disordered delights, and the harshness of the afflicting fire corresponds, as proper punishment, to that delight.

9. They will also not have interior punishment, as sadness, because they would not be saddened about their state, since sadness (according to Augustine City of God 14.15) is about things that happen to us against our will, and so they would be in that state against their will and would want the opposite; and thus they would murmur against the divine disposition and have as a result a disordered disposition of will [sc. actual sin], which seems absurd, for by the divine sentence things are so disposed that “wherever the wood falls, there it will lie” (Ecclesiastes, above d.7 n.53). Therefore since they had no disordered volition in this present life, they will consequently have no interior sadness. If, further, they were saddened by the lack of blessedness and of the divine vision, they would despair of it (for they have no hope), and so would have the gravest of the sins of all the damned, namely sadness from despair.

10. It seems too that sadness, as it is distinguished from pain, is simply a greater punishment (for man) than any other pain of sense, because as the will is more man’s appetite than is the sensitive appetite, so whatever a man does or suffers as to his will he does or suffers more as he is a man than what he does or suffers simply as to any other appetite; and so a man suffers simply more if he is sad than if he is in pain. So it does not seem that any sadness should be posited for them [sc. those damned for original sin alone].

11. And if a question be asked about their knowledge, one can concede, without asserting, that since they will have an intellect impeded by a corruptible body (to the extent that our intellect too is impeded in this present body) and yet it will not be impeded by torments (of the sort the other damned will have), they will be able to have a natural knowledge of things, and a knowledge newly acquired, because new acquisition is not repugnant to the unchangeableness of their state, since having new understanding of some contingent facts is not repugnant to the unchangeableness of the state of the blessed; so likewise there is no repugnance to the stability of the state of the blessed (which consists in seeing God or the Word) that they should newly understand some necessary truth that they did not understand before, and understand from one necessary truth another necessary truth, and so be able to learn some truths about necessary things within their proper kind. So as to the others too [sc. those damned for original sin alone], since they do not have a knowledge so perfect that they cannot receive more, and since it is not reasonable to posit in them an impediment because of which they cannot acquire more, it seems probable to concede that they can naturally have knowledge of all naturally knowable things (and have it more excellently than other philosophers had it in this present state), and so they can attain to some natural blessedness about God as known in general.

12. But if an objection is raised whether they will have knowledge of blessedness in particular or be saddened about it, I reply:

Just as was said, in Prologue nn.13-18, that particular knowledge is not possible for man unless he is raised supernaturally, so either the supernatural knowledge in particular will not be given to them, because it would be a sadness for them, for they did not fail to merit it as a pagan has (for which reason knowledge of blessedness in particular is allowed to a pagan by way of very grave punishment, namely so that he may be saddened by despairing of being able to reach it); or if they will have knowledge of blessedness in particular, they will not be saddened, because they will be content with their state knowing that God has disposed thus in their regard, and that they did not at any time fail by their own act to merit it.

II. To the Principal Arguments

13. To the argument of Augustine [Fulgentius, n.2] Bonaventure replies that Augustine is speaking by way of excess about those punishments (as the saints often do), because some said [e.g. Pelagians] that [unbaptized children] have no guilt and so no punishment - for just as, according to the Philosopher [Ethics 2.9.1109b4-7], the way of reaching the mean in morals is to proceed in some way beyond the mean toward the extreme, so the saints spoke by way of excess when extirpating the heresies burgeoning against them, wishing to tend toward the other extreme (and thus there is need to consider carefully which heretics the saints spoke against); just as Augustine seems as it were to tend toward Sabellius against Arius and conversely; likewise he seems to tend toward Arius against Sabellius and conversely

14. One could in another way say that [unbaptized children] are to be consumed with the punishment of eternal fire [n.2] in the sense of division, that is, they are to be in that punishment which is in eternal fire, namely they are to be punished with the penalty of loss and not with the eternal penalty of sense.

15. To the second [n.3] it should be said that just as the bodies of the damned will suffer from eternal fire but not be destroyed, so [unbaptized children] will perpetually lack the supernatural vision of God without any such exterior suffering - and also they will not suffer any interior suffering by which they will be able to be consumed, so that their bodies will be impassible by divine disposition (and not by the gift of impassibility), and so that they will suffer neither from within nor from without.

16. To the next [n.4] I say that just as the kindling did not excite in them any disordered movement in this life, so neither will it there excite any.

17. To the next [n.5] I say that natural desire, unless it is by choice, does not cause any sadness.

18. But [as to the last, n.6, one must say it is true] but it does not seem to posit that [an unbaptized child] is per se more punished than the other [someone in a state of pure nature, n.6], because just as it not a per se reward for the intellect to know creatures but rather a reward for it to know God, so neither does it seem a per se penalty of loss for the intellect not to know creatures but rather a loss for it to be per se deprived of the vision of God - and to this extent they are equal [an unbaptized child and someone in a state of pure nature]. And therefore it can be said, as was said in d.29 n.24, that the one is punished and the other not; for the one is a debtor for the justice that he does not have and so he is guilty, and to the other the gift is simply not given, and not because of any guilt or responsibility. It is as if I should first gratuitously accept two people on equal terms for receiving some honor or gift, and afterwards one of them should offend (because of which he fails to merit the honor) and the other does not, and yet the honor is not given to him who did not offend (not because of some lack of merit but because it did not please me to give him the honor); these two would really be unequal, because the first is punished on the ground he is guilty and the other is not. In fact, however, no one will ever be in a state of pure nature, because the rational nature God makes he always produces with a view to the end, provided there is no impediment or defect on the part of the nature itself.