THE FATE OF BABIES DYING BEFORE

BAPTISM IN BYZANTIUM*
by JANE BAUN

In the city of the Laodikaians lived a devout, pure, and

blameless priest. T o this priest one night the local governor
came in urgent haste, pressing him to rise up and baptize his
child, whose breath was already beginning to fail. Leaping up
right away, the priest ran into the church. But while he was
preparing the water and the holy oil the child died, before it
could be baptized.
Taking the child, the priest placed it in front of the font
and said to the attendant angel, 'To you, my fellow servant,
angel of God, I say: by the authority that Christ gave us to
bind and loose in heaven and upon earth, restore the soul of
the child in the body until I shall baptize it, lest it depart
unenlightened into that age. For my Master and yours knows
that I was not careless, but when I was called, I ran straight
away.' When the priest had spoken, the child returned to
life. He then baptized it, kissed it, and said, 'Go, child, into
the kingdom of heaven.' And immediately the child fell back
asleep in the Lord. 1

T HIS medieval Greek edifying tale, of the type labelled by

the Bollandist fathers 'de baptismo pueri mortui', was a
perennial favourite in Byzantine anthologies of popular
religious stories.2 It also appears in two major 'question and
answer' collections on canon law and church practice, first in the
seventh-century compilation of Anastasios, Abbot of Sinai, and
again, five centuries later, in that of Michael Glykas.3 I have
chosen, however, to paraphrase the version as told in a humbler

* I am indebted to Bishop Basil Rodzianko and Dr Joseph Munitiz. S. J., and also to Professors Peter
Brown and Judith Herrin, for their patient endurance and many helpful suggestions.
Theognosti Thesaurus, ed. Joseph A. Munitiz. CChr.SG, 5 (1979) [hereafter Thesaurus] XV , 5,
pp. 129-30.
F. Halkin, ed., Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 3rd edn, 3 vols (Brussels. 1957), no. 1444X.
As cited in Munitiz, Thesaurus, pp. lxxiii-iv, who places its probable origin in the seventh-century
Anastasian corpus.

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 JANE BAUN

and later source: a mid-thirteenth-century handbook of religious

instruction known as The Treasury (Thesauros). The work's priest-
monk compiler, Theognostos, frames our story with stern admonitions to
parents and priests regarding the grave dangers of letting children die
unbaptized.
The Laodikaian baby experienced a narrow escape and a happy
ending. But what if a more conventional priest, or a less co-oper-
ative angel, had been on duty that evening? What if as-yet-
unbaptized 'baby x', like so many other Byzantine infants, had
not been miraculously revived, but had remained prematurely,
irrevocably, dead? I should like to explore the moment that
might have come next, when the disconsolate parents asked the
priest what would happen to their child.
If our priest had been a post-Augustinian, Western, Catholic
priest, his task would have been much more straightforward.
Thanks to the challenges of Pelagius, the Western Church had
been compelled at an early stage to work the issue out in detail.4
Even if later theologians and pastors departed gradually from the
strictures of a purely Augustinian formulation, still, the debate
was well established, the terms were known, and a geograph-
ical location, limbo, eventually evolved to contain those awk-
ward in-between souls, worthy neither of punishment nor of
reward.
What did our Orthodox priest, however, have to fall back on?
As far as I have been able to determine, nothing so definite and
three-dimensional as the Western version. 5 In fact, most O r t h o -
dox treatments of the question, from the Byzantine period to the
present day, take pains to distance themselves from the Augusti-
nian tradition of thought on original sin, human nature, judge-
ment, and purgatory. 6 But for our hypothetical priest and
parents, the question was not merely an academic exercise in
original sin and eschatology, but rather a matter of immediate
ritual and existential consequence, of spiritual life and death.
For the centrality of the fate of babies to the Pelagian controversy, see Elizabeth A. Clark, The
Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton, NJ, 1992), pp.
194-244. I am indebted to Gary Hansen for this reference.
5
A judgement echoed by Bishop Kallistos Ware, in his The Orthodox Church (New York, 1980), p.
229, n. 2.
For 'the Latin doctrine of purgatory' as a sore point between East and West, see John Meyendorff,
'Theology in the Thirteenth Century: Methodological Contrasts', in J. Chrysostomides, ed.,
Kathegetria: Essays presented to Joan Hussey (Camberley, 1988), p. 403, with n. 20.

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 The Fate of Babies

Accordingly, Byzantine canonists treated the question of the

proper timing of infant baptism frequently and with great seri-
ousness. It appears in some form in most Byzantine responsa
collections, and serves as the opening problem in two important
late eleventh-century texts, the 'Questions' attributed to the
deacon Peter, chartophylax under Alexios Komnenos, and the
'Solutions' of the Patriarch Nicholas III Grammatikos. 7
The usual ritual intervals to be observed between birth and
baptism varied. Canonists most often advised either an eight-day
period, taking the circumcision and naming of the infant Jesus as
a model, or a forty-day hiatus, after which the mother, newly
churched, could attend the ceremony. 8 But almost all the canon-
ists, after describing the norm, hasten to add that infants who
were sickly or in mortal danger were to be baptized immediately.
The entire ritual, consisting of multiple anointings, exorcisms,
blessings, and perambulations, did not need to be performed if
death were feared imminent, but only the rite's core, three total
immersions in water with invocation of the Holy Trinity. 9 Bapt-
ism could if necessary be performed in the home. Symeon,
Archbishop of Thessalonike in the early fifteenth century, en-
couraged priests to be in attendance at the actual birth, in case of
emergency. 10
A few witnesses, such as the ninth-century Nikephoros the
Confessor, would allow monks or any Orthodox Christian lay-
man in good standing to perform baptisms in an emergency. 11
But this option is always treated as a desperate last resort. More
typical perhaps is the case of the Laodikaian governor already
mentioned, who, in spite of the increased risk to his child,
preferred the church to the kitchen sink.
The possibility of the child's mother, the attending midwife,
or any other laywoman's performing an emergency baptism,
'Petrou Khartophylakos erotemata', in G. Rhalles and M. Potles, eds, Syntagma ton theion kai hieron
kanonon, 6 vols (Athens, 1852-9) [hereafter RP.Syn.], 5, p. 369. J. Darrouzes, 'Les Reponses de
Nicolas III a l'eveque de Zetounion', in Chrysostomides, ed., Kathegetria, p. 336.
Eight days: Symeon of Thessalonikie, On the Holy Sacraments [hereafter Sym.Thess.], 60, PC 155,
cols 209-12; forty days: Peter the Chartophylax, in RP.Syn., 5, p. 369. Current Eastern Orthodox
practice tends toward forty days; cf. Fr Paul Lazor, ed., Baptism, Dept. of Religious Education, The
Orthodox Church in America (New York, 1972), pp. 21-2.
Sym.Thess., 63, PG 188, col. 228. See also Balsamon and Zonaras' commentaries on Apostolic
Canon no. 50, PG 137, cols 138-42.
Sym.Thess., 58, PG 155, col. 208.
Nikephoros the Confessor, canons (2nd ser.) 6, 7, in RP.Syn., 4, p. 431.

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 JANE BAUN

strongly attested in the medieval West, does not feature promi-

nently in the East.12 A theological explanation for the lack of
evidence might be sought in the medieval Byzantine insistence
on the ritual impurity of women for forty days after childbirth,
and also during menstruation. Most canonists considered fe-
minine ritual impurity a serious impediment even to receiving
the sacraments, let alone administering one. 13
Ritual and canonical complexities combined with a generally
high infant mortality rate ensured that the possibility of a baby's
dying before baptism was an ever-present threat in Byzantium.
And so, as we would expect, the problem arises frequently in
canon law. But it arises most often with reference to the moral
and theological predicament of the parents only. It is to the
nature and duration of their penance that the canonists attend,
not to the fate of the babies themselves.
The standard penance in such cases is recorded in the canons
of John the Faster. Of the actual writings of John, Patriarch of
Constantinople from 582 to 595, almost nothing has survived,
but the numerous works attributed to him formed one of the
most widely-copied and quoted bodies of penitential and ca-
nonical texts in the Byzantine Church. 14 The 'Johannine' tradi-
tion dictates that parents whose children die unbaptized through
negligence be excommunicated for three years. During this
period they are to practise the severe form of fasting known as
xerophagy, pray on bended knees, weep profusely, give alms, and
perform forty metanies (acts of repentance) each day.15 If the
child dies at seven days or younger, the period is shortened to
forty days.
Both this text and later commentaries upon it focus entirely on
the parents: the urgency consists in putting them right with God
for their sin of negligence. Nowhere is the suggestion found that
the parents' penance might benefit the unfortunate child itself,
might affect its progress in the other world. But what about the
infant? Could its parents do anything to help it, or discover
anything about the fate of its soul? Could its infant sins be
shriven? Did it have sins? Did it still have a soul?
For the West, see Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), pp. 49-50.
Timothy of Alexandria, questions 6, 7, in RP.Syn., 4, pp. 334-5.
Complete corpus in PG 88, cols 1889-1918.
John the Faster, canon 24, in RP.Syn., 4, p. 443.

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 The Fate of Babies

This last question, I believe, holds the key to our dilemma.

Elizabeth Clark has observed of the Pelagian controversy that
much of Augustine's great labour in refuting Pelagius—and in
explaining what happens to unbaptized babies who die—can be
traced to a failure (or refusal) to formulate a consistent doctrine
of the origin of the soul.16 It is, of course, unrealistic to expect
our Byzantine canonists to have responded to concrete pastoral
problems with lengthy and abstract theological explanations. In
any case, the bitterly divisive controversies over 'Origenist' ideas
in the Eastern Church, from the fourth to the sixth centuries,
had perhaps rendered the origin and transmission of souls a
highly sensitive topic. Yet had our canonists had access to a
definitive teaching on the origin of the soul, their task of coun-
selling bereaved parents might have been much more straight-
forward.
Byzantine texts of all kinds, perhaps reflecting this theological
gap, present a uniformly bleak (if not blank) picture on the fate
of such infants. In a phrase from the Thesauros found throughout
the Orthodox literature on the problem, from Gregory of
Nazianzus in the fourth century to the present day, the unbap-
tized infant is 'worthy neither of the kingdom nor of punish-
ment'. 17 But of what exactly these infant souls might be worthy,
none of the Fathers, ancient or modern, speculates.
This was not due to lack of interest: priests and people con-
tinued to ask variations on the theme. An unknown questioner
of Anastasios of Sinai went straight to the point: 'Whither do
they depart, the innocent five- or four-year-old children of Jews
and the unbaptized: to judgement, or to paradise?'18 The
seventh-century Abbot of Sinai's response is a masterful early
demonstration of the tension produced when pastoral necessity
confronted theological ambiguity on this issue. Citing 'the
Prophets', Anastasios says he does not believe that God visits
the sins of the fathers upon the children any more, and so the
innocent children of sinners clearly do not go to Gehenna (his
word). But do they then attain paradise? Our abbot seals his

Clark, Origenist Controversy, pp. 197, 221, 232-9, 244.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40, PC 36, cols 381-9; for a strikingly similar nineteenth-century
view see Cyril, Patriarch of Constantinople, tr. in Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral
Imagination in Modern Creek Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1991), p. 196.
Anastasius of Sinai, Question 81, PC 89, col. 709 (no. 9 of the original Anastasian questions).

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 JANE BAUN

response tersely: 'But it is not good to probe into the judgements

of God.'
Byzantine theologians, canonists, and exegetes, feeling that
they had neither biblical warrant nor theological justification for
the certainty that gradually evolved in the West, always stop
short of the precise definition and evocative description that
people craved. There are no pictures, gentle or terrible, no
intimations of neutral resting-places between reward and punish-
ment, there is no 'discretion'. N o amount of prayer, fasting, or
weeping is suggested as able to ease the consequences for the
child of its parents' sin of omission.
Even the authors of popular visionary texts, who usually gra-
tified the laity's need to know certain things that the bishops
could not or would not reveal, provided no niche for these
infants. The middle Byzantine Apocalypse of Anastasia, a pious
nun's visionary journey to the other world, is full of babies:
baptized babies who die under three years old throng the throne
of the Almighty, as do the Holy Innocents, who have been
baptized in the blood of their martyrdom. 19 Unbaptized inno-
cents, however, are nowhere to be found, though their parents
are greatly in evidence. In fact, the punishment of negligent
parents and godparents forms one of the longer stops on Anasta-
sia's tour. 20
Anastasia is taken beyond the third gate of heaven and shown
two pools. The first is the source of the River Jordan, on whose
banks John the Baptist stands, transformed into a priest. The
second pool, immense, teems with parents and baptismal spon-
sors of children who died before baptism. The Archangel M i -
chael explains that the inhabitants of these pools are being
punished, but Anastasia does not describe any particular suffering
or torment, and we are not given to know whether the punish-
ment is everlasting. The Palermo redaction of the vision, more
prone to theatrical effects, adds pitch, sulphur, and darkness to
the scene, but still stops short of torment. It is significant that the
pool is located not in hell, which Anastasia visits later, but in
heaven: authorial ambivalence at the parents' fate? Conspicuous-
ly missing from Anastasia's journey, however, so detailed in most

Apocalypsis Anastasiae, ed. Rudolf Homberg (Leipzig, 1903), p. 5.

20...,
Ibid., p. 9.

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 The Fate of Babies

other ways, are the actual babies, without whom the unhappy
adults would not be in the pool at all.
The thirteenth-century didactic handbook with which we
began, the Thesauros of the priest-monk Theognostos, provides
the fullest discussion I have found. Theognostos's exegesis of
John 3.5 is unambiguous:
Concerning those who die unbaptized, it is impossible to
falsify the divine voice, for he said, 'Truly, truly I say to you,
unless one be born from water and spirit, he shall not enter
the kingdom of heaven'. Thus the impious are handed over
from darkness into darkness when they die, just like not-yet-
fully-formed babes from the womb. In Hades and in annihila-
tion they receive the punishment in store for them. . . . It is
not possible for one who does not bear upon him the seal of
rebirth of baptism to be known as Christ's, and to attain
salvation. For this same reason, unbaptized infants are
worthy neither of the kingdom nor of punishment. Of how
great a penalty for their children, then, do parents become
the cause, if from carelessness they rob them of divine
baptism, and through this also of the kingdom of heaven! 21

What keeps such a child from the kingdom? The strict August-
inian would answer, original sin. The Eastern Church, however,
has approached original sin from a different angle. Orthodox
theologians are agreed with St Paul that death, corruption, and
sin came into the world through Adam, and are still with us. But
the actual guilt for Adam's fall is not transmitted personally to
each mortal as a judicial sentence, only the effects of that fall,
which are mortality, and the inclination toward sin and disobe-
dience. 22 O u r unbaptized deceased infants do not fail to enter the
kingdom because they bear a guilt burden of inherited sin, as in
the Augustinian formulation—which would imply a moral
identity of sorts—but because, I would argue, their unbaptized
state means they have no identity at all, whether moral, personal,
or spiritual.
This hypothesis is possible because baptism, for the Byzan-
tines, signified far more than a simple ritual initiation into church
Thesaurus, XV2, 4, lines 617-24, 633-7.
John Meycndorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York, 1979),
pp. l43-°-

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 JANE BAUN

life. The sacrament, considered the only true source of Christian

being and identity, worked a radical transformation on the inner-
most soul. Nowhere is this understanding more completely or
beautifully presented than in a fourteenth-century treatise, en-
titled Concerning the Life in Christ. This series of discourses on
sacramental theology by the lay theologian Nicholas Cabasilas is
still considered normative by Orthodox today. 23
Baptism, asserts Cabasilas, is literally the beginning of existence
for the Christian soul: those who were formerly nothing receive
being itself, and begin to exist truly for the first time. 24 In an
almost Platonic sense, to the extent that they are conformed to
the ideal, which is Christ, they receive true being. The soul is
molten gold, silver, or bronze, given form by the sculptor; it is
soft wax or lead, receiving the imprint of Christ as from a seal.25
Before baptism, the soul is formless matter, like the stuff of
creation before God's word gave it shape and name. A modern
analogy might be with a computer disk, which cannot func-
tion within a system until it is formatted. Like the unfor-
matted disk, the unbaptized soul can neither receive information
nor respond to commands within its (Christian) 'operating
system'.
The Christian soul is given form, however, not through some
mechanical process, but in a manner consonant with the mystery
of the Incarnation. Theognostos builds on a time-honoured
patristic analogy in describing the rebirth of baptism: the child
receives human form in its mother's womb, but can receive
spiritual form only in the spiritual womb, the font of baptism. 26
The unbaptized child, however, has not yet been reborn as a
child of God, and so its heavenly Father is not bound to acknow-
ledge it as his own.
Hence the urgency of the question: parents who allow their
child to die unbaptized have, it seems, denied it the chance to be
a person at all in the eyes of God. This is perhaps why John the
Faster, and the later patriarch Nicholas Grammatikos, both con-

Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ, ed. Marie-Helene Congourdeau, SC, 3SS. 2 vols (1989); English
tr. C.J. de Catanzaro, The Life in Christ (Crestwood, NY, 1974). The late Father John Meyendorff
made extensive use of Cabasilas in his now standard Byzantine Theology.
Cabasilas, Vie en Christ, i, 19, ii, 8; 1, pp. 94-5, 138.
Ibid., ii, 11—13; 1, pp. 140-2.
Thesaurus, XV2, 4, lines 628-37, p. 129.

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 The Fate of Babies

sider it together with abortion, smothering, and abandonment of

children; it is, in effect, spiritual murder. 27 Here, if I am correct
in my reading of the sources, are free will and moral respons-
ibility carried to a terrible extreme.
Can it be that parents may simply annihilate a soul created by
God, just as humans may destroy other parts of God's creation?
From the sixth century to the thirteenth, the reasoning of John
the Faster, Nicholas Grammatikos, and Theognostos, taken to its
logical conclusion, seems to arrive at this position. Of course, the
possibility of rhetorical hyperbole to raise the moral stakes, in the
model of the Sermon on the Mount, must be taken into con-
sideration. Much of the harshness of the authors and compilers
of canonical and apocryphal texts no doubt derives from a
fervent desire to impress the importance of baptism indelibly
upon the minds of all parents, pastors, and godparents who might
be tempted to slacken their vigilance.
Certainly, few Orthodox pastors or theologians would adopt
quite this line today, that unbaptized infants simply cease to exist,
and most likely few Byzantine pastors explicitly did so in the
past. Yet it is at least a possible explanation for the sources'
seeming refusal to discuss the topic in detail, for the grave anxiety
expressed in the apocryphal visionary literature, and for the
utmost seriousness with which the canonists treat the issue of
parental penance.
The existence—or non-existence—of the child, theologically
and culturally, was also inextricably linked with its having a
name. Cabasilas highlights the baptismal day as the day that God
first knows us by name: 'It is equally for this reason that the
salvific day of baptism is also the name day for Christians: for on
this very day we are modelled and configured, and our unshapen
and indefinite life receives a shape and a definition.' 28
Symeon of Thessalonike also stresses the importance of the
name, and the moral responsibility of parents to choose their
child's name (and with it, his or her heavenly patron) thought-
fully. Each child should receive its own name, just as Jesus did on
the eighth day. 'Don't', Symeon admonishes his priests, 'just

John the Faster, 'Exerpta', PG 88, col. 1933D; Nicholas Grammatikos, in Darrouzes, 'Reponses',
p. 336.
Cabasilas, He en Christ, ii, 14, lines 1-5; 1, p. 144.

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 JANE BAUN

baptize them all John and Mary, the way some simpletons and
ignorant persons say.'29
Anthropological field work carried out in twentieth-century
Greece on the creation of the personal, corporate, and eschato-
logical identity of the child is of special value, for here we see
these seemingly 'medieval' and 'abstract' theological ideas on
being and naming played out in the flesh. Neither Symeon of
Thessalonike nor Nicholas Cabasilas would be surprised at the
conclusion of the anthropologist Charles Stewart, when he ob-
serves that 'The naming of a child at baptism marks one of the
most important performative utterances in Greek culture.' 30
Between birth and baptism, the rural Greek infant is tradition-
ally not called by name. A Christian name has been chosen, but
its use is avoided as inauspicious. Unbaptized infants occupy a
' liminal, not clearly defined, status between animal and human,
nature and society; they are referred to variously as snake-like
creatures, as 'male baby' or 'female baby', or in the neuter. As
they are especially susceptible to demonic activity, in one village
it was considered prudent to spit three times in such a baby's
direction upon meeting it.31 It is only after the infant's baptism,
with its exorcisms, prayers, anointings, and rituals, that the
villager (and, if my reading of the theological texts is correct,
God as well) knows exactly what and who this new being is.32
Abhorring ambiguity, Greek villagers advanced a number of
theories, some with antique pedigrees, as to the fate of the infant
who died before baptism. 33 The child's soul might be claimed by
the Devil or sent on a long, wandering journey; it might re-
appear to see its family, or torment the priest who neglected to
baptize it. Each of these explanations is worthy of consideration,
but none, of course, could be offered in good conscience by a
priest—of any period or confession.
Our priest's final resort, I think, would have to be to the
Orthodox willingness to leave some issues to the limitless and
unfathomable mind and heart of God. If the Western Catholic
genius inclines toward cataphatic theology, affirming and defi-

Sym.Thess., 60, PC 15s, col. 209B.

Stewart, Demons, pp. 213-14.
Ibid., pp. 55, 208.
Ibid., p. 214; Sym.Thess., 61, PG 155, cols 212-14.
Stewart, Demons, p. 196.

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 The Fate of Babies

ning what can be said about God, perhaps the Eastern Orthodox
genius can be said to tend toward apophatic theology: some
things simply cannot be said or known about God's ways. The
divine intelligence works through mysteries beyond normal
human speech and perception, and can begin to be understood
only by going beyond human rational categories.
Set in such a theological context, the seeming Eastern O r t h o -
dox 'failure' to provide a niche for its deceased unbaptized babies
does not imply any lack of concern for them or their parents. O n
the contrary: Byzantine pastors were obsessed, first, with trying
to prevent the problem, and then, with trying to formulate an
appropriate pastoral response. But that pastoral response was
limited to the pastor's immediate cure: the souls of those still on
earth, the bereaved parents standing in front of him. As for the
departed child, unless the priest had a direct line to an angel (as
in the edifying tale with which we began) there was nothing that
he could do for it. He could only remind the parents of what
could be known with certainty—the infinite compassion and love
of the Creator for all his creatures.

Princeton University

125