St. Augustine & Infants: "No Baptism, No Salvation"

Añadido: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Infants who are not baptized in this life cannot inherit paradise, the kingdom of God, heaven, but are actually sent to a part of hell usually called limbo, where they experience little to no torment, but are nevertheless deprived of the vision of God, because they inherit a sort of contagious original guilt from Adam by sexual generation. And this is actually the view that St. Augustine puts forward in great detail and explicates in his anti-Pelagian writings. This is really one of the very, very core issues of the Pelagian controversy. Even though Augustine presents his view as virtually the unanimous tradition that he inherits from the earlier church fathers, I would like to look at an Eastern view, which is a little bit different. A lot of Eastern fathers believe that bodily mortality and the weakness of the flesh with its inevitable propensity towards sin was inherited from Adam, but not a contagious original guilt. One of these fathers is St. Ephrem the Syrian.