A view on where aborted infants go from Elder Cleopa

[Columba7]

I think this is why we say when it comes to aborted babies, still born, etc that we trust them in God's hands. I do know that there are folks working on a prayer service for the unborn, and there is an Akathist for a saint who intercedes for those outside of the Church (the unborn, suicides, heterodox, etc). so their certainly must be hope, or else those prayers would not exist.

That is good, but if I am being honest it isn't enough.
For my own part, if we are asked "Do innocents go to heaven?" the answer shouldn't be "I hope so" but "yes, obviously." Anything short of an affirmative answer reveals a cruel aspect of God.

 

[~Anastasia~]

Would I be correct to say that it seems to me the the Orthodox Church is not generally quick to make statements regarding those things that remain a mystery? Some things we simply do not know for sure, and so they tend not to be dogmatically stated?

After-death teaching seems to be carefully stated, most of the time. As far as official Church position. I am certainly not speaking against Elder Cleopas or any other person of prayer who may have been given additional insights. But I have just found that in terms of things we don't have completely spelled out for us, the Orthodox tend to be cautious?

The Orthodox pray for the souls of the dead. Why? Can prayers "save" them? I don't think that anyone would generally say that yes, certainly they can. But they also would probably not say no, they certainly cannot. After all, all judgment is left to God, and He will have mercy on who He will have mercy? I think most are careful not to tread on that ground ...

If prayers for them simply let them experience a momentary break from torment, or whatever comfort they may receive, or whether it affects God's mercy, who knows?

I'd appreciate any correction if I'm wrong - and I may very well be. But would that be the Church's position?

 

[ArmyMatt]

That is good, but if I am being honest it isn't enough.
For my own part, if we are asked "Do innocents go to heaven?" the answer shouldn't be "I hope so" but "yes, obviously." Anything short of an affirmative answer reveals a cruel aspect of God.

well, the Holy Innocents who were killed by Herod are saints, and I would suspect that some of them were killed before their circumcision (kinda an OT death before baptism) and they are saints.

if you ask me personally I would say yes, they do, because of their innocence and purity. but we must remember that heaven does not exist until after the Last Judgment, so we are NOT talking about their eternal state.

 

[inconsequential]

If the "foretaste" we receive after death is based on how we perceive God's unmitigated presence, wouldn't this be kind of like God sparing them from something overwhelming? Or am I misunderstanding the concept?

 

[buzuxi02]

Clement of Alexandria has a bit to say on this. I will get the quotes later on . Cases of abortion and miscarriages are somewhat different than dying unbaptised. In order to be born again you need to be born a first time. The necessity of baptism would not be warranted in cases of deaths in the womb of still born.

In monachos.net alittle while back there was a discussion on an elder that taught to pray for those that committed the abortion as they had the stain of murder but not for a child that was never born in human form. The context was unclear.

Western theology followed the path of Augustine with his debates against Pelagianism, and original sin. In the east there tended to be certain variations in the stories and visions of such things without the need to set down a doctrinal position.

 

[Columba7]

I can't post links yet, but silouan thompson has a good article on his website called "Do unbaptized infants go to hell?"

 

[Dorothea]

Thank you for the response. Death being as mysterious as it is, I should not be surprised that there is still some debate within Orthodoxy as to judgment and the state of the soul after death, but I admit that I am. I have always taken for granted that the orthodox position was that presented on the GOARCH site; namely that the eternal state of the soul was decided upon at the moment of the separation of soul an body.

Yes, but the person gets a foretaste of that eternal state. if you read the goarch article/writings on the Judgment, it says particular judgment and then Last Judgment. Here's a portion of it:

V. ORTHODOX ESCHATOLOGY

The Holy Spirit of God, working through the Church and its sacramental life, leads the plan of salvation in Christ to completion and final fulfillment. The final battle with evil that operates in the world will occur just before the coming again of the Lord. In the meantime, the struggle against evil and dark forces in the world continues, with some victories on behalf of the Church, and with some failures on behalf of some of its members. This is the normal condition of the life of the Church, which is the inaugurated Kingdom of God, and which, however, has not yet come fully. Two distinct stages are to be recognized, in terms of Christian Orthodox eschatology: that of a "partial judgment," of a "partial" or "realized" eschatology, and that of a "final judgment," at the coming again of the Lord, which will come at the end of time.

a) Partial judgment - the hour of our death

Our physical death, a consequence of the first man's sin that we still suffer, can be seen in two ways:

negatively, as a kind of catastrophe, especially for those who do not believe in Christ and life everlasting in Him; and
positively, as the end of a maturation process, which leads us to the encounter with our Maker. Christ has destroyed the power of the "last enemy," death (1 Cor. 18:26).
A Christian worthy of the name is not afraid of this physical death insofar as it is not accompanied by a spiritual or eternal (eschatological) death.

A partial judgment is instituted immediately after our physical death, which places us in an intermediate condition of partial blessedness (for the righteous), or partial suffering (for the unrighteous).

Disavowing a belief in the Western "Purgatory," our Church believes that a change is possible during this intermediate state and stage. The Church, militant and triumphant, is still one, which means that we can still influence one another with our prayers and our saintly (or ungodly) life. This is the reason why we pray for our dead. Also, almsgiving on behalf of the dead may be of some help to them, without implying, of course, that those who provide the alms are in some fashion "buying" anybody's salvation.

b) General Judgment - the Coming Again of Christ

The early Church lived in expectation of the "day of the Lord," the day of His coming again. The Church later realized that its time is known but to God; still, some signs of Christ's second coming were expected:

The Gospel will be preached everywhere in the world (Matt. 24: 14; Luke 18:8; John 10: 16);
The Jews will be converted to Christ (Rom. 11:25-26; cf. Hosea 3:5);
Elijah, or even Enoch, will return (Mark 9:11);
The Antichrist will appear with numerous false prophets accompanying him (1 John 2:10; 2 Thes. 2:3; Matt. 24:5);
Physical phenomena, upheavals, wars, sufferings will occur (Matt. 24:6; Mark 13:26; Luke 21:25); and,
The world will be destroyed by fire (ekpyrosis; see 2 Peter 3:5).
All these signs are expected to be given in due time; without them, the end-time will not come.

The resurrection of the dead is a miracle that will happen at the second coming of the Lord. According to the Creed: "I await the resurrection of the dead." This resurrection will be a new creation. However, our physical bodies as we know them now will be restored, in a spiritualized existence like that of the Lord after His Resurrection.

The final judgment will follow the resurrection of all. Some will rise to the resurrection of life, and some to the resurrection of judgment and condemnation. Christ will be our Judge on the basis of our deeds, our works of love or our acts of wickedness.

The end-time will follow, with a permanent separation between good and evil, between those who will be awarded eternal life of happiness and bliss in heaven, and those who will be condemned to the fire of eternal damnation, to the eternal remorse of their conscience for having rejected God and authentic life in Him and having joined the inauthentic life invented by the devil and his servants.

A new heaven and new earth will be established, inhabited by righteousness (2 Peter 3:13). The Kingdom of God will be fully established; the Church will cease to exist. Finally, the Son of God will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, "that God may be everything to everyone" (1 Cor. 15:28).

The Dogmatic Tradition of the Orthodox Church — Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America

 

[jckstraw72]

That is good, but if I am being honest it isn't enough.
For my own part, if we are asked "Do innocents go to heaven?" the answer shouldn't be "I hope so" but "yes, obviously." Anything short of an affirmative answer reveals a cruel aspect of God.

what you are saying is that because you are unable to use your logic to harmonize this teaching with the vision of God you want to have then God is a jerk, or the teaching must be false. do you not see the problem in this approach? why are you so uncomfortable with mystery?

 

[Columba7]

what you are saying is that because you are unable to use your logic to harmonize this teaching with the vision of God you want to have then God is a jerk, or the teaching must be false. do you not see the problem in this approach? why are you so uncomfortable with mystery?

I didn't say that, but continue to interpret what I say in strange ways if you so desire. And as for logic, if I read a Church Father that says 2+2=5 I am going to rely on logic and the total of my life experiences. What else do I have to judge the veracity of things?

 

[buzuxi02]

St Methodios of Olympus 295 A.D.

"Wherefore we have received it handed down in scriptures inspired by God that children who are born before their time, even if they be offspring of adultery, are delivered to care taking angels... How could they have confidently summoned their parents before the judgement seat of Christ to bring a charge against them, saying, "Thou o Lord, didst not grudgingly deny us the light that is common to all, but these have exposed us to death, despising thy commandment"

Clement of Alexandria 195 A.D.

'The scripture says that infants exosed are handed over to a guardian angel to be trained and educated, and they shall be as the faithful of a hundred years old here.....Peter says in the Apocalypse, that children that die before they come to the birth will be the recipients of a better lot, and will be handed over to a guardian angel, that they may receive knowledge and obtain a better abode. And endure what they would have endured had they been born. But the others will obtain salvation only, as victims of injustice and objects of pity shall remain without punishment, having obtained this as their reward."


St Gregory of Nyssa, excerpts from infants early death:

There (the Master) says, the acquisition of the Kingdom comes to those who are deemed worthy of it, as a matter of exchange. When you have done such and such things, then it is right that you get the Kingdom as a reward.... If one unreservedly accepts a statement such as that, to the effect that any so passing into life will necessarily be classed among the good, it will dawn upon him then that not partaking in life at all will be a happier state than living. Seeing that in the one case the enjoyment of good is placed beyond a doubt even with barbarian parentage, or a conception from a union not legitimate; but he who has lived the span ordinarily possible to nature gets the pollution of evil necessarily mingled more or less with his life.... For virtue is achieved by its seekers not without a struggle; nor is abstinence from the paths of pleasure a painless process to human nature. So that one of two probations must be the inevitable fate of him who has had the longer lease of life: Either to combat here on Virtue's toilsome field, or to suffer there the painful recompense of a life of evil. But in the case of infants prematurely dying there is nothing of that sort; but they pass to the blessed lot at once, if those who take this view of the matter speak true. It follows also necessarily from this that a state of unreason is preferable to having reason, and virtue will thereby be revealed as of no value: if he who has never possessed it suffers no loss, so, as regards the enjoyment of blessedness, the labour to acquire it will be useless folly; the unthinking condition will be the one that comes out best from God's judgment. For these and such-like reasons you bid me sift the matter, with a view to our getting, by dint of a closely-reasoned inquiry, some firm ground on which to rest our thoughts about it.

it is time to examine in the light of them the question proposed to us.... If the recompense of blessedness is assigned according to the principles of justice, in what class shall he be placed who has died in infancy without having laid in this life any foundation, good or bad, whereby any return according to his deserts may be given him?...We may say that the enjoyment of that future life does indeed belong of right to the human being, but that, seeing the plague of ignorance has seized almost all now living in the flesh, he who has purged himself of it by means of the necessary courses of treatment receives the due reward of his diligence, when he enters on the life that is truly natural; while he who refuses Virtue's purgatives and renders that plague of ignorance, through the pleasures he has been entrapped by, difficult in his case to cure them, gets himself into an unnatural state, and so is estranged from the truly natural life...Whereas the innocent babe has no such plague before its soul's eyes obscuring its measure of light, and so it continues to exist in that natural life; it does not need the soundness which comes from purgation, because it never admitted the plague into its soul at all. Further, the present life appears to me to offer a sort of analogy to the future life we hope for, and to be intimately connected with it, thus; the tenderest infancy is suckled and reared with milk from the breast; then another sort of food appropriate to the subject of this fostering, and intimately adapted to his needs, succeeds, until at last he arrives at full growth. And so I think, in quantities continually adapted to it, in a sort of regular progress, the soul partakes of that truly natural life; according to its capacity and its power it receives a measure of the delights of the Blessed state....But the soul that has never felt the taste of virtue, while it may indeed remain perfectly free from the sufferings which flow from wickedness having never caught the disease of evil at all, does nevertheless in the first instance partake only so far in that life beyond (which consists, according to our previous definition, in the knowing and being in God) as this nursling can receive; until the time comes that it has thriven on the contemplation of the truly Existent as on a congenial diet, and, becoming capable of receiving more, takes at will more from that abundant supply of the truly Existent which is offered. Having, then, all these considerations in our view, we hold that the soul of him who has reached every virtue in his course, and the soul of him whose portion of life has been simply nothing, are equally out of the reach of those sufferings which flow from wickedness.
Nevertheless we do not conceive of the employment of their lives as on the same level at all...before all these, the philosophy contained in the inspired Writings, which affords a complete purification to those who educate themselves thereby in the mysteries of God. But the man who has acquired the knowledge of none of these things and has not even been conducted by the material cosmos to the perception of the beauties above it, and passes through life with his mind in a kind of tender, unformed, and untrained state, he is not the man that is likely to be placed among the same surroundings as our argument has indicated that other man, before spoken of, to be placed; so that, in this view, it can no longer be maintained that, in the two supposed and completely opposite cases, the one who has taken no part in life is more blessed than the one who has taken a noble part in it. Certainly, in comparison with one who has lived all his life in sin, not only the innocent babe but even one who has never come into the world at all will be blessed.

From the underlined phrase in St Gregory's treatise we can see there was some variation in belief. St Gregory though wasn't too keen on such a simplistic view.
When reading all of the above in context and in their entirety its not that far off from what elder Cleopa taught. All teach these parents will have a charge brought against them at judgement by their children (in cases of abortion or exposure). Elder Cleopa's is actually the most merciful because the penance actually free's the parents from that charge of murder, releasing the children of a need to testify.
Likewise St Gregory when comparing the virtuous man who lived a full life with that of an infant, contrasts the mature virtuous man as being nobler because he comprehends the beauty of the cosmos, the light of the sun, he comprehends and appreciates the sciences, thus he can handle and appreciate the more mature rewards.

 

[ArmyMatt]

If the "foretaste" we receive after death is based on how we perceive God's unmitigated presence, wouldn't this be kind of like God sparing them from something overwhelming? Or am I misunderstanding the concept?

it very well could be, since they did not have time to struggle for virtue, and then they would be ready to recieve it at the Second Coming. interesting point

 

[Lukaris]

From what I understand from St. John Chrysostom re the murder of the holy innocents (Matthew 2:16), it seems that innocents have already paid the price & await a reward for their tragedy:


3. “But what kind of sin had these children,” it may be said, “that they should do it away? for touching those who are of full age, and have been guilty of many negligences, one might with show of reason speak thus: but they who so underwent premature death, what sort of sins did they by their sufferings put away?” Didst thou not hear me say, that though there were no sins, there is a recompense of rewards hereafter for them that suffer ill here? Wherein then were the young children hurt in being slain for such a cause, and borne away speedily into that waveless harbor? “Because,” sayest thou, “they would in many instances have achieved, had they lived, many and great deeds of goodness.” Why, for this cause He lays up for them beforehand no small reward, the ending their lives for such a cause. Besides, if the children were to have been any great persons, He would not have suffered them to be snatched away beforehand. For if they that eventually will live in continual wickedness are endured by Him with so great long-sufferings, much more would He not have suffered these to be so taken off had He foreknown they would accomplish any great things.

NPNF1-10. St. Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew - Christian Classics Ethereal Library


As I quoted earlier from the ancient epistle of St. Aristides (ca. 125 AD) re his observation of Christians towards children who die innocent:

And when a child has been born to one of them, they give thanks to God; and if moreover it happen to die in childhood, they give thanks to God the more, as for one who has passed through the world without sins. And further if they see that any one of them dies in his ungodliness or in his sins, for him they grieve bitterly, and sorrow as for one who goes to meet his doom.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/aristides-kay.html




The Shepherd of Hermas

The Shepherd of Hermas

Ninth Similitude

THE GREAT MYSTERIES IN THE BUILDING OF THE MILITANT AND TRIUMPHANT CHURCH,


CHAPTER XXIX. "And they who believed from the twelfth mountain, which was white, are the following: they are as infant children, in whose hearts no evil originates; nor did they know what wickedness is, but always remained as children. Such accordingly, without doubt, dwell in the kingdom of God, because they defiled in nothing the commandments of God; but they remained like children all the days of their life in the same mind. All of you, then, who shall remain stedfast, and be as children, without doing evil, will be more honoured than all who have been previously mentioned; for all infants are honourable before God, and are the first persons with Him. Blessed, then, are ye who put away wickedness from yourselves, and put on innocence. As the first of all will you live unto God."


http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/shepherd.html




It seems like some things that had a basic understanding among the early Christians became confused as time went on. The holy innocents are a primary example since their numbers were inflated in traditions from 14,000 to 144,000! A basic concept of divine mercy towards the most innocent seems to become confused as time went on.

Please note I added the Shepherd of hermas quote much later & out of sequence to other posts.

 

[Dorothea]

Do you all think there is a difference between babies already born that were killed by Herod and those who were killed in the womb?

 

[gracefullamb]

.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Do you all think there is a difference between babies already born that were killed by Herod and those who were killed in the womb?

it depends, since he killed all under the age of two, so some were members of the covenant having been circumcized, and they would have had the grace that comes with that.

 

[Protoevangel]

I revere the venerable Cleopa's words, as I do the words of the other Saints that have been shared.

For Columba7, and anyone else who might be scandalized by what was posted throughout this thread, may I introduce a quote by Elder Pasios for you to chew on:

 

[Dorothea]

it depends, since he killed all under the age of two, so some were members of the covenant having been circumcized, and they would have had the grace that comes with that.

Oh, ok. I see what you mean.

 

[Dorothea]

This is just my opinion but only if we are going by the definition of life that the Pro-Choice movement and field of Biology has developed. Otherwise I really don't see a difference between the two and think trying to create one in our faith gives rise to perfect argument for those in Pro-Choice movement and field of Biology that a child unborn is not the same as a child born so doesn't deserve the same consideration. Then again I found the most problematic part of your quote in Post #1 isn't where these murdered babies go but the fact that they will be forced to remain their until their mothers repent and only until then. I can't even comprehend how some on here were even able defend such a notion as having to pay for your parents sins and that is exactly what he is stating with the second part of that quote.

I felt somewhat like you did when I first read it, but this is why I shared it here because I wanted to get other people's view on his saying because I may be perceiving it incorrectly and from a mindset of the times we live in that effect us all - meaning the way we see things through sometimes feminist and secularist and a modern 21st-century mindset. I realized that it wasn't the really accurate understanding of it, but I can see how we could see that. It seems a bit more profound than that.

 

[Dorothea]

I revere the venerable Cleopa's words, as I do the words of the other Saints that have been shared.

For Columba7, and anyone else who might be scandalized by what was posted throughout this thread, may I introduce a quote by Elder Pasios for you to chew on: