[1] In his Confessions, St. Augustine tried in vain to
understand where his infancy went. Did boyhood overtake
it? Or did infancy leave of its own accord, and if so,
"where did it go?"1 Were Augustine to write
today, he would have only been more confused. Children like
Jon Benet Ramsey sport grown-up costumes and flash "come hither"
glances, while adults rifle the self-help sections of bookstores in
search of their inner child. A father and husband wanders out
of a marriage and family to find someone he should have located
decades earlier: himself. He leaves behind children who have
spent their childhoods parenting a parent. The Jonesboro
shootings in 1998 prompted a Texas legislator to propose extending
the death penalty to eleven-year-olds. Parents of two
Columbine High School killers had no idea what their children were
plotting. Too busy with their own lives and careers, they
hadn't been inside the adolescents' bedrooms. Whither
childhood?
[2] Sociologist John Demos argues that childhood can be studied
as a mirror which focuses and reflects back the central issues of a
culture.2
If he is right, what should we see in the mirror? We
see a culture that deliberately blurs the distinction between
childhood and adulthood. Ironically, the same culture
obsesses over boundaries: boundaries between men and women in the
workplace, boundaries between church and state, boundaries
governing professional ethical conduct. Why then is this one
boundary violated again and again, by children and the people who
tend them?
[3] Augustine helps us understand what we see in the
mirror. He repudiated romantic notions about the innocence of
children, finding even in infants seeds of jealousy and selfishness
that he saw in adults on a larger, more sinister scale. But
children plainly fascinated him, and he observed them with a care
and attention unusual for a man of late antiquity. More
importantly, Augustine understood the seasons of human life, and he
adopted a kind of graduated moral accountability appropriate to
each stage of the life-cycle.
[4] Augustine spent much time in the Confessions
probing the innocence of childhood, and his conclusion was
resolute: "...where or when was I, your servant, ever
innocent?"(1.7) He dismissed any claims for the innate
innocence of infants and children. Nor did he come to the
opposite conclusion, arguing for innate depravity. Between
innocence and depravity, Augustine posed a third possibility:
non-innocence. Any innocence in a squalling infant resided in
physical weakness, i.e., in being unable to harm anyone else,
literally, non - nocens, literally, "not
harming."3
[5] Following a common classical trope, Augustine proposed six
stages of the human life-cycle, the first three of which are
crucial to this discussion of juvenile justice: infancy, childhood,
and youth.4 Infancy, the first
stage, extended from birth to the acquisition of language.
For Augustine, it was simultaneously the most treacherous and the
most transparent stage in the whole of the life-cycle. He
attempted to put this world without language into words, describing
tenderly the smiles of sleep and the comfort of nursing. But
the paradigmatic incident of this first stage of the life-cycle was
a newborn's jealous rage when, even after it had been fed, it saw
another infant at the nurse's breast.(1.7) Augustine judged
the tantrum that followed unworthy of punishment: without language
the infant could not understand the rebuke. But the incident
embodied the non-innocence of infancy: a baby already fed and in no
hunger still grasping for the breast.
[6] The acquisition of speech inaugurated the second stage of
the life-cycle: childhood. The child could understand rules
and verbal commands, and with this came greater moral
accountability. Yet, despite this increased accountability
Augustine could not condone the many beatings he had received as a
child. He archly observed that both adults and children
played games; yet children were the ones who got punished for
playing them. "Was the master who beat me himself very
different from me? If he were worsted by a colleague in some
petty argument, he would be convulsed with anger and envy, much
more so than I was when a playmate beat me at a game of ball."
(1.9) Though childhood was full of reprehensible actions,
Augustine did not favor punishing children as adults. As
children matured, the rationale behind the rules became clearer,
making willing obedience a possibility.
[7] Adolescence marked the next stage of the life-cycle.
It was the onset of sexual maturity; it was also the stage where
reason began to take hold. Augustine recorded the pride
his father Patricius registered at the city baths when he observed
obvious signs of his son's emerging virility. Yet,
Augustine did not characterize this stage with some salacious
sexual sin - but with the gang-theft of pears from a neighbor's
yard. Augustine remembered that "we took away an enormous
quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw
them to the pigs."(2.4) The incident recalled the
jealousy of an infant, already fed and angry because another nurses
at the breast. Like the infant, these adolescents were not
even hungry, but they bear increased responsibility for their
action. An infant's non-innocence registered an innate
narcissism that wants everything for itself alone. A child
erred in disobeying a verbal command. These youths did
something they knew was wrong, and thus knowingly violated a basic
code of human decency.
[8] The meaning of accountability shifted throughout these three
initial stages of the life-cycle. While the infant's
non-innocence may be judged pre-moral due to its lack of physical
strength, the child's developing language skills conferred
increasing accountability for behavior, which consisted in
obedience to verbal commands. Adolescence heralded the
emergence of reason. What had been a verbal command requiring
external obedience was now internalized, and the youth faced even
greater accountability for his or her behavior. With maturity
and the acquisition of speech and reason, the non-innocence of an
infant phased into increasing accountability in childhood and
adolescence. Augustine lamented the harsh treatment of
children. He focused instead on punishment appropriate to the
child's stage in the life-cycle, and he provided a template for
understanding the various seasons of moral accountability.
Insights for the present:
[9] The Christian tradition inherits an ambiguous legacy
from this long-dead saint, whose ideas continue to have impact
today. I would not credit him with notions of innate
depravity in children - but his thought certainly fed that
fire.5
Let me conclude with three observations.
[10] First, Augustine marked clear boundaries between various
stages of the life-cycle, finding in each levels of accountability
and punishment that were stage-appropriate. Augustine
lamented the sins of his youth - but at least he knew when it was
over. I wonder if we today are so clear, and here I
cite everything from the plethora of self-help books written to
help adults locate the inner child to the ongoing debate, fueled by
schoolyard shootings, about whether to punish children as
adults.
[11] Second, though his understanding of a human nature
saturated with sin may have fueled Calvinist and Puritan notions of
innate depravity, Augustine's own thinking on childhood was more
nuanced. He refused the romantic option of seeing children as
completely innocent, but he also spurned the cynics' option of
viewing children as miniature demons in need of discipline.
Non-innocence fairly characterized his attitude to infants, with a
graduated accountability as the infancy gives way to childhood, as
childhood matures into adolescence.
[12] Third, Augustine was clear about the impact of sin even on
infants. But he spoke entirely of personal sin, transmitted
through Adam's semen. What if he had paid equal attention to
two other dimensions of sin, both of which impinge on moral
accountability in children? What if he had attended to the
sins of the parents and their impact on their children? I
speak here of lapses in attention, care, and nurture, as well as
the graver sins of physical and sexual abuse. The sins of the
parents, great and small, are visited upon their children, from
generation to generation. Statements from the Old Testament
are less dire prediction than sad description of the way things
are. Prisons are full of adults who suffered abuse as
children - and then became themselves abusers. Children
practice behavior they have learned at the hands of their parents
and care-givers. There may well be a component of parent or
care-giver complicity involved in assessing the moral
accountability of children.
[13] In addition, what if Augustine had paid equal attention to
second dimension of sin: structural injustice, i.e., the structures
of injustice that mean an infant born into poverty will have a
shorter life expectancy, a poorer education, and a greater penchant
for petty crime than his sister born in the wealthier communities
several miles to the east.
[14] I would wish for a juvenile justice system that could
operate with the kind of graduated moral accountability that
Augustine displays in his own observations on childhood. In
addition, I would hope for a juvenile justice system that could see
beyond his blind spots, acknowledging the deficits in upbringing
and environment that impair the moral development of
children.
© January
2004
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 4, Issue 1
1 Saint Augustine, Confessions 1.8, trans. R.S.
Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970), 29. All quotes are
from this translation unless otherwise noted.
2 John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in
Puritan America (New York: Oxford University, 1970).
3 Gillian Clark, "The Fathers and the Children," in The
Church and Childhood, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1994), 23.
4 "Aetas," in a Latin Dictionary, ed. Charlton T. Lewis
and Charles Short (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). See also John
Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in
Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1988), 30.
5 For a more detailed investigation of Augustine's
thinking on childhood, see M.E. Stortz, "'Where or When was Your
Servant Innocent?': Augustine on Childhood," in The Child in
Christian Thought, ed. Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2001.