Infant baptism reveals what it means to be person

I had the great privilege of witnessing my nephew’s baptism this past weekend. Prior to the holy water being poured over his head, he stated his desire to be baptized into the Church, affirmed that he clearly understood what he was undertaking and made his profession of faith.

Except, he didn’t. Luca is a baby. He can’t understand most words, can’t speak and certainly isn’t capable of professing the Catholic faith.

And yet, he was baptized all the same. Instead of seeking baptism on his own volition or confirming his own belief in the faith, his parents did so on his behalf. They presented him to the Church to receive the sacrament, and they confirmed that he would be raised according to the faith, a faith which they professed anew that Sunday morning. And Luca was baptized.

How is this possible? How can a small child be baptized and enter into the life of the Church without any apparent individual understanding or choice in the matter?

As Catholics, we tend to take this practice of infant baptism for granted — as just the way it is and always has been. And sure enough, infant baptism has been practiced for a long time, as a “rule of immemorial tradition” in both the East and the West, as a 1980 instruction from the Vatican reminds us. Scripture attests to the practice when it speaks of entire “households” being baptized, and the practice is considered a “tradition received from the Apostles” — not an innovation — by Church Fathers like St. Irenaeus, St. Cyprian and St. Augustine.

But just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean that there isn’t a deep and profound theological reason for why it is and has been done that way. The underlying logic of infant baptism isn’t arbitrary, after all; if it’s true, it must be connected to the mystery of our Catholic faith in its totality. Other supernatural mysteries help us understand this particular mystery, and infant baptism helps us to understand other aspects of our faith (a theological principle known as the “analogy of faith”). In particular, our practice of infant baptism reveals something profound about what it means to be a person.

The textbook definition of what a person is was provided to us by the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius: A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. And this is evident in the case of an infant baptism. My nephew Luca is clearly an individual; after all, this is why he, as Luca, needs to be baptized individually! And even though, as an infant, he can’t actualize all of his rational powers and potencies, as a human being, he is rational in nature.

And yet, this isn’t all we can say about being a person. Before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his magnificent “Introduction to Christianity” that we can also think of a person as “being from and for” another. In other words, a person is an individual, but he or she is also fundamentally relational. In a sense, we are incomplete, not fully persons, if we are not in relation with others.

Ratzinger emphasized this point again in a pivotal article on the theological understanding of personhood he wrote for the journal Communio: “Relativity toward the other constitutes the human person. The human person is the event or being of relativity.” Relationality is not an “add-on” to the human experience; it is at the core of who and what we are.

This understanding of the human person as relational flows from the Church’s theological reflection on the persons of the most holy Trinity, persons who are inter-personal relations: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Made in the image and likeness of this relational God, it is not an accident that the human person is also fundamentally relational.

Infant baptism reflects this profound truth of the relational character of the person. My nephew Luca, as an isolated individual, cannot be baptized. It is only as a member of a family, or even, in an anticipatory way, of the Christian community, that he can approach the baptismal font. As St. Augustine wrote, “it is the whole company of saints and faithful Christians” who present the child. St. Thomas Aquinas adds that the baptized child believes not on his own, individual account, but through others, “through the Church’s faith communicated to (him).”

If Luca is merely an isolated individual, then this is a violation of his nature and of his freedom, understood as autonomous choice. But if Luca is a person, a being “from and for” others, whose dependency upon his parents for not just his natural but also his supernatural needs is not arbitrary, but is actually an intentional part of God’s providential plan, then his baptism as a volition-less, understanding-less infant is actually a fulfilment of his nature and personal dignity.

Persons are fundamentally relational and interdependent. This is true for baby Luca — but it’s also true for each of us, no matter our age. Amid a society animated by radical individualism, the Church’s practice of infant baptism provides us with an opportunity to not only renew our own baptismal promises, but to reflect upon and recommit to living as persons, “from and for” each other.

Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity.