January 31, 2001

limbo

I've come across the phrase in limbo a number of times in articles dealing with current political issues. By context, it means 'to be unsolved', I guess. Am I right?

Here are some headlines, all from January 2001: "Estrada's corruption trial in limbo" (Agence France Presse); "Decision on Transit Post Still in Limbo" (Los Angeles Times); "Miners' Families Left in Limbo on Payments" (Newcastle Evening Chronicle); "Stem Cell Research Advocates in Limbo" (New York Times).

I think these quotations make it clear that, in current usage, if something is in limbo, it is awaiting resolution. If a person is in limbo, he or she is in a transitional place or condition.

The phrase in limbo came directly from Latin in the fourteenth century; the preposition in was mistakenly thought to be English, and the Latin noun limbus, meaning 'border or edge', came into English in the ablative form limbo.

In Roman Catholic theology, limbo is a region on the border between hell and heaven. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that limbo is 'the abode of souls excluded from the full blessedness of the beatific vision, but not condemned to any other punishment'. There is no specific mention of limbo in the Bible. The concept developed in the Middle Ages, based on writings of the early fathers of the Church.

There are two forms of limbo. One is called limbus patrum 'limbo of the fathers'. It is the place where the righteous of the Old Testament, who had died before Christ's coming, dwelt until Christ "descended into hell" and released them to heavenly bliss. This was known in the Middle Ages as "the harrowing of hell" ("harrowing" in the sense of 'plundering', related to "harry") and was believed to have taken place after Christ's crucifixion and before his ascension. The harrowing of hell was a popular theme in medieval literature and art.

The other limbo is called limbus infantium 'limbo of the children' and is the place where unbaptized infants dwell forever. They cannot enter heaven because they have not been freed of original sin through baptism, but they have no other sin so they are not condemned to hell. There have been considerable differences of opinion for many centuries concerning the nature of this limbo -- some theologians have declared it to be a happy place while others have said there must be an element of sadness because the denial of entrance to heaven is, by definition, a punishment.

Limbo was used in transferred senses by the end of the sixteenth century. When the porter in Shakespeare's Henry VIII says, "I have some of 'em in Limbo Patrum," he means 'prison'. Limbo can also be 'a place or state of oblivion for persons or things cast aside': "At length they drew breath, let the argument fly away into the limbo of other good arguments... (Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, 1919). Jane Addams wrote in Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) of "the limbo of forgotten specters."

Judging from the citations I found, limbo has now, in common usage, lost the sense of sorrow which it held when Edith Wharton used it in a poignant passage in The House of Mirth: "The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers."

Georgia