The Age of Reason

The age of reason, also called the age of discretion, is the moment when the child acquires the use of reason: the capacity to discern good from evil and to act knowingly. Before he reaches it, the import of his acts still escapes him. Scripture knows this threshold: it speaks of the little ones “who know not this day the difference of good and evil,” Deuteronomy 1:39 and describes the child growing “that he may know to refuse the evil, and to choose the good.” Isaiah 7:15

The awakening of reason

Before this threshold, the child acts by impulse, by imitation or by habit, without grasping what he does. The use of reason names the moment when three linked capacities awaken in him: to recognise that an act is good or evil, to understand that he is its author, and to deliberate before acting. It is the awakening of conscience, that inner voice which judges good and evil. The child then ceases to be merely led: he begins to lead himself.

The mark of seven years

The Church places this threshold around seven years. The Church's law makes of it a presumption: the child who has completed seven years is held to have the use of reason, while the younger one is deemed not yet accountable for himself, and purely ecclesiastical laws bind only from that age. The presumption stays flexible: some children reach the use of reason a little earlier, others a little later. This mark serves as a common rule, from which the child is held responsible for his acts. It marks the beginning of the moral life: judgment continues to mature long afterward, and full maturity is acquired only with the years.

Knowledge and freedom make the act

An act engages its author only if it is posed in knowledge and willingly: one must know what one does and will it to answer for it. This is why the child who does not yet have the use of reason commits no personal sin, being able neither to measure nor to choose what he does. Responsibility is born with discernment, and each answers only for what is his own: “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son.” Ezekiel 18:20 It holds in both directions: having become able to recognise the good, man also answers for the evil he commits knowingly. “To him therefore who knoweth to do good and doth it not, to him it is sin.” James 4:17 According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, when the child reaches the use of reason, his first deliberation bears on himself and the meaning of his life: if he then orders himself to his true end, he receives grace; if he turns from it, he sins. The gravity of a fault always depends on the knowledge and freedom engaged: the threshold opens the capacity to sin, leaving to each act its own weight. The same principle grounds the doctrine of invincible ignorance: an ignorance for which one is not responsible removes the fault, for no one answers for what he could neither know nor will.

A threshold in the Christian life

From the age of reason, the child enters a moral life responsible before God: now capable of fault, but also of merit, of freely good acts that make him grow in grace. It is this same age of discretion that the Church keeps for first confession and first communion: the child becomes able to receive forgiveness in confession, for he can examine his conscience and recognise his faults, and to be admitted to communion, for he can discern in the host the body of Christ. This threshold also distinguishes the effects of baptism: received in the little child, it erases original sin alone; received after the age of reason, it erases besides all personal sins.

Those who die before this threshold

The child who dies before having reached the use of reason could commit no personal sin. If he was baptised, his soul, washed of original sin and adorned with grace, enters at once into the glory of God. Christ showed his tenderness for these little ones and gave them as a model of the Kingdom. “But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such.” Matthew 19:14 God already spoke his pity for the little ones of Nineveh, “that know not how to distinguish between their right hand and their left.” Jonah 4:11 Those who die without baptism, the Church entrusts to the mercy of God, who “will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” 1 Timothy 2:4 and, as the Catechism affirms, she commends them to that mercy in the hope that a way of salvation exists for them.