Euthanasia: a Crossroads For the West
"France, watch out..." This was the warning contained in three manifestos that a French theologian addressed to the people of that country to put them on guard first against Nazi infiltration,1 then against that of communism by way of progressivism2 and, finally, against a secularization that was numbing the faith.3 Nazi or Fascist totalitarianism in Europe now belongs to past history, and that imposed by the Soviets in the middle of this continent, having today shown its true face,4 no longer mobilizes anyone except those nostalgic for the dream it inspired: the third threat remains. If Christianity was able to escape the first two, despite the scepticism which the Encyclicals of Pius XI Mit brennender Sorge and Divini Redemptoris encountered in 1937, there is still the problem of knowing whether the West today will be able to escape the fascination of those advocating secularization, only one of whose signs is the growing indifference to the spread of abortion and euthanasia. If the great battles against the legalization of abortion were fought in the majority of Western countries 20 or 25 years ago, it is now against euthanasia that we should again take up the fight, but will we have enough energy to do so?
Public opinion comes to the tore here; on it depends the line of conduct which the European societies of the future will adopt, because anything can happen if it realizes its own strength; but it must fully understand what is at stake in the choice it cannot avoid making: it must decide between two types of social development; on the one hand, one that gives some the right to kill innocent people, as in totalitarian regimes, and the other which demands full respect for the person and allows no one this right to kill under any pretext.
The leaders of totalitarian regimes were right when they said that they wished to create a new man; for them it was a matter of producing a being whose moral standards no longer, coincided with the world formed by and through Christianity, which therefore opposed them with all its spiritual strength. The struggle against euthanasia, which is now beginning is of the same kind. The ideology underlying European society at the turn of the millennium no longer recognizes that individuals are oriented to transcendence and are invited to come out of themselves and to express the universal fatherhood of God in social reality.
I. The stakes
A certain conception of man has prevailed in the West for over a millennium. It has been active and has been gradually deepened. After St Thomas and the Scholastics had stressed the concept of the person and his value, an effort was made to understand his role in society better; it was then that his responsibility was insisted upon, because by his nature he has the capacity to make decisions. As the Second Vatican Council would say, the person is responsible for discovering God's plan for the world's development and deciding whether or not to make it a reality.5 The human being consequently appears as an essentially moral being with a morality understood as that which makes him free in relationship to another freedom on which he depends: God.
A contemporary philosopher of mainland China has rightly observed that being free in everyday life to ratify or not one's own relationship with God has been the mainspring of progress in the West;6 in his opinion, believers' sense of responsibility has spurred them to introspection, to ask themselves whether they have fulfilled their duties to God. The man of Western civilization was spurred to overcome himself in order to lead the world forward to "more human"7 forms of social life.
Humanity has always recognized certain social structures as the constitutive elements of every society, i.e., that every individual is a moral being capable of good or evil, that the family is the natural environment for his development, that the group (tribe or nation) is the vital and indispensable context for his material survival and his human development, that certain rules cannot be violated without causing harm: but at the same time he sees the difficulty of respecting them.
For the Christian, the development of human society is subject to laws inscribed in the nature of the world,8 and this temporal history can be discovered by reason; but, at the same time, it is integrated into another, supernatural order, which enables him to resolve the contradiction in which individuals and societies find themselves. He knows that human nature was damaged by sin and that it was wonderfully restored by Christ. He sees Christ as the Saviour of the world because he offers him the possibility of personal redemption and because he teaches the way of reconciliation to divided humanity.9
This is poles apart from the view now spreading in the West, which it contradicts on two essential points: human life has a specific nature, and the dignity of the human being is an objective fact that must be recognized by all.
A new vision of man has gained ground since the Renaissance; it has become general in the past two centuries. Rejected at first with horror, it has nevertheless pervaded common opinion, as we see from the debate about norms which entire generations had considered inviolable. If the first debates were about divorce and then abortion, now they concern the acceptability of euthanasia. Little by little the debate is extending to the legitimacy of surrogate mothers, homosexuality, sexual freedom, the limitation of parental rights over their children in the name of the latter's freedom, artificial insemination, the possibility of using so-called spare embryos for experimentation or to obtain tissue, etc.... We must realize that all this stems from one and the same logic. The evolution of society taking place before our eyes is guided by a new scale of values and implies a new anthropology. Reason is considered capable of attaining on its own knowledge of the truth about man: God, in effect, has become a mere hypothesis, which one can assume or not. The way of rational and immediate certainties has been set against that of God's commandments. Man thus returns to the dream of Greek thinkers, who, in the myths of Prometheus and Tantalus,10 claimed the right to direct their own destiny.
The contemporary Western world is secularized. The taboos of procreation and of death suffered and accepted in dignity no longer exist. While there once was a time when everyone was asked to react consciously and responsibly to a fact of nature that was the sign of the human condition, free access to abortion, to euthanasia (which is now spreading) and even the free use of bioethical advances are perceived as a sign of human dignity, since they seem to make man capable of becoming the arbiter of his own development. This state of affairs is the logical conclusion of an evolution which, after making transcendence an intellectual hypothesis, has entrusted "the care of human affairs" (Grotius) to reason alone. Thus the moral mainspring that was the driving force of Western civilization has been violated.
Christianity is therefore being radically challenged in the Western world; this contestation concerns man's role in the universe; it is a question of knowing if his historical role as defined by Christianity and Graeco-Latin culture has now ended: if the civilization born in the Mediterranean basin ought to give way to another, which would be that of a new humanity.
II. What To Choose?
Man cannot avoid making a choice as to whether human development should be considered dependent or not on the religious dimension of existence. His decision will determine his behaviour. Supporters of both these positions have not failed to advance arguments: each is a response to the other. They are certainly useful and even indispensable; however the final option is not made at the level of reason but of conscience. The source of morality by which it is determined will lead the mind to adopt one or the other of these interpretations of the existence of man and the world.
The Alternative
The religious vision of human development is opposed in the name of two affirmations: a) there is nothing specific to human life; b) it is therefore society's task to determine the norms which guarantee respect for its dignity.
One current of thought opposed to what developed under the influence of Christianity has grown in the West since the Renaissance; at first it was the offspring of certain anticonformist spirits (Jacques Vallee des Barreaux, Cyrano de Bergerac and others), but it gradually spread among the masses in the 19th and 20th centuries, before taking extreme forms. One could cite the texts of Charles Richer or Alexis Carrel, which explain how life has no value except for those who are conscious. The consequence is that we should be sorry for those who are reduced to a vegetative state or are disqualified as members of the human community; they must be disposed of in "a humane and economical way".
The answer to this argument has always been given at two levels: on the one hand, human life is different from animal life; on the other, the dignity of the human being, and therefore his inviolability, is based on his nature and is not acquired from the outside.
Specific Nature Of Human Life
It is obvious to common sense that human life is qualitatively different from that of all the other living beings. Only the human being is able to reflect, to direct his actions freely, to leave his mark on the surrounding world. In entrusting him with the care of creation, the first chapter of Genesis only confirms daily experience. Man dominates creation.
Experience shows that there is a vital relationship between the unborn human being, or one who has lost consciousness, and his surrounding environment. The infant in his mother's womb suffers, and his psychological future will be influenced by his mother's feelings about him during the time of pregnancy; as for human beings already born but afflicted with a loss of their faculties, even if the loss seems total, they remain sensitive to the relations people have with them, even if they cannot express themselves.
A problem has already been raised of knowing whether a person who possesses life can refuse it.11 The problem consists in this: wanting to end one's life by suicide or planned euthanasia means in some way abandoning one's identity; it is constituting oneself as another ego which then judges the one which is actually mine. The action of someone who puts an end to his days, on the pretext that he has lived long enough, confirms the absolute value of life; he confirms his power over existence by killing himself.
Contemporary man's pretension to act as if he were the absolute master of creation and to treat it as a set of givens which he could dispose of at will is unacceptable for the Christian and for anyone who dwells in a world which he knows he has not created.12
Human Dignity
Discussions about the basis of human dignity are at the centre of the debate between Christianity and contemporary culture; they can be summarized in an alternative, that of deciding whether man's pre-eminent position in the world stems from the fact that he has an innate dignity, or whether this position is due to particular circumstances of which society is the arbiter. In other words, man's dignity derives from the fact that he was constituted as a free and responsible being, and will be judged on the way he has used his responsibility; or, should he be respected only as long as the faculties based on his intelligence are still perceptible?
In the first case, it is said that the human being is constituted — created, say Christians — as a responsible person; in this case his dignity is something constitutive; since it belongs to every human being as a person, it does not depend on the free will of others; not only that: it imposes itself on them and limits their freedom of action; it is a duty of the public order to protect it, as the Declaration of 1789 affirms in its Preamble. Human dignity is an objective fact imposed on every man and woman and every legislator; this truth was firmly asserted by Pius XI in relation to totalitarianism.13 The rules adopted by many cultures and the positions taken by the Church on the problems of society are inspired by the idea that every human being has inherent value. Basing this idea on revelation, the Church has given it a force and authority, which cannot be infringed.
In the second case man receives his dignity from his recognition by society. But if a human being's dignity depends on the fact that it is recognized by his surroundings, it becomes legitimate not to respect it when this recognition is lacking. Was this not the way that totalitarian regimes acted whenever they pursued the mass extermination of social categories declared unworthy of living because of their sex, religion, colour or race? The truth of a thesis is judged not only by the coherence of its argument but also by the logical consequences flowing from its assertion; it contains these consequences from the beginning and certain special circumstances are enough for their effects to ensure.
There is a consensus in the human race that recognizes the specific nature of the human being; but all too often its basis remains veiled; it was truly explored only by biblical revelation, which has always taught the inviolability of human life, and by Christianity, which has stated unequivocally that man is capable of a supernatural life laden with the promise of life even after death. In fact, wherever Christianity grows weak, we see doubt cast on the innate dignity of man and the inviolable nature of life. Indeed, the two are connected. Therefore one can only wonder about the consequences of the new culture developing in Western countries, which John Paul II has called a "culture of death". Are not the effects we can already see in total contradiction to the requirements of humanity's spiritual development?
The idea of human dignity is at the heart of society's current debates. Doubtless these would be more enlightened if its foundation and society's perception of it were more clearly distinguished. Every human being has the "capacity" to act as a responsible person. Beyond this firm foundation, which escapes human control is the development of dignity; this is achieved through one's relations with other human beings. Man is a social animal, that is, he does not reach his full stature except in relationship with others, a relationship that consists of sentiments of equality and affection. Doctors and nursing staff willingly acknowledge their experience of how the human care of the terminally ill who have apparently lost consciousness can restore in a way their joy and energy. The fact of participating in a common project and of entering into a network of relations makes it possible to develop the human being's sense of his own dignity and to increase the reasons for acknowledging it: but it cannot be its cause, because it would thus lose the absolute character which protects every individual from the judgment of others and of the State.
There are two opposing humanisms: the humanism of Christians and of all who assert the reality of the subject, and that of contemporary thinkers who denounce the Judeo-Christian tradition for the pre-eminent role that it attributes to man in creation. Their anthropology eliminates history and considers individual existence as a mere succession of instants.
We are in the presence of a break in tradition. While the codes of medical ethics condemn euthanasia, today it is argued that "dignity is what defines human life",14 a position that allows for attacks on life once this dignity is no longer recognized by society.
Conclusion: Human Progress In Crisis
The plan to pursue human progress while ignoring its religious dimension is based on an illusion, because it deprives individuals and communities of a common, higher standard to which they can refer in reconciling their divergent interests; it shows that human progress has reached a serious crisis. Many may find this statement surprising. But are we not seeing that technological advances are overturning the material conditions of life as well as the range of values and their hierarchy? Human communications are multiplying; the means of learning, of knowledge, of dominating nature seem infinite. Does not the successful cloning experience show that man is acquiring a control over life, which allows him to hope he will conquer death? Cassandras are never well received when they warn of the dangers of a way that seems open to the infinite; however, those who reflect on the transformation of the human condition occurring in the West today cannot but wonder. Technological advances as well as those in the democratic organization of societies were due to a desire to promote material development and spiritual progress at the same time. A development policy that is deprived of a relationship with transcendence can only run out of steam and impede that commitment to moral improvement, which has given its energy to humanity's growth.
Christian communities today are facing an imposing challenge because they are assaulted by the surrounding atheism, which calls into question life's absolute character. In fact, they know that it is not enough to recall the doctrinal foundations of Christian anthropology, despite the fact that this teaching is indispensable. Christians must learn to make their own specific contribution to society's great debates. Here, Christian education must be rethought: it must become accustomed to discerning in everyday existence what is contrary to life, in order to reject it as if instinctively and to choose what encourages its development at all levels, biological, intellectual and religious.
In an era which has become conscious of the unity of the human race and of the need to strive for an organization of global society that will guarantee peace, two paths are open to the men and women of the 21st century, two paths which they must choose between in today's debates on euthanasia: one trail blazed by theologians and humanists such as Vives or Erasmus in the Renaissance considers absolute respect for life and the equality it implies between all human beings in the name of their constitutive dignity as the primary requirement. The other, since it does not see in every human life an absolute that must be respected in all circumstances, allows for the exclusion of individuals and groups whose race, sex or religion are considered a nuisance to society. By excluding transcendence, members of society are deprived of the inner moral requirement that would enable them to counterbalance their inclination to dominate society's weakest members. The issues of euthanasia and bioethics have placed 21st-century man at this crossroads. He cannot shirk his responsibility to promote human dignity in the truth.
Notes
1 G. Fessard, "France prends garde de perdre ton ame", first clandestine issue of Temoignage chretien (1941), p. 17.
2 G. Fessard, "France, prends garde de perdre ta liberte!", in Temoignage chretien (Paris 1945), p. 151; cf. also Address of Pius XI for the exhibition on the world Catholic press, 12 May 1936, which identified communism as the "principal adversary to be combatted".
3 G. Fessard, Eglise de France, prends garde de perdre la foi! (Paris: Julliard, 1979), p. 250.
4 S. Courtois, Le livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, repression (Paris: Laffont, 1997), p. 848.
5 Gaudium et spes, n. 43.2; Centesimus annus, n. 59.
6 Liu Xaobo, "The Inspiration of New York: Meditations of an Iconoclast", in Problems of Communism (Washington: January-April 1991), pp. 113-118; G. Barme, "Confusion, Redemption, and Death: Liu Xaobo and the Protest Movement of 1989", in G. Hicks, The Broken Mirror: China after Tienanmen (UK: Longman, 1990), pp. 52-99.
7 Populorum progressio, n. 20.
8 J. Joblin, "Actualite du Christianisme dans le processus de mondialisation", in Communio (2000/1), pp. 57-69.
9 M. Sales, Introduction in G. Fessard, Le Mystere de la societe (Brussels: Culture et verite, 1997), p. 78.
10 A. Jeanniere, Lire Platon (Paris: Aubier, 1990), pp. 43-45.
11 A. Lizotte, "Y-a-t-il un droit au suicide?", in Liberte politique (1999/8), pp. 53-72.
12 Cf. Pius XII, Christmas Radio Message, 1956 (AAS, 49 [1957], pp. 5-22), in which he reproves modern man for behaving like an engineer who treats living beings as inert matter.
13 Mit brennender Sorge, n. 37 (AAS, 29 [1937], pp. 145-167); cf. especially pp. 159-160.
14 This expression is found in a resolution adopted at the initiative of Dr. Sxhwartzenberg of the Commission for the Environment, Health and Consumer Protection, at a session of the French National Assembly on 25 April 1991 (cf. Le Monde, 3 May 1991, p. 10).
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