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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
If theological ethics speaks about man, it does not have in view man as he understands himself but man as he knows that he is understood, as he finds himself addressed by the Word of God that has come to him.
2 Barth, K., Ethics, ed. Braun, D., translated Bromiley, G.W. (Edinburgh, 1981), 461Google Scholar. Although this statement comes from one of Barth's relatively early works (that is, from lectures given in Munster in 1928–9) it is consistent with the anthropology which he developed some twenty years later in Church Dogmatics, III/2, translated H. Knight et al. (Edinburgh, 1960), from the insight that ‘anthropology should be based on Christology and not the reverse’. (46) Thus, ‘in our exposition of the doctrine of man we must always look in the first instance at the nature of man as it confronts us in the person of Jesus and only secondarily—asking and answering from this place of light — at the nature of man as that of every man and all other men’, (ibid.)
3 Indeed, what is increasingly characteristic of bioethics is a pretence to viewing humankind from no-where, so to say; the cost of the pretence is, naturally enough, that bioethics is often rather obviously incomplete and arbitrary, being the application to a variety of problems of values which, lacking a place in a coherent, cogent and compelling anthropology or metaphysicas, amount to little more than barely comprehensible prohibitions and permissions: I have made out this charge in some further detail in a review article discussing The Ethical Dimensions of the Biobgical Sciences (Cambridge, 1993), ed. Bulger, R.E., et al. ; see ‘The Taboos of Bioethics’, Minerva, 34 (1996), 199–204.Google Scholar
4 Revelation, I17. Biblical quotations will be from the Revised Standard Version.
5 The scope of this paper would expand beyond manageable bounds if as well as trying to illustrate the questions which Christian ethics poses to medical practice at the beginning and ending of human life, an attempt were made to illustrate the questions to be posed as regards the being of human of life. I have tried to suggest something of what is required on this point, specifically in relation to gamete donation, in a paper which is, however, chiefly concerned with other issues: ‘“Who are my Mother and my Brothers?”: Marx, Bonhoeffer and Benedict and the Redemption of the Family’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 9 (1996), 1–22.
6 Revelation, I8; see the argument of Richard Bauckham's two recent treatments of the book of Revelation: The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3, and The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Booh of Revelation (Edinburgh, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 4. In my reading of Revelation I have been greatly assisted by these studies. It will also be clear that I have taken up many points from Barth's reflections on ‘Jesus, Lord of Time’ in Church Dogmatics, III/2, 437–511.
7 See Prior, A., Past, Present and Future (Oxford 1967).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Luke 210 and 130; Matthew 120.
9 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III/2, 484.Google Scholar
10 Barth, , Church Dogmatics, III/2, 493.Google Scholar
11 It may be worth stressing that this formulation of the question is not meant to suggest that we might interrogate medicine on the basis of three distinct and discrete questions. There is really only one threefold question for it is not as if medicine which reckoned with the past as a time of grace, but not with the present and the future, or which reckoned with the present as a time of grace in ignorance of the grace of yesterday and tomorrow, or which looked for the grace of the future, and knew nothing of its past or present reality, could be anything but seriously distorted. All medical practice must be interrogated in the light of the threefold affirmation and promise found in the text.
12 Throughout the paper I have found it convenient to speak of medicine as an acting subject. This is not intended to deny the following points; first, that it is not medicine, but doctors who do this or that; second, that many individual doctors act in ways which are opposed to the way of action I attribute to ‘medicine’. In any case this paper is not concerned chiefly with attributing motives and intentions but with examining the underlying logic of actions which may be performed under a variety of rationales.
13 O'Donovan, O.M.T., Resurrection and Moral Order (Leicester, 1986), 14ff.Google Scholar
14 Luke, 73.
15 John, 2027.
16 Colossians, 116.
17 Thus when R. Bultmann finds a negativity in Paul's ‘treatment of the marriage question’ in I Corinthians 71–7 which is reckoned to be deeply influenced by ‘the Hellenistic-dualistic depreciation of the body’, we may suspect that there has been a certain carelessness in the reading of the Greeks as in the reading of Paul — see Bultmann, R., Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1, trans. Grobel, K. (London, 1952), 202.Google Scholar
18 Rist, J.M., Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge, 1967), 129Google Scholar. See further, Rist, J.M., ‘Plotinus on Matter and Evil’, Phronesis 6 (1961), 154–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
19 Rist, Plotinus, 128, citing Ennead 1.8.14.
20 Armstrong, A.H., ‘Plotinus’ in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1967), ed. Armstrong, , 229CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited by Brown, P., The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (London, 1989), 179.Google Scholar
21 Rist, J.M., Augustine (Cambridge, 1994), 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Brown, , Body and Society, 222.Google Scholar
23 Brown, Body and Society, 235.
24 Brown, Body and Society, 235–6. We might also observe that in the later development of the ascetic tradition, the same perspective is maintained. In his study John Cassian (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar, Owen Chadwick notes that ‘The use of Platonic language by the monks led extreme critics to accuse them of adopting a non-Christian doctrine of an evil body. The mortifications of the body, it was sometimes alleged, were intended to strip the good soul of its evil clothing. A father of the desert explained his self-maceration thus: “My body kills me, I kill it.” Whatever justification this theory of dualism might have among simpletons or fanatics, the myth of Evagrius [i.e. the Origenist account of the relationship of body and soul taught by Evagrius, Cassian's teacher] shows that it was not a charge which could be lodged against the Origenists. For in that myth the body was created to save the soul. The body is good. The natural world is good. ‘We are taught’ said Abba Poemen in the Apophthegmata, ‘to kill not the body, but the passions.’ (92)
25 See Rist, Augustine, especially ch. 4, and Miles, M.R., Augustine on the Body (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979)Google Scholar, passim. And contrast City of God with his Confessions.
26 See also Sermons, 30, 4: ‘What I want is for it to be healed as a whole, for I am one whole. I do not want my flesh to be removed from me for ever, as if it were something alien to me, but that it be healed, a whole with me’. (Cited in Rist, 92)
27 Augustine, , City of God, trans, by Bettenson, H. (London, 1972), xiii, 17.Google Scholar
28 See City of God, xiii, 16–24 and xxii, 4, 11–21 and 24–29.
29 City of God, xiii, 19.
30 Augustine, City of God, xxii, 17.
31 See Gregory of Nyssa, De Hominis Opificio, PG 44, 123–256, trans. Moore, W. and Wilson, H., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. v (Oxford and New York, 1893)Google Scholar. Gregory argues, on the basis of an interpretation of Genesis I27, that our creation is, so to say, ‘twofold’, in the image of God, but then, as male and female, as sharing in an animal nature — ‘for something like this the passage darkly conveys by its arrangement when it First says “God created man, in the image of God created He him”, and then, adding to what has been said, “male and female created He them” — a thing which is alien from our conception of God’, (xvi, 8) And creation is twofold ‘that the multitude of human souls might not be cut short by its fall from that mode by which the angels were increased and multiplied [i.e. non-sexually] — for this reason, I say, He formed for our nature that contrivance for increase which befits those who had fallen into sin, implanting in mankind instead of an angelic majesty of nature, that animal and irrational mode by which they now succeed one another’, (xvii, 4)
It is worth observing that even here, with a thinker much closer to Platonism than the later Augustine, there is a significant divergence from the assumptions of neo-Platonism. For Gregory, as Brown says (The Body and Society, 300), ‘formulations from Plato and Plotinus dropped easily from his pen… But they had changed their meaning. For the soul to find itself in the body in its present, fallen state was a sad and perilous situation for Gregory; but it was no longer the principal cause of the present anomaly of the human condition’ — as, of course, Plotinus held.
32 Augustine, , City of God, xiv, 22.Google Scholar
33 Augustine, , City of God, xiv, 23.Google Scholar
34 Augustine, , City of God, xix, 10.Google Scholar
35 Rist, , Augustine, 102.Google Scholar
36 It would require too long a detour to defend Augustine's treatment of sexual ethics against his modern opponents (who are, for the most part, Manichees, Pelagians or Sadducees, though unlike their forebears, unwittingly). Such a defence would not maintain that there are no elements in Augustine's treatment deserving of criticism; it would maintain, however, that the logic of his analysis, which places human sexuality firmly within and not outside the history of redemption, remains definitive for Christian thinking in this area. For the elaboration of such a claim see Paul Ramsey's important discussion, ‘Human Sexuality within the History of Redemption’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 16 (1988), 56–88.1 have tried to display the strength of the overall conception which determines Augustine's teaching, albeit within a short article, in ‘Sexuelle (Ethique)’, in Dictionnaire de Théologie, ed. Lacoste, Jean-Wes (Presse Universitaires de France, forthcoming)Google Scholar. Suffice it to record here a comment of Peter Brown's (The Body and Society, 425): ‘The fatal flaw of concupiscence would not have seemed so tragic to Augustine, if he had not been ever more deeply convinced that human beings had been created to embrace the material world. The body was a problem to him precisely because it was to be loved and cherished’.
The refusal of most contemporary popular books on sexual ethics to engage with anything but a second-hand parody of Augustine's thought in particular, or of Patristic thought in general, reveals plainly enough the underlying conceit of an age which nonetheless manages to pride itself on its tolerance. Whatever else might be said about these books, they do at least make a contribution, however unintentionally, to the theatre ofthe absurd, for how else should we regard the sight of these modernday midgets swiping at the ankles of giants?
37 See, e.g. De Doctrina Christiana, i, 24: ‘Even if some seem to persecute their bodies by restraint and labour, those who do this according to reason are striving not to rid themselves of their bodies, but rather to possess them, subjected to reason and ready for all necessary work’, while it is only ‘those who do this in the wrong way [who] make war upon their bodies, as if they were their natural enemies; cited in Chadwick, John Cassian.
38 On abortion in Augustine and the Fathers, see Noonan, J.T., ‘An Almost Absolute Value in History’, in The Morality Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives, ed. Noonan, (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 1–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39 The translation of the tide of the short treatise De Cura Pro Mortuis, which includes book i, 13 of the City of God.
40 Augustine, City of God, i, 13.
41 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a, 25, 6; vol. 50 of the Blackfriars edition, trans. C.E. O'Neill (London, 1965), 203. It is noticeable, however, that in his explication of the authoritative text, Aquinas sounds more like Origen than Augustine. Thus he claims that ‘We do not venerate a lifeless body for what it is in itself, but by reason of the soul which was once united to it and which now enjoys God’. Compare Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge, 1980), v, 24, where Origen remarks that a verse of Heraclitus cited by Celsus (‘corpses ought to be thrown away as worse than dung’) ‘causes us not the least difficulty’. ‘Yet someone might say even of this that while dung should be thrown away, yet human corpses should not be thrown away, out of respect for die soul that has dwelt within, and especially if it is a soul of a good character. For according to good customs they are thought worthy of burial with all the honour possible appropriate to their character so that, as far as possible, we may not insult the soul that has dwelt within by casting out the body when the soul has gone out of it, as we do with the bodies of beasts’.
42 A careful treatment of the history and theology of relics is provided by Séjourné, P., ‘Reliques’, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 13 (Paris, 1936) 2312–2376Google Scholar. In addition see Chiovaro, F., ‘Relics’ in New Catholic Entylcopedia (New York, 1967)Google Scholar — which is not, however, to be relied upon for its knowledge of Calvin! It is surprising that the recent Catechism ofthe Catholic Church (English trans., London, 1994) provides so little by way of theological interpretation of a practice which it seems inclined to treat as a form of popular piety, and thus perhaps as lacking a profound theological rationale and therefore simply to be tolerated; see para 1674.
43 O'Donovan, O.M.T., ‘Transsexualism and Christian Marriage’, Joumal of Religious Ethics, (1984).Google Scholar
44 Noonan, ed., The Morality of Abortion, ‘Introduction’, xviii.
45 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, ‘The Wamock Report’ (London, 1984)Google Scholar, paragraph 2. (Subsequent references will be to paragraph numbers.)
46 According to The Wamock Report the early embryo does have a certain status — it is because of this that research, even if permissible, ‘must be subject to stringent controls and monitoring’. (11.18)
47 The Wamock Report, 4.
48 The Wamock Report, 11.5.
49 The Wamock Report, 11.22.
50 This is not to say that no argument whatsoever could be made for the significance of the fourteen day divide, and Ford's, N.M.When Did I Begin? Conception of the Human Individual in History, Philosophy and Science (Cambridge, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is a defence of the proposition that the human individual is to be thought of as coming into existence at approximately two weeks after conception. I believe that his argument is flawed for the sort of the reasons set out in the following papers: Grisez, G. ‘When Do People Begin’, in Abortion: A New Generation of Catholic Responses (Braintree, Mass., 1992), 3–27Google Scholar; Fisher, A., ‘Individuogenesis and a Recent Book by Fr. Norman Ford’, Anthropotes, 8 (1991), 199–244Google Scholar and ‘“When did I begin?’ Revisited”, Linacre Quarterly, 58 (1991), 59–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tonti-Filippini, N., ‘A Critical Note’, Linacre Quarterly, 56 (1989), 36–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Specifically, both Ford's biology, and the inferences he draws from the possibility of twinning and the formation of chimaeras, are alike suspect. My point here, however, is not that no even prima facie plausible case can be made for the distinction on which The Wamock Report's central recommendation depends—it is simply that The Warnock Report shows no interest in making such a case. It was noticeable that the advocates of experimentation on embryos in the debate surrounding the implementation of The Warnock Report showed, for the most part, a similar lack of interest, and seemed satisfied simply to employ the terms ‘pre-embryo’ and ‘conceptus’ to label the early embyro, as if thereby marking an important difference of some moral consequence. The use of these terms, however, no matter the air of scientific authority which they suggest, does not establish but merely asserts such a difference.
51 In Britain the Abortion Act of 1967 allows legal termination of pregnancy prior to the 28th week in order to avoid injury to the ‘physical or mental health’ of the mother or ‘any existing child of her family’, or where ‘there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped’. This is now amended by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, 1990, which substituted 24 weeks for 28, but excluded the severely handicapped from this restriction, so that they may now be aborted up to term. The judgement of the Supreme Court of the United States in Roev. Wade in 1973 is seemingly more radical in holding the prohibition of abortion prior to viability unconstitutional, thereby denying the fetus the prima facie protection which the English law seems to enshrine. However, the interpretation of the 1967 Act by medical practitioners as permitting abortion on demand suggests that there is little difference in practice between the two countries.
52 An example of a failure to realise even what is needed in a treatment of this subject is found in the article ‘Abortion’ in the New Dirtionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology, ed. Atkinson, D.J. and Field, D.H., (Leicester, 1995)Google Scholar, written by David Cook. Perhaps it will not surprise us unduly that an article even in a publication with a broadly evangelical provenance should be unconstrained by Christian principles, but the manner in which the article likewise turns its back on the most basic principles of rational discussion ought to cause us greater surprise. The author plainly does not understand the doctrine of double effect and hence Roman Catholic teaching on the subject; the question of the legality of abortion is quite absurdly discussed without reference to any particular jurisdiction; various ideas relating to the issue of when the embryo becomes worthy of protection are listed without any critical comment, even when some of those ideas are so highly questionable as to verge on the absurd. (‘Medical practitioners favour viability’, so we are told, ‘as the point when a clear patient becomes the responsibility of the doctor’; but shouldn't the moralist pose the pointed question whether then, in private practice, the opening of a bank account is the key moment as being ‘the point when a clear patient’ hoves into view?) The evasion of rational engagement with the issues does not, however, inhibit the author from solemn pronouncements on his theme: thus we are warned that ‘Christians… do not have the right to inflict their morality on society’ — which can only cause us to be grateful that our Christian forebears who campaigned for the abolition of slaverywere not weighed down by the fatuous pieties of modern liberalism. (The warmth in this complaint lies in the fact, which a Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology ought to know very well, that the Christian ethicist should take up a question such as abortion seriously, or not at all.)
53 Tooley, M., Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford 1983), 303.Google Scholar
54 Fletcher, J., Morals and Medicine (Boston, 1954)Google Scholar, cited in Grisez's, G. important study Abortion: the Myths, the Realities and the Arguments (New York, 1970), 280.Google Scholar
55 Report of the Working Party to Review the British Medical Association's Guidance on Euthanasia, (London, 1988), paragraph 132.Google Scholar
56 Aristotle, , The Politics, trans. Jowett, B. (Oxford, 1905), II, v.Google Scholar
57 Aristotle, The Politics, ibid.
58 See, de Vitoria, Francisco, De Indis, ql, conclusion, in Political Writings, ed. Pagden, A. and Lawrance, j. (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar. For Sepulveda and the general background to the debate see Pagden, A., The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar. A readable, but not entirely reliable, introduction is Hanke's, L.Aristotle and the American Indians (Chicago, 1959)Google Scholar; it fails, in particular, to understand the way in which Thomism is reponsible for the use to which Aristotle was put.
59 Cited in Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians, 16. See also The Defence of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolemé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas, ed. and trans. S. Poole (DeKalb, III., 1974).
60 So we might say, in addition, of the stipulation that it is present possession of this attribute or attributes (not simply potential to possess them in the future) which counts. After all, it would be odd to maintain that the sterilisation of a. boy at the age of ten does him no wrong simply because he presen tly possesses only the potential to reproduce in the future.
61 See on this point, the patient critique of Tooley in Hursthouse, R., Beginning Lives (Oxford, 1987), esp. 107–117Google Scholar. ‘Tooley's conclusion (Cl), “Foetuses and babies do not have a right to life” was based on the premise (P2) “Only persons have a right to life” and the supposed definitional truth (Dl) “Foetuses and babies are not persons”. But now it has emerged that (P2) and (Dl) simply assume the truth of (Cl)’. (117).
62 I have put ‘perhaps’ in this sentence, since I have not found room to argue fully for the stronger thesis. When we find, however, philosophers such as James Rachels declaring that ‘the idea of human dignity turns out… to be the moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics’, it is clear that grounds exist, even from the side of secular philosophy, for making a case for the removal of the ‘perhaps’. For Rachels, , see: Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford, 1990), 5Google Scholar. Nietzsche might also be brought forward as a witness, with his clear sense of the distinctiveness of Christianity. See his insistence that on a scientific view of humankind, the idea of human dignity is not gegeben (i.e. given) but aufgegeben (i.e. abandoned); The Anti-Christ, trans. RJ. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1968).
63 It ought to be clear that nothing said here is taken to provide a defence of an exceptionless moral norm which would always and ever preclude abortion. Whether such a norm could be defended is not settled in this paper which is concerned more to establish the presumption in its favour which a properly Christian anthropology warrants.
64 For the sake of simplicity I deal only with voluntary euthanasia. The treatment of involuntary or non-voluntary euthanasia would require a somewhat extended analysis, which would draw attention to the usual reliance of the case for involuntary or nonvoluntary euthanasia on ‘anthropologies of qualification’ of the sort we have already referred to in the discussion of abortion — see, for example, Brock, D.W., Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics, (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: killing certain patients is permissible where those patients fail ‘to have the properties of personhood necessary and sufficient for possessing the right not to be killed’. (102) (Any anxieties such a proposal is likely to raise are hardly quelled by the assurance that ‘Moderately demented patients, in the absence of democratically based public decisions to thecontrary, have roughly the same claims to care as nondemented patients’. (16) — emphasis added. Pope John Paul II's warning in Centesimus Annus, English trans. (London, 1991), para. 46, that ‘a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism’ is surely apposite.)
We might note just how difficult it is, however, to maintain the voluntary/involuntary distinction both in theory and practice. As regards the problems in maintaining the distinction in theory, see the extremely lucid ‘Submission to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Medical Ethics from the Linacre Centre for Health Care Ethics’, reprinted in Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law, ed. L. Gormally (London, 1994), 111–165. The relevant argument is as follows (131–2) — since a doctor could not regard a request for euthanasia as sufficient to warrant killing a patient (the request may arise from a faulty grasp of the prognosis, relievable depression, or whatever), he or she will only accede to this request on the basis of a judgement that the patient really does no longer have a worthwhile life. Now since the doctor is responsible for thisjudgment, not the patient, the justification of the killing is the same as the justification of involuntary or non-voluntary euthanasia — that the patient no longer has a worthwhile life.
On the difficulty in maintaining the distinction in practice, see Keown, J., ‘Some Reflection on Euthanasia in the Netherlands’, in Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law, ed. Gormally, , pp. 193–218Google Scholar. Keown argues that ‘the significance of the Dutch euthanasia experience for law, medicine and social policy in other countries is considerable, not least in respect of the support it lends to the “slippery slope” argument’ (216) — i.e. the slope from voluntary to involuntary euthanasia. He cites the conclusion to C. Gomez's study, Regulating Death: Euthanasia and the Case of the Netherlands: ‘on the core issues of the controversy — how to control the practice, how to keep it from being used on those who do not want it, how to provide for public accountability — the Dutch response has been, to date, inadequate’. See further, Keown, J. ‘Euthanasia in the Netherlands: Sliding Down the Slippery Slope?’ in Euthanasia Examined: Ethical, Clinical and Legal Perspectives. ed. Keown, J., (Cambridge, 1995), 261–296CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And on the problems with the theoretical distinction, see further, in the same volume, L. Gormally, ‘Walton, Davies, Boyd and the Legalization of Euthanasia’, 113–140.
65 Barth, Ethics, 468–9.
66 Titus, 213.
67 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/iv, trans. A.T. Mackay et al., (Edinburgh, 1961), 263.
68 Barth, , Ethics, 469–470.Google Scholar
69 Barth, , Ethics, 486–487.Google Scholar
70 Barth, , Ethics, 490.Google Scholar
71 Augustine, , City of God, i, 17–27.Google Scholar
72 Augustine, , City of God, i, 26.Google Scholar
73 Augustine, City of God, ibid.
74 Augustine, City of God, i, 23 and 24.
75 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, trans. Wilson, W., Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Roberts, A. and Donaldson, J., vol. ii (Grand Rapids, 1977), 299–567Google Scholar. For a treatment of the history and theology of martyrdom up to 361 a.d., see Frend, W.H.C., Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to the Donatists (Oxford, 1965).Google Scholar
76 Augustine, City of God, i, 22, quoting I Thessalonians 45.
77 Clement, Stromata, iv, 11. It is likely that the soldier whose actions provide the occasion for Tertullian's De Corona had been accused by fellow Christians of acting in an unnecessarily provocative way — Tertullian's treatise constitutes a defence of him against such a charge. Tertullian, of course, provides a sharp contrast with his near contemporary Clement's careful approach in delineating the proper readiness for martyrdom. Note, for example, that in DeFuga, Tertullian rules out an interpretation of Matthew 1023 of the sort favoured not only by Clement and Augustine but also indeed in his own earlier treatise Ad Uxorem (at 1, 3) — now he argues thatjesus's command is given only to the Apostles and to their times and circumstances. He even maintains that it is wrong to ransom prospective martyrs with money when they have already been ransomed by Christ's blood. But in addition his praise of martyrdom, to Clement's ears at least, would have come too close to encouraging Christians to be accomplices in their own deaths. Besides De Corona, DeFuga and Ad Uxorem, see Ad Martyras, Scopiacc and Apologeticum, all in The Ante-NiceneFathers, vol iii, ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (Grand Rapids, 1976).
78 Clement, , Stromata, iv, 4.Google Scholar
79 Clement, , Stromata, iv, 9.Google Scholar
80 It would be interesting to trace the place this attitude would have in subsequent Christian thinking about martyrdom down to, and beyond, the Reformation when we find Cranmer taking a line close to Clement's in a letter to Peter Martyr of 1555. See Ridley, J., Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1962), 369.Google Scholar
81 Clement, Stromata, iv. 4. It is, of course, characteristic of Clement that he should be arguing for a, so to say, via media in relation to martyrdom, and particularly against those whose enthusiastic renunciation of life might be taken as expressing a doubt as to its goodness. The same concern is found in his critique of sexual asceticism in Book iii of the Stromata, as in his best known treatise, on the proper use of wealth, Who is the Rich Man That Shall be Saved?, also in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ii.
82 Augustine, City of God, i, 12. It is presumably a belief of this kind which explained how veneration of the bodies of the saints came to thought compatible with the dismemberment of their corpses, a practice which became commonplace by the sixth century in spite of the prohibition found in the Theodosian Code.
83 It will be obvious to those who know his writings that in what follows as regards medicine's handling of death, I owe a very great debt to May's, W.F. analysis of medical practice, and in particular to The Physician's Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics (Philadelphia, 1983)Google Scholar. For a bibliography and discussion of May's work see Meilaender's, G. ‘Corrected Vision for Medical Ethics’, in Theological Voices in Medical Ethics, ed. Verhey, A. and Lammers, S. (Grand Rapids, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. H. Weaver (Harmondsworth, 1983) — significantly his discussion of modern behaviour in relation to death is headed ‘Death Denied’.
84 May, F., The Patient's Ordeal, (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 119.Google Scholar
85 The Rule of St. Benedict, trans. McCann, J. (London, 1976), chapter 36.Google Scholar
86 The Linacre Centre's ‘Submission to the Select Committee of the House of Lord's on Medical Ethics’ states the point neatly: ‘It can be morally acceptable to withhold or withdraw treatment precisely because it is reasonably judged inefficacious (futile) or excessively burdensome, even if one foresees that in consequence death will occur earlier than it might otherwise have done. One's reason for withholding treatment is not a judgment about the desirability of putting an end to the patient's life, but a judgment about the desirability of putting an end to treatment, either because it is inefficacious or because it is imposing excessive burdens on the patient’. (144)
87 Camus, A., The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. O'Brien, J. (Harmondsworth, 1975), 7.Google Scholar
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89 Ibid.
90 Camus, , The Myth of Sisyphus, 109.Google Scholar
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94 To name the virtues which, as May puts it (The Physician's Covenant, 84), the community's ‘aged and dependent, its sick and dying’may display to it—but which they will learn to display, of course, only in so far as the Church reappropriates the tradition of reflection to which, for example, Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying is a contribution.
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97 Ibid.
98 Paul, John II, Evangelium Vitae, English translation (London, 1995), para. 80.Google Scholar
99 Paul, John II, Evangelium Vitae, para. IGoogle Scholar. Oliver O'Donovan is, of course, right to maintain that the encyclical would be more assured in its treatment of the questions of abortion, euthanasia, and so on, if it were to treat the birth of Christ more fully in connection with his resurrection; see his review in Studies in Christian Ethics, 9 (1996), 89–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar