Inaugural Lecture Series - Spring 2005
“The University and the Human in a Pluralistic Age”
Celebrating the Inauguration of the Rev. Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., as 16th president of Loyola University New Orleans, October 15, 2004
Universities, and Bioethics
Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D.
Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Medical Ethics
Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University Medical Center
Chair, The President’s Council on Bioethics
March 9, 2005 p.m.
Dr. Edmund Pellegrino is
currently professor emeritus of
medicine and medical ethics
at the Center for Clinical
Bioethics in the Georgetown
University Medical Center.
He is a fellow or member of
20 scientific, professional, and
honorary societies as well as
the author, co-author, or
editor of 24 books. He is also
listed in Who’s Who in
America, America’s Men of
Science, and World’s Who’s
Who in Science, among others.
Bioethics today is an interdisciplinary enterprise which draws on the humanities and social sciences as well as ethics. This lecture will describe how ethics serves as a bridge between the humanities and the sciences for health professionals.
In his convocation address to the university community, Fr. Kevin Wildes chose as his topic the central place of Christian humanism in the mission of Catholic universities, and specifically in the mission of Loyola. He placed particular emphasis on the importance of social justice in Christian humanism and its relevance to church teaching in the contemporary world.
This evening I would like to extend Fr. Wildes’ theme a little further by examining the importance of Christian humanism in our confrontations, as Catholics, with the issues set before us by contemporary bioethics. Fr. Wildes is himself an accomplished bioethicist and will have occasion, I am sure, to speak to you of bioethics during his years here. Without pre-empting his future remarks I would like to suggest why today’s bioethics is urgently in need of an authentic and integral idea of what it means to be human as a foundation for the way we meet the challenges of the new biology and medicine.
The scientific advances in the last quarter century in biomedical science are truly unprecedented. They provide us with the power to control almost every aspect of human life—its beginnings, endings, and even its future evolution. However, these advances have nothing to say about how we are to use our powers ethically and humanely. But they must be used within ethical constraints, or man himself will be overshadowed by his own ingenuity. The only way we can arrive rationally at those restraints is through an authentic conception of who man is, what his destiny may be, and why he exists in the first place.
To develop these themes I will address three questions: 1) What is humanism and specifically what is Christian humanism? 2) How do humanism and the theories of man they espouse shape systems of bioethics? and 3) What is the obligation of Catholic universities to preserve and teach authentic and integral Christian humanism? Clarity on these questions is essential if Loyola is to respond to Fr. Wildes’ challenge to place Christian humanism at the heart of its mission.
I will assume throughout that secular bioethics will continue to grow and develop in the immediate future. My hope is that an authentic, and vigorous, Christian bioethics will become an intellectually sound partner in our pluralistic society representing aspects of human good, unrepresented or depreciated in secular bioethics. In this way Christian humanism and the system of bioethics it generates will not be disenfranchised in the public debate.
I. What is Humanism and What Specifically is Christian Humanism?
“Humanism” is an old, much abused, pleomorphic, and philologically battered term. It is nonetheless the integrating force underling any orderly system of bioethics. It is incumbent therefore for anyone who uses the term to define its boundaries.
In general the term “humanism” is applied to any study, activity, organization, or movement which focuses on humanity, the human condition, what it means to be human. At the core of any humanism is an idea or image of man which defines what makes him the kind of being he is, and sets him off from other living beings in the biosphere. Inevitably any humanism will give some account of morality, of what it considers to be right or wrong human conduct. Ultimately, behind every civilization and culture there lies an idea of man which gives it its identity.
Many things differentiate humanisms. The most important differentiation for bioethics today is the way a particular humanism defines its relationship to moral authority. Those who acknowledge God as man’s creator and the source of moral norms that should guide the good life are theologically oriented and theocentric. Those who deny the existence of, or need for God or moral authority beyond man himself, are secular and anthropocentric. Each of these two broad categories contains a variety of humanisms, sometimes overlapping. Contemporary bioethics is decidedly secular in its origins and teachings. It has its origins in the philosophy and ethics of Plato and Aristotle who concentrated on man the rational animal rather than on the cosmos which had preoccupied the earlier philosophers in the Greek tradition. The emphasis of classical humanism was on man’s rationality as the essential feature in his nature that made him distinctive among all the other beings in the world. Using unaided human reason the Greek philosophers, and later the Roman Stoics, developed systems of morals that came to be labeled in the Renaissance as “humanism.”
In the Middle Ages, Christian philosophers supplemented and enriched the classical idea of man with the teachings of the Jewish Bible and the Christian Gospels to lay the foundations for a Christianized idea of man whose flourishing was not simply his well being in this world but included a spiritual destiny in the next world. This classical medieval synthesis has continued as the basis of Christian humanism. However it began to be altered in the Renaissance. Both elements of human existence, the sacred and the secular, were retained although the pendulum swung more decisively to the secular.
It was in the Renaissance that the term “humanism” was first used. Its first use was to separate the professors of the medieval university who taught the “humanities,” e.g., grammar, rhetoric and logic, philosophy and theology from those who taught medicine and law. Humanism was also associated with an educational idea based in the subjects the humanistic faculties taught—those based in the literature and languages of the classical world. The Renaissance thinker retained the classical medieval synthesis but for some the emphasis on the human condition overshadowed the sacred.
This is not the place to spell out the subsequent history of humanism except sketchily. In the Enlightenment, humanism became distinctly secular. It was shaped by the desire of the philosophers to rid philosophy of God, to see man as an autonomous moral being, unfettered by dogma and the creator of his own moral laws. This Enlightenment spirit was re-enforced by the later secular trends of Darwinian biology, Comptean sociology, and then Marxian communism. More recently existentialism and post modernism have forcefully moved humanism to the secular pole. Many forces in modern life have produced what is today an idea of man free and liberated from religion and God, having no need of either and capable with his new scientific knowledge of redeeming himself. On this view religion became an encumbrance stifling progress.
II. Why is Humanism and the Idea of Man It Favors so Crucial for Bioethics?
Modern medicine has become for many the locus for debates about the meaning of human life, and what man may ethically pursue in his quest for the “good” life. This is the result largely of the enormous expansion of our powers of biotechnology which make it possible to control human life in all its stages from its beginnings to its endings. With mechanical respirators, artificial food and hydration, cardiac resuscitation, and antibiotics, the movement of death and its manner can now be controlled.
Concomitantly, expansion of man’s knowledge of reproduction has put humans in control of the beginnings of life. Identification of the human genome has added the power to alter and control inherited characteristics adding the power also to control and shape the life and nature of future generations. Molecular and cell biology has opened possibilities of using embryonic and adult stem cells to cure illness, grow new organs, and enhance the duration of human life and man’s intellectual, physical, and emotional satisfactions.
Let us turn to the sharp dichotomy between the ways secular humanism and Christian humanism determine the content of bioethics in theory and practice.
Secular Humanism
Secular humanism as indicated earlier puts man at the center of the universe morally. It expresses itself in a variety of forms. I will choose only three of the most influential today. All are characterized by rejection of any authority for morality beyond man himself.
Scientific Humanism—Man as a Material Being
This is the form of secular humanism most prevalent among academic bioethicists, the press, and the scientific community. This is the materialist view of man as highly organized matter totally understandable in terms of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. He is the product of chance, natural selection, and the genome. There is no “intelligent designer” to account for his existence, or the intricacies of his body and mind.
This view holds that man is morally alone in the universe. There are no moral norms except those he devises. He may change the moral order as he sees fit to meet the needs he determines to be essential for his own version of happiness. Human life is not special in any way. Man is simply not more worthy of respect that any other species.
This is not the view of all scientists. Indeed it is not scientific at all. This is why it is “scientific;” it makes science an ideology, a substitute for religious belief and the only source of both truth and morality. Variations on these themes can be found in the well meaning but distorted “humanism” of educated and sophisticated non-scientists. It is the credo of many television commentators, academic bioethicists, and celebrities.
Psychologized Humanism
This humanism is based in an image of man which emphasizes his feelings, consciousness, emotions, and social relationships. This too is “scientistic” using the science of psychology to fashion a set of morals. Man’s feelings about himself and his world are paramount. The good for man is not related to his nature as a rational, social, and spiritual being but to his feelings and desires. What satisfies man’s inner personal and communal needs becomes the measure of what is morally valid.
There is no need for God or religion except as a psychological myth to aid man’s inner security and satisfaction. Ethics centers on subjective “values” not on reasoned norms, principles, or obligations. The result is a sea of conflicting personal values which are asserted as justifications for moral choices. They are difficult to debate because they are personal commitments to things humans value as persons. They are self-justifying.
Again, as with scientistic humanism, psychologistic humanism is not the credo of truly scientific psychologists or psychotherapists. This form of humanism is a distortion of psychology taken beyond its capacities to become an ideology.
Man as a Political Animal
This form of humanism ideologizes political liberalism. Its emphasis on human freedom as an absolute norm limited only if it directly or seriously harms another. Here what is morally acceptable is a matter of democratically agreed upon norms, arrived at by free public debate and common consent. Conflict is settled by the democratic processes of dialogue, debate, consensus, negotiation, or vote. What is legal is what is ethical. Morality is linked by public opinion to law and regulation. These can be changed any time they do not serve prevailing political opinion.
Again, like scientistic and psychologized, this is a distortion—this time of politics and political theory. It puts the practices of politics ahead of the ethics of politics.
Theocentric Humanism—the Christian Idea of Man
Many Catholics, Christians, and religious people of other persuasions find “humanism” a troubling idea. They assume that “humanism” is automatically atheistic or nihilistic. They have in mind the realities of distorted Darwinism, Communism, the writings of some major existentialists and post-modernists. They rightly fear the secularism of the schools, the press, and the political order. They are right to be cautious.
But these contorted visions of man and human life must not be allowed to discredit the theocentric Christian and Catholic humanism which has so much to contribute. It is a corrective to the moral ills of our time and crucial to the moral resolution of some of the major questions raised in bioethics.
In this respect, we might begin with the Christian personalism and humanism of His Holiness John Paul II. George Weigel in his superb biography of John Paul called him the “Pope of the New Humanism.”2 By this he meant that Pope John Paul II saw Christian humanism as the antidote to the crisis of modern civilization. What the Pope meant is spelled out in his many writings and addresses and, in detail, in his seminal encyclicals and literary writings.
Beginning with Redemptor Hominis he calls for an active engagement of Christianity with the problems of modern culture. He gives fuller philosophical foundations for Christian humanism in his great Encyclicals Evangelium Vitae, Veritatis Splendor, and Fides et Ratio, as well as in his book The Acting Person. It is not possible to summarize John Paul’s Christian humanism here. He epitomizes the church’s rich tradition of concern for man as a rational, social, and spiritual being each dimension infused by the revelations of Sacred Scripture and the Gospels.
John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, in his Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff, made the same call for a return to Christian witness. He pointed specially to the “dictatorship of relativism” which is the central moral flaw of secular humanism. In these words the new Pope joined his concerns with those of John Paul for the destructive morality of directions modern culture is taking.
Christian humanism is centered in the dignity of man as created in the image of God and in the incarnation in which God became man and gave human nature its meaning and hope. Man’s moral guidance comes from his creator and is embodied in the life, suffering, and teachings of Jesus Christ. These teachings are represented authoritatively in the official traditions and teaching of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
Catholic humanism has roots in the Greek classical notion of man as a rational being. It has enlarged and enriched that notion to embrace man’s spiritual nature. Christian humanism is a true and an integral humanism one suited not just to our times but to all.3 It recognizes that man is endowed with freedom but not with license. The destiny of humans is not entirely of this world but lies in union with a loving God.
Secular and Christian humanism are worlds apart although both start with a concern for man. The answers each gives us now and in the future to the challenges of bioethics are radically different. It is important for all Catholics to recognize these differences to guide their own lives and to make clear their relevance for contemporary culture.
III. What is the Mission of Catholic Universities?
Education in Christian humanism, its content and relevance must therefore be, as Fr. Wildes has stressed, an essential element of a Catholic university education. This is a responsibility they have not met as vigorously as they might. Yet, Catholic universities are the last strongholds of the classical-medieval traditions of humanism. They combine that tradition with a firm commitment to Christian and Catholic theology and the best in modern scholarship. They can, if they wish, provide an education in that “true humanism” with Maritain, John Paul II, and other Catholic scholars believe to be the humanism needed to evangelize modern culture. Indeed, Catholic universities have a duty to evangelize the world of intellect.
This is not the place to detail the curricular and programmatic changes such teaching will require. For many observers of Catholic higher education, especially in Jesuit universities, a sounder basis in philosophy and theology seems required than is now common. This may reflect changes in the formation of Jesuits themselves.4 What is clear is that engagement in dialogue and dialectic with secular humanism and the bioethics it engenders requires academic credibility and genuine learning.
This credibility requires in its turn a knowledge of the history content and methodology of Christian culture. Fr. Wildes has pointed out the need for an engagement with issues of social justice. This will need to be joined with a critique of the erosion of the classical-medieval and modern synthesis of man’s physical, rational, spiritual, and social natures. The fragmented philosophies of the last several centuries need re-synthesis.
It would be presumptuous in a brief address like this to suggest specific changes in the curricula of Catholic universities to equip them better to prepare future Catholics for their roles in the revitalization of Christian humanism. One beginning suggestion might not be amiss.
Catholic universities could start with a course on the most relevant writings on the new humanism of John Paul II. His is the most sustained, orderly, and authentic presentation of Christian humanism. He has encapsulated the dimensions of the problem and the substance of the response educated Catholics must master as a minimum.
First would be Redemptor Hominis his first Encyclical which acutely diagnoses the crisis of modern civilization and calls for dialogue with modern culture. Then, Evangelium Vitae which engages most of the serious human life questions raised by medical and biotechnological progress. This should be followed by a careful reading of Veritatus Splendor which confronts the cultural notion that freedom can survive without moral norms without degeneration in license. John Paul insists against the post-modernist deconstruction of moral norms that there is a universal moral life rooted in human nature and it binds us all.
Finally, there is Fides et Ratio which reconstructs the heart of Catholic humanism which lies in the human capacity to know the full truth only by combining faith and reason. That full truth is available to human reason through the synthesis of Greek philosophy with Christian theology, of reason with faith and of religion with science.5
However, the task is addressed, there can be no doubt about its importance for the future of Christian humanism and the Christian image of society it nurtures. Bioethics has become everybody’s business. It is not, and must not be, the province of a small group of specialists. It is now entering the realm of public policy. Secular bioethicists are opinion-makers and advisers to legislators. Biotechnology is big business. It is not an exaggeration to say that bioethics may be the most divisive force in man’s immediate future.6
If this is so, as I strongly believe it is, then John Paul’s words delivered in 1980 before teachers and students in Cologne Cathedral are prophetic: “The pursuit of a new humanism, on which the future of the new millennium will be successful only on condition that scientific knowledge again enters upon a living relationship with the truth revealed to man as God’s gift. Man’s reason is a grant instrument for knowledge and structuring the world. It needs, however, in order to realize the whole wealth of human possibilities, to open to the word of eternal truth which became man in Christ.”7
There can be no better, no more specific guide to Catholic universities in their mission of revitalizing Christian humanism. It is the guide which must enable Catholic university graduates to engage in the debates in whatever station of life they choose. It is the obligation of Catholic universities to equip them to perform this act of Christian witness convincingly and authentically.
________
Notes
- The Whole Truth About Man, John Paul II to University Faculties and Students, edited and with introduction by James V. Scholl, 1961, St. Paul Editions, Boston, MA, p. 140
- Weigel, p. 842
- Maritain, 27-88
- Becker, 261ff
- Weigel, p. 842.
- Jeffrey Rosen, p. 24 ff.
- The Whole Truth About Man, John Paul II to University Faculties and Students, edited and with introduction by James V. Scholl, 1961, St. Paul Editions, Boston, p. 195.
References
Benedict XVI. Homily at the Mass for Selection of the Roman Pontiff/ Joseph Ratzinger. April 18, 2005.
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man; An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture, by Ernst Cassier. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1944.
D’Arcy, Martin C. Humanism and Christianity. New York, World Pub. Co. 1969.
Fichtner, Joseph. Theological Anthropology. South Bend, University of Notre Dame Press, 1963.
Guardini, Romano. Pascal for Our Time. Translated by Brian Thompson. New York Herder and Herder 1966.
John Paul II. The Acting Person/Karol Wojtyla; translated from the Polish by Andrzej Potocki. Holland, Dordrecht ,1969.
Maritain, Jacques. True Humanism. Translated by M. R. Adamson. London, The Centenary Press 1946.
Rosen, Jeffrey. “Supreme Futurology,” NY Times Magazine, Aug. 28, 2005, Section 6, p. 29ff.
Scheler, Max. Man’s place in nature. Translated, and with an introduction. by Hans Meyerhoff. Boston : Beacon Press, 1961.
Teilhard de Chardin, Teilhard. The Phenomenon of Man.; with an introduction by Julian Huxley; translation by Bernard Wall. New York : Harper & Row, 1961, c1959
Weigel, George. Witness to Hope. The Biography of Pope John Paul II. New York, Harper Collins, 1999, pp. 159-60.
