The Emergence of Philosophic Reason

Ionian and Eleatic Philosophy: 6^th – 5^th Century B.C.

“The Axial Age”[1]

Ratzinger: “It must be noted that the ancient world itself knew the dilemma between the God of faith and the God of the philosophers in a very pronounced form. Between the mythical gods of the religions and the philosophical knowledge of God there had developed in the course of history a stronger and stronger tension, which is apparent in the criticism of the myths by the philosophers from Xenophanes to Plato, who even thought of trying to replace the classical Homeric mythology by a new mythology appropriate to the logos. Contemporary scholarship is coming to see more and more clearly that there are quite amazing parallels in chronology and content between the philosophers’ criticism of the myths in Greece and the prophets’ criticism of the gods in Israel. It is true that the two movements start from completely different assumptions and have completely different aims; but the movement of the logos against the myth, as it evolved in the Greek mind in the philosophical enlightenment, so that in the end it was bound to involve the fall of the gods, has an inner parallelism with the enlightenment which the prophetic and Wisdom literature cultivated in its demythologization of the divine powers in favour of the one and only God. For all the differences between them, both movements coincide in their striving towards the logos. The philosophical enlightenment and it ‘physical’ view of Being pressed the mythological semblance further and further back, though certainly without doing away with the religious form of the worship of the gods.  The ancient religion did eventually break up because of the gulf between the God of faith and the God of the philosophers, because of the total dichotomy between reason and piety. That no success was achieved in uniting the two, that reason and piety moved further and further apart, and the God of faith and the God the philosophers were separated from each other, meant the inner collapse of the ancient religion. The Christian religion would have to expect just the same fate if it were to accept a similar amputation of reason and were to embark on a corresponding withdrawal into the purely religious, as advocated by Schleiermacher great critic and opponent, Karl Barth.

            “The opposing fates of myth and Gospel in the ancient world, the end of myth and the victory of the Gospel, are fundamentally to be explained, from the point of view of cultural history, by the opposing relationship established on both occasions between religion and philosophy, between faith and reason….

            “Religion did not go the way of the logos but lingered in myths already seen toa be devoid of reality. Consequently its decline was inevitable; this followed from its divorce from the truth, a state of affairs which led to its being regarded as a mere institutio vitae, =that is, as mere furniture and outward form of life. The Christian position, as opposed to this situation, is pout emphatically by Tertullian when he says with splendid boldness: ‘Christ called himself truth, not custom.’ In my view this is one of the really great assertions of patristic theology. In it the struggle of the early Church, and the abiding task with which the Christian faith is confronted if it is to remain itself, is summed up with unique conciseness…. Christianity thus pout itself resolutely on the side of truth and turned its back on a conception of religion satisfied to be mere outward ceremonial which in the end can be interpreted to mean anything one fancies.”[2]

Ionians

Wikipedia

According to semi-historical Greek legend, Ionia was colonised by refugees from mainland Greece expelled by the invading Dorians in the Heroic Age, leaving Attica as the only European outpost of the Ionian race. According to myth, the Ionians were descended from the hero Ion, son of Xuthus, son of Hellen (the mythical progenitor of all the Hellenes, whose other two sons were Aeolus and Dorus).

During the sixth century BC Ionian coastal towns such as Miletus and Ephesus became the focus of a revolution in approaches to traditional thinking about Nature. Instead of explaining natural phenomena by recourse to traditional myth, the cultural climate was such that men began to form hypotheses about the natural world based on ideas gained from both personal experience and deep reflection. These men - Thales and his successors - were called physiologoi, those who discoursed on Nature. They were sceptical of religious explanations for natural phenomena and instead sought purely mechanical and physical explanations. They are credited as being of critical importance to the development of the 'scientific attitude' towards the study of Nature. (see Ionian school)

The Catholic Encyclopedia:
The Ionian School includes the earliest Greek philosophers, who lived at Miletus, an Ionian colony in Asia Minor, during the sixth century B.C., and a group of philosophers who lived about one hundred years later and modified the doctrines of their predecessors in several respects. It is usual to distinguish, therefore, the Earlier Ionians and the Later Ionians.

Earlier Ionians: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes

This group includes Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, with whom the history of philosophy in Greece begins. They are called by Aristotle the first "physiologists", that is "students of nature". So far as we know they confined their philosophical enquiry to the problem of the origin and laws of the physical universe. They taught that the world originated from a primitive substance, which was at once the matter out of which the world was made and the force by which the world was formed. Thales said that this primitive substance was water; Anaximander said that it was "the boundless" (to apeiron); Anaximenes said that it was air, or atmospheric vapour (aer). They agreed in teaching that in this primitive substance there is an inherent force, or vital power. Hence they are said to be Hylozoists and Dynamists. Hylozoism is the doctrine of animated matter, and Dynamism the doctrine that the original cosmothetic force was not distinct from, but identical with, the matter out of which the universe was made. From the scanty materials that have come down to us -- a few fragments of the writings of the early Ionians, and allusions in Aristotle's writings -- it is impossible to determine whether these first philosophers were Theists or Pantheists, although one may perhaps infer from their hylozoistic cosmology that they believed God to be at once the substance and the formative force in the universe.

Later Ionians: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras

This group includes Heraclitus Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, who lived in the fifth century B.C. These philosophers, like the early Ionians, were deeply interested in the problem of the origin and nature of the universe. But, unlike their predecessors, they distinguished the primitive world forming force from the primitive matter of which the world was made. In Heraclitus, however, and, to a certain degree, in Empedocles, this mechanism -- the doctrine that force is distinct from matter -- is expressed hesitatingly and in figurative language. Anaxagoras is the first Greek philosopher to assert definitely and unhesitatingly that the world was formed from a primitive substance by the operation of a force called Intellect. For this reason he is said by Aristotle to be "distinguished from the crowd of random talkers who preceded him" as the "first sober man" among the Greeks. Heraclitus was so impressed with the prevalence of change among physical things that he laid down the principle of panmetabolism: panta rei, "all things are in a constant flux". Empedocles has the distinction of having introduced into philosophy the doctrine of four elements, or four "roots", as he calls them, namely, fire, air, earth, and water, out of which the centripetal force of love and the centrifugal force of hatred made all things, and are even now making and unmaking all things. Anaxagoras, as has been said, introduced the doctrine of nous, or Intellect. He is blamed however, by Socrates and Plato for having neglected to make the most obvious application of that doctrine to the interpretation of nature as it now is. Having postulated a world-forming Mind, he should they pointed out, have proceeded to the principle of teleology, that the Mind presiding over natural processes does all things for the best. None of these early philosophers devoted attention to the problems of epistemology and ethics. Socrates was the first to conduct a systematic inquiry into the conditions of human knowledge and the principles of human conduct.

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Eleatics

History

The school took its name from Elea, a Greek city of lower Italy, the home of its chief exponents, Parmenides and Zeno. Its foundation is often attributed to Xenophanes of Colophon, but, although there is much in his speculations which formed part of the later Eleatic doctrine, it is probably more correct to regard Parmenides as the founder of the school.

Xenophanes had made the first attack on the mythology of early Greece in the middle of the 6th century, including an attack against the whole anthropomorphic system enshrined in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. In the hands of Parmenides this spirit of free thought developed on metaphysical lines. Subsequently, either because its speculations were offensive to the contemporary thought of Elea, or because of lapses in leadership, the school degenerated into verbal disputes as to the possibility of motion and other such academic matters. The best work of the school was absorbed into Platonic metaphysics.

Philosophy

The Eleatics rejected the epistemological validity of sense experience, and instead took mathematical standards of clarity and necessity to be the criteria of truth. Of the members, Parmenides and Melissus built arguments starting from indubitably sound premises. Zeno, on the other hand, primarily employed the reductio ad absurdum, attempting to destroy the arguments of others by showing their premises led to contradictions (Zeno's paradoxes).

The main doctrines of the Eleatics were evolved in opposition to the theories of the early physicalist philosophers, who explained all existence in terms of primary matter, and to the theory of Heraclitus, which declared that all existence may be summed up as perpetual change. The Eleatics maintained that the true explanation of things lies in the conception of a universal unity of being. According to their doctrine, the senses cannot cognize this unity, because their reports are inconsistent; it is by thought alone that we can pass beyond the false appearances of sense and arrive at the knowledge of being, at the fundamental truth that the All is One. Furthermore, there can be no creation, for being cannot come from non-being, because a thing cannot arise from that which is different from it. They argued that errors on this point commonly arise from the ambiguous use of the verb to be, which may imply existence or be merely the copula which connects subject and predicate.

Though the conclusions of the Eleatics were rejected by the later Presocratics and Aristotle, their arguments were taken seriously, and they are generally credited with improving the standards of discourse and argument in their time. Their influence was likewise longlasting -- Gorgias, a Sophist, argued in the style of the Eleatics in his work "On Nature or What Is Not," and Plato acknowledged them in the Parmenides, the Sophist and the Politicus. Furthermore, much of the later philosophy of the ancient period borrowed from the methods and principles of the Eleatics.

Reason Exposed to the Absoluteness of the Believing Subject is Broadened and Recovers

“Israel always believed in the Creator God (but) (t)he moment when creation became a dominant theme occurred during the Babylonian Exile. It was then that the account… based, to be sure, on very ancient traditions- assumed its present form. Israel had lost its land and its temple. According to the mentality of the time this was something incomprehensible, for it meant that the God of Israel was vanquished – a God whose people, whose land, and whose worshipers could be snatched away from him. A God who could not defend his worshipers and his worship was seen to be, at the time, a weak God. Indeed, he was not God at all; he had abandoned his divinity. And so, being driven out of their own land and being erased from the map was for Israel a terrible trial: Has our God been vanquished, and is our faith void?

            “At this moment the prophets opened a new page and taught Israel that it was only then that the true face of God appeared and that he was not restricted to that particular piece of land. He had never been: He had promised this piece of land to Abraham before he settled there, and he had been able to bring his people out of Egypt. He could do both things because he was not the God of one place but had power over heaven and earth. Therefore he could drive his faithless people into another land in order to make himself known there. And so it came to be understood that this God of Israel was not a God like the other gods, but that he was the God who held sway over every land and people. He could do this, however, because he himself had created everything in heaven and earth. It was in exile and in seeming defeat of Israel that there occurred an opening to the awareness of God who holds every people and all of history in his hands, who holds everything because he is the creator of everything and the source of all power.”[3]

There is a great intellectual step here, a switch of mental horizons: The pagan gods ere always contained within the world of sensation because they were the explanation and causes of the events in the world. And this even if they could not be sensed such as Plato’s One and Aristotle’s First Unmoved Mover.

The non-Christian thought of the pagans consisted in a one to one correspondence of sensible perception and deity. The pagan deities were “the most powerful, most independent and self-sufficient, most unchanging beings in the world.”[4] And that is the point. They are within the context of the world of sensible being. “They are the expression of necessities that men encounter in the world, necessities that men must respect. Zeus, Poseidon, Ares and Aphrodite, the Muses, and Apollo are agents that rule over their particular domains, and they are the causes, the ones responsible, of what happens.”[5] The first Unmoved Mover of Aristotle and the One of Plato are the most supreme realities, but they are supremely in the world and belong to it. Their meaning is within the context of the sensible world even though they are not visible.

But there is dramatic epistemological shift with the introduction of the revelation of the Judeo-Christian God as Creator of the world. The upshot of such information is that God would be Who He is even if the world did not exist. The Being of God is so different from the being of the world that if the world were not, God would still be God. To access such a God, one must become self-transcendent (going out of self), which is a change in anthropology and ontology. Judeo-Christian revelation goes on to state that the human person, although creature of the sensible world, has been made in the image and likeness of the Creator. Therefore, there is something in the being of the creature that is “like” the Being of the Creator. The burden, then, of such information as creation weighs on how we construe a creature to have the ontological constitution of relationality as image of the divine relations of Father, Son and Spirit.  Notice that so different are these two noetic orders that if the created order were removed, the Creator would still be. The burden, then, of such information as creation, is how to know the human person as part of the created order, yet image and likeness of the Creator.

This shocked Greek reason into the development from mythical deities into cosmologies of the absolute and metaphysics of being. The cause of this intersplicing is certainly the understanding of the daily intercourse of Greek and Jewish culture during the captivity in Babylon, but also the extraordinary particularity that the Greek philosopher Pythagoras is reported to have received classes from the Jewish prophet Ezekiel.[6]

As we saw above, Ratzinger notes that there was an amazing parallel between what happened to reason for the Greeks, and reason for the Jews. As the Greeks were introduced to the Absolute God-Creator of the Jews, the Jews were introduced to the enlightenment of reason whereby reason was jogged from a forgetfulness of creation to “anamnesis” or “not forgetting.” Hence, they are confronted their God or revelation Who is the Creator of all things, even Babylon. Jeremiah and Ezekiel are hard at preaching the Word of God before and during the Exile (and suffering mightily for it). Karl Jaspers called this moment of the great religious and intellectual revival “the axial age.”[7]

And so, it was here and now in the 6^th century B.C. in the slavery of Babylon after their fall from a living faith, that the Abrahamic faith as living experience was recalled and written in a vital confrontation with the conquering religion of Babylon that explained the “the world assumed its form when Marduk, the god of light, appeared and split in two the body of the primordial dragon. From this sundered body heaven and earth came to be. Thus the firmament and the earth were produced from the sundered body of the dead dragon, but from its blood Marduk fashioned human beings… The world is a dragon’s body, and human beings have dragon’s blood in them. At the very origin of the world lurks something sinister, and in the deepest part of humankind there lies something rebellious demonic, and evil… (O)nly a dictator, the king of Babylon, who is the representative of Marduk, can repress the demonic and restore the world to order.”[8]

What is conveyed to the Greeks because of this emerging of Judaic faith and scripture, is God, the Creator of all things, the source of the reasonableness of Being, Who is the Absolute Reality. This revelation is precisely what the Greek mind is searching for: the Absolute. And so philosophy begins with the encounter with the Transcendent God Who is Creator, and Who is in such a different way that even if the world were to cease to be, God would continue to be in this different way. And that “way” has been revealed to be personal as relation. The huge point is that it begins only within the experience and enlightenment of faith experience. And with regard to reason Benedict remarks that reason without faith cannot reason, nor reasonable: “Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason”.[9]

Experience is the key criterion to understand the relation of faith and reason as “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”(Fides et ratio: The Dedication p. 7). Evidence is something objective to us. Experience is subjective (but not subjectivist). Tounderstand this, consider John Pau II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope.”[10] There he speaks of empirical knowledge of reality by sensation and coments: “The fact that human knowledge is primarily a sensory knowledge surprises no one.Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor any of the classical pohilosopohers questioned this. Cognitive realism, both so-called naïve realism (things are what they seem to be) and critical realism (we critique that the way we know through the senses and concepts are mediate ways of inowing and therefore distortive and distorted), agrees that ‘nihil es tin tinetllectu, quod prius non fuerit in sensu’ (‘nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses’). Nevertheless, the limits of these ‘senses’ are not exclusively sensory. We know, in fact, that man not only knows colors, tones, and forms; he also knows objects globally – for example, not only all the parts that comprise the object ‘man’ but also man in himself (Yes, man as a person). He knows, therefore, extrasensory truths, or, in other words, the transempirical,. In addition, it is not possible to affirm that when something is transempirical it ceases to be empirical.

“It is therefore possible to speak from a solid foundation about human experience, moral experience, or religious experience. And if it is possible to speak of such experiences, it is difficult to deny that , in the realm of human experience, one also finds good and evil, truth and beautry, and God. God Himself certainly is not an object of human sensible) empiricism; (but He is certainly an object of human experience); the Sacred Scripture, inits own way, emphasizes this: ‘No one has ever seen god” (cf. Jn. 1, 18). If God is a knowable object – as both the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Romans teach – He is such on the basis of man’s experience both of the visible world and of his interior world. This is the point of departure for Immanuel Kant’s study of ethical experience in which he abandons the old approach found in the writings of the Bible and ofSaint Thomas Aquinas. Man recognizes himself as an ethical being, capable of acting according to criteria of good and evil, and not only those of profit and pleasure. He also recognizes himself as a religious being, capable of poutting himself in contact with God. Prayer – of which we talked earlier – isin a certain sense the first verification of sch a reality...(underline mine). “And we find ourelves by now every close to Saint Thomas, but the path passenot so much through being and existence as through people and their meeting each other, through the ‘I’ and the “Thou and their meeting each other, through the ‘I’ and the “Thou.”This is a fundamental dimension of man’s existence, which is always a co-existence…Such co-existence is essential to our Judeo-Christian tradition and comes from God’s initiative. This initiative is connected with and leads to creation, and is at the same time – Saint Pal teaches – ‘the eternal election man in the Word who is the Son(cf. Eph. 1, 4)”[11]

Philosophically, Karol Wojtyla uses “experience” (not evidence) as criterion of access to reality. That reality is is mediately grasped through the external senses and rendered abstact as conceptual thought, propositional knowing, syllogistic reasoning and return to the sensible reality to make a judgement as to truth. But this is an objectified way of knowing. It renders reality as object.

There is also a realistic knowledge of the self that is not only mediated by sensible perception and concepts of reason, but which is immediately experienced in the act of going out of self in faith as prayer (its first act). That experience gives us a consciousness of self as image of God. Hence it is a realistic experience of God, and it begs for philosophy to give an account of it.

John Paul II makes such an account in Fides et Ratio #83:

“I want only to state that reality and truth do transcend the factual and the empirical, and to vindicate the human being's capacity to know this transcendent and metaphysical dimension in a way that is true and certain, albeit imperfect and analogical. In this sense, metaphysics should not be seen as an alternative to anthropology, since it is metaphysics which makes it possible to ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of their spiritual nature. In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.

“Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being's interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation.”

            To make this clear, Wojtyla assimilates the metaphysics of being of St. Thomas. He never wants to leave it. But he adds to it the experience of the “acting person,’ or “lived experience.” It simply was not Thomas’s time to see this for the completion of his metaphysics of esse. That is, there is an experience that the self has of itself in the act of moral freedom. The experience of responsibility, the experience of joy, the experience of love, the experience of anxiety – are all experiences of the exercise of freedom either to stay within selfe or to migrate out of self. Wojtyla doesn’t deny the notion of being in Aristotle and St. Thomas that is “substance,” but he adds the dimension of “lived experience” which is the dimension of the “.” “Substance” is a metaphysic of everyman. Subject is the metaphysic of the unique and irrepeatable “I.” “In my lived experience of self-possession and self-governance, I experience that I am a person and that I am a subject.”[12] This “I” is snot consciousness but being. Consciousness is the result of the experience of the self lived in the free moral act. The “living “I” is always relational as imaging the relations that are the Father, Son and Spirit mediated to us by the humanity of Jesus Christ. Christ is the “I” of the Son Who has assumed a full humanity that He exercises His divinity through. When Christ wills humanly, it is not His human will that wills. It is His divine “I” that wills humanly. Christ is not a zero sum of humanity and divinity, but totally God and totally man. This is so because He is not a Substance but pure Relation to the Father and “for” us. He is Relation to the Father and “for” us as Relation.

            Thus, the great adventure today is to see how this incorporation of the subject as relation translates as anthropology: work, politics, economics and sexuality. To be clear, the “laws” of being are different if you consider being as object or subject, substance or relation.

The philosophy of man (anthropology) is spelled out in Gaudium et Spes #24:

“The Lord Jesus, when praying to the Father ‘that they may all be one… even as we are one’ (Jn. 17, 21-22), has opened up new horizons closed to human reason by implying the union of the sons of God in  truth and love. It follows, then, that if ma is the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake,[13] man can fully find discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself.”

            And now the faith of Abraham begins to take on its global outreach. The new “axial age” is upon us. The Person of Christ as “the working person” is on the threshold of becoming the defining center of a new global civilization and the new evangelization.

Consider Benedict’s thought concerning the Europe of now:

Faith Needs Reason To Offer the Human Person (GS #24) as the Defining Center of the Global Economy and Politics of Nations

On the feast of the Epiphany on January 6, 2007, Benedict said:

“The whole of the Second Vatican Council was truly stirred by the longing to proclaim Christ, the Light of the world, to contemporary humanity. In the heart of the Church, from the summit of her hierarchy, emerged the impelling desire, awakened by the Spirit, for a new epiphany of Christ in the world, a world that the modern epoch had profoundly transformed and that, for the first time in history, found itself facing the challenge of a global civilization in which the centre could no longer be Europe or even what we call the West and the North of the world. The need to work out a new world political and economic order was emerging but, at the same time and above all, one that would be both spiritual and cultural, that is, a renewed humanism. This observation became more and more obvious: a new world economic and political order cannot work unless there is a spiritual renewal, unless we can once again draw close to God and find God in our midst. Before the Second Vatican Council, the enlightened minds of Christian thinkers had already intuited and faced this epochal challenge. Well, at the beginning of the third millennium, we find ourselves in the midst of this phase of human history that now focuses on the word "globalization."

What is the Meaning Today of European-American Culture?

Then-Cardinal Ratzinger asked: “Above all, what is European culture, and what has remained of it? Is European culture perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization that has marched triumphantly across the planet? Or is it instead a post-European culture born on the ruins of the ancient European cultures?... The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression – especially in the non-European countries of Asia and Africa – that Europe’s value system, culture, and faith – in other words, the very foundations of its identity – have reached the end of the road, and have indeed already departed from the scene. From this perspective, the time has apparently arrived to affirm the value systems of other worlds, such as pre-Colombian America, Islam, or Asian mysticism.

“At the hour of its greatest success, Europe [America] seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.”[16]

Further: Ratzinger ends his talk announcing this insightful yet chilling fact:

“The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized – so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals – the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger –above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler.”[17]

Notice: “The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today.”

            Me: We have not solved Marxism by Capitalism. There is ultimately no difference. We have not moved one iota from the consciousness of man as an economic automaton. We have no consciousness of God, the meaning of the human person as mere individual to be manipulated, nor the universe as a meaningless object to which we impose meaning.

            The ideologies of Marxism and Capitalism can only be resolved by the person as image of the Trinitarian God in the exercise of work. Instead of the Socialism and Capitalism: the working person. In work, the human person finds himself by the sincere gift of himself. Thus, what is true in both ideologies is released in the solidarity and subsidiarity of the person that is derived from the revealed notion of person in Christ that is ultimate derived from the Trinity.

            Notice that we are now on the brink of the achievement of the promise made to Abraham that he would be the father in faith of the global population. As the ideologies collapse, the shoot of the working person – finding self as Christ by sincere gift of self -  begins to emerge. The one world to which we are destined (“Going, teach all nations…”) will have one defining truth: the dignity of the human person revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ: true God and true Man, who is the Word of the engendering Father of the Trinity.

            Secularity: The truth of Christ as the defining center of the global population is not “religious” but secular. Secular is defined by the humanity and freedom of Jesus Christ to master and subdue His human will to live out the obedience to the Father that He is in His Person. Secularity is never a given out there now. It is an achievement of becoming Christ, exercising his freedom of self-mastery and therefore “autonomy.” Our goal for each to be another Christ in work in the world is not a theocracy, but secularity as true freedom and true autonomy (theonomy).

Repeating Sts. Cyril and Methodius:

[16] J. Ratzinger, “The Spiritual Roots of Europe” in Without Roots Basic Books (2006) 65-66.
[17] Ibid 74.

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[1] “In 1949, Karl Jaspers introduced the notion of an ‘axial age’ to describe a few centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C. when great spiritual masters planted the seeds of the great world faiths. To a world of tribal deities, primitive myths, and nature rituals, Confucius, Lao-tse, Siddhartha Gautama, the Hebrew prophets and Greek thinkers from the pre-Socratics to the Greek thinkers from the pre-Socratics to Plato brought new visions of universal ethics, individual salvation, and personal quest for higher meaning. Since then, religion has never been the same.

                “Our ‘secular age,’ in Charles Taylor’s view, is no less pivotal. Between 1500 and today, something ‘titanic’ and irreversible has happened. Religion will not disappear but, again, it will never be the same…” Peter Steinfels, Commonweal, May 9, 2008, 14-21.

[2] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 95-97.

[3] J. Ratzinger, “In the Beginning…” Eerdmans (1995) 10-12.

[4] R. Sokolowski, “The God of Faith and Reason,” UNDP (1982) 12.

[5] Ibid.

[6] According to Matthew Henry, Ezekiel is also believed to have been known as Nazaratus Assyrius, a teacher to Pythagoras…. Sir William Smith, in his "Bible Dictionary," points out that John Selden, among others, consider it a possibility. In the book "Pythagoras: Greek philosopher" it states; "Nazaratus, the Assyrian, one of Pythagoras' masters, was supposed to be the prophet Ezekiel, and Thomas Stanley's Life of Pythagoras says that Ezekiel and Pythagoras flourished together.

[7]

[8] J. Ratzinger, “‘In the Beginning…’” Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1995) 11-12.

[9] J. Ratzinger, “Church, Ecumenism and Politics,” Crossroad (1988) 218.

[10] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Knopf (1994) 33-34.

[11] Ibid. 34, 36.

[12] K. Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Communit, Lang (1993) 214.

[13] This means that not even God can use man for a purpose other than himself, and this because He has made man free to determine himself and decide for himself, about himself. And this is the reason why God has revealed the supernatural destiny of man. Cf. Wojtyla’s “Love  and Responsibility,” Ignatius (1990) 27.

Matthew and Work

St. Matthew, September 21, 2011: Theme – Sanctification by and in Work

1) Matthew was called by the Lord in the exercise of doing his work as a tax collector.

2) He was called “to follow” Christ = to become Christ.. The vocation is not just to be moral or be virtuous, or even to imitate Christ. There is no holiness independent of Christ, since Christ is the God-man. There is no salvation independent of Christ. Divinization and divine filiation can be achieved only by becoming “another Christ.”

St. Augustine: “Following Christ is not an outward imitation, since it touches man at the very depths of his being. Being a follower of Christ means becoming conformed to him who became a servant even to giving himself on the Cross (cf. Phil 2, 5-8). Christ dwells by faith in the heart of the believer (cf. Eph. 3, 17), and thus the disciple is conformed to the Lord…

“Having become one with Christ, the Christian becomes a member of his Body, which is the Church (cf. 1 Cor. 12, 13, 27). By the work of the Spirit, Baptism radically configures the faith to Christ in the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection, it ‘clothes him’ in Christ (cf. Gal. 3, 27): ‘Let us rejoice and give thanks,’ exclaims Saint Augustine speaking to the baptized, ‘for we have become not only Christians, but Christ (…). Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ!’”[1]

3) St. Josemaria Escriva on becoming Christ: “With all our personal defects and limitations, we are other Christs, Christ himself.…” Notice that sin and defect (as obviously in the case of Matthew) are not an obstacle to becoming “another Christ.”

4) But how does this happen after the fact of Baptism? Work! You cannot separate the fact that Christ is God from his role as redeemer.” As the divine Persons are pure relations, so also the divine Person who becomes flesh is pure relation: his very Person is work.

Benedict XVI says this best: “(W)ith Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, this differentiation simply becomes inapplicable. The person is the office, the office is the person. The two are no longer divisible. Here there is no private area reserved for an ‘I’ which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions and thus at some time or other can be ‘off duty;’ here there is no ‘I’ separate from the work; the ‘I’ is the work and the work is the ‘I.’”[2] The meaning of the name “Jesus Christ” is that Jesus is the Christ. His very being is the relation of self-gift, and every human deed of work has the divine “I” as protagonist of the deed. The divine “I” wills with a human will and turns all the sin of the human will into the obedience of total self-gift: the Cross. This is redemption and salvation. The theology of the Incarnation must be completed by the theology of the Cross. Chalcedon (451) is completed by Constantinople III (680-681) that does the phenomenology of Christ before its time and gives us the prototype of Christian personalism and the Christian anthropology of the sanctification of work.

Divinized Human Work: “Work too has been taken up in the mystery of the Incarnation, and has been redeemed in a special way.”[3] This is the development by Constantinople III of Chalcedon’s one Person, two natures. It is developed from an objectified epistemology to a subjectified epistemology. The Person of Christ is not merely a substance or substratum in the background sustaining the human nature and its acts. The divine “I” of the Son is the Actor, the One Who acts in human work.

Secularity: ” Baptized into that, we too are able to make the gift of ourselves to God in the service of the others in ordinary secular work. And this so much so that secularity is derived from it. That is, secularity is the very freedom of the human will and work of Christ that is His very Person. The freedom of the Son is the grounding of the secularity of the world. “Secularity, with all that it implies (work, occupations, outlook, lifestyle, ways of acting and behaving) is not added on to our vocation from outside. On the contrary, it receives its fullest meaning from our vocation….Secularity is something Christian, a Christian way of being and living. In other words… Christian faith and morality… cannot be judged from the starting-point of a secularity defined a priori. Rather, secularity should be judged and valued – or rather, discovered – from the starting-point of… what Christian faith reveals to us about man, about the world and about our destiny.”[4]

In other words, secularity is not the given state of affairs we find in the given culture and street and in which we are immersed. Secularity is not extrinsic to us or added on to us from outside. Secularity comes from us in that we are becoming Christ. The humanity – the human will – of Christ is the meaning and measure of secularity. And this is what must be imparted to the world by us in the very exercise of work.

5) Secularity as “Dimension;” Secularity as Characteristic:” The entire Church is secular because it is the Body of Christ. Even the religious are “secular” as “dimension.” However, the laity become Christ-in-act precisely in the exercise of work in the world. Hence, secularity as characteristic is a theological note, not merely sociological or geographical.[5] Authentic work itself is always the exercise of the self-gift of the worker who is becoming another Christ. It is never merely an external performance. Authentic work must be an act of obedience of the “I” of the worker. And the work must be a manifestation of that “I.” Therefore, it must be well done. The worker becomes good, nay, another Christ, in the exercise of the work. He becomes Christ precisely in working. The work itself must be prayer that becomes a consciousness accompanying the true going out of self that work must be.

6) Awaiting a New Culture: Benedict XVI has asked on January 6, 2007: : “Is European culture perhaps nothing more than the technology and trade civilization that has marched triumphantly across the planet? Or is it instead a post-European culture born on the ruins of the ancient European cultures?... The victory of the post-European techno-secular world and the universalization of its lifestyle and thinking have spread the impression – especially in the non-European countries of Asia and Africa – that Europe’s value system, culture, and faith – in other words, the very foundations of its identity – have reached the end of the road, and have indeed already departed from the scene. From this perspective, the time has apparently arrived to affirm the value systems of other worlds, such as pre-Colombian America, Islam, or Asian mysticism.

“At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.”[16]

Further: Ratzinger ends his talk announcing this insightful yet chilling fact:

“The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized – so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals – the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about god, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger –above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler.”[17]

---

[1] John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, #21.

[2] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 149.

[3] John Paul II, “Redemptoris Custos,” #22.

[4] Letter from the Prelate of Opus Dei, November 28, 1995.

[5] Christifideles Laici, #15.

Get Real on Divorce's Damage to Kids

Courtesy of Katie Martinson

Blogger's take: The real point of the remarks below is not the damage to kids, but the damage done to parents as people called to intimate relations. The solution is not scientific civility seeking rationalized solutions, but whatever messiness it takes to stay in relation. The kids will then turn out just fine.

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In "The Child-Focused Divorce" (Personal Journal, Sept. 6) you imagine a world where divorced parents cooperate with an abundance of civility, mutual respect and charity, and you offer advice from experts who liken raising children of divorce to a kind of "business venture." You encourage attention to details, planning, coordination and even a kind of professional respect between the parents.

As a child of divorce, I found this almost laughable. If divorced parents were capable of cooperating like this, they would still be married. Living in a post-divorce atmosphere of civility and respect would send a clear message to the children, not that they are loved, but that their reasonable and accommodating parents apparently couldn't be bothered to put as much hard work into saving their family.

This is, in some ways, a more painful message than the one my siblings and I got in the 1970s after the divorce of our thoroughly unreasonable and uncooperative parents. Amid all the hardship and conflict, we kids were clear on one thing: Our family was too important, too elemental to be negotiated into some other arrangement by nice people with professionalism and tact. It could only be blown up, utterly rent asunder with great sound and fury by forces that our parents were powerless to resist.

If that isn't what happened, if it wasn't a disaster, then maybe our family wasn't much of a family after all. Maybe we kids were just another detail to be discussed, with inside voices, over bad coffee in some beige conference room. As it is, our parents don't want to be in the same room with each other even 40 years later and, honestly, that feels about right to me these days. It's a kind of silent tribute to what's been lost.

So, please, if we have to have divorce (and I'm not saying we do), let's keep it messy—for the children.

John Mulcahy

Does "Brain Death" Really Give "Moral Certitude of Death?"

Remarks of John Paul II in August 2,000:

"When can a person be considered dead with complete certainty?

In this regard, it is helpful to recall that the death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. It results from the separation of the life-principle (or soul) from the corporal reality of the person. The death of the person, understood in this primary sense, is an event which no scientific technique or empirical method can identify directly.

Yet human experience shows that once death occurs certain biological signs inevitably follow, which medicine has learnt to recognize with increasing precision. In this sense, the "criteria" for ascertaining death used by medicine today should not be understood as the technical-scientific determination of the exact moment of a person's death, but as a scientifically secure means of identifying the biological signs that a person has indeed died.

5. It is a well-known fact that for some time certain scientific approaches to ascertaining death have shifted the emphasis from the traditional cardio-respiratory signs to the so-called "neurological" criterion. Specifically, this consists in establishing, according to clearly determined parameters commonly held by the international scientific community, the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem). This is then considered the sign that the individual organism has lost its integrative capacity.

With regard to the parameters used today for ascertaining death - whether the "encephalic" signs or the more traditional cardio-respiratory signs - the Church does not make technical decisions. She limits herself to the Gospel duty of comparing the data offered by medical science with the Christian understanding of the unity of the person, bringing out the similarities and the possible conflicts capable of endangering respect for human dignity.

Here it can be said that the criterion adopted in more recent times for ascertaining the fact of death, namely the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity, if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of a sound anthropology. Therefore a health-worker professionally responsible for ascertaining death can use these criteria in each individual case as the basis for arriving at that degree of assurance in ethical judgement which moral teaching describes as "moral certainty". This moral certainty is considered the necessary and sufficient basis for an ethically correct course of action. Only where such certainty exists, and where informed consent has already been given by the donor or the donor's legitimate representatives, is it morally right to initiate the technical procedures required for the removal of organs for transplant. "

* * * * * * * *

Remarks of Benedict XVI, 2008:

NOV. 7, 2008 (Zenit.org).- upon receiving in audience participants in the international congress "A Gift for Life. Considerations on Organ Donation."
With frequency, organ transplantation takes place as a completely gratuitous gesture on the part of the family member who has been certifiably pronounced dead. In these cases, informed consent is a precondition of freedom so that the transplant can be characterized as being a gift and not interpreted as a coercive or abusive act. In any case, it is useful to remember that the various vital organs can only be extracted "ex cadavere" [from a dead body], which posses it's own dignity and should be respected. Over recent years science has made further progress in ascertaining the death of a patient. It is good, then, that the achieved results receive the consensus of the entire scientific community in favor of looking for solutions that give everyone certainty. In an environment such as this, the minimum suspicion of arbitrariness is not allowed, and where total certainty has not been reached, the principle of caution should prevail.For this it is useful to increment interdisciplinary research and study in such a way that the public is presented with the most transparent truth on the anthropologic, social, ethical and legal implications of a transplant. In these cases respect for the life of the donor should be assumed as the primary criterion, in such a way so that the extraction of the organs only take place after having ascertained the patient's true death (cf. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 476).

In trying to get at the truth of this in the spirit of the Magisterium:

1) Benedict did not make any explicit change in the declaration of John Paul II;
2) I take “moral certainty” to be certainty without reasonable doubt.;
3) However, on mere hearsay by me, there seems to have been a significant number of “resurrections” after declaration of “brain death” [who did not undergo organ removal].
4) Could such a number (which would be hard to calculate since organ retrieval is a hot commodity with long lists of people a-waiting) be ascertained with any degree of accuracy?
5) Would such number, if significant, change the qualification of certitude from “moral” to “suspicion of arbitrariness”?
6) The phrase, “vital organs can only be extracted ‘ex cadavere,’ followed by “where total certainty has not been reached, the principle of caution should prevail,” are strongly tilted toward a certitude beyond “brain death” where moral certitude crumbles into “suspicion of arbitrariness.”

The Reduction of the Person to “Thing”

“One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring”

David Ahntholz for The New York Times (Tuesday Sept 6, 2011, D1).

Notice the early references to morality. But the morality is only about self-aggrandizement in the just handling and inter-relation of "things."


Cynthia Daily and her partner used a sperm donor to conceive a baby seven years ago, and they hoped that one day their son would get to know some of his half siblings — an extended family of sorts for modern times.

Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

DATA KEEPER Wendy Kramer, who had her son through a donor, started a registry to help families learn about a child’s half siblings.

So Ms. Daily searched a Web-based registry for other children fathered by the same donor and helped to create an online group to track them. Over the years, she watched the number of children in her son’s group grow.

And grow.

Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together — they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.

As more women choose to have babies on their own, and the number of children born through artificial insemination increases, outsize groups of donor siblings are starting to appear. While Ms. Daily’s group is among the largest, many others comprising 50 or more half siblings are cropping up on Web sites and in chat groups, where sperm donors are tagged with unique identifying numbers.

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.

“My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason,” said the mother of a teenager conceived via sperm donation in California who asked that her name be withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. “She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education” for her.
Critics say that fertility clinics and sperm banks are earning huge profits by allowing too many children to be conceived with sperm from popular donors, and that families should be given more information on the health of donors and the children conceived with their sperm. They are also calling for legal limits on the number of children conceived using the same donor’s sperm and a re-examination of the anonymity that cloaks many donors.

“We have more rules that go into place when you buy a used car than when you buy sperm,” said Debora L. Spar, president of Barnard College and author of “The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.” “It’s very clear that the dealer can’t sell you a lemon, and there’s information about the history of the car. There are no such rules in the fertility industry right now.”

Although other countries, including Britain, France and Sweden, limit how many children a sperm donor can father, there is no such limit in the United States. There are only guidelines issued by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a professional group that recommends restricting conceptions by individual donors to 25 births per population of 800,000.
No one knows how many children are born in this country each year using sperm donors. Some estimates put the number at 30,000 to 60,000, perhaps more. Mothers of donor children are asked to report a child’s birth to the sperm bank voluntarily, but just 20 to 40 percent of them do so, said Wendy Kramer, founder of the Donor Sibling Registry.

Because of this dearth of records, many families turn to the registry’s Web site, donorsiblingregistry.com, for information about a child’s half brothers or half sisters.
Ms. Kramer, who had her son, Ryan, through a sperm donor, started the registry in 2000 to help connect so-called donor families. On the Web site, parents can register the birth of a child and find half siblings by looking up a number assigned to a sperm donor. Many parents, she said, are shocked to learn just how many half siblings a child has.
“They think their daughter may have a few siblings,” Ms. Kramer said, “but then they go on our site and find out their daughter actually has 18 brothers and sisters. They’re freaked out. I’m amazed that these groups keep growing and growing.”

Ms. Kramer said that some sperm banks in the United States have treated donor families unethically and that it is time to consider new legislation.

“Just as it’s happened in many other countries around the world,” Ms. Kramer said, “we need to publicly ask the questions ‘What is in the best interests of the child to be born?’ and ‘Is it fair to bring a child into the world who will have no access to knowing about one half of their genetics, medical history and ancestry?’

“These sperm banks are keeping donors anonymous, making women babies and making a lot of money. But nowhere in that formula is doing what’s right for the donor families.”
Many of those questions were debated in Britain shortly after the birth there, in 1978, of Louise Brown, the first baby born using in vitro fertilization. In 1982, the British government appointed a committee, led by Mary Warnock, a well-known English philosopher, to look into the issues surrounding reproductive health.

The groundbreaking Warnock Report contained a list of recommendations, including regulation of the sale of human sperm and embryos and strict limits on how many children a donor could father (10 per donor). The regulations have become a model for industry practices in other countries.

“It is quite unpredictable what the ultimate effect on the gene pool of a society might be if donors were permitted to donate as many times as they chose,” Baroness Warnock wrote recently in an e-mail.

Without limits, the same donor could theoretically produce hundreds of related children. And it is even possible that accidental incest could occur among hundreds of half siblings, said Naomi R. Cahn, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Markets Need Legal Regulation.”

Sperm donors, too, are becoming concerned. “When I asked specifically how many children might result, I was told nobody knows for sure but that five would be a safe estimate,” said a sperm donor in Texas who asked that his name be withheld because of privacy concerns. “I was told that it would be very rare for a donor to have more than 10 children.”

He later discovered in the Donor Sibling Registry that some donors had dozens of children listed. “It was all about whatever they could get away with,” he said of the sperm bank to which he donated. “It is unfair and reprehensible to the donor families, donors and donor children.”
Ms. Kramer, the registry’s founder, said that one sperm donor on her site learned that he had 70 children. He now keeps track of them all on an Excel spreadsheet. “Every once in a while he gets a new kid or twins,” she said. “It’s overwhelming, and not what he signed up for. He was promised low numbers of children.”

The fertility industry has long resisted regulation, but the explosion of related half siblings may change that. Dr. Robert G. Brzyski, chairman of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine ethics committee, had been skeptical that there could be donors with more than 100 children. But now, he said, it is time to take another look at donor limits.
“In the past, when decisions were made about how many children should be attributed to a donor, it was based on estimates of the risk of unintended consanguinity between brothers and sisters who could meet and marry,” Dr. Brzyski said. “I think those models were very limited in their vision when they were created. Now I think there needs to be a reassessment of the criteria and the policies regarding the appropriate number of offspring.”

Because there is so much secrecy surrounding sperm and egg donations, Ms. Kramer said, it has been difficult for families of children born via sperm donation to step forward with their concerns. Some heterosexual couples never tell a child that he or she is the product of a sperm donation.

(Why?)

Ms. Daily, the Washington social worker, said that other parents in her son’s group had been secretive because of fears that their children would be stigmatized. She and other donor parents are coming forward, she said, because they “need to start advocating for some regulation.”
Experts are not certain what it means to a child to discover that he or she is but one of 50 children — or even more. “Experts don’t talk about this when they counsel people dealing with infertility,” Ms. Kramer said. “How do you make connections with so many siblings? What does family mean to these children?”

Benedict XVI on Organ Donation

In the light of the below, it is difficult to say that the criterion of brain death gives moral certitude when in reality there are telling numbers of the "brain dead" who have revived after long periods of time. Benedict XVI remarks below: "In an environment such as this, the minimum suspicion of arbitrariness is not allowed, and where total certainty has not been reached, the principle of caution should prevail." I would suggest that "moral certainty" is not "total certainty."



"A Unique Testimony of Charity"

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 7, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Here is the address Benedict XVI gave upon receiving in audience participants in the international congress "A Gift for Life. Considerations on Organ Donation."The congress, under way in Rome through Saturday, is sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life, the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, and the Italian National Transplant Center.

* * *

Venerated brothers in the episcopate,Bothers and sisters:Organ donation is a unique testimony of charity. In a time such as ours, frequently marked by various forms of egotism, it is more and more urgent to understand how it is necessary to enter into the logic of gratitude to correctly understand life. There exists, in fact, a responsibility of love and charity that commits oneself to make one's own life a gift for others, if one truly seeks one's own fulfillment. As Lord Jesus taught us, only by given one's life, can you save it (cf. Luke 9:24).Greetings to all those present, in particular to Senator Maurizio Sacconi, Italy's labor minister; and I thank Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Academy for Life, for the words he addressed to me, illustrating the deep significance of this encounter and presenting the synthesis of the work of the congress.Together with him, I also thank the president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, and the director of the Italian National Transplant Center, underlining with appreciation the value of the collaboration of these organizations in the area of organ transplants, which has been debated in your days of work and study.The history of medicine shows evidence of the great advances that have been made in giving more dignity each day to people who suffer. Tissue and organ transplants represent a great conquest of medical science, and are certainly signs of hope for those suffering serious, and often grave, illnesses.If we turn our gaze to the entire world, it is easy to confirm the numerous and complex cases in which, thanks to the technique of organ transplantation, many people have overcome extremely grave illnesses, and in them the joy of life has been restored. This would never have happened if the commitment of the doctors and the competence of the researchers had not been able to count upon the generosity and altruism of those who have donated organs. Unfortunately, the problem of the lack of available vital organs is not a theoretical one, but a considerably practical one; one can see this in the long waiting list of those whose only hope for survival is linked to the small number of non-useful donations.It is useful, above all in this context, to reflect on this advancement of science so that the multiplication of transplant petitions don't change around the ethical principles upon which it rests. As I said in my first encyclical, the body can never be considered as a mere object (cf. "Deus Caritas Est," No. 5); to do otherwise would impose on it the logic of the market. The body of each person, together with the spirit that is given to each one individually, constitutes an inseparable unity upon which is impressed the image of God himself. To prescind from this dimension brings to mind points of view that are incapable of understanding the totality of the mystery present in each person. It is necessary, then, that priority must be given to respect for the dignity of the human person and the protection of individual identity. Regarding the technique of organ transplants, this means that one can only donate if this act doesn't put one's own health and identity in serious danger, and if it is done for a valid moral and proportionate reason. Any reasons for the buying and selling of organs, or the adoption of utilitarian and discriminatory criteria, would clash in such a way with the meaning of gift that they would be invalidated, qualifying them as illicit moral acts. Abuses in transplants and organ trafficking, which frequently affect innocent persons, such as children, must find the scientific and medical community united in a joint refusal. They should be decidedly condemned as abominable.The same ethical principle must be reiterated in the case of the creation and destruction of human embryos destined for therapeutic objectives. The very idea of considering the embryo as "therapeutic material" contradicts the cultural, civil and ethical foundations on which the dignity of the person rests.

With frequency, organ transplantation takes place as a completely gratuitous gesture on the part of the family member who has been certifiably pronounced dead. In these cases, informed consent is a precondition of freedom so that the transplant can be characterized as being a gift and not interpreted as a coercive or abusive act.

In any case, it is useful to remember that the various vital organs can only be extracted "ex cadavere" [from a dead body], which posses it's own dignity and should be respected. Over recent years science has made further progress in ascertaining the death of a patient. It is good, then, that the achieved results receive the consensus of the entire scientific community in favor of looking for solutions that give everyone certainty (my emphasis). In an environment such as this, the minimum suspicion of arbitrariness is not allowed, and where total certainty has not been reached, the principle of caution should prevail. For this it is useful to increment interdisciplinary research and study in such a way that the public is presented with the most transparent truth on the anthropologic, social, ethical and legal implications of a transplant. In these cases respect for the life of the donor should be assumed as the primary criterion, in such a way so that the extraction of the organs only take place after having ascertained the patient's true death [my emphasis] (cf. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 476). The act of love, which is expressed with the gift of one's own vital organs, is a genuine testament of charity that knows how to look beyond death so that life always wins. The recipient should be aware of the value of this gesture that one receives, of a gift that goes beyond the therapeutic benefit. What they receive is a testament of love, and it should give rise to a response equally generous, and in this way grows the culture of gift and gratitude. The path that must be followed, until science discovers new and more advanced possible therapies, needs to be that of the formation and diffusion of a culture characterized by solidarity and that opens itself to others without excluding anyone. Organ transplants that are in line with ethic of giving require the commitment of all sides to invest every possible effort in formation and information, so as to increasingly awaken consciences to a problem that directly affects the lives of so many. It would be necessary, then, to overcome prejudices and misunderstanding, dispel suspicions and fears and substitute them with certainties and guarantees, so as to create in all people an awareness, ever more widespread, of the great gift of life.Wishing that each one of you continues your own commitment with due competence and professionalism, I invoke the help of God over the working sessions of the congress and impart to all of you, from the heart, my blessing.

Brain Death Not Sufficient Criterion for Organ Transplantation: Dr. Allan Shewmon Vindicated

Vital Organ Transplantation–Not Truly Dead


by Paul A. Byrne, MD, Fr. Peter Damien Fehlner, FI

The August 29, 2000 Address of Blessed John Paul II is often quoted by those in support of obtaining vital organs for transplantation, but other statements by Pope John Paul II and a more recent statement by Pope Benedict XVI are ignored.Blessed John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae: "Nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying. Furthermore, no one is permitted to ask for this act of killing, either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or her care, nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or implicitly " (Ev. Vitae 52).

On Feb 11, 2003, World Day of the Sick, His Holiness stated, "Every therapeutic procedure, all experimentation and every transplant must take into account this fundamental truth. Thus it is never licit to kill one human being in order to save another." Pope John Paul II's Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences February 3-4, 2005 included, "It is well known that the moment of death for each person consists in the definitive loss of the constitutive unity of body and spirit. Each human being, in fact, is alive precisely insofar as he or she is 'corpore et anima unus' (Gaudium et Spes, 14), and he or she remains so for as long as this substantial unity-in-totality subsists."

Many in support of vital organ transplantation base their position on the August 29, 2000 Address by Pope John Paul II: "This consists in establishing, according to clearly determined parameters commonly held by the international scientific community, the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem). This is then considered the sign that the individual organism has lost its integrative capacity."

A survey of the leading neurological institutions showed that there is no consensus of the many (more than 30, probably 100, or even more) disparate sets of criteria (Neurology, Jan 2010).

Then, in Neurology, July 2010, it was published that "brain death" is not evidence based.

Thus, for "brain death" can there be "clearly defined parameters commonly held by the international scientific community"? ["Evidence based is the modern standard that doctors are encouraged to follow; but it doesn't exist for "brain death"!]

Many misconceptions about criteria for determining "brain death" revolve around "irreversibility." Irreversibility cannot be observed by a doctor like a change in function or even destruction of tissue or an organ. Thus, "irreversibility cannot serve as evidence, nor can it rightly be made part of an observable criterion of death." [1] A presumption of irreversibility of a lack of brain functioning, even if "cerebrum, cerebellum and brain-stem" are included, is insufficient grounds for removing a patient's vital organs or for immediate autopsy, cremation, or burial. Even though cerebellum is included, none of the many sets of criteria include evaluation of the cerebellum. ABSOLUTE irreversibility of brain functioning, among other characteristics of a cadaver, reflects the fact of death. But such irreversibility can be known by us only if we already know the fact of death. Death is the criterion of absolute irreversibility, not vice-versa. RELATIVE irreversibility, viz., relative to our capacity to reverse the non-functional character of this brain, is not a criterion of death. If we are not sure of absolute irreversibility, then we are not sure that real death, as distinct from a clinical declaration of "brain death," "heart death," "as good as dead," "soon to be dead," etc., has occurred.

Without such certainty organ extraction cannot begin without violating the fifth commandment.The declaration of Pope John Paul II is a conditional one that has not been met because there are no "clearly determined parameters commonly held by the international scientific community." Pope Benedict XVI on November 7, 2008 specified: "Individual vital organs cannot be extracted except ex cadavere." Pope Benedict XVI made his teaching clear and specific by using Latin, "ex cadavere," which translates as "from a dead body." Pope Benedict continued, "The principal criteria of respect for the life of the donator must always prevail so that the extraction of organs be performed only in the case of his/her true death (cf.Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 476)." Thus, Pope Benedict is very clear, vital organs cannot be taken except from a dead body after his/her true death. A dead body does not have a beating heart, circulation and respiration. Genuine certainty must exist prior to any declaration of death. A very simple test of the certainty that this key condition concerning "brain death" has been fulfilled is the following: could it be wrong and is it often wrong? If the reply is yes, then the condition required for moral certainty to be genuine certainty in the sense of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, namely that this human body is not a living body, but is a cadaver, has not been realized. Can there be certainty of any kind if one would say a cadaver has a beating heart, circulation, and respiration? A cadaver (dead body) does not and cannot have signs of life like a beating heart, circulation and respiration; a cadaver is suitable for autopsy, embalming, cremation and burial.Over time it has become clear that "brain death" is not true death. Many do not accept that "brain death" is true death.

These include: "Brain Death is Not Death: A Critique of the Concept, Criterion, and Tests of Brain Death" [2] Rix, 1990; McCullagh, 1993; Evans, 1994; Jones, 1995; Watanabe, 1997; Cranford, 1998; Potts et al., 2000; Taylor, 1997; Reuter, 2001; Lock, 2002; Byrne and Weaver, 2004; Zamperetti et al., 2004; de Mattei, 2006; Joffe, 2007; Truog, 2007; Karakatsanis, 2008; and Verheijde et al., 2009. Even the President's Council on Bioethics (2008) in its white paper, has rejected "brain death" as true death.There are many news accounts of people recovering after a declaration of "brain dead." [3]Zack Dunlap from Oklahoma was declared "brain dead." There was no blood flow to his brain as evidenced by a PET scan. The helicopter was landing to extract Zack's organs. A cousin who is a nurse in the ICU did another test. A response was observed. The transplant was stopped. This and others were recorded for the national and international community. Even one such patient should be enough to wake people up to the fact "brain death" is not true death. And there are many!NOTES:[1] Byrne PA,O'Reilly S, Quay PM:Brain Death – An Opposing Viewpoint.JAMA 242:1985-1990 . 1979.[2] Joffe, A. Brain Death is Not Death: A Critique of the Concept, Criterion, and Tests of Brain Death. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 20, 187-198 (2009), andReferences that "brain death" is not true death include: Rix, 1990; McCullagh, 1993; Evans, 1994; Jones, 1995; Watanabe, 1997; Cranford, 1998; Potts et al., 2000; Taylor, 1997; Reuter, 2001; Lock, 2002; Byrne and Weaver, 2004; Zamperetti et al., 2004; de Mattei, 2006; Joffe, 2007; Truog, 2007; Karakatsanis, 2008; Verheijde et al., 2009. Even the President's Council on Bioethics (2008), in its white paper, has rejected "brain death" as true death.[3] Zack Dunlap from Oklahoma

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23768436/Val Thomas from West Virginiawww.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,357463,0.htmlFrenchman began breathing on own as docs prepared to harvest his organswww.msnbc.msn.com/id/25081786Australian woman survives "brain death"http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/brain-dead-woman-recovers-after-husband-refuses-to-withdraw-life-support UTM source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=231fd2c2c9-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines05_12_2011&utm_medium=email© Paul A. Byrne, M.D. and Peter Damian Fehlner, F.I., S.T.D.