Dear Carlo Maria Martini,
According to the schedule we have agreed to, it is time for us to continue our conversation. The goal of this letter exchange is to identify common ground between lay people and Catholics (and I remind readers that you are participating as a believer and a man of culture, not in the robe of a prince of the Church). I have been wondering, however, if we should be limiting our discussion to include only what beliefs we have in common. Is it worthwhile for us to ask each other what we think about capital punishment or genocide, for example, only to discover the we agree profoundly on these topics and the values associated with them? For this to be a true dialogue, we should be exploring the subjects on which there is no consensus. Yet that’s still not enough. A layperson does not believe in the Holy Spirit and a Catholic obviously does, for example, but that does not occasion a lack of understanding, just a mutual respect for our personal beliefs. The critical moment occurs when from disagreement is born a deeper conflict and incomprehension that can be translated into political and social agendas.
One such conflict is right-to-life versus existing abortion legislation.
Confronting a problem of this scope calls for putting one’s cards on the table, and avoiding ambiguity. He who asks the question should clarify his own perspective as well as what he expects from the respondent. Hence, my first clarification: I have never been in the situation of having a woman tell me she is pregnant by me, and put the question to me as to whether to abort or to consent to her wish to abort. Had it ever happened, I would have done everything possible to persuade her to grant life to that being, whatever the price. The birth of a baby is a marvelous thing, a natural miracle that we must accept. That said, I don’t feel I have the right to impose my own ethical position (my emotional disposition, my intellectual persuasion) on anyone. I believe there are terrible moments about which neither you nor I know very much (which is why I’ll refrain from drawing hypothetical comparisons), when a woman has the right to make an autonomous decision about her body, her feelings, her future.
Nonetheless, there are those people who appeal to the right to life. If we cannot permit someone to kill another person, nor even to kill himself (I won’t embroil myself in a debate about self-defense), we likewise cannot allow someone to halt the course of a life begun.
So we come to my second clarification: it would be inappropriate of me to ask you to express your opinion or restate the teachings of the Church. Instead, I am inviting you to offer your own reflections in relation to current doctrine on the subject. When the banner of Life is waved, it can’t but move the spirit — especially of nonbelievers, however “pietistic” their atheism, because for those who do not believe in anything supernatural the idea of Life, the feeling of Life, provides the only value, the only source of a possible ethical system. Despite that, there is no more elusive, nuanced, or, as today's logicians are wont to say, “fuzzy” concept. As the ancient Greeks knew, life is not recognized exclusively from the appearance of intellectual spirit, but also from the manifestation of sensory, even vegetative spirit. Nowadays, for example, there are “radical ecologists” who believe that Mother Earth with her mountains and volcanoes has a life unto herself, and who speculate the human race might have to disappear in order to ensure the survival of the planet it threatens. There are vegetarians, who sacrifice vegetable life to preserve animal life, and oriental ascetics who cover their mouths, so as not to swallow and kill invisible microorganisms.
At a recent conference, the African anthropologist Harris Memel-Fote noted that the typical attitude of the Western world is cosmophagic (a beautiful term: we have always tended to devour the universe). Now we should be open (and some societies already are) to some form of negotiation: between what mankind can do to nature in order to survive, and what it shouldn’t do so that nature will survive. When negotiation occurs it’s because there are still no fixed rules; one negotiates to establish them. I believe that, with the exception of certain extremist positions, we are constantly negotiating (more often with our emotions than our intellect) our concept of respect for life.
Most of us would be horrified at the idea of slaughtering a pig, but happily eat ham. I would never squash a caterpillar in the park, but am merciless when it comes to mosquitoes. I discriminate between bees and wasps (both constitute a threat, but I recognize virtues in the former that I don’t in the latter). You could argue that while our perception of vegetable and animal life is nuanced, our perception of human life isn’t. Yet this is a problem that has troubled theologians and philosophers for centuries. If, by chance, a properly trained or genetically manipulated monkey should show that it could type reasonable sentences into a computer, engaging in a dialogue, demonstrating affection, memory, the ability to solve mathematical problems, reactivity to logical principles of identity and perception of the Other — would we then consider it to be almost human? Would we grant it civil rights? Because it thinks and loves? Yet we don’t necessarily consider everything that loves to be human; in fact, we kill animals even though we know the mother “loves” her own offspring.
When does human life begin? Are there (today, never mind the customs of the Spartans) any nonbelievers who would affirm that a being is human only after his culture has initiated him into humanity, granting him language and articulated thought (which according to St. Thomas were external accidents that allowed us to infer the presence of rationality — one of the defining aspects of human nature), and who would condone the murder of a newborn because, in point of fact, he is only an “infant”? I think not. Everyone considers the newborn still attached to the umbilical cord to be a human being. But how far back do we go from there? If life and humanity already exist in the seed (in our genetic makeup, even), then is the wasting of semen a crime equal to homicide? The indulgent confessor of a tempted teenager wouldn’t say that, and neither do the Scriptures. Cain’s sin in Genesis is punished with an explicit divine curse, while Onan’s brings him death by natural causes for shirking his obligation to give life. On the other hand, and you know this better than I do, the Church repudiated Tertullian’s Traducianism whereby the soul (and original sin with it) is transmitted through semen. St. Augustine was still trying to negotiate that idea through a form of spiritual Traducianism, but it was Creationism that gradually imposed itself, according to which God introduces the soul directly into the fetus at a given moment in its gestation.
St. Thomas used up precious stores of subtlety to explain how and why this was the case, and from that ensued a long discussion on the purely vegetative and sensory phases the fetus passes through and how only after these phases are completed is the fetus ready to receive intellectual spirit (I have just reread his wonderful meditations on this very question in both the Summa and the Contra Gentiles). I won’t go on evoking the long debates undergone in order to determine at what phase of pregnancy definitive “humanization” occurs (what’s more, I don’t really know to what extent modern theology is still willing to consider this issue in Aristotelian terms of potentiality and actuality). I do want to say that at the very core of Christian theology lies the question of the threshold (a paper-thin threshold) beyond which what was a hypothesis, a germ — a dark articulation of life still tied to the mother body, a marvelous desire for the light, not unlike a seed deep in the earth struggling to flower — at a certain point is recognized as a rational animal, a mortal Nonbelievers face the same problem; a human being is always born from this initial hypothesis. I am not a biologist (no more than I am a theologian) and don’t feel equal to drawing any reasonable conclusions about where the threshold lies, or even if there is a threshold at all. No mathematical theory of catastrophe can tell us if there is a breaking point, a point of spontaneous explosion. We are perhaps condemned to know only that there is a process of which the miracle of the newborn baby is the final outcome. Determining when in the process we have the right to intrude, or when we no longer have the right, can be neither pinpointed nor discussed. And so, either the decision ought never to be made, or making it is a risk the mother must meet alone or before God or before the court of her own conscience and of humanity.
As I said, I’m not looking for some kind of pronouncement from you. I am asking for your comments on this impassioned theological debate that has gone on for centuries over a question that underlies our identification of ourselves as a part of a human society. Now that theology no longer measures itself against Aristotelian physics, but rather against the certainties (and uncertainties!) of modern experimental science, what is the current state of the theological debate? You know how such questions involve not only the abortion problem but a whole series of dramatic new issues such as genetic engineering, and how everyone, believer and nonbeliever, is debating bioethics today. Where does a modern theologian then stand in relation to classical creationism?
The definition of what life is, and where it begins, is a question that concerns our life. These are heavy questions, morally, intellectually, and emotionally — believe me — for me too.
Umberto Eco