Page 359 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

T H E C H U R C H A N D T H E Q U E S T I O N O F E U T H A N A S I A
The Church and the
Question of Euthanasia
Nowhere are these questions more urgent than in the
realm of life and death. The Church does not possess
ready-made answers to the difficult and complex problem of
euthanasia. Yet one thing stands at the center of the Ortho-
dox understanding of life: the Resurrection of Christ. For
Orthodox Christians, nothing is more decisive than the vic-
tory over death. Death is the final enemy of humanity; it can
never be called good. For this reason the very term euthana-
sia contains a contradiction. Death, including physical and
biological death, is never a positive good, nor can its inevita-
bility justify hastening it.
If one begins from this premise, one is obliged to reject
anything that causes death, whether actively or passively, vol-
untarily or involuntarily. The Church must ask all who ac-
company the dying—physicians, nurses, relatives, caregiv-
ers—to delay death and prolong life as much as possible by
every available means. The state likewise should discourage
the hastening of death. The fact that death is inevitable for all
human beings cannot become a moral justification for accel-
erating its arrival.
Among all creatures, only the human being refuses to rec-
oncile with death. This refusal belongs to the very meaning of
personhood, which is freedom: freedom not merely to accept
nature as given, but to transcend it. Human beings yearn for
theosis, for participation in the immortality that belongs to
God alone. This yearning reveals the difference between indi-
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