Page 361 - 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
toral practice concerning suicide: since it is nearly impossible
to know when freedom acts in a fully unbound way, the
Church often assumes diminished responsibility rather than
absolute guilt.
A third difficulty arises from the relational character of
personhood. If the body is not merely one’s private possession
but bearer of relationships, then death too cannot be reduced
to an individual affair. Those who love and are loved by the
dying person cannot be excluded from the meaning of death.
Freedom severed from relation becomes demonic self-asser-
tion; the person collapses into the isolated individual. Death
is never merely “mine”; it belongs also to those whose lives are
bound up with mine.
A fourth issue concerns utility. Is it worthwhile to prolong
the life of an elderly person with no hope of survival when
younger patients need hospital beds, medical attention, or
organs for transplantation? These dilemmas are morally grave.
Yet the Christian understanding of personhood excludes ab-
solutely the use of any person as a means to an end, however
noble that end may seem. The individual human being has
absolute priority over every utilitarian calculation. Once this
is abandoned, the first steps toward totalitarianism begin.
Yet euthanasia raises another question: pain. Much of the
pressure for euthanasia arises not from abstract theories, but
from unbearable suffering and the humiliation that often ac-
companies dying. Here the issue becomes profoundly theo-
logical. Modern culture elevates the avoidance of pain into
one of its highest ideals, often identifying quality of life with
freedom from suffering. Christianity cannot accept this as
ultimate. Christ Himself accepted pain, even in its most hu-
miliating form. Pain cannot by itself justify euthanasia. Indeed
suffering may become, as Dostoevsky suggests, a source of
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