TRANSPLANTS AND THE GENERAL RESURRECTION
Written by Vladimir Moss
TRANSPLANTS
AND THE GENERAL RESURRECTION
Cannibalism, vampirism, necrophilia – for
generations these ideas have been regarded with horror and loathing not only by
Christian but also by non-Christian peoples. They have been the stuff of bad
Hollywood horror movies, which frighten children and disgust adults. But they
are becoming reality now… Since the 1960s, with extraordinary stubbornness,
surgeons and doctors have been attempting to heal diseases by transplanting
organs from dead or even – horror of horrors! – living donors. This has led to
a new form of organized crime – the extraction of body parts from living people
(often Chinese criminals being executed or poor peasants in Turkey or India) in
order to prolong the lives of rich sick people in the West.
“But no! this is a gross distortion!” some
will say. “The selfless donation of organs to save the lives of others has
nothing to do with such nefarious practices! After all, we’re talking about
science, not magic!”
Are we? A recent BBC documentary on the
greatest of scientists, Sir Isaac Newton, was entitled “The Last Magician”. For
Newton, in addition to writing his great works on light and the movement of
bodies, also practiced alchemy and tried to find the philosopher’s stone… Many
writers, from C.S. Lewis to Fr. Seraphim Rose, have emphasized the roots of
science in magic, and their common aim, by fair means or foul, not only to understand nature, but also, and
primarily, to gain control over it.
This desire to control nature independently of, and sometimes in conscious
opposition to, the will of nature’s Creator, cannot lead to good. Of course,
modern science likes to think that it always does its work for the common good
of mankind; but successive tragedies, from Hiroshima to thalidomide to recent
attempts to create human beings from three
different parents paint a different picture.
An experiment at the CERN elementary
particle collider near Geneva could, we are told, have blown up the whole world…
But the chance of it doing that was very small… Well, that’s alright then! So
we can continue to throw tens of billions of dollars into experiments that
might – just might – blow up the world with a good conscience! Crazy
scientists! Can we really believe that the motivation for such work was pure
altruism?! How can such extreme irresponsibility be condoned?!
God’s greatest work, the crown of His
creation, is the nature of man. Science with all its ingenuity has never come
close to creating anything as extraordinary as a man, and can certainly not
improve on man as God has created him. Once there was a scientific conference
that tried to establish ways of improving on the human hand. The conclusion
was: we cannot improve on it. You cannot do better than God. For “Thou hast
fashioned me, and hast laid Thy hand upon me. Thy knowledge is too wonderful
for me; it is mighty, I cannot attain unto it…” (Psalm 138.4-5). When
man attempts to overstep the bounds of nature by trying to improve on it, he is
always silently rebuked. Thus attempts to transplant organs from one human body
to another always come up against an obvious and decisive sign of God’s
displeasure – rejection. Only by
massive doses of drugs administered daily and for the rest of one’s life will
the body be persuaded to accept the foreign invasion of the donor’s body part.
Inadvertently, in the course of these
transplant operations, scientists have discovered what the Holy Fathers always
knew but which our modern mechanistic theories have caused us to forget: that
there is a very mysterious, even ineffable union between the soul and the body,
between certain functions that we would term psychological and certain “purely”
physical organs. We are not here talking about the crude materialist theory
that mental activity is simply the same as brain activity. We are talking about
the fact that memory, emotion, even personal identity seem to be linked with every organ of the body.
We have always known this about the heart. And the first
heart-transplant operations produced frightening results. The family of the man
who received a new heart could not recognize him after the operation; he seemed
to be a different person. Later
transplants have confirmed that many of the characteristics of the donor seem
to be transplanted with his heart into the patient. Some of these
characteristics are trivial, such as tastes in food; others are more serious,
such as sexual orientation, or suicidal thoughts…
More recently, as Dr. Danny Penman writes,
scientists “started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not
just in our brain, but throughout our entire body.
“Consciousness, they claim, is created by
every living cell in the body acting in concert.
“They argue, in effect, that our hearts,
livers and every single organ in the body stores our memories, drives our
emotions and imbues us with our own individual characters. Our whole body, they
believe, is the seat of the soul; not just the brain.
“And if any of these organs should be
transplanted into another person, parts of these memories – perhaps even
elements of the soul – might also be transferred.
“There are now more than 70 documented
cases… where transplant patients have taken on some of the personality traits
of the organ donors.
“Professor Gary Schwartz and his
co-workers at the University of Arizona have documented numerous seemingly
inexplicable experiences… And every single one is a direct challenge to the
medical status quo.
“In one celebrated case uncovered by
Professor Schwartz’s team, an 18-year-old boy who wrote poetry, played music
and composed songs was killed in a car crash. A year before he died, his
parents came across a tape of a song he had written, entitled, Danny, My Heart
is Yours.
“In his haunting lyrics, the boy sang about
how he felt destined to die and donate his heart. After his death, his heart
was transplanted into an 18-year-old girl – named Danielle.
“When the boy’s parents met Danielle, they
played some of his music and she, despite never having heard the song before,
knew the words and was able to complete the lyrics.
“Professor Schwartz also investigated the
case of a 29-year-old lesbian fast-food junkie who received the heart of a
19-year-old vegetarian woman described as ‘man crazy’.
“After the transplant, she told friends
that meat now made her sick, and that she no longer found women attractive. In
fact, shortly after the transplant she married a man.
“In one equally inexplicable case, a
middle-aged man developed a newfound love for classical music after a heart
transplant.
“It transpired that the 17-year-old donor
had loved classical music and played the violin. He had died in a drive-by
shooting, clutching a violin to his chest.
“Nor are the effects of organ transplants
restricted to hearts. Kidneys also seem to carry some of the characteristics of
their original owners.
“Take the case of Lynda Gammons from
Weston, Lincolnshire, who donated one of her kidneys to her husband Ian.
“Since the operation, Ian believes he has
taken on aspects of his wife’s personality. He has developed a love of baking,
shopping, vacuuming and gardening. Prior to the transplant, he loathed all
forms of housework with a vengeance.
“He has also adopted a dog – yet before
his operation he was an avowed ‘cat man’, unlike his wife who favoured dogs…”[1]
Not surprisingly, there is nothing on
transplants in the patristic writings. And to the present writer’s knowledge,
there are no contemporary conciliar church decisions. However, Church Tradition
provides us with some important clues in our search for guidance in this
question…
Thus St. Philaret of New York wrote: “The
heart is the center, the mid-point of man's existence. And not only in the
spiritual sense, where heart is the
term for the center of one's spiritual person, one's ‘I’; in physical life,
too, the physical heart is the chief organ and central point of the organism,
being mysteriously and indissolubly connected with the experiences of one's
soul. It is well known to all how a man's purely psychical and nervous
experiences joy, anger, fright, etc.,—are
reflected immediately in the action of the heart, and conversely how an
unhealthy condition of the heart acts oppressively on the psyche and
consciousness... Yes, here the bond is indissoluble—and
if, instead of the continuation of a man's personal spiritual-bodily
life, concentrated in his own heart, there is imposed on
him a strange heart and some kind of strange life, until then totally unknown
to him—then
what is this if not a counterfeit of his departing life;
what is this if not the annihilation of his spiritual-bodily life, his
individuality, his personal ‘I’? And how and as whom will such
a man present himself at the general resurrection?
“But the new attainment does not end even
here. It is intended also to introduce into the organism of a man the heart of
an animal—i.e.,
so that after the general resurrection a ‘man’ will stand at the Last Judgement
with the heart of an ape (or a cat, or a pig, or whatever). Can one imagine a
more senseless and blasphemous mockery of human nature itself, created in the
image and likeness of God?
“Madness and horror! But what has called
forth this nightmare of criminal interference in man's life—in
that life, the lawful Master of which is its Creator alone, and no one else?
The answer is not difficult to find. The loss of Christian hope, actual
disbelief in the future life, failure to understand the Gospel and disbelief in
it, in its Divine truthfulness—these are what have called
forth these monstrous and blasphemous experiments on the personality and life
of man. The Christian view of life and death, the Christian understanding and
conception of earthly life as time given by God for preparation for eternity—have
been completely lost. And from this the result is: terror in the face of death,
seen as the absolute perishing of life and the annihilation of personality; and
a clutching at earthly life—live, live, live, at any cost or means
prolong earthly life, after which there is nothing!”[2]
St. Philaret’s reference to the general
resurrection and the last judgement provides us with the clue, not just to the
evaluation of transplants, but also of a whole host of medical innovations that
appear to have as their hidden aim the transformation and degradation of our
understanding of man.
The Orthodox Church teaches, on the one
hand, that the soul survives the death of the body, and continues to function
with full consciousness even after the body has been reduced to dust; but on the
other hand, that the body will be resurrected at the last day in order that
soul and body together may receive the reward fitting to them for the deeds
they have performed together in life. This illustrates two important truths.
First, man, the whole man, is not soul alone, still less body alone, but soul and body together. Just as they are
conceived together and simultaneously, so they will enter into eternal life
together.[3]
And secondly, every soul will be judged with his own personal body, and not with
any other’s.
This second truth is sometimes doubted on
the grounds that in the course of a man’s lifetime every single cell in his
body dies and is replaced many times, so that it makes no sense to speak about “his
own personal body”. We borrow the elements of our body from outside organisms
and replace them in a constant interchange that unites us indissolubly with the
nature around us and with each other. However, the discovery of DNA in the
1950s weakened this objection in that it showed how, in principle, a man’s body
can be said to be the same throughout
his lifetime and in spite of the fact that the entire cellular composition of
his body may be different from what it was at birth. His bodily identity may be
said to be encapsulated in his DNA. Thus every organ and every cell of my body
is marked by a seal showing that it belongs to me and me alone – my personal
DNA. This is who I am, physically
speaking. This is the natural order, the foundation of my personal physical
identity and the earnest of the re-establishment of my personal physical
identity at the General Resurrection.
Of course, scientists may find new forms
of personal identification that are still more exact and indestructible than
DNA. But that is not the point. The point is that we now know how in principle a body can be said to be
the same and unique and belonging to only one person in spite of the most radical
overhauls in its cellular and atomic composition.
In view of this, it is not difficult to
understand why God has ordained that my body rejects the invasion of a body
part with a different DNA – it’s simply not me! Physical rejection by the body
should be accompanied by moral rejection by the soul – it cannot be God’s will
for this mixing of persons (and even of species) to take place! Of course, this
general thesis raises as many questions as it answers. Are all organ
transplants to be rejected? Or only transplants of the most complex and central
organs, such as the heart, and perhaps the liver?
The present writer will make no attempt to
provide answers to such questions. Only a truly Orthodox Synod, employing the
expertise of doctors and scientists, can determine such matter. But we can
continue to explore the issue in its more general aspects…
The mixing of the body parts of different
people in one organism can be compared to the sin of fornication. Some will
immediately reject this comparison, saying that the sin of fornication consists
in the experience of illicit sexual pleasure whereas transplants involve only
pain… However, the presence of pleasure or pain is neither here nor there.
Fornication is a sin, not because it involves sexual pleasure, but because it
involves the mixing of two bodies leading (in the case of conception) to the
creation of a new human from the mixing of the bodies and their DNA. Such a
mixing is forbidden by God except under the circumstances of lawful marriage.
Transplants also involve a mixing of DNA. And no Synod has yet declared under
what circumstances it is and is not lawful…
Chaste people have a strong sense of
personal identity, both spiritual and physical. While loving other people, they
retain a strong sense of their individuality, and jealously preserve that
individuality and sexual purity for the sake of union with God. For God will
not enter into union, whether spiritually or physically (in His Body and
Blood), with those who are promiscuous, who mix their own identity with
others’. It can hardly be coincidental that the development of organ transplant
techniques has gone in parallel with the development of various new techniques
in the field of sexual reproduction. Contraception, in vitro fertilization and
surrogate motherhood all involve sins against chastity; GM crops and genetic
therapy are further violations of God’s order concerning the natural bounds
that must be preserved between species and individuals.
All this is taking place within the
context of an evolutionist world-view that rejects the idea of the separate creation of species and
individuals, but sees everything as having evolved from something else, so that
nature is a kind of huge pan-cosmic soup in which every element can be
interchanged with every other. For those who think like this there is no reason
why man, as the summit of evolution, should not stir the pot still more… But in
the dietary laws of the Old Testament God indicated that some things should not
be mixed with other things; and even if these laws have been superseded in the
New Testament, the principle they teach remains valid: certain things are
different and separate from each other, and should remain different and
separate. Thus men are different from women and should remain so. The attempt
to create some kind of unisex or “metrosex” hybrid, and still more the practice
of men acting as women or women acting as men in sexual relations, is unnatural
and an abomination in the sight of the Lord…
The goal of life is union, union in love
with God and with our neighbour. But this union is unity in diversity, not
unity in perversity; it transcends, but does not destroy, the natural
differences that God has installed into creation for all ages. Recent
developments in organ transplants and gene therapy witness, not to man’s
ability to mix the immiscible (for nature will always take its revenge and
reject false unions), but to his fallen, demonic desire always to rebel, to remove
the boundaries set by the Creator within His creation and thereby to fulfill the
ancient dream of our forefathers: “ye shall be as gods...”
April 5/18, 2013.
[1] Penman, “Can we really
transplant a human soul?” The Daily Mail (London),
April 9, 2008.
[2] St. Philaret, “An
Orthodox View of Heart Transplantations”, Pravoslavnaia
Rus’, No. 4, 1968;The
Orthodox Word, Vol. 4, No. 3 (May-June 1968), pp. 134-137.
[3] As St. Maximus the
Confessor writes: “Neither exists in separation from the other before their
joining together which is destined to create one form. They are, in effect,
simultaneously created and joined together, as is the realization of the form
created by their joining together.” (Letter
15; P.G. 91:552D, 6-13) Again, St. John of Damascus writes: “body and soul
were formed at one and the same time, not first the one and then the other, as
Origen so senselessly supposed.” (Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 12).