Opinion

Virgil Nemoianu

The opposite is, of course, the actual case: the humanities were born of-and, by right, still belong to-a Christian religious tradition. They have always had as their goal the reconciliation between human solidarity on the one hand and the dignity of individual, concrete persons, situations, and facts on the other. The possibility of religious transcendence was "always already" (to speak with the deconstructionists) part of the whole project.

This is why we urgently need college courses today on Christian humanism. Some students will undoubtedly mistrust the humanism of such classes, and many more will mistrust their Christianity. But Christian humanism is properly nothing but a reclaiming of the basic inheritance of our history and the natural connection of culture with the religious vistas of the human being. The current separation is the artificial relation, not the other way around. My own suggestions for a syllabus of Christian humanism are certainly not cast in stone. I mean them more as a spur to further reflection than as a map. I, for one, would try to tell my students most of the following.

What came to be called "Christian humanism" is rooted primarily in the Gospels of Luke and John. The Lucan text is addressed to a more cultivated public than the other synoptic gospels; the Johannine Gospel, too, is a highly intellectual text, combining the spiritual, symbolic, and factual. Once it became apparent that the Second Coming was not as near as many early Christians had supposed, it became imperative for Christians to construct a framework for handling the world and its culture, and it was primarily to these Gospels that they turned.

The rudiments of the consequent Christian philosophy, theology, and art were already in place by the late third century: Christians could boast of Origen, for instance, a powerful intellect by any standard. But many Mediterranean intellectuals nonetheless feared that Christianity would endanger the aesthetic amenities and social balances that had been assured by Roman religion, and it is as though the entire Christian world collectively decided to meet its adversaries on their own ground. We witness between the years 350 and 450 an extraordinary explosion of Christian intellectual achievement. While Jerome was translating the Bible into Latin, Athanasius was helping formulate the Profession of Faith, and the first great Church orator, John Chrysostom, was preaching. Toward the end of this century Augustine began to acquire his reputation, while in Milan Ambrose displayed his extraordinary combination of managerial power and spiritual depth. I would have my own students pay special attention to the Cappadocians-Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa-because, more than anyone else, they engaged their polytheistic rivals on their own terrain by appropriating Neoplatonism (the "Summa" of the Ancients, so to speak) and Christianizing it.

This appropriation of Neoplatonism, culminating with the Pseudo- Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor, allowed Christian thinkers to incorporate into their thought such Neoplatonic features as the primacy of beauty and the metaphysics of descent and ascent, and thereby to lay the philosophical foundations of nearly all future Christian humanism. But the pattern of appropriation is what I would want my students to notice most, for it is the typical and fundamental gesture of Christian humanism: to respond to the world by taking it over, by embracing it, by showing that no beauty, intelligence, or goodness is alien to Christianity or incompatible with it.

The Middle Ages brought about a great flowering of Christian culture: the cathedrals and the philosophical systems (especially in Thomas Aquinas), as well as Christianity's development of social structures. One German scholar, Gerhard Nebel, speaks of the kairos of Christian art: the moment of nearest approach between the divine and the artistic, when simultaneously the Romanesque style appeared in the West and the art of the icon appeared in the East. Christian humanism remained vivid, in Albertus Magnus' encyclopedic mind, for instance, or in the formidable figure of Hildegard of Bingen. I would wish my students to see at least two movements of the Middle Ages-that of the great mystics and that of the Franciscans-as exemplifying Christian humanism in several important features. The mystics (many of them women) brought together the sentimental and the rational in extraordinary ways, while the Franciscans, and Bonaventure in particular, brought to high medieval culture their love of nature and the beautiful.

Louis Bouyer, himself one of the great Christian humanists of our own age, wrote in 1959 a book about Erasmus and his times that remains as good an introduction to later Christian humanism as any I know; another good introduction is the book by Henri de Lubac about the times of Pico della Mirandola. The figures examined in these two studies may well represent the peak of Christian humanism. They include Nicholas of Cusa and Thomas More, the Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, Pius II, and Paul III, Cardinals Pole, Contarini, Barberini, Bessarion, and many others. Protestants, particularly in seventeenth-century England, developed their own tradition, informed by John Donne, George Herbert, and Izaak Walton. When historians use the term in a narrow sense, "Christian humanism" refers exclusively to the Renaissance-often presented as a departure from Christianity, or even anti-Christian. The actual histories of the Renaissance thinkers, however, suggest exactly the opposite. Thomas More was ready to die for his beliefs, Pico went so far as to approach Savonarola toward the end of his short life, and Erasmus stubbornly and ingeniously pursued a course between personal independence and a refusal to abandon tradition. In the Renaissance we witness a new attempt at the Cappadocian gambit: an appropriation of the cultural achievements of the Ancient world, of Platonism in particular, as well as a dramatically heightened presence of the Church in the world of culture. The humanism of the Renaissance was in many ways limited to the elite, and thus differs from the more popular sweep of Medieval efforts. But Renaissance humanism strongly affirmed Christianity's capacity to be inclusive and to reclaim areas in which its universality could shine forth again.

At this point in the course, I would want my students to grasp what was just beginning to become clear to the Renaissance humanists themselves: that there are fundamental commonalities between humanistic culture and Christianity that bring them together objectively, irrespective of the wishes and plans of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Christianity's concept of the Trinity posited from the beginning a tremendous abundance of activities inside God's nature and a great variety of relations with the created world. On a closer look, "cultural production" was in its turn trying to do the same: stake out a territory of freedom, openness, and creativity. Or, even better, it was trying to imitate on a finite scale the infinite creative and gratuitous freedom of God. A humanity created in God's "image and likeness" was following the God of Genesis: incessantly creating new possibilities for the universe in architecture, music, verse, and philosophy. The humanity of Christian humanism was trying to supplement in its modest way the majestic gestures of original Creation.

No less suggestive is Holy Tradition, the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. Briefly put, there is in the Church's life a special connection between stability and expansion, growth and continuity. This, of course, as much as anything else, could serve as a model for the pursuit and the shaping of the beautiful and of intellectual speculation in the secular world on the basis of common outlines. Other commonalities can be easily enumerated. Suffice it to say that they were all wrapped up in two large realities. The first is that all human societies contain a kind of opening toward transcendence; the relationship between the human person and God is constitutive and unavoidable. The second is the equally incontestable fact that culture is derived from and connected to religion: architecture to temples of worship, drama to religious ritual, universities to acquiring sacred knowledge, music, sculpture and painting to the praise of the divine, indeed science and political economy themselves to categories generated by divine stories.

By the end of the eighteenth century, knowledge of these commonalities was widespread and accepted by nearly everyone, even the emerging skeptics, agnostics, and lukewarm believers. It was thus around this date that Christian humanism took on its current form-due in large measure to Chateaubriand, who invented a modern idiom in which the great harmonies of the world could be spoken. In his Genius of Christianity (1803), the beautiful emerges as an indispensable key to any grasp of the true and the good. The amazing appeal of Chateaubriand derives from his ability to turn the privileging of nature (the great innovation at the end of the eighteenth century) into an argument for sacrality, and to legitimize the spheres of the emotional and the aesthetic as valid replacements for those of the rational and the social. Chateaubriand was, of course, not alone. Many German and some English Romantics, especially Coleridge, worked through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries toward forging this alliance between the beautiful and the world of religion. The Swiss Alois Gugler, today virtually forgotten, argued that biblical writing was the prototype of any sublime expression. The Catalan Jaime Balmes engaged directly the philosophies of history of his time, and his contemporary Donoso Cortes argued that politics derives from theology. The Oxford Tractarians altered the religious landscape of England for almost a century. Schleiermacher reinvented hermeneutic analysis starting from religious principles. Lamennais and Gorres demonstrated how crucial religious concepts could operate in the context of social and national preoccupations.

It would be idle to deny the crisis of Christianity in the twentieth century. But I could not allow my students to overlook the enormous resurgence of original intellectual thought and artistic creativity associated with Romano Guardini, Joseph Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Henry Bremond, Jean Danielou, Lubac, Lonergan, Rahner, Claudel, Peguy, Chesterton, Waugh, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy on the Catholic side. Or with Eliot, Auden, C. S. Lewis, Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Vladimir Solovyov, Lossky, and Bulgakov, not to mention Unamuno, Simone Weil, Berdyaev, and Leo Chestov-and these are only a small number among those connected closely with the continuing tradition of Christian humanism. I think, however, that I would concentrate my students' gaze on Hans Urs von Balthasar. His work offers a kind of summa of this revival of Christian humanism, for he tried to bring together the insights of most of these thinkers. Balthasar provided historical outlines of the Catholic tradition in culture, and he strove toward erecting an explanatory system for ordering the rather individualistic views of many of his predecessors. Significantly, his system resorted to the aesthetic, dramatic, and symphonic to communicate a tentative synthesis of Christian humanism.

For the Christian humanists, culture is a kind of tumbling ground for the spiritual, the social, the historical, and the psychological. Culture mediates in some important way between the creaturely and the divine, and aesthetics is the attempt to articulate the opening toward transcendence. If God is seen as primarily the Creator, then the fullest imitation of God must be in creative activity. One purpose of my course in Christian humanism would be to introduce my students to a fundamental strand of Western intellectual history. But a greater purpose would be to reveal to them-and to allow them to discover in themselves-the foundation of all humanism on the insights of Christian faith.

Ted Peters

A theological bomb was dropped on May 18, 1995 at a press conference in Washington, D.C. in which a group of religious leaders-who claim to have collected signatures of nearly 180 individuals representing eighty different faiths or denominations-called for a ban on the patenting of human genes and genetically engineered animals. Advance press leaks led to a front-page story in which the New York Times (May 13, 1995) described the event as "a passionate new battle over religion and science." Along with Jeremy Rifkin, who heads the Foundation on Economic Trends, the signers of the Joint Appeal Against Human and Animal Patenting included Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Abdurahman Alamoudi, Executive Director of the American Muslim Council; Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, Secretary General of the Reformed Church in America; Richard D. Land, President of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Kenneth Carder and Jaydee Hanson of the United Methodist Church. "By turning life into patented inventions," said Rifkin, "the government drains life of its intrinsic nature and sacred value."

During the last year the controversy has begun to take form. Two scientific groups, the Human Genome Organization and the Council for Responsible Genetics, have both taken stands against patenting knowledge of naturally occurring DNA sequences. Under the leadership of Audrey Chapman and Mark Frankel, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington is attempting to broker the discussion between the scientific community, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, and the religious leaders who issued the Joint Appeal. President Clinton is now in the process of appointing a fifteen-member National Bioethics Advisory Commission with two agenda items: the rights of human subjects in research and, you guessed it, gene patenting.

My concern here is by no means simply to defend the practice of patenting intellectual knowledge of the human genome or new life forms. The larger issue is this: when religious leaders enter into this public debate they should employ sound theology combined with a minimal understanding of the science and an accurate knowledge of just what is and what is not patentable. Unfortunately, the theologians tied to the Joint Appeal coalition flunk when measured by these criteria.

The Joint Appeal begins with a clear theological affirmation:

We, the undersigned religious leaders, oppose the patenting of human and animal life forms. We are disturbed by the U.S. Patent Office's recent decision to patent human body parts and several genetically engineered animals. We believe that humans and animals are creations of God, not humans, and as such should not be patented.

Rabbi David Saperstein, one of the coalition leaders, stated at a meeting I attended that we are creatures of God living in God's creation and that it is our responsibility to reduce human suffering and thereby make the world a better place. Now, that's good theology in my book. Why is it ignored by the Joint Appeal? By ignoring sound theology the Joint Appeal is blessing an anti-science and anti-technology philosophy with a vague religious baptism. The New York Times quoted Richard D. Land, one of the key signatories of the Joint Appeal, describing "altering life forms, creating new life forms, as a revolt against the sovereignty of God and an attempt to be God." Quite the contrary, such scientific advance in the service of reducing suffering is a healthy exercise of human creativity.

In addition to unsound theological reasoning and a failure to see how scientific research and medical development can serve our stewardship of creation, the Joint Appeal works with misleading assumptions regarding what can and cannot be patented. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does not patent things that exist naturally, such as the human genome. It grants intellectual property rights on human ingenuity that meets three criteria: novelty, nonobviousness, and utility. What is invented is patentable. What already exists in nature is not. Nor, despite widespread propaganda to the contrary, does the PTO patent human beings or body parts. No persons get patented. This would violate the U.S. Constitution's proscription against slavery. Rather, the PTO grants patents for cell lines and even genomes of transgenic animals that are used in biological research for the purpose of developing medical therapies for genetically based diseases such as cancer, heart disease, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Wilson's Syndrome, and eventually perhaps four thousand other diseases. Such patents draw venture capital for this extremely risky and expensive process of research and development. This is an area of ethical concern, to be sure, and one that deserves careful and informed deliberation by our religious leaders. It does not deserve categorical dismissal.

My deepest regret is that our religious leaders are looking at the smoke and missing the fire. The advance of genetic research is about to ignite a firestorm of new social and ethical problems in our society, and we need to enlist our best theological minds to analyze those problems.

What are the ethical issues that genetics research will ignite or fuel? First is the threat of genetic discrimination. The development of tests for genetic predispositions to disease may identify an expanded category of pre-existing conditions. Because medical care is connected to private insurance and to employment, we can expect thousands if not millions of people to discover suddenly that they are uninsurable and hence unemployable. This could create a new underclass-a genetic underclass-to add to the thirty-five million people already inadequately covered by medical insurance. If religious leaders want to show ethical concern regarding the implications of genetics, here is a problem crying out for immediate attention.

Genetic discrimination will be closely followed by numerous other problems such as selective abortion. As prenatal testing expands, we can forecast wholesale aborting of fetuses that do not meet genetic standards. This will be more than a moral issue for the parents in question. We can expect the insurance industry to demand abortion for potentially expensive babies. The result is likely to be market-driven eugenics. There is also the knotty question of moral and legal responsibility for antisocial behavior for which some individuals have a genetic predisposition. If it can be shown that some persons are genetically predisposed toward alcoholism, aggression, or violence, will society consider them culpable for their actions? What will the courts do when those having committed crimes claim innocence on the grounds that "my genes made me do it"? And how will the logic of responsibility for our behavior help us to understand the implications of the 1993 discovery of what is possibly the "gay gene"?

Other ethical conundrums include the controversy over somatic therapy versus germ line intervention. Should we engage in genetic engineering that will influence the evolution of future generations? Finally, the scientific and legal communities are, as we have noted, already wrestling with the patent issue. On these matters, scientists and even the White House might appreciate some considered deliberation and ethical insight offered by theological thinkers. But if religious leaders are genuinely interested in taking up ethical issues facing our society over genetic research, they must realize that the agenda will be long, serious, and complicated.

Richard D. Land & C. Ben Mitchell

We should be clear at the outset that we applaud and rejoice in many of the existing and potential uses of the new genetics. The treatment and cure of more than four thousand genetically linked illnesses are prima facie grounds for celebrating and endorsing some genetic technologies. Cures for diseases such as cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, and colon cancer certainly merit both praise and the expenditure of significant financial resources.

At the same time, genetic technology is not an unmixed blessing. The potential abuses of genetic technology warrant our careful and considered attention. Linkages between genetic screening and abortion, testing and discrimination, and the supposedly positive and negative aspects of the discredited pseudo-discipline of eugenics represent important subjects meriting wider public discussion. No less important are the implications of patenting human genes and genetically engineered animals. Unfortunately, due to the rapid expansion of the technology, we do not have the luxury of discussing these issues in a leisurely manner or one at a time. The breathtaking pace of technological advancement requires that the cultural discourse and the public policy with respect to genetics must develop simultaneously.

Unfortunately, some policies have been enacted imprudently. Consequently, some policy decisions in these areas will have to be replaced with policies that reflect more careful and mature moral examination, however embarrassing or disconcerting that may be. Bad decisions make bad policy and should not be defended just because they have been made.

In Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), the Supreme Court ruled in a five-to- four vote that a genetically engineered microbe could be patented. Less than a decade later, in April 1988, the first animal patent was issued to Harvard University for the so-called "oncomouse." The patented mouse was genetically engineered to contain a cancer gene making it useful in human cancer research. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company was granted exclusive licensure "to practice the patent." According to the now defunded Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the patent specifically covers "a transgenic nonhuman eukaryotic animal (preferably a rodent such as a mouse) whose germ cells and somatic cells contain an activated oncogene sequence introduced into the animal." That is to say, the patent was granted not only on a mouse and its progeny, but on any mammal that has cancer genes inserted into its genome at an embryonic stage. The mouse now reportedly sells for about fifty dollars.

While whole human beings have not been patented yet, human genetic material is routinely patented. In July 1990, the California Supreme Court ruled that a patient whose diseased spleen had been used to produce patented cell lines had no right to the millions of dollars potentially resulting from the sale of pharmaceutical products derived from his spleen. By September 4, 1993, the National Institutes of Health had filed for patents on 6,122 gene fragments. Although patenting of "gene fragments of unknown biological function" is presently disallowed, who knows what the future holds? Most of this territory is uncharted. Boston University Professor of Health Law George Annas has asked, "Since cloned human embryos are not persons protected by the Constitution and theoretically at least could be as 'immortal' as cloned cell lines, could a particularly 'novel' and 'useful' human embryo be patented, cloned, and sold?" Our candid presupposition is that both humans and animals are more than the sum of their genetic code. In our view, genetic patenting of Homo sapiens is, however, a separate issue in some respects from patenting other organisms. Both are problematic, but for slightly different reasons.

Opposition to patenting human beings and their genetic parts is grounded in the unique nature of Homo sapiens. Human beings, alone among living organisms, bear the imago Dei. "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him" (Genesis 1:27). Human life is therefore sacred and possesses unique value derived from the Creator. Thus, as Philip Edgcumbe Hughes has said, "It is the image of God in which man was created, rather, which pervades his existence in its totality and is the cause of his transcendence over the rest of God's creation." The distinction between human life and animal life, as well as the prohibition against the unjustifiable taking of human life, is foundational to Jewish and Christian anthropology.

Human beings are pre-owned. We belong to the sovereign Creator. We are, therefore, not to be killed without adequate justification (e.g., in self-defense) nor are we, or our body parts, to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Yet the patenting of human genetic material attempts to wrest ownership from God and commodifies human biological materials and, potentially, human beings themselves. Admittedly, a single human gene or a cell line is not a human being; but a human gene or cell line is undeniably human and warrants different treatment than all nonhuman genes or cell lines. The image of God pervades human life in all of its parts. Furthermore, the right to own one part of a human being is ceteris paribus the right to own all the parts of a human being. This right must not be transferred from the Creator to the creature. Imagine a society in which patented human cells, cell lines, and tissues are bought and sold in the scientific marketplace. If such a scenario seems impossible to conceive, consider that Nobel laureate Kary Mullis has bought the rights to extract a part of Elvis Presley's DNA from a lock of the rock idol's hair using a "genetic amplification" technique that Mullis himself invented. Mullis intends to make millions of copies of Presley's genes, according to a September 1995 Washington Post article, "and preserve these minuscule globs inside artificial gemstones, to be made into a line of necklaces, earrings, and other collectables." While Mullis' good sense may be questionable, the commodification of human genes is not inconceivable with only a naturalistic anthropology to guide genetic science.

We argue that the current status of U.S. patent law is incapable of dealing with the potential abuse of human genetic materials. When the framers of the Constitution established congressional power "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries," it was impossible to envisage the patenting of human genetic materials. Even in 1952, when Congress passed the Patent Act, intending patentable subject matter to include "anything under the sun that is made by man," it is unlikely that they foresaw human "biopatents." We, therefore, conclude that human genetic materials should not be patentable matter.

We further maintain that a moratorium should be placed on animal patenting on slightly different grounds. In the case of animal patents, social justice issues rise to the fore. Animals, like human beings, are pre-owned entities. Every part of God's creation is owned by the Sovereign. Most Jews and Christians would, however, interpret the mandate of Genesis 1:28 to permit animal ownership. "God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'" Responsible stewardship of the created order is not only allowed, it is imperative.

Under U.S. patent law, patentable subject matter is defined as "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, observes that "although products of nature may not be patented as such, patents have been issued on such products in human-altered form." This is exceedingly troublesome in our view. Oncomice are, in fact, human-altered forms, but are they really "compositions of matter"? Do they truly constitute an "improvement thereof"?

Philosopher Ned Hettinger has rightly said, "There is a substantial disanalogy between these biopatents and the traditional subject matter of patents. Edison really did invent the light bulb. The Wright brothers created a flying machine. But Harvard did not invent or create the oncomouse. Biotechnicians alter, modify, assist, and manipulate nature. They are not inventors of novel organisms or genes that could be appropriate objects for patents."

In truth, the patent on the Harvard mouse constitutes a monopoly on an entire subclass of animal. Again, according to the OTA report, "The actual patent coverage is broad, embracing virtually any species of 'transgenic nonhuman mammal all of whose germ cells and somatic cells contain a recombinant activated oncogene sequence introduced into said mammal, or an ancestor of said mammal, at an embryonic stage.'" Since there are about forty known cancer-causing genes, the patent covers an indordinately wide variety of potentially patentable mammalian life.

While animal ownership per se is morally acceptable, patenting animals represents an abuse of the notion of ownership, and more importantly, of ownership rights. Patents presently protect the ownership rights of the patent holder. Changes in U.S. patent law were recently made under a new set of international trade rules, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. After June 8, 1995, "the term of a patent begins on the date of issue and ends twenty years from the original filing date," according to an article appearing in the Scientist. Since animals are patentable, biotech companies, universities, or individuals may monopolize entire species or subclasses of animals and, as in the Chakrabarty decision, bacteria, for twenty years. In his superb discussion on this subject in Toward a More Natural Science, Leon Kass opines, "It is one thing to own a mule; it is another to own mule. Admittedly, bacteria are far away from mules. But the principles are invoked, the reasoning, and the stance toward nature go all the way to mules, and beyond."

Bernard Rollin, professor of philosophy, physiology, and biophysics at Colorado State University, maintains that "the Patent Office rushed in where angels fear to tread.... The issuing of patents begs these questions or ignores them. It was a bureaucratic decision made in a value-free context (or value-ignoring context) by an agency that has notoriously avoided engaging the ethical and social issues raised by inventions like switchblades, assault rifles, shock collars, and devices for sadomasochists, and agency of that judges applications only by the formal criteria of novelty, usefulness, and nonobviousness. It disavows concern with issues of safety; danger to humans, animals, or environment; or welfare of animals. The decision is, as it were, a punch line without a joke, an ending without a story. The decision to patent or not to patent should follow in the wake of a democratic social examination of the concerns discussed here, and in the wake of establishing a democratic regulatory mechanism for all aspects of genetic engineering of animals.

The explosions of our capabilities without a concomitant expansion of ethical reflection demands that we resist the temptation to apply unthinkingly every technology the day it is conceived. We need careful investigation of alternatives to human and animal patenting. A blind frenzy of patenting is far more dangerous than a strict prohibition. We need to strive for and cultivate measured judgments and restraint with respect to the new genetics.

Recognizing that a moratorium on patenting genes may put some potential treatments and cures for genetically linked illnesses at risk, we advise that Congress and other policy-making bodies encourage the kind of democratic social examination and cultural discourse about biopatents for which Bernard Rollin calls.

There are, of course, social justice issues beyond these to be explored with respect to biopatents. The fact that on May 18, 1995 some 180 leaders from diverse religious perspectives gathered together to call for a moratorium on patenting is evidence that wider and deeper discussion must take place between science, law, and religion.