Personalist Bioethics: Foundations and Applications by Elio Sgreccia (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 319 It is noteworthy in this regard that this book originated as a dissertation under the direction of Fr. Brian Daley, for whom Martens also edited a festschrift. The balance that Martens’s Origen proposes between scholarly expertise and spiritual exercise reminds one of Brian Daley. Similarly, Martens’s book is an exemplar of scholarly balance: he does not propose controversial theses but instead seeks carefully to integrate various aspects of Origen’s project into a coherent whole. The book itself is much like the Origen whom it recommends. This is high praise. The drawback perhaps is that the controversial aspects of Origen’s project come across a bit muted: for instance, his subordination of the Word to God the Father, his account of preexistent souls and of the pedagogical restoration of all souls, and so forth. Martens discusses these aspects of Origen’s thought, but he does not grapple with the problems that thereby arise for Origen’s theology of the apostolic rule of faith. Others, however, have taken on the task of situating Origen’s thought vis-à-vis the Church’s doctrine, and so Martens’s book serves us well by giving us Origen the scholar who, without compromising his scholarship, found in the very practice of Christian scholarship a path of configuration to Christ Jesus. MATTHEW LEVERING University of Saint Mary of the Lake Mundelein, Illinois Personalist Bioethics: Foundations and Applications. By ELIO SGRECCIA. Philadelphia: The National Catholic Bioethics Center, 2012. Pp. 838. $79.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-935372-63-2. The breadth and depth of research in Elio Sgreccia’s Personalistic Bioethics make this translation of his impressively multidisciplinary work a great contribution to bioethics in the English-speaking world. A synthesis of the history of medicine and science, and of philosophy and theology as they influenced the science of bioethics, this tome is primarily meant to be a critical analysis of false solutions to major ethical and scientific problems facing humanity today. The author proposes a Thomistic philosophy of nature and metaphysics as the foundation for an authentic bioethics. He observes that the moral problems flowing from a secular bioethics have been caused by the advancement of science coupled with the belief that practical solutions for bodily ailments are such high goods that they rise above any ethical norms. In other words, for adherents of a secular bioethics the frontiers of science would 320 BOOK REVIEWS be without ethical boundaries, thus permitting the destruction of embryos, or fetuses, or even the elderly in the name of progress. As Sgreccia brings out in the last chapter of the book, precisely because of the desire for progress in science, bioethics emerged in the twentieth century as an attempt to protect man’s fundamental desire for transcendence in accord with his nature. The culture war arises from the conflict between the quest for efficiency and quantitative analysis on the one hand, and a natural desire for meaning in the universe and true fulfillment of the human person on the other hand. One can understand this intellectual turmoil as a conflict between a philosophy of human value based upon man’s God-given nature versus a philosophy of dominating, controlling, and manufacturing human nature according to the adventures of limitless scientific discovery. Much of our moral cultural war arises from the fact that the scientific method has lost a sense of teleology and has led to a freedom of decision without ontological principles. This is autonomy without conscience and is based upon a philosophy of doing or having over being. Throughout his work Sgreccia constantly warns scientists and ethicists about these problems. He demonstrates how the laws of many countries have led to a false notion of “quality of life” and even a false idea of man’s being in “the image of God the creator.” Sgreccia asserts that without an ontology of man, science can recreate man in ways that have harmed and will continue to harm the human person. The first chapter deals with the beginnings of bioethics as an offshoot of moral philosophy and theology. Sgreccia reminds us that the term “bioethics” came from Van Rensselaer Porter of the United States in 1970...