Recently I was writing about the anti-mask movement which is the outward sign of the rejection of the universal treatment of covid as though it were the plague.
"I wear a mask, as an amulet, to show I care. The fearful get some sense of security through a general adoption of face coverings though its medical efficacy may be dubious. I do not feel cowed into submission by doing so as some of the anti-mask crowd claim is its purpose.”
Wearing the mask as an amulet signified my sense of it as powerful ju ju with a similar causal connection to the evil averted. The more serious issue is that a vaccine developed from cell lines derived from an aborted foetus is not acceptable to me and as there are no others I shall not be getting the shots. It is not a matter of life and death and getting a bad flu is something that I am prepared to risk. In the dismal lucubrations of one priest I have achieved the status of an exquisite. The idea was that the abortion took place so long ago and was so remote that the good of the vaccine was greater that the evil of the act that facilitated it. Is there a downstream in eternity? I didn't know.
The moral arguments surrounding this issue interest me and the approach of Gilbert Meilaender in a recent article in ‘First Things’ was gentler. Some reasoning seemed strained. Do you refuse to travel on a railroad built by slave labour? Hardly but if you were to look out the window and see a spur line being built by a gang having a whip cracked over them by men with rifles, you might take a bus. Would you spurn an organ donation from a murdered man? Again, by the time the pathologist has done the p.m. there wouldn’t be much to harvest. In any case permission is required for organ donation. If the murdered man had signed such a document then at his death his wishes would be carried out.
He also worries that vaccine rejection will harm the pro-life cause. As if those that do not accept abortion as part of a progressive humane polity would cease to be regarded as anything but mad fanatics.
I looked at Meilaeneder’s treatment of the issue in his ‘Bioethics’ (2013/2020). He sums up his chapter on ‘Embryos: The Smallest of Research Subjects’ by referring to the biography of Augustine by Peter Brown. I read it some years ago and had forgotten completely the part about amulets. The mind is a quare contraption or was it a whisper of illumination?
“Discussing some sermons of St. Augustine, first preached in the year 397 but newly discovered in 1990, Peter Brown notes that Augustine was often required to preach at festivals of martyrs. At Augustine’s time the cult of the martyrs—the “muscular athletes” and “triumphant stars” of the faith—continued to be of profound importance to ordinary Christians. Nevertheless, Brown suggests that in these sermons one can see Augustine quite deliberately underplaying the martyrs’ feats in order to emphasize instead God’s everyday work in the heart of the ordinary believer. Those average Christians did not doubt the courage of the martyrs, but they questioned their own ability to accomplish anything even remotely as heroic in the fabric of their everyday lives.
In response, Augustine tells his hearers: “God has many martyrs in secret. . . . Some times you shiver with fever: you are fighting. You are in bed: it is you who are the athlete.” And Brown comments:
Exquisite pain accompanied much late-Roman medical treatment. Furthermore, everyone, Augustine included, believed that amulets provided by skilled magicians (many of whom were Christians) did indeed protect the sufferer—but at the cost of relying on supernatural powers other than Christ alone. They worked. To neglect them was like neglecting any other form of medicine. But the Christian must not use them. Thus, for Augustine to liken a Christian sickbed to a scene of martyrdom was not a strained comparison.7
It must have been a hard renunciation indeed; yet, we see here a way of life for which relief of suffering—however greatly to be desired—is not the overriding imperative. We can learn from these Christians to break the hold on our own, understandable, tendency to believe that nothing can count for more than medical progress in the relief of suffering.
That god will fail us, and we must therefore break its hold on us before, like all idols, it breaks our integrity. We can do this only as we remind ourselves that, however greatly we value the betterment of life made possible by medical research, we have no overriding obligation to seek such betterment. Research brings betterment of our life; it does not save our society—or us. Noble goal that it is, medical progress is always optional, and, to cite Hans Jonas yet once again, there is “nothing sacred about it.”
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