INTRODUCTION: BEFORE AND BEYOND THE SCHOLASTIC–ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT

There is a continuity between the commitments of the Scholasticism that emerged in the thirteenth century and the Enlightenment project of providing a discursive rational account of proper moral probity. Although the Enlightenment attempted to give an account of morality undirected by revelation and ecclesiastical authority, thus involving a substantive break with previous moral and political assumptions, the Enlightenment as well as Scholasticism share a substantive commitment to reason's abilities to provide a universal account of morality. Bioethics as it took shape in the 1970s reflected a late-Enlightenment attempt to provide a secular surrogate for the religious moral authorities that had once guided the West (Engelhardt 2002). Secular and Western Christian bioethics have drawn on philosophical assumptions regarding the capacities of discursive reflection. They both have a penchant for identifying moral truths with the deliverances of systematic moral reflections. In contrast, Orthodox Christianity lives in an understanding of morality unaltered by Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment.

Orthodox Christianity understands the moral life to be a whole, a way of life within which one can enter into union with God. Orthodox theology, morality, and bioethics identify this way of curing the soul of self-love such that distinctions among dogmatic theology, moral theology, and liturgical theology threaten to distort and disorient the lived appreciation of theology as a practice transcending the confines of the academy.