Abstract

This essay explores the spiritual crisis of postmodern man contrasting a Christian anthropology with a materialistic, mechanistic conception of human nature and being reflected in bioethics. Bioethics seeks to control general evolution via advances in biology and medical technology, but functions almost exclusively at an impersonal level. It objectifies procedures, numbers people, and addresses general states, and not persons or interpersonal relationships. Bioethics thus takes a global approach to ultra-generalized principles. When bioethics does not express itself in a religious confession or a cosmological theory, it ignores religious conceptions, and tries to rely merely on utilitarian principles and values. Such a mechanistic, one-dimensional anthropology is in essence alien to Christianity. In Orthodox vision, man’s natural state is a state of grace actualized in communion with God and fellow human beings.