Despite including fundamental theoretical problems, of a metaphysical and theological

nature, the theme of death remains first of all an anthropological issue. It belongs to
practical philosophy, concerning human life and human behavior. The question of the
meaning of death is related to the question of what is human nature and "what" comes after
death. Such questions are strongly related to the fundamental question of philosophical
anthropology: what is the human being? The anthropological problem cannot be analyzed
thoroughly if we neglect the reality of mortality. Like all other living beings, the human being
aspires to self-preservation triggering biological defense mechanisms against death, but, at
the same time, he or she is the only living being "to be aware of death" as the inescapable
end hanging over one's own life. Human life is always planned and lived bearing death in
mind. Because of this, it is impossible to confront any anthropological problem without
taking death into account.

I. The Mortal Condition of Human Beings and the

Belief in Immortal Life
Death is part of human life. Therefore, we can understand why most human efforts to
comprehend who the human being is result in the question of the meaning of death. The
variety and contrast among the answers that have been provided over the centuries reveal
that death is at once an indisputable fact and a mystery summarizing the mystery of human
life (cf. Schmaus, 1953). Death is interpreted as the end of the historical form of an
individual human life. By interpreting freely Aeschylus' Prometeus, Gadamer (1993) sharply
defined the meaning of the condition of "uncertainty" surrounding the moment of death.
Prometeus, "friend of mankind", glories in the advantage he obtained for human beings by
taking the knowledge of that moment away from them: before then, men used to live in
poverty and in idleness in the caverns; it was only by ignoring the end of life that they could
create that solid cultural system that distinguish them from the other living creatures.

II. Biblical and Theological Reflections on the Nature

and Meaning of Death
1. Death in Sacred Scripture: Philosophical Consequences of Biblical Teachings. Sacred
Scripture performs a sort of "de-mythification" of death, which certain mythologies went as
far as considering a divinity. Death represents a truly "human event," i.e. a reality that, as
the Revelation declares, does not belong to the original plan of God for creation. Death
enters the world after human sin (cf. Gn 2,16-17 and 3,19). God did not create death
(cf. Wis 1,13). He exerts his sovereign dominance over it (cf. 1Sm 2,6). God does not desire
the death of the impious, but his conversion and life (cf. Ez 18,32; Ez 33,11). Mortal and
sinful men and women are the object of God's love (cf. Rom 5,7-8), and even by dying they
do not lose their original relationship tying them to their Creator (cf. Wis 3,1-3).

In biblical language, "immortality" does not refer mainly to a biological characteristic, but it
concerns mostly the dignity and uniqueness of the human being as the "image of God." In
such an image, there is something that makes "living for ever" as congenital to the human
person: immortality is God's gift received by human beings at the moment of their creation,
a kind of reflection of the imperishable divine image in them. As a consequence, sin
represents the dimming of such an image, to live no longer in accordance with it, to refuse
life and choose death. Sacred Scripture reveals a wide analogy and an explicit convergence
existing between life and divine law, between death and sin (cf. Dt 30,15-20; Prv 8,35-
36; Rom 6,21-23).

By interpreting the biblical accounts on creation, especially the one contained in the Book of
Genesis , the Church's teachings associated human death with original sin. After that sin,
men and women began to have a relationship with God that is different from the one they
had "in the beginning." The consequences of this sin they hand down to the all mankind (cf.
DH 1511-1512; Gaudium et spes, n. 13). Our ancestors, having been the subject of divine
promises, were invited to accept life as God's permanent gift and not to doubt the original
goodness of their Creator. Immunity to death depended on their behavior before God's
commandments. The first sin was an attempt to build their life in an autonomous way, trying
to behave independently from God, and forgetting that life was possible only by recognizing
it as God's gift. The price paid was the loss of immunity: "for dust thou art and unto dust
shalt thou return" (Gn 3,19). Human beings, who came from the earth, will return to the
earth with death. Death is the painful return, in the opposite direction from the act
of creation, to the earth. After original sin, all men and women are subject to the law of
death and no human effort can obtain a full victory over it. The metaphor, of Aristotelian
origin, where medicine is compared to a victorious strategist, means only its ability to heal
from certain diseases, thus putting off the moment of death. And yet, living awareness of
death (meditatio mortis) is the first step towards salvation.

III. The Concept of "Natural Death": a Critical

Evaluation
1. Does "Natural Death" exist? The concept of "natural death" is today identified with death
due to old age. In the technically advanced societies we have a better medical control over
the causes of premature death, while an ever increasing number of men and women reach
the natural threshold of life. The numerous successes of human intelligence, which include
a social and political organization aimed at obtaining better conditions for individual and
collective life, together with the progress of the medical science and widespread and
qualified health care, push ever further the limits of human life. The limit set for the ageing
of the human body, is fixed at around 110-115 years (cf. Migone, 1997, pp. 60-61), and is
considered as non-pathogen from a biological point of view. It is a natural event, which is
distinct from death caused by accidents, wars, homicides, and disease. An "unnatural"
death is that attributed even to doctors, when people believe they have not been able to
keep a person alive, or to society, which has not assured the conditions that allow every
single individual to live a full life. Generally speaking, only unnatural death is considered as
something fearful and painful. However, it is part of the human way of approaching the
subject of death to think that it is not important whether the sudden or progressive collapse
of the body is caused by other people or by the blind course of nature. It is always a
"violent" act (cf. Elias, 2001). Thomas Aquinas already affirmed that death is at the same
time "natural," because it is inevitable, and "unnatural," because everybody fears it (cf. De
malo , q. 5, a. 5 ad 17um ).

However, there are contradictions and ambiguities in the concept of natural death, strictly
connected to those "naturalistic" visions of death, typical of modernity, in particular starting
from Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Hegel (cf. Sciacca 1959, pp. 51ff ) or, more recently,
commented by Heidegger and Sartre (cf. Polo 1991). The sociologist W. Fuchs (1969)
affirmed that the structures of industrial society pushed human beings to eliminate the
magic-archaic vision of death as an eternal constant factor - a vision which allowed us to
understand human mortality and the vanity of every worldly activity - by attributing more and
more importance to the concept of natural death. The latter should be considered as
"rational death," characterizing a period, such as ours, of in-depth knowledge of nature and
dominion over it. Fuchs' theory, which is very complex as regards the analysis of the social
factors that would make the image of natural death generally valid, highlights how, in the
industrial society, two kinds of instruments are at work: the instruments of dominion over
nature, which support the idea of natural death, and the instruments of violence, which
cause premature death, due to scientific as well as social progress. Because of the
preponderance of technological imperatives or of complicated research logic, the progress
of medicine, oriented towards the removal of every "non-natural" cause of death, will
produce forms of death that we cannot define as a serene decease. According to this
author, the concept of natural death represents an important acquisition of the
contemporary lay vision of human life, while Christianity, believing in the afterworld and
having an ethical resistance to develop a complete technical-biological control over nature,
would represent one of the main forces that could stop its success.

IV. The Problem of a "Definition" for Human Death: is

Death an Event or a Process?
1. Methodological Developments in Determining the Timing of Death. A tradition supported
by common sense considers the death of a human being as an event to be set
chronologically, in the view of precise legal executions. The term "death" is generally used
in different situations compared to those for which the term "dying" would be employed: if
death is seen as an event, we refer instead to dying as a process, in which the different
organic components deteriorate progressively with different rhythms.

Since the technologies currently used to keep active the functions of the heart and lungs in
some patients in the "state of death" can be used also as an artificial support to those
patients who are seriously injured, this has led some people to think that death is a process
without net limits. Consequently, the declaration of death should be judged more as a
convention than as a clinical-biological fact. As if life, with methods that are still unknown,
could continue indefinitely artificially.

The uncertainties regarding the moment of death (and sometimes the skepticism about the
possibility of determining it) derive from the fact that we do not understand the difference
between clinical death and biological death, between death of the whole body, as a single
subject, and death of the body in all its parts. If "clinical death can be defined as an event
which marks the cessation of integrative action between all organ systems of the body"
(Lamb, 1985, p. 71, cf. also Collins, 1980, p. 3), by "biological death" we mean the
irreversible cessation of the "functions" of all the body organs: the latter is actually a
process that lasts in time, even after the most important organs have stopped working, and
it involves all the tissue cells and organs of the body, up until their decomposition. Since the
biomedical technology makes it now possible to prolong the functions that are typical of
certain vital organs, even in very serious clinical conditions, one might wonder: what are the
organs that are really "essential," i.e. if you lose them, the whole body will die? What is the
"moment" when it is correct to declare a patient "dead," if at the same time some individual
organs still work from a biological point of view, and they are potentially useful for
transplants? When is it morally and scientifically correct to extract organs to transplant them
in order to keep another person alive?

V. Death as a Human Act

To think of death as a "human act" is a strictly philosophical-theological problem, related to
ethics, which points out that human death is something specific, that cannot be reduced to
an event as the object of empirical observation. Death is certainly a natural event, subject to
the power of inescapable biological laws, but it is nonetheless "determined" by the
personality of the individual human being who experiences it. It is the most private act in life,
the only one where no human being can be replaced by others. Nobody can take upon
oneself the death of someone else. Yet we can "die for someone else" and sacrifice our life
for him or her in a specific situation, but this never means that we avoid the death of whom
we want to help. Properly speaking, I cannot claim "I am dead" as I cannot look at myself in
such a condition, although now, as a living person, I can imagine how I will be when I am
dead. On the contrary, in philosophical terms, the statement "I am dead" is not a
contradiction and means "I am dead while living" (cf. Sciacca, 1959, p. 128). According to
the Italian philosopher Sciacca, "living death" means to live and act in the knowledge that
we will die. In other terms, it is "to realize that death itself, which is always involved in our
life, is the pre-eminent act, the absolute act that may be fulfilled in this very instant"
(ibidem , p. 33). To live thinking about death means devoting our own life to changing the
world, ourselves and others, so that our life can achieve those values through which we
fulfill ourselves, body and spirit, as a way to immortality (cf. ibidem, p. 47).

VI. The Experience of Death in Contemporary Society

Western culture subjects the experience of death to a privatization process that keeps it at a
distance from public life. It is no use saying that many people oppose this tendency. In fact,
even atheists still keep some rites such as a Christian funeral ceremony, commemoration of
the dead, visits to the cemeteries, purchasing and care of the family vaults. Maybe
veneration of the dead is the only display of "religiousness" which equalizes believers and
atheists of all today's confessions. Philippe Ariès (1975), a French historian, says that the
"expropriation of death" is a modern phenomenon that is totally new. Human beings have
been the complete master of their own death, together with its attendant circumstances, for
millenniums. In fact, the dying person had to "preside" his or her death and not be deprived
of it. When someone was in poor health, the doctor had to inform him or her quite
straightforwardly. The room of the dying person turned into a public place, when death
approached. Nowadays there is a discrepancy between the "bookish death" and the "real
death." The first one shows its loquaciousness in literature, philosophy, social science and
the media, while the second one is quiet and embarassing. Death we take into
consideration "has to be moved away from us as soon as possible, maybe saying that
science and technology can deal with it better than human mercy" (Natoli, 1997, p. 81). We
are likely to leave the hopeless sick alone in health facilities, because the moral support of
their families is often lacking, even when health facilities are available (cf. Cattorini, 1996, p.
6). The fact that death is too often anonymous in hospitals and clinics shows there are deep
anthropological and ethical side effects. The public nature of the event that ends life is not
the only thing that disappears. In fact, the dying person is separated from his or her home
environment and the people who are emotionally involved in this death stifle their authentic
feelings. According to Gadamer, this separation introduces death into the technological
cycle of industrial production (cf. Gadamer, 1993).

VII. Ethics of Death: the Euthanasia

As a human, not merely an individual act, death emphasizes its intrinsic ethical dimension.
It is not that death in itself is ethical, but the way we die, we live and prepare ourselves for
our own death (cf. Lain Entralgo, 1985). If death were the object of an ethical choice, we
could possess it; instead, death does not depend on our will. We know we will certainly die,
but we do not know when we will die. The disease announces the time of death, and
therapeutical care can be considered as a resistance and fight against death. Genuine
human reaction in front of death is a mixture of resignation and acceptance. It is the
resistance against an illness that should not exist, of which one wants to be cured, and the
acceptance of human limitations that make this will vain. To be aware of such necessary
interplay between resistance and acceptance helps to avoid the double risk of excess of
therapeutical cares and euthanasia.

VIII. Concluding Remarks

In today's culture, according also to the heritage deriving from philosophical thoughts that
originated in an atheistic existentialism, negative conceptions of death as the absolute and
irreversible end of life, or as the definitive destruction of human hope, prevail. Since the
human being is not reducible to a mere empirical level, previous conceptions are not, strictly
speaking, a conclusion of a scientific kind, as much as expressions of a philosophical nature
that leave the fundamental question concerning the final destiny of the human being and of
the cosmos, unresolved. The progressive affirmation of a materialistic comprehension of
human life, which is a consequence of a loss of faith in immortality, that remains the
common characteristic of all great religious traditions, has led us to recognize, especially in
the Western and industrialized world, an "eclipse of the values of life" and the diffuse
presence of a "culture of death" (cf. Evangelium vitae, nn. 11-12). Actually, the fruit of such
a culture is also a certain "eclipse of death," in the sense that this death is often emptied of
its human, personal, and relational characteristics, and finds itself facing technical and
pragmatic categories.