![\"Thanatology\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/521\/2015\/04\/Thanatology.jpg\")
<\/a>It is Good Friday, and we are reminded of the day that promise gave way to despair.\u00a0 A weak, powerless man hung before a crowd to be beaten, mocked, and killed.\u00a0 All the rhetoric of salvation and eternal life reduced to naked, quivering flesh.<\/p>\n
To the modern mind, the death of Christ is evidence against Christ: What kind of God would create a world where human beings must endure such suffering?\u00a0 As Flannery O\u2019Connor observed in her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann<\/em>, \u201cOne of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him.\u201d \u00a0In place of God, we try to eliminate suffering through our own efforts.<\/p>\n The Catholic novelist and essayist Walker Percy rekindles O\u2019Connor\u2019s concerns in his 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome<\/em>, his sequel to Love in the Ruins<\/em>, a mystery surrounding a group of scientists in a future America who attempt to eliminate human suffering through medicine and euthanasia.\u00a0 The protagonist is the psychiatrist (or \u201cpsyche-iatrist\u201d) Dr. Thomas More, a self-described \u201cbad Catholic\u201d and one of the last remaining doctors to treat the ailments of the soul rather than simply prescribing medications. \u00a0In the past, Tom was respected in the medical community for his discovery of heavy sodium ions that can sedate the region of the brain from which human malady flows.\u00a0 He is currently disgraced, however, after his recent time spent in prison for prescribing amphetamines to truck drivers to help them stay awake on long trips.\u00a0 When he returns to his home in Louisiana, he discovers that these scientists have begun a pilot program, \u201cBlue Boy,\u201d in which they had been drugging the local water supply with heavy sodium ions, all for their ameliorative effects on society\u2014to reduce child abuse, wife battering, violent crime, AIDS, and teenage pregnancy. \u00a0At the same time, Tom observes strange behavior in his patients such as simplified linguistic capabilities, idiot-savant recollection of random facts, and especially their animalistic, perverse sexual behavior.\u00a0 Rather than simply suppressing human malady, the scientists have depersonalized the subjects and numbed the will, therefore removing human freedom.\u00a0 Furthermore, Tom uncovers the scientists\u2019 new Qualitarian Centers that are euthanizing the sick, elderly, and even \u201crejected\u201d infants, all in the name of social stability and compassion for the suffering. (For a fuller summary, click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n So what do the sexual perversions of Tom\u2019s patients have to do with the scientists\u2019 efforts to euthanize the sick and suffering?Percy\u2019s future society illustrates what John Paul II called \u201cthe civilization of death,\u201d which he juxtaposes to the \u201ccivilization of love.\u201d\u00a0 In his 1994 Letter to Families<\/em><\/a>, written in honor of the Year of the Family, JPII describes how civilization of love is formed by an integral humanism that is rooted in the \u201cgreat mystery\u201d of the sacrificial love that flows from Christ\u2019s spousal act on the Cross into the love of man and woman.\u00a0 By \u201cspousal act,\u201d he is referring to the \u201cspousal meaning of the body,\u201d that is, that man and woman are created in the image of God and endowed with the power to express love: \u201cprecisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift and\u2014through this gift\u2014fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence\u201d (TOB<\/em> 186).\u00a0 In the Theology of the Body<\/em>, JPII teaches that authentic love between husband and wife must be of this sacrificial nature.\u00a0 Therefore, through an understanding of love as a complete gift of self, we see how both sexuality and suffering can be rooted in the same sacrifice: Christ\u2019s death on the Cross.<\/p>\n While integral humanism is rooted in this great mystery, the humanism of the \u201ccivilization of death\u201d that Thanatos <\/em>demonstrates is formed by scientific rationalism and is therefore opposed to all mystery.\u00a0 It is characterized by selfish individualism rather than the selfless, authentic love that characterizes integral humanism.<\/p>\n One of the best ways in which Thanatos <\/em>illustrates this contrast between the two civilizations is when Tom More has sexual intercourse with his wife Ellen for the first time since his release from prison.\u00a0 Tom describes the experience in a way that reveals its animalistic and de-personalized manner, which is how he realizes that Ellen too been drugged by the sodium ions.\u00a0 Their sex is evidently unsatisfying to him as he says, \u201cWe have never made love so. Her head is turned and I miss seeing her face\u201d (Percy 55).\u00a0 In this instance, Tom still retains the goodness of personalism <\/em>that is represented in the civilization of love, as he desires to recognize his wife in her completeness and bond with her in love.\u00a0 Ellen exhibits individualism<\/em>, as she seems only to be following instinct and satisfaction of desires.\u00a0 Her display of animalistic tendencies is indicative of a creature that has no will, no freedom through which to give herself to her spouse and her spouse alone; thus she and Tom are depersonalized in their act because she is unable to receive Tom as \u201csomeone unique and unrepeatable, someone chosen by eternal Love\u201d (TOB<\/em> 188).<\/p>\n Furthermore, Tom and Ellen\u2019s sexual relations bring out another important aspect of the mystery of personhood: freedom of will.\u00a0 The Theology of the Body<\/em> explains that love rooted in self-gift makes human beings distinct from animals; for in order to give oneself to another, one must first possess his or her own self.\u00a0 John Paul II draws from Gaudiem et Spes<\/em> to explain that this ability of self-gift is only possible because \u201cman is the only creature in the world that the Creator willed \u2018for its own sake,\u2019 and \u2018this same man, willed in this way by the Creator from the \u2018beginning,\u2019 can only find himself through a disinterested gift of self\u201d (TOB<\/em> 187).\u00a0 As man is the only creature to whom God has given self-mastery and freedom of will, he can choose either to use this freedom to give himself to others and to receive them as persons (personalism), or he uses freedom as the license to do whatever he wants, treating others as an object for his pleasure or use (individualism) (Letter to Families<\/em>\u00a022).<\/p>\n Later in the story, Tom also discovers that John Van Dorn, one of the supporters of Blue Boy, is simultaneously operating a boarding school as a secret testing facility for his theories on sexual liberation that surpass even Freud.\u00a0 In this second example of sexual perversion, Percy shows how the rationalism of the civilization of death further diminishes the mystery of personhood, as Dr. Van Dorn\u2019s sexual education teaches the children a lie about their personhood: that human action is determined by \u201clibido\u201d rather than the will that man controls through his spiritual freedom (TOB<\/em> 547).\u00a0 One of the major issues in The Thanatos Syndrome <\/em>is Percy\u2019s \u201cover-sexualized\u201d writing, especially his detailed descriptions of lust, sexual perversion, and in this case the sexual abuse of children.\u00a0 As Tom fights to expose the school for what it really is, however, we see that Percy is really grasping at what John Paul II claims in his Theology of the Body<\/em>: the idea that sexuality is intimately related to the self and therefore is central to our self-knowledge, relationship with God, and human relationships within society.\u00a0 In Thanatos<\/em>, he demonstrates that rightly-ordered sexuality is the first thing to be lost as the civilization death encroaches.<\/p>\n In Letter to Families<\/em>, JPII warns that this depersonalized view of man that the proponents of scientific rationalism hold is especially dangerous when it makes humans expendable.\u00a0 The scientists justify their Qualitarian Centers as respecting \u201cthe rights of the unwanted child not to have to suffer a life of suffering and abuse, the right of the unwanted aged to a life with dignity and a death with dignity\u201d (Percy 216).\u00a0 JPII writes that this way of thinking leads to the tendency to consider the human \u201con the basis of its similarity to all the other bodies present in the world of nature, bodies which man uses as raw material in his efforts to produce goods for consumption\u201d such as in experimentation on embryos and fetuses (Letter<\/em> 37-8).\u00a0 In his fight to close the Qualitarian Centers, Tom More answers JPII\u2019s call for the family to embrace suffering by making room in the community for \u201cpeople with physical or psychological handicaps, of whom the so-called \u2018progressive\u2019 society would prefer to be free\u201d (Letter<\/em> 36).<\/p>\n