Fragments of the Body in Christian,Bioethical and Social Imaginaries

Introduction

There is a need for new ways to think about dead bodies and fragments of bodies in religious ethics. As biomedical research expands into the areas of personalized medicine, big data and regenerative medicine, it increasingly depends on cells and tissues derived from patients for information about the relation between genotype and pathology, to examine responsiveness to drugs, or to create immortalized cell lines for ongoing therapies. Despite this growing importance of tissues and cells, ethical questions on their derivation and use remain unsettled, including questions surrounding what kinds of consent are necessary to protect the donor. ¹ Western religious and legal traditions recoil at imagining the body as property, the most obvious idiom in a neoliberal society, but mainstream bioethical models of deidentified samples or informed consent fail due to both practical difficulties and a lack of justification as to why the dead should maintain control over their tissues.

In contrast to these theoretical accounts, Michael Banner forcefully argues for a turn to a study of practice; by engaging ethnography, Christian ethics can develop an accurate account of how people think about the body and, by turning to history, can respond with practices and concepts drawn from the Christian tradition. Arguing from ethnography and an Augustinian understanding of death, he suggests that the desire for the remains of loved ones relates to the practice of mourning, a conclusion that allows him to avoid what he calls a superstitious understanding of the connection between person and corpse. ² Yet ethnographic and popular accounts of organ donation, tissue transplants and human cell lines reveal that there is a widespread belief in our culture that the essence of the person continues in the body part even after death.

This concern over superstition not only conflicts with ethnographic data but also denies long-standing Christian practices regarding the dead. Drawing on the historical work of Caroline Walker Bynum, I suggest that the practice of the cult of relics in early and medieval Christianity as well as in contemporary Christian Churches like Catholicism offers productive insights for understanding concerns over fragments of the body. ³ This practice suggests an intimate connection between the person and the body even after the soul has left the body or the fragment has been separated from the body, an understanding that supports the need for a strong form of consent for the use of these materials and that gives shape to more inchoate popular understandings of the corpse. Moreover, this practice provides a positive understanding for how God can use the fragments of the deceased body to bring healing, while also suggesting that, for healing to occur, these fragments must be tied to a particular person and her history.

Bioethical and Legal Approaches to Cells and Tissues

Human tissues have become an essential resource for biotechnology. Tissues can be used for treatments such as skin grafts or retinal transplants, but they are also important for research in fields like pathology and genetics. Through the techniques of regenerative medicine, isolated cells can take on an independent existence, surviving in labs long after the person from whom they were taken has died. These technologies engender a new relationship to the body, one prefigured in organ transplantation but accentuated because of the different ethical valence of organs as compared to tissues. In organ donation, a whole organ, which has clear symbolic importance, is a charitable gift to heal a discrete patient. ⁴ Different organs can go to different individuals, but each is a gift. In contrast, researchers can turn tissues and cells into immortalized cell lines that exist for an indefinite period and may contribute to an indefinite number of experiments or treatments. Moreover, researchers are not only using samples that they obtained specifically for research, but also samples originally used for diagnostic purposes and stored for either the future care of the patient or ongoing research. Thus, bioethicists frequently confront leftover products of the process of medical care rather than initial donations.

Our society’s conceptual resources have not yet caught up to these developments, as shown by the failure of the most common understandings of and approaches to these body parts to gain widespread acceptance. Biobanks and bioethicists have sought to address these issues by severing samples’ ties to patients by simply deidentifying samples. If no one knows to which person a tissue belongs, the information arising from experiments cannot harm the donor. Even more importantly, the question of informing patients or families of risks, such as susceptibilities to cancer, discovered through genetic screening, does not arise. Beyond concerns over autonomous consent or justice regarding profits derived from these tissues, deidentification of tissue samples is becoming impractical. Contemporary research in personalized genomics requires making connections between genetic risks and actual pathologies through the tools of big data. The value of a tissue sample lies in knowledge of the donor: lifestyle, ethnic background, pathologies, and so on. As Hannah Landecker explains, ‘In the structure of reasoning behind the use of the cell line, there is an absolute necessity for a link between in vitro and in vivo life to be maintained; the information gleaned from cells is useless unless it eventually relates back to the biology and pathology of the patient.’ ⁵ It is only through integrated knowledge of the background of samples that these samples become useful for prediction, making deidentification counterproductive. Moreover, because of the expansion of available data, deidentification is becoming impossible: investigators can reconstitute the identity of the source of a tissue with the tools of big data. ⁶ Ethicists can no longer avoid addressing the relationship between a person and her tissue.

In a market-based society, another way to relate the person to the dead body or extracted tissue is the idiom of property. Some commentators appeal to a property framework to argue that body parts should become objects of sale for reasons of economic efficiency, ⁷ although viewing the body as a commodity raises dangers of exploitation based on socioeconomic status. ⁸ Some feminist social scientists and ethicists have argued that the body and bodily materials should be seen in terms of property rights understood through a Marxist analysis of labour. Such a framework, they maintain, would safeguard patients, especially female patients, from exploitation by scientists and biomedical corporations. ⁹ Yet, neither Marxist nor capitalist property models have gained general approval because they contradict legal and religious traditions. Historically, the common law rejects the idea of the body as property, viewing it instead as quasi-property, which gives families certain rights, such as to burial, but not others, such as of sale. ¹⁰ Importantly for the present argument, current property law fails to support patients’ ties to tissues. The law in many US states regards fragments of the body extracted through medical procedures as waste, such as faeces or cut hair, which become res nullius, belonging to no one. Scientists can take these waste products and turn them into property, such as a cell line, through their work, but these conversions raise concerns over exploitation. Patients’ compensation is only for the time and inconvenience of the recovery of tissue, such as blood draws, rather than for the tissue itself.

Elements of the Christian tradition also reject the property paradigm. In the Catholic tradition, God has ultimate sovereign power over the body. While individuals have control over the body as stewards, as with all other created goods, the modern concept of property envisions an absolute control and disposition over the body that humans cannot have in a created world. God’s sovereignty rules out seeing the body as property in the modern sense, as either the property of the individual, who can sell or do whatever he wills with the body, or the property of society or other individuals in society who make use of others’ bodily fragments. ¹¹ A simple property paradigm is insufficient for both secular legal and religious traditions.

In ruling against the property paradigm, the majority in Moore v. Regents of the University of California provided another way of understanding the relationship between patients and tissues, focusing on the fiduciary nature of the doctor–patient relationship. ¹² This emphasis fits well with the predominant bioethical concern with informed consent. Consent forms are the most stereotypical of bioethical solutions, but these also provide grounds for dispute. Some bioethicists favour broad consent forms, ones that force patients to accept or reject their tissues’ use in all research projects, because of the unknown directions that future research may take and because it reduces the bureaucratic load on biobanks. ¹³ Others suggest tailored consent forms, which either specify the kinds of research that can be performed on the samples, allow the donor to choose from a menu of possible options, or allow the donor or his family to provide ongoing consent for the research projects in which the sample is used. ¹⁴ In this last dynamic consent process, the donor or his family become more like participants in research.

These approaches all have their strengths, especially the last, to which I will return at the end of this article, but, if argued in a secular framework, all of them share a fundamental weakness identified by John Harris and Banner. None of them provides a theoretical justification: ‘The insistence on the need for consent relies on some assumptions about the human body which are hidden, not revealed, by that mere insistence.’ ¹⁵ In a discussion of the Alder Hey scandal in which a hospital retained organs and tissues of children without parental consent, Harris argues that a person has no interest in what happens to her dead body. ¹⁶ The person is already dead, and thus it does not matter what happens to her body. Harris argues that the fragments of dead bodies should be open to use by researchers because that allows them to provide the greatest good to society. ¹⁷ Any other concerns over the integrity of the corpse are ‘absurd’ and ‘scarcely rational’. ¹⁸ While Harris ignores problems of exploitation, assumes that all research is beneficent, and runs against broader concerns for autonomous consent, it is difficult to find a rejoinder from a secular perspective.

Ethnography, Practice and Theology

As the preceding discussion suggests, society’s understanding of the postmortem body is far from clear. Michael Banner argues that it is therefore necessary to explore secular and Christian understandings of the relationship between the person and the dead body or tissue if Christian ethicists are to develop better theoretical conceptions of and practical approaches to this relationship. Anonymization, property or consent remain too theoretical to actually prove therapeutic in the lives of either Christians or non-Christians, as they are divorced from actual practices surrounding the body that might give them meaning. Ethicists apply these concepts to quandaries such as organ donation without integrating them into the whole of Christian life. ¹⁹ For this reason, Banner suggests engaging the ethnographic method as a way to gain a ‘psychologically and socioculturally realistic’ account of how people live and act. ²⁰ This rich anthropological account of current situations read in light of the Christian tradition allows theologians to prescribe therapies, therapies that themselves come from historical or contemporary practices of the Church. As Banner suggests, it is only if religious bioethics looks ‘to describe the moral life as it is shaped by a religious imagination’ that it will help illuminate particular issues. ²¹

While Banner engages anthropology around a number of issues, the most relevant one for this article is the Alder Hey scandal. For him, the struggles between the parents of the dead children whose tissue samples were withheld and the doctors who withheld them reveal a fundamental conflict over how to understand the dead body. ²² More importantly, the medical staff and Harris’s incomprehension of the parents’ concerns suggests the need for a richer understanding of the relationship to the dead body. Turning to history for a normative account, Banner finds this richer understanding in Augustine’s reconfiguration of Christian practice toward the dead, which he sees occurring in the aftermath of the death of Monica, Augustine’s mother. As opposed to earlier Christian approaches of either joyful hope for the deceased taking their place in the kingdom of God or resignation in the face of death seemingly derived from Greco-Roman philosophy, Augustine saw death as an evil, making it appropriate to mourn the dead. ²³

In De cura pro mortuis gerenda, Augustine relates the importance of care for the deceased’s body to the Christian practice of mourning. In response to Paulinus of Nola’s questions about the practice of burying the dead near the remains of martyrs, Augustine argues that burial does no good for the dead, since, as will be discussed below, God can reassemble the scattered remains of the dead on the last day. ‘All these things – the care of the funeral arrangements, … the pomp of the ceremonies – are more for the solace of the living than an aid for the dead.’ ²⁴ Banner interprets this aspect of the Christian tradition to mean that the practice of mourning is natural and good and that care for the corpse is important in this work of mourning. ²⁵ He proceeds to expand this insight beyond the Christian tradition through ethnographic studies of mourning. Read through the lens of the Christian imagination exemplified by Augustine, these studies show that in a variety of cultures, including contemporary London, people confront grief in part through the bodies and graves of the deceased. ²⁶ The importance of the remains of the dead in the practice of grieving stands in opposition to medical and some philosophical understandings of the dead body. This analysis allows Banner to support the demands of parents for the return of tissues retained at Alder Hey as an understandable aspect of their practice of mourning.

At this point, Banner takes another step that is more problematic. Eager to respond to Harris’s charges of irrationalism, he attempts to exclude understandings of the dead body that he terms superstitious, tying the importance of the body only to the practice of mourning. ²⁷ He never explicitly defines what he means by superstitious, but he seems to mean any understanding that would suggest that the mourners still thought the dead body had a connection to the soul or consciousness of the dead person, ‘the belief that the dead continue to exist as sentient beings who are somehow aware of the activities performed by the living on their behalf’. ²⁸ Augustine argues that the dead do not know what is happening in this life, but only hear of it from the recently dead, ²⁹ so burial near a saint does no good for the dead unless it encourages prayer for the dead from the living. ³⁰ Thus, Augustine downplays the importance of the cult of martyrs. ³¹ In this work, he downplays the importance of the body itself, focusing instead on despising this life and body and conquering the love of the flesh. ³² From this normative conception of the body, Banner does not see the fragments of the corpse having any importance beyond their contribution to mourning.

The anthropologists he cites do not always agree with this interpretation, having ‘a regrettable enthusiasm … for discovering superstition’, so Banner is forced to reinterpret their ethnographic data against them. ³³ Despite the anthropologists’ interpretations, he argues that mourners seemingly speaking to their loved ones at graves in a London cemetery do not actually think that the deceased can hear them. Instead, they are just working through feelings through speech. The dead are like characters in a novel who are meaningful to mourners not concerned over their ontological status. ³⁴ Despite the anthropologists’ interpretation, he argues that Greek widows distraught at the exhumation of their husbands’ bodies for deposition in an ossuary, a ritual that ends a five-year practice of care at the gravesite, do not actually think of this removal of the body from the grave as a new death, but merely see it as the end of a practice of mourning. ³⁵ In the light of Augustine’s writings, Banner reinterprets ethnographic data to avoid what he terms superstition.

This procedure may not be the best way for religious ethicists to use ethnography. ³⁶ First, through participant observation, the ethnographer gains access to tacit knowledge and meanings embedded in practices, meanings that may not be easily encapsulated in a quotation of an informant. The reader must place a certain trust in the ethnographer’s interpretation of data. If there is no surplus to interviews, then there is no reason to draw on ethnography rather than a battery of qualitative interviews. Second, the field of cultural anthropology increasingly recognizes and respects alternative understandings of ontology. Instead of reinterpreting their informants’ practices through alternative frameworks such as structuralism, functionalism or materialism, many ethnographers attempt to take alternative worldviews at face value. This ontological turn takes many forms. Joel Robbins hearkens back to an older anthropological project seeking the possibility for better ways to live in alternative ontologies like those provided by religion. ³⁷ Eduardo Vivieros de Castro argues that Amerindian perspectivism differs from relativism by its engagement with the body. ³⁸ Bruno Latour’s object-oriented ontology allows anthropologists to explain alternative constructions of the world through practices engaged by people and objects. ³⁹ Most importantly for this argument, many anthropologists of religion discuss the need to take the spirit world seriously. As Edith Turner argues,

members of many different societies, even our own, tell us they have had experience of seeing or hearing spirits … Mainline anthropologists have studiedly ignored the central matter of this kind of information … and only used the material as if it were metaphor or symbol, not reality, commenting that such and such ‘metaphor’ is congruent with the function, structure, or psychological mind set of the society … But the neglect of the central material savors of our old bête noire, intellectual imperialism. ⁴⁰

It is thus surprising to see a theologian chastise anthropologists for seeing ongoing ties between the living and the dead. Rather, theologians should support movements in anthropological theory that increase grounds for conversation.

Returning to the material Banner presents on the case at hand, it is clear that his reinterpretation is problematic because much of the ethnographic material Banner cites supports the idea that people find a tie between the person and her remains. The participants in Lesley Sharp’s ethnography of organ transplantation desire to meet the recipients of their dead loved one’s organs, not only as a way to assuage grief, though it is surely that, but also because they believed ‘that transplanted organs can retain the life essence of their donors’. ⁴¹ In turn, the recipients report that they change after receiving organs, sometimes in ways that correspond to the attributes of organ donors. ⁴² Sharp discusses the frequency of what she calls ghost stories surrounding transplants – omens or the appearance of the donor in dreams. ⁴³ Banner discusses the relationships between donor families and recipients in terms of fictive kinship, interpreting it through the normative lens of the early Christian social message as showing the malleability of family ties. ⁴⁴ Yet people act upon these ties because of their perception that, in some way, a part of their actual family member lives on in the organ recipient. ⁴⁵ These ties come into being because of this material connection, as shown by the lack of such relationships to non-blood relatives of the donor. To describe this belief merely in terms of grieving or fictive kinship denies the self-understandings and ontologies of those participating in these studies, since much of contemporary popular opinion apparently believes that the person continues in the parts of the body.

To take another example, one not cited by Banner: cell lines in labs also raise concerns over the continuation of the person. Researchers derived the HeLa cell line, an essential tool for cell biology for over sixty years, from a cervical tumor biopsy from Henrietta Lacks. As numerous commentators have discussed, the story of this cell line is one of many ethical problems: failures of informed consent, failures to notify the family, privacy violations, possible economic exploitation, and racism. ⁴⁶ Yet the family is also troubled by problems of recognition and the ontological status of the cells. They want the world to know that these cells are from their mother and that her body has contributed to saving countless lives. They speak of these cures as resulting from their mother’s sacrifice.

Moreover, Lacks’s daughter is concerned about the continued connection between HeLa and her mother. After hearing details of experiments using the cells, she dreamt of her mother combined with plants or experiencing the symptoms of diseases, suffering panic attacks in the wake of these visions. ⁴⁷ It may be tempting to dismiss these concerns as superstitious or the musings of a scientifically illiterate population, except for the fact that scientists engage in the same verbal slippages between artifact and person when discussing HeLa cells. While biologists affirm that the cells are mere lab material, like any other reagent, they also refer to them as ‘her’, personifying the cells. A medical journal’s obituary for George Gey, who derived the cell line, said that his work ‘secured for the patient … as HeLa, an immortality which has now reached 20 years’. ⁴⁸ Journalists writing on HeLa cells repeat this same trope, asking how much Lacks would weigh including all her cells. In these stories, as Landecker notes, ‘the woman and the cells are immortal – the woman through the cells’ life and the cells through the woman’s death’. ⁴⁹

The Lacks family speaks of Henrietta’s essence continuing in these cells. Rebecca Skloot suggests that the family draws on the Christian tradition to interpret the connections between person, cells and immortality. Specifically, Gary Lacks, Henrietta’s cousin, read Skloot New Testament verses referencing the resurrection of the body. ⁵⁰ Thus, the practice of Christian mourning is not the sole lens through which to understand Christians’ engagement with these new technologies. It is necessary to identify other elements of the Christian tradition that reinforce the link between the person, bodily remains and the resurrection.

The Practice of the Cult of Relics

The problem with Banner’s concern with superstition, if I am interpreting it correctly, is that it sweeps away the most prominent practice used by early and medieval Christianity as well as contemporary Roman Catholicism to come to terms with the linkages of the dead body with the soul of the departed, which is the cult of relics. This practice embedded in Christian history provides a different normative lens through which to interpret contemporary ethnographic data and suggest therapies. The most prominent historian of this practice is Caroline Walker Bynum, who describes it as central to late antique and Western medieval Christianity. ⁵¹ Since the early Church, the body of a saint has been a locus of veneration and healing. These martyrs’ bodies were important to Christians because martyrs had been joined to the body of Christ through their sufferings. Though initially this cult centred on the martyrs’ bodies in tombs, soon bishops and abbots began to ‘translate’ these bodies to other churches and monasteries. ⁵² Through a complex series of movements and cultural shifts, the manipulations of saints’ bodies changed from the mere translation of whole bodies to the fragmentation and distribution of parts of these bodies to churches, monasteries and private collections.

Christians venerated saints’ relics because they believed that they were in some way still connected to the soul of the saint in heaven, and the late antique Church had a rich understanding of the ongoing connections among the communion of saints. ⁵³ Having attained heaven, these saints could intercede at the throne of God for the rest of the Christian community, ⁵⁴ and the fragmented body in which the martyr suffered was an especially important physical locus at which to importune the saints’ intercession for God’s actions. These intercessions frequently resulted in physical healings, with saints helping to impart their wholeness to others through their prayers.

The cult of relics gives concrete form to the vaguer (but less objectionable to modern ears) understanding that the mortal remains retain some of the dignity of the person or the image of God. This dignity remains because the body itself is in some way formed in the image of God and also because of its intimate linkage to the soul, which, at least in the Augustinian tradition, more fully bears the image of God. ⁵⁵ Some remnant of that image remains in the body after the soul has departed and death has severed the body–soul unity, even in fragments of that body.

In the case of the saint, this continued connection is evidenced by bodily fragments’ tie to healing, a tradition which draws on Scriptural accounts of healings, where touching the clothes of Jesus or Paul is enough to heal the ill or disabled body. ⁵⁶ The power given by the Holy Spirit resided even in the touch of clothing, so saints’ clothes became obvious relics, but also the bodies that clothed the soul. Even if the body in question were fragmented, the whole saint would still be considered present in each part of the body, no matter how small. For some authors, these fragments of the body remain united to the saint’s soul that rests with God. Victricius of Rouen says that ‘he who lives is present in his relics’, and Peter the Venerable affirms that ‘the bodies of the saints live with God’. ⁵⁷ These beliefs were intimately tied to the concrete practices of the cult.

The bodies of saints are not important merely because of their past connection to the soul of the saint, but because they will clothe that soul again on the day of the general resurrection. The tradition continually affirmed the idea that the same dust that formed the person’s earthly body will form, though transformed in some way, the person’s resurrection body, despite the practical and philosophical difficulties of that belief. This doctrine, affirmed in the earliest Creeds, argues that human immortality will not be that of a disembodied soul because the body is essential to the self. For the Christian, the body is part of the person rather than a substrate separable from the mind. On the Last Day, souls will rejoin bodies so that the blessed may enjoy beatitude as a psychosomatic whole, an argument developed most fully by Thomas Aquinas. ⁵⁸

This doctrine is reflected in burial practices of all the dead, not just the saint. The body should be treated with respect because it was the home and instrument of the soul and because this body will be the soul’s home again. Burial is a work of mercy. Catholic authorities have opposed burial practices that fragment the body because such practices seem to deny belief in this ultimate wholeness, and funeral practices both express and shape beliefs. In one medieval controversy, Boniface VIII wrote the Bull Detestande feritatis in 1299 forbidding the practice of disembowelling the corpse, severing it into pieces and boiling it to prepare the parts for burial in multiple locations, ⁵⁹ through which wealthy Christians hoped to increase the number of prayers offered for their soul in purgatory and also to be buried near family members and locations important to them during life. ⁶⁰ Popular practice and official exceptions overcame ecclesiastical resistance, but still expressed theological reservations about such rituals. ⁶¹ Similarly, cremation was long rejected as a practice that failed to properly express Christian belief about the body. Even today, though the Catholic Church no longer proscribes cremation, the Order of Christian Funerals forbids the scattering of ashes, enjoining that they remain together, either buried or placed in a mausoleum or columbarium. ⁶²

As the cult of relics and the approval of organ donation shows, this rejection of fragmentation is not definitive. Using fragments of the body to help others does not deny the resurrection but is instead an act of charity. God can overcome any fragmentation to reassemble the body, a teaching many Patristic and medieval theologians saw affirmed in Jesus’ promise that ‘not a hair of your head shall perish’. ⁶³ Christian theology and iconography have drawn on Enoch 61:5 to envision the day when ‘the fishes of the sea’ shall ‘cast up the bones which they have devoured’. ⁶⁴

In much of the theological tradition, it is the exact same matter that makes up the body that will be joined together again in the Resurrection body, which shows a relation between the corpse and the soul even beyond the special case of the saint. As Gregory of Nyssa describes it, the soul

remains after dissolution in those very atoms in which she first grew up, and, like a guardian placed over private property, does not abandon them when they are mingled with their kindred atoms … Should the signal be given by the All-disposing Power for these scattered atoms to combine again … all these, once so familiar with each other, rush simultaneously together and form the cable of the body by means of the soul. ⁶⁵

In this account, everyone’s soul, not just the saint’s, maintains a connection to the body after death. Gregory’s account here is even more remarkable because ‘this emphasis on the reassembly of the decomposed body’s scattered parts … seems inconsistent with the rest of Gregory’s anthropology, which emphasizes … the transformation of our corporeal form’. ⁶⁶ Gregory subscribed to an Origenist account of the Resurrection that relied on Stoic conceptions of seminal reasons that emphasized bodily change. This Origenist account allowed for a greater transformation of the Resurrection body. ⁶⁷ Bynum notes that such examples of great theologians fitting the reassembly of the body incongruously into their larger schema shows the importance of the connection between soul and material body for the Christian imagination, one that defied full theoretical explanation. ⁶⁸

Lessons for Bioethics

The resurrection of the body has always been an embarrassing Christian doctrine, as much to Greek philosophy as to today’s science. Similarly, the cult of relics has caused controversy ever since worship occurring in a cemetery disgusted the Romans. Even within Christianity, the tradition’s foremost theologians have failed to provide a consistent and convincing understanding of either of these doctrines, and these doctrines have certainly given rise to some extravagant speculation as to the Resurrection body that should not become part of contemporary theological discourse. It is impossible to develop a full account of these eschatological doctrines in the space of this article, and there is Scriptural warrant for thinking that our grasp of them will always be limited. ⁶⁹ At the level of practice, the lack of ethnographies of the contemporary practice surrounding relics in those congregations that continue it restricts this analysis.

The goal of this article is more limited: to understand at a general level the meaning of the dead body that the practice of the veneration of relics and doctrine of the resurrection of the body depend on and support. This practice suggests that there continues to be a strong link between the person and the body as a whole or as fragments, even after death. This basic understanding correlates well with the understanding of this relationship revealed in ethnographies. As troubling as this concept of the dead body and isolated tissues and cells of the body may be to contemporary science and philosophy, it seems to agree with popular conceptions of the dead body and body fragments. It is because a large portion of the contemporary public holds something like this understanding that many parents are concerned about the retention of tissues and organs of their children, that organ donors and recipients form connections, and that some people see the person continuing in a cell line. The public merely lacks the language and rituals to state and enact this understanding that the Christian tradition provides. The practice of relics gives greater depth to the concept of some part of the image of God remaining in the body in a way that is not completely alien to public understandings of mortal remains. In the remainder of this article, I attempt to show how this interpretation can inform contemporary action.

While this understanding of the body may seem merely to give grounds to restrict disrespectful uses of the body, it actually supports using fragments of the body in medicine. To return to the historical cult of relics, it is precisely as bodily fragments that relics contribute to healing. As they are distributed throughout the world, they themselves as fragments serve as a principle of unity overcoming space and time to bring the community of the Church into one, a community of prayer and mutual support. As principles of unity and wholeness, these fragments sometimes also aid in the search for bodily or psychological healing. Yet these fragments have these potentialities precisely because they maintain a connection to the history of a specific person, the saint, to that person’s soul, and to that person’s relation to her community and her God. Personal history and relations are embodied, and these aspects continue to be actuated through the body as corpse. Healing becomes the ongoing gift of the person still engaged in a community of charity.

Applying these insights to current perplexities over tissue and cell culture technologies, it is not so much the fragmentation of bodies that raises problems, as the bodies of the saints were fragmented into multiple relics. Nor is it the instrumental use of these fragments in health care that raises concern, since relics were certainly used as instruments in the healing process. Nor is it even the economic trade in these fragments that should be the most important worry, as there was a lively trade in relics, despite the condemnation of their sale in canon law. The problem comes when the medical system treats fragments in these ways, as instruments and items of trade, while denying that these body parts have a connection to a specific person – in the Christian tradition an essential connection of body and soul that will be revealed again. Practices that turn bodily fragments into deidentified lab material or property deny this connection of body and person. It is this denial of connections between bodies and persons that allows for the exploitation of bodies that our communities do not value. These bodies become mere material to be used for replacement parts to repair the bodies of those who can afford it. Science itself reveals the problem of such an approach. To be useful for scientific research, the bare materiality of the body must be informed by personal, family and social history.

Recognizing this link between person and body is difficult in the contemporary corporate regime of biomedical science because this model of science demands that bodily material be stripped of its personal characteristics, treated as abandoned, so that it can be transformed into property. The difficulties of dealing with the personal body even when one wants to recognize these connections can be seen in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) current approach to HeLa cells. When researchers published the DNA sequence of these cells in 2013, they realized that this sequence would reveal genetic information about the Lacks family, violating their privacy. ⁷⁰ The NIH’s solution was to include the family on a board overseeing the use and release of this information. ⁷¹ While the family sought for years to influence research using their mother’s cells, it was only once the understanding of her bodily fragments was translated into the idiom of information and privacy that the family’s concern could be recognized. Unfortunately, these rights to input do not extend beyond research involving the DNA sequence, and the NIH does not plan to extend this model to other cell lines. A more expansive recognition of the cells’ relation to a person and a family would force society to change the way it uses these cell lines and tissues in both scientific research and the biotechnology industry. Such an inclusion of personal or familial perspectives is not impossible, but it would require work on the part of researchers and funders.

Conclusion

It is for the above reasons that Christians should affirm models of consent that allow the person or her family to participate in ongoing research projects involving fragments of the body. Such models provide society with a way to recognize the continued connection of the body with the person even after death or fragmentation, an understanding that ethnographic research shows is widely shared in our society. Of course, such models allow room for casuistry. There is still much to negotiate about emergency exceptions for public safety, individuals and families comfortable with broad consent, or how much input an individual or family should have. Affirming such models as ideals for which society should strive does not lead necessarily to overly restrictive ethical or policy guidelines. Yet having such an ideal would avoid the dangers of exploitation to which the images of the body as property or social resource could lead. The veneration of relics shows a concrete practice that can instil a Christian vision of the body shared in some ways by much of the population in the habits and perceptions of practitioners and patients. ⁷²