Tonti-Filippini's intellectual quest undaunted by physical pain

13 November 2014

The French Dominican philosopher Antonin Sertillanges wrote of the intellectual life that ‘the the man of vocation should put away and deliberately forget his everyday man … the whole complicated entanglement of impediments which block the road to the True and hinder its victorious conquest’.

This noble aim is a struggle for most of us at the best of times, let alone when we are sick, discomforted or in pain. Which is why the work of Professor Nicholas Tonti-Filippini, the prominent and pioneering Australian Bioethicist who died last Friday, was always doubly impressive.

I first met him some years ago when, as a neophyte in the Bioethics world, I attended an annual conference at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, where he was Associate Dean and Head of Bioethics. Tonti-Filippini came across as serious, thoughtful and reserved, not uncommon traits in such a complex and controversial field of research.

But over time it became clear that his work in the field was exemplary of Bioethics in general and of Catholic Bioethics in particular. His writing was reliably measured, considered, and objective – qualities that may not sound impressive and should indeed be ubiquitous in an ideal world, but are in fact the product of painstaking and rigorous intellectual work.

The fact that he accomplished such quiet feats despite the continual pain and discomfort of chronic auto-immune disease, renal failure, and ischaemic heart disease, is an achievement not lost on those who understand both the fragility of intellectual work and the debilitating force of physical pain. A 2011 report in The Age revealed that he slept upright and wore an oxygen mask at night to control pain. His pain had became so bad that he even considered giving up dialysis.

Tonti-Filippini had much more to put away and deliberately forget than most, and he did so more consistently than many. Even when he finally brought personal experience to bear in his contribution to the euthanasia debate, he did so with characteristic objectivity, describing the details of his terminal illness, pain and suffering with impartial care, as though anxious to establish the precise and limited relevance of his personal circumstances to the overall ethical debate.

Whether or not one agreed with his conclusions on a whole range of controversial ethical and bioethical issues, it would be difficult to find a more fair or measured exponent of Catholic intellectual opposition to abortion,

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Tonti-Filippini's intellectual quest undaunted by physical pain

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