Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion of Liberation, used to say: “I see what you see, but I see more!” He meant that the Catholic Christian engages with the same reality set before everyone else, but more deeply. Christianity provides corrective lenses, and once we receive them, a whole new world appears before our eyes. We see everything the secular world does, but we see more.
Giussani’s words have been on my mind during the Easter season. In particular, they have been on my mind as I consider the culture’s creep (or technological leap) towards transhumanism in light of the Christian mystery of the Resurrection.
The transhumanist attempts, through innovative technology, to postpone or overcome biological fragility and curate a kind of eternal body. Jesus’ Resurrection, through divine ingenuity, definitively overcomes death and opens to all humanity the possibility of eternal life — in bodily form. The transhuman tries to go beyond the human via the less-than-human and at the expense of what is human, while the Resurrection realizes something far beyond the transhuman, and it does so in a divine act that makes humanity more human.
Transhumanism
Diego Lopéz Marina’s recent article summarizes an interview with Argentinian philosopher Mariano Aslo on the ethical implications of transhumanism. Asla describes transhumanism as a scientific and cultural movement that aims to “create a new species” by blurring the boundaries between the biological and artificial through the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, computer technology, and cognitive science. The use of such technologies will modify human biology to make people “healthier, more intelligent, more empathetic, and have longevity.” We will live more fully — and perhaps forever — via innovative technologies capable of overpowering our pathetic humanity.
In her book Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton describes transhumanism as a techno-utopian movement, one which“worships human potential and its technological manifestations, including artificial intelligence.”[1] American transhumanism is the “Californian Ideology,” a “mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and countercultural libertarianism,”[2] which would free the autonomous mind from the feeble body.
Those clever enough to transcend their [bodily] limitations — in part by developing skills that allow them to join the increasingly disembodied ranks of the “virtual class” of developers, programmers, and scientists, rather than remaining alongside the drone-like drudges of industrialism — have the inherent right to extend that freedom as far as it can go.[3]
As Burton puts it, their goal is to hack their way through clunky traditions and bulky biology to produce a new human being, “an optimized self, a finely-tuned machine.”[4] Ethical concerns pale before this awesome task. We just need to be chipped and we will no longer need our bodies to do basic tasks. Rather than searching far and wide for a fountain of youth, we will make it ourselves. Transhumanism would build Babel, except it no longer cares about a stairway to heaven. It will create its own capitalistic paradise here, where individual gain and efficiency reign.
Without explicit reference to transhumanism, Matthew Crawford describes its general ethos as an antihumanism. Antihumanism “has various elements,” Crawford says, “but the common thread is a low regard for human beings, whether on the basis of their fragility, their cognitive limitations, their latent tendency to ‘hate,’ or their imminent obsolescence with the arrival of imagined technological possibilities.” Transhumanism paints a bleak picture of humanity as something broken, and therefore justifies an elite whose capital and technological prowess would “fix” it.
The Resurrection
Christianity aligns with transhumanism’s basic desire, its longing for the eternal and its sense that humans should live forever. It also aligns, to a degree, with the transhumanistic belief that something within our very being prevents us from attaining eternity. Whereas transhumanism roots the problem in biology and the solution in technology, Christianity sees sin as the source of the problem and God as the only possible solution. We cannot dig our way out of the hole, no matter how advanced our excavators. For the Christian mind, tech cannot solve the fundamental problem, because the fundamental problem is relational — not technical or even biological. Again, Catholic Christianity sees what everyone else sees, but differently. And radically so.
Benedict XVI points out that the Resurrection illuminates the whole of Christian thought. “The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead,” Benedict XVI says, echoing St. Paul.[5] Without the Resurrection, Jesus may have offered us some interesting religious factoids and Christianity would have been a merely intellectual project, a belief system. If he is risen, everything changes: “Only if Jesus is risen has anything really new occurred that changes the world and the situation of mankind. Then he becomes the criterion on which we can rely. For then God has truly revealed himself.”[6]
Jesus was not resuscitated only to die again at a later date. No. He is risen. And his Resurrection is not simply for the elite. It is either a universal event — one affecting all of us — or it is nothing at all: “If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised…But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:16, 20). He died once, for all, and lives, now, as the Way by which we might also live (cf. Rom 6:10–11).
The Resurrection opens a new dimension of human existence. It is the in-breaking of “an entirely new form of life…a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming, but lies beyond it — a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence…In Jesus’ Resurrection a new possibility of human existence is attained that affects everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future, for mankind.”[7] Benedict XVI explains that while human beings were created for immortality, only with the Resurrection does the immortal soul find its eternal “bodiliness.” The Resurrection opens up the possibility of living forever. It takes place in history, at a precise moment in time, yet it explodes history’s horizon and transcends it. The Resurrection introduces a new kind of life to us, and Baptism initiates us into it. As Paul says to the Romans, “We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). In his April 19, 2006 General Audience, Benedict XVI quoted St. Augustine on this very point:
Let us consider, dear friends, the Resurrection of Christ: indeed, just as his Passion stood for our old life, his Resurrection is a sacrament of new life....You have believed, you have been baptized; the old life is dead, killed on the Cross, buried in Baptism. The old life in which you lived is buried: the new life emerges. Live well: live life in such a way that when death comes you will not die” (Augustine, Sermo Guelferb. 9, 3).
What the transhumanists want — namely, eternal life — Jesus’ Resurrection provides, but again, differently. His Resurrection is no exercise in eternal individualism, and what conquers death is not the isolated, individual man or the disembodied mind, as it is in transhumanism. Resurrection does not pertain only to individuality, but to relationality.
In this vein, Benedict XVI concludes that “immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind.” To this, he adds, “Christ’s transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are thus able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life.”[8] The body is that which separates one from others. It places boundaries on a person; it solidifies individuality. However, the body is also that bridge from one to another via shared materiality. The body communicates the otherwise incommunicable. Body is, at once, boundary and bridge. But, in the Resurrection, the boundary is blown wide open and the body becomes a sheer means of communion.[9] The possibility of eternal relationality, eternal communion marks an ontological leap that creates a “new space for being in union with God,” and, as such, with one another.
Beyond Transhumanism
The Resurrection stands before and beyond the transhumanist position. The Resurrection resolves the human problem not by denouncing or destroying humanity, but precisely by raising it to its full stature from the inside.
Unlike transhumanism and its reliance on human tekhnē (craft, skill), in the Resurrection, the Christian sees God’s tekhnē at its finest. In the Cross and Resurrection, God himself breaks through the prison-bars of sin and death in the person of Jesus Christ who lives forever. This properly eschatological reality, however, can be encountered now. In and with Christ — in relationship with him — human beings experience liberation from the sin and guilt which cripples them and damages their relationship with God and others. They gain a foretaste of eternal communion.
The Resurrection is the Incarnate Word’s ultimate biohack. But, it is one that does not despise or destroy humanity itself, but, rather, exults it (see Col 3:1–17; Gal 3:27–28). The Resurrection transcends the bounds established by sin and opens for humanity a new horizon. The Resurrection reveals something far beyond transhumanism — what transhumanists could never fathom for themselves — and, in so doing, it reveals precisely what it means to be human. To be human is to be capable of union with God — to be in union with God. Resurrection restores such union, bodily, and makes the possibility of such union an enduring reality ever before us.
Dr. Brad Bursa is director of evangelization for the Stella Maris Family of Parishes in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Notes
Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020), 191.
Burton, Strange Rites, 190. Here, she is quoting Barbrook and Cameron’s 1995 article “The Californian Ideology.”
Burton, Strange Rites, 190.
Burton, Strange Rites, 167.
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, trans. Vatican Secretariat of State (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 241.
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, 242.
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, 244.
Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, 274.
See Joseph Ratzinger, “The Eucharist: Heart of the Church,” in Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works: Theology of the Liturgy (vol. 11), edited and translated by Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2014), 288–89.