The Transhumanist Gospel of Living Death

“Our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10)

Ross Douthat’s final podcast for The New York Times featured a conversation with Bryan Johnson, the wealthy tech bro who has garnered fame for his apostolic labors on behalf of the “Don’t Die” movement. Johnson’s self-proclaimed “war on death” indicates that the human aspiration for transcendence remains vigorous. Unfortunately, like most of his collaborators in the transhumanist project, Johnson has construed this yearning in materialistic terms and devised an ostensible solution that, far from vanquishing mortality, would further enslave man thereto. His lethal error invites a positive Catholic contribution to the increasingly salient discourse around man’s constitution and destiny, for the Church alone possesses the genuine antidote to death and the authentic prescription for integral human flourishing.

In fairness, Johnson’s fundamental intuition is correct. Death—human death, at the very least—is evil. According to the Christian account, it is traceable to the malicious designs of Satan, who lured man away from the blessings of immortality after gleaning an inkling of his noble vocation. “God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the Devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wisdom 2:23-24). Manipulated by the serpent, our first parents diverted their gaze from the bright wellspring of life, the One Who Is, plunging their kind into the gloom of suffering and disintegration.

Strangely, certain Christians have forgotten this datum of revelation. Examining the cosmos with a carnal eye, they view death as basically “natural.” They do not appreciate that “nature” is not as it once was, nor as it one day will be. Alienated from God because of the widespread apostasy of intelligent creation, it has been “subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20), but eventually it will be “set free from its bondage to corruption” and ushered into “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

The problem is that Johnson misjudges the full measure of death, skewing his diagnosis and remedy alike. For death is not a discrete event but a pervasive condition; it is not principally a biological malady but an ontological disease. Death is the defining mark of the “present evil age” (Galatians 1:4), a phenomenon of cosmic scale and import: the irresistible inclination toward entropy, toward nonbeing, experienced by beings who are estranged from the fountain of existence, God.

Because Johnson misjudges death, he fails to grasp that the life he diligently works to extend—the life of this fallen domain—contains a poison seed, which renders it incurably debilitated. Indeed, the life of this eon is a mere shadow of life real and true (1 Timothy 6:19). Reason can discern as much apart from revelation. The philosophers perceived that the more life we gain in this world, the more life we lose, such that he who lives the longest dies the most. The poets, too, noted this paradox, which is why the fables of immortality are tinged with melancholy, ambivalence, and occasionally horror.

The longer a man lives in the flesh, the more acutely he feels the incongruence between the false life he daily endures and the true life he pants after. For the heart is endowed with an apprehension of eternity, compared to which five hundred years seems as ephemeral as five years. “A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4).

What if a man managed to number his age in centuries, millennia? Death—the condition of ineluctable ontological diminution and fragmentation—infects every aspect of our reality. Multiplying his years, a man would multiply his sorrows. Let it be supposed that he remained healthy and prosperous despite the passage of time. Still, he would not be immune to the influence of corruption, to errant appetites and unquenchable cravings, to the exhaustion of chronic dissatisfaction.

Let it even be posited that the transhumanist fantasy comes about and our hypothetical man “succeeds” in detaching mind from body (a situation, curiously, that approximates the traditional definition of death). What terror! For then, undisturbed by the base passions, he would more keenly ascertain the substance of eternity and more painfully realize his agonizing dispersion across the boundless course of time.

He would discover, to his shame, that far from achieving transcendence, far from securing life, he has entombed himself in the charnel house of this saeculum, in which nothing is stable, nothing whole, nothing at peace, nothing at rest; where everything wastes, stretches thin, evaporates; where the dimensions are doomed to collapse and the elements dissolve until there is only a still and frigid void—and, hidden within its silent chamber, the vast spectral prison of Hades.

Confronted by such a monstrous and ravening antagonist, whose proportions are plainly metaphysical, what can man do? By techne and magic—the difference between the two often obscure—he can slow the corruption that afflicts him. But he cannot stop it any more than he can step beyond the walls of the universe. If there is salvation, it must originate from the outside.

Which is precisely the Gospel announced by the Church: God has condescended to remove man from the misery of this age and establish him in the beatitude of the age to come, the ageless age, which is the eternal today of unwavering divine light. For, as the Holy Doctors teach, the life we want is not length of years but plenitude of being, the very life of God, “with whom there is no change or shifting shadow” (James 1:17).

But is such life attainable? It is. For one of our race has already tasted its splendor. This is the thesis of the Christian religion, a thesis whose fittingness appeals to our mythic and religious sensibilities and whose veracity is confirmed by the facts of history (the caviling of skeptics notwithstanding). A particular man plunged into death and emerged again from its black pit—not by resuscitation, returning to the weakness of the fleshly vessel, but by resurrection, His earthen frame wholly transfigured into a heavenly frame by the fire of divinity, such that He participates comprehensively—body and soul—in the power and majesty of God. “Death no longer has dominion” (Romans 6:9).

This pioneer of immortality is, of course, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the incarnate Word, who deigned to become our brother and captain, that He might give to us what is properly His. He descended into our eon, sinking into the depths of death, that He might destroy death and break the tyranny of Satan. Rising from the grave, He put death to death; and now, enthroned in glory, He communicates to those joined to Him a share in the divine nature, to be openly manifested in the eschaton.

Consequently, for the Christian, death is defanged. Annexed to Christ, the Christian has died with Christ and lives with Him in God. When the Christian sleeps after his sojourn here is finished, after his soul-fashioning exertions are consummated at the divinely appointed time and in the divinely appointed manner, then he will wake at last into life. To the exasperated rage of Satan, the saint’s deathday will prove his birthday, God using for good what the devil meant for evil.

We should want to live, since to live is to be, and to be is divine. Johnson gets this much right. But by fastening himself to this false life, he has made himself an evangelist of the transhumanist gospel of living death. For the form of the world is passing away. We cannot escape its demise. We can only attach ourselves to the one who has already explored its extremities and ascended high above its thick and deathly darkness, entering into the realm of unfading day where He shows Himself to be true light and eternal life, the God made man who makes men gods.