Incarnate Transcendence in an Age of Transhumanist Counterfeits

It’s no secret that we are inhabiting a moment in which digitalization is reshaping our world at an unprecedented pace. Day by day, screens, algorithms, and infrastructures of virtual reality are becoming the dominant frame through which we move through the world.

Meanwhile, we find ourselves strangely detached from the world right in front of us. We scroll endlessly, overstimulated and numb, filling our days with distractions under a cultural regime intent on pulling us out of our bodies and into the cloud. We are more connected than ever—and less in contact with reality than at any point in memory.

This phenomenon is not confined to the young. Even those of us who came of age before smartphones find ourselves fraying under the relentless onslaught of algorithmically curated chaos accessed through the portals we cradle in our hands for a disconcerting number of our waking hours. But we weren’t made for this. And, as a result, we are becoming increasingly estranged from the real world in front of us, while society at large is experiencing an eclipse of what it means to be human.

The question is no longer whether technology shapes us, but what kind of human beings it is shaping us into.

Entrenched as it has become in our lives, this problem calls for a sustained, multifaceted response. Happily, a newly-published document from the Vatican’s International Theological Commission has contributed to this effort. My aim here is to sketch several of its central insights and carry them forward in a constructive way.

Competing paths to transcendence

We are creatures who require roots: bonds of place, practices, and embodied belonging that ground us in reality and orient us toward communion with others in ways that are not digitally manufactured. As these anchors fade from society at an unprecedented rate, it is little wonder that a mounting sense of dislocation is prompting some to suspect that something in the dominant cultural vision of human fulfillment has gone deeply awry. And thus, we now stand at a crossroads where a decisive decision is required. As the ITC puts it, each of us is confronted with a fundamental choice between two rival paths that we might take toward transcendence: the illusory path of self-divinization, and the true path of divinization through grace and self-sacrifice, the way of theosis through kenosis.

The illusory way: transhumanism and posthumanism’s quest for self-divinization

Immersed in the virtual world of screens and algorithms, the first vision of transcendence seeks fulfillment in the attempt to sever itself from the human condition—rejecting the body and striving to overcome the limits that define creaturehood.

As the ITC notes, this “negative” path of transcendence takes the form of a technological dream: the hope of becoming self-creators who use science to generate an evolutionary leap that leads us beyond the human condition itself (§22). Yet this, the commission comments, leads not to the desired elevation or enhancement of man but the “replacement or suppression of the human.” The ITC identifies this tendency as a contemporary form of “neo-Gnosticism”: a drive to secure salvation by freeing the self—now reduced to an interior reality—from all dependence and limitation, cut off from the body, the cosmos, community, and history (§61).

Today, this perennial Gnostic temptation finds explicit expression in two related but distinct movements, which the ITC ventures to define: transhumanism (which seeks to overcome the biological limits of the human condition through technological mastery) and posthumanism (which goes further by questioning whether there is any enduring human nature to preserve—collapsing the distinction between human and machine and envisioning a future where humans have become cyborg hybrids).

Given this, the ITC points out that the transhumanist and posthumanist projects ultimately represent “an existential expression of escapism” which, in its presumptuous quest to transcend humanity, ironically results in its opposite: dehumanization, the loss of the human person (§§15, 128). In response, the commission insists that embodiment is essential to the identity of the human person, and therefore incapable of being set aside without fundamentally distorting what it means to be human (§134).

The anthropological crisis at the root of transhumanism and posthumanism

A shared logic underwrites the ideologies of transhumanism and posthumanism. As Pope Francis memorably wrote, our world finds itself increasingly under the sway of a “technocratic paradigm.” The contemporary West is animated by a way of inhabiting the world like a machine bent on the destruction of all limits. In this brave new world, the human person—disembedded from community, culture, history, and the natural order—is re-conceived chiefly as a sovereign consumer in a marketplace of unbridled possibilities.

The ITC extends the thought of recent popes, contending that what we are facing is a breakdown in how we perceive and receive reality. Echoing Aquinas’s teaching that errors concerning the natural world tend to give rise to a false metaphysics, it underscores that present-day fractures in our society “affect our relationship with the Mystery of the origin and ultimate purpose of human life.” Elaborating upon this point, the commission writes, “When human beings reduce created nature (persons, the cosmos) to matter to be transformed, they no longer manifest the glory of the Creator, but take His place” (§50).

This excerpt exposes a mentality that has grown blind to creation’s sacramentality, the ancient Christian vision of its character as an epiphany of divine love. Having endured this loss, the human person and the broader created world are now treated as raw material for manipulation rather than as gifts ordered toward communion.

Indeed, with rapid digitalization intensifying in everyday life, we have been conditioned to have machines solving our problems effortlessly, and we have grown accustomed to appraising everything (people included) in terms of metrics, speed, and productivity. As the ever-expanding artificial world increasingly mediates our own self-understanding and our relationship with the real, the ITC cautions that we easily come to assume that human freedom, emboldened by technological power, assumes the role of arbiter of reality (§33–34).

Perhaps above all, our present moment is marked specifically by an anthropological crisis: an epochal upheaval in which what is at stake is nothing less than the question of what it means to be human. In this light, the ITC contends that the pressing question is not how to overcome our creaturely limits, but what it is that makes our existence authentically human in the first place (§§19, 56). In the prescient words of Pope John Paul II, the crisis at hand stems from the absence of an “adequate anthropology”: the need for an account of the human person that does justice to the unity of body and soul, the meaning of the sexed body, and man’s vocation to communion through self-gift.

In this light, what is required is the recovery and enactment of a robustly incarnational anthropology amid the coercive, disembodying pressures of our society’s prevailing technocratic order.

The true path to transcendence: embodied divinization, a work of grace

Here, the Church’s rival vision of transcendence comes into view as the only authentic path to fulfillment—the very end that transhumanist and posthumanist ideologies seek in vain. In the words of the ITC, “The Christian proclamation identifies the appropriate way to go beyond (trans) the limits of human experience, with the deification (theiosis) possible only to God, which is the exact opposite of transhumanist self-deification” (§161, citing Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 112, a. 1). Accepting finitude as a gift rather than an obstacle to be overcome, this vision embraces embodied life with all its messiness as the messy, paradoxical path to glory. Whereas the others attempt their ascent through mastery over the world, this path discovers it through self-giving descent patterned on Christ’s kenosis, in which our Lord took on human form and “emptied himself” on the cross for our salvation (Phil 2:6–8). Only this path opens the human person to true transcendence—to becoming fully alive.

True salvation, therefore, does not supplant our humanity but takes it up and purifies it, bringing it to completion in the adventurous relationship of communion with God. As the ITC emphasizes, it involves a full transcendence of our humanity “only in the sense that it brings about the process of taking up, purifying and recreating the human” (§128). Thus, the true meaning of transcendence is found in the transumanar spoken of by Dante in the first Canto of the Paradiso: an elevation that consists in intimate union with God by grace, not through the product of human technique (§24).

The Christian tradition gives an astonishing name to this destiny: theosis—divinization or deification—“becoming God.” Far from a later theological embellishment, this graced participation in the life of our Lord runs throughout Scripture and is revealed with startling clarity when Peter declares that we are called to “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). Significantly, this biblical claim corresponds to the deepest longings of the human heart. Joseph Ratzinger put it well: “We all thirst for the infinite: for an infinite freedom, for happiness without limits… Man is not satisfied with solutions beneath the level of divinization.”

In the end, everything hinges on this contrast that defines embodied living: the difference between authentic divinization—graced participation in the very life of God—and its modern, self-asserted counterfeit. Yet, as I noted above, true divinization does not occur by escaping the body or transcending creaturely limits through technological mastery. As the Catholic tradition attests, it comes through conformity to Christ: communion in his incarnate way of life, his self-emptying kenosis, and his resurrection in glorified flesh. For, as the ITC observes with the Second Vatican Council, “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of the human being take on light.”

Armed with the conviction that Jesus Christ alone fully reveals man to man himself, the ITC can boldly declare that there can be no such thing as a “trans” or “post” that lies beyond him who is the Last Adam (§§146, 150; cf. 1 Cor 15:45).

Recovering an incarnational way of life by relearning how to see

Amid all the troubling headlines and struggles we face these days, the good news is that a growing hunger for a more human, sacramental, and cosmologically attuned way of life is emerging—something I am increasingly witnessing firsthand as I engage a variety of audiences across the country. As believers, one of our central tasks is to lead others to the fulfillment of this longing in the Church. Beginning in our own lives, this means gaining the principles and cultivating the disciplines that can restore a measure of sanity and joyful wonder amid the constant noise and algorithm-driven anxiety of modern life.

For his part, Pope Leo has called for habits that resist the pull of disembodiment by stressing our “extreme need for a contemplative gaze.” To riff on C.S. Lewis, the first task is simply to learn how to see. In the Ramage household, one of the key lessons we try to teach our children is how to find God by noticing the little gifts he has placed before us—whether in our backyard, in the liturgy, or in the majestic “cathedrals of nature” that we encounter on national park road trips.

In this way, perhaps despite itself, I find that even the popular internet insult “go touch grass” conveys a crucial truth. I think that half of our problems could be solved if people would simply get out of their heads, go outside, and more routinely touch real grass, rock, or sand—anything in God’s good creation that draws us out of our own minds and into deep incarnational living.

Taken up seriously, the vision recently proposed by the ITC directs us toward simple, actionable practices capable of freeing us from captivity to technology’s cultural hegemony and the unrest it so often foments. These habits not only attune us to what is most real in creation but awaken us to the God who meets us in the dust of daily life. The irony is not lost on this author: to live in a fully human way amid a dehumanizing age, one of the best things you can do right now is to turn off the very screen on which you are reading these words and step outside.

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