Was Thomas Aquinas the First Modern Transhumanist?

One of the main tenets of transhumanism is that the mind of man can and should be liberated from the body, since the latter (in their view) restrains the intellect from ascending to higher levels of evolution. An Orthodox priest, Fr Vitaliy Utkin, enlarges on this:

<<The main efforts are now aimed at using information and nanotechnology when creating the superman. The human personality is perceived by representatives of transhumanism exclusively as a set of gene information encoded in DNA, plus a carrier of consciousness — the brain — which is considered to be a neurocomputer.

Consciousness, in this view, consists of a certain information set based on the electronic impulses of the brain. Therefore, it is believed that by completely copying such pulses, you can transfer them to other, technical carriers.

When contemplating the hypothetical transfer of consciousness from a biological brain to a computer, transhumanists call it the “loading of consciousness”, “brain reconstruction”, or simply “loading”. After such a transfer has been realized, the consciousness, from the point of view of transhumanists, will live in virtual reality. And this, they believe, provides unlimited possibilities for human self-realization.>>

He is seconded by other Christians. The Protestant Pastor Doug Wilson:

<<Now that technology and science have declared nothing in nature off limits, the despots have naturally expanded how much they want to dominate. Lewis outlined it clearly. The rape of nature was going to lead, eventually, to the rape of the nature of man, and hence the title—the abolition of man. The domineering ways of man over nature was going to lead to an assault on the nature of man himself, which was going to result in the eradication of mankind. We are witnessing the first waves of this now. This is what the tranny movement is all about, and trans-humanism is next after that.>>

The Roman Catholic Abp Vigano:

<<She identifies a vast raft of powerful NGO’s closely connected with the rapidly growing pharmaceutical and medical markets that profit from sexual transitioning, and which creates a growing number of people permanently consuming and dependant on pharmaceutical and medical resources to manage the life long trauma of transition. 

The public is not greatly aware of the transhumanist ideology that has given birth to trans sexual culture. And there is little space here to do it justice, but behind it lies the ambition for disembodiment.

Bilek explains: “Disembodiment is everybody lives in cyberspace. We live in a virtual reality. We don’t live in our bodies any more. We’re going to be uploaded into cyberspace.”

In order to sell transhumanism and disembodiment as a life to the public, you’re going to have to groom them to get them there. And the way to do that is to create this ideology that says that you can choose your sex. That’s “disembodiment”.>>

This is good! The more allies in this fight, the better. Nevertheless, as opponents of transhumanism do the good work of defending the dignity of the human body, they must also find the source, the origin, of this nefarious creed so that it can be eradicated, never to plague mankind again, even if uncovering that source reveals truths that are discomfiting. And we are afraid that the truths will be disturbing for our Roman Catholic and Protestant friends.

For where do we find the origin of this denigration of the body and the exaltation of the mind? In the two main pillars upon whom the theology of the post-Orthodox West is constructed – Blessed Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae says specifically that the body is not necessary for the happiness of the soul; the intellectual operation of the soul is the only essential thing:

<<But as to perfect Happiness, which consists in the vision of God, some have maintained that it is not possible to the soul separated from the body; and have said that the souls of saints, when separated from their bodies, do not attain to that Happiness until the Day of Judgment, when they will receive their bodies back again. And this is shown to be false, both by authority and by reason. By authority, since the Apostle says (2 Corinthians 5:6): "While we are in the body, we are absent from the Lord"; and he points out the reason of this absence, saying: "For we walk by faith and not by sight." Now from this it is clear that so long as we walk by faith and not by sight, bereft of the vision of the Divine Essence, we are not present to the Lord. But the souls of the saints, separated from their bodies, are in God's presence; wherefore the text continues: "But we are confident and have a good will to be absent . . . from the body, and to be present with the Lord." Whence it is evident that the souls of the saints, separated from their bodies, "walk by sight," seeing the Essence of God, wherein is true Happiness.

Again this is made clear by reason. For the intellect needs not the body, for its operation, save on account of the phantasms, wherein it looks on the intelligible truth, as stated in I:84:7. Now it is evident that the Divine Essence cannot be seen by means of phantasms, as stated in I:12:3. Wherefore, since man's perfect Happiness consists in the vision of the Divine Essence, it does not depend on the body. Consequently, without the body the soul can be happy.>>

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated statement in the West. It is part of a larger body of teachings that reinforce the idea that the created world is a thing unloved by God. The late author Philip Sherrard expanded on that in his slim but powerful book The Rape of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science:

<<In the fallen world as seen by St Augustine—the world in which we actually live—things are far worse, and this separation between the uncreated and the created is now truly abysmal. Through the Fall man and the rest of the natural order are deprived of even that extrinsic participation in grace which they possessed in their pre-fallen state. Their original and true nature is now vitiated, totally corrupt and doomed to destruction. It is a lump of damnation.

. . .

From St Augustine we may turn to the other major representative of western mediaeval theology, St Thomas Aquinas; and it is against this background of the radical disparity in St Augustine’s thought between the world and the Church, nature and grace, or nature and what is now regarded as the supernatural, that the efforts of St Thomas to ‘save’ the natural world must be viewed. Unless it is viewed against this background the fact that his thought helped to consolidate the rift between the world of nature and the divine and so contributed to the process of desanctification we are tracing may seem inexplicable.

It must be remembered that by the time St Thomas set out upon his attempt to reconcile all views, however contradictory they might appear, in an all-embracing synthesis, the idea of the separation between the natural (understood now in the non-Augustinian, Aristotelian sense as a physical reality) and the supernatural was so deeply embedded in Latin thought that is was impossible to establish any genuine ontological link between them. . . .

The immediate conclusion is that there must be different principles appertaining to the natural and the supernatural spheres. There must be, as St Thomas put it, a double order in things. This means that nature itself—the natural as such—is now accorded a status of its own, to all intents and purposes independent of the divine; and the Augustinian dichotomy between nature and grace is replaced by a dualism between the natural and the supernatural. Assuredly, God is still regarded as the author of nature, but essentially nature works according to its own laws, and it is quite sufficient to take account only of these laws in order to discover how nature does work.

. . . Indeed, the only knowledge which man as a rational creature could effectively obtain was said to be that which he could derive from the observation of phenomena through the senses—a proposition which is at the very basis of the later scientific attitude to knowledge.

. . .

Analytical Thomist methodology, . . . effectively promotes the idea that there is an uncrossable boundary between God and man, between the divine and the human. Implicit in it is a failure to grasp the full significance of the unity of the two natures in one person; and the immediate consequence of this was to be the neglect of the possibility of man’s personal participation in the divine and a growth in the conviction that he may know the truth concerning God only indirectly by means of his rational faculty operating within the one sphere accessible to it, that of the natural world. And here again what is implicit is not man’s supra-rational and personal participation in the inner meaning, the indwelling logos of this world, or his disclosure of God’s self-expression within it, but a belief that he may decipher, articulate and eventually dominate it as a self-sufficient entity by the use of his individual reason in disregard of, if not in contradiction to, the truths of the Christian revelation (Ipswich, Suffolk, Golgonooza Press, 1987, pgs. 105-9).>>

One finds a diametrically opposite view in the Orthodox Church, expressed well by Vladimir Lossky:

<<Every created thing has its point of contact with the Godhead; and this point of contact is its idea, reason or logos which is at the same time the end towards which it tends. The ideas of individual things are contained within the higher and more general ideas, as are the species within a genus. The whole is contained in the Logos, the second person of the Trinity who is the first principle and the last end of all created things. Here the Logos, God the Word, has the ‘economical’ emphasis proper to antenicene theology: He is the manifestation of the divine will, for it is by Him that the Father has created all things in the Holy Spirit. When we are examining the nature of created things, seeking to penetrate into the reason of their being, we are led finally to the knowledge of the Word, causal principle and at the same time end of all beings. All things were created by the Logos who is as it were a divine nexus, the threshold from which flow the creative outpourings, the particular logoi of creatures, and the centre towards which in their turn all created beings tend, as to their final end (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, trans. Crestwood, Ny., SVS Press, 1976 [1944], pgs. 98-9).>>

The key difference between the post-Schism West (Roman Catholics and Protestants) and the Orthodox is the view of God. The former follow St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in professing God as a simple divine essence that may be grasped by the intellect. For them, beholding God with the intellect is the greatest good; the body and the rest of the created order are not really necessary. Not so for the Orthodox, explains Dr David Bradshaw:

<<The East has no concept of God. It views God not as an essence to be grasped intellectually, but as a personal reality known through His acts, and above all by oneself sharing in those acts. I have pointed out how this understanding leads to a distinctive view of the role of asceticism and other spiritual practices. For the East these are viewed, not as a way of disciplining the body, but as contributing to an ongoing deification of the whole person, body as well as soul [by participation in the uncreated divine energies that proceed from the shared essence of the Three Persons of the All-Holy Trinity—W.G.]. A similar difference can be observed in regard to religious morality as a whole. For the East morality is not primarily a matter of conformance to law, nor (in a more Aristotelian vein) of achieving human excellence by acquiring the virtues. It is a matter of coming to know God by sharing in His acts and manifesting His image. . . . One finds nothing like the goliardic poetry or the courtly love movement of the Middle Ages [in the Orthodox world—W.G.], much less the studied worldliness of authors such as Boccaccio. No doubt there were many reasons for this difference, but among them was surely the varying extent to which East and West had succeeded in incorporating the whole person within their conception of the human good (Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom, Cambridge UP, New York, 2004, pgs. 275-6).>>

Such are some of the deformations that the human body has been subjected to in the West. And without the recovery of Orthodox theology, she will not be able to escape the transhumanist trajectory she is currently following. The Western Augustinian/Thomist theology will continually push her back into it if she tries to leave it through Roman Catholicism or Protestantism because of the errors that they have fallen into – that God is an intellectual concept, the human body isn’t necessary, the radical separation of the creation from God, etc. The West cannot say that she was not warned. The exceptional theologian and defender of Orthodoxy, St Gregory Palamas, sounded the warning in the 14th century in his One Hundred and Fifty Chapters:

<<If the ousia does not possess an energeia distinct from itself, it will be completely without actual subsistence and will be only a concept in the mind (Bradshaw, p. 263).>>

So it has come to pass in the West, which affirms the hidden and transcendent ousia/essence of God but denies His energeia, which all the creation know and participate in, making God an intellectual puzzle to speculate and think about – and ultimately to reject – followed predictably enough by the elevation of the mind of man into its new role of transhumanist deity.