Transhumanism

Before judging, one must understand, and understand honestly. Transhumanism is neither science fiction nor the fad of a few eccentrics: it is a structured current of thought, with academic authors, journals, richly funded foundations, and real influence in Silicon Valley. Presenting it in its weakest form would be dishonest. Here, then, is its strongest form.

A promise: "surpassing" man through technology

The reference definition, given by the Transhumanist FAQ edited by Nick Bostrom for the World Transhumanist Association, is precise:

"The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities." — Transhumanist FAQ, World Transhumanist Association / Humanity+^[4]

Three words carry everything: improvement (and not healing), fundamental (and not marginal), human condition (and not this or that disease). Transhumanism does not want to repair a damaged man: it wants to improve normal man — the healthy, the sound — because it judges the human condition itself unsatisfying. It is this shift, from care to enhancement, that changes everything.

From Dante to Julian Huxley: the origins of the word

The verb existed before the movement. At the threshold of Paradise, Dante coins the neologism "trasumanar" — "to pass beyond the human" — to express the inexpressible elevation of the soul toward God^[5]. The word, originally, thus denotes a spiritual transfiguration, exactly the opposite of what the moderns would make of it.

It is the English biologist Julian Huxley — brother of the writer Aldous Huxley and first director of UNESCO — who gives the word its contemporary meaning. In his 1957 essay Transhumanism, he writes:

"We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature." — Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 1957^[6]

One biographical detail immediately illuminates the social stakes: this same Julian Huxley was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962^[7]. The man who invents modern transhumanism is also a theorist of the selective improvement of the species. This is not a hostile detail: it is a structural clue. Transhumanism and eugenics share a common root — the idea that humanity is a perfectible material whose evolution can, and must, be steered.

The contemporary turn: Bostrom, Kurzweil, and the Singularity

The movement professionalized at the turn of the 2000s. Nick Bostrom founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in 2005 and theorized transhumanism as the culmination of Enlightenment humanism: since reason can improve everything, why should it stop at the frontiers of biology^[8]?

Its most famous face is that of the engineer Ray Kurzweil, who announces the "Singularity" — a tipping point at which technological progress will become so rapid that "human life will be irreversibly transformed"^[9]:

"I set the date for the Singularity — representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability — as 2045." — Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 2005^[10]

By that date, he prophesies, man will have merged with the machine, defeated biological death, and will eventually be able to "upload" his mind. We shall see below why this last promise collides not with a technical obstacle, but with an impossibility of principle.

The Transhumanist Declaration and its great themes

In 1998, an international collective — Max More, Nick Bostrom, David Pearce, Natasha Vita-More, and others — drafted a Transhumanist Declaration, adopted in 2009 by the organization Humanity+. Its first article sets the program:

"Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth." — Transhumanist Declaration, 1998 / 2009^[11]

To their credit, transhumanists are not naive: the Declaration itself acknowledges that "humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies" and that "although all progress is change, not all change is progress"^[12]. The movement is therefore neither monolithic nor stupid. Its four great promises must be taken seriously.

Defeating aging and death

This is the emotional heart of the movement. The gerontologist Aubrey de Grey maintains that aging is a reparable "disease" and proposes a bioengineering program (the SENS project) to halt it^[13]. Max More, in a Letter to Mother Nature that has become a manifesto, puts it bluntly:

"We will no longer tolerate the tyranny of aging and death. Through genetic alterations, cellular manipulations, synthetic organs, and any necessary means, we will endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date." — Max More, A Letter to Mother Nature, 1999^[14]

Abolishing suffering

The philosopher David Pearce pushes the logic to its end with his "hedonistic imperative": biotechnology should, in his view, eliminate all pain from the living world.

"Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world." — David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative, 1995^[15]

Enhancing body and mind

Beyond health, the aim is to increase normal capacities: memory, concentration, intelligence, mood, strength, longevity. Some bioethicists go so far as to theorize a duty to select the "best" possible child: this is Julian Savulescu's "procreative beneficence," according to which parents "should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life"^[16]. Others, like Savulescu and Ingmar Persson, even advocate a "moral enhancement" of the species by pharmacological or genetic means^[17].

"Morphological freedom"

All this appeals to a principle, "morphological freedom": the presumed right of everyone to modify their own body as they please, with no limit other than desire^[18]. It is the extension to the biological body of the modern ideal of individual autonomy — and we shall see that this is precisely where the moral debate is joined.

Honest criticism begins by acknowledging what truth an opposing thesis contains. Transhumanism does not seduce by chance: it grafts its project onto authentically good desires, and it raises questions that Christians cannot brush aside.

The desire for self-transcendence is inscribed in man

Man is the only being not content with what he is. The Catechism formulates this magnificently:

"Human beings make their own contribution to their interior growth; they make their whole sentient and spiritual lives into means of this growth." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1700^[19]

This desire to be "more than oneself" is not a sickness: it is the trace in man of his supernatural vocation. Transhumanism captures this desire — but directs it toward the technical register alone, as if one could become "more" by adding functions to a machine. The question, then, is not to kill the desire for self-transcendence, but to know toward what it is truly fulfilled.

Medicine, legitimate improvement, and the duty to heal

The Church has never sacralized sickness or suffering as goods in themselves. Healing, relieving, prolonging a life, correcting a disability: all this is not only permitted but commanded by charity. The Catechism recalls that "science and technology are precious resources when placed at the service of man and promote his integral development"^[20]. The International Theological Commission goes so far as to say that "therapeutic interventions serve to restore physical, mental, and spiritual functions; they place the person at the center"^[21]. Vaccinating, grafting, fitting a prosthesis, correcting vision, treating depression: none of this is "transhumanist" — it is medicine, and it is good.

The decisive distinction: healing is not enhancing

Everything therefore turns on a distinction that the secular debate itself has clearly formulated. The report Beyond Therapy of the American President's Council on Bioethics, chaired by the philosopher Leon Kass, sharply contrasts the two registers:

""Therapy" is the use of biotechnical power to treat individuals with known diseases, disabilities, or impairments. "Enhancement," by contrast, is the directed use of biotechnical power to alter, not disease processes, but the "normal" workings of the human body and psyche, to augment or improve their native capacities and performances." — Leon Kass et al., Beyond Therapy, 2003^[22]

The Church adopts this boundary as her own. Dignitas Personae affirms that "procedures used on somatic cells for strictly therapeutic purposes are, in principle, morally licit"^[23]. The criterion is not the novelty of the technique, but its purpose: giving back to a man what sickness took from him (therapy) is not the same as endowing a healthy man with powers no man has ever had (enhancement). The first serves the person; the second claims to redefine him. The rest of this article unfolds the reasons — anthropological, moral, social, and spiritual — why this second step is problematic.

Before it is a question of ethics (what may we do?), transhumanism is a question of anthropology (what is man?). For one cannot "improve" a thing without knowing what it is. Yet transhumanism rests on a certain idea of man — man as a perfectible machine, as information — which the Catholic faith holds to be false.

Man is not software: the unity of body and soul

The most radical promise of transhumanism is mind uploading: "uploading" a human mind into a computer to make it immortal. This idea assumes that the mind is information, software lodged by chance in the "hardware" of the brain, which could therefore be copied onto another medium. It is a dualist vision: on one side the mind (what counts), on the other the body (a mere vehicle, disposable).

The Catholic faith holds exactly the opposite. Man is not a mind in a body: he is a unity of body and soul, so profound that they cannot be separated like software from its machine.

"The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the 'form' of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 365^[24]

This formula — the soul as the "form" of the body — is not a pious metaphor: it is a dogmatic definition, laid down by the Council of Vienne in 1312^[25]. It has a direct consequence: my mind is not a file. It does not exist "apart" from this body which is mine, to be extracted and copied. What a computer could at best contain would be an imitation of my data, never me. The dream of digital immortality thus collides not only with engineering difficulties: it collides with what a man is.

The soul is not "produced": what technology will never do

There is more. Even supposing perfect technical mastery of the genome and the brain, one thing would remain beyond technology's reach: man's spiritual principle. For the soul is not a product of matter; it is created immediately by God.

"The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God — it is not 'produced' by the parents — and also that it is immortal." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 366^[26]

That is why the International Theological Commission, in the most directly "anti-transhumanist" magisterial text in existence, judges the project of manufacturing a superman unthinkable:

"Recourse to genetic modification in order to produce a superhuman being or a being with essentially new spiritual faculties would be unthinkable, since the spiritual principle of man — the principle which informs matter so as to make it the body of a human person — is not produced by human hands and is not subject to genetic manipulation." — International Theological Commission, Communion and Stewardship, 2004, § 91^[27]

One may thus modify a gene, boost a muscle, connect a chip to a brain. One cannot manufacture a soul, nor upgrade the mind a notch as one upgrades a computer's memory. The boundary is not only moral: it is metaphysical.

Dignity is not manufactured: it is received

Transhumanism assumes, more or less consciously, that a man's worth lies in his capacities: the more intelligent, high-performing, healthy, durable one is, the "more" one is worth. This is exactly the opposite of Christian anthropology. Man's dignity is not a performance: it is a given, primary and indestructible.

"The most important [meaning of dignity] is that of ontological dignity, which pertains to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God. This dignity can never be erased and remains valid beyond any circumstances in which individuals may find themselves." — Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Infinita, 2024, § 7^[28]

This distinction is the heart of the debate. If dignity is ontological — attached to the very being of the person — then the newborn, the senile elder, the profoundly disabled, the dying are worth as much as the genius in full health. But if dignity depends on capacities, then enhancing some mechanically devalues others. Transhumanism, by making man a being to be optimized, saws off the branch on which the equal dignity of all rests.

The body is a gift, not an obstacle

There remains the common root of all these errors: contempt for the body. To upload a mind, to "liberate" oneself from biology, to treat aging as a manufacturing defect, one must first see the body as an obstacle — a cumbersome envelope from which the mind would gain by escaping. This is precisely the diagnosis made in 2025 by the first magisterial text explicitly to name transhumanism, the doctrinal note Antiqua et nova:

"Transhumanists argue that technological advancements will enable humans to overcome their biological limitations. [...] Both views rest on a fundamentally negative perception of human corporality, which treats the body more as an obstacle than as an integral part of the person's identity. [...] Yet, this negative view of the body is inconsistent with a proper understanding of human dignity." — Antiqua et nova, 2025, note 9^[29]

The Catholic faith holds, on the contrary, that "the body of man shares in the dignity of 'the image of God'"^[30], and that life received in the flesh is "a gift from God, to be welcomed with gratitude"^[31]. The body is not the prison of the mind: it is a part of me. The transhumanist dream of "liberating" oneself from it is, literally, a dream of disincarnation.

Behind the technical promises hides a fundamental moral decision: does man acknowledge himself as creature — received, limited, ordered to One greater than himself — or does he proclaim himself creator of himself, free to redefine his nature at will? It is the question posed, since the Genesis narrative, by the forbidden fruit: "you will be like gods" (Gen 3:5).

"Deciding good and evil": the temptation to make oneself God

John Paul II named this temptation with a precision that anticipates, as it were, the whole transhumanist project:

"The power to decide about good and evil does not belong to man, but to God alone." — John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 1993, n. 35^[32]

Yet what does transhumanism do, if not claim this power? Deciding that death is an evil to be abolished, that one capacity is "better" than another, that one type of man deserves to exist and another does not: this is making oneself judge of what man ought to be. Dignitas Infinita names this pretension by its true name:

"To wish to dispose of oneself [...] disregarding this fundamental truth of human life as a gift amounts to nothing other than yielding to the age-old temptation of the human being who makes himself God and enters into rivalry with the true God of love." — Dignitas Infinita, 2024, § 57^[33]

Not everything technically possible is morally permitted

Transhumanism constantly confuses two questions: "can we do it?" (the technical question) and "should we do it?" (the moral question). For it, the possible calls for the permitted: if a technology exists, refusing it would be obscurantist. This is what Benedict XVI called the "absolutism of technology":

"The social question has become a radically anthropological question, in the sense that it implies the way itself, not only of conceiving, but also of manipulating life, increasingly placed in man's hands by biotechnology. Here the absolutism of technology finds its greatest expression." — Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 2009, n. 75^[34]

Yet our status as creatures imposes bounds that power does not remove:

"Our ontological status as creatures made in the image of God imposes certain limits on our capacity to dispose of ourselves. The sovereignty we enjoy is not unlimited. [...] Man is created in the image of God, but he is not God." — International Theological Commission, Communion and Stewardship, 2004, § 94^[35]

The Catechism draws the practical consequence: "Research or experimentation on the human being cannot legitimate acts that are in themselves contrary to the dignity of persons and to the moral law; the subjects' potential consent does not justify such acts"^[36]. In other words: someone's wanting to be enhanced does not make enhancement good. "Morphological freedom" is not an absolute.

The "superman": a project judged "unthinkable"

Gathering these threads, one understands why the magisterium does not merely warn but calls the project of radical enhancement "radically immoral" when it aims to change man as a person^[37]. Not from fear of progress, but because there is, in the pretension of producing a "superman," an idolatry: substituting for God the Creator a work of human hands. Antiqua et nova restates it in all clarity: "the presumption of replacing God with a work of one's own hands is idolatry"^[38].

Here we touch the heart of the social and moral angle. Even leaving metaphysics aside, transhumanism poses a problem of justice that its supporters struggle to resolve: if intelligence, health, and years of life can be bought, who will be able to afford them? And what will become of those who cannot?

The return of eugenics under a liberal face

Twentieth-century eugenics — forced sterilizations and camps — was imposed by states. The new eugenics comes with a gentle face: no longer imposed but chosen, in the name of parents' freedom and the child's good. It is the "liberal eugenics" that the philosopher Jürgen Habermas analyzes as an attack on the autonomy of the programmed child, who will no longer be able to experience himself as the undivided author of his own life^[39]. But the project remains the same: sorting humans by quality. Dignitas Personae perceives an unsettling logic in these proposals:

"Some proposals [...] display a kind of dissatisfaction or even rejection of the value of the human being as a creature and person marked by finitude. [...] Such manipulations foster a eugenic mentality and introduce indirect social stigmatization of those who do not possess certain particular qualities." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae, 2008, § 27^[40]

The expression is apt: indirect social stigmatization. In a world where one "selects the best possible child"^[41], the one born with trisomy, a malformation, or a simple fragility becomes, in society's eyes, a mistake that could have been avoided. The pressure will not be a law: it will be a gaze.

"GenRich" versus "Naturals": the announced fracture

This concern is not a clerical projection: it comes from transhumanists themselves. The Princeton biologist Lee Silver, though favorable to these technologies, coldly describes the world they are preparing:

"If the accumulation of genetic knowledge and advances in enhancement technologies continue at the present rate, then, by the end of the third millennium, the GenRich class and the Natural class will become the GenRich-humans and the Natural-humans — entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee." — Lee Silver, Remaking Eden, 1997^[42]

Two species; two humanities; the end of the unity of the human race. The following table summarizes what changes when economic inequality — reversible, corrigible — gives way to biological inequality, inscribed in the flesh and passed on to descendants.

The rejection of the fragile, the sick, the disabled

The logic of enhancement is, by construction, a logic of eliminating the imperfect. Where the Gospel places the least at the center, the transhumanist project places them at the margin. John Paul II had named this drift well before the transhumanist hour, regarding "eugenic abortion":

"Such is the case of eugenic abortion [...] which accepts life only under certain conditions and rejects limitation, handicap and infirmity." — John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 1995, n. 14^[43]

This "rejection of limitation" is the very mainspring of transhumanism. Yet a civilization is judged by the place it makes for its weakest members. By declaring human finitude unacceptable, transhumanism installs what Pope Francis calls the "throwaway culture": a world in which whatever is not high-performing is, sooner or later, judged superfluous.

"Unjust domination of man over man"

At bottom, selecting, enhancing, sorting always means one man exercising power over another — over the unborn child "designed" to a specification, over future generations programmed in advance, over the "natural" relegated to the margins. Dignitas Personae names this structure:

"In affirming the ethical inadmissibility of this type of intervention, which implies an unjust domination of man over man, the Church also recalls the need to return to a perspective of care for persons and of education in welcoming human life in its concrete historical finitude." — Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Personae, 2008, § 27^[44]

Even the liberal thinker Francis Fukuyama, who writes from no religious standpoint, called transhumanism "the world's most dangerous idea"^[45]: for it threatens, he says, that "Factor X" — that essence shared by all men — on which the very idea of equal rights rests^[46]. To modify that essence is to dynamite the foundation of all justice.

One would miss the essential in seeing transhumanism as only a technical program. It is, in the strong sense, a spirituality — an answer to the great religious questions (death, evil, salvation, immortality) that dismisses God and puts technology in His place. That is why several Catholic authors see in it a modern gnosis or a secularized eschatology.

An eschatology without God: salvation through technology

Christianity proclaims a salvation: victory over death, the transfiguration of the body, eternal life — but received from God, by grace, beyond death. Transhumanism takes up word for word these promises — defeating death, transfiguring the body, living indefinitely — but claims to produce them here below, by technology alone. It is a counterfeit of Christian hope: the same promise, without the Cross, without God, without gratuitousness. The "Singularity" stands in for the Parousia; uploading, for resurrection; longevity engineering, for eternal life.

The myth of manufactured immortality

But this immortality, supposing it were ever attained, would be a caricature. Indefinitely prolonging a biological life is not eternal life: it is indefinite survival, always threatened by accident, with no promise of happiness, answering in no way the human heart's thirst for the absolute. Saint Augustine said it for the ages:

"You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1^[47]

No technology will ever satisfy a desire that is, structurally, desire for God. Transhumanism offers seawater to a man thirsting for the infinite.

A neo-Gnosticism: despising the flesh to save the mind

Finally, in its "uploading" version, transhumanism revives the oldest Christian heresy: Gnosticism, which despised the flesh and made salvation an escape of the mind from the evil body. Antiqua et nova noted it: this "fundamentally negative perception of corporality" is "inconsistent with a proper understanding of human dignity"^[48]. Christianity, on the contrary, is the religion of the Incarnation: God became flesh, took a body, died in a body, and rose in a body. Christian salvation does not save man from the body: it saves man with his body.

It would be easy, and false, to conclude with a mere "no." For the desire captured by transhumanism — to be more than one is, to defeat death, to see the body transfigured — this desire is just, and Christianity answers it "yes." But it shows where this "more" is truly fulfilled. To false technical transcendence, faith opposes a true transcendence, infinitely higher than anything transhumanism dares dream.

Man is already called to "more than human": divinization

Man's Christian vocation goes far beyond any "enhancement." The goal is not to become a superman: it is to become, by grace, a partaker of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). It is the mystery the Fathers called divinization or theosis:

"The Son of God became man so that we might become God." — Saint Athanasius, quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 460^[49]

There is the true "trans-humanism," Dante's: man passes beyond the human, not by adding functions to his biology, but by being raised to the very life of God. No chip, no gene, no machine will ever be able to offer that — and it is offered freely to the poorest of men.

The transfigured body: the resurrection of the flesh

To those who dream of a body freed from sickness, pain, and death, faith answers not with contempt but with an even greater promise — the resurrection of the flesh. Saint Paul describes this glorious body, this body "enhanced" by God and not by man:

"What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body." — Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:42-44^[50]

Tradition has recognized in it the four "qualities" of the glorious body: impassibility (no more suffering), clarity (the light of glory), agility, subtility. It is exactly what transhumanism seeks to manufacture — a body without pain, without decline, without death — but what God alone can give, and will give. The difference is not in the goal; it is in the way: the one claims to seize it by technology, the other receives it by grace, through death and not by dodging it.

Holiness, the only mutation that truly elevates man

Meanwhile, true "self-transcendence" has a very simple name: holiness. The saint is not a man "enhanced" in his capacities: he is a man transfigured in his charity. A Francis of Assisi, a Thérèse of Lisieux, a Maximilian Kolbe are not worthy for a higher IQ or longevity, but for a love become superhuman — that is, divine. It is the only mutation that truly changes man for the better, and it is open to all, from genius to the disabled, from the powerful to the dying. Where transhumanism deepens inequality, holiness abolishes it: the least is the greatest there.

Suffering, finitude, and death: what technology cannot redeem

There remains the hardest point: suffering and death, which transhumanism wants purely to eliminate. Christianity does not glorify them — it hates them enough to have seen them defeated at Easter — but it knows they are not healed by denying them. Christ did not abolish suffering: He passed through it, and by passing through it in love, He made it redemptive. Finitude itself, accepted, becomes the place where man learns that he is not God, and where he opens himself to Him who is. To want technically to abolish every limit is to condemn oneself never to receive what only limitation teaches: that life is a gift, and a gift is received, not manufactured.

The Catholic position is therefore neither reactionary fear of technology nor naive enthusiasm. It is a discernment. The following table summarizes its criteria: what faith can bless, what it must refuse, and why.

The underlying criterion fits in one sentence: technology is good as long as it serves the human person as he is; it becomes bad as soon as it claims to redefine him. Pope Francis formulated it with the "enhanced man" directly in view:

"It is paradoxical, for example, when referring to technologies for enhancing the biological functions of an individual, to speak of an 'augmented' man if one forgets that the human body refers to the integral good of the person and therefore cannot be identified with the biological organism alone. A mistaken approach in this field ends up in reality not by 'augmenting' but by 'compressing' man." — Pope Francis, address to the Pontifical Academy for Life, 20 February 2023^[51]

Everything is there. Transhumanism believes it enlarges man; in reality it shrinks him, because it reduces him to what can be measured, enhanced, and sold. Man's true greatness lies not in his capacities, but in what he is: a person created in the image of God, called not to manufacture himself, but to receive himself from God and to let himself, by grace, be transfigured in Him.

• Technology and Man — the overall Catholic vision of the relationship between man and his technical power, of which transhumanism is a limit case.
• Artificial Intelligence and Catholic Doctrine — AI, often associated with the transhumanist dream of the "Singularity."
• Bioethics — CRISPR, genetic engineering, assisted reproduction: the concrete techniques transhumanism would place at enhancement's service.
• End of Life — death, the Christian refusal of both futile treatment and euthanasia, against the grain of the manufactured-immortality dream.
• The Dignity of the Human Person — why dignity is ontological and not indexed to capacities.