Cur Homo Deus? A Catholic Response to a Posthumanist Narrative

Abstract

Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus has popularized and promoted the case for a posthumanist reading of universal history in the 21st century. Among the features of his narrative are atheism, a deterministic rejection of free will, and a hedonistic theory of value. Passing the seventieth anniversary of Humani Generis, Pius XII’s call for “seriousness, moderation and measure” when weighing and judging the conclusions of human science, including theories of evolution, remains relevant. With special attention to Anselm of Canterbury’s aptly titled Cur Deus Homo, this essay will identify and respond to several misrepresentations of key Christian doctrines which, when corrected, undermine the reliability of Harari’s narrative history and speculations. Rather than conceding Harari’s posthumanist conclusion that humanity’s path to divinity is a global, social agenda of biological and technological upgrade, I counterargue that Christian soteriology better responds to the deepest longings in human dissatisfaction through notions of grace and love manifest in the doctrines of incarnation and divine satisfaction.

1. Introduction

When Pius XII promulgated his encyclical letter Humani Generis in 1950 he could not have imagined the rapidity and variability with which people would adopt and adapt theories of evolution across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Not only looking backward to explain human origins, theories of evolution can suggest trajectories that inspire futurists to imagine possible scenarios for humanity within both theistic and atheistic worldviews. Many Christian theologians have worked to accommodate the science of evolutionary biology and sociology into existing doctrine and even write theologies to develop or rearticulate that doctrine in terms of evolution.1 Others, mostly without a theistic commitment, however, have set out transhumanist and posthumanist agendas that would carry humankind into a brave new world of genetic and biotechnological enhancement, or give free rein to agents of inorganic intelligence—what we commonly refer to as artificial intelligence, or AI—which could end the Anthropocene epoch as quickly as it has begun.

Among those promoting such visions of trans- or posthuman evolution as “a brief history of tomorrow” is Yuval Noah Harari. His New York Times best-selling book Homo Deus invites the reader to consider the possible benefits of a collapse of the religion of “humanism” just as, he argues, the fall of autocratic pharaohs and the “death of God” had positive developments for the advance of human society and culture (Harari 2017, p. 68).2 The disposition one has toward his alternative interpretations of religion in general and evolutionary theories affects the narrative and response that one can offer in public discourse about the good we ought to seek in a world that is rapidly globalizing its technologies and information. Though explicitly stating his intention to remain neutral, Harari seems to evangelize a posthumanist world where information processing is paramount and the human being is merely functional yet satisfied in sensory bliss. Harari’s claims have been both compelling and divisive; but one such claim with which even critics seem to agree is that “[h]umans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better” (Harari 2018, p. 1). To remain meaningful and relevant at this pivotal historical moment, it is imperative that the story Christianity tells is clear, concise, and convincing.

Rather than concede Harari’s posthumanist conclusion that humanity’s path to divinity is a global, social agenda of technological and biological “upgrade” rooted in the tenets of technohumanism and “Dataism,” I counterargue that the narrative of Christian soteriology exemplified in the work of Saint Anselm better responds to the deepest longings in human dissatisfaction through the doctrines of the incarnation and divine satisfaction. This paper identifies and responds to several philosophical and theological misunderstandings and misrepresentations in Harari’s work, which, when corrected, undermine the reliability of his narrative history and speculations. In addition, it lays out key contributions made by another figure concerned not with “homo deus” but rather with “deus homo,” namely Anselm of Canterbury. By returning to his works Proslogion, Cur Deus Homo, and Epistolae de Incarnatione Verbi with their ideas of grace through satisfaction, one can attain a more satisfying understanding of who God is, what true human freedom is, and in what our happiness consists. Lastly, the paper will return to the notion of humanism and evolution on which both Pius XII and Harari commented to show how Catholic philosophy and theology could point the way toward human advancement in its purpose to love the highest good.

2. Homo Deus: Feasting at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

From the very first page of Homo Deus, Harari lays out a provocative narrative appealing to human pride and power at the expense of God and human relationships with the divine. Harari declares that though

[m]any thinkers and prophets concluded that famine, plague, and war must be an integral part of God’s cosmic plan or of our imperfect nature, and nothing short of the end of time would free us from them … they have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. We don’t need to pray to any god or saint to rescue us from them.

(Harari 2017, pp. 1–2)

These first three horsemen of the apocalypse seemingly have been reined in by human ingenuity, and the fourth, death, is in our sights as well.3 In the afterglow of this triumphalism, Harari lays out a “new human agenda” for the twenty-first century characterized by the pursuit of (1) immortality, (2) happiness, and (3) the evolution of homo sapiens into homo deus. The means by which each of these items on the agenda will be pursued are diverse and still in development, but the priority that Harari places on these three is premised on three important claims. First, God is not empirically verifiable; therefore, God does not exist. Second, all organic processes, human life and experience included, are nothing more than complexes of algorithms, eliminating the possibility of human free will. Third, because human beings are little more than algorithms, human experience and valuation of experience is most logically grounded in the sense experience of pleasure and pain, namely hedonism. Though Harari’s avowed commitment to the exclusive truth of scientific fact roots his narrative and argument, its reductivism also sows the seeds of its internal incoherence.

First, one must investigate whether Harari’s atheism is necessary for his argument and if it is a fitting conclusion based on evidence and his other premises.4 At the outset, I want to point out that Harari changes the terms of the debate and the narrative understanding common to all the Abrahamic faiths and many in the other great religious traditions of the world. He narrows the definition of divinity, or God, to such an extreme so that he can make the claim that:

people often misunderstand the meaning of divinity. Divinity isn’t a vague metaphysical quality. And it isn’t the same as omnipotence. When speaking of upgrading humans into gods, think more in terms of Greek gods or Hindu devas than the omnipotent biblical sky father. Our descendants would still have their foibles, kinks and limitations, just as Zeus and Indra had theirs. But they could love, hate, create and destroy on a much grander scale than us.

(Harari 2017, p. 47)

Is it “people” who misunderstand the meaning of divinity or, rather, Harari? In the fashion of Feuerbach, Harari argues that his move to redefine divinity is justified: theistic religions disingenuously justified their domination over other animals and the ecosystem in the Agricultural Revolution, through the creation of myths that sanctified humans, which elevated them above nonhuman animals and promoted a false metaphysic of ontological discontinuity. It was only one more small step to discarding the need for the gods or God altogether, when, after the Scientific Revolution, human beings recognized that they created the gods in their own image and likeness (Harari 2017, pp. 98–99; cf. Feuerbach 1890, pp. 332–39). Harari’s definition of divinity is not new or revolutionary in its claim that divinity is nothing more than the recognized, highest, self-justifying authority. He can make that claim, yet he cannot prove that there is no deeper metaphysical being, only that more meagre claims to divinity can be instrumental in human organization, cooperation, or manipulation (Harari 2018, pp. 143–44). Ontological arguments for the existence of God, like that of Anselm of Canterbury to be discussed in the next section, make clear the terms and conditions for defining divinity, where faith in such an ultimate ground of being remains a reasonable contender for human meaning and purpose alongside or beyond the possible successor religion to humanism, Dataism, or faith in the free flow of information. Moreover, faith in and cooperation with such an ultimate being sets even more aspirational goals for the 21st century and beyond, where human flourishing and evolution are measured less in power, pleasure, and longevity, and more in grace, love, and communion.

Second, beyond rejecting the primary tenet of theism, Harari rejects the primary tenet of humanism, that human beings have a free will whose activity imbues the world with meaning and purpose. Leaning on select studies in life sciences, he asserts, “Over the last century, as scientists opened up the Sapiens black box, they discovered there neither soul, nor free will, nor ‘self’—but only genes, hormones and neurons that obey the same physical laws governing the rest of reality” (Harari 2017, p. 284). These physical laws govern the electrochemical brain processes, which “are either deterministic or random or a combination of both—but they are never free” (Harari 2017, p. 284). Because of this, human beings may be able to decouple intelligence from consciousness and replicate intelligence in inorganic material, which may, in turn, become the successor to homo sapiens as a species. In such a world, human beings become merely instrumental to the goal of increasing data flow and processing, and the trend in our current collective behavior regarding the use of information technology, says Harari, makes Dataism the probable successor religion to humanism. It is not that Dataism is anti-humanist, only that it takes a strictly functional, deterministic approach to human beings, each of which is merely one more algorithm in the great chain of causation.

Two significant issues arise, however, from Harari’s rejection of the doctrine of free will: one a loose end and one a performative contradiction. The loose end in question is that Harari fails to land on the cause of determinism in human behavior. He states that the physical laws governing our brain function are either deterministic or random or a combination of both. He admits where there may be a combination, we can “get probabilistic outcomes, but this too doesn’t amount to freedom” (Harari 2017, p. 285). His commitment to mind/brain identity without explaining the grounds for such other than the lack of empirical evidence for a “soul” leaves him in the same place as with his notion of God, able to make a claim but unable to prove or engage with reality beyond the tangible. More damaging to his project is that his claim that human beings lack free will does not square with his stated intention at the close of the first chapter: “All the predictions that pepper this book are no more than an attempt to discuss present-day dilemmas, and an invitation to change the future” (Harari 2017, p. 65). An invitation to change the future suggests that Harari still harbors some notion of free will; otherwise, such an invitation would be disingenuous, and his book propaganda or prophecy. Since Harari claims neither of these, one should take him at his word and push him on the validity of his premise.

Third, to satisfy the human desire for happiness as part of the new agenda for this century, Harari doubles down on his atheistic materialism and proposes a hedonistic approach to value. Citing evolutionary biology, Harari argues that humans are hardwired to seek survival and reproduction, where the achievement of those is accompanied by pleasant sensations, such as satiety or orgasm. Because of the difficulty in the achievement of those necessary goods for the generational passage of genes, when those sought-after goods became more easily achievable, human beings do a poor job of maintaining happiness and satisfaction. Instead, “rather than combining the right doses of excitement and tranquility … most of us tend to jump all the way from stress to boredom and back, remaining as discontented with one as with the other” (Harari 2017, p. 39). To solve this problem of cyclical mania and ennui, Harari argues that “[i]t will be necessary to change our biochemistry and re-engineer our bodies and minds … You may debate whether it is good or bad, but it seems that the second great project of the twenty-first century—to ensure global happiness—will involve re-engineering Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy everlasting pleasure” (Harari 2017, p. 43). In a posthumanist framework, there is no correspondence between happiness and moral goodness. What is important for happiness is that human beings are not confronted with the questions of meaning and purpose that lead to a confrontation of the self before God and others.

Harari’s dismissal of theistic religion and his argument for the failure of its humanistic successor religion is weak in general and demonstrably false in specific parts. Harari relies on a reductive notion of reality limited to physical material and phenomena. He refuses to engage deeper questions of ontic significance and claims victory over strawmen. He presents his narrative as an invitation for discussion of alternatives but denies the very power that would allow interlocutors to dispute his predictions. He reduces happiness to the pleasure principle, ignoring any concept of the good beyond biochemical sensate experience. Nevertheless, Harari continues to push the idea that human beings can evolve themselves into “gods.” The retention of that term is questionable enough for a figure who sees merely a functional value for it. Yet, in his own mythmaking, Harari continues to use it. When speaking of the procession of “religions,” he writes:

In fact, God is present even in the Newton myth: Newton himself is God. When biotechnology, nanotechnology and the other fruits of science ripen, Homo sapiens will attain divine powers and come full circle back to the biblical Tree of Knowledge. Archaic hunter-gatherers were just another species of animal. Farmers saw themselves as the apex of creation. Scientists will upgrade us into gods.

(Harari 2017, p. 98)

Harari’s project repeats the offense of Adam and Eve, who ate at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and unrepentantly wanted to be like God. Like the figures Adam and Eve, if we accept Harari’s narrative and its suggestions, we too may find ourselves even further alienated from God, each other, and the created world.

3. Deus Homo: Redemption through Suffering on a Tree

Harari ostensibly celebrates inverting the narrative of the Fall into the rise of human power, believing that the serpent in the garden was veracious and God mendacious. In so doing, he turns his back not only on God, but also on the notion of theodicy and ethics, so closely tied to the doctrine of faith outrightly rejected in the kind of hyper-rationalism with which Pius XII was concerned in Humani Generis (Pius XII 1950, n. 34). However, just as Harari’s own argument contains troubling incoherence and even outright contradiction, even more weight can be brought to bear against his position should one put his work into critical dialogue with Anselm of Canterbury, who creatively thought about the relationship of humanity to divinity, but not as “homo deus,” but “deus homo.” In this section, I intend to demonstrate the relevance and strength of this 11th century philosopher and theologian’s ideas for responding to errors in this posthumanist narrative and its foundations in atheism, determinism, and hedonism. By using Anselm to respond to contemporary theological concerns surrounding evolution, I hope to demonstrate how his theology contributes to a more satisfactory eschatology and appreciation of the wisdom of the Catholic Church’s tradition.

First, of all Harari’s presumptions atheism is the one Anselm is most fit to address. He is probably best known in both academic settings and popular imagination as the inventor of the ontological argument (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, pp. 87–88).5 However, given the conclusion of the ontological argument and the characteristics of God that follow, could Harari admit to believing in divinity, even one constrained by the very limits of what he will warrant? Harari, indeed, uses the term god and divinity, but only as a cipher for fictional powers such as spirits, fairies, and demons which, after the Cognitive Revolution about 70,000 years ago, stood as objects around which communities could build intersubjective reality. Harari writes off deities and their establishing myths as epiphenomena of the neurological processes in the human brain “to preserve the collective myths and organize mass cooperation” (Harari 2017, p. 156). Harari would not seem to admit that these imaginings had any more significant foundation in reality than the electrical signals firing across synapses in similarly structured human brains living in bodies in so-called communities. Harari maintains such a limited portrait of reality and its supreme being that, were he willing to concede a notion of being at all, the ontological argument would still seem to fall on deaf ears.

That is not, however, the end of what Anselm has to say to Harari and other cultured despisers. Anselm quotes the Psalmist, “The Fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps 14:1; 53:1). This is no juvenile name-calling. The consequences of rejecting the ontological argument rebound on the one rejecting. Anselm in prayerful meditation reflected on this: “You exist so truly, Lord my God, that You cannot even be thought not to exist. And this is as it should be, for if some intelligence could think of something better than You, the creature would be above its Creator and would judge its Creator—and that is completely absurd” (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 88). The charge of absurdity, and failure of logic is serious, but one that Harari could dodge by denying creation, and therefore an intelligent creative agent. Yet, Anselm goes on to further push what is the difference between “saying in one’s heart” and thinking, saying:

For in one sense a thing is thought when the word signifying it is thought; in another sense when the very object which the thing is is understood. In the first sense, then, God can be thought not to exist, but not at all in the second sense. No one, indeed, understanding what God is can think that God does not exist, even though he may say these words in his heart either without any [objective] signification or with some peculiar signification.

(Anselm of Canterbury 1998, pp. 88–89)

If one understands the argument and is really thinking about the kind of being described as God, “something-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought,” then one cannot coherently deny God’s existence.6 To do so is to reject the very premises of rationality upon which any meaningful signification can be made. It can only ultimately end the way Genesis 3 did, with the unhappy alienation of a person from God and the Tree of Life in guilt and vulnerability for oneself and one’s progeny.

The denial of free will also is a challenge that also can be met with the wisdom of the Christian tradition. Were one to deny, as Harari does, the rational free will of human beings, the moral order falls into jeopardy, making it difficult to hold anyone accountable for personal actions. Moreover, it seems to preclude meaningful distinctions between good and evil, or greater goods and lesser goods. In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm connects humanity’s original righteousness with its rational capacity, writing, “It ought not to be doubted that the nature of rational beings was created by God righteous in order that, through rejoicing in him, it might be blessedly happy. For the reason why it is rational is in order that it may distinguish right and wrong, and between the greater good and the lesser good. Otherwise it was created rational to no purpose” (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 315). The notion of purpose is incumbent on knowing a good and judging its value rightly with reference to other goods. Certainly, God as something-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is the supreme good, but even were one to consider lesser goods, knowledge of them and their proper evaluation is part and parcel of the nature of a rational being and the divinely ordained structure of participation in God’s being. Moreover, knowing is not enough, but the perfection of the rational being comes with the activity of willing and freely choosing the highest good and as an end-in-itself. Anselm further elaborates, “But it is not fitting that God should have given such an important power to no purpose. It is a certainty, therefore, that rational nature was created to the end that it should love and choose, above all, the highest good, and that it should do this, not because of something else, but because of the highest good itself” (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 315). This not only runs counter to the arbitrariness of entropy or the biological determinism to which Harari commits himself but also the claims of the liberal humanism that Harari finds dissatisfying in its appeal to autonomy as the ultimate good (Harari 2017, p. 237).7

One can further inquire if anything in Anselm’s work can help to explain the apparent deterministic effect on human choice of the will that seems to arise from biogenetics, conditioning, or its opposite, randomness. In his treatise De libertate arbitrii, Anselm begins with a different, though not unrelated, concern of whether grace, predestination, and providence are opposed to free will. A distinction is made between free will and the exercise of free choice, whereby free will is the “power of preserving the rectitude of the will for its own sake,” while free choice is rather the capacity for righteousness, though once lost, is irrecoverable under one’s own power alone (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 179). For one subscribing to Harari’s world of algorithms operating in systems or networks or a liberal humanist’s socially-negotiated individualism, free choice is rarely free. It is conditioned by factors both within and without the system. This constrains any attempt to realize goods recognized by reason or experience as valuable. Anselm’s understanding appreciates both constraints on and aids to one’s freedom to choose, everything from internal and external obstacles to one’s ability to choose, such as the duress of temptation, as well as internal and external facilitation of choosing rightly, such as virtue and grace.8 This insight suggests that Harari owes it to his readers to consider, if not defend, some notion of compatibilism between free will and determinism; but he does not. He retains oversimplified notions of free will and determinism that are mutually exclusive, though Anselm and many others recognize the possibility of holding the two in creative tension. Nevertheless, Anselm’s own argument can speak to both Harari and their mutual rival of secular liberal humanism by connecting four things: purpose, knowledge of good and evil, the capacity to choose the superior goods, and the ability to retain rectitude of will for its own sake. A righteous, rational nature is definitive of human existence, for if “it has been created with this characteristic to no purpose, as a result loving and choosing the highest good—the purpose for which it was created—it will be miserable, because it will be in need against its will, not having what it yearns for. This is an extreme absurdity” (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 316).

Yet, human beings are still miserable, not having that for which they yearn while living in seeming absurdity. Harari proposed that the search for any deeper meaning might indeed be absurd because of the failure of the humanist religion to satisfy human needs and longings under its narrative myths. Humanistic aspirations “miss the mark,” a common translation for the classical understanding of hamartia, or sin. He points out that in the wake of that failure, and in line with the science that advances materialism, a hedonistic pursuit of biomedical therapy may be the best hope to end the human quest for happiness. Anselm and the Catholic tradition reject the principle of hedonism upon which Harari premises his pursuit of happiness because of its reductionism regarding both the human potential for a deeper, eternal, and integral happiness and the necessary assistance of divine grace to achieve it. Consistently the tradition has maintained that though human beings are created for blessed happiness, no one can pass through life without sin, yet “[t]he remission of sins, therefore, is something absolutely necessary for man, so that he may arrive at blessed happiness.” Anselm’s treatise Cur Deus Homo lays out the means of remission of those sins for human happiness through divine satisfaction.

One such passage by Anselm addresses what is rightly a connection between the state of happiness and moral rectitude that was absent in Harari’s account. Anselm wrote:

No wrongdoer, moreover, will be admitted to a state of blessed happiness, since blessed happiness is sufficiency in which there is no want and, correspondingly, this state is appropriate for nobody except a person in whom there is such pure righteousness that there is no wrongdoing in him … A human being, therefore, who does not repay to God what he owes, will be incapable of being blessedly happy.

(Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 311)

One cannot understand what is good and the correspondence of goodness to the state of blessed happiness unless one is in just relationship to supreme goodness in God. In order to achieve this, the moral debt must be paid and atonement must be made with the one injured, namely God. Unable to do this on our own account, Anselm and the Gospel affirm that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). Anselm hits on some important truths about human happiness and relationships that go beyond the pleasure principle. One cannot medicate the pain away and find bliss while still in a state of disintegration. One must accept the gracious love of God to move from a state of perdition to a state of redemption. The Anselmian narrative does not set justice against compassion, but rather God’s requirement for just satisfaction is enabled through an act of gratuitous mercy, which saw God become a human being so that human beings might become like God. This great, perennial insight sets the grounds for reforming one’s understanding of what true humanism is and how Harari’s limited scope for understanding it leads to its underestimation as a coherent and creative way to envision the future flourishing of humanity in the right relationship with God and creation.

4. Christian Humanism and Ultra-Humanism: Incarnation and Satisfaction

Harari posited that experience and sensitivity were the necessary components for ethical knowledge in the religion of humanism. Though he thought such knowledge bankrupt in the face of advancing science and posthumanist ascendancy, humanism might find a strange ally against such a narrative in the theistic religion of Christianity. In fact, one can find in Anselm the roots of religious humanism; but, more importantly, one finds the roots of a more elaborated and particularly Christian humanism. R.W. Southern points out that it is Anselm who both elevates the experience of analytic introspection in the human intellect and the experience of human friendship as a means to knowing God (Southern 1970, pp. 33–35). God can be known and experienced by the human person in the human person, both within and without. Though Anselm is often considered merely the torchbearer for the twin sources of faith and reason for the knowledge of what is real, manifesting truth, goodness, and beauty, he also is a spokesperson for experience and the key notion that plays in human progress toward its purpose to love and glorify God.

Experience, which Harari himself characterizes as the summit and goal of humanistic pursuits is not diametrically opposed to faith or reason. Rather, as Kevin Hart points out, experience is the culmination of what seems to be suggested in John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio and the titular traditional conjunction. He proposes that Aeterni Patris (1879), Humani Generis (1950), and Dei verbum (1965) form an extension of commentary and elaboration on the First Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution and that John Paul II “gathers the earlier documents into a tradition,” while recognizing that the conjunction of faith and reason is not exclusive of other sources for knowing (Hart 2002, p. 201). Hart’s proposal is to open the conjunction to “fides et ratio et …” so as to suggest other sources of knowledge and invite further appreciation for “love and sacrament, hope and exegesis, imagination and testimony—in a word, ‘experience’” (Hart 2002, p. 220). Though a seeming innovation in response to or as an acceptance of novel philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hart quotes Anselm as a source for this critical claim, stating, “those who have not believed will not understand. For those who have not believed will not find by experience, and those who have not found by experience will not know” (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 236). Using the contrapositional equivalent: those who will know have found by experience, and those who have found by experience have believed. Knowing by experience implies faith, even if implicit or inchoate. As Christian theism held to faith and reason, and humanism clings to experience and sensitivity, Christian humanism can be the locus of a synthesis intelligible to those who may not share in faith as a source for knowledge but do understand reason and experience.

The experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has yielded pluralism regarding dispositions toward both faith and reason through experience. To make sense of it, one could take the path of what Jacques Maritain would describe as integral humanism. Maritain’s integral humanism admits that “[t]here is no longer but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him; humanism, but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the Incarnation” (Maritain 1973, p. 72). Affirming an experience of the rootedness of human persons in God, even beyond the language and membership of Christian institutions, can further carry the Chalcedonian dogma that Christ is true God and true man, one person in two natures and two natures in one person to those who have yet to believe and understand. Anselm had clarified for Boso and us that “in the incarnation of God it is understood that no humiliation of God came about: rather it is believed that human nature was exalted” (Anselm of Canterbury 1998, p. 275). Likewise, today, advancing and applying the Incarnation as a touchpoint for understanding the role of experience in bringing people to mutual appreciation of reason and faith exalts our human nature and advances our common human agenda and purpose.

If the posthumanist agenda of self-directed upgrade to homo deus is not on the agenda for Christians, then they need to have a way to explain what evolution means to them and how it might set an agenda for the twenty-first century. This is not contrary to the spirit of Humani Generis, but it is arguably the fruit of its careful application. Many theologians are taking steps today both to respond to moral critics as well as those who would see a more explicit explication of faith by way of reason. For example, Harari’s narrative painted a picture of the rise of monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, as a justification for the elevation of human beings above other animals and the subsequent domination of those other species. Relying on the Thomistic notion that all creatures exist by participation in diving being, James Wiseman argues that one need not abandon the scriptural affirmation of the distinctive role and position of the human being as the “crown of creation” (cf. Gen 1, 2; Ps 8) but

that there is a whole spectrum of ways or degrees in which creatures might image forth their Creator. Accepting the existence of such a spectrum (a term which itself implies a continuum) could allow one to affirm a genuinely soul-like aspect to other creatures other than humans and so avoid the need to posit the kind of “ontological leap” the Pope John Paul II referred to when noting the pronounced physical continuity that natural science affirms between human beings and other organisms.

(Wiseman 2002, p. 92)

By not abandoning metaphysics and remaining cognizant of both scripture and science through faith and reason, genuine articulations of consistent doctrine on the place of the human race in the universe can be made more accessible not only to those beyond the Christian community but those within it as well.

Thinking further about the place of humans in the divine economy of creation and its eschatological fulfillment, Anselm does not leave behind the body, as Harari would prophesy with his faith in Dataism. Rather, Anselm makes a reasonable inference in light of faith and experience, writing:

For lower nature—nature insensible to God—certainly ought not to be brought to perfection before higher nature—nature with an obligation to rejoice in God. Moreover, lower nature, being itself changed at the bringing of higher nature to perfection, would, so as to speak, rejoice in its own way. No, indeed: every created thing would be happy, each in its own way joining in eternal rejoicing in its Creator and in itself and in their mutual relation to one another, upon this final fulfillment of itself, so glorious and amazing.

(Anselm of Canterbury 1998, pp. 295–96)

Anselm’s own reckoning of human perfection is not, as Harari suggests, further alienation of the rational part from the sensible and vegetative parts of human nature, but a simultaneous realization of the object of their mutual longing. Not only that, but in Anselm’s vision, the fulfillment of the hopes of theistic religion is not in human dominance over other animals and its ecosystem, but its opposite: humiliation and satisfaction for sins of pride and power through faith and fidelity in Christ. Only in this way may there be a saintly communion of God with all God has created, human and non-human creation alike.

Even if there is an irresistible movement toward transhumanist bio-enhancement, it need not cause a retreat from Christian engagement with science and society. Admittedly, Harari has speculated, “In the not too distant future, we might create superhumans who will outstrip the ancient gods not in their tools, but in their bodily and mental faculties. If and when we get there, however, divinity will become as mundane as cyberspace—a wonder of wonders we take for granted” (Harari 2017, p. 49). There may, however, be a different way to look at the means by which human beings relate to one another and God through those very enhancements that need not cause stratification of humanity into super- and subhuman castes. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist wrote in the 1950s of “ultra-humanity.” Neither a separate over-class of genetically or biotechnologically enhanced people, nor a machine intelligence that outpaces organic human intelligence, the next step in human evolution would be based on “the intensification of our powers of understanding and love” (Teilhard de Chardin 1964, p. 290). It is not by reason divorced from primitive faith but by an understanding rooted in faith and reason informing love that humans might come to maintain both theism and humanism while advancing in achievement and perfection in Christ. The physical powers we may acquire do not necessitate relinquishing or subjugating our moral powers; in fact, it is all the more important that our sensitivities to others and God’s created order evolve at pace with them. By keeping our focus on Christ as the Omega Point of evolution, we have a target at which to aim and a source for help and grace.

5. Conclusions

Though Harari may have been right about the failure of the project of secular humanism and the self-alienation that follows in its wake, he is gravely mistaken about the content and continuing creativity of theistic religions like Catholic Christianity to respond meaningfully to today’s world and set a new agenda for the twenty-first century. Rather than abandon theism and all humanistic doctrine, there is still important work of reflection, refinement, and application of integral humanism and ultra-humanism before abandoning our very nature and destiny to posthumanism. Harari continues to evangelize his posthumanist narrative in his most recent work, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and what is notable is the shift in his presentation toward a more explicit normative voice for helping readers grapple with the most urgent problems of the present day through his posthumanist agenda. To follow his suggestions, let alone accept his atheistic, materialistic, hedonistic framework, would be akin to what Yeats describes in “The Second Coming”:

• Turning and turning in the widening gyre
• The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
• Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
• Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
• The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
• The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
• The best lack all conviction, while the worst
• Are full of passionate intensity.
(Yeats 1996, p. 89)

Thoughtful dissenting voices of conviction must be prepared to meet and challenge passionate posthumanist proposals with their own lessons and illustrations of possible future for human progress. The perennial philosophy of the Catholic tradition and its doctors like Anselm must remain a wellspring where the Church can draw water for inspiration in meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century with both faith and reason.