The Upgrade
Transhumanism, the Church, and the question of what we are
They are not trying to improve humanity. They are trying to replace it.
That is the sentence most people are not saying clearly enough — inside the Church or outside it. The conversation about AI tends to land on productivity, job displacement, misinformation, the ethics of deepfakes. These are real concerns. But underneath all of them is a more fundamental argument, one being made in Silicon Valley boardrooms and philosophy departments and TED talks, and now — finally — being named explicitly by the Church.
The argument is this: the human being is a problem to be solved. Mortality is a design flaw. Emotion is inefficiency. The body, with its fragility and limitation and need, is an obstacle. And given enough time and compute, we can engineer our way past all of it.
This is transhumanism. And it is not fringe.
What Transhumanism Actually Is
Julian Huxley coined the term in 1957. He meant it as aspiration: humanity transcending itself through conscious evolution, using science and technology not just to cure disease but to fundamentally redesign what we are.
Seventy years later, his successors are less poetic and more concrete. They want to upload minds into machines, merge human cognition with artificial intelligence, reverse the aging process, and eventually produce what they call the ‘posthuman’ — a being so enhanced by technology that the word human no longer quite applies. Nick Bostrom at Oxford describes the goal as overcoming all biological limitations: cognitive, physical, emotional, mortal. Elon Musk frames Neuralink as defensive necessity. Ray Kurzweil, once dismissed as eccentric, now holds an official position at Google, predicting the ‘singularity’ will arrive within years.
These are not science fiction premises. They are the stated goals of well-funded projects already underway.
What is important to understand is that transhumanism is not primarily about technology. It is a doctrine about the human person. It carries a very specific answer to the oldest questions: What are we? What is wrong with us? What would fix us? And the answers are: information systems. Mortality and limitation. Better engineering.
What the Vatican Is Actually Saying
Pope Leo XIV named it directly in a general audience in December 2025. He called it lo scenario del transumano — the transhuman scenario — a contemporary promise of what he called ‘immanent immortality’: the defeat of death, not through resurrection, but through optimization.
The Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova had already framed the problem at its root: that AI ‘intelligence’ is functional and reductionist compared with human intelligence as the faculty of a whole embodied person, and that perspectives treating the body as an obstacle rather than integral to personal identity represent a fundamental error.
This is not defensive posturing from an institution anxious about change. It is a coherent counter-argument grounded in a more complete account of what human beings actually are.
The Argument Transhumanism Cannot Answer
Antiqua et Nova returns repeatedly to the Thomistic distinction between intellectus and ratio — between the contemplative capacity that receives truth and the discursive capacity that reasons toward it. Human intelligence is not primarily computational. It is not pattern-recognition operating at high speed. The deepest mode of human knowing — intellectus — is participatory, receptive, relational. It cannot be replicated by a system that processes tokens and predicts outputs, however sophisticated that system becomes.
The human person is not a machine running below its potential. The human person is a unity of body and soul, created in the image of a God who is Trinity — irreducibly relational, ordered toward communion, oriented to a truth that transcends what any system could produce. We are not the sum of our outputs.
Dignitas Infinita makes the point that dignity is not a function of capacity. It is not earned by intelligence, enhanced by augmentation, or diminished by limitation. It is inherent, grounded in what the person is — not what the person can do. This is the argument transhumanism has no answer for.
The Pastoral Dimension
There is a pastoral dimension to this that I cannot ignore, because I sit with people every week who are already living inside it.
The logic of enhancement is not only a Silicon Valley ideology. It is a spiritual condition. It is the old accusation made new, dressed in code. You are not enough. You could be more. The limits you have — the weakness, the need, the mortality — these are defects, not gifts. And if you will not fix yourself, something else will have to do it for you.
That is not a TED talk premise. That is the voice most of us have been hearing since childhood.
What transhumanism does is give that voice institutional credibility, venture capital, and a roadmap. It sanctifies the project of self-transcendence through control. It turns the oldest wound — the wound of not being enough — into the engine of a civilization. And it offers, in place of resurrection, an upgrade.
What We Should Actually Focus On
The body is not a problem. Limitation is not a flaw. Mortality is not the enemy — it is the door. And the God who entered human flesh, who took on our fragility and was buried in it and rose from inside it, did not do so to suggest that flesh was temporary scaffolding.
He did it because this is where He chose to be found.
The upgrade that is being offered cannot give us what we are actually hungry for. It can optimize our outputs. It cannot make us more loved. It can extend our lives. It cannot give them meaning. It can accelerate intelligence. It cannot form a conscience.
What we actually need is not more capability. It is more depth. Not enhancement. Formation.
That is the thing no algorithm produces and no engineer can deliver. And it is, still, exactly what the Church exists to offer.
Thank you for reading.
This is the sharpest framing of the transhumanist question I have encountered, and I say that having spent months writing on exactly this territory. Your line, "it sanctifies the project of self-transcendence through control," names what most commentary dances around.
What strikes me is how old this pitch actually is. The serpent's offer in Genesis 3 is the first transhumanist proposal: "you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." The promise is transcendence through acquisition, the overcoming of limitation through grasping. And the terrible irony, the one the text holds without explaining, is that Adam and Eve were already image-bearers. They were already participating in the divine likeness. The thing they reached for, they already possessed. What they lacked was not capacity but trust.
That is exactly the pastoral wound you name here. "You are not enough" is not a modern invention. It is the oldest lie, now dressed in venture capital and compute. And the transhumanist offer is structurally identical to the original: you can be more than what you are, if only you will grasp rather than receive. The fruit has changed. The architecture of the temptation has not.
Your closing distinction between enhancement and formation is the one I keep returning to in my own work. Enhancement assumes a deficit. Formation assumes a gift already given that must be uncovered, tended, and inhabited. The difference between those two postures is, I think, the difference between Babel and Eden.
Thank you for writing this.
"And the God who entered human flesh, who took on our fragility and was buried in it and rose from inside it, did not do so to suggest that flesh was temporary scaffolding."--that is my favorite line.