By S.A. McCarthy

The term “prophet” has been somewhat overused in the past, subsequently diluting its meaning. A prophet was once an individual who spoke on behalf of God (or a god or goddess, in pagan religions) and very often foretold the future, often in terms of doom. One of the best-known prophets, John the Baptist, foretold the coming of Christ — “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:16-17) — and, through his execution and burial, even foreshadowed Christ’s death. While it is difficult to say that prophets still walk among us, the 20th-century Christian author C.S. Lewis is a strong contender for the title.

One of the chief evils of the modern age is that of transhumanism, a movement that seeks to use modern science and technology to “enhance” humanity in terms of cognition and longevity, even to the point of artificially achieving immortality. The term “transhumanism” was popularized by biologist Julian Huxley, brother of “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley, in a 1957 essay entitled, unsurprisingly, “Transhumanism.” He wrote:

“We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings of our ancestors, that were rooted in superstition and professional secrecy. … The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. 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. ‘I believe in transhumanism’: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”

Shortly afterward, the futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who would rename himself FM-2030, began teaching courses on transhumanism at the New York-based New School, positing that synthetic body parts and organs would dramatically expand human life expectancy. After claiming that his transhumanist philosophy would enable him to live to his 100th birthday in 2030, Esfandiary died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 69, describing his pancreas as “a stupid, dumb, wretched organ.” The work of transhumanism has been continued since then by the likes of British academic Max More, physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) Yuval Noah Harari, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, artificial intelligence (A.I.) pioneer Marvin Minsky, self-styled philosopher David Pearce, and even tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Larry Page.

One of the defining characteristics of transhumanism is the belief that human beings can rely on modern advances in science and technology — whether blood transfusions, synthetic organs, or microchips implanted into the brain — to increase the human lifespan, possibly even indefinitely. A recent example of transhumanist idealism was caught on a “hot mic” moment between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin during a military parade in Beijing on Wednesday. Seemingly unaware that his voice was being recorded and broadcast, Xi commented, “People rarely lived to be over 70, but these days, at 70 you are still a child.” Putin replied, “Biotechnology is making advances. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become — even achieve immortality.” Xi then predicted that, aided by technology, the Chinese life expectancy may even rise to 150 years of age by the end of the century.

So where does C.S. Lewis factor into all of this? In 1945, Lewis published a novel entitled “That Hideous Strength.” Nowhere near as widely-read or well-known as his “Chronicles of Narnia” tales, nor even of works such as “The Screwtape Letters” or “Mere Christianity,” “That Hideous Strength” is the dystopian conclusion to Lewis’s science fiction trilogy which began as a friendly contest between himself and his Oxford University colleague J.R.R. Tolkien. While the first two books in Lewis’s trilogy take place on Mars and Venus, respectively, “That Hideous Strength” takes place in a small university town in the heart of England. The story revolves around a young couple, Mark and Jane Studdock. Mark is a sociologist who finds himself inducted into a cabal of bureaucrats and scientists under the influence of demons, while Jane is befriended by the protagonist of the first two novels, who turns out to be the spiritual heir of King Arthur.

While contemporary authors of speculative fiction such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley rooted their visions of future evils in politics and consumerism, Lewis alone correctly predicted the demonic advent of transhumanism. The villains of the piece, the network of bureaucrats and scientists known as the “Belbury set,” turn out to be, of course, transhumanists. As Mark moves deeper and deeper into the “inner circle” at Belbury, he draws closer and closer to meeting “the Head,” the rarely-seen figure orchestrating the Belbury set’s modern machinations. As the obese Italian physicist Filostrato and the apostate pastor Straik prepare Mark to meet the Head, they reveal to him their organization’s sinister intentions:

“I speak that you may know what can be done: what shall be done here. This Institute — Dio meo; it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”

Even this brief passage bears more than a passing resemblance to the transhumanist philosophy laid out by Julian Huxley, the microchip-in-the-brain ideology of Silicon Valley’s elite, and the artificial organs discussed by Xi and Putin. But the character of Straik exposes the transhumanist philosophy’s chief moral flaw:

“There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plough. And there are no reservations. The Head has sent for you. Do you understand — the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol; tonight you shall see what it symbolized. This is real Man at last, and it claims all our allegiance. … A king cometh … who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase ‘Son of Man’ that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”

When Mark is finally brought before the Head, he discovers that the name is no mere title: the leader of the Belbury group is a decapitated head, the head of a scientist named François Alcasan, seemingly kept reanimated by a complicated mechanical system designed by Filostrato. The Italian scientist is later horrified to discover that the Head is actually animated not by his technology but by a demonic force hungry for human sacrifice.

Of course, Lewis has much more to say about the idea of reanimating decapitated heads with the goal of achieving immortality, but his critique of transhumanism as an entire philosophy is more prescient. Not only does Lewis castigate the abuse of science and technology, but he observes that the abuse of science and technology in the modern age will inevitably and even invariably be married to the old spirit of black magic, what is called “naturalism.” The key tenet of naturalism is that nature — that is, the created, the creature — can usurp and replace or even transcend supernature — that is, the creator, God. It is the sin of Satan and, while a germ or kernel of naturalism is present in nearly all sin, the naked and unbridled desire to replace God has animated the greatest evils of human history. In “That Hideous Strength,” Lewis explains:

“A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. … The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already … begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. … It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe … would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen.”

It is perhaps lesser-known that Lewis often paired his non-fiction books with his fiction. The non-fiction companion to “That Hideous Strength” is “The Abolition of Man.” Although the slim volume begins as a treatise on morals in education, Lewis does quickly move on to discussing the very passage above from “That Hideous Strength.” In more academic terms, he writes:

“I have described as a ‘magician’s bargain’ that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician has failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. … There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious — such as digging up and mutilating the dead.”

Lewis may, had he lived a few decades more, have added to the list of “disgusting and impious” acts the modern scientist-with-the-spirit-of-a-magician would be willing to undertake: mutilating the genitals of children and fashioning false vaginal canals from cadaver flesh, implanting AI microchips into impaired human brains, and tearing the vital organs out of the young and healthy so that the old and sickly might live a little longer. Regardless, by so clearly and viscerally defining and illustrating the evils of transhumanism, Lewis implicitly elucidates the antidote to those evils.

Just as the “magician’s bargain” that Lewis describes — again, whether that be giving up some body tissue or an organ or volunteering as a test subject for bionic limbs or brain-chip implants — ultimately demands that the would-be-magician surrender himself in return for power — or longevity or immortality, as the case may be — so also God demands object after object, and finally the whole self. But where transhumanism promises longevity, another century of life perhaps, or even a sort of artificial immortality, God has delivered on His promise of life everlasting. Transhumanism may demand that one surrender one’s limbs, one’s organs, perhaps even one’s mind, all in an effort to attain eternal life, but in the process, it destroys the self. Human beings are not souls that have bodies, nor bodies that have souls, and transhumanism ultimately separates the two, ripping apart the essence of what it means to be human.

God also demands more and more of the self, but where transhumanism strips away that which makes up the self, that which makes one in essence human, God perfects it, stripping away only that which is not necessary to be human, only that which will prevent one from fully embracing his identity as a child of God. In short, both God and transhumanism demand sacrifice, which makes both Christianity and transhumanism religions. Of course, only one can be true. Both God and transhumanism promise everlasting life, but God alone offers everlasting life along with maintaining one’s humanity. Transhumanism demands that one’s human essence be the sacrifice. God offers everlasting life, but on His terms, for He alone has the authority to offer it; it is a gift which He alone can give. Transhumanism offers everlasting misery and inhumanity, but on one’s own terms. As Lewis wrote in yet another book, “The Great Divorce”, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.” Thus, Lewis’s prediction that, if transhumanism succeeds, Hell itself will be incarnate here on Earth may yet come true.

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.