Cardinal  Felipe Arizmendi , Bishop Emeritus of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and responsible for the Doctrine of the Faith at the  Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM) , offers Exaudi readers his weekly article.

FACTS

What does it mean to be a human being? What is human and what is inhuman? What makes us human? These might seem like pointless questions, but they are very relevant and timeless. For example, someone born male may want to be a woman, believing that to be what it means to be human; and a woman may want to be, appear, and act like a man, and there is a struggle to make this the “normal” thing. There is insistence that abortion is a human right, as if the unborn were not human. Attempts are made to legislate euthanasia as a human right, as an act of humanity to end the suffering of a sick person. Some prefer to have animals instead of children or friends. It is considered very human to indulge in excessive alcohol consumption or sexual experiences, as if that makes us more human. Our current government boasts of a “new humanism,” which is reflected in the content of school textbooks, written by an avowed Marxist, and whose content the President says will not change. Hence the question: what is human?

In recent years, there has been much talk of transhumanism and posthumanism. What are these terms? The International Theological Commission, which collaborates with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, has just published an interesting, though not easy, document with a very suggestive Latin title:  Quo vadis, humanitas?  It means: Where are you going, humanity? It has a subtitle:  “Reflecting on Christian Anthropology in the Face of Some Future Scenarios for
Humanity.”  This document reflects on where humanity is headed: toward its fulfillment, or toward its destruction? It describes these two current trends as follows:

Transhumanism and posthumanism, although related and sometimes considered identical (due to their still fluid definitions), represent different perspectives on understanding human nature and the future of humanity .  Transhumanism is a philosophical movement based on the conviction that human beings can and should use the resources of science and technology to overcome the physical and biological limitations of the human condition, particularly aging and even death. In this way, it shapes its own evolution and seeks to maximize its potential, even to the point of redesigning human beings and making them capable of transcending limitations. With its programmatic emphasis on increasing individual human capabilities, it develops a distinctly anthropocentric perspective, based on an ideological and naively uncritical view of scientific and technological progress.

Transhumanism imagines a future in which human beings will perfect the biological form that currently characterizes human nature, in order to achieve the goal of individual immortality sustained by technology. The utopian dimension of the search for immanent immortality allows us to interpret transhumanism as an existential expression of a presumption that is both naive and overbearing”  (14).

“Posthumanism in the strict sense criticizes traditional humanism, questioning the specific characteristics of human beings, as well as the existence of a ‘human form’ that deserves to be safeguarded as such because it carries a universally valid meaning. It emphasizes the ‘hybrid’ (cyborg) to the point of deconstructing the human subject and makes the boundary between human and machine completely fluid, rejecting the anthropocentrism characteristic of transhumanism. Ultimately, posthumanism in the strict sense can be understood as an existential expression of escape from reality, based on a radical devaluation of the human”  (15).

LIGHTNING

The document offers a Christian vision of what it means to be human:

“For us Christians, among the many elements that constitute human identity, there is one that stands out as a true formal principle, capable of ordering the other aspects. It is the gift of being not only creatures or servants of God, but called to be sons and daughters of the Father, for the praise of his glory and the benefit of all creation. This is attested to by the Spirit of God who cries out in us, ‘Abba, Father!’ and conforms us to Christ, so that we are made sharers in his divine identity as Son of the Father. Filial identity is the ultimate and radical determination of our identity, and whoever is sealed in his heart by the Holy Spirit finds in this filial identity the point of reference for integrating every other aspect of his identity”  (115).

“The full revelation of who we are and who we are called to be is given to us by the incarnation of Him who is the Image of the Father, in whose image and likeness we have been created and divinized and who has redeemed us from sin”  (143).  “The encounter with the humanity of Jesus Christ illuminates our humanity and reveals ourselves to us”  (146).

“What all men, at least implicitly, seek, desire, and hope for, is so transcendent and infinite that it can only be found in God. The true humanization of man, therefore, reaches its culmination in his gratuitous divinization, that is, in his friendship and communion with God. The grace of Jesus Christ abundantly fulfills the intimate desires of man that reach beyond the limits of human strength. The fulfillment of the human in God neither absorbs nor diminishes the human, just as it does not impoverish the divine that is communicated. It is, in fact, an encounter of freedom, where God divinizes at the same time as the human being becomes human”  (147).

“Christian anthropology is fully illuminated when it recognizes that we have been loved and created by the Father to become ‘sons and daughters in the Son’ and to participate, through the gift of the Spirit, in the communion of the intradivine love”  (148).  “Christ is the unsurpassed model, because through the shaping of each human being’s personal history with his singular history, by the gift of the Spirit, one becomes sons and daughters of the Father”  (149).

ACTIONS

The same document proposes:  “The Christian life as a vocation translates into the involvement of one’s personal existence in the existence of Christ until Christ is formed in us. It is a progressive assimilation to Christ, until we have his very feelings and his very thoughts”  (151). In short: to be more human, we must strive to become more and more like Christ, as the Virgin Mary did.