Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO INFANTILIS TO HOMO DEUS

Written by Vladimir Moss

FROM HOMO SAPIENS TO HOMO INFANTILIS TO HOMO DEUS

 

     Long before old-fashioned Marxism was defeated in 1991, it had evolved a still more dangerous mutant called Cultural Marxism. This was an attempt by the revolution to conquer the West, not through politics and economics, but through culture understood in the widest sense. Thus humanrightism appeared to provide the moral – but still secular, non-religious – code for the West that old-fashioned Marxism signally failed to provide.

     Now that the twentieth century has passed into the twenty-first, Cultural Marxism has passed into a new phase so extreme as to appear almost unbelievable to members of the older generation, such as the present writer. The most important ideas of this new phase, which is continuing to develop strongly at break-neck speed, are: multiculturism, transgenderism and infantilism. Multiculturism tries to destroy the last vestiges of Christian culture by submitting it to non-Christian, especially Islamic cultures. Transgenderism tries to destroy the most basic - biologically-based – differences between human beings. Infantilism tries to destroy human nature itself in its most fundamental aspect – the ability to act as rational, free adults.

     However, the descent of Homo Sapiens into Homo Infantilis and Asexualis is only the first stage of the revolution. The second, more seductive stage, is the supposed ascent of Homo Sapiens (now already transformed into Homo Infantilis) to Homo Deus – the deification of man through purely atheist, mainly scientific means. Let us study the main aspects of this dual revolution as it has developed in the last quarter-century.

* 

     The Norwegian blogger Hanne Nabintu Herland writes: “Multiculturalism – many cultures living side by side with none of them taking the lead – has in essence turned out quite differently than then utopian dreamers and naïve neo-Marxists initially hoped for when they started out implementing this theory in the 1960’s. Instead, multiculturalism has slowly robbed ordinary Europeans of pride in their own culture, many now feeling discriminated against in their own countries. Today, we watch how the tensions are building up in Europe and clashes happening now on an almost daily basis.

     “Over the past decade the opponents of multiculturalism have multiplied. Leading politicians like Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have all condemned this neo-Marxist strategy of integration that equates the ideals of other cultures with European traditional values in Europe. The idea was that Europeans should not uphold their own cultural roots on their own soil, but instead listen humbly to new immigrants and accept their traditional norms and customs in the name of diversity. Whoever protested, has quickly, over the years been labelled ‘racist’ or ‘intolerant’, causing the person to quickly be silenced.

     “The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida is often called the father of multiculturalism. He developed the theory of deconstruction, implying that power structures come in pair: one weak, the other strong. For example, the pair of man – woman, white – black, European – African/Asian. His desire to tone down the ‘strong in the pair’ was done by giving ‘the weak’ extra rights. Among the many mistakes that the neo-Marxist Derrida did, in his quest to tear down the traditional structures of the European society, was naively believing that ‘Europeans’ are always the strong part and ‘Africans – Asians’ always the weak part in the West. So, his theories legitimized a discrimination against Europe’s population, insinuating that their perspectives are uninteresting and that only the perspectives of ‘the weak’ – that is the non-Western foreigner – had the right to strongly voice his beliefs...”[1] 

     Multiculturism in Europe usually means the triumph of Islam over the indigenous Christian culture. The blame for this must lie, first of all, on Christian leaders, who, with very few exceptions, have shown a spineless defeatism in the face of the Muslim threat and a shameful surrender of their own professed faith. The invasion of Europe by Muslim immigrants, and the vast inroads they have made into the Christian population, is both a consequence of, and punishment of, this Christian spinelessness. Experience shows that when Muslims reach about 20% of any nation’s population, they become uncontrollable, with no-go areas for whites (especially blonde female whites), sharia law operating in parallel with constitutional law, the take-over of schools and universities, the censoring of all anti-Muslim comment. It looks as if Sweden has already reached this stage – helped, of course, by the exceptionally liberal ideology of the Swedish state.[2] 

     The growth of Muslim influence in the West is rapid and inevitable for one simple reason: the Muslims have large families, whereas westerners prefer to abort their children. Almost all the countries of Europe now have rapidly aging populations and demographic growth rates well below that which would sustain the dominance of white, non-Muslim populations. But the suicidal ideologies of abortion and gay rights, not to mention ecumenism, continue to hold sway in European minds…

     Essentially, the battle to stop the Muslims’ internal take-over of the West has already been lost. There is no way western governments can now stop this short of resorting to civil war against the Muslim population – or building a wall between whites and Muslims on the model of Israel’s wall along the West Bank. But this is not only not remotely practical: it is excluded by the human rights ideology adhered to by almost all western leaders. 

     However, the Europeans, we are told, have a strategy! Actually, it is the strategy of complete and unconditional surrender. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel signified the triumph of this strategy when in 2015 she opened the gates of her country (and through that, of the rest of Europe) to massive, unprecedented and more-or-less uncontrolled migration – if “migration” is the right word, as opposed to “invasion” - from the Muslim Middle East. Already the government measures this has necessitated – such as turning German citizens out of their own properties in order to accommodate migrants – as well as the totally unacceptable behavior of some migrants – such as defecating in public places, and demanding the services of prostitutes at government expense – has created bitter opposition to her policies, and she is beginning a small and hesitant retreat from them. But the game is up; the enemy is already within the gates; there is essentially nothing that the West European states can do except accept the inevitable. As the saying goes: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

     However, it is a little different in Eastern Europe. Hungary’s President Orban has defied Germany’s “moral imperialism”, as he puts it, and refuses to let the Muslims settle in his country. Slovakia has agreed to take migrants, but only if they are Christians – the only country so far that seems to be concerned to protect Christian civilization. The Romanians say, quite reasonably, that if they cannot absorb their Gipsy Roma population, how can they be expected to take in untold numbers of anti-Christian Muslims? Meanwhile, the Bulgarians, in a quiet but determined fashion, have built a wall along their frontier with Turkey…

     Greece is in a different position again. Completely helpless to stop the flood of Muslims crossing the Aegean Sea by boat, but entirely dependent on the EU to sustain their vast debt, the Greeks can only look on hopelessly as their Orthodox culture is invaded and destroyed. The Marxist government of Tsipras has reneged on its promise to leave the EU if the Europeans did not release them from their debts. So a “Grexit” seems unlikely in the near future. In any case, the atheist socialist, quasi-totalitarian ideology of the EU is close to the heart of the atheist Marxist Greek government.

    Multiculturism usually goes together in the minds of liberals with ecumenism, LGBT fanaticism and Islamophilia. Paradoxically, the Muslims are far from multicultural or ecumenical, wishing to impose the exclusive truth of Islam and sharia law wherever they settle. Nor do they approve – in theory - of LGBT… 

     Melanie Phillips describes how, since 1991, the implementation of the gay rights and LGBT agenda has in effect destroyed Christian civilization in the West: “As communism slowly crumbled, those on the far Left who remained hostile towards western civilization found another way to realize their goal of bringing it down. 

     “This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped. 

     “The key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals – who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.

     “Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of ‘production, distribution and exchange’ as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution. 

     “He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be formed into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.

     “So he advocated a ‘long march through the institutions’ to capture the citadels of culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down.

     “This strategy has been carried out to the letter.

     “The nuclear family has been widely shattered. Illegitimacy was transformed from a stigma into a ‘right’. The tragic disadvantage of fatherlessness was redefined as a neutrally viewed ‘lifestyle choice’.

     “Education was wrecked, with its core tenet of transmitting a culture to successive generations replaced by the idea that what children already knew was of superior value to anything the adult world might foist upon them.

     “The outcome of this ‘child-centred’ approach has been widespread illiteracy and ignorance and an eroded capacity for independent thought.

     “Law and order were similarly undermined, with criminals deemed to be beyond punishment since they were ‘victims’ of society and with illegal drug-taking tacitly encouraged by a campaign to denigrate anti-drugs laws. 

     “The ‘rights’ agenda – commonly known as ‘political correctness’ – turned morality inside out by excusing any misdeeds by self-designated ‘victim’ groups on the grounds that such ‘victims’ could never be held responsible for what they did.

     “Feminism, anti-racism and gay rights thus turned… Christians into the enemies of decency who were forced to jump through hoops to prove their virtue.

     “This Through the Looking Glass mind-set rests on the belief that the world is divided into the powerful (who are responsible for all bad things) and the oppressed (who are responsible for none of them). 

     “This is a Marxist doctrine. But the extent to which such Marxist thinking has been taken up unwittingly even by the Establishment was illustrated by the astounding observation made in 2005 by the then senior law lord, Lord Bingham, that human rights law was all about protecting ‘oppressed’ minorities from the majority…

     “When the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves that this was the end of ideology. We could not have been more wrong.

     “The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle duster, as our cultural commissars pulverised all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled…”^[3]

     Or perhaps he would not have been so pleased… For, as Ryszard Legutko writes: “If the old communists had lived long enough to see the world of today, they would be devastated by the contrast between how little they themselves had managed to achieve in their antireligious war and how successful the liberal democrats have been. All the objectives the communists set for themselves, and which they pursued with savage brutality, were achieved by the liberal democrats who, almost without any effort and simply by allowing people to drift along with the flow of modernity, succeeded in converting churches into museums, restaurants, and public buildings, secularizing entire societies, making secularism the militant ideology, pushing religions to the sidelines, pressing the clergy into docility, and inspiring powerful mass culture with a strong antireligious bias in which a priest must be either a liberal challenging the Church or a disgusting villain.”[4]

     “Consider the main enemy,” writes Codevilla: “religion. America’s mainline Protestant denominations have long since delivered their (diminishing) flocks to the ruling class’s progressive priorities. Pope Francis advertises his refusal to judge attacks on Western civilization, including the murder of priests. His commitment of the Catholic Church to the building of ‘a new humanity,’ as he put it at July’s World Youth Day in Krakow, opens the Catholic Church to redefining Christianity to progressive missions in progressive terms, a mission already accomplished at Georgetown University, Notre Dame, and other former bastions of American Catholicism now turned into bastions of American progressivism. Evangelical leaders seem eager not to be left behind. Gramsci would have advised that enlisting America’s religious establishments in the service of the ruling class’s larger priorities need not have cost nearly as much as Mussolini paid in 1929. Refraining from frontal challenges to essentials would be enough.

     “Instead, America’s progressives add insult to injury by imposing same-sex marriage, homosexuality, ‘global warming,’ and other fashions because they really have no priorities beyond themselves. America’s progressive rulers, like France’s, act less as politicians gathering support than as conquerors who enjoy punishing captives without worry that the tables may turn…”[5]

     Tragically, America’s Orthodox Christians have not stood up against the LGBT movement. Thus Fr. Alexander Webster writes: “Prominent Orthodox clergy and theologians have advocated for various avant-garde causes of non-Orthodox provenance, ranging from women clergy (first, the ‘restoration’ of the obsolete order of “deaconess” and, for some, even the radical innovation of female ‘priests’) to a soft-sell of the ancient proscriptions against abortion to the latest trend, ‘transgenderism.’ But the granddaddy of them all is a mounting obsession with all things LGBT. Concerning the latter, the leftist elites are surprisingly not so far ahead of a majority of the regular church-going faithful. The 2016 Religious Landscape Study by the Pew Research Center disclosed that 64 percent of Orthodox Americans surveyed in 2014 thought that homosexuality ‘should be accepted,’ while only 31 percent thought it ‘should be discouraged.’ Similarly, 54 percent strongly favored or favored ‘same-sex marriage,’ while only 41 percent strongly opposed or opposed it. The ‘same-sex marriage’ percentages comport with those of Mainline Protestants and Catholics, but are inverted compared to Evangelical Protestants and Mormons.”[6]

     Let us now turn to the mos shocking aspect of this revolution: transgenderism. This is sometimes called the “rainbow” or LGBT revolution. However, a British political party has gone further; its manifesto declares: “Welcome to the LGBTIQA+ website of the Green Party of England & Wales. Our mission is to advance the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer and Asexual people.”

     But this is nothing compared to the latest acronym, created by Wesleyan University in Connecticut, is: “LGBTTQQFAGPBD”, which stands for: “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, flexural, asexual, gender-f**k polyamorous, bondable/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism”![7]

     “Once upon a time,” writes Melanie Phillips, “’binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental.

     “This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorized as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast becoming an enforceable orthodoxy, with children and young people particularly in the frame for attitude reassignment.

     “Many didn’t know whether to be amused or bemused when the feminist ideologue Germaine Greer was attacked by other progressives for claiming that transgender men who became women after medical treatment were still men. What started as a baffling skirmish on the wilder shores of victim-culture has now turned into something more menacing.

     “The Commons Women and Equalities Select Committee has produced a report saying transgender people are being failed. The issue is not just whether they really do change their sex. The crime being committed by society is to insist on any objective evidence for this at all. According to the committee, people should be able to change their gender at will merely by filling in a form. Instead of requiring evidence of sex-change treatment, Britain should adopt the ‘self-declaration’ model now used in Ireland, Malta, Argentina and Denmark. To paraphrase Descartes, ‘I think I am a man/woman/of no sex; therefore I am.’…

     “If people want to identify with either gender or none, no one is allowed to gainsay it. Objective reality crumbles under the supremacy of subjective desire. Those who demur are damned as heartless.

     “In fact, gender fluidity itself creates victims. Professor Paul McHugh is the former chief psychiatrist at John Hopkins hospital in the US. In the 1960s this pioneered sex-reassignment surgery – but subsequently abandoned it because of the problems it left in its wake. Most young boys and girls who see sex reassignment, McHugh has written, have psychosocial issues and presume that such treatment will resolve them. The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only ‘gender counsellors’ who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.

     “In two states, any doctor who looked into the psychological history of a ‘transgendered’ boy or girl in search of a resolvable problem could lose his or her licence to practice medicine…

     “The intention is to break down children’s sense of what sex they are also wipe from their minds any notion of gender norms…”[8]

     Every civilization known to man before our own has recognized, following God’s clear word that man was created “male and female” (Genesis 1.26, 27), that there is a fundamental difference between men and women that cannot be extirpated and that this is the basis for certain important moral and cultural norms. The desire to change one’s sex from male to female, or from female to male, was once considered a psychiatric illness, gender dysphoria, but in recent decades has been restored to “normal” status. Moreover the LGBT fanatics have forced through various abhorrent changes in moral and cultural norms, such as allowing men who have supposedly become women to use female toilets, and encouraging children to choose their gender. Those who doubt that men can really, deeply become women, or vice-versa, are discriminated against in various ways; and traditionalists can only watch in horror as the attempt to create a new, sexless civilization proceeds apace.

     However, just recently an authoritative decision by the American College of Pediatrics has given us hope that this madness of our contemporary civilization may eventually be healed. Michael Dorstewitz writes: “The American College of Pediatricians issued a statement this week condemning gender reclassification in children by stating that transgenderism in children amounts to child abuse.

      “The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex. Facts – not ideology – determine reality.”

      “The policy statement, authored by Johns Hopkins Medical School Psychology Professor Paul McHugh, listed eight arguments on why gender reclassification is harmful.

      “1. Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder.

      “2. No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.

      “3. A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.

      “4. Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous. Reversible or not, puberty-blocking hormones induce a state of disease – the absence of puberty – and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.

      ‘5. According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

      “6. Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.

      “7. Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT – affirming countries.

     “8. Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful as child abuse.

      “The left, as one might expect, reacted swiftly with claws fully extended.

      “Think Progress described the American College of Pediatricians as a ‘hate group masquerading as pediatricians.’

      “The Huffington Post said that ‘Once again, Paul McHugh has used the ever more tarnished name of Johns Hopkins to distort science and spread transphobic misinformation.’

      “McHugh, who formerly served as Johns Hopkins’ psychiatrist in chief, issued an opinion last year stating that transgenderism is a ‘mental disorder’ and sex change is a ‘medical impossibility’.

      “The statement was also signed by Drs. Michelle A. Cretella, M.D., president of the American College of Pediatricians, and Quentin Van Meter, M.D., the organization’s vice president…”[9]

      The rebellion against God’s nature, in essence an attempt literally to recreate human nature, has reached such a state of blasphemous pride that soon even those forms of sexual activity which are still considered beyond the pale by contemporary legislators will soon be found acceptable. Thus the gay actor George Takei has openly and without being punished expressed his delight in the joys of paedophilia.[10] The only good aspect of this statement lies in the fact that it suggests (but does not, of course, prove) what many people have suspected, that homosexuality and paedophilia are closely related forms of sexual perversion… 

     Earlier it was pointed out that the essence of humanrightism consists in the assertion of self-will. Man wants something, so he asserts that he has the right to it. Moreover, if obtaining what he wants entails a change in identity, so be it: he will re-identify himself. And nobody has the right to deny his new identity. For “I want: therefore I am”. So if a man wants to be a woman, he re-identifies himself as a woman. And anybody who denies this “fact” is “transphobic”, “hate-filled”, etc.

     But then the traditionalists also have the right to label this man, much more accurately, as narcissist and infantile. For what is the difference between adults and children if not that while adults are expected to take at least some account of reality and not mistake what they want to be with what they in fact are, children are excused that responsibility?

     Until, that is, they grow up! But our narcissistic generation does not seem to want to grow up. Its main occupation seems to be in taking “selfies”, delights in completely self-centred, infantile behavior – even to the extent of dressing up as children.

     The narcissism of contemporary western civilization is reflected in what Professor Frank Furedi has called “therapy culture”. He argues, as Peter Watson writes, “that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the legacy of the therapeutic revolution is that ‘society is in the process of drawing up a radically new definition of what constitutes the human condition’. He has found that therapy, happiness and fulfilment can be damagingly intertwined.

     “The core element in this new condition, he says, is that many experiences which have hitherto been interpreted as a normal part of everyday life have been redefined as injurious to people’s emotions. He quotes a wealth of figures to substantiate this, including the fact that children as far unhappier these days than ever before, that children as young as four are ‘legitimate targets for therapeutic intervention’, that there has been a ‘massive increase’ in depression ‘due to the difficulty that people have in dealing with disappointment and failure’.

     “The number of mental health counsellors has snowballed, in both the UK and the USA. In Furedi’s critique, 53 percent of British students had ‘anxiety at pathological levels’, and a host of new ‘illnesses’ have been conceived, or created, by new profession[al]s who ‘invent the needs they claim to satisfy’. He explores many aspects of this ‘medicalization’ or ‘psychologicalization’ or ‘pathologicalization’ of life, arguing that there has been a ‘promiscuity’ in therapeutic diagnosis: counselling for job loss, for people who are ‘exercise addicts’ or ‘sex addicts’, for the recently divorced, for women who have just given birth, for athletes who retire from competition and face ‘the onset of post-sporting depression’. He describes self-help books to help people survive their twenties, claims that office politics has been redefined as ‘bullying’, caution as ‘inhibition’ and diffidence as ‘withholding’. In a survey carried out in the same place in 1985 and again in 1996, he reports, there was found to have been an increased of 155 percent among sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds who considered themselves disabled.

     “His point is that, from birth to education to marriage and parenting, all the way through to bereavement, ‘people’s experience is interpreted through the medium of the therapeutic ethos’. Among all this, religion has been subordinated to therapy. ‘This subordination of religious doctrine to concern with people’s existential quest reflects a wider shift towards an orientation towards a preoccupation with the self. A study of ‘seeker churches’ in the United States argues that their ability to attract new recruits is based on their ability to tap into the therapeutic understanding of Americans.

     “Furedi believes, as Christopher Lasch does, that there has been a powerful shift away from the more traditional affirmation of communal purpose toward encouraging people to find ‘meaning through their individual selves’. And this is where the fundamental problem lies. It is a problem because it exaggerates people’s vulnerability. Some accounts of therapeutic culture associate it with the ‘selfish or at least self-centred’ quest for fulfilment, but, he argues, in fact therapy culture promotes self-limitation. ‘It posits the self in distinctly fragile and feeble form and insists that the management of life requires the continuous intervention of therapeutic expertise.’ He finds that in therapy culture, many emotions are depicted negatively ‘precisely because they disorient the individual from the search for self-fulfilment’.

     “Even love, though portrayed as the supreme source of self-fulfilment, is depicted as potentially harmful ‘because it threatens to subordinate the self to another’. In books such as Anne Wilson Schaef’s Escape from Intimacy and Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood, ‘Intense love towards another is regularly criticized for distracting individuals from fulfilling their own needs and from pursuing self-interest’. In a similar vein, ‘It has been suggested that people who have too much faith may be suffering from religious addiction’. Father Leo Booth in his Where God Becomes a Drug warns of becoming ‘addicted to the certainty, sureness or sense of security that our faith provides’.

     “The rise of confessional novels and television programs, what Joyce Carol Oates has described as ‘pathography’, has eroded the sphere of private life, with the result that no shame now attaches to negative events and ‘mere survival is presented as a triumph’, as we sacralise self-absorption. From this it follows that we have redefined the meaning of responsibility: ‘This redefinition of responsibility as responsibility to oneself helps provide emotionalism with moral meaning’.

     “What has happened, says Furedi, following Ernest Gellner, is that in our risky modern society the spiritual struggle of former times has been replaced by a personal struggle for ‘attention and acceptance’. The decline of tradition helps situated the demand for new ways of making sense of the world. The weakening of shared values fragments this quest for meaning, privatizes it and lends it an individual character. ‘Therapeutics promises to provide answers to the individual’s quest for the meaning of life.’ But this gives rise, he says, to a therapeutic ethos in which there are no values higher than the self. Therapy attempts to avoid the problem of how people can be bound to a shared view of the world (as with religions) by offering individuated solace.

     “Furedi argues that the invasion of the therapeutic ethos into life has reached such proportions that ‘[b]eing ill can now constitute a defining feature of an individual’s identity’… Self-esteem has become paramount in our psychological lives: almost any action or policy can be justified by its effect on our self-esteem, almost any behavioural wrong or dereliction can be put down to lack of self-esteem. He scoffs at the absurdities it can lead to, such as the case of Jennifer Hoes, a Dutch artist who was so much in love with herself, she said, that she decided marry herself. ‘Self-esteem has acquired a free-floating character that can attach itself in any issue.’”[11]

     “Self-marriage” is indeed one of the most striking and characteristic examples of contemporary narcissism and infantilism. Abigail Pesta writes: "Self-marriage is a small but growing movement, with consultants and self-wedding planners popping up across the world. In Canada, a service called Marry Yourself Vancouver launched this past summer, offering consulting services and wedding photography. In Japan, a travel agency called Cerca Travel offers a two-day self-wedding package in Kyoto: You can choose a wedding gown, bouquet, and hairstyle, and pose for formal wedding portraits. On the website I Married Me, you can buy a DIY marriage kit: For $50, you get a sterling silver ring, ceremony instructions, vows, and 24 ‘affirmation cards’ to remind you of your vows over time. For $230, you can get the kit with a 14-karat gold ring.

     “‘It's not a legal process — you won't get any tax breaks for marrying yourself. It's more a ‘rebuke’ of tradition, says Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. ‘For generations, if women wanted to have economic stability and a socially sanctioned sex life or children, there was enormous social and economic pressure to do that within marriage,’ she says. ‘Personally, as someone who lived for many years single and then did get married, I know that the kind of affirmation I got for getting married was unlike anything I'd ever had in any other part of my life.’ That, she adds, is ‘incredibly unjust.’"[12]

     Here we come back to that passion which unites all the Marxists – old and new, cultural and barbarian: the feeling of burning injustice, of resentment, of envy. This feeling, together with the desire to “rebuke” tradition, shows that Cultural Marxism is the social and political mode of Satan’s protest against God. Only, in becoming “cultural”, Marxism has now migrated from a social or political movement to pure individualism, narcissism, even infantilism, which can be described as a childish refusal to face up to reality, an insistence that what I want I must have and will have – and woe to anyone who stands in my way. So the poor man insists on being rich; the stupid man insists that he is clever; the boy insists that he is a girl, and the girl – that she is a boy. And anyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy of the people who must be exterminated – or, at a minimum, utterly ostracized.

* 

     Where and when did this madness begin and where could it end?

     Ultimately this is the same madness Adam and Eve succumbed to when they accepted the temptation of “becoming as gods” who “will not surely die”. In its modern form, it began in the Renaissance, when man became intoxicated by his increasing knowledge, and was pierced again with the desire to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil through science… 

     However, the early modern age was still a religious age, and for all its fascination with humanism, believed in other forms of knowledge than science. Moreover, it believed in the supra-scientific mystery of man, born in the image of God and having an immaterial “quintessence” that could not be reduced to the four material elements. Thus Hamlet rebuked his friend:

There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio,

than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And to the probing but dim-witted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he said:

You would play upon me;

You would seem to know my stops;

You would pluck out the heart of my mystery;

You would sound me from my lowest

note to the top of my compass.

And there is much music, excellent voice,

in this little organ.

Yet cannot you make it speak…

     However, the Enlightenment dispelled the aura of mystery, the idea of a certain unfathomability in the nature of man. In its stead came the conviction that nothing was beyond the bounds of human investigation and manipulation - including human nature itself. Hence the preoccupation with – and fear of - the figure of Frankenstein in the nineteenth century. 

     The real explosion in science, and in the numbers of scientists, came during the Cold War. Both of the superpowers were motivated by the desire to steal a march on the other in the arms race; both believed in science as the key to knowledge, which in turn was the key to power; both subjected even human beings to scientific manipulation, hoping to produce a new man – “Homo Sovieticus” or “Homo Orientalis”. But this new man was seen as only a variant of the old man – more pliable, more obedient, and less religious; conditioned so as to be “beyond freedom and dignity” (B.F. Skinner), subhuman rather than superhuman, as befitted the totalitarian ideologies of both East and West. For the ideal in both countries was control rather than recreation, the reduction of man to a machine or an animal rather than a god.

*

     What is new about the last quarter-century since the end of the Cold War is the desire to create a new and superior species, not a variant of Homo Sapiens, but something completely new – Homo Deus! [13]Nor is there any Frankensteinian horror at this prospect. On the contrary, it is embraced with enthusiasm and even with a certain intoxicated, quasi-religious rapture.

     The critical breakthrough event, according to the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, is what he claims is “the replacement of natural selection by intelligent design”, when, instead of being the passive object of mindless natural selection, man takes active, intelligent, deliberate control of his own evolution. This “could happen in any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of in-organic life.”

     The most important of these methods is biological engineering, which is “deliberate intervention on the biological level (e.g. implanting a gene) aimed at modifying an organism’s shape, capabilities, needs or desires, in order to realize some preconceived cultural idea.”[14]

     After describing some remarkable genetic experiments performed on voles and mice, and the possibility of resurrecting Siberian mammoths and Neanderthal ape-men, Harari continues with even more remarkable chutzpah (or hubris): “Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design a better Sapiens? The abilities, needs and desires of Homo Sapiens have a generic basis, and the Sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice. (The mouse genome contains about 2.5 billion nucleobases, the Sapiens genome about 2.9 billion bases – meaning the latter is only 14 per cent larger.) In the medium range – perhaps in a few decades – genetic engineering and other forms of biological engineering might enable us to make far-reaching alterations not only to our physiology, immune system and life expectancy, but also to our intellectual and emotional capacities. If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?

     “The Cognitive Revolution that turned Homo Sapiens from an insignificant ape into the master of the world did not require any noticeable change in physiology or even in the size and external shape of the Sapiens brain. It apparently involved no more than a few small changes to internal brain structure. Perhaps another small change would be enough to ignite a Second Cognitive Revolution, create a completely new type of consciousness, and transform Homo Sapiens into something altogether different.

     “True, we still don’t have the acumen to achieve this, but there seems to be no insurmountable technical barrier preventing us from producing superhumans. The main obstacles are the ethical and political objections that have slowed down research on humans. And no matter how convincing the ethical arguments may be, it is hard to see how they can hold back the next step for long, especially if what is at stake is the possibility of prolonging human life indefinitely, conquering incurable diseases and upgrading our cognitive and emotional abilities.

     “What could happen, for example, if we developed a cure for Alzheimer’s disease that, as a side benefit, could dramatically improve the memories of healthy people? Would anyone be able to halt the relevant research? And when the cure is developed, could any law enforcement agency limit it to Alzheimer’s patients and prevent healthy people from using it to acquire super-memories?

     “It’s unclear whether bioengineering could really resurrect the Neanderthals, but it would very likely bring down the curtain on Homo sapiens. Tinkering with our genes won’t necessarily kill us. But we might fiddle with Homo sapiens to such an extent that we could no longer be Homo sapiens…

     “Recently, only a tiny fraction of these new opportunities have been realized. Yet the world of 2014 is already a world in which culture is releasing itself from the shackles of biology. Our ability to engineer not merely the world around us, but above all the world inside our bodies and minds, is developing at breakneck speed. More and more spheres of activity are being shaken out of their complacent ways. Lawyers need to rethink issues of privacy and identity; governments are faced with rethinking matters of health care and equality; sports associations and educational institutions need to redefine fair play and achievement; pension funds and labour markets should readjust to a world in which sixty might be the new thirty. They must all deal with the conundrums of bioengineering, cyborgs and inorganic life.

     “Mapping the first human genome required fifteen years and $3 billion. Today you can map a person’s DNA within a few weeks and at the cost of a few hundred dollars. The era of personalized medicine – medicine that matches treatment to DNA – has begun. The family doctor could soon tell you with greater certainty that you face high risks of liver cancer, whereas you needn’t worry too much about heart attacks. She could determine that a popular medication that helps 91 per cent of people is useless to you, and you should instead take another pill, fatal to many people but just right for you. The road to near-perfect medicine stands before us.

     “However, with improvements in medical technology will come new ethical conundrums. Ethicists and legal experts are already wrestling with the thorny issue of privacy as it relates to DNA. Would insurance companies be entitled to ask for our DNA scans and to raise premiums if they could discover a genetic tendency to reckless behavior. Would we be required to fax our DNA, rather than our CV, to potential employers? Could an employer favour a candidate because his DNA looks better? Or could we sue in such cases for ‘genetic discrimination’? Could a company that develops a new creature or a new organ register a patent on its DNA sequences? It is obvious that one can own a particular chicken, but can one own an entire species?

     “Such dilemmas are dwarfed by the ethical, social and political implications of the Giglamesh Project [the Project to achieve immorality] and of our potential new abilities to create superhumans. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, government medical programmes throughout the world, national health insurance programmes and national constitutions worldwide recognize that a humane society ought to give all its members fair medical treatment and keep them in relatively good health. That was all well and good as long as medicine was chiefly concerned with preventing illness and healing the sick. What might happen once medicare becomes preoccupied with enhancing human abilities? Would all humans be entitled to such enhanced abilities, or would there be a new superhuman elite?

     “Our late modern world prides itself on recognizing, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of societies. Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality.

     “This is not science fiction. Most science-fiction plots describe a world in which Sapiens – identical to us – enjoy superior technology such as light-speed spaceships and laser guns. The ethical and political dilemmas central to these plots are taken from our own world, and they merely recreated our emotional and social tensions against a futuristic backdrop. Yet the real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our emotions and desires, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

     “Science fiction rarely describes such a future, because an accurate description is by definition incomprehensible. Producing a film about the life of some super cyborg is akin to producing Hamlet for an audience of Neanderthals. Indeed, the future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.

     “Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist. Time did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed ‘before’ the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world – me, you, men, women, love and hate – will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond this point is meaningless to us…”[15]

     It would be foolish to deny the possibility of stunning scientific discoveries in the future that will enable scientists, if not radically to change the nature of man, at least modify it – within the limits placed on His creation by the Creator. However, Harari’s vision of the future depends on three rather large and definitely false assumptions: (1) that God does not exist, (2) that the origin of man is through the mindless process of Darwinian natural selection, and (3) that the nature of man is entirely material, wholly “wrapped up” in his genes. For believers in God, in creation (as opposed to evolution) and to the fixedness of human nature as made in the image and likeness of God, it would seem much more likely that the technological innovations he hails will lead to a kind of “superman” that Harari appears not to have envisaged at all, but which was definitely envisaged by the saints: the Nietzschean superman, “genius of geniuses”, world ruler and perdition that Church tradition knows as the Antichrist.

     In 1953, DNA was discovered. As we have seen, properly understood this discovery disproved the foundation myth of western civilization – Darwinism. But at the same time it gave scientists in the image of Frankenstein the hope of changing human nature by shifting around its physical building blocks.

     The discovery of DNA was followed by notable “advances” in reproductive technology with potentially enormous – and catastrophic - consequences for society. “First, contraception severed the connection between sex and reproduction. It became possible to have sex without having babies. Then modern technology severed the connection between reproduction and sex. It became possible to have babies without having sex.”[16] Further developments from this included the cloning of animals, and the supposed creation of animal-human hybrids.[17]

     Again, since the 1960s surgeons and doctors have been attempting to heal diseases by transplanting organs from dead or even – horror of horrors! – living donors. This has led to a new form of organized crime – the extraction of body parts from living people (often Chinese criminals about to be executed or poor peasants in Turkey or India) in order to prolong the lives of rich sick people in the West.There is no doubt that the motivation of several of these scientific experiments is not just ungodly, but anti-God.

     Thus Professor Sir Robert Edwards, who invented the technique of in vitro fertilization (which invariably involves infanticide through the destruction of spare fertilized eggs), said that his research was aimed at establishing who was in charge: God or the scientists. “He was left in no doubt. ‘It was us,’ he said…”^[18]

     The evil and truly eschatological possibilities of this revolution were clearly seen as early as 1976 by the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Academician N.P. Dubinin: “The achievements of human genetics, and of general and molecular genetics, will push forward the problem of interference in human heredity. The coming revolution in genetics will demand a decisive overturning of the previously dominant view concerning the primacy of nature in its natural form. Genetics will turn out to be capable of overcoming the natural story of life and creating organic forms inconceivable in the light of the laws of natural evolution… For the molecular genetics and the molecular biology of the 21^st century there lies in store the prospect of creating cells as the only self-regulating open living system, which will be bound up with the understanding of the essence of life. An exchange of living forms will take place between the earth and other worlds… The aim of genetic engineering is the creation of organisms according to a given model, whose hereditary program is formed by means of introducing the recipient of new genetic information. This information can be artificially synthesised or separated in the form of natural genetic structures from various organisms. In this way a new single genetic system which cannot arise by means of natural evolution will be created experimentally… Various manipulations with DNA molecules can lead to the unforeseen creation of biologically dangerous hybrid forms… ”[19]

     After quoting this passage, Fr. Vladislav Sveshnikov expressed the truly apocalyptic fear: “We have to admit that contemporary science is preparing the ground for the coming of the Antichrist.”[20] In more recent years, with the mapping of the human genome, and the development of ever more sophisticated methods of genetic manipulation, these fantastical ideas seem less fantastical by the day… Both St. Nilus the Myrrh-gusher and St. Seraphim of Sarov hinted that the Antichrist will be born through a form of in vitro fertilization: the devil will enter, and take complete control of, the sperm of his father before it has entered the womb of his mother.[21]

*

     Now human nature is God’s greatest work, the crown of His creation. Science with all its ingenuity has never improved on man as God has created him. Once there was a scientific conference that tried to establish ways of improving on the human hand. The conclusion was: we cannot improve on it. For “Thou hast fashioned me, and hast laid Thy hand upon me. Thy knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is mighty, I cannot attain unto it” (Psalm 138.4-5)…

     When man attempts to overstep the bounds of human nature by trying to improve on it, he is silently rebuked. Thus human organ transplants come up against a clear sign of God’s displeasure – rejection. Only by massive doses of drugs administered daily will the body be persuaded to accept the foreign invasion of the donor’s body part. And so inadvertently, in the course of these transplant operations, scientists have discovered what the Holy Fathers always knew but which our modern mechanistic theories have caused them to forget: that there is a very mysterious union between the soul and the body, between certain psychological functions and certain “purely” physical organs. We are not here talking about the crude and obviously false materialist theory that mental activity is simply the same as brain activity.

     We are talking about the fact that memory, emotion, even personal identity, seem to be linked with every organ of the body.Now we have always known this about the heart. And the first heart-transplant operations produced frightening results. The family of the first man who received a new heart in South Africa could not recognize him after the operation; he seemed to be a different person. Later transplants have confirmed that many of the characteristics of the donor seem to be transplanted with his heart into the patient. Some of these characteristics are trivial, such as tastes in food; others are more serious, such as sexual orientation, or suicidal thoughts…

     More recently, as Dr. Danny Penman writes, scientists “started claiming that our memories and characters are encoded not just in our brain, but throughout our entire body. 

     “Consciousness, they claim, is created by every living cell in the body acting in concert.

     “They argue, in effect, that our hearts, livers and every single organ in the body stores our memories, drives our emotions and imbues us with our own individual characters. Our whole body, they believe, is the seat of the soul; not just the brain.

     “And if any of these organs should be transplanted into another person, parts of these memories – perhaps even elements of the soul – might also be transferred.

     “There are now more than 70 documented cases… where transplant patients have taken on some of the personality traits of the organ donors. 

     “Professor Gary Schwartz and his co-workers at the University of Arizona have documented numerous seemingly inexplicable experiences… And every single one is a direct challenge to the medical status quo.

     “In one celebrated case uncovered by Professor Schwartz’s team, an 18-year-old boy who wrote poetry, played music and composed songs was killed in a car crash. A year before he died, his parents came across a tape of a song he had written, entitled, Danny, My Heart is Yours.

     “In his haunting lyrics, the boy sang about how he felt destined to die and donate his heart. After his death, his heart was transplanted into an 18-year-old girl – named Danielle.

     “When the boy’s parents met Danielle, they played some of his music and she, despite never having heard the song before, knew the words and was able to complete the lyrics.

     “Professor Schwartz also investigated the case of a 29-year-old lesbian fast-food junkie who received the heart of a 19-year-old vegetarian woman described as ‘man crazy’.

     “After the transplant, she told friends that meat now made her sick, and that she no longer found women attractive. In fact, shortly after the transplant she married a man.

     “In one equally inexplicable case, a middle-aged man developed a newfound love for classical music after a heart transplant. 

     “It transpired that the 17-year-old donor had loved classical music and played the violin. He had died in a drive-by shooting, clutching a violin to his chest.

     “Nor are the effects of organ transplants restricted to hearts. Kidneys also seem to carry some of the characteristics of their original owners.

     “Take the case of Lynda Gammons from Weston, Lincolnshire, who donated one of her kidneys to her husband Ian.

     “Since the operation, Ian believes he has taken on aspects of his wife’s personality. He has developed a love of baking, shopping, vacuuming and gardening. Prior to the transplant, he loathed all forms of housework with a vengeance.

     “He has also adopted a dog – yet before his operation he was an avowed ‘cat man’, unlike his wife who favoured dogs…”^[22]

     The most recent – and shocking – proposed innovation is frozen brain transplants.[23]

     Although, to the present writer’s knowledge, there are no contemporary conciliar church decisions on this subject, nevertheless Church Tradition provides us with some important clues in our search for guidance on the issues raised by these facts… Thus St. Philaret of New York (+1985) wrote: “The heart is the center, the mid-point of man's existence. And not only in the spiritual sense, where heart isthe term for the center of one's spiritual person, one's ‘I’; in physical life, too, the physical heart is the chief organ and central point of the organism, being mysteriously and indissolubly connected with the experiences of one's soul. It is well known to all how a man's purely psychical and nervous experiences joy, anger, fright, etc., — are reflected immediately in the action of the heart, and conversely how an unhealthy condition of the heart acts oppressively on the psyche and consciousness... Yes, here the bond is indissoluble—and if, instead of the continuation of a man's personal spiritual-bodily life, concentrated in his own heart, there is imposed on him a strange heart and some kind of strange life, until then totally unknown to him—then what is this if not a counterfeit of his departing life; what is this if not the annihilation of his spiritual-bodily life, his individuality, his personal ‘I’? And how and as whom will such a man present himself at the general resurrection?

     “But the new attainment does not end even here. It is intended also to introduce into the organism of a man the heart of an animal—i.e., so that after the general resurrection a ‘man’ will stand at the Last Judgement with the heart of an ape (or a cat, or a pig, or whatever). Can one imagine a more senseless and blasphemous mockery of human nature itself, created in the image and likeness of God?

     “Madness and horror! But what has called forth this nightmare of criminal interference in man's life—in that life, the lawful Master of which is its Creator alone, and no one else? The answer is not difficult to find. The loss of Christian hope, actual disbelief in the future life, failure to understand the Gospel and disbelief in it, in its Divine truthfulness—these are what have called forth these monstrous and blasphemous experiments on the personality and life of man. The Christian view of life and death, the Christian understanding and conception of earthly life as time given by God for preparation for eternity—have been completely lost. And from this the result is: terror in the face of death, seen as the absolute perishing of life and the annihilation of personality; and a clutching at earthly life—live, live, live, at any cost or means prolong earthly life, after which there is nothing!”^[24]

     St. Philaret’s reference to the general resurrection provides us with the clue to the evaluation of the innovations we have been discussing. The Church teaches, on the one hand, that the soul continues to function with full consciousness even after the body has been reduced to dust; but on the other hand, that the body will be resurrected at the last day in order that soul and body together may receive the reward fitting to them for the deeds they have performed together in life. This illustrates two important truths. First, man, the whole man, is not soul alone, still less body alone, but soul and body together. Just as they are conceived together and simultaneously, so they will enter into eternal life together.^[25] And secondly, every soul will be judged with his own personal body, and not with any other’s.

     This second truth is sometimes doubted on the grounds that in the course of a man’s lifetime every cell in his body dies and is replaced many times, so that it makes no sense to speak about “his own personal body”. We take the elements of our body from outside and replace them in a constant exchange that unites us indissolubly with the nature around us. However, the discovery of DNA in the 1950s weakened this objection in that it showed how, in principle, a man’s body can be said to be the same throughout his lifetime in spite of the fact that its entire cellular composition will be “recycled” as it were several times in the course of his life from birth to death. For his bodily identity is encapsulated in his DNA; every organ and every cell of my body is marked by a seal showing that it belongs to me and me alone – my personal DNA, which is who I am, physically (but not psychologically or spiritually) speaking. This is the natural order, the foundation of my personal physical identity and the earnest of the re-establishment of my personal physical identity at the General Resurrection.

     In principle, therefore, a body can be said to be the same and unique and belonging to only one person in spite of the most radical overhauls in its cellular and atomic composition. In view of this, it is not difficult to understand why God has ordained that my body rejects the invasion of a body part with a different DNA – it’s simply not me! Physical rejection by the body should be accompanied by moral rejection by the soul – it cannot be God’s will for this mixing of persons (and even of species) to take place!

     This general thesis raises the question: Are all organ transplants to be rejected? Or only transplants of the most central organs, such as the heart? Only a truly Orthodox Council, employing the expertise of scientists, can decide this question; and there has been no such Council, to the present time...

* 

     Being a religious animal, man will never be satisfied with a purely scientific progress to godmanhood or superman status, the more so in that the collapse of Marxism-Leninism has discredited the purely atheist concept of man. However, in order that the religious component in the scientists’ world-view should support science wherever it leads, it must not be a traditional, dogmatic religion like Christianity. Apart from any other problems (and there are many), traditional religions like Christianity claim to have discovered the one truth once and for all – “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13.8). But scientists claim to have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth through the uniquely reliable path of empiricism, so they cannot allow that the most important truths were discovered thousands of years ago, and not by empirical methods, but by Divine Revelation. From this point of fiew, Christianity (and Islam) is passé, outdated, pre-scientific and, to a significant degree (in that it allows other, non-empirical methods of reaching the truth), anti-scientific.

     However, there is one ancient, pre-scientific religion that is not incompatible with the scientific march to godmanhood – Buddhism. Buddhism is popular with scientists because of its adogmatism and rejection of a personal Creator God distinct from His creation, and because some of the cosmological ideas of Buddhism and its ancestor, Hinduism, are compatible with popular modern cosmological ideas. 

     The most popular attempt to claim godmanhood  has been the Hindu-Masonic-Theosophist-New Age doctrine that man is a god by nature. The main intellectual foundation of this doctrine, as of all materialist anthropologies, remains the theory of evolution. But the raw material or dust from which evolution springs is now endowed with a supra-material principle, or natural divinity, which emerges ever more clearly as inorganic matter evolves in organic matter, vegetable into animal, animal into human, and human – into divine status. 

     Thus J.S. Buck writes: “First a mollusc, then a fish, then a bird, then a mammal, then a man, then a Master, then a God… The theologians who have made such a caricature or fetish of Jesus were ignorant of this normal, progressive, higher evolution of man.”[26] Again, Marilyn Ferguson writes: “The myth of the Saviour ‘out there’ is being replaced with the myth of the hero ‘in here’. Its ultimate expression is the discovery of the divinity within us… In a very real sense, we are each other.” And psychiatrist Scott Peck writes: “Our unconscious is God… The goal of spiritual growth is… the attainment of godhead by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally, wholly God.” Finally, John Dunphy preaches “a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being.”[27]

     However, man is not a god by nature, although he can become one by grace. True, his soul was created by an act of Divine inbreathing. But, as St. Macarius the Great points out, this does not mean that his soul is part of the uncreated Godhead, but rather that it is “a creature noetical, beautiful, great and wondrous, a fair likeness to and image of God”.[28] If man were a god by nature, as Vladimir Lossky points out, then, “without mentioning other outrageous consequences, the problem of evil would be inconceivable… Either Adam could not sin, since by reason of his soul, a part of divinity, he was God, or else original sin would involve the Divine nature – God Himself would sin in Adam.”[29]

     It is because man is not a god by nature that he is able to fall, and has in fact fallen, from his godlike status. Thus man has not evolved from the apes, but he can devolve to an animal-like status[30], while retaining the ability, through Christ, of returning from his present animal-like to the godlike status he had in the beginning.

     It should be clear now that the Orthodox Christian doctrine of man as a bicomposite creature made in the image of the God-Man is the only final safeguard against the opposite and antichristian doctrine of man as the man-god made in the image of the beast, to which the whole of modern culture and scientism, both theist and antitheist, tends. For if the godlike in man is denied, he is assimilated to the animals and becomes like them. If, on the other hand, the godlike in him is recognized, but is ascribed, in common with the theistic evolutionists and New Agers, to some emergent properties of matter, then the position is no better, and even decidedly worse. For then man is seen as the summit of being, whose godlikeness comes from within creation, and within his own nature, but not from without.

     And the final consequence of that is that he becomes like Satan or the prince of Tyre in his pride, of whom the only true God says: “Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou has said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas, yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God” (Ezekiel 28.2).

     The Christian vision of man is both far greater, and far humbler, than the New Agers’. On the one hand, the origin of man is to be found, not in the dust of an original “big bang”, but in the Council of the Holy Trinity, and the Divine image is to be identified with those attributes of reason, freedom and self-sacrificial love which raise him far above the animals. And on the other hand, his glorious destiny is not the result of his own efforts or the reward for his own merits, but the work of God Himself. Man is called to be a partaker of the Divine nature (II Peter 1.4); in St. Basil’s striking phrase, he is a creature who has received the command to become a god. But he carries out this command, not in pride, but in humility, not by inflating himself, but by magnifying God his Saviour, not by nourishing his own supposed divinity, or “divine spark”, but by purifying the image of God in himself so as to be irradiated by the Uncreated Light.

 

 

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