Engineering Desire: Biotechnological Enhancement as Theological Problem

Introduction

In this article, I argue that biotechnological enhancement of human beings (BTE) is a phenomenon whose theological significance goes well beyond ethical questions about which forms of BTE should be approved or resisted by Christians. ¹ Although such questions are important, in what follows I suggest that BTE also raises fundamental theological questions about salvation and sanctification in light of creaturely materiality and embodiment. The result, I propose, is that BTE is, in several respects, a matter of dogmatic rather than just ethical significance for Christian theology.

I make this argument by examining the theological implications of the fact that one major area of human experience—broadly, our affective capacities of feeling and desiring—is in principle substantially subject to biotechnological enhancement and control. ² In contemporary theology it is increasingly clear that bodily dimensions of Christian experiences of salvation and sanctification are not mere side-effects of more fundamental theological realities, but in fact cannot be fully extricated from them. But if Christian holiness is to a substantial degree a matter of the transformation, renovation and sanctification of feelings and desires, and if feelings and desires are likely to be increasingly engineerable through biotechnology, does it follow that holiness can be engineered?

The Theological Significance of Affects

Human beings are affective creatures. Fundamental to how we think, how we behave, and how we go about our lives in the world, is as creatures who feel and desire. We get angry and sad, we are filled with joy, we desire love and we desire for suffering to end, we hate, we yearn, we despair, and we feel compassion and hope. Given how fundamental these dimensions of human experience are, it is no surprise that there is a long history of theological reflection on the affective dimensions of creaturehood, especially the relationship between holiness and desire.

One classic approach to the theological significance of affects is pneumatological. The locus classicus for the connection between the Holy Spirit and affect can be found in the fifth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. Here Paul describes the whole of Christian life in the world and before God in affective and desiderative terms, as a struggle between competing desires, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the Spirit, and then characterises the outcome of this competition substantially in terms of patterns of affective experience. The works of the flesh include affections such as enmity, jealousy, anger and envy, and the fruit of the Spirit are all either affections directly—love, peace, joy—or else dispositions that shape affects and desires: kindness, patience, generosity, self-control. ³ From this text we see that there are excellent biblical reasons to believe that the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in Christians is something that cannot really be conceived of apart from embodied affective response, even if it does not simply reduce to such response.

The significance of affect for theological anthropology can also be demonstrated christologically, through the fact that Jesus himself experienced emotion. It is a christological commonplace that Jesus’ humanity is in some sense normative for humanity as a whole, that we learn what it truly means to be human from looking at the humanity of Christ. It is therefore highly significant that in the Incarnation the Word took on a body that felt hunger, thirst and fatigue, and which experienced affections such as compassion and sadness and joy and anger (Lk. 10:21; Jn 11:33, 35; etc.). As Augustine puts it in The City of God: ‘human emotion [humanus affectus] was not feigned in Him Who truly had the body of a man and the mind of a man … Truly, He accepted these emotions [hos motus] into His human mind for the sake of His own assured purpose’. ⁴

The result is that that the christological claim about the normativity of Christ’s humanity includes within it an affirmation of affectivity. If Christ himself was not emotionless, and if the form his perfection took included affective experiences of compassion and sadness and joy, then it follows that affect is a feature of our humanity that is to be embraced and perfected rather than suppressed or extinguished. This incarnational argument is part of why Christian theology could not ultimately subscribe to a stoic concept of apatheia as disinterestedness, despite certain inclinations in that direction. ⁵ The logic of the Incarnation means that the problem for Christians is wrong affect and wrong desire, which need to be transformed and reordered, rather than affect or desire as such.

With such strong pneumatological and christological support, it is no surprise that affect and desire have been fundamental to core discussions in the history of theology across confessional traditions. This is particularly clear in relation to the loci of soteriology and sanctification, where theologians who otherwise have significant disagreements about salvation affirm that the encounter with divine grace involves some kind of direct engagement with the affections. Didymus the Blind, for example, describes a core instance of the deifying presence of the Spirit as increased mastery over our affections: God the Spirit ‘fills’ us with ‘joy and peace’ and gives ‘minds joyful and calmed from every storm of the passions’. ⁶ Maximus the Confessor likewise places the transformation of desire and affection through ascetic practice very close to the heart of his understanding of theosis: to undergo divinisation is to be among those who are ‘dominated neither by anger, nor envy, nor rivalry … nor desire [epithumia] for the seemingly splendid things in life, nor any other vice from the wicked swarm of the passions [pathon] … so that, filled with joy, they might be united with the principles of those very virtues that they had come to know, or rather with God’. ⁷ Thomas Aquinas, likewise, found it impossible to give a compelling account of how Christians come to grow in sanctifying grace without an extended discussion of what he calls ‘the passions of the soul’ [passiones animae]. ⁸

And it is not just Orthodox and Catholic theologians who make so much of the affective body in the encounter with divine grace. Martin Luther, for example, developed his convictions about the bondage of the will in significant part through reflection on the unmasterability of sinful affection, as when he argues in the Disputation against Scholastic Theology that ‘Outside the grace of God it is indeed impossible not to become angry or lust [concupisci] … Therefore it is impossible to fulfil the law in any way without the grace of God.’ ⁹ For Luther, the problem of sin before God—the core problem to which salvation through justification by faith alone is the divine response—is not really thinkable apart from the experience of sinful affection. ¹⁰ Philipp Melanchthon follows and extends Luther on this point, placing ‘the affections’ at the heart of his theological anthropology: ‘since God judges hearts, the heart and its affections [cor cum suis affectibus] must be the highest and most powerful part of man’. ¹¹ And in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards makes much the same observation on the way to perhaps the most probing protestant theological analysis of religious affect in the centuries after the Reformation, his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: because ‘God has so constituted human nature, that the affections are very much the spring of men’s actions, this also shows, that true religion must consist very much in the affections’. ¹²

It would not be difficult to pile up further examples. The history of Christian soteriology is shot through with discussions of God’s engagement with human affections and desires. Although the fact is not always adequately recognised, there are in fact very few serious patristic accounts of theosis, or Thomist accounts of sanctifying grace, or protestant accounts of justification by faith alone, that fail to acknowledge the work of the Spirit in the realm of feeling and desire as a matter of fundamental and irreducible significance.

Engineering Affects through Biotechnological Enhancement

The importance of affect for Christian accounts of salvation and sanctification has direct implications for theological reflection on BTE. It implies that any ability we as humans have or are likely to have in the future by which we can establish substantially greater control over our affects and desires is dogmatically, rather than merely ethically, significant. ¹³ If the complex connections between affect, reasoning, doctrinal concepts, desiring and willing can be meaningfully and durably altered through technological intervention, then BTE is not just theoretically connected to our creaturehood before God. Such enhancement instead implicates, quite directly, one of the core ways in which God relates to us and we to God.

There is no doubt that a significant arena for BTE, both now and in future, will be the manipulation of affect, broadly construed. As the prominent transhumanist Nick Bostrom has observed, ‘Among the most important potential developments [for the future of humanity] are ones that would enable us to alter our biology directly through technological means. Such interventions could affect us more profoundly than modification of beliefs, habits, culture, and education’. In particular, ‘Drugs and other neurotechnologies could make it increasingly feasible for users to shape themselves into the kind of people they want to be by adjusting their personality, emotional character, mental energy, romantic attachments, and moral character’. ¹⁴ Indeed, some of this work is being done already in the form of antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication, prescription amphetamines, and other pharmacological tools for managing problematic affects and promoting healthy ones.

Bostrom is hardly alone in his interest in the transhumanist potential of such technologies. David Pearce’s classic transhumanist work The Hedonist Imperative, for example, takes as its starting point the likelihood, in his view, that pleasure and positive affect in all their forms will be available before too long at the proverbial flip of a switch. In this posthuman future, Pearce predicts, ‘Our happiness will be chemically and genetically enhanced with ever greater artistry and finesse’ and that various ‘vicious [physiological] triggers of extraordinary nastiness … will be banished from the sensorium’. ¹⁵

Although such prophecies are often overblown, they are not pure speculation either. The prospect of highly sophisticated technical control over human emotional experience builds on initiatives that are already underway. Consider the example of fear. It is well known that the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been interested for a number of years in forms of BTE that might improve the capabilities of soldiers on the battlefield, including affective enhancements to alter soldiers’ experiences of fear, fatigue, and even guilt. ¹⁶ More directly, there is the growing body of psychological and pharmacological literature researching techniques for altering fear response in patients suffering from debilitating fear, which grows out of the larger therapeutic literature on the treatment of anxiety disorders, and which often involves direct physiological and pharmacological intervention. ¹⁷ It seems, then, that it is not particularly farfetched to imagine future enhancement therapies that intervene directly to regulate human fear responses to create better soldiers, or better construction workers for skyscrapers, or to help people suffering from fear-related trauma of various kinds.

What is theologically interesting about this is that it is a relatively short step from engineering fearlessness on a battlefield to engineering a more theologically-freighted regulation of fear response. Compassionate acknowledgement of and pastoral response to certain deep-seated human fears—fear of judgement, fear of death, fears of suffering and failure and rejection—are in fact a core feature of the affective landscape of Christian life as it is described in Scripture. Hebrews 2:15, for example, speaks of Jesus’ saving work quite directly in terms of ‘free[ing] those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death’. But what if human beings no longer feared death, not because it is no longer in principle tragic or problematic, but because biotechnical interventions have made it physiologically and neurologically difficult to experience that particular sort of fear, at least with the sort of intensity the author of Hebrews seems to have in mind? Likewise, the phrase ‘Do not be afraid’ occurs over and over in the New Testament, including eleven times from Jesus’ own lips. How will Christians relate to this aspect of Jesus’ ministry if the deepest and most debilitating forms of fear are so easily avoidable or at least psychiatrically manageable? Why would we care about the fact that ‘perfect love casts out fear’ (1 Jn 4:18) if we are no longer particularly afraid in the first place? ¹⁸

The prospect of sophisticated engineering of the affective landscape of human experience thus does indeed appear, in principle, to have significant implications for the experience of being a Christian. There is a kind of affective topography to being a follower of Christ that is irreducible. Augustine describes it like this:

We Christians … are citizens of the Holy City of God … Such citizens feel fear and desire, pain and gladness, but in a manner consistent with the Holy Scriptures and wholesome doctrine …They fear eternal pain and desire eternal life. They feel pain at the present time, because they are still groaning within themselves, ‘waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our bodies’. They rejoice in the hope that there ‘shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory’. Again, they fear to sin, and they desire to persevere. They feel pain for their sins, and gladness in their good works … But it is not only for their own sakes that the citizens of the City of God are moved by these feelings. They also feel them on behalf of those whom they desire to see redeemed and fear to see perish … ¹⁹

The fact that in practice the details of this affective topography are complex and variegated—that it varies from person to person, from context to context, and from confession to confession—does not mean that it does not exist or indeed that there are not certain affective tropes that recur and around which Christian experience often clusters. Here we might think, for example, of the way that the theology of the Resurrection interacts with natural human fears about death. What would it mean to participate in a religion whose central symbols involve death and resurrection from the dead if we could manage our fear of death quite effectively through a pill or a procedure?

Similar questions about biotechnological enhancement of affects and desires can be raised in relation to traditional Christian understandings of sin and salvation. A significant theme in Christian ethics, articulated most clearly in the Sermon on the Mount, is the ethical priority that Jesus appears to place on motivation, affect and intention over formal actions, for example in the ethical equivalence he draws between anger and murder (Matt. 5:21-22). Jesus famously applies this principle to marital and sexual ethics as well: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust [or desire: pros to epithumesai auten] has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Matt. 5:27-28). It need hardly be mentioned that an enormous amount of theological energy over the past two millennia has gone into reflection on how to avoid or deal with wrongful sexual desire, however exactly we construe what ‘wrongful’ means here. For example, a central and explicit focus of monastic and other ascetic practice, historically, has been to cultivate conditions in which wrongful desires—sexual and otherwise—can be eliminated or transformed. ²⁰

We saw above that Bostrom talks about the possibility of altering our ‘romantic attachments’ through BTE. The question arises: what if when you get married you could get some sort of gene therapy or sophisticated hormonal treatment that severely inhibits your sexual desire for anyone but your spouse, while allowing ‘normal’ libido function within your marriage? Could Christians enhance their way out of the desire for another person’s spouse that is talked about in the Ten Commandments and in the Sermon on the Mount? Again this prospect is not quite as farfetched as it might appear. For example, a crude form of biochemical intervention in the arena of sexual ethics is already at work when convicted sexual offenders are prescribed anaphrodisiacs to reduce their likelihood of committing further offences. It is not so big a step from this to the possibility at some point in the future that we could develop more sophisticated anaphrodisiacs which would involve targeted rather than blanket libido suppression, or some similar method of developing reasonably precise control over our sexual energies and over which partners we are drawn to.

Does this mean Christians will in principle be able to ‘hack’ the sin of adultery in the future, using technology to preclude it as a physiological and psychological possibility, if they so choose? The question is a deeply important one. It is not difficult to imagine many other forms of future BTE that might affect the affective landscape of sin, from the management of anger and violence to the enhancement of our faculties for empathy. Reflecting theologically on BTE today means that such possibilities can no longer be excluded, at least in principle.

Indeed, to some degree such enhancement is already happening on a wide scale in the form of various psychiatric medications. There is little question that the use of an effective antidepressant can in many cases significantly change, for example, the ability of a depressed parent to give their child loving attention, to be present in their life and to be concerned about their emotional wellbeing—in short, to perform the behaviours the child is likely to associate with being loved. But if this is the case, does it mean that antidepressants are helping us, in a quite concrete way, to sin less, and to become more sanctified? To put it bluntly: are such enhancement technologies a kind of immanent means of grace? For soteriologies that require the progressive transformation of the Christian into a creature capable of the beatific vision, these are not idle questions.

Manufactured Saints?

I have shown that the prospect of sophisticated biotechnological control over key dimensions of our affective experience does in principle have significant implications for theological reflection on the affective topography of Christian life in general, and for questions related to sin, salvation, and holiness in particular. In the remainder of this article, I will reflect briefly on two specific theological questions that arise from this observation.

The first is the question of what holiness actually is if, at the level of intention as well as action, its forms can to some degree be engineered through biotechnology. Insofar as we may one day be able to generate ‘Christlikeness’ in a laboratory—say, tinkering with a human embryo to make a person less self-regarding, or more uncomfortable with material wealth, or more honest, or more faithful and courageous and compassionate—would this sort of lab-generated ‘Christlikeness’ actually be Christlikeness in the sight of God? Arguably, this question is in fact qualitatively different when asked from the perspective of future bioenhancement technologies than it is when asked from the perspective of milder examples like antidepressants, for a particular reason. Namely: such technologies could very well push the envelope quite radically on the question of the Christian’s moral ‘cooperation’ with such enhancement. Here I am thinking in particular of BTE that involves genetic editing, due to its germline effects. Ethically speaking, it is one thing to choose to modulate virtues and vices through BTE oneself, and it is quite another to be made to do this from birth. Germline effects of BTE represent a very real possibility that what is ‘chosen’ for one generation will be a biological given for the next, taking the question of individual ‘cooperation’ with our sanctification off the table in unprecedented new ways.

The reason this matters theologically is that the classic answer to a question like that of whether holiness can be engineered through biotechnological enhancement and alteration of our affective capacities would be to say ‘no, it cannot’, on the grounds that holiness is only holiness, and sin is only sin, insofar as it is in some sense freely willed. As Augustine famously puts it in De liberto arbitrio, ‘Whatever the cause of the will is, if it cannot be resisted there is no sin in yielding to it’. ²¹ Harry McSorley elaborates on Augustine’s claim: ‘If an action cannot be avoided there can be no sin; sin can only be committed when the sinful act can be avoided or resisted’. ²² By this reasoning, it also follows that an ostensibly righteous deed that ‘cannot be avoided’—i.e., that is coerced—is not in fact righteous. This means that insofar as BTE in a given case truly overrides any possibility of cooperation or resistance from the individual will at any point—say, if the modulation of courage or compassion or sexual desire were both very strong and genetically encoded prior to conception, in the genes of the parents—then what we have is a mere facsimile of sin or holiness rather than the real thing. According to this line of argument, the question of moral responsibility before God thus would not be implicated for actions directly attributable to BTE, and BTE is therefore of little relevance to theological discussions of sin, salvation and sanctification.

However, if we ask such questions through the lens of BTE and its prospects for the engineering of affects, certain problems with the traditional argument about free will and moral responsibility become particularly sharp. For one, this sort of moral reasoning—where moral responsibility for an act is only generated insofar as one is in principle free to do otherwise—risks separating the consequences of an action from its moral value. As Al McFadyen has demonstrated so powerfully in his book Bound to Sin, analysis of individual human moral agency of this sort is quite severely limited in its ability to make useful theological and moral sense of the sorts of large-scale pathological situations in which so much human suffering and cruelty is embedded. ²³ If a pathological behaviour can be shown to be modulated very substantially by structural and other ‘external’ factors, then what are we talking about when we talk about moral blame in such cases? Has the ignored child not been ‘sinned against’ by the depressed parent even though there is a strong and compassion-inducing medical explanation for the parent’s behaviour? The fact that there is such an explanation—that in an important sense the moral will of the parent has been compromised by a psychiatric disorder—is one thing; the suffering and damage caused to the neglected child is quite another. McFadyen’s point is that our understanding of sin before God is likely to be an impoverished one, with a limited range of explanatory power, insofar as it can make sense only of cases that involve some baseline level of free and deliberate cooperation from individual human agents.

BTE raises the ante on this dilemma by raising the prospect of ‘strong’, thoroughly irresistible engineering of our capacities to feel and desire on a wide scale. The prospect of such engineering, especially insofar as it affects the germline, renders accounts of moral agency that require some minimal appeal to free cooperation of the will increasingly implausible. ²⁴ In a case where BTE might be said to ‘cause’ some righteous action, or prevent some unrighteous one, more or less all the way down, there is a serious question as to whether we may have moved beyond the realm where the usual Aristotelian and Thomist tools for making sense of causal complexity in theological ethics are ethically compelling. ²⁵ It may be that theological approaches like those of the early protestant reformers, which draw more on the later than the earlier Augustine to assert the reality of moral responsibility precisely in light of lived experience of the ‘bondage of the will’ and the overwhelming causal power of external factors, will prove newly fruitful for reflecting on sin and salvation in light of BTE. Questions like this are already being raised in theology through moral analysis of structural sin; theological reflection on BTE simply ups the ante on such questions. ²⁶

Experience and Metaphysics: Guilt is Not Just a Feeling

Another theological issue that is rendered more acute by the prospect of increased control over affects and desires through BTE is the question of the relationship between theological realities before God and the concrete embodied experiences of Christians. Much of the most interesting Christian theology in the past two decades has sought to push back against ways that theology in recent centuries often failed to take adequate account of the body. Regardless whether it is attributed to Scotist univocalism, to protestant Word-oriented theologies of justification by faith, to Descartes, or to Karl Barth’s positions on revelation and natural theology, there is wide agreement in theology that the body, and with it a sense of God’s activity in the world in and through natural processes, needs to be recovered. As Kathryn Tanner puts it, we need to retrieve a sense that ‘the Spirit does not begin to work where ordinary sorts of human operation come to an end’, but rather ‘works through the whole of … ordinary human operations’. Tanner speaks for many in arguing that the ‘fully human character of religious processes’, which always involve ‘human faculties and human historical processes’, is in fact perfectly compatible with belief that the Spirit is still directly and meaningfully involved in such processes, ‘in and under the human’. ²⁷ For example, much of the recent interest in a closer integration of theology and spirituality can be understood as a series of attempts to find new and better ways to articulate the connections between God and the body, and between ‘theological’ realities and experiential ones. ²⁸

What makes BTE interesting in this context is that it raises in quite a precise way the question of just how far theology’s late-modern reintegration of the body should go. Clearly a theology that cannot give a robust and compelling account of the place of the body in salvation or sanctification is problematic, as I argued at the start of this article in relation to bodily experiences of affect and desire. But if we tie theological realities before God too closely to the body, we may have to claim that the effects of divine grace, and the effects of the Spirit’s presence, in and on the body can be augmented, enhanced or dampened through biotechnology. Perhaps such a claim is the right way forward, and perhaps it is not; in any case it is a topic that theologians cannot avoid discussing in an age of biotechnological enhancement. Reflecting theologically on BTE, we see that such questions about how exactly God does or does not work ‘in and under the human’ are not going to go away, and that the relationship between metaphysical and bodily realities is likely to continue to be one of the most interesting and urgent issues in theology for some time to come.

To approach the same issue from another angle: we saw earlier that BTE has real potential in principle to alter our relationship to particular sins, and to avoid some behaviours traditionally associated with sin, in quite direct ways through the technological manipulation of affect. But it is also clear that BTE will only ever be able to change the body in relation to future sin. Soteriologically speaking, it will not be able to undo the moral reality of suffering and damage done in the past. We see this in the example of the child neglected by the clinically depressed parent. To change our feelings and perceptions about guilt—our experience of guilt—is not the same as removing guilt before God. The latter does not reduce to its affective components, because, theologically-speaking, guilt is a relational reality before God, not just a feeling. Likewise, to use BTE to help heal and repair the child’s relationship to her painful past—to help the victim rather than the ‘perpetrator’—does not alter the moral fact that the damage was done and the suffering occurred. The example indicates an important larger truth: connected though they are, bodily realities and metaphysical realities are not fully coterminous. No matter how advanced our biotech gets, undoing the sins of the past will continue to require the work of a divine engineer.

The Christian Grammar of Human Limitation

In this article I have argued that the prospect of powerful biotechnological enhancement of human capacities of feeling and desiring has implications for how we understand the affective topography of Christian life, and for how we think about the related areas of sin, salvation and sanctification. I have shown how fundamental theological and ethical questions about the importance of free cooperation for generating moral responsibility, and about the relationship of the body to theological-metaphysical realities, are foregrounded and rendered acute when viewed through the angle of BTE.

In this we see how BTE can serve as a useful tool for reflecting on a number of specific theological and ethical questions. In discourse terms, BTE is to a substantial degree a language for theorising about the possibility of lifting traditional biological and psychological limitations on human beings. It provides a kind of semi-scientific authorisation for an expansive and radical discourse about creaturely potential. And I have argued that such discourse cannot be ignored by theologians, as it has undeniable dogmatic implications in certain areas, especially those related to affect.

Having established the importance of discourse about BTE for theology, the next step would be to demonstrate the reverse, and show how theology can inform wider reflections on human enhancement. Part of what Christian theology can also offer in this context is a sophisticated grammar for thinking about the limits of such potential. By way of a conclusion I offer two brief suggestions of what this might look like.

The first is the metaphysical distinction between the creature and Creator that is articulated in the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. In relation to BTE, this distinction is a way of suggesting that we will never ‘become gods’ no matter how unimaginably effective we become at engineering our experience of the world and our efficacy within it. Theologically-speaking, creaturehood is non-transcendable.

The second is the doctrine of original sin, and the corollary assertion that the cosmos is a ‘fallen’ place. Together, these doctrines provide a kind of metaphysical shorthand for the conviction that quests for human perfectibility will always fail, that there is a worm in the apple and we cannot get outside the apple any more than we can become the Creator. As Ted Peters puts it, transhumanist dreams of creating utopias through BTE ‘are naïve because they take insufficient account of the human propensity for using neutral things or even good things for selfish purposes, which results in chaos and suffering’. ²⁹ But a robust doctrine of the Fall goes beyond even this. It holds that even if you could change specific dimensions of these human propensities, including deep affective pathways, sin will always find new ways to manifest. From a theological perspective, there is little question that enormous good can and will be done through BTE, certainly in terms of relieving a wide range of sufferings and debilitating limitations, and perhaps also in the facilitation of specific dimensions of sanctification, as I have suggested. Legitimate and exciting as such hopes are, however, the doctrine of original sin predicts that efforts to change the human condition on a more fundamental level through human enhancement will prove to be a kind of biotechnological game of whack-a-mole. To speak of the fallenness of Creation is to describe a reality that operates in a realm that precedes and transcends what is enhanceable by human beings on their own powers. It is to suggest that if there are abiding answers to the deepest dilemmas of the human predicament, their origins will continue to be found outside of the order of creation.