On the Soul and the Cyberpunk Future: St Macrina,St Gregory of Nyssa and Contemporary Mind/Body Dualism

Introduction

If I lose my arm in an accident and get a prosthetic replacement, is my new arm part of me? Am I less me than I was when I had an organic arm? What about if I choose to replace my organic arm with a prosthetic one because it is functionally superior? What if I choose to replace all my body with mechanical equivalents—is it still my body? What precisely about the physical matter of our bodies is important for identity, if at all? In this article I consider how the conversations of St Macrina the Younger and St Gregory of Nyssa can shed new light on the troubles of transhumanist mind/body dualism. In On the Soul and the Resurrection, written in approximately 379 ad, Gregory of Nyssa records a dialogue between himself and his sister, debating the soul, the transitory nature of the body, the effects of time as a feature of sin, and personal identity in the face of the doctrine of the resurrection.

I will illustrate the relevance of On the Soul and the Resurrection for contemporary bioethics, near-future transhumanism, and posthumanism by using an example from a fictive cyberpunk scenario. The term cyberpunk popularly refers to science-fiction settings where society is technologically advanced, often featuring human augmentations or advanced levels of artificial intelligence, but consequently struggling socially and in economic disparity as a result of such rapid technological changes and their impact on everyday lives. These cyberpunk scenarios often serve as cautionary tales exploring the misuse of technology, especially under corporate capitalism, or raise questions about our current assumptions when it comes to personal identity and our relationship to technology. I use the TV show Altered Carbon (2018) to illustrate a difficulty present in our contemporary bioethics—what about the body is to be considered integral to personal identity? The science-fiction show presents us with a radical but logical extreme, demonstrating a hard-line dualism between body and soul. Personhood is reduced to information contained on a ‘stack’ (or hard drive), that can be uploaded into different bodies. The body itself is an exchangeable luxury, whilst the necessities for identity—namely consciousness—exist in purely information format.

When discussing death and resurrection, Macrina gives us surprisingly relevant insights into a modern theology of personal identity. The concept of spirit as apart from body is a central concern in Gregory and Macrina’s dialogue, leading Gregory to pose questions about how a body that changes all the time can be considered consistent and truly him. In the course of this article I demonstrate the nuance that Macrina’s understanding of identity can bring to our contemporary concerns. She gives us a means to talk about changes that occur to our bodies making us no less who we are, but also addresses that concern that there is something important about my physical body that makes me me. I begin by explaining Macrina’s position on the soul, then outline the problems Gregory raises with this. I correlate Gregory’s concerns with science-fiction concepts found in Altered Carbon, and explain the wider problems these typify for bio-ethics, identity ethics, and transhumanist philosophy. I conclude by explaining how Macrina’s answers can help overcome some of these difficulties and concerns.

The Ghost in the Machine

On the Soul and the Resurrection is a dialogue between Gregory and his older sister, Macrina. It takes place shortly after the death of their brother, Basil of Caesarea (d.379 ad). Macrina herself is on her deathbed with a doctor sitting nearby for the duration of the dialogue. ¹ We have evidence that Gregory often suffered from ill health and throughout his life relied on Basil to come to his aid. ² Both Basil and Macrina were central figures in his life and especially in his education. In the dialogue, Gregory places himself in the role of pupil to Macrina, whom he calls ‘teacher’. ³ The dialogue echoes that of Socrates and Plato in the Phaedo and bears a number of similarities, such as both Macrina and Socrates being on their deathbed, both giving arguments for the soul’s immortality, and both chastising a pupil who at the present moment is not capable of rational thought, as noted by Adamson in his recent study of the text. ⁴ As well as echoing the format of the Phaedo, the text also sheds light on the relationship between Gregory and Macrina. As Louth writes, ‘Although various scholars have pointed out the parallels between the statement by Gregory of Nyssa about Makrina and Plato’s description of the disciples of Socrates in the Phaedo, that literary device does not necessarily take away from its historical verisimilitude, any more than it does from that of Plato’s accounts of the public defence and the final hours of Socrates’. ⁵ Gregory’s Life of Macrina gives testament to the role that Macrina played in his upbringing and education. Under Gregory’s presentation, Macrina is a theologian in her own right. Louth calls her ‘the fourth Cappadocian’, placing her next to Gregory, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus as one of the great theologians of the fourth century. The context we have in On the Soul and the Resurrection is one of both personal distress and theological reassurance. Gregory, in a moment of weakness and understandably distraught by his brother’s passing, asks how his faith can stand up in the face of death, and Macrina, importantly nearing death herself, explains that this is not a wavering point for faith, but the very purpose of Christianity. She turns Gregory’s despair into eschatological hope, chastising him for his incisive scepticism, and inviting him first to accept that some things are beyond human understanding, and then putting his mind at rest with a philosophical theology that addresses his concerns.

Macrina argues that the soul is the unseen thinking element that binds together our body: ‘The soul is an essence created which has a beginning; it is a living and intellectual essence which by itself gives to the organic and sensory body the power of life and reception of sense-impressions as long as the nature which can receive these maintains its existence’. ⁶ The body then is more than the sum total of its physical elements, ⁷ as evidenced by the higher functions it achieves that go beyond the simple functions of any one of the body’s limbs or organs. Macrina points, for an example of this, to the physician at her side. She notes how the physician observes her condition with his eyes, and places his finger to feel her pulse—determining her ailment not through any one single observation, but by collating this information at a higher level. ⁸ Knowing an illness is not a function of the eye or of the finger alone, but evidence of a higher cognitive function, something beyond the isolated functions of individual body parts. ⁹ For Macrina, that unexplained something that is beyond individual functions and acts like a cohesive whole above and beyond bodily particulars, is the soul—the ‘thinking’ part of the body.

Macrina’s description of the soul is akin to what in contemporary philosophical parlance we might want to refer to as consciousness. It is that rational thought that doesn’t seem to belong specifically to any one part of the body, but instead inhabits the whole body. ¹⁰ Even in the twenty-first century, where we can point to the brain as the primary organ involved in these functions, we still cannot give a decisive account of how conscious thought arises, ¹¹ or explain those functions that some call the ghost in the machine. ¹² Despite being a fourth-century text, On the Soul and the Resurrection as a rumination on the mysteries of the soul still has stark relevance for today, especially for those who ask whether the ghost can exist apart from the machine.

Macrina’s position on the soul arises, she informs us, in opposition to the Epicureans. According to Macrina, the Epicureans claim that the body and soul are all made of the same (physical) elements. ¹³ If this were the case, Macrina argues, then for them, (1) the soul is either common to the elements of this world and can be counted among them (so the soul must exist in material, physical components), or, (2) the soul is to be considered alien, and has no (natural) place in this world. Macrina’s description of the soul on the basis of her above argument explains why she has a problem with proposition 1—the soul is not the eye or the hand itself, and yet receives information from them, whilst itself seeming to reside nowhere in particular. Macrina also argues that the soul is that which animates the body. She asks, if the soul is just another series of physical materials, then why and how do we distinguish between life and death—surely a dead body can be said to have all the same components as a live body, in which case there is no life—only death. ¹⁴ With regard to proposition 2, Macrina asks why it is that we suppose only physical, visible things have a natural place in the world. She argues that the intelligible and invisible do have a place in the world, as not just evidenced in our bodies, but everywhere. She argues that there is an intelligible dimension to all material things. ¹⁵ In a similar way to how God penetrates the universe and holds it in order, so does the human, as a microcosm of the universe, ¹⁶ have an intelligible soul that orders their physical parts.

Whilst Macrina’s language of intelligible and sensible is rooted in the theology of her day, the idea of a collated thinking part of us that we wish to distinguish from our physical bodily functions again calls to mind certain contemporary ideas of consciousness. For example, emergentist theories argue that consciousness might emerge as a higher level property of a complex system, while supervenience theories argue that consciousness might supervene on physical states without being identical to those states. ¹⁷ Both of these kinds of theory maintain the same flavour as Macrina’s approach insofar as consciousness (or soul) exists in a close relationship with the physical body, but is not reduced to or identical with it.

One place where Macrina’s understanding of the soul departs more radically from a contemporary understanding of consciousness is the way that the soul animates the body. In many contemporary accounts, such as those mentioned above, consciousness arises from the mechanical functions of the body (even if it is ultimately considered separate from them) and is thus a result of those functions, rather than a cause of them. For Macrina, it doesn’t make sense to think of the soul as being either the cause or consequence of bodily functions. She believes that the soul arises with the body and animates the body, but not that it is produced by bodily functions, or that the soul enters the body from somewhere else (since this would imply its pre-existence outside the body). Despite disagreeing with how the soul comes to be, we can still point out important similarities between her position and contemporary non-dualist theories of consciousness.

We can see this by taking a moment to consider Macrina’s account of when the soul enters the body. For Macrina, objects do not just move themselves—bronze does not just turn itself into a statue, it is animated by forces working on it:

In fact, however, none of these things is brought about automatically by the nature of the elements, but rather each is induced by art to accomplish the inventor’s intention. Art is a kind of steadfast thought operating through matter towards some purpose, and thought is a kind of motion and operation proper to the mind (νοῦς). ¹⁸ So even through the objections which you have adduced, the consequence of our reasoning has proved that the mind is something else besides that which we can see. ¹⁹

Macrina rehearses here again the argument that not only is matter inert unless it is animated, but also that that which animates matter is something beyond just the physical components involved. The fact that for Macrina it is the soul that animates the body and not the body that produces the soul is perhaps not as an important a distinction as might appear at first glance. Given the tensions that Origenism leaves in early Christian theology, ²⁰ Macrina is quick to discuss when the soul enters the body: ‘a common transition into being takes place for the compound constituted from both soul and body. The one does not go before, nor the other come later.’ ²¹ The soul manifests with matter, not before. Its persistence and identity exist alongside and arise with matter, so that ‘the remaining alternative is to suppose that soul and body have one and the same beginning’. ²²

We see this confirmed for the case after death as well, where Macrina explains that the soul stays with its elements. Like a painter who knows every tint that went into the colour that was mixed, so the soul knows all its bodily elements when they become scattered. However wide the interval between atoms, the soul remains present with them, ²³ no matter how far they are scattered in decomposition. As Moore and Wilson put it in a particularly poetic translation: ‘Therefore the soul exists in the actual atoms which she has once animated, and there is no force to tear her away from her cohesion with them’. ²⁴ Macrina asks us to think of the body and soul as like a seed and the earth—growing together from small origins, but together being a single human person:

Just as, when the earth receives from the farmer a slip cut off from its root, it produces a tree, not itself putting the power of growth into that which it nourishes, but only giving the start towards growth to the slip which is planted; in the same way we say that what is separated from a human being for the propagation of a human being is itself also in some way a soul-endowed being from a soul-endowed being, a growing being from a growing being. If the cutting was too short to contain all the energies and motions of the soul, we should not be at all surprised. The seed of grain does not appear immediately as an ear (for how would it contain so much in so little?), but as the earth nurses it with appropriate food, the grain becomes an ear, not changing its nature while it is in the soul but revealing and perfecting itself by the operation of its nourishment. So just as the growth of a sprouting seed proceeds gradually to its goal, in the same manner also when a human being is formed the power of the soul appears according to the measure of bodily stature. ²⁵

The soul is not the source of the body’s life, since God ‘the husbandman’ is the origin of life. The soul is rather that which nourishes the body. The soul likewise does not begin writ large, but flourishes, unfolding along with the body, so that at any moment ‘the power of the soul appears according to the measure of bodily stature’. ²⁶ The sense in which Macrina wishes to talk about the soul animating the body, then, is in the sense that it is its nourishment and the spark within the otherwise inert matter. She does not wish to imply that the soul originated elsewhere, or preceded the body, or indeed that it exists apart from the body. A human being is the simultaneous existence of the intelligible alongside matter. Although precisely how the soul arises may be a point of contention between Macrina and contemporary non-dualist accounts, that fact that the body and the soul arise simultaneously for her means that her position can still play an important theological role in critiquing dualist accounts of body and soul in the human person.

Am I the Same Person As I was Yesterday?

We have a picture of what the soul is for Macrina and some ways in which it parallels our contemporary thoughts concerning the human body and consciousness. On the Soul and the Resurrection also gives us a wealth of extremely cynical questions from Gregory of Nyssa concerning the soul. Unafraid of pulling up Christian doctrine by its roots, Gregory sets out to interrogate his sister about practical questions concerning the soul and the resurrection.

Gregory notes the way that our bodies are always changing, and asks: which is most truly our ‘real’ body if our body looks different at different times? If we are always in a state of growth, decay and transience, which of our atoms does our soul cling to and consider its own? What physical body will be with us at the resurrection? If our body is as important to our identity as our soul, if these together are truly what makes me a person, then who does that mean I am in a world of constant change? Am I even the same person I was yesterday? He writes,

Who does not know that human nature is like a stream, proceeding from birth to death perpetually in motion and ceasing from motion only when it ceases from being? This motion is not any change of location, for our nature does not move out of itself but makes its progress through alteration. This alteration never remains in the same condition as long as it really is alteration; for how could the process of change be compatible with sameness? ²⁷

The most obvious example of this for Gregory is the differences our body undergoes as we grow from babies to adults, and as we age towards death. Which of these is our truest body, he asks, and what about people who never reached this so-called perfect stage? If a baby died in childbirth, will it come back as a grown person? And who would recognise such a child?—not even the baby itself who was incapable of thought at the time of its death. And if we cannot even recognise ourselves, Gregory goes on, are we not justified in considering our resurrected body to be someone else? It is certainly not me, he says, since this resurrected body bears no resemblance to me. ²⁸

Macrina answers Gregory by arguing that time itself is one of the features of sin that will be drawn out from us, or, more precisely, that the effects of time and a life lived under the assault of evil and the touch of the passions will be drawn from us. ²⁹ The concept of growth from infancy to old age is an understanding of personhood situated in time and under the effects of evil. Whilst Macrina doesn’t go so far as to say that time itself is one of those evils, ³⁰ she does characterise most of the changes by which we conventionally measure time as among the things that will be drawn out of us—like, for example, the aging process. Our resurrection occurs outside of this passion-influenced time. Macrina argues that our identity is bodily, but that the sufferings and passages of time that alter our bodies mean that we are an imperfect version of ourselves in this life. Who we will be at the resurrection will be free from the influence of evil and the ravages of impermanence. ³¹ The passing of time is an effect on us, and is not essential to who we are. We are more than the sum total of what is done to us and happens to us. Importantly, this means that there is still a wholeness to us as persons even when time and the changes of this world disfigure us. Sin and all Fallenness will be drawn out of us, including those sufferings and changes that occur as a result of time.

One difficulty this raises is that Christ Himself was raised with the marks of his suffering. If time and its ravages are withdrawn from the body, why does His body bear the marks of crucifixion? ³² Macrina’s position on bodily resurrection is derived from 1 Corinthians 15:

But someone may ask, ‘How will the dead be raised? What kind of bodies will they have?’ What a foolish question! When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn’t grow into a plant unless it dies first. And what you put in the ground is not the plant that will grow, but only a bare seed of wheat or whatever you are planting. Then God gives it the new body he wants it to have. A different plant grows from each kind of seed. (1 Cor. 15:35-38)

Our bodies are buried in brokenness, but they will be raised in glory. They are buried in weakness, but they will be raised in strength. (1 Cor. 15:43)

Drawing on the above chapter in Corinthians, Macrina holds that the transfiguration of the body and the way it is raised to a fullness cannot be comprehended in this life, but that we know that the ill effects of suffering and brokenness will no longer be with us. ³³ Whilst Macrina does not deal with the difficulty of Christ’s resurrection differing from her account of the general resurrection, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Christ’s resurrection might look different to ours anticipated in the Eschaton. Macrina’s philosophy, after all, proposes that resurrected bodies in the Eschaton will have the effects of time drawn out of them, and Christ’s resurrection, whilst being a model and ikon of those to come, is the only resurrection to defeat death itself, redeem human nature, and to occur within human history. ³⁴ Regardless, while being perhaps a controversial reading of the resurrection, Macrina’s understanding has good scriptural basis, interpreting the body being raised in glory and strength to mean a return to its pre-Lapsarian state.

As well as bodies being unaffected by time, Macrina explains that in the resurrection our bodies will also have the effects of sin removed from them, including those changes that occurred to human nature as a result of the Fall:

Since whatever was added to human nature from the irrational life was not in us before humanity fell into passion, we shall also leave behind all the conditions which appear along with passion. If a man wearing a ragged tunic should be denuded of his garment, he would no longer see on himself the ugliness of what was discarded. Likewise, when we have put off that dead and ugly garment which was made for us from irrational skins (when I hear ‘skins’ I interpret is as the form of the irrational nature which we have put on from our association with passion), we throw off every part of our irrational skin along with the removal of the garment. These are the things which we have received from the irrational skin: sexual intercourse, conception, childbearing, dirt, lactation, nourishment, evacuation, gradual growth to maturity, the prime of life, old age, disease, and death. ³⁵

Macrina’s answer to Gregory, then, is one that tells us a lot about what she believes personal identity to be tied to. Personhood is simultaneously embodied, but also detached from the things we traditionally want to consider as belonging to our bodies, such as ageing, eating, and having sex. Drawing on passages like 1 Cor. 15, Gal. 3:28, Matt. 22:23-33, Lk. 20:27-39 and Mk 12:18-27, Macrina affirms that in resurrection our bodies will be neither male nor female and that our transfiguration will not resemble what we are used to on earth. ³⁶ Personhood is located in the union of our body and soul. Whilst our actions and choices in time are important, in the resurrection there will be a purging of the ravages of time, and those who have buried their identity in sin will have a long, painful extraction process. ³⁷ It is important to understand that Macrina is not suggesting that our lives were irrelevant. The effects of time on our bodies may have been drawn out of us, but that does not mean our lives have been rewound somehow, or made insignificant. Instead, Macrina implies that it is our choices, made and acted upon, body and soul, that define us. She explains that if we choose to spend our lives attaching ourselves to greed and selfishness then we spend our lives digging a chasm between ourselves and virtue and the promise of the life to come:

So this is the gulf, in my opinion, which does not come from the opening of the earth but is made by the decisions of human lives divided towards opposite choices. He who has definitively pursued pleasure for this life and has not cured his misguided choice by repentance makes the land of the good inaccessible to him hereafter. He digs for himself this impassable necessity, like an immense pit which cannot be crossed. ³⁸

Gregory clarifies elsewhere that ‘in some way man is his own judge, because he passes sentence on himself by judging those subject to him’. ³⁹ We spend this life on earth becoming the people who can receive the life that is to come. If the ‘gold’ in us is buried in dull ore, ⁴⁰ then when it comes to the end times, and God draws what is His to Himself ⁴¹ (i.e. the gold), then the soul, ‘wrapped up as it is in material and earthy attachments, it struggles and is stretched, as God draws His own to Himself. What is alien to God has to be scraped off forcibly because it has somehow grown onto the soul. This is the cause of the sharp and unbearable pains which the soul must endure.’ ⁴² When fire has purged us of sinful passion and attachment, that which remains is most truly us. It is implied that for those of us buried in our attachment to sin, there might not be much left of us as a person by the time this has been stripped away. ⁴³ The choices we make in this life shape the people we become. Thus when Macrina talks about the effects of time being drawn out of us, we oughtn’t to think of this as a rewinding of time. Time is not being reverted, but taken out, and whilst it may be ambiguous what that entails, it certainly doesn’t mean that our lives, choices, and suffering have been for nothing.

What relevance does all this have to ethics today? In this discussion of the soul and the body in resurrection, Macrina has begun talking about what it is that makes us a person. And she has suggested both that our body is important to that, but also that we shouldn’t get too attached to our body, because it will undergo changes in our life, and even from the very outset of our birth does not resemble the transfiguration it will undergo at resurrection. In the field of post-humanism, there are discussions on how the mechanisation of the body could help those suffering from disability, ⁴⁴ or could further be used to enhance human life beyond its current capabilities. ⁴⁵ Such a field runs into ethical questions concerning how we should use technology and how it affects our identity with our body. In bioethics we are asked to consider our relationship to medical and scientific advances, with questions such as: Should we cure something or extend life just because we can? Concerning identity, we run into questions like—what about my body is important to who I am? What if I do not feel comfortable in the body I was born with? Similarly, in our science fiction and especially our cyberpunk dystopias, we find concepts that are at present outside our capabilities but that often shape the future of our research, or raise ethical questions that could become essential given the current trajectory of scientific research. Macrina’s understanding of the relationship between body and soul and the nuance of personal identity offers a very different way of approaching these difficult questions.

Downloading from Stacks to Sleeves

The first way Macrina can address the problems raised by our cyberpunk premise is by offering a corrective to dualist understandings of the soul and body. The principal question raised by Altered Carbon (2018), a television show based on a novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan, ⁴⁶ is whether consciousness and personal identity can be separated from the body. The characters in Altered Carbon exist in a universe where dualist division between the material and intelligible has been taken to its logical extreme. The vestiges of Cartesian dualism have permeated much of our real-world contemporary science and science fiction, so that the idea of an ‘I’ who sits in my body and controls it, and is somehow apart from it, has a lot of purchase in current scientific theory. ⁴⁷ For example, in a 2014 article, a leading psychiatrist, Alan Hobson, and a leading neuroscientist, Karl Friston, argued that the Cartesian theatre can still be applied to a scientific understanding of consciousness, since ideas can be proposed and thought through before being tested in the real world. There is an internal place where stuff gets done before we release it into the sensible world, or as they put it: ‘there is a dualism that distinguishes between the (conscious) process of inference and the (material) process that entails inference’. ⁴⁸ So Cartesian dualism is still very much alive and well in contemporary scientific discussions of consciousness. Macrina’s position challenges the idea that there is a me that is distinct from my body. She argues that ‘I’ am just as much the scattered atoms of my decomposing body as I am the soul that lingers with it waiting for the resurrection. Who I am arises in conjunction—body and soul simultaneously, not one before the other.

Although there are many examples in science fiction that press the distinction of body and selfhood to extremes, Altered Carbon offers us a recent and particularly lucid example. The premise in Altered Carbon is that our mind and consciousness can be stored as information on hard drives called ‘stacks’, and that this is where our selfhood resides. These stacks can be inserted into the spine of a ‘sleeve’: a body that can be exchanged (for the right price) when damaged. Bodies become a commodity to be perused and chosen—they can be inhabited and animated by downloading a person’s consciousness into it. The body becomes a transient, unimportant lump of matter that transports our consciousness. The role it plays in our identity is minimal. The television show itself explores the ways in which this division of identity is not so easily maintained, with characters wishing to return to the bodies they were born with, or struggling to adjust to new bodies, along with critiques of corporate control of bodies and who is permitted access to them. It is the premise that is more interesting for our purposes here, however, and the underlying (real-world) scientific assumptions that have pushed this fictional society to where it is. The base assumption is that our bodies are subject to change, but that with the right technology, this needn’t be the case for our souls/consciousnesses. We can technologically free ourselves from mortality, if we can remove our reliance on bodies and matter.

These are arguments that are very familiar to Macrina and Gregory from Manichean, Gnostic, ⁴⁹ and even (Neo)Platonic ⁵⁰ dualisms that proposed that the soul was to be liberated from the flesh. Macrina instead insists that the temporal changes that affect us, affect both body and soul, but that this does not define who we are as people. Our soul does not spring into existence—or exist before our body; it arises in conjunction with it. The life we lead and the choices we make as a single person (body and soul) are what makes us us. For the purposes of our Altered Carbon example, Macrina tells us that ‘I’ am more than just my stack—more than just the informational or intelligible part of me. My soul would not be me if it was not in my body. It arises with my body and is shaped by my body, and who I am is both body and soul together. If our consciousness is equated with the information on a hard drive, then Macrina effectively argues that our hardware is essential to the perpetual existence of the software of our soul and our personal identity. It would not be the same information if placed in a new computer, because it arises with and in some ways is the computer. To extend the metaphor, the hard drives we possess in this day and age do not contain ‘just information’. They contain physical components that, when placed into a computer, can be read by that computer because the physical infrastructure and programming have been set up in such-and-such a way. The information arises from, and is readable by, a physical system. The ‘information’ literally does not exist unless it is booted up within just such a system. ⁵¹ If I give you a punched card full of holes and tell you it has my credit card details on it, I might as well be giving you nothing at all—there is no information in your hand if you do not have access to the machine that can read that information. Similarly, if I boot up my laptop and start writing this article on it, then in a fit of rage smash my laptop open and start pulling out bits of wiring, I can’t then expect to turn it back on again and keep writing where I left off. The physical components of the machine are the information displayed on my screen. The more complex our machines get, the easier it is to disassociate the display from the mechanics, but the two still fundamentally rely on one another in order for meaning to be conveyed by the system as a whole. The human body, then, is doing some incredible mechanical operations, and the conscious thinking part of us is so complex that we easily slip into talking about a division between mind and body. Whilst it might be useful at times to distinguish between the intelligible part of us and the material, Macrina argues that we would be greatly mistaken if we thought of our soul as all there is to a me.

So is that it then—I am my soul and my body? To a certain extent, yes. But as we saw earlier, Macrina has a lot to say about what counts as the body. This is where her theology is particularly interesting for ethics.

The Ethical Relevance of Macrina’s Theology of the Soul

Macrina’s theology helps us reassess a number of classic cyberpunk problems, such as the question of whether personal identity is eroded as our organic bodies are replaced. All good science fiction helps us identify current problems in our society or potential problematic directions we might be heading towards. In presenting Macrina’s thought as a theological response to difficulties like those in Altered Carbon, I also wish to point out the way Macrina’s thought counters value-laden assumptions made of our bodies and particularly what sex our bodies are. In a theology where sexual difference is considered a temporary Fall-related feature of human bodies, there are no theological grounds for sexual discrimination, transphobia or homophobia. I wish to explore a few of these ethical and social implications after looking at the more specific premises Macrina can help us establish in our contemporary ethics.

In the course of On the Soul and the Resurrection, Macrina gives us a number of theological principles that can help us rethink the more dualist tendencies in our contemporary science (and science fiction). First of all, though, she doesn’t say that your body is perfect the way it is. Neither does she suggest that the changes that happen to it in this life change who you are as a person. She also says that lots of things about your current body aren’t the things that are actually important. Your age and sex, scars and disabilities are not who you are. But, she says, your body is important. It will change, but it will also grow, and it will grow alongside your soul. This is where it is important to recall that, despite saying that the effects of time will be drawn out of our bodies, Macrina never implies that time doesn’t matter. Growth here is about spiritual growth as a person (body and soul). The choices we make in our temporal life affect our spiritual growth, and it is this that counts at the end.

By taking the principles found in Macrina’s theology we can think through some of the difficulties that feel problematic in science-fiction situations like Altered Carbon. Whilst we are happy to talk of alterations to our body (laser-eye surgery, hip replacements, limb replacement for amputees), the idea of the body being totally replaceable is often upsetting. There is something important about our body even if we’re not sure what. Even though, as Gregory points out, in the course of our life and day-to-day living we eventually do not have the same atoms as those we started out with. What is it then that we are afraid to lose? If our atoms are always changing and our cells are always decaying and being replaced, why is the idea of a completely new bodily receptacle so repugnant?

There are two ways that Macrina helps us address this difficulty. The first concerns the paradox itself of being attached to a body that completely changes as a result of time—Macrina tells us that is completely normal, acceptable, and not at all contradictory, theologically speaking. We’ve talked about the way that the effects of time will be drawn out of the body, and the way that the body is vital for personal identity—so that paradoxical position of the body being in flux, and yet also being important, is resolved in a theology that asks us to consider the body outside of the effects of time. Whilst this is no less difficult to imagine, and doesn’t necessarily make it easier to deal with feelings of discontinuity when our bodies undergo radical changes, it does give validation to that otherwise paradoxical expression of both being receptive and adverse to bodily changes. Our distress is not unfounded if someone were to propose giving us a completely new body on the grounds that our cells die and are replaced all the time anyway.

The second way that she helps us is to understand that our body isn’t merely a replaceable receptacle, but fundamental to who we are, and that we would be a different person if our souls grew to fullness in a different body. Our body is integral to who we are, even though we may struggle to understand it in this life because of the effects of sin and temporality. According to Macrina, our body is mysterious to us, and only in the general resurrection will we know it as it was intended. In the previous section we discussed computer software and hardware as a kind of parallel for consciousness and the body. When it comes to personal identity, it is the body as well as the soul that together give rise to who we are, and to talk of the soul alone as unrooted from the body is to have only one component of a system that requires two to have meaning.

Whilst Macrina’s contributions don’t give us a clear instruction manual explaining, say, what percentage of my body can be replaced before I don’t feel like me anymore, they do give us a theological paradigm to start unpacking the metaphysical and ethical assumptions that underlie premises like those in cyberpunk fiction such as Altered Carbon. Our body is not perfect now and it is not the way God intended it to be. This is an important statement for (theological) bioethics. It recognises that there is suffering that can be alleviated, that a body is not born perfect, and that the things that happen to us in the course of our life are not the intended way things are to be. It affirms the moral importance of science and healthcare to try and alleviate those difficulties—in itself a vital affirmation to make, particularly in Christian ethics where one might try to make a case for human improvement working counter to a ‘natural’ divine plan. ⁵² There is, however, something integral about our very atoms that makes us us. In taking away our body, we splinter our personhood. Macrina doesn’t give us a ratio of atoms to keep, or tell us which bits of our bodies to hold on to. She acknowledges the truth to what Gregory is saying when he claims that his material make-up changes all the time. She does give us something important, however, and that is nuance. She tells us that we ought to have a mysterious respect for matter, even though we should not get too attached to the way we physically look now. She tells us that how we choose to act, body and soul, will define who we are as people, not the changes our body undergoes, or the changes we choose to make to it, or even the things about it we were born with that we do not like. She interprets the message of Christ and the words of Paul to give us a series of paradoxical statements that caution us to recognise that we are imperfect, material beings, but that we have the potential to become in Christ’s image.

Gregory and Macrina’s dialogue gives us a series of sometimes paradoxical-seeming statements that inform us of what we need to know in order to live well now. This is something of a recurring theme in Gregory’s theology—he presents us with a picture of the ineffability of God, and in the face of this mystery, turns our attention to how we can live virtuous lives that help us draw closer to God. ⁵³ The unknowability of the future—a mystery caught up in how we will change in the eschaton as a result of communion with the divine—is countered by attention to how this affects who we should be now. Knowing an unknowable God has to do with ethics for Gregory. The kataphatic counter to his apophatic considerations is that the virtuous way will lead us closer to comprehending some of (though never all of) the mysteries of the divine. ⁵⁴ Thus the language Gregory and Macrina use to talk about the changes our body will undergo is paradoxical in places, with tension about what it will truly look like remaining ambiguous, and yet with affirmation about what this means for living now coming to the fore.

We know that our body is essential to our identity as a person, despite being subject to changes in time and being under the influence of sin. The soul takes its identity and existence from the body, and the body takes its identity and existence from the soul—both, however, are gifted to us by God. Our identity is shaped by virtuous choices made and done by body and soul. My soul would not be me if it was not in my body. The underlying message Macrina leaves Gregory and us with is that though we do not know exactly what will happen after death, we know enough for us to choose how to live now. We know that who we are as persons is defined by what we cling to and where we place our hearts. It is our spiritual growth, found in the struggles that we make as intelligible and sensible beings, that matures us as persons. The purpose of eschatology, in this reading, is not to unravel every mystery to come, but to reveal how we ought to live here and now. The fact that what may happen in the eschaton remains shrouded in mystery is not a deficit of Macrina and Gregory’s theology, but a testament to the place of hope for what might come to be, and consequently a focus on how this changes the way we ought to be living in the meantime.

What we take away from this in our bioethics, transhumanist ethics, and posthumanism is an ethic that is informed by eschatological hope. How we live now can be informed by the tensions present in Gregory and Macrina’s theology. The implicit divide between ‘me’ and ‘my body’ that we see exacerbated in science fiction could lead us down paths of scientific research that continue to value mind over matter. A return to more embodied understandings of identity could challenge this dichotomy and likewise turn the direction of transhumanist research to one less focused on escaping the body. On the other hand, an acceptance that bodies are imperfect now, and that we should not be too attached to many of their ‘defining’ characteristics according to current socio-cultural norms, could help us make huge steps forward in combatting sexism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia.

For example, we can move away from any theological implication that suffering is intended, or the fault of the one suffering, or ought not to be treated, whilst at the same time being sceptical of people who dismiss the importance of our bodies or dismiss the personal nature of a decision we make regarding our own body. Macrina and Gregory give us a theology that affirms that our personal identity is intimately tied to our own body, whilst eradicating the idea that there can ever be a theological justification for using social expectation or the presence of suffering or disability to hurt and discriminate against others. A contemporary ethics informed by Macrina and Gregory’s embodied understanding of personhood and asexual anticipation of the afterlife could give us many opportunities to rethink positions the Church has taken on suffering and on trans identity in the twentieth and twenty-first century. ⁵⁵

If it is the case that human nature was sex-less prior to the Fall, as Gregory and Macrina believe, and that we will be sexless after the resurrection, there are certainly a lot less theological grounds for arguments that would deny someone access to Hormone Replacement Therapy. If humanity in the eschaton has no features of sexual differentiation, then whether or not one chooses to live as a man or a woman or neither can hardly be consequential for an ethics that focuses on how we grow spiritually in our lives on earth and ultimately believes that these sexual differences will be removed from our bodies. ⁵⁶ Likewise, there are a lot less theological grounds for objecting to the love between two people of the same sex, if we agree with Macrina and Gregory that sexual differentiation is a non-essential feature of our human nature. Eschatological promise plays an vital role in how we choose to live out our current lives—and if ultimately our identity is defined by our choices and how we choose to love, and not by the sexual organs of our body, then Macrina and Gregory’s position could greatly illuminate contemporary theological discussion on who we choose to love in this life.

Thus what at first appears to be a series of paradoxical statements about body and soul, actually provides us with much needed nuance when approaching how we live with and understand our own bodies. In particular, the focus on eschatologically reaching for the divine, underscores the need for our ethics to be about how best to love one another and spiritually grow in this life and thus draw closer to the divine transfiguration intended for us. It is spiritual growth—choices made by persons who are body and soul—that shapes us into who we are, and Macrina and Gregory’s understanding of this can serve both as an affirmation of the value of the body in transhumanist ethics, and as a challenge to contemporary viewpoints that would make moral judgements over how we choose to live with and present bodies that will ultimately be transfigured in the resurrection.

Conclusion

Macrina and Gregory offer us a way of conceiving personhood as embodied, and both intelligible and material. They ask us to think of ourselves as both body and soul, and that it is both together that make a person. They tell us that our bodies are essential to who we are, but also not to get too attached to the precise way they are now. They offer a theological interpretation of what a human person is that rejects the dualist dichotomy of soul and body. Their challenge to dualism echoes many of the contemporary debates occurring in consciousness science, over where consciousness comes from and how important the body is in that discussion. Gregory and Macrina offer insight from a very different philosophical tradition from that which dominates our sciences now, but one that still has relevance and important challenges to make of our contemporary bioethics, our near-future scientific research, and our cyberpunk dystopias.