Dante's Medieval Transhumanist Fantasy

Part 1: Superficial Similarities

Gustav Doré, “The Rings of Glorified Souls in the Sun” (1868)

In the first canto of Paradise, the third and final book of his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s textual avatar stands in the Earthly Paradise on Purgatory’s peak, ready to ascend. Unlike his previous two jaunts through tracts of Catholic eschatology, leaving Earth behind requires him to undergo certain modifications to his being. As he gazes at the radiant Beatrice, come down from Paradise to be his deliverer and guide, he feels himself changing in ways he doesn’t entirely understand and cannot account for:

Trasumanar significar per verba
non si poria; però l'essemplo bastia
cui esperïenza grazia serba.

The first word in the stanza was invented by Dante. Mark Musa’s translation runs:

“Transhumanize”—it cannot be explained
per verba, so let this example serve
until God's grace grant the experience.

The first two times I read the Divine Comedy, I wasn’t phased by the occurrence of a term that’s much more at home in science fiction (or more lately in philosophical literature) than in religious poetry from the early fourteenth century.¹ When I read it for the third time over the last few weeks, it didn’t register either. Not at first. Not until I got far enough into Paradise to feel something of the eerily and recently familiar, which soon elicited the recollection that the poet had already said it himself.

The superficial agreements of Dante’s vision of heaven and the contemporary transhumanist dream (as developed by the likes of Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, William MacAskill, Max More, et al.) are myriad:

1. Most of of Paradise narrates the pilgrim rising through the celestial spheres of the geocentric cosmos mapped out by Ptolemy, Plotinus, and al-Farabi (Latinized as Alpharabius), where he meets and speaks to the “flashes of living light” basking in the emanations of God.² It almost strikes one as a crude prefiguration of arch-longtermist William MacAskill’s forecast of the billions and billions of electronic beings that will someday (if we play our cards rights) reside in digital habitats whose physical architecture expands throughout the galaxy like spaceborne slime molds composed of steel and silicon.

2. When Beatrice shows up at the end of Purgatory, she makes clear that everyone admitted into heaven is plugged into the divine intelligence. The luminous entities Dante meets within the spheres all possess superhuman knowledge and understanding, and are capable of what we’d now call telepathy: after encouraging the hesitant pilgrim to voice the questions on his mind, she clarifies, “not that your words would add to what we know.” Seven centuries later, Nick Bostrom’s posthuman messenger in “Letter from Utopia” tells us that he/she/they/it has “read all your libraries, in the blink of an eye.” It’s generally taken as a given that theoretical digital entities (and perhaps humans with sophisticated brain implants) should be capable of transmitting “thought” to one another as directly and near-instantaneously as networked computers.

3. The representative of Bostrom’s posthuman future concurs with the denizens of Dante’s paradise in advising the reader that life on Earth has a possible Good Ending in which we experience bliss to the power of infinity in perpetuity forever. Mere humanity doesn’t possess the RAM to run the software to even simulate the idea of such happiness, let alone experience it.³ (Dante doesn’t put it in quite these terms, but the message is the same.)

4. As he does in Inferno and Purgatory, Dante meets familiar faces and deceased relatives in Paradise—such as his friend’s sister Piccarda Donati and his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida degli Elise. (This is of course one of Christianity’s most popular lures, and a trope of Western epic poetry dating back to the Odyssey.) Meanwhile, Ray Kurzweil is confidently working away at digitally resurrecting his father—to, in his words, “create an avatar that an AI would create that would be as much like my father as possible, given the information we have about him, including possibly his DNA”—while Pratik Desai is urging people to make as many recordings of their loved ones as possible for use in creating AI templates: “there is a 100% chance that they will live with you forever after leaving [their] physical body.” Presumably, if the transhumanist version of longtermism’s aspirations comes to pass, those of us (or our descendants) who live long enough to transmigrate from mortal flesh to digital immortality can expect to spend as much of eternity as we’d like communing with sapient copies of our deceased ancestors aboard a colossal solar-powered server bank about the orbit of Rigel.

5. Dante and his transhumanist successors—particularly the ones who also move about in longtermist circles—all stress the urgency of living in such a way as to secure a home in their respective conceptions of the best possible hereafter. Christianity and longtermism both wield a carrot and a stick. Dante presents the eternal agony of hell and the endless delight of heaven as the binary outcomes of one’s choices vis-à-vis Catholic virtues and doctrines. The longtermists tell us we’ve got a choice to make between imminent armageddon and enlightenment, galactic expansion, and billions of years of blissful [post]human life (or something resembling life).

6. “O earthbound creatures! O thickheaded men!” exclaims the poet. Elsewhere he cites the Babylonian captivity as a metaphor for the human condition and refers to the world below him as “the puny threshing-ground that drives us mad.” Compared to the splendor and music of heaven, mortal life on Earth seems paltry indeed. The transhumanists agree: Bostrom’s messenger from the future describes our present as sooty: “the ever-falling soot of ordinary life…soot, casting its pall over glamours and revelries, despoiling your epiphany, sodding up your finest collar.” Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, sums up the intolerability of life in the [pre-trans]human world in terms of the “weak, vulnerable, stupid bodies and brains” we’re stuck with (for now).

7. Dante and many prominent dreamers of the contemporary transhumanist dream are dedicated rationalists—albeit rationalists of their respective centuries. In the second canto of Paradise, the authorial Dante has Beatrice explaining to the fictional Dante why the face of the moon has dark patches.⁴ By modern standards, her account certainly qualifies as pseudoscience (especially since we now possess the tools and methods to prove her wrong)—but within the rationalistic framework of Dante’s epoch, her reasoning holds water, and a learned reader would have nodded along in admiration. The intellectual paradigm of Dante’s age observed the Aristotelian emphasis on categories and qualities; the prevailing rationalism of our age, particularly among the tech community, is concerned with quantification and optimization.⁵ Getting to paradise has become a problem of engineering and radical utilitarian calculus.

We ought to be cautious about reading too much meaning into these areas of overlap.

The Christian poet and the transhumanist philosophers/engineers are all of them ideologues, 100 percent convinced of the reality of a paradisiacal world to come, and they all present their respective doctrines as the singular road map for getting there. Both programs on offer are essentially eschatological schemes making fantastic claims within their irreconcilable frameworks of theology and scientific materialism. The fact that the philosophy which prides itself on its grounding in hard empirical fact and technical precision should be selling more or less the same package as the premodern doctrine based on a holy book compiled nearly two thousand years ago is a coincidence whose interpretation I leave up to you.

What’s interesting to me, and which might be more relevant, is that both the Christian and the materialist projections of our perfect future are bookish utopias. Neither is apt to make mention of sex, athleticism, or fine dining happening after our transfiguration. Whether we’re talking about living lights or digital minds, both prophecies characterize the blessed existence in terms of perpetually happy minds thinking on their own thinking and scintillating in blissful communion. It makes sense: one version was cultivated by a celibate knowledge-worker caste that gobbled up Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et al. in portions that would explode the bellies of most of us moderns, while the other is the issue of an age in which the mathematical intellect is commonly regarded as holding the most authoritative claim to truth and sense, and where the exercising of human knowledge and action in the world has grown exceedingly indirect.

This is basically a roundabout way of reiterating that these transhumanist fantasies are the dreams and projections of committed rationalists—and this point of contact is also where they most sharply diverge.

1. It gets better each time. The sensationalist torture porn and contrapasso of Inferno might draw the crowds, but Purgatory is really the best of it.

2. Though I’m not one to administer a well ackshally to the likes of Monsieur Doré, his engraving derives more from popular conceptions of heaven than Dante’s poem. The souls the pilgrim encounters aren’t described as shiny winged people, but called “lights” and “lamps” and compared to shooting stars. Intelligent energy patterns, living in outer space…

3. Take a guess: is this from an English translation of Paradise sans line breaks, or an excerpt from Bostrom?

What I feel is as far beyond feelings as what I think is beyond thoughts. Oh, I wish I could show you what I have in mind! If I could but share one second with you!

4. More on medieval rationalism—Coming into the sphere of the fixed stars, Dante meets Saint Peter, who quizzes him on the nature of faith before letting him continue on. Dante explicitly compares the procedure to a medieval oral exam, and it is both representative of the general character of Scholastic reasoning and suggestive of why the empiricist vanguard of the scientific revolution held the tradition and its pervasive abstruseness in such contempt.

Dante answers Peter’s question: “Faith is the substance of those hoped-for things and argument for things which we have not seen. And this I take to be its quiddity.”

Peter replies: “You are right but only if you understand why Faith is classified as substance first and then as argument.”

Dante: “The deep mysteries of Heaven that generously reveal themselves to me are so concealed from man’s eyes down on earth that they exist there only in belief; on such a base is high hope built—it is substant by its own nature, one could say. And since from this belief we must construct logical proofs for what cannot be seen, by nature, this partakes of argument.”

5. Whitehead:

In a sense, Plato and Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical science than does Aristotle. The two former were mathematicians, whereas Aristotle was the son of a doctor, though of course he was not thereby ignorant of mathematics. The practical counsel to be derived from Pythagoras, is to measure, and thus to express quality in terms of numerically determined quantity. But the biological sciences, then and till our own time, have been overwhelmingly classificatory. Accordingly, Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on classification. The popularity of Aristotelian Logic retarded the advance of physical science throughout the Middle Ages. If only the schoolmen had measured instead of classifying, how much they might have learnt!