It was a great honor and privilege to be invited by Father James, a personal friend of mine, to deliver a lecture to the brotherhood under the Patronage of the New Nun Martyr the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Romanov, in the trapeza of St. John Chrysostom Russian Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Father James asked me to speak on the eschatology of Blessed Fr. Seraphim Rose and my initial thought was, where do I even start? That practically encompasses his entire body of work. Since we had just recently finished a 2 month long reading and discussion on the Orthodox Survival Course in The Reversion Book Club, I thought it best to pick up where Fr. Seraphim left off in his last lectures on Evolution and the Antichrist.
Thank you again to my dear friend Fr. James and the brotherhood at St. John Chrysostom ROC in Grand Rapids who were incredibly welcoming and hospitable.
We have entered the age of transhumanism, a phase of human evolution in which Fr. Seraphim had anticipated in his great wisdom and awareness of the spirit of the age.
Lecture by Anthony of Westgate, presented on August 25th, 2024 to the Brotherhood of St. John Chrysostom ROC
To start off, I think it would be appropriate to quote Fr. Seraphim Rose since I will be drawing from his eschatological writings throughout this lecture.
“There is nothing of which it is more dangerous to speak than the Apocalypse. Futile and over-literal speculation on apocalyptic events is an only too obvious cause of spiritual harm; and no less so I think is the facile way in which many of our contemporaries refer to the “apocalyptic” character of the times and in so doing raise in others deep fears and hopes which their own vague pronouncements are far from satisfying. If a Christian is going to speak of the Apocalypse at all, it is quite clear that in this, as in everything else, his words must be sober as precise as possibly and fully in accord with the universal teaching of the Church.”1
I take his words quite seriously here, especially since I am still in my infancy of living the Orthodox faith and learning the teachings of the Holy Fathers. So I will do my best to use my own words sparingly and with intent, filtering them through Fr. Seraphim’s own words. I firmly believe that if Blessed Fr. Seraphim were alive today, he would have written a great deal on the new religion of transhumanism and the evolution of man into a posthuman super-intelligence. In fact, you may be surprised to know that he actually did have a lot to say about transhumanism before it was even recognized as such.
The leaders of transhumanist revolution are largely extreme materialists, although they are actually unknowingly religious—not unlike many of the great thinkers of its prior revolutions. And as we will see, this materialism has an eschatology and supernatural utopian realm which is an inversion of Orthodox Christianity.
It’s important to understand that transhumanism, while it has philosophical and religious roots, cannot be understood as a cohesive ideology because it is ultimately egocentric. There are as many transhumanist philosophies as there are transhumanists. But that is not to say there aren’t prominent themes that we see recurring in among its revolutionary thinkers.
So I will be covering 3 ways in which the transhumanist revolution will usher in the age of antichrist, by integrating false miracles with the religion of the future, attempting to evolve mankind into a super-intelligent posthumanity, and implementing this revolution through globalization.
I. Resurrection
The contemporary transhumanist movement can be traced back to a subculture of west coast futurists who believed speculative innovations in nanotechnology and cryogenics would usher mankind into the next phase of human evolution. The term transhuman was first coined by the British eugenicist Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous Huxley, the psychedelic prophet of the 1960s.
Transhumanism reached the mainstream when renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote his book “The Age of Spiritual Machines” in which he describes an entire history of human evolution through the lens of information. He wrote how information emerged from the Big Bang and evolved in complexity through plants and animals, accelerating in a more complex form of processing through human minds at an exponentially accelerated rate through technological advancement.
Kurzweil fantasizes that this evolution of information would ultimately lead to the complete mergence of our minds with machines, forming the posthuman man. For Kurzweil, the Singularity occurs when “there won’t be a distinction between humans and technology…it's a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed.”2
And we will see later on how close we are to this point. While Fr. Seraphim did not explicitly mention transhumanism, he was certainly aware of the philosophical movements it emerged from which can be seen in his commentary on 2 primary figures who were considered precursors of transhumanist philosophy.
One being Russian Orthodox cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov, whom Fr. Seraphim called a “crazy prophet […] disillusioned with revolutionary ideals”. The other, the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, who according to Fr. Seraphim was “most symptomatic of all these chiliastic currents which are going out in the world now”. He goes on to say,
“We see today we have the new science of cryogenics, that is, people are letting themselves be frozen in the hope that they will be resurrected in some future day when their disease will be cured. But that very idea is a chiliastic idea — I’m going to be resurrected in the future. I’m going to come back to life — very filled with this secular chiliasm. And this man Fyordorov puts this into the form of some kind of prophecy that in the future — this book is called The Common Task — the great task of mankind is to resurrect the ancestors. Of course, it’s a wild dream but it’s very much, you know, this is what the Antichrist will resurrect: people, and be able to look like resurrection, will be able to put demons into them and make them walk around again, with walking corpses.”3
These chiliastic transhumanist dreams of altering the human biology and uploading consciousness into supercomputers should be understood as a secularized utopian inversion of the Christian promise of bodily resurrection. In fact, in a Rolling Stone interview, Kurzweil stated that his most ambitious plan for life after the Singularity is to bring his dead father back to life using technology. He even goes on to explain how the resurrection will work.
“We can find some of his DNA around his grave site – that’s a lot of information right there, the AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they'll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.”4
Transhumanist tech billionaire Bryan Johnson made achieving immortality his primary mission in life, investing millions of dollars into building a growing community and brand around his arrogance. On his website named after his slogan “Don’t Die”, he very boldly declares his mission to defeat death by sheer human will:
We are at war with death and its causes.
We are building towards an infinite horizon.
We are fighting for the freedom to exist as long as one chooses.
Why? Because we have things to do tomorrow. And tomorrow’s tomorrow. Until we no longer want tomorrow.5
Johnson’s predecessor, Max More, even gave recognition to transhumanism’s occult roots of Renaissance alchemy when he wrote,
“We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next."
Interestingly, Fyodorov also called for a quite literal augmenting of the human body by adding wings to it.
II. Apotheosis and Transcendence
While the transhumanist’s efforts to evolve humanity into an immortal super-intelligent posthuman is largely materialistic, there is an underlying secular eschatology which Fr. Seraphim Rose summarizes in Teilhard de Chardin’s “unitary view of reality” as a “joining together[…] of the spiritual and the secular, into a single harmonious and all-encompassing process which cannot only be grasped by the modern intellectual, but can be felt by the sensitive soul that is in close contact with the spirit of modern life; indeed, the next step of the process can be anticipated by the “modern man,” and that is why de Chardin is so readily accepted as a “prophet,” even by people who do not believe in God: he announces in a very “mystical” way, the future which every thinking man today (save for conscious Orthodox Christians) hopes for.”6
Transhumanism has its own form of deification of the self as apotheosis. This language can be seen in the work of Israeli transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari, who described this mockery of Christian deification as an upgrade, a kind of Human 2.0. He said, “Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”7
This apotheosis is the same self-worship of Lucifer that positions transhumanist leaders as forerunners to the Antichrist, “who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped” (2 Thess. 2:4).8 As Enlightenment philosophy sought to improve Christianity with rationalism, the apotheosis of new posthuman man becomes an inevitable conclusion to the godless ideologies of its revolutionary thinkers. Fr. Peter Heers said,
“They are the contemporary successors of previous apostles of Antichrist: Nietzsche, Marx, and other Utopianists, yet now freed from the need to destroy the old order and singularly focused on the forging of “singularity” (technological super-intelligence), a chiliastic post-human paradise-nightmare.”9
There is an undeniable religious side to the transhumanist revolution and we can already see this spiritual language start to develop. I would argue that this revolution is ushering in a new religious order. This Cyborg Theocracy has its own priests, prophets, heavenly realm, rituals and transcendence. It is an effort to build a new utopia apart from Christianity, which ultimately finds itself reconstructing it.
As with all revolutions, the destruction of the old order must occur to establish the new. This phase has already completed. It happened while we were dazzled by its devices. For the transhumanists, the old order is religious faith, yet as Max More demonstrates, it only puts faith into the next phase of evolution.
”No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to posthumanity."10
Fr. Seraphim Rose anticipated this next evolution as a “revolutionary dream that has stirred men into performing the incredible drama of modern history. It is an ‘apocalyptic’ dream, and they are quite correct who see in it a strange inversion of the Christian hope in the Kingdom of Heaven.”11
According de Chardin, man himself is reaching the pinnacle of his evolutionary development, which is called Super-Humanity. He says, “Humanity would reach a point of development when it would detach itself altogether from the earth and unite with Omega, a phenomenon outwardly similar to death perhaps, but in reality simple metamorphosis and accession to the supreme synthesis.” That is, this new state which is coming. He calls it the Omega Point, the point to which all the creation now is ascending.12
Eric Steinhart, a proponent of "Christian” transhumanism contends that there is a significant overlap of ideas between the secular singularity and Teilhard's religious Omega Point. Steinhart quotes Kurzweil, saying “evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never reaching this ideal."13
So there’s this supernatural language in the way that transhumanists talk about information, as if it were a transcendent eternal realm where consciousness gets uploaded and stored eternally in an infosphere where it cannot be corrupted or decay. Even in such an extreme form of materialism, there is this inescapable spirituality and religious language used by its atheistic proponents.
Just listen to how Yuvel Harari describes this infosphere as a new religion he calls “Dataism”.
“Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong. The supreme value of this new religion is "information flow". If life is the movement of information, and if we think that life is good, it follows that we should extend, deepen and spread the flow of information in the universe. According to Dataism, human experiences are not sacred and Homo sapiens isn't the apex of creation or a precursor of some future Homo deus. Humans are merely tools for creating the Internet-of-All-Things, which may eventually spread out from planet Earth to cover the whole galaxy and even the whole universe. This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.”14
But it is a mistake to think that this is actually a new religion. It should be understood as an evolution of occult magic with fancy new tools and machines that make its practice more appealing to the masses.
This alchemical influence of modern technology and science was recognized by Fr. Seraphim Rose who said in his Orthodox Survival Course,
“Modern science was borne on the experiments of the Platonic alchemists, the astrologers and magicians. The underlying spirit of the new scientific world-view was the spirit of Faustianism, the spirit of magic, which is retained as a definite undertone in contemporary science today. The discovery, in fact, of atomic energy would have delighted the Renaissance alchemists very much. They were looking exactly for power like that.15
Just recently, we saw the release of a new AI device called “Friend”, a $100 amulet that is worn around the neck which its creator Ari Schiffmann describes as “very supportive, very validating, it’ll encourage your ideas. It’s also super intelligent, it’s a great brainstorming buddy. You can talk to it about relationships, things like that.”16
Despite the widespread rationalism of the modern west, it’s not difficult to imagine that even materialists and skeptics will be easily convinced by technological "miracles" of the Antichrist.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk spoke of the first patient to receive Neuralink’s implantable brain-computer interface called “Telepathy”, where he claimed “even if someone has never had vision ever, like they were born blind, we believe that we can still restore vision using Neuralink.”17 In a reply to a video post on X of Elon delivering this update, he commented, “Blindsight is the next Neuralink product after Telepathy.”18
Do you see where this is going? We still don’t know how to navigate having these devices we carry with us in our pockets every day and they’ve already become attached to our bodies, while the leaders of this revolution are accelerating technological advancement beyond their own ability to comprehend its impact on humanity.
In Raising the Mind, Warming the Heart, Fr. Seraphim Rose writes,
“The Antichrist must be understood as a spiritual phenomenon. Why will everyone in the world want to bow down to him? Obviously, it is because there is something in him which responds to something in us — that something being a lack of Christ in us. If we will bow down to him (God forbid that we do so!), it will be because we will feel an attraction to some kind of external thing, which might even look like Christianity, since ‘Antichrist’ means the one who is ‘in place of Christ’ or looks like Christ.”19
III. Tower of Babel 2.0 and Digital Globalization
Digital technology has colonized the west as a materialistic manifestation of man’s quest to undo the confusing of the languages and build a global civilization. But this religion is only new in the sense that it has evolved into a new material form. As Fr. Peter Heers brilliantly stated,
“Today’s transhumanists are, in one sense, nothing new. They merely seek to build a new Tower of Babel, “to reach unto heaven” and thus to “make a name” for themselves (Genesis 11:4). The Babylonians used the technology of their day, brick and mortar, whereas the new Babylonians use AI, genetic engineering and other modern technology. And just like the blind Babylonians of old, with desperate actions of self-preservation they seek life and unity outside themselves but not in God. They imagine god-like greatness in their demonically inspired arrogance, much of which will not happen and for which they will also be scattered and then shattered like a potter’s vessel.”20
Dostoyevsky also recognized this universal effort to build a new Babel. In the Brothers Karamazov he writes,
“Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a universal state... Oh, the ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism.”21
Their efforts to achieve material immortality will ultimately end in the same death that awaits us all, but like the Grand Inquisitor wisely stated, if immortality is achievable without God, then “nothing would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism”.22
The transhumanist revolution is not brought about from a violent overthrowing of a government with blood and gunfire. Instead, we were colonized from within by a digital swarm that we ourselves invited into our lives, surrendering our will to be controlled by its’ algorithms that are engineered by techno-globalists we wouldn’t willingly invite inside our homes.
How many of us feel naked when we go somewhere without our mobile device? I know that I am guilty of it. That is the digital swarm invading our very human biology, causing us to feel the anxiety of phantom pain when we are detached from it. The fact that this is such a common human experience is shocking. Posthuman man is so enslaved to technology, he feels less free without it.
In an interview with Russian state TV, Patriarch Kirill said smartphone users should be careful when using the "worldwide web of gadgets" because it represented "an opportunity to gain global control over mankind".
”Every time you use your gadget, whether you like it or not, whether you turn on your location or not, somebody can find out exactly where you are, exactly what your interests are and exactly what you are scared of, if not today, then tomorrow methods and technology could appear that will not just provide access to all information but will also allow the use of this information.
Do you imagine what power will be concentrated in the hands of those who gain knowledge about what is going on in the world? Such control from one place forebodes the coming of the Antichrist."23
And to think our consumerist society not only invited this technological slavery into their lives, but they get in line and pay more money for the new upgrades, which always include more invasiveness, more dependence, more “convenience”.
In September 2022, the President Biden quietly mandated an executive order titled “Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy”. The word “safe” should ring a bell for anyone familiar with the Orwellian newspeak of recent tyrannical U.S. government mandates such as “safe and effective” vaccines.
“For biotechnology and biomanufacturing to help us achieve our societal goals, the United States needs to invest in foundational scientific capabilities. We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence.”24
G.M. Davis in his book Antichrist: The Fulfillment of Globalization, documents the many ways in which western civilization is being groomed throughout modern history into a globalized one world religion.
“A widespread notion, which has continued to gain momentum since the Enlightenment, is that the technical science possesses unlimited potential to improve the human condition. Everywhere science and technology are proposed as the answers to the world’s ills: from bad health, physical and mental, to poverty, political strife, social decay, even mortality itself — whatever problem that plagues the human condition, there exists now a “science” that holds out the promise of “solving” it.”25
IV. Spiritual Warfare in the Digital Age
This should be understood as a spiritual battle we will all face for the rest of our time on earth, one which will only accelerate in its intensity along with technological advancement. It doesn’t mean we need to become Luddites. Modern technology offers some incredible advantages which makes our every day lives the more convenient than any previous generation in human history.
In fact, I would not be delivering this lecture to you right now without it. Not just because I wrote it on my laptop, but because Fr. James and I first connected online, through my Orthodox community. I would likely not even be Orthodox if it weren’t for the internet. So I believe the internet, for example, is primed for the spread of Orthodoxy throughout the modern world.
But just as art is not neutral, technology is not neutral. The creators of these technologies cannot be trusted to be unbiased because it is impossible for them not to infuse their beliefs into their creations. All technologies are biased and come with a tradeoff. It is becoming increasingly more important for us as Orthodox Christians to be mindful of the technologies we integrate into our lives and to be watchful of this aimless direction the technocrats are driving us towards and making efforts to push back against it, even if it means missing out on many of the great “conveniences” that the world is blindly adopting.
Or as St. Ignatius Brianchaninov said, “know the spirit of the age to avoid its influence”.
We must hold technology captive to the obedience of Christ. If it doesn’t serve us in guiding us closer to theosis, it will enslave us.
So just as I’ve opened with the words of Blessed Fr. Seraphim Rose, I will close with them.
“Our times, however, are so filled with what could be called “apocalyptic” events that we should be very aware of them. Our Lord says that, although we do not know the day and the hour, we should take example from the fig tree, which when its leaves become green we know that summer is close. Likewise, when all these things begin to happen—when it becomes possible for there to be one world government, when the Gospel is being preached to all peoples, when so many spiritual currents are coming into being which are obviously deceptive—they are clearly signs that something momentous is about to happen, and are very likely bound up with the end of the world.
In order to be spiritually prepared for this, it is very instructive for us to be reading about what happens to people in prison camps. Such accounts show us that, no matter what might happen—even if we are under Antichrist himself and placed in a prison—we can survive because we have Christ. The lives of martyrs have always been a source of instruction and edification, and even today people are being martyred whom we can learn about.”26
Rose, Eugene (Fr. Seraphim). A Letter to Thomas Merton, 1962. Orthodox Christian Information Center. Accessed July 22, 2024. http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/merton.aspx.
The Best Definition of Singularity. 2024. Archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20190417002644/http://www.singularitysymposium.com/definition-of-singularity.html.
Rose, Eugenge (Fr. Seraphim). 1975. The Orthodox Survival Course. 2nd Edition (Draft Copy). Samizdat Press. p.374
Kushner, David. 2009. When man and machine merge. Rolling Stone, February 19, 57-61.
Don’t Die.” 2024. Bryanjohnson.com. 2024. https://archive.is/tgDCt
Rose. The Orthodox Survival Course. 1975. pp.375-376
Harari, Yuval N. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. First U.S. edition, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017. p.24
Heers, Archpriest Peter. 2023. Transhumanism: The End of Evolution, Apotheosis of Carnal Man, and Preparation & Path to Antichrist. Orthodox Ethos. February 6, 2023. https://www.orthodoxethos.com/post/transhumanism-the-end-of-evolution-apotheosis-of-carnal-man-and-preparation-path-to-antichrist.
Ibid.
Socrates. 2011. Transhumanist Philosopher Max More: Question Everything. Singularity Weblog. March 20, 2011. https://www.singularityweblog.com/question-everything-max-more-on-singularity-1-on-1/.
Rose, Eugene (Fr. Seraphim). 1994. Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. p.93
Rose, Eugene (Fr. Seraphim). 1975. The Orthodox Survival Course. 2nd Edition (Draft Copy). Samizdat Press. p.468
Steinhart, Eric (2008). Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism. Journal of Evolution and Technology. 20 (1): 1–22. ISSN 1541-0099. Retrieved 2015-06-03.
Harari, Yuval N. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. First U.S. edition, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017. p.364
Rose, Eugene (Fr. Seraphim). 1975. The Orthodox Survival Course. 2nd Edition (Draft Copy). Samizdat Press. p.61
Pierce, David. 2024. Friend: A New Digital Companion for the AI Age. The Verge. The Verge. July 30, 2024. https://archive.ph/qTQNH
x.com. March 20, 2024. https://archive.ph/evsXe
x.com. March 20, 2024. https://archive.ph/7a4ph
Rose, Eugene (Fr.Seraphim). 2003. His Life and Works. St. Herman Press), Platina, CA. pp.825-833
Heers, Transhumanism: The End of Evolution, Apotheosis of Carnal Man, and Preparation & Path to Antichrist.
Rose, The Orthodox Survival Course, 29
Ibid.
The Moscow Times. 2019. Russian Patriarch Warns ‘Antichrist’ Will Control Humans through Gadgets. The Moscow Times. January 8, 2019. https://archive.ph/jVPHZ
The White House. 2022. Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy | the White House. September 12, 2022. https://archive.is/wMU4I.
Davis, G.M. PhD. 2022. Antichrist: The Fulfillment of Globalization: The Ancient Church and the End of History. Uncut Mountain Press. p.202
Rose, Euegene (Fr. Seraphim). 1981. God’s Revelation to the Human Heart. Fifth printing, Second edition. Platina, Calif: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.
Posthumanity and the Age of Apotheosis