IMAGO DEI

CONSTRUCTING A BIJECTION BETWEEN TRINITARIANISME AND THREE

PARADIGMS OF TRANSHUMANISM

Mohamed BEN MUSTAPHA, Ph.D., University of Paris

Trinitarianisme, the founder of Christian theology, would admit, in this presentation, frank
analogies with transhumanism. Although the consonances between the "phenomenon of Christ"
and the ancient mystery cults as well as the Eastern traditions 1 are – in a stated concern for
ecumenism – fertile, the Trinitarian structure of God represents the ultimate paradigm of
transhumanism - its θεωρία in concreto. Contrary to the scholastic tradition questioning and
thematising the Imago Dei, we will propose, according to a concordant tripartition between
Platonism and Aristotelianism – σῶμα, Ψυχή and νοῦς – a history and a utopia in three stages:

1. The incarnation of the Father in Christ triggers the first transhumanist revolution insofar
as the human soul will bear, once this eventual actualization – or “saturated
phenomenon”, according to Jean-Luc Marion – was effective for the Son of the Man, a
deification of the αἰσθητικόν that could be compared to the notion of the “Sacred Heart”.
2. The resurrection of Christ initiates the second transhumanist revolution – which is the
horizon of current scenarios of the genre: dead death, in the literal sense, as it is incident
to the body, could enter a hermeneutic circle according to which the Paschal Christ
potentiates an actuality – messianic – for a humanity liberated from the death of the
body, hic et nunc.
3. Utopia: The sending of Paraklêtos would close, with a third and definitive
transhumanist revolution, destined for an epistemological rupture bringing the intellect,
both speculative and reflexive, to the thresholds of meaning and logos. This coming of
the Holy Spirit, in the light of the enhancement produced at Pentecost, would allow at
least two fundamental determinations: i) a transition between theory to praxis insofar as

1
“See Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest, tans. Eng. A. F. Wills with an introduction by Mario von der Ruhr, Routledge,
London, 2002, p. 29: “Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the
Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his
soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light — and in the best of
cases the fullness of light — in the heart of that same religious tradition. It is, therefore, useless to send out
missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.”
the deification of the intellect would be reciprocal to a deconstruction of the postmodern
techno-scientific spirit – fundamentally nihilistic and apocalyptic – so that networks of
singular intelligences can emerge, abstracting in the solvency the various problems
driving the common destiny of Humanity (triumphant capitalism, climate crisis, health
cataclysms, etc.) ; ii) seal the union between the intellect and mystical thought – notably
with paraconsistent logics – with a view to tending asymptotically towards the ipseity
of God, questioning the limits of the history of “negative theology”.