"Before our very eyes, godless historiosophy is inevitably arriving at its total triumph and justification: the idea of the immanent, biological conquest of death by means of natural resurrection. This idea is supposed to plug up all the holes and to overcome the flaws in the theory of immanent progress [i.e., 'evolutionary progress with its immanent achievements of "petty-bourgeois" humanism] ... The idea of technological immortality is beginning to tempt the godless progressivists, who hope to use it to decisively overcome the religious worldview and to achieve the triumph of immanentism by assuring the possibility of definitively making oneself at home on the earth.
"The tendency of de-godded [humanistic resurrectionism] is to eliminate eschatology, to make superfluous and unnecessary the second coming of Christ and the final transfiguration of the world. Therefore the 'project' ... is transformed into the idea of the Tower of Babel, built by theomachic humankind without and against God. Technological resurrection is the supreme and final achievement of 'petty-bourgeois' progress, beyond which ... there is nothing to do. This is the kingdom of insurmountable emptiness and boredom, of mutual cannibalism on the ruins of sentimental love (one of Dostoevsky's nightmares). This is the barrel of the Danaïdes, an effort to deplete the inexhaustible, despair for the thinking mind and the feeling heart. This is the inner end of the antichrist whom Christ 'shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming' (2 Thessalonians 2.8). 'He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision' (Psalm 2.4). [This 'project'] is a touchstone for godless progress. It leads consciousness to the ultimate question about man himself: does he really exist, and what is he? If he is only an aggregate of atoms that fall apart only to be collected again, then man does not really exist. There is no one to resurrect and no one to do the resurrecting: there is only the ewige Wiederkehr [eternal return] nightmare of Ecclesiastes-Nietzsche. A series of illusions arises, in which repetition is taken to be identity, since the latter cannot be subjectless. Therefore, the de-godded 'project' is not the triumph but the total collapse of the theory of progress, an abyss of despair that opens up before man at the end of his path."
And here is the appended note:
"It would take the art of a Dostoevsky to show the whole depth of this collapse: A mother who, by the regulation of natural forces, gets back her raised son and, by the instinct of a mother's heart, sees in him a deceitful double, not a son but an automaton; a fiance who, instead of his beloved, embraces a robot and knows it is a robot. Mannequins can only mechanically reproduce but cannot creatively unite the past with the future, continuing one life. The character of the mechanical repetition that replaces identity is not altered by the fact that 'raised' robots are produced not only by a mechanical agglomeration of corporeal or corporealized particles of cosmic matter, but also by an addition of physiological elements, including spermatozoids; for in the living individual the body is only the substrate of the spirit that lives in it. The body is such only in relation to and in union with the spirit living in it, but outside of this union it is a robot. It is theoretically possible to fabricate an indefinite number, a crowd, of robots that repeat one another but that thereby recede farther and farther away from the original."
-- Fr Sergius Bulgakov, in "History," from The Bride of the Lamb, p346
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