YOU AREN’T YOU, ARE YOU?
Supper at Emmaus (Caravaggio), 1601.
In the LOGOS Journal Winter 2020 article “You Aren’t You, Are You?”, Paul Treschow engages the Incarnation’s effects through a look at the popular Netflix series “Black Mirror,” specifically the episode “Be Right Back.” He argues that the episode’s critiques of transhumanism pair well with Jacques Maritain’s personalist philosophy, ultimately offering the viewer “a fertile site from which longing for the beloved can reemerge in the form of desire for the person of Christ as ‘the risen Lover.’” In the following excerpt, Treschow illustrates the differences between the pseudo-body of the main character’s dead husband (which a technology company has “resurrected” based on his digital footprint) and that of the risen Christ. Through this comparison Treschow shows that “beneath [human] qualities lies not just ‘the power to objectify and remake,’ but the true object of love.”
Gerard O’Collins, building on Augustine’s understanding of the Resurrection, maintains that Christ’s Resurrection “brought no loss of personal identity.” In seeking to establish this continuity of identity, O’Collins breaks with the ambivalence towards the body that we noted as a feature of the Lockean punctual self and transhumanism. O’Collins understands bodily continuity to be the guarantor of personal identity: “To be and to be recognized as the same person, we must remain ‘the same body’.”
This understanding coincides with Maritain’s claim that “a soul separated from its body is not a person.” These claims lend new weight to Augustine’s insistence that “our Lord rose again in the very same body in which he had been buried.” Christ’s bodily continuity signifies the continuity of his identity and personhood. O’Collins emphasizes
is affirmed in the scars that remain on Christ’s resurrected body, which Augustine suggests are there “in order to remove from people’s hearts the wound of unbelief.” These markers of Christ’s embodied history become evidence of the continuity of his identity and personhood. Thus, Thomas’s verification of Christ’s body gives him faith in the Resurrection of Christ’s person, provoking his response, “My Lord andmy God!” There is a marked contrast in Martha’s response to Pseudo-Ash’s
the importance of “embodied histories,” noting that through
embodied interaction we “make and suffer our history.” This connection
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