Life extension hacks. Blood transfusions from the young to the old. Space colonization. Despite what you might think, these ideas were not dreamed up in Silicon Valley a few mere decades ago. Their roots reach back to an obscure movement from late nineteenth-century Russia called “cosmism.” The dream of cosmism was biological immortality—the unending extension of life on earth—and the resurrection of all those who had previously died, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. Its eccentric founder was a poor but hyper-educated librarian named Nikolai Fyodorov, whose ideas combined technological futurism, radical social reform, and strict adherence to his Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. Russian cosmism sounds strikingly modern, but its spiritual instincts are ancient. The yearning for immortality is, after all, a deeply Christian impulse born out of the conviction that “death is the final enemy,” as St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians. Death is something that God did not create, according to the Wisdom of Solomon; it is an unwelcome guest in the universe. And if that is so, should we not fight against it with all we have, with whatever tools we can develop?

The transhumanism of today is unlike Russian cosmism in that it is untethered from religious orthodoxy. Yet Silicon Valley’s syncretic spiritualism is readily apparent. American tech CEOs ascribe godlike powers to large language models and welcome their coming supremacy with an almost religious fervour, and well-heeled doomsday preppers speak in biblical terms of an AI apocalypse. Peter Thiel, no stranger to the religious dimension of tech, has even linked his projects to Russian cosmism while keeping direct connections to particular forms of Christianity muted.

Despite the differences between these future-facing movements, they share the same basic definition of what immortality is: unending biological life on this earth (or at least this galaxy). As we enter a new phase of history in which the defeat of aging and death suddenly looks less and less like science fiction, do Christians have anything of substance to say about it beyond entrenched opposition or uncritical acceptance? Russian cosmism, along with the Christian critique it engendered, offers a path forward.

Nikolai Fyodorov and the Common Task of Cosmism

Fyodorov was a strange genius, dubbed the Socrates of Moscow. The illegitimate son of a prince, he never finished his education but found work as a librarian from the 1870s until his death in 1903. By all accounts he was an exceedingly eccentric but humble man who gave his salary to the poor, refused to be photographed, and resisted his friends’ attempts to publish his voluminous writings. Fyodorov died from pneumonia, which he caught while wearing an overcoat his friends had bought for him because they couldn’t bear to see him walking barely clothed in the streets of Moscow in winter. These same friends published his writings after his death.

Fyodorov would hold talks and discussions in the library on weekends (many thought he lived in the library), and the Russian intelligentsia, which included Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, could not get enough of his wild yet strangely compelling ideas. Some came because of Fyodorov’s revolutionary social ideals: the abolition of private property, free education for all, universal health care, and reform of the military to pursue ecological projects. Others came because of his fresh take on Russian Orthodox Christianity. They believed his ideas could bring the Orthodox Church out of its rigid institutionalism and a passive conservatism that was completely uninterested in this world, only in the next.

Every single person, Fyodorov believed, is an active participant in a universal story, a story he called the “common task” (obshchee delo). Not unlike Karl Marx, Fyodorov held that the question of the meaning of life cannot be answered by theory alone; praxis is also necessary. He believed the common task of humankind—our purpose—is to bring heaven to earth, and the only thing stopping us is death. Therefore, the common task is to defeat disease, aging, and death and to resurrect our dead ancestors in order to free them, too, from death’s tyranny.

To call this project ambitious is a little like calling the great Russian novels light reading. But the late nineteenth century was a time of tremendous technological innovation. Fyodorov, like many of his contemporaries, was a techno-optimist who believed that the potential for technological progress was truly boundless. He followed closely the newest experiments of the time and believed it a duty to transform the natural elements into tools in service of the common task. By putting ever greater technological advances to use on this one, all-consuming worldwide project, humankind, he believed, would one day reach its collective goal: immortality.

Fyodorov viewed his ideas through an unabashedly religious lens. For him, the final purpose of the common task is the re-creation of paradise: a garden of Eden for everyone who has have ever lived. The story of the garden of Eden in Genesis is the story of paradise lost. But the world’s restoration is not just God’s business. God, Fyodorov believed, entrusted the world’s renewal to us and gave us the tools and creative powers to do so. Fyodorov held that the incarnation and resurrection of the Son of God in Jesus Christ, and the founding of the church, restored our human capacity to re-create Eden—to go back to the beginning and rewrite the story. And for that, we need everyone to pitch in.

Fyodorov advocated for scientists and workers to collaborate and find solutions to the problem of death. Because of the inevitable limitation of space on earth, he championed the exploration and eventual colonization of other planets. If we are going to live forever and resurrect all our dead ancestors, he reasoned, we will need the entire cosmos as our home. (Along the way we also must figure out how to stop the inevitable heat death of the universe.) None of these things are impossible, Fyodorov taught, because human beings are unlimited in their creative capacity. To be made in God’s image does not just mean to be rational, or to have free will; it means to be a creator, like God. The only thing stopping us is ourselves. That is why he called for the elimination of war and ethnic hatred: These are mere distractions from the universal human calling to the common task.

In Fyodorov’s view, we should eliminate poverty and private property and provide good, universal health care because everyone needs the means and the health to do the work that’s necessary—not just academics, scientists, and inventors but also labourers, farmers, poets, and priests. Every resource and every skill should be put in service of what Fyodorov called “kinship”—a force at once spiritual, moral, and gravitational that not only binds all human beings together as siblings but also holds the entire universe together. Every particle of matter is related, alive, potentially containing the “dust” of our ancestors, just waiting for us to revivify them. He was deeply convinced that matter itself is enchanted, the bearer of the spiritual. The existence of the church’s sacraments—physical objects carrying grace and divine power—seemed completely obvious to him.

How did such an eccentric vision of biological immortality dreamed up by an obscure librarian take root in California’s Silicon Valley?

Futurism from Moscow to California

The decades following Fyodorov’s death in Russia were a time of experimentation and optimism about the future as people sought to create a new kind of human being: the “New Soviet Man.” Many of Fyodorov’s ideas fit the future-obsessed spirit of the times. One of the first to take up his ideas was a scientist and writer named Alexander Bogdanov. His 1908 science fiction novel Red Star speaks about the exchange of blood from the young to the old as a path toward rejuvenation and eventual immortality. Bogdanov himself began to experiment in blood transfusions, creating the world’s first hematology research institute at the order of Josef Stalin in 1926. He did not simply want to help patients who had lost blood; he saw the sharing of blood as creating solidarity and kinship among humans, and as a method of reversing aging.

Another early Soviet futurist inspired by cosmism was the rocket-science pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who may have been tutored by Fyodorov himself. Tsiolkovsky combined successful experiments in rocket science with Fyodorov’s ideas about space colonization. But where he departed from Fyodorov was the notion that the common task would be for all humanity; for Tsiolkovsky, it would be carried out by a select few. Like other Soviet scientists, Tsiolkovsky believed in a form of social Darwinism which held that the weak must be eliminated for the greater goal. And the Bolsheviks were very efficient at the elimination of undesirables. Perhaps the most famous Soviet symbol of life extension and hope for an eventual immortality through technology is the preservation of Lenin’s corpse, which is on display in his mausoleum in the Kremlin to this day.

Recent scholarship has shown that there was a moment in the 1980s and early 1990s when Soviet and American scientists gathered and exchanged ideas about immortality and anti-aging techniques, drawing from cosmist ideas that had recently come back in vogue in Russia. Researcher Taylor Genovese argues that the injection of cosmist ideas into California culture during this time contributed to the rise of a distinctly American cosmism, one that combined these old Russian ideas with new experiments in cryopreservation, fashionable ideas about “peak experiences” and “energy fields,” and a commitment to active participation in the process of evolution by merging human intelligence with technology.

This latter idea, known more commonly in America as the “singularity,” was popularized in the mid-1980s and has only grown in popularity with the rise of computer technology. This year Elon Musk declared, with his characteristically underwhelming bravado, that we are already “in the singularity.” Whether or not that is true, and whatever that might mean, the questions of life, death, and immortality and their relationship to science and technology have never been more pressing.

What Is Eternal Life? Orthodox Critiques of Cosmism

Even as Soviet and Silicon Valley futurisms dispensed with the Christian spirituality that inspired Fyodorov, a religious stream of cosmism continued along a separate path. As anthropologist Anya Bernstein has shown in her work, an “old-school” and overtly religious form of cosmism is alive and well in the former Soviet Union among a group called “active Christians,” avowed Russian Orthodox believers who continue to work for a common task and experiment with anti-aging technologies. It isn’t hard to see why cosmism retains an undeniable appeal for those who, like Fyodorov, adhere to a Christianity of action over passivity, collectivism over individualism, creativity over indifference, and the resurrection of the body over the mere salvation of the soul—all things that Fyodorov had creatively (if haphazardly) unburied from the Christian past and resurrected with a modern, techno-futurist twist.

Yet historically, Christians have been uncomfortable with eschatological immanentisms of the cosmist sort. Is immortality really reducible to anti-aging pioneer Bryan Johnson’s slogan, “Don’t die”? Is the “eternal life” Jesus promised in the Gospels supposed to be set in this world, in its present, corruptible condition? Vladimir Solovyov and Sergii Bulgakov, two well-known Russian Orthodox theologians moderately sympathetic to cosmism, both saw a fatal flaw in cosmism’s definition of life and immortality: its lack of eschatological imagination.

Solovyov was a contemporary and friend of Fyodorov and swore his undying devotion to him in a letter in 1882. In that letter he also gently needled Fyodorov on the idea of resurrecting dead ancestors, writing: “The simple physical resurrection of the dead cannot be a goal in itself. The resurrection of people at a stage when [still] they seek to devour each other . . . would be both impossible and quite undesirable. Therefore the goal is not a simple resurrection of human personnel, but resurrection in the state it should be.” Even if we could raise the dead and extend our own life spans indefinitely, Solovyov thought, it would not solve the real problem humanity is up against. We cannot forget that death is connected to sin and evil. One problem can’t be solved without the other. According to Solovyov, even if biological death could, theoretically, be indefinitely postponed, the problem of sin would remain and plague the pursuit of the common task until the second coming of Christ.

Bulgakov, who was from the next generation of Russian Orthodox theologians, lived through the brutality of the Bolsheviks’ atheist appropriation of cosmism and eventually fled the Soviet Union as a refugee in the 1920s. He concluded that “the naturalistic resuscitation of dead humanity is therefore ‘the ultimate temptation.’” But that didn’t mean that Christianity should stand idly by in the face of death, violence, and destruction, waiting passively for the next life. Even if Christians look for the “life of the world to come,” as we say in the Nicene Creed, we may not simply take an “eschatological flight from history.” Rather, the Christian relationship to life and immortality is one of tension in paradox. Bulgakov saw that, yes, “death is the final enemy,” but St. Paul also wrote about how he “longed to die and be with Christ.” Bulgakov articulated a path forward through this paradox. He agreed with the cosmists that heaven and earth are destined to be brought together, and that human beings have an active role to play in this shared destiny. But what Fyodorov and all futurist thinkers have missed, he stressed, is that heaven and earth have already been brought together. This goal is not—or not only—a goal for the future.

God becoming human in Jesus Christ was the meeting of heaven and earth, divine and human, the uncreated and the created. But Christ did not come simply to return to the beginning and re-create the garden of Eden. Christ was leading humanity to a life beyond Eden, beyond biological life itself. And to make that life possible he had to die a biological death. Christ’s death was not a surrender to death; it was a defeat of death, its defanging. As we say at Easter every year in the Orthodox Church, Christ “trampled down death by death” and transformed death into the passage to life in the deeper sense—the life of divine love, the true, full life of zoe, not simply bios extended indefinitely.

Bulgakov saw the incarnation of Christ as an act of God’s self-emptying love for creation. It is love, the love that God is, that is heaven on earth; that love is the true substance of life itself. But the only way that divine love can be revealed fully to each of us is not through some technologically assisted extension of biological life but, mysteriously, for each of us to pass through death. Bulgakov advocated not for suicide, any more than St. Paul did, but rather, as he put it, for us to “co-die” with Christ. Because Christ is both human and divine, the cross possesses an eternal dimension. He shares in our death even to this day if we accept it, even in the moment that we suffer it—perhaps especially in that moment.

Facing up to the techno-futurism of contemporary transhumanism armed with these critiques of cosmism’s immanent eschatology, we can affirm that immortality is not merely about “not dying.” Rather, there is a deeper, more interesting riddle to life that is paradoxically unlocked only through the experience of biological death—an experience our dead ancestors have gone through themselves. Why would they want to be resuscitated?

What the transhumanists of Silicon Valley fail to recognize is that biological immortality is not a terribly interesting goal. The paradox of immortality is that biological death is part of it; in fact, it is essential. Our death is our door, individually and collectively, to true life, which is the self-emptying love of the God who offers himself to us precisely in death.