Beautiful Creatures: On Being Created and Being Human

Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognise the truth… —Benedict XVI

What sort of creatures are we? Asked in one way, this question poses a problem for religion or philosophy to consider. Asked in another way, it expresses bafflement at the mystery we are to ourselves.

As a problem to consider, we can engage it in an orderly manner with the help of revelation and reason. When we ask it in bafflement, it becomes more fraught, particularly perhaps when contemplating the frightening evils we can commit, but also the ways in which, as individuals, we can become lost to ourselves through unhappy circumstances, bad choices, and forces beyond our control. Reflecting on what it means for human beings to be creatures, in both ways of asking this question, might be a helpful approach to considering the challenges that now confront us.

Fiction is another avenue for exploring these questions. They are at the centre of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun. The novel is set in a world much like our own but at some time in the not-too-distant future. The society it depicts is not dystopian or futuristic or otherwise drawn from the world of science fiction. It is the world we live in, but with more advanced technology, and one more completely dominated than we are today by what Pope Francis calls “the technocratic paradigm”.

The story is told by Klara, an Artificial Friend or AF, a type of humanoid robot sold commercially as a companion for children. In the story, AFs are quite common among a certain class of children, particularly it seems those who have been “lifted”. The lifted have undergone some form of unspecified enhancement at a very early stage of their lives, perhaps to increase their intelligence. It certainly assures them of better opportunities. Higher education, for example, is almost completely closed to the “unlifted”. It seems that this process, while well established, is still confined to its first generation of young people. There do not seem to be any adults who are lifted.

One of the risks involved in being lifted is serious illness, leading in some cases to death. This may be the reason that the lifted seem to be given only limited opportunities for meeting other children. Gatherings to meet other lifted children, organised by anxious parents concerned for their socialisation, seem to commence in the early teenage years. Perhaps the health risks entail a weakened immune system before adolescence. In any case, AFs seem to be intended to compensate for the lack of real friends that the children have.

Klara is purchased to be the Artificial Friend for Josie, a lifted fourteen-year-old girl whose health has been compromised by the enhancement. Later we learn that Josie had an older sister who died as a result of being lifted. It is not clear that all AFs have superior intelligence, but Klara is an acute and attentive observer of the human beings around her. Josie’s mother notices this in Klara and it is one of the reasons she agrees to buy this particular AF at her daughter’s request. She asks Klara to imitate Josie’s walk and later in the story to imitate Josie’s speech, conversation and mannerisms, which Klara is quite able to do. Having already lost one daughter to being lifted, Josie’s mother is making arrangements for Klara to assume Josie’s appearance and characteristics, to replace her in the event that the enhancement kills her as well.

Klara is devoted to Josie, and Josie is quite attached to Klara. Josie’s mother regards Klara with ambivalence, and the only other person in the house, the housekeeper, dislikes having an AF around. While Klara is not mistreated, as the AFs of some other lifted children are, she is regarded as less than a servant but something more than an appliance. Despite the many person-like attributes she exhibits, including her attention to people’s emotions, the characters in the novel understand that Klara is nothing more than a machine acquired for a particular purpose. Some of the characters are uneasy or hostile in their initial encounters with Klara, perhaps reflecting more general attitudes in the society of the novel, but they eventually warm to her because of her perceptiveness and patent concern for Josie.

Because she is a machine, Klara also needs a source of power. AFs are solar-powered, and Klara only needs to be in the sun—sitting, moving, standing—to recharge her system. Her experience of this leads her to see the sun as a source of life, energy and healing. Watching and perhaps misinterpreting the healing effects of the sun on humans, she also comes to see it as a source of benevolence. There are a number of instances in the novel of Klara misinterpreting what she sees and experiences. While AFs are intelligent machines and often assumed by humans to be more intelligent than them, “superstition” seems to be one of their features as well, arising from the flaws in their technology and their limited understanding of the human world.

Klara’s case, however, demonstrates the common fact that machines can sometimes detect things that humans cannot. At the centre of the novel, Josie’s health suddenly deteriorates, to the point that death is expected. Klara is deeply concerned for Josie and disturbed at the anguish she sees in those who love the girl. Her reverence for the sun as the source of life and healing—the life she feels in herself, and the healing she has observed bestowed upon others—leads her to expect the sun to heal Josie. As Josie’s condition worsens, the idea comes into Klara’s mind “that for her to receive the Sun’s special help, it might be necessary to draw his attention to Josie’s situation in some particular and noticeable way”.

During her time in Josie’s home, Klara has watched the sun set in the west behind an old barn some distance away. In her naive fashion, Klara concludes that the barn is the place to which the sun retires each night. So, with the help of Josie’s unlifted friend Rick, who is not let in on the secret, Klara makes her way to the barn to present her appeal. The appeal she makes has all the characteristics of prayer: adoration of the sun for his “great kindness”; thanksgiving for the generosity Klara has seen him show to others; propitiation of his anger towards humans “on account of their Pollution and inconsideration” (Klara makes a vow to destroy a machine causing pollution as part of her prayer); and simple petition: “Please make Josie better”.

Klara’s interior disposition also matches what we understand about prayer. She comports herself with an attitude of humility and respect in the presence of the setting sun. She makes her appeal silently: “I didn’t actually say the words out loud, for I knew the Sun had no need of words as such … so I formed the words, or something close to them, quickly and quietly in my mind.” She is absolutely sincere and selfless in her desire for the good of another. She willingly makes a sacrifice of herself to fulfil the vow she has made to destroy the machine causing pollution, and understands her actions in destroying the machine as something pleasing to the sun. She displays the sort of unshakeable confidence and trust that we usually call faith, and she perseveres in urgent pleading for Josie’s recovery. As she makes her appeal, she is attentive to the thoughts and cues which lead us to hope that our prayer is being heard, that we are in a dialogue with God, not merely in a monologue with ourselves. And her prayer is answered.

As the household is preparing for Josie’s death, an overcast morning is suddenly broken by a tremendous outpouring of the sun flooding through the windows of Josie’s room, “illuminating her, and the entire bed, in a ferocious half-disc of orange”. The housekeeper is so startled by Klara’s protests that she abandons her attempts to lower the blind. “The Sun’s nourishment then came into the room so abundantly” that the intensity of the light forces Josie’s mother and the housekeeper to step back and raise their hands to their faces. Astonished and uneasy, they watch the sun focus “ever more brightly on Josie”, until it suddenly gives way again to the overcast morning. Josie wakes up from her sleep, still weak but obviously better. After receiving the sun’s “nourishment” on that “dark sky morning, she grew not only stronger, but from a child to an adult”.

Klara never speaks to anyone about her prayers to the sun. Only Josie’s unlifted friend Rick, who had helped Klara make her way to the barn, wonders about the connection between what Klara was doing and Josie’s recovery: “that morning when the weather went really strange, and the Sun came into Josie’s room … It almost seems like that was when Josie first started to get better.” It might have just been luck—“But these days, I keep wondering if there was more to it.”

As Josie’s young adult life becomes busier, Klara is moved into the “Utility Room” and half forgotten. Some time after Josie’s departure for college, Klara herself “departs” for a large scrap yard, where among all sorts of other mechanical refuse, Klara and other AFs are immobilised and abandoned to undergo their “slow fade”. A story that begins in a shop for high-tech and high consumption ends in a junk yard, an emblem of what Pope Francis has described as “the throwaway culture”.

A novel, of course, is not a scientific paper, but when it comes to creating humanoid robots with characteristics uncannily close to those of humans, it is still novelists who are better able to rise to the task than scientists. Whatever the advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and whatever their promises and illusions, we are a long way from creating machines like Ishiguro’s Artificial Friends, with consciousness and interiority and something approximating a soul. Klara’s decision to pray for Josie, and the actions she takes to follow this through, suggest something like moral agency. Even so, her range of experiences, emotions and insights is still much more limited than those of a human, and with it her capacity for moral deliberation properly understood. It is unclear that machines would ever be capable of moral deliberation. The point, however, is that we are so far away from any of this being a reality that we have to rely on the work of novelists rather than scientists to contemplate what some such reality would mean for being human.

In Hollywood films, the singularity in technology focuses on the moment when artificial intelligence escapes the bounds of human intelligence and capabilities, acquires self-awareness, and rapidly accelerates beyond our control, possibly threatening the continuation of both human civilisation and the human species. It is an idea with many intriguing dimensions, only one of which is the way it reflects a strange attraction we have to imagining our self-destruction, in this case by being superseded by our own machines. If the singularity represents the moment when humans are surpassed by what they have created, what if that moment occurs not when machines acquire super-intelligence or self-awareness, but when a robot begins to pray?

Would God hear the prayer of a machine? Would God help a machine to pray, as he helps us to pray? Would God answer such a prayer? If so, what would this mean for man? If God responds to the pleas of love, perhaps he would answer the prayer of a machine for a person, if a machine could love. St Thomas Aquinas teaches us that prayer is a property of rational creatures, that is, of human beings. The Psalms tell us that the animals praise the Lord and call upon him, but Aquinas concludes that this should be understood more as an instinct which leads them to look to their creator, rather than as prayer as such. In any case, God inclines to humans and animals because they are his creatures. A robot is a creature of man, perhaps made in man’s image, but not in the image of God.

Of course, these are absurd questions to contemplate. The question which gave rise to them, however—What if a robot begins to pray?—is not so much about the manner in which we might be surpassed by our machines, or what this might entail, both for ourselves and for the machines. It is about human diminishment and how this is reflected in the attitudes to technology, consumption, and ourselves and our relationships, which drive so many of the problems which confront us. Klara and the Sun depicts a future world completely without prayer and religion, except in a machine. There is one incidental reference to Christmas holidays, and only one or two occurrences where the name of Jesus is used as a profanity, suggesting perhaps that even this base usage is dying out. As Josie is dying, everyone in the house is in despair, and no one thinks to pray, not even the migrant housekeeper, a character who in lesser works could be counted on to do so.

Klara is the only character in the story who prays, the only one to whom it occurs to pray, who observes that there is a greater power than our own to which we can appeal. If her capacity for prayer allows her to surpass the humans around her, to become more than them, it arises not from massively superior intelligence or strength, but from a sense of being created. The human characters have lost this and sense only their weakness, which they seek to deny through frantic efforts at control and self-creation. The robot becomes more human by accepting that she is created, while the humans become more unthinking and machine-like in their insistence on being uncreated.

Religion of course is another thing which is meant to have been surpassed. If we look at projections of population and religion globally over the course of the current century, however, it is not religion that looks likely to be superseded but people who live without it. The fond hope for a long time was that religion was something that belonged to the childhood of our species. Perhaps we just never grow up. If the world Klara inhabits represents the adulthood of the species, then the surpassing of religion looks more like growing old than growing up, a long process of desiccation rather than coming into full strength and vigour. It could be imagined that Klara’s capacity for prayer is merely some sort of recapitulation of the evolutionary path that humans have taken, that robots too have to pass through religion to supersede it. This evades the point.

Klara is made to be a child’s companion. While her insights and reflections are more than those of a child, there is certainly a childishness to her, in the limits of her cognition (memory, knowledge, interpretation) and her capacities (sight, unsteadiness in walking on rough ground). Like a child, however, she has the ability to perceive things which the adults cannot. The accumulation of socialisation, culture and experience, along with the “sin and violence” they often entail, “trains us to lose sight of creation in its fullness”. For this reason childish insight is not always inferior, as any adult who has been astonished by a child’s observations can confirm. Their greater openness to things makes them more open to God as well, and the limitlessness of the life which he offers to us, while in the absence of religion our longing for limitlessness focuses on power.

It is in the “estrangement” of the creature from his creator that we find “the deepest roots of all the evils” that afflict social, political and economic life. It is the origin of the rupture in “the internal unity of the human person”, in the relationship between men and women, and in harmonious relations with other creatures and the created world. This estrangement causes us to seek “to control [our] life and action in the world”, to assert our control and will against reality. Human identity is founded on being created in the image and likeness of God. The vocation of the human person is to enter into a relationship with our creator. It is through this relationship that the meaning of our own lives and our relationships with others can find complete fulfilment. It is through this relationship that we can carry out properly the task entrusted to us “of ordering created nature according to his design”.

The creature’s relationship to his creator makes prayer a constitutive part of our identity. It is not prayer that makes us human as such. Obviously those who never pray or cannot pray are in no sense lesser human beings, in no sense made in a lesser image of God. It is more about our relationship to the truth in its fullness. In the high priestly prayer of the Lord in St John’s Gospel, he prays to the Father for his disciples: “Consecrate them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). What is the truth? The truth about ourselves as we stand before God, the truth that there is more, something greater than us, to which we belong; the truth about our weakness and sinfulness; the truth of God’s mercy. “Once we recognise our nothingness and helplessness before God then we can begin to pray.”

Reflecting on what it means for us to be creatures, as the starting point for understanding the challenges and crises before us, finds a long line of authority in papal social teaching. “The social question” in its many forms requires deeper reflection about the nature of the creature man. Beginning with St John XXIII, a key theme of Catholic social teaching has been that the major social questions of modern life—peace, development, economics, justice, protecting human life and human dignity, protecting the environment—tie all of us together, “in every part of the world”.

St Paul VI placed particular emphasis on this idea in his social teaching, which expanded on the broader outlook that the Second Vatican Council had signalled in Gaudium et Spes. He welcomed the increasing interconnectedness created by economics and technology and the emerging sense of shared responsibility for the problems facing people in different parts of the world. These developments highlighted the unity of the human family, and the importance of solidarity between different peoples for responding to the interconnected problems. In Populorum Progressio (1967) he also underscored the importance of authentic human development, beyond material or economic development alone: “Development cannot be limited to mere economic growth. In order to be authentic, it must be complete: integral, that is, it has to promote the good of every man and of the whole man.”

St John Paul II elaborated the ideas of interconnectedness and authentic or integral development in his own reflections on Paul VI’s social teaching. He observed that while social questions increasingly bind the peoples of the world together, this global dimension does not mean denying that they also have “national and local importance”. It means a sharper appreciation that the problems in a particular country or region “are not to be considered as isolated cases with no connection. On the contrary they depend more and more on the influence of factors beyond regional boundaries and national frontiers.”

He also emphasised that authentic or integral development “cannot be reduced to a ‘technical’ problem”. Approaches which focus primarily on technical or economic solutions, which do not “include the cultural, transcendent and religious dimensions of man and society”, or “recognise the existence of such dimensions”, do not help people realise their aspiration for a “more human life”. Integral development must keep in sight the interior dimension of human nature. It must be “measured and oriented according to the reality and vocation of man”, who “has been created by God in his image and likeness”.

John Paul II directly addresses the implications of being created for the relationship between human beings and the rest of creation. Because we are made by God, “we share a certain affinity with [the] other creatures” he created. At the same time, because we are alone among the creatures in being made in God’s image, we have “a true affinity with him too”. While superior to the other creatures and being placed over them, we remain “subject to the will of God, who imposes limits upon [our] use and dominion over things”. This teaching means that development cannot consist only in the use, domination “and indiscriminate possession of created things and the products of human industry”.

Our nature as creatures also ties the principle of the universal destination of goods to integral development. Obviously, the vocation of the human person is not realised in having an abundance of possessions, but in being or becoming fully human. Like his predecessors, John Paul II values the way that the goods produced by industry, science and technology open new horizons and enhance the opportunities for becoming more fully human. Therefore, as many people as possible must be supplied with “the goods essential for them ‘to be’”. Limiting development to this “necessary economic dimension”, however, without attention to the interior and moral dimensions of our lives, risks turning the new freedoms which technology and abundance create into “new forms of slavery”.

In Caritas in Veritate (2009), Benedict XVI broadens the concept of development and interconnectedness to encompass our “duties arising from our relationship to the natural environment”. Nature speaks to us of its Creator and his love for his creatures. It is given to all, and so “in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole”. This duty of stewardship entails the appropriate use of nature to ensure that all people can share in the material goods they need to flourish, and that succeeding generations can inhabit and flourish in the created world.

It is also important to understand what being created means for the environment itself. “Nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us by God as the setting for our life.” This precludes “total technical dominion over nature”, treating it as nothing more than raw materials for our exploitation. It also precludes the opposite attitude which divinises nature, or sees it “as something more important than the human person”.

The Church has a responsibility to defend creation. This means not only protecting the natural world from destruction but also protecting humanity from self-destruction. The danger of self-destruction looms not only from the destruction of the environment, but also from the denial of our responsibilities to both the created world and to other creatures, not least of all the other creatures who share the divine image with us. It is not just a question of the impact of our actions on the environment and other people. More fundamentally it is about the underlying moral dispositions we have embraced and how they order our lives. “The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence.” At the same time, nature is now “so integrated into the dynamics of society and culture that by now it hardly constitutes an independent variable”. For these reasons Benedict XVI speaks of the importance of understanding the interconnectedness between “human ecology” and environmental ecology. “Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others.” How we treat the environment is influenced by how we treat other people, and how we treat other people is influenced by how we treat the environment.

“The book of nature is one and indivisible.” In this phrase, Benedict XVI encapsulates the compass of integral development. “It takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations.” Pope Francis quotes this phrase in the opening paragraphs of Laudato Si’, noting that the damage done to both the social environment and the natural environment has the same cause: “the notion that there are no indisputable truths to guide our lives, and hence human freedom is limitless”. Forgetting God leads us to claim “absolute dominion over the earth” and “an unlimited right to trample his creation underfoot”. The best way “to restore men and women to their rightful place” and to end their arrogance towards creation is to remind them that they too are created.

Pope Francis devotes a key chapter of Laudato Si’ to the idea of integral ecology, drawing on the ideas of interconnectedness and integral development in the social teaching of his predecessors. “When we speak of ‘the environment’, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it.” Destruction of the environment needs to be understood in the light of “the workings of society, its economy, its behaviour patterns, and the ways it grasps reality”. The complex crisis we face is “both social and environmental”, and strategies to address it require “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature”.

Integral ecology therefore encompasses “the analysis of human, family, work-related and urban contexts”, as well as “how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and to the environment”. It means looking to the consequences that “the health of a society’s institutions has for the environment and the quality of human life”. If respect for the law is compromised, for example, it can mean not only injustice and violence for communities, but ineffective laws and regulations protecting the environment. Respect for local cultures and communities “when studying environmental problems” is also required, along with the flexibility to develop approaches that meet local needs rather than imposing imported frameworks.

Integral ecology extends to the environment in cities and towns in which people live, particularly the poor, mindful of the way chaos, “noise and ugliness” shape “the way we think, feel and act”. It comprises “the relationship between human life and the moral law”, including respect for our embodiedness as men and women. It is “inseparable from the notion of the common good”, from the respect for the dignity of the person which underlies it, and from working for social peace and distributive justice. It also means intergenerational solidarity, “since the world we have received also belongs to those who will follow us”. Thinking about the sort of world we want to leave to those who come after us is not only an interconnected environmental and moral question, but also a question about our identity and purpose as human beings. “Unless we struggle with these deeper issues, I do not believe that our concern for ecology will produce significant results.”

The idea that “everything is connected”, “everything is related” is a leading motif of Laudato Si’. The encyclical’s focus on the environment and interconnectedness makes the idea of integral ecology more appealing to a broad audience, but only up to a point. It is not just that many people would not accept some of the implications of integral ecology, which Francis makes explicit in Laudato Si’; for example, in his teaching that “since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion”. Greater consciousness of the role that ecosystems play, for example, in sustaining life for ourselves and other creatures may bring people to “realise that we live and act on the basis of a reality which has previously been given to us, which precedes our existence and abilities”. However, the idea that this is part of a larger reality to the created world which is not of our making, which limits our freedom, and which we are obliged to respect as a condition for life to flourish, is anathema to secular societies.

It suits us in many ways to see the created world—including our own bodies which are part of it—as raw material to be used rather than as having a natural and moral structure we have to respect. Francis speaks of a “practical relativism” which follows from a “misguided anthropocentrism”. This is one of the major causes of “environmental degradation and social decay”. By placing ourselves at the centre, and believing in our own power and technological capacities, we give “absolute priority” to our own interests and “all else becomes relative”. In this context, neglecting the environmental impact of our decisions “is only the most striking sign of a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself”.

Practical relativism means denying the reality of worth: the worth of other creatures, the worth of the created world and its systems, “the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities … everything is connected”. The renewal of our relationship to nature depends on “a renewal of humanity itself … There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology.” Such an anthropology is grounded in our being created. It comprises “three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself”. These relationships were broken “by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations”.

We can find our way back, however, if we allow the natural world and its givenness to teach us. Francis quotes the book of Wisdom (13:5): “Through the greatness and beauty of creatures, one comes to know by analogy their maker.” Approaching nature, including our own place in it, as a source of “awe and wonder”, rather than as “an object simply to be used and controlled”, transforms not only our relationship to creation, but also to other creatures and our creator. In this way, integral ecology “takes us to the heart of what it means to be human”.

“Among all the world’s visible creatures, only man has ‘a capacity for God’.” We are “created by God to be in relationship with him”. Our superior place in the world arises not from our ability to transform it, from our power, but from our unique dignity as the creature “who converses with God”. It is under his gaze that we make decisions about our lives and the created world entrusted to us. Understanding ourselves as creatures, who are answerable to their Creator and have responsibilities to other creatures and the created world, sets us on one path. Seeing ourselves either as the products of mere chance, or as the ultimate creators of gods and worlds, answerable to nothing beyond ourselves except those with greater power, sets us on a very different course. This truth is harder to grasp “when God is eclipsed”, and “without a Creator the creature vanishes”.

We need to recover an openness to the truth through a renewed conviction, not least among the leaders of culture and thought in our times, of our createdness; that we are creatures; that we have a creator. The massive investment that we have made in denying our createdness, in resisting what it tells us about ourselves and our relationship to creation, has cost much. Conversion of heart is the beginning of a new creation.

M.A. Casey is the Director of the P.M. Glynn Institute at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney. This is an edited version of a paper he delivered to the 13th Korean-German Colloquium at Sogang University, Seoul, in October