As a traditionalist Catholic, I am familiar with the tendency—especially among good and faithful people—to recoil instinctively from new technologies that touch the body. I understand it. We live in a disordered age, one in which materialist science is often arrayed against the spiritual truths of the Faith. But to mistake all medical progress for transhumanist hubris is, I think, a category error. That is the central flaw in John M. Grondelski’s Crisis Magazine article “Bodyoids: Frankenstein Slaves Meet Cartesian Technophilia.” Its arguments are not just mistaken—they are based on a metaphysical confusion that Saint Thomas Aquinas would have seen through at once.
Mr Grondelski warns of a future in which “bodyoids”—bodily constructs without brains—are grown from human cells. His horror is that we might create “a being that looks like a man, walks like a man, has human DNA, and can do what a man does,” and yet lacks any rational soul. For him, this is monstrous. But this is where his reasoning falters. If a body lacks the capacity for rational thought, then by definition, it is not a man. And if it is not a man, then the proper moral category for it is not “person” but “organism” or “instrument.” It is no more entitled to human dignity than a kidney in a petri dish.
Aquinas is clear: the soul is not a separate ghost residing in the flesh, but the forma corporis—the form of the body, that which gives it its identity as a living, rational animal. The human soul is rational not because the body looks human, but because the body is organised for rationality. Remove the brain, or reduce it to animal function, and you no longer have a human being in any true sense. You have a biological artefact—organic matter, yes, but with no more claim to personhood than a corpse or a severed limb.
Anima autem humana, quae est forma corporis, non est forma corporis nisi corporis humani, cuius potentiae complectitur.
(ST I.76.1)
The human soul, which is the form of the body, is not the form of just any body, but only of a human body whose powers it contains.
Aquinas is not describing the external appearance of a human body. He is describing its internal structure, its capacities—potentiae. Without those, the soul is absent.
Nor should we assume, as Mr Grondelski does, that the horror of bodyoids lies in their resemblance to us. Here we must resist the emotional confusion that often accompanies modern Catholic commentary on bioethics. The sin of Frankenstein is not that he made life, but that he misunderstood what life is. A grown body without mind, without soul, without any capacity for reason, does not belong to the moral community of human beings. It may be distasteful to manufacture such things for labour or organ harvest, but the immorality lies in degrading ourselves—not in violating the dignity of the bodyoid, which possesses none.
Some will ask, “But what if we do not know whether a bodyoid has a soul?” That is a good and necessary question. Aquinas would reply by turning to potentia intellectiva—the power of intellectual apprehension—as the test. If a being cannot in principle engage in rational reflection, then it cannot have a rational soul. To this we may add: if it has no brain or only a rudimentary one, there is no reasonable ground to suppose it has been infused with a soul at all. The moral law, in cases of uncertainty, commands caution—but not paralysis. It does not require us to grant rights to that which cannot by nature exercise them.
The mistake made by Mr Grondelski is, ironically, a Cartesian one. He treats the body as something into which a soul might be poured, like water into a jar. But that is not how Catholic anthropology works. As Aquinas writes in De Anima, man is not a soul and a body joined together, but a single substance composed of form and matter. Remove the form, and the matter ceases to be human. It may look like a man, but it is not one.
There is a kind of idolatry in granting rights to bodyoids. It mistakes appearance for essence. And worse, it distracts us from the real threats to human dignity: euthanasia, abortion, pornography, and social atomisation. To waste moral concern on brainless meat is to concede the principle that human worth is accidental, rather than essential.
Medical progress, when rightly understood, does not threaten the Catholic vision of the person. In fact, it often illuminates it. Skin grafts, prosthetic limbs, gene therapies—none of these are unnatural. They are ordered toward the good of the whole person, and they do not pretend to create souls where none exist. When they do overreach, it is not because they use technology, but because they forget the telos—the end—for which the body exists.
At this point, a serious objection presents itself—one that must be answered without equivocation.
If, as I have argued, the presence of rational capacity defines the human soul, what are we to say of those born with profound mental disabilities? What of the child whose brain never develops beyond the most primitive level? If the bodyoid has no soul because it cannot reason, then do we not risk excluding these people too?
No. And here is why.
In the Summa, Aquinas makes a crucial distinction between actus primus and actus secundus—between the possession of a faculty and its active use. The soul is present not only when the intellect is in act, but when it exists in potentia—as a possibility rooted in nature, even if it cannot be realised in this life.
Anima est actus primus corporis physici organici potentia vitam habentis.
(ST I.76.1)
The soul is the first act of a physical, organic body having life potentially.
A severely disabled child remains a human being because its body is, by kind and organisation, the body of a rational creature. Its tragedy is a privation—an injury or deficiency in the realisation of what it is, not evidence that it never was.
Aquinas explains further:
Rationalis anima non unitur corpori nisi tali corpori, quod sit proportionatum tali formae.
(ST I.76.5)
The rational soul is not united to a body unless it be a body proportioned to such a form.
The malformed child is not another species. He is one of us—damaged, yes, but human. The image of God is not erased by incapacity.
A bodyoid, by contrast, is not a damaged human but a constructed non-human. It has never been proportioned to the rational soul. It has no brain, no internal orientation to thought, no possibility of rational development. It lacks the very organisational principle that would make the infusion of a soul possible. It is not disabled—it is empty.
To conflate these two is to fall into a utilitarian trap: to judge the person by function rather than by nature. But nature comes first. The disabled belong to the human family. The bodyoid never did.
The Catholic understanding of the soul is not mystical sentimentality. It is metaphysics. A man is not a man because he looks like one, but because he is formed for rational life. Where that formation exists, however impaired, there is personhood. Where it is absent, there is not.
Bodyoids may provoke unease, and that unease may not be wholly wrong. But the Church’s role is not to validate feelings—it is to proclaim truths. And the truth is this: if a thing cannot in principle think, love, or know God, then it is not a man. It is not a person. It has no soul. And it deserves no more protection than a fingernail grown in a lab.
Let us not waste our moral outrage. There are real victims in the world. Bodyoids are not among them.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
[…] varnish. What do we mean when we call something conscious? If we follow Sebastian Wang’s line — that consciousness is ensoulment by God and nothing less — the question ends quickly. Kai has no soul. He cannot be conscious. His apparent emotions are […]