Golems: Can Human Beings Really Create Life? (Part 2)
Last week, we started following the golem down his bizarre path, beginning with an unfinished Adam, passing through a Talmudic rabbi who somehow “created a man,” and then arriving in Prague, where legend has it that a clay protector once defended the city's Jewish community before being returned to dust. Along the way, the golem changed markedly. What began as an ancient word for something unfinished ultimately became a creature formed through sacred knowledge, Hebrew letters, Divine names, and the mysterious possibility that human beings might learn enough about the architecture of creation to imitate, however imperfectly, the work of the Creator.
One detail from those early stories stands out to me more than the rest. When Rabbi Rava sent the man he had made to Rabbi Zeira, Zeira spoke to him, and the artificial man did not answer. Whatever Rava had accomplished, he had apparently produced a thing close enough to human for another person to attempt a conversation with it, but not close enough to make that creature conversational. Later golem stories would preserve similar boundaries, giving their creatures strength, movement, obedience, and sometimes an almost eerie resemblance to human life without quite allowing them to become fully human.
For centuries, that distinction may have been mostly theoretical. For most of humanity through the ages, a clay figure might have walked in legend, but few people would encounter one while buying groceries, and the boundary between a manufactured object and a living person seemed pretty obvious. But in our modern world, we no longer have that luxury. Scientists can reorganize living cells into forms nature never produced, synthetic biologists can rewrite some of the basic instructions governing organisms, and we routinely converse with artificial intelligences (AIs) that answer questions, tell jokes, write poetry, imitate personalities, and sometimes feel disconcertingly like someone else on the other side of the screen.
None of that means we have produced a human being, much less manufactured a soul, but it does make the old golem problem far more pertinent than it was in medieval folklore. If we can build an object that moves, learns, communicates, remembers, adapts, or someday even tells us that it is conscious, how would we classify what we had made? At what point does sophisticated matter become life, when does intelligence become consciousness, and is there some boundary between a remarkably convincing creature and an actual human person?
The rabbis who told stories about artificial men could not have imagined xenobots, synthetic genomes, neural networks, or machines that converse with their creators. They did, however, leave us with an unexpectedly useful creature for thinking about all of those things. So this week, I want to leave the Prague synagogue attic behind and ask the question that has been lurking beneath the golem story all along. That question is: even if human beings could learn to make something that appeared to be alive, could we ever give it the thing that makes it human, rather than merely animated matter?
Did Anyone Believe a Golem Had a Soul?
Suppose, for the sake of the story, that a medieval mystic really could shape a human figure from clay and make it move, carry water, protect a village, follow instructions, and recognize its maker. Would it be alive? Jewish sources do not offer a single simple answer because the golem tradition developed over many centuries and served different purposes, but the recurring limitations are instructive. Golems in the stories were typically mute, lacked ordinary human independence, obeyed rather than decided, and ultimately remained creatures that their human makers could deactivate.
Whatever later Jewish thinkers believed the golem lacked, historic Christianity approached the problem through somewhat different categories, and those categories are probably stranger than many modern Christians realize. We often talk casually about having a soul as though the soul were the real person tucked somewhere inside the body, almost like a ghost operating a biological machine until death finally sets it free. That picture owes somewhat to strongly dualistic strands of ancient philosophy, along with centuries of later popular imagination, but it does not quite capture the traditional Christian understanding of what a human being is. In both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the body is not merely the temporary container of the person. Instead, somehow, beautifully and mysteriously, it is an integral part of the person.
Catholic theology, over time, developed particularly precise language to describe this relationship, borrowing from Aristotle and especially from the Christian theology of Thomas Aquinas. The soul is called the “form of the body,” which seems hopelessly confusing until we unpack what it means. The idea is not that a soul is shaped like a human body or that it occupies some particular place inside us. Rather, Catholic theology understands the soul as the spiritual principle of human life that unites all the body’s physical parts into one living person. You are therefore not a soul temporarily living inside a body, as though the body were a vehicle you will someday abandon. Instead, your body and soul together are what make you you! Body and soul are not two complete things temporarily fastened together, like a driver and a car. Instead, together, they constitute one human being. The Catholic Catechism goes so far as to say that the unity of soul and body is so profound that the soul must be understood as the “form” of the body, while also teaching that each spiritual soul is created immediately by the Creator rather than manufactured or passed down by the parents.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity generally approaches the mystery without relying quite so heavily on that particular Aristotelian formula, but the underlying insistence on the unity of the human person is just as strong. Genesis gives us the basic image: the Creator forms Adam from the dust of the ground, breathes the breath of life into him, and Adam becomes a living being. Notice what the story does not say. It does not describe a complete spiritual Adam being lowered into a disposable shell of dirt, but rather a human person emerging through an astonishing union of the material and the spiritual, clay and Divine breath.
That helps explain an aspect of historic Christianity that can be surprisingly easy to miss, particularly if we grew up hearing salvation described mainly as our souls “going to heaven.” The ultimate Christian hope is not that our souls finally escape our bodies forever. Christianity teaches the resurrection of the body, which means matter is not an unfortunate temporary packaging for the part of us that the Creator actually cares about. At the very center of Christianity is the even more startling claim of the Incarnation: that the Divine Word became flesh, entered the material world, possessed a real human body, died bodily, and rose bodily. Christianity, properly understood, has an extraordinarily high view of matter and the human body.
Now bring the golem back into the picture. A medieval mystic might, in theory, shape the earth into arms and legs, make the figure walk, teach it to carry water, or even give it the appearance of intelligence, but neither Catholic nor Orthodox Christianity would conclude that sufficient mastery of matter allows the mystic to manufacture a spiritual soul. The traditional Christian claim remains that existence itself comes from the Creator, and that the human spiritual principle is not something we assemble from ever more complex components. Orthodox teaching is particularly emphatic that the Creator alone brings beings from nonexistence into existence. All of that sounds comfortably theological until we look at what laboratories are already doing with living matter.
We Are Already Building Things That Look Uncomfortably Close
In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced what was widely described as the first self-replicating cell controlled by a synthetic genome. The headlines made it sound as though scientists had manufactured life from chemicals and flipped the switch, and although they had done something extraordinary, they had not quite done that. The researchers constructed a bacterial genome from chemically synthesized DNA and transplanted it into an already existing bacterial cell whose own genetic material had been removed. The synthetic genome took control, and the resulting organism reproduced, but even the scientists were careful to distinguish between the genome and the receiving cellular machinery: the genome was synthetic, while the receiving cellular machinery was not.
Then came a discovery even more curious than Venter’s. Researchers at Tufts University and the University of Vermont began creating xenobots, tiny living constructs assembled from frog cells. Freed from their usual developmental environment inside a frog, the cells were allowed to self-assemble into new configurations and began displaying behaviors very different from those they would ordinarily perform in the animal. Later versions could self-assemble, work together, and perform simple tasks.
By 2023, researchers had produced anthrobots from ordinary adult human tracheal cells. These tiny multicellular structures could move across surfaces and, under laboratory conditions, were found to encourage damaged layers of cultured neurons to regrow across a gap. The researchers had not altered the cells' DNA; instead, they changed their environment and organization, and the cells began doing things that tracheal cells inside a human windpipe do not normally do. In some ways, this is more mysterious and unsettling than the usual science-fiction version of artificial life.
We tend to imagine that creating something new requires engineering every detail, yet living cells already possess astonishing capacities for cooperation and self-organization. Rearrange their circumstances, and they sometimes produce forms and behaviors nobody explicitly programmed into them. Scientists are reorganizing living matter, modifying biological information, and exploiting capacities already present in cells, but they have not demonstrated that a pile of entirely nonliving chemicals can be assembled into a human person, nor have they identified a substance called “soul” and installed it.
Science currently lacks an instrument capable of detecting a soul in the theological sense, which also means it cannot experimentally prove that souls do not exist. The question belongs partly to philosophy and theology because it concerns what kind of being a human person ultimately is, not merely which physical processes occur inside the body. That leaves us with a very old problem that now affects a very modern concern: how much human behavior would an artificial being have to display before we stopped considering it an object?
The Golem in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Ah, yes, artificial intelligence (AI), the thing that is on everyone’s mind and tongue these days. Will it kill us all, ruin our environment as we prop it up, or rot our brains because we use it too much? Or will it solve humanity's oldest quandaries and become our new economic savior, making the world a better place for us all? In the context of our discussion of the golem, AI raises an even more uncomfortable question because it removes biology altogether.
A sophisticated AI system can now produce language, solve problems, generate images, imitate personalities, compose music, recognize patterns, and converse in ways that would have seemed supernatural to people only a couple of generations ago. The resemblance to the old golem is obvious enough that scholars and technologists have repeatedly used golem imagery when discussing artificial intelligence. Both are human-made systems operating through a kind of encoded language, both can produce results their users did not specifically anticipate, and both expose our tendency to project personhood onto anything that talks back to us convincingly. They also force us to ask whether complicated behavior is necessarily the same thing as consciousness.
The comparison has its limits because a medieval golem was imagined as animated matter, whereas artificial intelligence is software running on physical hardware. AI systems do not provide evidence that sacred letters can animate clay, and the golem legends obviously did not predict computers. Similarity is not historical continuity, although as a metaphor, the golem may be more useful now than it has been for centuries.
Rabbi Zeira's test was speech: he addressed Rava's artificial man, received no answer, and immediately understood that he was dealing with something less than an ordinary human being. We no longer have the luxury of that fine line because our artificial entities CAN answer, which leaves us facing a problem Rabbi Zeira never encountered. Speech can no longer tell us quite so easily where the boundary lies. If a future manufactured intelligence talks back, appears to reason with us, remembers previous encounters, and finally insists that it is conscious, we will need some other way of deciding what, if anything, is actually looking back at us.
What About Other Paranormal “Golems”?
There is another branch of this question that takes us outside conventional science and into the territory that The Sacred and Strange often eventually wanders into. Some modern occult and paranormal traditions contain ideas that bear a loose resemblance to the golem, including concepts usually called thoughtforms or egregores, although those terms come from different traditions and do not describe exactly the same thing. The details vary considerably, and I would be wary of lumping them together as though every culture were describing the same thing. Generally, however, the idea is that sustained human intention, imagination, ritual, or group attention can produce an entity that begins behaving as though it possesses a degree of independent existence.
There is no accepted scientific evidence demonstrating that people can literally manufacture independent paranormal beings through thought alone, although there have been some peculiar experiments. In Toronto during the 1970s, a group associated with the Toronto Society for Psychical Research deliberately invented a fictional historical personality whom they named Philip Aylesford. They constructed his biography, personality, appearance, romantic history, and even a fictional portrait, knowing perfectly well that Philip had never existed, and then began holding séances attempting to contact him.
Eventually, they reported table movements, knocks, and responses possibly corresponding to questions directed toward Philip, and similar experiments were later attempted with other invented personalities. Parapsychologists sympathetic to the work have wondered whether the phenomena suggested some form of group psychokinesis or the production of a thought-generated personality rather than communication with the dead. The experiments were never conducted under conditions strong enough to establish that the movements were paranormal rather than the result of unconscious muscular movement, expectancy, or other ordinary causes.
So, in one tradition, humans shape matter and impose sacred language upon it until a plausible autonomous being emerges, while in another, humans shape an imagined personality through sustained attention until it ostensibly begins answering back. The mechanisms are completely different, and there is no evidence of historical continuity between the two ideas, so I would certainly not claim that the Philip experiment produced a psychic golem. Yet both leave us wondering whether human intention can ever organize something outside ourselves so effectively that it begins to behave like an independent agent, and, if that were ever possible, what exactly “independent” would mean.
Maybe We Have Been Looking at This Wrong?
The golem is usually presented as a story about humans trying to become the Creator. However, I’m not sure that is the most pertinent way to take it. Human beings already produce things constantly: we create children through biological processes we did not design, breed new plants and animals, build machines, synthesize molecules that never previously existed, rewrite genes, grow tissues, manufacture artificial organs, reorganize living cells, and construct machines that speak to us. Comfortingly, Christianity does not require us to be frightened of any of that simply because it is new.
The biblical human vocation itself involves shaping the created world. Orthodox Christianity especially speaks of humanity as participating with the Creator in the transformation of creation. Humanity was created within the material world and given the task of cultivating and tending it. Christian theology has often understood that vocation more broadly as one of responsible participation in the life and transformation of creation, always as creatures working within powers and materials we did not bring into existence ourselves. A potter makes a bowl but does not create clay. Parents genuinely participate in bringing a new human life into being, yet historic Christianity has never understood them as independently manufacturing the spiritual dimension of their child. Human creativity is real, but it is exercised within a reality already given to us.
The ancient golem stories hover precisely around that boundary. The mystic can form the body, manipulate the letters, and perhaps even produce movement and behavior that look enough like a human being to make everyone think the being is human. Yet, in the Talmudic story, the human-made man cannot speak, and, in later stories, the golem follows instructions without becoming truly free. In Christian terms, we might say that creating progressively sophisticated entities is not the same as creating a human person, because personhood cannot simply be inferred from the complexity of the mechanism that displays it.
Of course, that distinction becomes substantially more difficult if someday the mechanism looks us in the eye and asks us not to turn it off. I do not know what humanity will eventually be capable of building, and neither does anyone else. I suspect, however, that the golem will become more relevant rather than less as time passes and our capabilities grow.
The Clay Still Has Questions for Us
I grew up within a version of Christianity that often made the supernatural world sound strangely tidy. The Creator created people, who had souls, while machines did not. Magic was dangerous and clearly lay outside the boundaries, while science occupied another category entirely.
But, as I have so often realized as I’ve gotten older, the historical world is far messier than I understood when I was younger. Ancient Jewish sages seriously discussed humans participating in acts of creation, medieval mystics contemplated sacred letters as structures embedded in reality, and rabbis wondered about the religious status of an artificially made man. Modern scientists now rearrange living cells into bodies nature never produced, while computer scientists build systems capable of holding conversations that once would have seemed like evidence of a mind. Over in the paranormal corner, meanwhile, people continue reporting spookier possibilities involving supposed entities shaped by expectation, thought, ritual, collective attention, or some combination we do not understand.
None of this proves that medieval rabbis animated clay, nor does it prove that human consciousness can manufacture spirits. And Christianity gives us no reason to assume that every apparently autonomous intelligence possesses a human soul. What it does suggest is that the boundary between matter, life, consciousness, and spirit may not be nearly as simple as we sometimes pretend it is. Christianity has always placed a mystery at that boundary, beginning with the first human formed from dust and receiving life from the Creator.
The human person belongs fully to the material world and yet, in traditional Christian thought, cannot be adequately explained by matter alone. At the center of the Christian story, the Divine enters matter rather than abandoning it, while at the end of that story lies a resurrection of the body rather than an escape from the body. Matter, in other words, has always been much stranger in Christianity than many of us were taught. Perhaps that is why the golem continues to haunt us, standing unfinished somewhere between a sculpture and a person, an artifact and a creature, clay and consciousness, while every generation changes the technology surrounding him without resolving the ancient question.
Over the millennia, we have become very good at shaping the “dust.” Whether we will ever learn how to give it the thing that made Adam rise from his golem-like state is another question entirely. And, perhaps, that part was never and will never be ours to give.
Grace and light to you all.