Fedorov, Nikolai

Nikolai Fedorov taught that the common task of humanity is to raise its dead ancestors by science and shared labor. Mormon transhumanists count him among their forerunners, since Restoration doctrine also makes the living responsible for the salvation of the dead, while it parts from him on agency and the family.

Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829⁠–1903) was a Russian Orthodox philosopher and librarian who held that humanity's highest duty is the bodily resurrection of all who have died. He called this the common task, and he expected it to be carried out by human knowledge and labor in accord with God's design. Most Christians have read resurrection as an act God alone performs at the end of time, with the living left to wait. Fedorov read the same promise as a commission addressed to the living. Histories of transhumanism, including those written by Mormon transhumanists, place him among the movement's earliest religious precursors and the founder of what came to be called Russian cosmism.

Life and Influence

Fedorov lived in poverty and obscurity, yet his ideas reached several of the leading Russian minds of his century.

He was the illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Gagarin and was denied his father's name. After years as a provincial schoolteacher, he spent about twenty-five years as a librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, where he gave away most of what he earned and was reputed to have read every book he catalogued. Among the readers he guided was a partly deaf sixteen-year-old, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who later laid the theoretical foundations of spaceflight. Dostoevsky, sent an account of the ideas by a disciple, wrote that he agreed with them. Tolstoy admired the purity of his life, and in 1881 the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov called the project "the first step forward of the human spirit along the path of Christ" since the emergence of Christianity. Fedorov published almost nothing under his name. His disciples issued The Philosophy of the Common Task after his death, in two volumes (1906 and 1913), distributed free of charge.

The Common Task

Fedorov traced the world's divisions to the forgetting of the dead, and he proposed their resurrection as the work that would reunite humanity.

He described modern society as "unbrotherly," and he read it through the parable of the prodigal son: a generation that tells its parents to make way for the young speaks with "the voice of hate" of prodigal sons. The parable ends with a resurrection image, "this thy brother was dead, and is alive again" (Luke 15:32), and Fedorov's program turns that image into a duty. Scripture's first unbrotherly act ends in Cain's evasion, "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Genesis 4:9), and the common task answers that question in the affirmative for every generation. Humanity would first learn to regulate nature, steering weather and harvests and replacing the toil of miners with energy from the sun. It would then gather the scattered particles of the dead and restore their bodies, and finally settle other worlds to house the risen generations. He complained that the museum had "not yet asked, 'Will these bones come to life?'", which echoes the Lord's question to Ezekiel, "Son of man, can these bones live?" (Ezekiel 37:3). In Ezekiel's vision the prophet's word gathers bone, sinew, and flesh, but life comes only when ruach, the Hebrew word for breath, wind, and spirit, enters from the four winds. The vision allows a reading close to Fedorov's, in which human work, done at God's command, assembles the body and God's breath supplies its life.

Resonances with Restoration Theology

Restoration doctrine shares Fedorov's conviction that the living and the dead are bound in one work of salvation.

It has long been recognized that Fedorov's project resembles Latter-day Saint work for the dead. Paul's question, "Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?" (1 Corinthians 15:29), became for Joseph Smith a charge to perform ordinances for ancestors, so that "they without us should not be made perfect" (Hebrews 11:40). He read Obadiah's promise that "saviours shall come up on mount Zion" (Obadiah 1:21) as a description of the living who do this work for their kindred. Less often noticed is how closely Fedorov's institutions match the Latter-day Saint pattern. He wanted a library, a museum, and a graveyard beside every rural church and school, preserving the thoughts and handiwork of the dead, and he observed that the earliest histories of peoples were genealogies.

Agency, Family, and the Test

The Restoration departs from Fedorov at the points where his task would override the persons it means to restore.

Fedorov looked to an autocrat as a father of all nations, and he regarded the attachment between husband and wife as a force that makes men forget their fathers. Restoration theology seals husbands, wives, and children together as part of exaltation, and it treats every ordinance for the dead as an offer the dead may accept or refuse. Proposals to reconstruct the dead from their genomes, writings, or digital traces now give the common task a technical form. The test for any technology of restoring the dead is whether it honors them as persons with their own agency and binds the generations in love, or turns them into material for a project the living have decided for them.