Martha C Nussbaum and Transcending Humanity

Martha C. Nussbaum wonders what to do with the yearning we all have to 'transcend' our humanity. "Human beings want to be immortal and ageless", she writes, and she's right. (This is what wrinkle cream is for, isn't it?) But the problem is when we find non-human, or humanity-denying solutions to this in an attempt to leave our humanity behind. What she yearns for is a way of transcending humanity ('internal transcendence') that at the same time affirms our humanity, in its bodily finitude and its dependence on others, its 'situatedness' (to borrow Benhabib's term). She rejects as incoherent the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constituitive conditions of our humanity and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being.

Fair enough.

But she is sharp enough to realise that Christianity offers something entirely different to this in its vision of transcending humanity:

'what a profound response to the problem is embodied in Christianity...For Christianity seems to grant that in order to imagine a god who is truly superior, truly worthy of worship, truly and fully just, we must imagine a god who is human as well as divine, a god who has actually lived out the non-transcendent life and understands it in the only way it can be understood, by suffering and death.'

Her problem seems to be that she cannot see how the Christian ideal avoids lapsing into an 'external transcendence' of a non-human kind... She would prefer that we turn our longings for transcendence to this-worldly and humanity-affirming activities, striving for human excellences and to extend the capacity of human beings.

I would have thought that in Christ we have a both-and...