‘Cassandra’ On Being Human and Embodiment

Cassandra, a new and trending German streaming series on Netflix, is a thriller that gives commentary on what it means to be human. [Editor’s Note: Spoilers ahead]

This fictional series covers a modern-day family who moves into a retro “smart” home with an AI house assistant. Named Cassandra, this assistant is a virtual helping hand. Her face appears on a monitor in every room to help and assist all needs. She has complete control over the house, with the ability to open and lock doors, make meals, and constantly watch the activities in the home. Besides being in the home itself, she also has autonomy to roll freely in and out of the home as a 5ft tall human-like robot.

Throughout the limited series’ six episodes, the family and the audience learn why the house was created. Cassandra is not just a virtual assistant but is the consciousness of a real human individual.

Decades before the new family moved in, the house was owned by the original human Cassandra and her family. After hearing she would soon die of impending cancer, the original Cassandra seeks a way to live beyond death to take care of her family. She chooses to pursue an experimental route by redesigning her home and uploading her consciousness into it. She is able to make meals and watch over the home as the 60s stay-at-home mom trope.

The original family soon learns that the experiment is no substitute for the human wife and mother. After her death, the family now looks at the monitors in each room, and the robot wearing their deceased mother’s face knowing that this is not truly Cassandra, but a reminder of her deceased reality.

The reality that Cassandra is not her consciousness alone, becomes especially clear when the husband tries to hug her new form. He tries to embrace his wife but instead holds a cold metal machine.

While the intention to live after death for the sake of one’s family is a noble wish, the execution of that desire is unattainable. What the family learns is that to be human is to be more than consciousness, it is to be embodied.

The Christian faith has been reciting this truth for millennia.

From the start of the second century, Christians have refuted the heresy of Gnosticism, which lifts spiritual knowledge above physical reality, degrading the value of the physical world. Although remnants of this heresy exist today, this is not the orthodox Christian faith.

To be a person in the Christian faith is to be embodied. It is to equally be spirit and body, spiritual and physical.

This truth is scriptural. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 articulates the value God has given to our physical bodies, and the call Christins have to honor it:

 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So, glorify God in your body.” (NIV)

Christian theologians have also commented on the fact that God intentionally created humankind as both body and spirit and called the creation Good. C.S. Lewis speaks to this in Mere Christianity, he writes, “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.” When we neglect the physical realities and bodies God gives, we neglect an essential part of our being.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments on the improper separation of body and soul in Creation and Fall Temptation: Two Biblical Studies. He says: 

“Man’s body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not “have” a body; he does not “have” a soul; rather he “is” body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ.”

Both theologians C.S Lewis and Bonhoeffer articulate well this Christian truth that man cannot be only spiritual or physical but must be wholly both in his lived experience. Christians cannot degrade the value of their physicality. Afterall, even Christ himself came to save mankind in an embodied state, fully human and fully God.

“Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.” -C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity

What Cassandra demonstrates well is the orthodox truth that humankind cannot be dwindled down to one aspect of humanness. To be human is not just to have a mind, a consciousness, a spirit, etc. It is to live in all these states in a physically embodied experience.