For nearly five years, entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has been attempting that feat of which magicians and daredevils have boasted throughout history: defying death. In 2021, Johnson launched “Project Blueprint,” an anti-aging initiative with the eventual goal of equipping a human being to live forever. The venture capitalist’s X (formerly Twitter) profile features the slogan “Conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” He also boasted in a recent X post that he is founding a religion, called “Don’t Die,” which he claims will become “history’s fastest-growing ideology,” save the human race and usher “in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine.” While Johnson’s new idea may sound insane, it isn’t novel. In fact, at least two of the 20th century’s greatest authors predicted — and warned against — the rise of such a religious movement. While neither is noted for writing dystopian or futuristic fiction, both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis wrote of the warped view of eternal life that may emerge in the future. Many readers of Tolkien’s work are familiar with his adventure classic The Hobbit and the three-volume epic The Lord of the Rings, but there are thousands of years of significantly grimmer and darker history to Tolkien’s Middle-earth. In events chronicled in The Akallabêth and recounted in The Fall of Númenor, Tolkien warned of the dangers of pursuing immortality. When Middle-earth was created, the Elves were given the gift of immortality, living forever unless they were slain, while the race of Men was given what Tolkien called the “gift” of death. While Elves live on and watch all around them fade and fall into darkness and decay, Men are released from their mortal world and must endure suffering for only a (relatively) short time. Eventually, the Men of Middle-earth grew to fear death, recognizing that whatever lies beyond it is in darkness and cannot be seen by the eyes of mortals. They grew resentful of their Maker and attempted to cling to life, even into old age and mental decay, abandoning their sanity and even their dignity in their mad quest to escape death for just a few more years. It was not always so, Tolkien, chronicled. It was once the case that Men could choose, upon accomplishing all that they were meant to in their lives, to give up their lives willingly and die peacefully in their sleep. This unnatural fear of natural death, and the rejection of the “gift” of death bent and broke that capacity. Without delving too much into Tolkien’s rich, mythological history, suffice it to say that Ar-Pharazôn, the last King of the great nation of Númenor, rode out to challenge Sauron, the Satan-like archvillain of The Lord of the Rings, for the title of the King of Men. Ar-Pharazôn overwhelmed and captured Sauron, but the Dark Lord set to work corrupting the king’s heart and mind. Ar-Pharazôn’s greatest vulnerability, Sauron found, was his fear of death. After a few short years, Sauron became the king’s chief advisor and, eventually, his puppet-master. In secret, he preyed upon Ar-Pharazôn’s fear of death and taught the king to worship Sauron’s master, Melkor — better known as Morgoth, the Satan-figure in The Silmarillion. Worshipping Melkor, Sauron averred, was the key to immortality. After all, it was not Melkor who gave to Men the “gift” of death, but Melkor’s enemy, his hated Maker. “Then Ar-Pharazôn the King turned back to the worship of the Dark, and of Melkor the Lord thereof, at first in secret, but ere long openly and in the face of his people,” Tolkien wrote. Sauron and Ar-Pharazôn then ordered the construction of a great golden temple for the worship of Melkor. “Thereafter the fire and smoke went up without ceasing; for the power of Sauron daily increased, and in that temple, with spilling of blood and torment and great wickedness, men made sacrifice to Melkor that he should release them from Death,” Tolkien wrote. Those that the Númenoreans sacrificed were their own kinsmen and countrymen. But the Númenoreans’ quest for eternal life did not end with the horror of human sacrifice: worshipping Melkor did not alleviate death but instead plunged the Númenoreans into madness, illness, and an even greater fear of the darkness that they worshipped. So Ar-Pharazôn led the hosts of Númenor to the realm of the Valar (think of them as akin to the mightiest of angels) to claim their land and immortality for himself. Instead of winning eternal life, the king’s efforts resulted in the world being broken and remade and Númenor being destroyed in a flood. Tolkien’s is an epic, almost-Biblical-scale warning against the pursuit of immortality, told through mythology. His compatriot Lewis offered a warning alarmingly close to the reality emerging now in the second quarter of the 21st century. One of his lesser-read works, Lewis’s apocalyptic That Hideous Strength is nevertheless a treasure trove of philosophical, theological, and even social and political insight. One of the chief narrative threads in the novel follows the naïve-yet-ambitious sociologist Mark Studdock as he is seduced and nearly corrupted by a cabal of scientists, bureaucrats, and what we would today call progressive activists. While trying to navigate his way up the hierarchy of a well-funded think tank, Studdock discovers that the elite “inner circle” who run the organization plan to pursue — you guessed it! — immortality. At a critical juncture in the story, an obese physicist tells Mark that the Institute that they both work for is meant for “something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death…” The physicist continues, “It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature.” Mark then learns that the first of these New Men is the literal “Head” of the Institute: the decapitated and reanimated head of a criminal executed for murdering his wife. “At first, of course, the power [of immortality] will be confined to a number — a small number — of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life,” the physicist explains to Mark. But then, over time, the power of immortality “will be reduced to one man.” He continues: You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man — it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. He explains that the immortal man will have it in his power to grant other men immortality, too, and to make their existence either eternal bliss or unending torment. Another character, an apostate cleric, puts an explicitly theological spin on it: “And so, the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.” The bad theologian says, “You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol; tonight you shall see what it symbolized. This is real Man at last, and it claims all our allegiance.” The physicist, an obvious atheist, asks, “[D]oes it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?” The cleric adds, “Don’t you see that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty?” Eternal life is, of course, a central concept in the Christian faith, which Tolkien and Lewis shared. But that eternal life is on God’s terms: it is an eternity spent in intimate communion with God, with “Love Himself,” as Lewis once put it, in a state of both spiritual and, eventually, bodily perfection. Eternal life is a gift given to us by the hand of God, the very hand that was pierced with nails and bound to a cross in order to purchase eternal life for us, at the price of His own blood. Any effort to claim eternal life without God is, at its core, a fundamentally futile attempt to usurp the title of God for oneself. I would like to say that Johnson could, perhaps, benefit from reading some Tolkien and Lewis. But his determination to claim immortality as his own makes it clear, I think, that Tolkien’s warnings would be dismissed as mere meaningless mythology, and Lewis’s cautionary figures of the physicist and the cleric may be misinterpreted as inspiration. READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Trump Honors the American Catholic Tradition State Dept. 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