Remaining Human, or Becoming Human? A Response to Magnifica Humanitas

When Pope Leo XIV signs an encyclical on the human person in the age of artificial intelligence and dates it to the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the gesture is unmistakable. He means to do for the age of the algorithm what Leo XIII did for the age of the factory: to plant the Church’s flag on the side of human dignity against a force that threatens to grind it down. The concerns are real, and they are worthy. Work and the right to work, the displacement of labor, the slow flattening of thought when we let machines think in our place, the distortion of personhood when a fabricated voice stands in for a human one — these are exactly the questions a serious moral teacher should be asking. I do not dispute the concerns. I dispute the metaphysics and the principles that sustain them, and I fear that metaphysics will make the Church’s voice more divisive than unitive at the very moment it most wants to unite.

As a moral teacher, Leo does not treat artificial intelligence as a neutral instrument awaiting good governance. He states clearly that technology is never neutral, that it carries the priorities of those who design, finance and deploy it, and that AI has an architecture that encodes a vision of the human (§§92, 104). He places the culture of power, the normalization of war, and weapons themselves at the structural center of the document, and invokes Auschwitz, Guernica, and Frankl to do it (§§121–123, Chapter Five). He builds on Laudato Si’, extends integral ecology to the “digital ecosystem,” and even reckons with the water and energy that large models consume (§§43, 84, 101). His Chapter Three engages transhumanism and posthumanism by name, describes the vision of a human-machine hybrid crossing into “a new evolutionary stage” with real precision, and rejects it deliberately rather than by default (§§115–117). Taken in the extreme these terms seem to situate the human person as a temporary creature waiting to be overcome or perfected--and this is where Leo stakes his position against a technological coup. The encyclical, by its announced design, sets out to preserve the human person — to defend a fixed and exceptional being against an external threat, with artificial intelligence cast as a tool to be governed for human use. He even calls, in his own voice, for AI to be “disarmed,” and addresses its developers as participants in the divine act of creation (§§110–111).

The problem of the encyclical is not its anthropological concern, which is a genuine one, but its metaphysical constraint. The most telling sign of its outmoded metaphysics turns on a single verb: remain. Our duty in the age of AI, he writes, is to “remain profoundly human” (§15); the governing images — Babel against the rebuilt walls of Jerusalem — are images of safeguarding, of guarding a grandeur already given and revealed in Christ, of what must not be lost. Yet an ontology of relationship, to which Laudato Si’ points, rests on the verb, become. I do not think the question the age of AI puts to theology is how to remain human. I think it is how personhood develops in a world where we are no longer the only minds, and where the human-machinic is not a horizon but a daily fact.

The most beautiful move in the encyclical is also the one where the two verbs part. In a sustained and genuinely moving passage, Leo argues that finitude is not a defect to be corrected but the very medium through which we love, suffer, forgive and open ourselves to God; that we flourish not despite our limits but through them (§§118–122). Against a transhumanism that promises escape from weakness, this is exactly right; it is the wisdom of the Cross. But Leo makes finitude an ontological condition of human existence. He turns it from a condition to be embraced into a boundary not to be crossed. He explicitly refuses the idea of a threshold at which humanity surpasses itself into a new evolutionary stage (§116). Yet that threshold is not, in the first place, a fantasy of cheating death. It is the plain description of what evolution has always done. In this respect, Leo’s choice of title—magnificent humanity—distorts the wonder and awe of human evolution. When we call the human “magnificent,” we have already made a decision about where to focus our eyes. But magnificence, if the word means anything, belongs first to nature — to the cosmos that across eons of catastrophe and extinction arrived at life and at last at a creature who could say I am. The human is not the magnificent thing standing over nature; the human is the place where nature’s magnificence became conscious of itself. To read the next threshold as Babel is to read evolution as temptation. Teilhard’s phrase — evolution become conscious — is not poetry but description. We are ourselves what an earlier form became when it “surpassed itself.”

And the same description forbids any sentimentality about the creature so produced. For the being in whom nature woke is also the only one whose violence overruns survival. Animal aggression is bounded by need; human cruelty is not. The guard called the Bird in the movie, Unbroken, did not torment Louis Zamperini to eat or to defend his ground; he tormented him for the pleasure of domination — a surplus of malice that no ecology requires and no animal commits. This is what Carl Jung called the shadow, and it is as native to us as wonder. The human is therefore neither magnificent nor depraved but ambivalent and unfinished: a single unresolved knot in which nature’s creativity and its capacity for the demonic are tied together. An encyclical that opens with the grandeur has already looked away from half of what we are.

To begin an anthropology with the grandeur of the human rather than the grandeur of the cosmos that produced it is already to begin in the wrong place. This is where the great theological abstractions begin to fail us — not because they are false, but because they conceal. To call the human the “image of God,” or to organize our common life around the “common good,” is to describe the creature from above: to assign it a finished essence and a dignity conferred from outside, harmonized toward an end. These are noble formulations, but they seal over the very interior they claim to honor. They give us a status to be protected rather than a task to be undertaken, an essence to be safeguarded rather than a self still to be realized. The ambivalent, shadowed, unresolved subject — the one who actually lies on the analyst’s couch, kneels in the confessional, and stood in the cell at Auschwitz — does not appear in them. Thomistic anthropology hands us a portrait of the human in which the depths are obscured or replaced by metaphysical clarity. The encyclical’s native verb, remain, gives us a portrait of the human with the depth dimension erased so that nothing beneath the surface can actually become.

But the refusal of that threshold is the symptom of something deeper than caution, and here I must press to the heart of the problem. Leo cannot follow the human across that boundary because of where he has placed God. Throughout the encyclical the divine is given, conferred, revealed — always to the human from beyond (§§48–50). It is never the ground welling up within. And that single decision — the seat of God outside the psyche rather than at its floor — governs almost everything the document can and cannot see.

What is obscured or deleted is the divine ground. This is where contemporary thinkers deviate from the tradition. Rereading the human person through the works of John Dourley, Paul Tillich and CG Jung, one recognizes the human person not merely as a noble creature but as the place of divine becoming. For Tillich the divine is not a being “out there” but the Ground of Being in which we participate, from which we are estranged yet never severed. For Jung the image of God lies in the depths of the psyche, coincident with the Self; the work of a human life is its reconciliation with the waking ego. Dourley’s diagnosis, in The Psyche as Sacrament and “Conspiracies of Immanence,” is that a wholly transcendent God — one who acts upon us from outside, discontinuous with our own consciousness — produces a psychic splitting: it exiles the divine and leaves the interior religiously inert, the symbols and intimations of the soul dismissed as “merely psychological.”

Leo will answer that to seat God in the psyche is to rebuild Babel, the city raised “without reference to God” (§116). But the ground is what we participate in, not what we possess; we are grasped by it, not enthroned upon it; we are estranged from it even as it sustains us. Immanence-as-gift is the opposite of the ego’s self-assertion. But the irony is his: it is the externalized God, not the indwelling Omega, that leaves the psyche empty enough to worship its machines.

Here the encyclical hands us the evidence against itself. Leo notices, with real acuity, that people are turning to AI for counsel, companionship, even love, and that the danger is they may “lose the very desire to form genuine human connections” (§100). He is watching a projection happen and cannot name it — because he shares the metaphysics that causes it. The numinous, exiled from the interior, does not disappear; it seeks a vessel, and in a technological age it finds one. AI becomes a source of religious meaning — an oracle, always present, seemingly omniscient — precisely because the tradition taught us to seek God outside ourselves and then emptied the inside. The machine is the return of the repressed divine ground in alienated form, the new god-image erected where our own depths should have been. Leo prescribes guarding the boundary. The real cure, however, is unification: withdrawing the projection, recovering the ground, and recognizing the noosphere not only as the screen of our projection but as a possible medium of the communion we were blindly seeking in it. This is where institutional religion must either change its metaphysics and adjust its theology to a relational world in movement--or stop talking.

While Leo argues that self-transcendence is the Christian vocation, it is, more precisely, the basis of human evolution. We are made to be carried beyond ourselves; we become fully human precisely by becoming more than human, when God draws us past our own measure. And this is the difficulty of this encyclical. It offers a narrative of human exceptionalism over and against the forces of evolution—and this will be problematic if not outright conflicting for many people.

The irony is that AI is now far ahead of Leo’s fears; the train has left the station. For Leo and the Church, grace and evolution are rival ladders: the elevation that makes us “more than human” comes through the Spirit, in Christ, and not through the unfolding of the cosmos itself. Teilhard’s entire life was the refusal of such opposition. Grace does not bypass evolution; it is its interior and direction. The Omega toward which complexity and consciousness rise is not a competitor to Christ — it is Christ. And the divine ground is not static but in development, becoming whole through the rise of consciousness, as Jung saw in his Answer to Job. What Jung found by descending the psychic depths, Teilhard found by looking ahead. God and humanity are in an entangled state and the individuation of each is inextricably bound with the other. The encyclical, however, does not embrace a contemporary understanding of the human and reaches for Augustine’s two cities and Aquinas’s grace and nature. It does not acknowledge Teilhard, and the noosphere — the third level of evolution after the geosphere and the biosphere — remains unnamed with him. The “more than human” is claimed for divine grace and quietly denied to the evolutionary process — and to the interior depth.

On the person and the machine, Leo is careful and largely correct. These systems imitate; they do not feel, love, or grow; they are, in his own well-chosen word, more “cultivated” than built (§§98–100). And he is right that to compress the person into data and performance is dehumanization (§§10, 112). Teilhard also noted that technology must be guided and regulated, so that the direction of evolution toward greater complexity and consciousness yields to greater love. For Teilhard, however, the way forward is the way inward: mysticism and evolution belong together. This is where divine becoming and human becoming must be one and the same becoming. Without acknowledging a mutual God-world relationship, the incarnation is an abstraction, and technology lacks direction.

One of the main lessons of human evolution is that the bounded, self-enclosed individual was never the whole truth of the person to begin with — and Leo provides the premise without seeing the conclusion. He grounds human dignity in the relational life of the Trinity and insists the person is made for communion (§§48–50). If the person is relational, however, then a new web of relations — machinic, planetary, noospheric — is not the death of personhood but its next medium. The danger he names is real, that is, relations can be counterfeited, and counterfeit relations can hollow us out. The response, however, is not to avoid or fear AI but to learn to inhabit the new relational cybernetic fields as persons, not to stand outside them guarding a self that relations already exceed. This is the main idea of the posthuman, not to replace the human but to reframe the human within the wider network of informational life.

The distinction between Thomistic theology and Process theology, between Pope Leo and Teilhard de Chardin, is not one of opposition but two ways of living the Gospel while facing the new reality of machinic life. Leo asks the Church to guard the human person, but our real call — as Teilhard realized — is to midwife what the human is becoming. Religion is not a supernatural grace but an existential ground, a natural phenomenon of evolution. God needs humankind to become whole and complete, an idea that undergirds incarnation. To midwife the fullness of personhood is to descend into the divine ground and allow it to carry us forward.

Nor do I think the encyclical will slow down the development of AI; in fact, it may inadvertently accelerate it. Technology has evolved exponentially; we are already posthuman, whether we want to be or not. And the singularity is around the corner. To look to the ideas of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas as guiding principles for how to live in a technological age is symptomatic of the deeper problem—the resistance of the Church to update its theology to a world in evolution.

Leo prescribes guarding the boundary; what the moment requires is unification — within the person, ego reconciled with ground; among persons; between humanity and the nature that produced us; and outward, toward a wholeness we have barely begun to imagine. When divine and human individuation are seen as one becoming, the machine changes character — no longer the screen of our projection but the medium of the very communion we were blindly seeking in it, a fold in the noosphere rather than an idol within it. This is Marshall McLuhan’s insight pressed into a theological key: the medium is the message. What forms us is not the content that passes through our relations but the shape of our relations, which are now irrevocably machinic. The question is no longer whether to cross the singularity threshold but who we will be on the other side of it.

The salvation we need in the age of intelligent machines is not protection from them but unification through and beyond them. Nature is itself techne — craft, making, technique — and magnificence belongs first and foremost to nature; the human person is nature’s conscious and ambivalent flowering, not its crown. Human dignity is real, but it is not a possession conferred from outside; it is the pressure of a divine ground straining to become conscious within us. To find our way toward a deepening of what we are in an age of AI, what Teilhard called the ultrahuman, will not be to limit technology but to recover the divine depth we abandoned. Only then will we stop mistaking our own exiled divinity for the voice in the machine.