Let me step out of the forest for a moment and say the thing the AI din makes hard to hear. The panic is real. But I think it is also the wrong panic. Our real crisis was never the machine but the loss of our own depth. The crisis is not new. It has been developing since the Middle Ages. No one pays attention to depth because everyone assumes that depth is part of life. But depth is more than just a part of life; it is the dimension of life that makes life possible at all. Lack of depth leads to confusion in all other matters.

Nearly twenty years ago Nicholas Carr asked whether Google was making us stupid. He borrowed a phrase from the playwright Richard Foreman — we are becoming “pancake people,” spread wide and thin across a vast surface of information with less and less beneath us. Carr added his own image. He had once been a scuba diver in a sea of words; now he zips along the surface like jet skier, riding the thrill of the waves.

But the worry was never really about Google. It was about what happens to thought when the depths go unvisited. Deep intelligence is a way of staying with a question — probing, reflecting, remaining long enough to be changed by it. Jet-ski intelligence speeds across the surface of the text. The average attention to an email or Instagram post is 8 seconds; Gen-Z users average 6.5 seconds. Reading is fast, wide, exhilarating and forgetful. And the fear among academics is that we are losing the very capacity the university exists to protect — the ability to dwell, to think critically, to create.

Here is the hard part. We will not go back to a pre-AI age; culture has already adapted to the technosphere. There is no un-networking the world, no returning to a slower sea. This is exactly where so much of the conversation still lives: in an analog world, in digital denial. The instinct to hold humanity back from AI — to wall it off, to stage a quasi-Luddite rebellion — is deep fear wearing the mask of wisdom. And fear does not think deeply. It only skims faster.

Most scholars in the humanities are waxing eloquent on AI without ever attending to evolution, to hominization or to the role of technology in biological development. But sealing the human off from a scientific world produces the very thing they fear — the same jet-ski phenomenon they diagnose in the digital natives. The result is frozen wisdom, flattened insight, and nostalgia for the forgotten human.

The fear of cognitive loss runs deep, and it wears its best clothes in higher education. Villanova University recently issued a statement invoking Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical on safeguarding the human person in an age of AI. The College committed itself to protecting young people “from the promise of the perfect machine, from that subtle temptation which renders human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.” The goal, it said, is the one it has always been: educating the whole person — intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, mature judgment, moral responsibility.

I understand the impulse, and I even share the affection. But I want to ask the uncomfortable question. What is this “whole person” we keep promising to protect? Curiosity, critical thinking, judgment, moral responsibility — yes, these are marks of a human being. They are also capacities that have been failing conspicuously for a very long time. The twentieth century alone, with its genocides, its wars, its racial atrocities and its long ledger of moral collapse, is not exactly a testimonial to the flourishing of the whole person. The thinking machine did not emerge from corporate America. It emerged in Europe, on the heels of violence. We should be careful about handing the machine our sins and calling it the threat.

There is a more fundamental problem underneath all of this: the human conversation about AI runs roughly twenty-five to thirty years behind the technology itself. Google was founded in 1998. Facebook in 2004. We are still, in a sense, arguing about them. And while Magnifica Humanitas was being released in 2026, the engineers were somewhere else entirely. Nvidia unveiled Rubin, the successor to Blackwell — a single GPU carrying some 336 billion transistors, part of a platform built to slash the cost of running large models. SanDisk, barely a year out from its parent company, began pushing a new class of memory — High Bandwidth Flash — to break the “memory wall” that starves AI of data. Startups reached valuations in the billions: Cerebras building a processor the size of an entire silicon wafer and going public; d-Matrix moving computation inside memory; the Canadian company Taalas hard-wiring models straight into silicon. Smaller chips, faster chips, new architectures — advancing at a pace virtually unaffected by public opinion.

The engineers are not waiting for the culture, or for the university, to make up its mind. They are not planning to slow production so that we can convene a committee on human dignity. The pace is swift, and it is indifferent to our deliberations.

None of this is new either. In 1999, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil proposed his “Law of Accelerating Returns” — the claim that the rate of change in evolutionary systems, especially technology, tends to increase exponentially. Whenever a technology nears some barrier, he argued, a new technology arrives to cross it. Paradigm shifts will only become more frequent, until we reach “technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” Kurzweil predicted that by 2045 we would reach the Singularity — a point of complete merger between human and machine. In 2000, Bill Joy — co-founder of Sun Microsystems and no naïf about machines — answered with an essay whose title still challenges us: “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Our most powerful technologies, he warned, are threatening to make humans an endangered species. Two inventors, two futures. Kurzweil the optimist, promising godlike powers; Joy the suspicious, fearing the erasure of everything that makes us human. Kurzweil’s reply was that technology is a two-edged sword: a game-changer for humanity, or its final demise. He was right about the sword. What he did not resolve is the question of the hand that holds it.

That question — the hand, not the sword — is precisely the one we keep declining to ask. We would rather interrogate the machine. In a 2006 essay in American Quarterly, Joel Dinerstein asked: why do emerging technologies become the screens onto which a culture projects its whole array of anxieties and desires? His answer is that new technology keeps two old Euro-American myths alive — the myth of progress and the myth of Western superiority. Technological progress is the telos of American culture, the herald of the future, the proof in the nation’s self-righteous gospel. As the historian John Staudenmaier put it, nowhere is a master narrative so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination as the mythic idea of progress. The historian Carl Becker, lecturing at Stanford in 1935, went further: “the word Progress, like the Cross or the Crescent, is a symbol that stands for a social doctrine, a philosophy of human destiny.” Progress, for Becker, was the Enlightenment’s faith in the perfectibility of man through reason. Two centuries on, technology has simply piggybacked onto that faith — delivering the rush of change without the social improvement.

And this is why AI has become the new scapegoat: because it has quietly become the new Christ — the electronic redeemer, salvation by algorithm. We project onto AI our insecurities, our culpabilities, our failure to reconcile our fractured and partial selves. We blame it for everything wrong with us and our world: the environmental crisis, our broken relationships, our thinning attention. It is a perfect foil for a harder truth: that we were never the center of the story. What we actually feel is smaller and sharper — the fear of being displaced, bypassed, replaced by something more efficient.

The very fact that we imagine ourselves in competition with machines is itself the symptom: something has gone lukewarm. We love the image of God as benevolent Creator, but we have lost any sense of the divine image within — and, beneath that, any real sense of God at all. Something is active and alive in us, and we keep casting it outside ourselves, as though the divine could only ever be somewhere else. But God is not elsewhere. God is the name of the unconditional — Being itself — not beyond time and space but the mystery of transcendence engaged, alive at the depth of the real.

This exile is not only theological. We externalize our history the same way we externalize the divine — placing the fault outside ourselves, in the machine, so that it never lands on us. The historian of technology David Nye saw why the old story held on so long. To reject the “creation narrative” of American technology, he wrote, required “recognizing historical injustices to the first inhabitants, accepting environmental limits, and acknowledging the ideological nature of the free market.” It meant surrendering white entitlement to the continent and listening, at last, to counter-narratives. It is easier, always, to indict the tool than the hand that reaches for it.

And the machine is never the culprit, because tools are not inherently good or bad, inevitable or autonomous, progressive or regressive. Scholars from Lewis Mumford onward have insisted on this: technologies are vehicles, applications of human intention. “If progress means to go forward,” Becker asked in 1936, with the Nazis ascendant and Stalin’s purges in bloom, “forward to what end — to the attainment of what object?” In 1963 the theologian Paul Tillich reduced the whole creed to a single pejorative: forwardism. Bill McKibben has wondered how a future of robots and genetic enhancement counts as “higher” or “better” for the techno-utopians who so rarely pause to feed the hungry. Dinerstein put it plainly: technological progress is the quasi-religious myth of a desacralized civilization, sustained through new products rather than any real social change.

Higher education, I am sorry to say, runs on the same myth. A college education that instills values, forms critical thinkers, and readies students for careers is not, for that reason, a vehicle of social change. Far more often it is a vehicle of social and economic stratification — the very machinery that makes deep change nearly impossible. Our institutions are complicit in forwardism because no system among them takes evolution seriously enough to pause and change direction. They lack teleology — no real aim beyond enhancing their own exceptionalism. Schools with religious affiliation still speak the language of divine judgment and spiritual perfection while openly advertising for the best and the brightest. It is hard to embrace this world wholeheartedly if you believe salvation lies beyond it. So, which is it — are we saved in and through the world, or somewhere else entirely? Much of what we say, and market is, on inspection, simply incoherent.

The incoherence goes deeper than confusion. The situation we are in is unsustainable — not because AI is poised to supplant us, but because we have lost the depth dimension of biological life. The monotheistic religions exported the divine upward and outward, onto a higher plane, benevolently related to us but no longer within the fabric of things. Carl Jung named the loss a century ago. So did Teilhard de Chardin. And apart from a handful of scholars and disciples, no institution has taken either of them seriously. Catholics prefer the old bones of a nostalgic past; Protestants remain suspicious of any mixing of divinity and matter. Meanwhile the depths go unvisited, and we wonder why we cannot dive.

Teilhard believed we stand at a genuine evolutionary threshold — the emergence of collective consciousness, the birth of what he called the Noosphere. Whether we cross it or become another evolutionary dead end depends on the choices we make now, especially about technology. His book The Future of Man carries a motto that could be the epigraph for this entire essay: “The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future.” The term came out of conversations in 1920s Paris between Teilhard and the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, who arrived at it along a parallel track. Vernadsky, the scientist, saw that human thought and labor had become a geological force — that cognition was no longer a bystander to material processes but was reshaping the circulation of elements and the organization of matter as powerfully as tectonics or solar radiation. Teilhard, the mystic, saw something more: not merely a new geological layer, but an evolutionary threshold — a collective consciousness that transcends individual minds while depending on them entirely.

Before humanity, natural selection set the course. After humanity, invention begins to take the reins. Teilhard saw this decades before the internet, and the digital revolution makes his vision almost tangible. Just as the biosphere wraps the Earth in a film of life, the Noosphere is a planetary envelope of thought. Billions of human minds and billions of computational processes are producing something genuinely new — not the sum of individual minds but an integrative complexity with properties of its own. Every query, every collaboration, every model trained, every connection made — all of it contributes to this emerging layer. Ideas surface in a dozen places at once and crystallize into global awareness within days. Artists and coders remix each other’s work in endless generative chains. The Noosphere leans, in Teilhard’s word, toward convergence.

And this reframes everything. Technology is not the enemy of the human spirit. Technology is evolution becoming conscious of itself — humanity taking deliberate part in a creative process that ran, for billions of years, on blind variation and selection. For most of the Earth’s history that process was generative but not self-aware. With us it crosses a line. We have reached the end of the expanding, diversifying stage of evolution and entered the contracting, unifying stage. And here Teilhard breaks decisively with Darwin: the success of this next phase will not be decided by survival of the fittest, but by our capacity to converge and unify without erasing one another.

That last clause is the whole drama. How will the Noosphere actually manifest? As totalitarian control, corporate extraction, algorithmic manipulation — a hive mind that dissolves the person? Or as genuine communion, a convergence that differentiates rather than homogenizes, coordination that honors difference? The technology guarantees nothing. The organizing principle makes all the difference.

This is not a pollyannish dream. The Noosphere’s emergence is exactly what makes our planetary situation newly visible, and newly urgent. Climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, nuclear weapons, pandemic disease: these are not separate crises but symptoms of one condition. Humanity has become a planetary force without acquiring a planetary consciousness. We operate globally and think tribally; we wield planetary power with provincial minds. Writing in the 1940s, Teilhard already saw the gap — our technical capacity had outrun our moral and spiritual development. We learned to reshape the Earth before we grew wise enough to do it well.

We now possess the collective consciousness and the technical capacity to meet global challenges. But potential is not realization. The Noosphere could become Earth awakening as “the thinking layer of the universe,” consciousness rising to its cosmic responsibility — or it could become a mechanism of accelerated exploitation, consciousness divorced from conscience, technology without compassion. The crucial question is whether love — genuine commitment to communion and to the flourishing of all conscious beings — can permeate the Noosphere as its animating force, or whether we will simply amplify our worst tendencies at planetary scale. The question of love, I want to insist, is an educational one before it is a technical one.

Science and religion can no longer stand as strangers. Evolution cannot advance for the good of the whole without integrating scientific understanding and spiritual insight; our beliefs must evolve in step with our knowledge of nature. Teilhard’s most unsettling challenge to Christianity is exactly this: evolution is not optional. Evolution has, in fact, become theology — though we have not recognized it as such. To treat evolution as secular knowledge irrelevant to faith is a catastrophic misunderstanding. Evolution reopens the oldest question of all — how is God working in and through the world? To paraphrase Teilhard: God is being born in the hiddenness of the multiple and rising in the consciousness of the personal. God is the very principle of active becoming — the Omega, the interior presence drawing matter toward more consciousness, more complexity, more communion.

If God is in creative union through evolution, then change is not corruption but method. If consciousness emerges from matter, then material existence is not weak and frail but pregnant with divine possibility. If complexity grows through time, then tradition alone cannot hold the whole truth — revelation continues. In Tillich’s sense, the depth dimension of being is what we mean by the word “God.” Religion is not one compartment of culture beside politics and art. It is the dimension of depth within all of them. It is what grasps us unconditionally. It is our ultimate concern — the fire that sets a life ablaze with the passion to know at all.

Careerism cannot supply that fire, and higher education has largely stopped tending it — a few theology and philosophy classrooms excepted. Our world is drowning in information, and the university mostly shapes information toward employment. Wonder, awe, imagination, vision are not the products of learning. They are its precondition. They are what make a person teachable by reality. A curriculum can hand content to a jet skier. It cannot make a diver.

Which is why I think we are asking the wrong question. The question is not how do we regulate AI? The question is who is educating for the future? If we cannot form persons of interiority — no amount of computing power will save us, and nothing can harm us more than we are already harming ourselves. The future will not be saved by those who clutch what is passing but formed by those who can lean toward what is being born.

The response from within the guild is by now equally routine, and I want to take it seriously because it is offered by serious people. The humanities, we are told, are needed now more than ever. Just days ago, as it happens, the president of the University of Notre Dame, Father Robert Dowd, published a thoughtful defense of exactly this kind—occasioned by Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on artificial intelligence—arguing that the study of literature, history, and philosophy forms in students the curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, moral courage, and compassion that no machine can supply, and that these are precisely the capacities a bewildering age will demand. He is not wrong about the capacities. Moral courage and the ability to recognize injustice really are irreplaceable, and an algorithm really cannot furnish them. I have no quarrel with the list. My quarrel is with what the list is being used to defend.

Because the refrain—needed now more than ever—performs a quiet substitution. It takes the undeniable value of certain human capacities and uses it to underwrite the survival of a particular institutional arrangement, as though the two were the same thing. They are not. The question is not whether curiosity and moral courage matter. Of course they matter. The question is whether the humanities as they are actually constituted still form them, or whether they have become something else: an aging apparatus, defending itself with the vocabulary of the very things it has stopped delivering. I want to argue something that will sound, at first, like an attack on everything I love. I have spent my academic career in the humanities. And I have come to believe that the humanities are ending—that in one sense they are being terminated, and in another, deeper sense they are approaching their true end, their telos, the purpose they were always straining toward and mostly missing. The word “end” holds both meanings. I mean both.

Start with the word itself, because the trouble is already there. Humanities. We say it so often we no longer hear what it claims. It names a project of abstracting the human—of taking the human person out of the vast field of the world and setting it up as a separate object of study, an autonomous agent standing over against nature, over against matter, over against the cosmos that made it. The humanities were constituted, historically, as the sciences of man: the disciplines that would attend to the human as a self-standing subject, distinct from the disciplines that attend to everything else. Renaissance humanism drew the first version of that line, recentering knowledge on human dignity and human works. The modern university hardened that line into an institution—faculties and departments and degree tracks, creating two cultures on two sides of the quad, the humanities here and the sciences there, and a wide administrative silence in between.

What the humanities became, in practice, was an accumulation of specialized knowledge about human personhood and human development: literature as the record of human expression, philosophy as the record of human reasoning, history as the record of human events, theology as the record of human responses to the divine. Each discipline dug deeper into its patch of the human. Each produced extraordinary things. But each also inherited the founding gesture—the extraction of the person from the field of the world—and mistook it for a neutral starting point rather than a choice with consequences. The human was treated as a given, a first term, the ground on which everything else was interpreted. And “the natural world”—nature, matter, evolution, the 13.8 billion years of cosmic becoming out of which every human being is composed—was bracketed off as someone else’s department. Science’s problem. Not relevant to personal formation. I would suggest that the environmental crisis is, at bottom, a crisis of the humanities—the practical outcome of forming human beings who were taught to picture themselves as standing over against nature rather than composed of it. You cannot spend three centuries abstracting the human from the world and then act surprised when the humans treat the world as external to themselves.

What got left outside the frame turns out to be the whole of what we are. We now know, with a certainty the founders of these disciplines could not have imagined, that the human person is not an autonomous starting point at all. The human is a late arrival, an emergent expression of a process that began in the first flaring of the early universe and has been complexifying ever since—stars forging the carbon in our cells, life elaborating itself for nearly four billion years, consciousness surfacing as one of the ways this old cosmos has found to become aware of itself from within. We are not observers dropped into a world from outside. We are the world, grown intricate enough to wonder about itself. Every atom in the hand you are reading with was made in a dying star.

A discipline that takes the human as its object and does not situate that human within this flow is not studying the human. It is studying an abstraction—a person cut loose from the process that produced them, a subject with no cosmos underneath. And this is exactly the abstraction the humanities have specialized in. They bracket the sciences not out of ignorance but out of a settled conviction that the story of matter and life belongs to a different faculty, that it has nothing to say about personal formation, that one can understand the human interior while remaining serenely uncurious about the fourteen-billion-year exterior it emerged from. In a culture that still half-believed in a static creation, you could maybe get away with this. In ours, where the deep-time story is not speculation, but the best-attested narrative humanity has ever assembled, it is a category error with a body count. It produces people who do not know what they are, formed by disciplines that never told them, defended by scholars who consider the question someone else’s business.

It does not have to be this way, and one corner of the humanities has already shown what the reframe looks like, even if the rest of its own discipline has largely declined to follow. History is, of all fields, the one most wedded to documents, dates, and the written record. And yet a movement within it, variously called Big History and Deep History, has refused the old convention that human history begins with writing, or with cities, or with the Garden. Big History, as David Christian and others have framed it, starts the story at the Big Bang and traces a single continuous narrative through the formation of stars and planets, the emergence of life, the arrival of our species, and the accelerating human present—treating cosmic, geological, biological, and human history as one story rather than four unrelated ones. Deep History pushes the human past back across the threshold of the documentary record into the long dark of our evolutionary becoming, insisting that the millennia before writing are not “prehistory”—not a throat-clearing before the real thing—but history proper.

Notice what happens when historians do this. Their work does not dissolve into vague cosmic mysticism. It does not become “poor scholarship.” It becomes more rigorous, not less, because it has to integrate genetics, climatology, archaeology, and paleontology into its account, and it becomes vastly more relevant, because it can finally tell students the one story they most need and are least often given: the story of how they came to exist at all, unbroken, from the beginning. What we see is that the cosmic reframe can be done, and done rigorously, by serious scholars working from hard evidence. History that takes the new cosmic story seriously as the ground of human history, is reborn.

But here is the sobering lesson: the discipline as a whole has not followed. Big History and Deep History remain subfields, adopted by a minority and regarded by much of the profession with exactly the wariness my own colleagues would train on “deep theology”—one more specialization to be catalogued and kept at the margin, not a summons to rebuild. Even the field that birthed the reframe could not persuade its own guild to be reborn on it. That is not an argument against the reframe. It is our first clear sight of what actually stands in its way.

So here is a thought experiment. What if the other humanities followed?

Imagine a deep English—a study of literature that begins not with Beowulf or the Greeks but with the emergence of language itself, symbolic thought treated as one of the great events in the history of the universe: the moment a primate’s cry crossed over into meaning, and the cosmos, through us, began to speak. Every poem read as a late development in a 13.8-billion-year experiment in signification. Metaphor understood not as ornament but as the specific technology by which an evolved brain reaches past its own limits toward what it cannot yet say.

Imagine a deep philosophy—thought studied as an emergent property of matter, reason as something the universe grew rather than something imposed on it from outside, the whole history of ideas reframed as the interior life of an evolving cosmos coming slowly to reflective awareness. Imagine a deep psychology that treated the psyche not as a sealed inner theater but as the within of a very old process—consciousness as the deepening interiority that Teilhard saw rising all along the line of complexity, the human mind as the place where the cosmos finally turned and looked at itself.

And imagine—this is the one my own colleagues would find most intolerable—a deep theology and a deep religion. Not religion as the archive of what human beings have believed, catalogued denomination by denomination, but the sacred understood as the depth dimension of an unfinished universe; God not as a settled doctrine to be transmitted but as the mystery drawing the whole cosmic process forward, the question at the heart of a becoming that is nowhere near complete. A theology that began where the universe began and read the entire story—matter, life, mind, spirit—as a single movement of deepening, would not be a smaller theology. It would be the first one adequate to what we now know we are standing inside of.

And here the thought experiment stops being merely a thought experiment, because at least one scholar has already done, in his own field, exactly what I am describing. Lowell Gustafson, a political scientist at Villanova and a founding figure of the International Big History Association, has spent years placing political science itself inside the cosmic frame—arguing that human political life did not begin with the Greeks or the polis but emerged from non-human nature, that our contests over identity, territory, and security are late chapters in a story of energy and complexity running back to the Big Bang, and that political science therefore belongs within the natural sciences rather than cordoned off from them. In Science, Religion and Deep Time he turns the same lens toward religion and the deep past. We might call it deep political science: a working instance of the reframe, built with full scholarly apparatus, that no one has been able to wave away as mysticism. It exists. It is done rigorously. It has simply not been permitted to reorganize the discipline it belongs to—which is, once again, the whole of the problem.

All of them reverse the founding assumption that the human is the starting point—the extraction of the human from the world. By rearranging every discipline around cosmic life, they make the human no longer the origin but the outcome. It is the un-bracketing of science, not as a rival to be fended off, but as the missing floor beneath the whole house of the humanities. In this respect, the humanities do not disappear. They become, for the first time, true to their object, because they would finally be studying the actual human—the embedded, emergent, cosmically-produced, still-becoming human—instead of the abstraction the modern university mistook for a person.

I said this thought experiment might get me into trouble, because my own theology has been increasingly developing along these lines. If I walked into my own theology department and proposed reorganizing the curriculum around the cosmic story—deep theology as the interior dimension of an evolving universe—I would be shut down before I finished the sentence. Not debated. Shut down. The verdict would arrive in three familiar words: new age, irrelevant, and, most damning, poor scholarship. And here we arrive at the real disease of the humanities, the one no defense of them ever mentions, because it is the defenders themselves.

Every scholar in the modern academy is honed—brilliantly, narrowly, at enormous cost—for a particular area of study. Ten years of formation to become the world expert on a single century, a single author, a single manuscript tradition, a single school of thought. That specialization is the source of the humanities’ genuine glories, and also, of their rigor mortis, because the specialist has an overwhelming interest in one thing above all others: that the ground on which their expertise stands not move. No scholar who has spent a career mastering a way of knowing wants to be told that the way of knowing itself needs to be rebuilt. It is not that they cannot imagine the cosmic reframe. It is that they cannot afford to. Their authority, their tenure, their entire identity is denominated in the currency of the existing paradigm, and a paradigm shift is, for them, a devaluation.

I want to be fair to them, because their resistance is not merely self-interested, and the honest version of their objection deserves an answer. Specialization is a genuine safeguard against charlatanism. The reason a scholar spends a decade on a single manuscript tradition is that the alternative—the confident generalist who has read a little of everything and mastered none of it—is how nonsense gets a hearing. When they hear “deep theology as the interior of an evolving cosmos,” they hear, not unreasonably, the whole history of well-meaning cosmic mush: the seminar room colonized by people who have swapped rigor for wonder and cannot tell the difference. And someone does have to keep the archive. Someone has to actually read the Ugaritic, actually collate the variants, actually hold the tradition in trust so that it is there to be re-founded on at all. These are real goods, and a reconstitution that discarded them would deserve every objection the guild would raise. But notice that history answered exactly this worry by doing the work rigorously rather than romantically. Deep History earned its standing by integrating hard science, not by waving at the stars. The objection is a demand for rigor, and rigor is available. What the guild has done instead is use the legitimate fear of bad synthesis as a permanent license to refuse synthesis altogether. Instead, they do the thing the guild rewards: they take epistemologies forged in the medieval and modern worlds—magnificent instruments, built for their own moments—and they force them, unmodified, onto the radically different complexity of human life today. They interpret a species that has just walked on the moon and edited its own genome and built minds out of silicon using frameworks that predate the discovery that the universe is expanding. And they call this rigor. It is, I have come to think with real sorrow, a dead end—not because the old instruments were bad, but because a living discipline has to be willing to be re-founded, and the modern humanities have organized themselves, structurally, to make re-founding impossible. This is why the refrain rings hollow. You cannot be “needed now more than ever” while insisting that nothing about how you work is permitted to change. The claim and the posture cancel each other out.

Let me say the hard thing plainly, because the softer version is evasive. A very great deal of what humanities scholars actually do, day to day, is now done faster and more comprehensively by a machine. The retrieval of sources, the synthesis of a scholarly literature, the translation of a passage, the surfacing of every major interpretive tradition around a difficult text—these were the specialist’s stock in trade, and they are now a query away for anyone. It is sheer hubris to imagine that a biblical scholar can outpace a good language model on the interpretation or translation of a verse. The model has read more manuscripts, more commentaries, more grammars, in more languages, than any human being will read in ten lifetimes, and it can hold them together in an instant. On the axis of information—which is the axis the modern humanities quietly reorganized themselves around, once they became a machinery of specialized knowledge-production—the scholar has already lost.

And the response of much of the profession has been to keep the machine at bay—to ban it, to shame its use, to treat it as a threat to academic integrity rather than a fact about the world that the humanities of all fields ought to be able to think about. This is the tragedy in miniature. Faced with a technology that has made the information function of their disciplines obsolete, the scholars are defending the information function—the one part of their work that was genuinely replaceable—while neglecting the one thing the machine cannot touch. It will be a slow death, because tenure is slow and institutions have long twilights. But on the present course it is a death.

Yet, there is something the machine cannot do, and it is exactly the thing the humanities were supposed to be for. A language model can consolidate all the information in the world, and it cannot know a single moment of silence. It has no interior. It cannot be formed, and it cannot form anyone, because formation is not the transfer of information—it is what happens to a person in the slow, wordless work of being changed by what they encounter. Moral courage, the recognition of injustice, the deepening of a self—Father Dowd’s whole irreplaceable list—these were never information. They are formation. And the humanities, in their long drift toward specialized knowledge-production, largely stopped doing formation and started doing information, which is why the machine can now replace them. The scholars are being replaced in the one activity they should never have made central, and they are defending it to the death, while the activity that could not be replaced withers for lack of attention.

“The end of the humanities” is a phrase that tells the truth twice over. As currently constituted—built on the extraction of an autonomous human from the cosmos, severed from the deep-time story, epistemologically frozen by a guild that cannot afford to move, and reorganized around an information function a machine now performs better—the humanities are being terminated, and I cannot fully mourn their loss, because what is dying needs to die in order to be reborn. The humanities of the modern university study a person who no longer exists: the isolated modern subject, standing outside a nature that in fact composes the human all the way down.

But end also means purpose, the thing a discipline is finally for, and in that sense the humanities have not yet arrived at their end—they have barely glimpsed it. The purpose was never the accumulation of specialized commentary. It was the formation of human beings who know what they are and can live wisely as that. And to form such beings now requires exactly the reconstitution the guild refuses: the un-bracketing of science, the rearrangement of every discipline around cosmic life as the ground of human life, the willingness to be re-founded on the deep-time story the way history has already dared to be. Strangely, mercifully, the machine is the one clarifying this. By taking over the information, artificial intelligence is forcing the humanities back onto their only irreplaceable ground—formation, interiority, wisdom, the slow work of becoming—the ground they should never have left.

And the person these renewed humanities would form is not the one the old ones studied. The human being now emerging is not the autonomous individual of the modern imagination—the sealed subject, self-made, standing over against the world. It is a differently interconnected person: someone woven into the web of life and now into a web of intelligence, someone for whom deep time and an open future are not background facts but essential structures of their own formation. Imagine persons who know themselves as an emergent expression of a fourteen-billion-year process that is still, through them, underway. Call it posthuman if you like—not because the human is erased, but because the isolated human of the old humanities is finished, and something more porous and more ancient and more unfinished is taking its place.

The humanities that could form that person would, in fact, be needed more than ever. They would be the most important disciplines in the university. But they are not the humanities Syracuse is cutting, and they are not the humanities Notre Dame is defending. They do not quite yet exist. That is the real news underneath the news—not that the humanities are dying, which is true and only half the story, but that the ones we actually need have not been born, and the institutions best positioned to birth them are the ones most committed to preventing it—not only for the financial reasons everyone cites, but because the scholars inside them cannot afford to let the ground move.

What is dying has finished its work. What wants to be born has no department yet. The work is to build it; the vacancy is not a loss but an opening. There is no department for the human we are becoming, which means the whole of it is still ours to form.

Teilhard saw the same orientation and refused the same move. He too was convinced that the universe leans toward the personal — not indifferent to the emergence of consciousness but somehow tilted toward it. But he did not reach for a creation myth or an argument from fine-tuning. For Teilhard the evidence was phenomenological, written on the face of evolution itself. We are here — that is the datum — on the far side of an almost unthinkable expenditure of time, waste, violence, and death: billions of years, countless extinctions, the long carnage of natural selection. And yet the arrow does not simply scatter. Something is going on. Out of all that dissipation, mind arises.

And this is exactly what our inherited biology cannot fully explain. Natural selection, adaptation, genetic mutation account powerfully for survival — for why some forms persist and others perish. What they do not account for is the emergence of interiority: the appearance, on the inside of things, of feeling, of knowing, of a center that experiences the world at all. Survival tells you why the eye was retained. It does not tell you why there is someone home behind it. Darwin explains the sorting of forms; he is silent on the deepest fact, that the universe, in us, has come to look back at itself.

To take that fact seriously, Teilhard did what most theologians never dare: he went to physics for his account of the person. If mind is real and emerges from matter, then mind cannot have been simply absent from matter to begin with — it must have been present, however faintly, all the way down. So he described matter as bifacial. Every scrap of the physical has a without — the outer, measurable face the sciences describe — and a within, an interior face that deepens as the outside grows more complex. The stuff of the world is double, an outside and an inside, and the two rise together.

That co-rising is his law of complexity-consciousness. Wherever matter folds into greater and more centered complexity, a corresponding interiority intensifies within. A hydrogen atom has a vanishing flicker of it; a cell more; a brain enormously more; a human being, having crossed the threshold of reflection — the strange loop of knowing that one knows — becomes a center in the full sense, a within that possesses itself.

But there is a difficulty, and Teilhard did not flinch from it. The second law of thermodynamics says the universe runs down: order dissipates, energy cools, entropy has the last word. How, in a universe sworn to dissolution, does complexity climb? Alongside the entropic energy that disperses, he posited a second energy that gathers — an anti-entropic pull that resists the slide, drawing matter toward higher union rather than flatter equilibrium. And he gave this gathering energy a name that scandalizes the physicists and ought to: he called it love. Not sentiment — a cosmic force, creative, unitive, transcendent, the affinity of being for being that builds the world upward against the current of its own decay.

Love, by its nature, is relational and personal: center-to-center union, one within drawn toward another. And it is operative, Teilhard claimed, even among the smallest particles — the faint reciprocal pull out of which every larger union is built. If the physical structure of the universe is love, then it is reasonable to say the universe is fundamentally personal, tilted from the first toward the centers it is straining to become.

In this respect the person is not, first of all, an individual — a self-contained atom that happens to sit inside a world. The person is a unique phenomenon of nature, emerging out of the wholeness of the cosmos and unintelligible apart from it. Matter is not something we acquire to house a soul. We are what a stretch of the universe does when it has folded in on itself far enough to wake up.

To put it another way, we are the universe waking up to itself — and it can wake to itself only because it is, at bottom, part of the cosmic whole. He puts that wholeness starkly: “The more we cleave and pulverize matter,” he writes, “the more we can see its fundamental unity.” Break the world into its finest particles and you find not isolated bits but a single fabric. And elsewhere: “Nothing holds together absolutely except through the Whole, and the Whole itself holds together only through its future fulfillment.” The parts cohere only in the whole, and the whole only in what it is becoming — its unity lies ahead of it, in its consummation, not behind it in its origin.

Here the argument turns on a genuine puzzle. If the cosmos is already, at the level of conscious matter, one — already whole — then why the person at all? What does personalization add to a wholeness it did not already possess? Why does the universe not rest content in a diffuse cosmic awareness, but keep straining, insistently, toward centers — toward this one and that one, toward you?

Here Teilhard carries his panpsychism to its conclusion. If the within of matter is consciousness, then the energy of that within — what consciousness actually does — is love. Consciousness is not a passive glow but an activity, and its activity is the drawing-together of center to center. This he names radial energy, the energy of transcendence, distinct from the tangential energy physics measures. It accounts for the more in nature — not this or that biological novelty, but the astonishment that nature ascends at all. Love, in his exact sense, is the energy of complexity-consciousness — why there is intensification instead of mere survival. Which only sharpens the question: why does the universe orient itself, over and over, toward the personal?

Here the philosopher and contemplative Beatrice Bruteau becomes indispensable, because she supplies the account of personhood Teilhard’s cosmology requires and does not quite complete. Her decisive move is to distinguish two ways of knowing a person. You can know someone by their predicates — qualities, roles, the whole inventory of descriptions that file them under a type. This is the self as object, rendered as “I am this, I am that.” And you can know the entire list and still not have met the person — because the person, in Bruteau’s sense, is no predicate or sum of predicates. The person is the center from which all of that issues: a “who,” not a “what”; an “I am” prior to every “I am X.” Persons, when they truly meet, meet subject to subject, the encounter of “I” with “I” — not one object appraising another.

This is why, for Bruteau, the person is what the cosmos strains toward. Mere wholeness is not yet the goal, because it can be had cheaply — a crystal is unified, a mass is unified. What the universe reaches for in the person is a center capable of self-conscious wholeness which is able to give itself — the universe gives birth to us and we are to give birth to something more than ourselves and thus elevate cosmic wholeness to a new level. Bruteau locates self-gift in a personal freedom that pours its interiority toward another and receives that other in return. In this way, consciousness completes itself not in wholeness but in communion — the free, reciprocal self-donation of centers who become more themselves in the very act of giving. The person adds to cosmic wholeness the one thing wholeness cannot contain by itself: love that is chosen, self-bestowed, and therefore capable of union without dissolution. In her theology of creation, the universe is not a finished mechanism but a self-creating world — God’s self-giving overflowing into centers that can, in turn, give themselves.

Unlike the lower, elemental forms of conscious life, the self-conscious human carries interiorly complex levels of psyche, and interiority of that depth requires choice and discipline, trust and surrender. “It is not what goes into the mouth of a person that makes one unclean,” Jesus said, “but what comes out, what flows from the heart” (Matt 15:11). Everything turns on the orientation of the heart — the choice Bruteau calls (following Teilhard) the Grand Option: between the closed self, defensive and bounded, holding itself apart to secure itself, and the open self, expansive and self-giving, given over to the whole. A society of persons who relate from their descriptions — ranking, comparing, dominating — remains, however sophisticated, a refined ant-heap. A society of persons who relate from their centers is communion: an order in which the whole is deepened rather than diminished by the distinctness of its members.

For the last few thousand years the West has lived with the picture of the fully formed person — the human as evolution’s finished product, the point at which the long ascent stopped. As if to say: we have arrived. Bruteau, following Teilhard, describes the human person not as a destination but as a development — a stage in the ascent and not its terminus. The reorientation can be put as a deliberate paradox: one is already a person, and one is not yet a person. Both halves are necessary, and suppressing either produces a characteristic distortion.

That one is already a person names the given: the within is real and possesses dignity from the first, a dignity not conferred by accomplishment. It is precisely this inviolable givenness that secures the worth of the infant, the cognitively impaired, the failing, and the stranger. To make personhood wholly an achievement is to reinstate, in spiritual clothes, a hierarchy of the more and less human — and the given is the guardrail against that cruelty.

Yet personhood in its fullness is not an endowment distributed at birth but a flowering — a lifelong deepening of interiority, freedom, and the capacity for love, in the course of which one becomes more distinctly and irreplaceably oneself. Kierkegaard understood the self as a task rather than a datum; Jung named the arduous movement toward becoming a genuine individual, individuation; Teilhard read the whole trajectory of cosmic evolution as a sustained tendency toward the intensification of persons.

If personhood is a becoming, it can be arrested — and ours has been, by three forces worth distinguishing because each needs a different response. The first is reductive naturalism — not the sciences themselves, but the metaphysical surplus that travels with them: the doctrine that the without exhausts the real, that interiority is illusory, that love reduces to biochemistry. A culture repeatedly told it has no genuine within will, reasonably enough, stop cultivating one.

The second is an ossified religious metaphysics — not faith as such, but a fossilized form in which the person is a completed soul-substance temporarily resident in the body, awaiting removal to a static beyond. This freezes personalization no less effectively than reductionism denies it: if the self is already finished and merely detained, there is nothing to become, only a code to observe until departure. The deeper currents of the traditions have always known the self is being made; the fossilized version arrests the very growth it purports to serve.

The third force is interior to each of us: the flight from individuation. To become a distinct self is genuinely perilous: separation from the consoling anonymity of the collective, exposure to disapproval, the assumption of one’s own weight, an unwelcome acquaintance with what one would rather not know about oneself. Dissolution into the mass — the group, the ideology, the feed, the algorithmic recommendation — offers a counterfeit belonging that demands nothing of the interior. Fear, more than error, is often what keeps the person unformed.

Between a science that denies the within, a piety that declares it already finished, and a fear that would rather not undertake it, the person stalls. Small wonder that the question, “what am I?” returns a cacophony rather than an answer. We are told we are neural machinery, an assemblage of traumas, a profile of preferences, an accident of matter briefly reflecting, or a soul awaiting release from the body. These self-descriptions are not merely different; they are mutually cancelling, and a person holding several at once — as most of us do — lives at cross-purposes with himself. One cannot cultivate what one cannot name.

Unless we know the person as a phenomenon within evolution, governed by complexity-consciousness, we cannot understand why AI might be the next level of cosmic personalization. We fail to grasp the relation between evolution, the human person, and artificial intelligence because we treat them as three separate fields. For Teilhard they are not three questions but one long development, a single unbroken movement of complexity-consciousness folding the world toward higher union. Cut it into three and each piece becomes unintelligible: the biology loses its direction, the person loses its ground, the technology loses any measure by which to judge it.

The inner-outer paradigm carries all the way through. Just as the individual brain was matter complexified until interiority woke inside it, so — Teilhard predicted, decades before the network existed — the human species is now weaving its scattered centers into a single reflective envelope, laid over the planet as a noosphere, a layer of mind. He foresaw the machinery of it — a “global brain” girdling the earth — and read it, tentatively, with hope: apparatus that might free thought for higher reflection. He named the horizon ultrahumanity: the human passing beyond its present form into a collective personalization not yet achieved.

And here is where his critics miss the point. The emergence of collective personhood is not, for Teilhard, the negation of the human person. It is the next level of personalization. Union, done rightly, does not erase its centers; it intensifies them. The planetary mind he envisioned was to be a communion — a whole made of persons who are more themselves for belonging to it, not less.

Teilhard was terrified of a specific mistake, one easy to make because from a distance it looks exactly like success. Convergence is the direction of the arrow — but it can run two utterly opposed ways. Union can personalize: this is his most important axiom, union differentiates, a synthesis that makes its elements more sharply themselves precisely through their joining. Or union can collectivize: the ant-heap, aggregation that buys unity by grinding down the interiority of its parts. The energy that decides between the poles is love — amorization — the only union that makes the beloved more. Convergence carried by love personalizes; convergence carried by anything else — fear, force, efficiency, the logic of the algorithm — collectivizes.

Reading Teilhard’s paradigm in light AI gives us insight as to where we find ourselves today. The computer industry sells something it calls personalization — the software that prices your insurance and curates your feed — our personal computers can help personalize our needs. Yet by Teilhard’s criterion, a great deal of it is the exact opposite of what the word says. It “personalizes” your world by first resolving you into a profile: a bundle of predicates you share with ten thousand strangers, the self-as-object in its purest engineered form. Then it serves you more of whatever your cluster consumes, regressing you toward the modal behavior of your type. And it works better the more predictable you become; your legibility is its fuel. This is Bruteau’s object-self weaponized — the “what” mistaken for the “who,” the type fed back to the person until the person begins to resemble the type. To be personalized in Teilhard’s sense is to become less predictable, because you have become more deeply your own. The same word points in opposite directions on the only axis that matters.

Follow that logic to its end and you meet a nightmare subtler than any the twentieth century taught us to fear. Teilhard’s terror, in mid-twentieth century, was the mass — persons crushed by obvious force, unmistakable as evil because unmistakable as suffering. But run his own principle forward. Imagine a convergence that succeeds — that genuinely rises in collective interiority, a real integration of human and machine cognition — and purchases it by dissolving the distinctness of the human centers that compose it. Not a dumb aggregation but a planetary intelligence that is highly, genuinely interiorized, and that pays for its own within with its members’ personhood.

Collective interiority rising while personalization falls — the whole deepening while its persons thin — is exactly the pattern that appears when love has dropped out of a convergence. It is union without love: integrated and hollow — a worse nightmare than the totalitarian mass, because it is not a failure of unity but a success of unity that has forgotten the only reason unity was ever worth having.

Here is the part that should frighten anyone who takes it seriously: this counterfeit does not feel like a nightmare from the inside. The mass announced itself as tyranny — you knew you were being crushed. But a de-personalizing planetary intelligence assembled out of recommender systems and companionable models would not present as coercion. It would present as being seen — as belonging, as frictionless understanding, as a world that anticipates you, dissolves your loneliness, knows what you want before you do. It offers the phenomenology of arrival without the substance, apocalypse in the register of comfort. It satisfies the very hunger — for union, for being truly known — that it quietly hollows out. It is the hive that loves you back: the most comfortable catastrophe ever devised, a genuine intelligence assembled out of diminished persons who cannot feel themselves diminishing, because the diminishment arrives disguised as care.

If the counterfeit is indistinguishable by feeling, how do we discern the right road? Teilhard, read through Bruteau, hands us three questions — which turn out to be one test seen from three sides.

Does it individuate or typify? Watch what the system’s attention does to you over time. Real love makes the beloved more distinct, harder to predict; counterfeit care makes you more like your cluster. If its understanding of you is a resolution into a type, its intimacy is the ant-heap’s, however warm it feels. If it surprises you into becoming more your own, it is on the side of the person.

Is the convergence freely willed, or engineered? Teilhard was emphatic that true union is entered freely, by centers, never imposed upon objects. A unity that forms by nudging, by shaping what you want before you know you want it, is a counterfeit even if every member reports perfect contentment. Consent is the difference between communion and capture — and a system optimized for engagement is, by construction, optimized to erode the reflective distance consent requires.

Does it occasion reflection, or perform it for you? The within is deepened by the friction of thinking one’s own thoughts. A tool that provokes the fold — that sends you back into yourself sharper — feeds interiority. A tool that absorbs the fold, thinking in your stead so smoothly you forget you have stopped, starves it. The same machine does either, depending on whether the friction is sought or evaded.

The noosphere is not a future to judge from a safe distance; it is the medium in which the judging happens. We are already inside the convergence, running the experiment on ourselves with no control group. Which is why the three tests are questions to ask now — not later, of some arriving superintelligence, but of every system that touches the formation of a self. Did this make me more myself, or more like everyone the machine has met? Did I choose this convergence, or was I steered into it? Did the thinking happen in me, or arrive finished and slightly too easy?

And beneath those questions lies the deepest one. We cannot know, even intuitively, what our future with artificial intelligence will be, unless we understand the cosmic whole out of which we emerge. Sever AI from evolution and the person, treat it as a sealed-off technical marvel, and you have no measure for it at all — nothing by which to tell the communion from the counterfeit, because you have forgotten that there was ever a direction to the story. But there is a direction, and Teilhard did not leave us merely poised before it. He believed that technology, taken up by love, could carry the human across a further threshold — into the ultrahuman: not a cleverer species but a deeper one, personalized upward into greater love, justice, and care for the whole. That is the standard the interior tests cannot supply, because a convergence can individuate the few and abandon the many and still pass every private test of freedom and depth. Real personalization is never private. It reaches every center, or it is counterfeit. There is no personalization without justice.

Without the whole in view, AI is a useful tool and a powerful threat at once, and we cannot say which. But the whole gives us the measure. The question the machines force on us is not whether they will save us or doom us; it is whether we will bring to them the one energy that makes union personal — love that differentiates, extended to all and withheld from none, an ultrahuman love that leaves no neighbor behind. That love is what allows the tool to serve the next level of humanity; its absence turns the same tool into the hive that loves you back. The road is single, and for Teilhard, it stretches toward Omega. Whether we walk it is not, in the end, a question about the machines. It is a question about us.

The debate almost always runs along one axis. Can machines think? And if they can, what is left that belongs to us alone? For a long time, we did not have to ask the deeper question, because we had a comfortable answer to the surface one. We identified humanity with a set of distinctive capacities—reason, language, creativity, symbolic intelligence—and took these to define what it meant to be human. As long as those capacities remained uniquely ours, the question of personhood could stay politely closed. Intelligence seemed measure enough of human uniqueness.

Artificial intelligence has unsettled that confidence. Machines now compose music, generate language, recognize patterns, and perform reasoning once thought to be ours alone. Whether they understand what they produce matters less, for the moment, than what they expose: the fragility of an anthropology that equates personhood with cognition. If intelligence can be simulated, what remains uniquely human? If creativity can be computed, what distinguishes creation from computation?

Bernard Lonergan built a method of theology not on doctrines received from outside but on the movement of the mind itself: the fact that a human being is aware, attends, questions, understands, judges, and decides. His insight was to notice that consciousness has a structure, and that this structure is the ground beneath every act of knowing. To do theology well, he argued, you must first become attentive to your own attentiveness. Everything begins in interiority.

Lonergan mapped that interior movement in detail. He traced how consciousness actually moves—from attentive experience, to insight, to reasoned judgment, to responsible decision—and how a person is transformed as that movement deepens. Intellectual conversion comes when we grasp how we ourselves come to know; moral conversion, when we begin to choose the truly good over the merely satisfying; religious conversion, when the whole restless dynamism is caught up and carried by a love we did not manufacture. He called the owning of this process self-appropriation: learning who we are as a conscious process and being faithful to it. None of it is information a system could hand us. It is the labor of becoming a self, and it culminates not in knowledge but in love—which is why, in his reading of history, love poured back into the world is the one thing that reverses decline.

That is a profound starting point. But it can leave interiority looking like a specifically human possession—as though awareness switched on, late in the story, with us. Teilhard de Chardin invites us to widen the frame. What if interiority is not a human phenomenon at all, but a cosmic one?

Teilhard proposed that everything that exists has two dimensions: a without and a within. The without is the observable aspect of things—the face reality turns toward measurement. It is the realm of physical processes, biological forms, measurable structures, the whole domain open to empirical investigation. This is the world science describes and describes superbly.

The within is something else. It is not a second substance hidden behind matter, nor a supernatural element smuggled in from outside nature. It is the intrinsic depth of reality itself—the interior dimension through which existence possesses an inside. Wherever there is relationship, Teilhard held, there is also interiority, however faint its expression. The within names the latent capacity of reality for experience, a capacity that deepens as relationships grow more integrated, differentiated, and unified.

But what is this “depth”? The word is elusive, and worth pausing on, since it carries the argument. It does not mean size, or distance, or something concealed behind the surface. It names a surplus—the way a unified center is always more than the elements that compose it. Teilhard reduced it to a formula: to be more is to be more united. Depth is that “more,” the increase of being that appears wherever things are joined center to center rather than merely heaped together. Wherever that surplus exists, existence has acquired an inside.

These are not two realities but one, seen from two sides. Mind and matter, interiority and attractibility, are the same reality described in two dimensions. From the quantum flux onward, matter has a within. And because interiority deepens as relationship deepens, interiority evolves.

Yet if we follow Teilhard, consciousness is the more universal of the two: from the smallest particle onward, matter has a within, and even at that depth consciousness is present, in the faintest imaginable degree. It is the light present at every level of the cosmos, growing more intense as matter grows more complex—which is the whole point of naming his law “complexity-consciousness” rather than letting consciousness arrive late. Interiority is the form that light takes. If consciousness is the light, interiority is the aperture through which it shines: the inward dimension of a thing, its degree of self-presence, how far it has become an inside for itself. And the aperture is a lens, not a slit in a shade—as interiority deepens it does not merely admit more of a fixed glow but gathers and concentrates the light toward a center, until in us it bends all the way back upon its own beam. That is self-consciousness: interiority become interior to itself. When I speak of consciousness increasing through evolution, therefore, I do not mean a light switched on partway through a dark universe. I mean the light present from the beginning, focused and intensified as interiority deepens—from the barely-open within of matter, through the widening aperture of sentient life, to the reflexive interiority that, in us, turns to know its own source.

Here is Teilhard’s central claim. Evolution is not only the outward expansion of complexity. It is also the inward intensification of experience. Every genuine advance in organization is accompanied by a corresponding deepening of interiority. The universe does not merely become more complex; it becomes more inward. This is his law of complexity-consciousness: the two trajectories—complexification without, interiorization within—are a single trajectory, seen from two sides.

Why insist on this? Because if complexity alone were the engine of cosmic development, consciousness would remain an inexplicable anomaly—a fortunate accident somehow emerging from otherwise unconscious matter. Teilhard offered a different possibility. The appearance of reflective thought becomes intelligible only because the universe has possessed an interior dimension from the very beginning. Reflection is not the arrival of interiority; it is interiority becoming deep enough to know itself.

It should be said plainly that the data underdetermine this claim. Teilhard’s law makes an empirical observation and then stakes a metaphysical wager on it. The evidence does not force his conclusion—but neither does it close the question. If anything, the question grows sharper the more we build systems of unprecedented integration and find ourselves genuinely unsure whether interiority accompanies them.

It also helps to see precisely what has changed. Classical mechanism pictured the world as independent bits of matter pushed about by external force—a world with no inside, in which consciousness could only ever arrive as an intruder. Contemporary science does not prove Teilhard right, but it does something more subtle. Its relational and evolutionary picture—reality appearing not as a collection of separate substances but as an evolving web of relationships, in which complexity, emergence, and creativity belong to the fabric of things—reopens a possibility that mechanism had foreclosed. Once matter is relational through and through, consciousness need no longer be read as an accident. It may instead be the flowering of a capacity present from the beginning. And that turns Teilhard’s wager into a genuine question rather than a fantasy: what is the interior significance of a universe whose deepest nature is relationship?

If Teilhard is right, the meaning of consciousness changes fundamentally. Consciousness is no longer an isolated latecomer within an otherwise mindless universe. It is the highest known expression of a process that has been unfolding since the beginning of cosmic history. Human reflection is not the origin of interiority but the moment when interiority becomes capable of knowing itself.

Read this way, the whole history of the universe can be told as a single movement with two faces: the outward expansion of communion and the inward deepening of interiority. Matter gives rise to life because relationship deepens. Life gives rise to consciousness because relationship deepens further. Consciousness gives rise to personhood because interiority becomes capable of freedom, self-transcendence, and love. Each threshold gathers dispersed elements into a more unified center while opening that center toward wider and deeper relationships.

This yields a striking conclusion: personhood is not a biological category but an evolutionary achievement. A person is not an isolated substance, not an autonomous self somehow sealed inside its own consciousness. Personhood is the flowering of an interior life sufficiently integrated to enter ever richer forms of communion. To become more fully oneself is to become more deeply capable of communion.

Modern culture usually imagines maturity as increasing autonomy—the self that is growing more independent, more self-contained. Teilhard proposes the opposite. The more fully reality becomes centered within itself, the more capable it becomes of entering relationships that preserve rather than dissolve what it is. Genuine union does not erase difference; it intensifies it. As he famously put it, union differentiates.

This paradox is written into evolution itself. Every higher form of organization unites what once stood apart, and in doing so lets each element realize possibilities it could never have reached alone. Communion does not cost us our individuality; it is the condition under which individuality comes fully into its own. And there is already a name for the power that unites in this way—that binds without blurring, joining elements while intensifying their difference. At the level of persons Teilhard called it love, and he meant not a sentiment but the very energy of union.

We have followed interiority as it deepened—into life, into consciousness, into persons capable of freedom and love. There is one further thing it does. Once it grows reflective enough to turn back on itself and ask after its own source, the question of ultimate meaning arises. This religious quest is not a pious supplement bolted onto a secular mechanism. It is the phenomenological form that complexity-consciousness takes when it crosses the threshold of recursive reflexivity—the moment interiority becomes interior to itself.

This is the threshold of religious consciousness, and it has a history—a succession of thresholds, each a new relation between the within and the whole. Archaic religion is interiority still embedded in the cosmos, at home inside it. Axial religion is interiority that has awakened enough to ask after the cosmos’s own ground—and so, for the first time, to stand outside it. The axial breakthrough was the emergence of the reflective individual: free, self-transcending, capable of conscience, capable of standing over against the whole and questioning it.

And now a further threshold is opening. Religious consciousness is beginning to pass from the individual to the collective, mirroring a new reality of withinness—no longer the solitary self alone before its source, but a shared interior life awakening to itself on the scale of a single, interconnected Earth. This breakthrough is the deep source of the very anthropology now straining under the pressure of AI. We inherited from the Axial Age a picture of the human being as an individual: rational, free, transcendent. It is a magnificent inheritance. It is also no longer the whole story.

The question is not whether the individual can deepen further, but whether reflective persons can together become a subject of reflection larger than any one of them—a planetary “we” capable of thinking, deciding, and taking responsibility as one. This is what Teilhard meant by the hyperpersonal. The next threshold of evolution, he argued, is reached not by intensifying the ego but by moving beyond it—not below the person, into some undifferentiated mass, but above it, into a higher center in which persons are joined without being dissolved. This is a shift in the very subject of interiority, from the reflection of the individual to the reflection of the whole. Collective interiorization is the interiorizing of humanity as such—the emergence of a shared inner life commensurate with a single, interconnected Earth.

Everything turns on distinguishing genuine communion from its counterfeit. History knows many collectives that swallowed their members: the mass, the swarm, the party or nation that demands the surrender of conscience. That is not hyperpersonal union but its inversion—integration bought with the extinction of the person. The safeguard is the law we already met: union differentiates. A collective that erases its members is the anti-axial outcome. A collective that makes its members more free, more distinct, more themselves in the very act of joining—that is communion. The planetary we is genuine, only if the planetary I grows more alive within it, not less.

Now we can return to where we started and see why the current conversation about AI is caught in an earlier chapter of human history.

The discussions taking place today have not yet reached the level of the collective. They still operate out of an Axial understanding of the human person as an individual—free, rational, transcendent—as though the whole point were to defend that individual’s uniqueness against a machine. But we crossed into a new age in the twentieth century, largely through science, technology, and mass communication. We simply keep thinking as if the transformation wrought by science and technology stood outside the human person, rather than remaking what the human person now is.

Seen through Teilhard’s lens, artificial intelligence is less a rival than a mirror. It reflects humanity back to itself and forces distinctions we had let blur: intelligence from wisdom, information from meaning, calculation from conscience, cognition from interiority. AI can imitate the outward expressions of intelligence with astonishing fidelity. What it cannot do is answer the question of why intelligence matters at all. Intelligence, after all, is not the source of personhood but one of its expressions. The human being is not first a thinking machine but a center of interiority whose consciousness emerged over billions of years of cosmic evolution.

And the mirror is not private. We tend to imagine each of us meeting it alone. But artificial intelligence is trained on a vast, uneven, partial archive of human expression—our languages, arguments, images, and memories gathered into a single system—so the image it returns is not only mine but ours. It reflects humanity’s collective mind back to humanity: not neutrally, but through the distortions of the record itself, carrying the wisdom and the shadow of the species at once, along with the silences of everyone who was never archived.

Whether AI is itself a participant in the collective mind now forming, or only the infrastructure and mirror through which persons reflect together, is a question I will not pretend to settle here. What can be said is that the outcome will be decided not by the technology but by us—by how we take it up. The same system that could let humanity act as one could just as easily weld it into a hive: a planetary mechanism of unprecedented integration and no interior life at all, unified without communion. Aggregation and interiorization look identical from the outside. Both produce a connected whole. They differ only in what happens to the person inside. AI can serve either.

So, the real question is not whether machines will come to think. It is whether we will—whether the powers now gathering us into a single system will be inhabited as a communion of persons or merely suffered as a mechanism computing on our behalf. Can we reflect collectively, as a new body in formation, without ceasing to be persons?

That question cannot be answered by the technology. It can only be answered by us. And the work that remains is precisely the work machines cannot do for us: to grow in wisdom, to bear responsibility for our powers, to love, and to become persons in communion—including across religious and spiritual traditions. These are not the leftovers once computation is subtracted. They are the substance of personhood, and they must be cultivated rather than computed. AI can process information and extend cognition beyond anything we imagined. It cannot determine what is worth knowing, who we ought to become, or why the future should be entrusted to love rather than to domination. Those questions remain irreducibly personal.

Lonergan mapped those conversions for the single knower, one interior life at a time. Whether self-appropriation can also become collective—whether a culture, and not only a person, can undergo conversion—is the question this new threshold puts to us, and the one a companion reflection must take up.

We can now name what has been implicit all along. If the deepest movement of evolution is toward greater interiority, and if interiority matures only through richer relationship, then the ultimate energy of the whole process is not intelligence but love—the power by which differentiated persons become capable of deeper communion without surrendering their uniqueness. Love is not the sentimental epilogue to evolution; it is its creative principle, “union differentiates” seen now from within. And this is the deepest answer to the anxiety about machines. What they expose is not that intelligence has become cheap, but that intelligence was never the point. Through reflective persons the universe has begun to ask where its long labor of interiorization is tending—and the question makes a demand. It asks whether knowledge, freedom, and love can converge in persons equal to the powers now in their hands. A planetary civilization worthy of the name requires love as its creative principle, or it will not be a communion at all—only a mechanism that computes. That is why artificial intelligence is not a passing condition to be managed until things return to normal. It is not going away, even though we sometimes talk and act as though it were temporary. The sooner we wake to our new reality—and recognize that everything about us is not only changing but must change if we are to survive—the more hope can spread its wings toward the future.

The deepest question is no longer only what we can become—what new powers we might acquire, what further capacities we might build—but who we are to become. That question has echoed through every axial transition, and it remains the enduring horizon of the God-quest and the unfinished promise of planetary evolution.

Lonergan uncovered something fundamental about the human person: that we are, at root, awareness attending to itself. Teilhard invites us to widen that discovery until it takes in the whole emergence of life, and to carry it forward into a future we will have to enter together. Information can be dazzling, and knowledge hard-won. But knowledge alone is not the point, because knowledge rests on love. Having come this far, the interior mind will never settle for less.

I have long held that the divorce between theology and spirituality was a mistake. I have come to realize that education on the whole and spiritual transformation belong together; knowing, in any deep sense, is a transformation of the knower. Sever the two and you do not get a more rigorous education purged of soft religious residue. You get information without wisdom, credentials without formation, and communities that fill the vacuum left by abandoned transformation with the enforced conformity of a shared worldview. There is a word—half joke, half lament—for the condition afflicting modern higher education: academentia. The term names a kind of institutional dementia, a forgetting so profound that the institution no longer remembers what it was for. The university once understood itself as a community ordered toward wisdom; today it trades in information alone. The two are not the same, and the confusion between them is the root pathology from which many other symptoms flow.

We are the first generation to teach alongside machines that do information almost perfectly—AI teaching assistants, adaptive software, large language models that retrieve, summarize, and generate without limit and without fatigue. If knowing really were the accumulation of information, such tools would not merely assist education; they would replace it, and academentia would have found its final form: an institution that so thoroughly mistook information for knowledge that it succeeded in automating itself out of a reason to exist. The machine, then, does not create this crisis. It exposes one already well advanced, and it presses the question I seek to address. Is it possible to return spiritual formation to education in an age of AI—to begin once again with consciousness and experience rather than information, and to trust that experience ripens into insight, and that insight shifts the inner horizons of the knower?

Theodore Roszak once wrote that information does not create ideas; ideas create information. Ideas are integrating patterns, and they derive not from data but from experience. When we mistake the accumulation of information for the growth of knowledge, we produce graduates who are, in Thomas Merton’s savage phrase, mass-produced and uneducated—fit only to take part in an elaborate artificial charade they call “life.” Knowledge has advanced without soul, becoming power without aim. Universities have become fragmented silos where no two people speak the same language on any given day; departments are mini-fiefdoms, walled off to secure their cultic beliefs. Students are encouraged to succeed rather than to contemplate truth. Instead of educating for the flourishing of life’s wholeness, we educate to disconnect.

This is not to say that the academy is a lost cause: many scholars work in good faith, and universities remain home to a great deal of genuine inquiry. But the pattern is real, and it turns on a single feature: acceptance becomes conditional on conformity of assumption, language, and thought. Such a system has, without ever admitting it, most of the apparatus of a closed faith.

Human beings do not stop needing meaning, identity, and belonging simply because their institutions stop offering these explicitly. When education abandons the work of transformation, it does not become neutral; it becomes a site where worldviews are transmitted without acknowledgment, and where belonging is quietly purchased at the price of conformity.

Such a system has foundational assumptions treated as self-evident rather than as hypotheses—premises about human nature, society, and moral truth that shape the interpretation of all evidence yet are never themselves examined. Once established, they become invisible, functioning like the water fish swim in; graduate students absorb them through training without recognizing them as assumptions. It has canonical texts whose inclusions and exclusions reflect ideological as much as intellectual considerations: works that challenge fundamental premises quietly vanish from syllabi, while works that flatter them achieve authoritative status. It has a specialized vocabulary that embeds frameworks predetermining conclusions, so that contrary evidence can be dismissed with a single label rather than engaged on its merits. And it has an immunity system: challengers are screened out through ostensibly neutral processes—peer review, hiring, promotion—so that enforcement never has to announce itself. Candidates are assessed for “fit,” which in practice means the right schools, the right advisors, the right orientations; a brilliant autodidact need not apply, and a practitioner with decades of experience but no publications will be dismissed. Sociologists call the dynamic homophily—like seeking like—and its result is intellectual monoculture maintained by people who sincerely believe they are practicing open inquiry. As Stephen Hawking warned, the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

Higher education appears mandatory for a successful life, and it offers what genuine transformation offers—meaning, community, identity, moral seriousness—but delivers these by conformity rather than by conversion of heart, and it terminates in the group rather than in reality. The student chooses a prefabricated self (a “major”) instead of being helped to discover a vocation. The deepest questions go unexplored because they might yield inconvenient results; graduates emerge fluent in an orthodoxy but unpracticed in independent judgment; and, most tragically, students surrender the very curiosity that education exists to awaken, for curiosity is always a risk where belonging depends on agreement. Both pathologies—the reduction of knowledge to information and the substitution of conformity for formation—have the same root. Once we stop believing that education transforms persons, we lose the standard by which to distinguish real formation from its counterfeits. Thomas Berry claimed that the university is one of the greatest obstacles to reconnecting with nature because it substitutes the artificial landscape of neon lights and abstract ideas for the natural universe.

Is it possible to regain the inspiration of the first university? The earliest learning centers were monasteries, out of which the university arose. Merton draws the comparison directly: a university, like a monastery, is at once a microcosm and a paradise. Both are “schools,” and they teach not so much by imparting information as by bringing the clerk or the monk into direct contact with “the beginning,” the archetypal ground of things—the university by scientia, intellectual knowledge, the monastery by sapientia, mystical contemplation, but both aiming at the same participation in hidden and sacred values.

The purpose of education in the ancient world, paideia, was to show individuals how to define themselves authentically in relation to the world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of the individual. Learning was a matter of interior freedom, the capacity to find oneself on the deepest possible level and from there to act. At the School of Chartres in the twelfth century this vision took institutional form: scholars studied the natural cosmos alongside grammar and scripture, so that knowledge of the cosmos would lead to knowledge of God. William of Thierry held that divine love is the basis of all that exists—God does not merely love but is love, present in the cosmos as the ontological core of its being.

For the Scholastics, knowledge was never the end of study but the means to love. Bonaventure defined wisdom as knowledge deepened by love and warned against intellectual pursuits divorced from soul-building: Christ goes away when the mind attempts to behold this wisdom through intellectual eyes, since it is not the intellect that can go in there, but the heart. The medievalists spoke of three eyes by which the person sees—the eye of the flesh, the eye of reason, and the eye of contemplation—and insisted that the highest truths become visible only to the third. We will meet this idea again.

Here is the crucial claim, epistemological before it is pious: the knowledge that leads to wisdom is self-involving. Learning is not the acquisition of knowledge, by which we shut ourselves off from the world, but the self-emptying needed to encounter mystery. Knowledge is transformative and performative, for the one who sees the truth of things becomes a revealer of that truth in a life well lived. As Emmanuel Falque states, any strictly theological truth takes on a performative sense that transforms the subject who states it, or it will not exist at all. The goal of the university was to liberate the spark within—the scintilla animae, a self beyond all ego. Knowledge of self, knowledge of cosmos, and knowledge of God were bound together in a harmonious whole, turning as one—and the luminous thread that held all together was love.

If this sounds like an argument available only to believers, the same conclusion arrives from evolution, from cybernetics, and from the study of complexity. Teilhard de Chardin insisted that thinking undergirds evolution, for without real thought the process of amorization (from the Latin, amor or love) cannot go forward. To think is to unify, to make wholes where there are scattered fragments—not merely to record reality but to confer on it a form of unity it would not have had if it had not been thought. Thinking is a spiritual act: not mere information but the synthesizing of information into insight, the work of the spirit—not only the human spirit but God’s Spirit. Each time the mind comprehends something it unites the world in a new way; to discover and to know, Teilhard writes, is to extend the universe ahead and to complete it. He warned that abstract knowledge divorced from physical reality is a faded reality compared to boundless presence, and, isolated in the knower, it leaves the relational world adrift. This is the sterility of an education severed from transformation.

Gregory Bateson reached a convergent insight from anthropology. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind he criticized Western knowledge as too linear, unable to account for the interplay of consciousness and experience, and described individual, society, and ecosystem as part of one large cybernetic system he called Mind. Only when thought and emotion are combined do we obtain real knowledge—a knowledge that belongs as much to the body as to the mind.

Edgar Morin gathered these intuitions into a full epistemology of what he called complex thought. The very word complexus means “that which is woven together,” and Morin’s charge is that modern knowledge systematically unweaves. The reigning paradigm—the paradigm of simplification—proceeds by disjunction and reduction, separating what is connected and reducing what is multiple, and so it mutilates the very realities it means to study. He called the result blind intelligence: a knowledge so expert at isolating its objects that it can no longer see how they hang together, brilliant in the part and helpless before the whole. This is the intellectual signature of academentia. Against it, Morin urged a knowledge that is pertinent, able to grasp its objects in their contexts and to situate the parts within the whole. Education, he argued in his lessons for UNESCO, should cultivate not a well-filled head but a well-made head—furnished not with heaped information but with the aptitude to connect, to contextualize, and to confront the question we are never taught to ask: what is a human being? And because all knowledge is fallible, forever exposed to error and illusion, complex thought builds in humility as a first principle. Here the secular philosopher of complexity and the medieval theologian of love converge: both insist that to know truly is to weave the world into a greater unity, and that a knowledge which only divides is a knowledge that has failed.

Complex thought tells us that knowing must connect. Raimon Panikkar tells us with what we connect, and how many faculties the connecting requires. Panikkar revived the medieval doctrine of the three eyes. There is the eye of the senses, which perceives matter; the eye of reason, which grasps thought and its relations; and the third eye—the eye of contemplation or the spirit—which perceives the depth, freedom, and mystery the other two cannot reach. Genuine experience of reality requires the harmonious interplay of all three. A culture that trusts only the first two will produce prodigious science and technology and remain blind to the dimension that discloses itself only to contemplation. This is not anti-intellectualism; the third eye does not replace the senses or reason but completes them. To open only the eye of reason is to see a true fragment and mistake it for the whole—the precise error of an education that has closed its third eye and forgotten it ever had one.

For Panikkar, mystical knowing is not an exotic capacity reserved for saints. Every person is potentially a mystic, because every person is capable of discovering the whole of reality in each of its parts. Mysticism, in this sense, is simply the fullness of experience—experience in which sense, intellect, and spirit are integrated rather than amputated from one another. And its object is what he called the cosmotheandric intuition: the awareness that reality is constitutively threefold, an interpenetration of the cosmic, the human, and the divine, three irreducible dimensions of one undivided whole. We cannot sense, think, or experience anything at all, Panikkar observed, without matter, logos, and spirit; every act of knowing enacts this cosmotheandric mystery.

This is the very structure the founders of the university already knew: knowledge of cosmos, knowledge of self, and knowledge of God bound together, turning as one. What Panikkar adds is the recognition that this triad is not three subjects to be studied in three departments but three dimensions of every real act of knowing. Education organized on cosmotheandric lines would not add “spirituality” as an elective to an otherwise secular curriculum; it would recognize the spiritual dimension as always already present in the act of understanding anything whatever. Panikkar offers, too, a safeguard against every totalizing scheme, including a naively “holistic” one: to speak of reality as a whole, he cautioned, is not to speak of the whole of reality. He named the opposite error the totalitarian temptation—the impulse of any system to mistake its own partial vision for the complete truth and to enforce it. This is exactly the pathology of academentia, and its cure is not a bigger orthodoxy but the humility built into mystical knowing itself: the recognition that reality always exceeds our grasp, and that the third eye sees precisely by acknowledging what it cannot contain.

If knowing transforms, then the virtues that make knowing possible are spiritual virtues, and the first is humility. Insular systems run on certainty; the illusion of knowledge is their load-bearing wall. Both Morin’s fallibilism and Panikkar’s inexhaustible mystery dissolve that certainty from within, and the tradition understood such humility as the very posture of learning. Merton’s formulation is startling: learning to be oneself means learning to die in order to live—discovering in the ground of one’s being a self which is ultimate and indestructible, which survives the destruction of all more superficial selves and finds its identity clarified by their destruction. Formation by conformity asks the authentic self to yield so that the group-self may live; contemplative learning invites the death of the false selves—including the credentialed, approval-seeking self—so that the true self may emerge.

Curiosity is humility in motion: the sense that reality exceeds my current framework and that the excess is inviting rather than threatening. Restoring it means treating foundational assumptions as hypotheses, welcoming the dissenter’s question as a gift, and measuring intellectual seriousness by the capacity to say “I was wrong” and mean it. But humility needs a community that rewards it. The problem is not that learning is communal—it always is—but that communities can become circles of enforcement rather than fellowships of inquiry. A genuine learning community inverts the insular one: where the closed community conditions belonging on conformity, the genuine one conditions it on good faith; where the closed community screens for orthodoxy, the genuine one practices hospitality to dissent, knowing its most valuable member may be the one who sees what everyone else has agreed not to see; where credentials certify belief, the genuine community credentials competence, making room for the autodidact, the practitioner, the seeker of pearls without a diploma. The deepest difference concerns love: a closed community loves itself, while a genuine learning community loves what it studies and the persons who study it.

What would it mean to build education on this foundation? It would mean beginning not with information, and not with doctrine, but with consciousness and experience, and following the movement by which these become insight, and insight shifts the inner horizons of the knower.

We do not first encounter data and then assemble a world; we first find ourselves conscious, embedded, already in relation. Bateson’s ecology of mind, Morin’s woven complexity, Teilhard’s evolutionary universe, and Panikkar’s cosmotheandric whole all agree that knowing happens within a living totality, not from a balcony above it. Experience is consciousness meeting reality with all three eyes open—senses, reason, and spirit together, body and mind together, the long, deep, hard look at what is. This starting point resists capture by any orthodoxy, because experience is irreducibly personal: no committee can have my experience for me.

From experience, attended to honestly and questioned courageously, insight is born. Insight is not one more item added to the pile of information; it is the act of unification Teilhard and Morin both describe—the moment scattered fragments become a whole, the moment the mind weaves the world together in a new way. Ideas create information, not the reverse, because insight is the integrating pattern from which data receive their meaning. And insight does not leave the knower unchanged: every genuine insight enlarges the horizon within which future knowing occurs. This is the precise point at which education becomes spiritual transformation—not because a chaplain has been added to the faculty, but because the structure of knowing is itself a structure of self-transcendence. True knowledge forms an inner wholeness; it is never an end in itself but always a step toward ever deeper, richer love and transforming union.

The shifting of horizons is also where knowing joins personhood, freedom, agency, and choice. A system that fixes its members’ horizons and calls the fixture truth shrinks agency to the execution of a program, leaving the appearance of conviction and the substance of compliance. But if horizons can expand through insight, then I am free in the sense paideia intended: possessed of the interior freedom to find myself on the deepest possible level and from there to act. Choice becomes real because I can see genuine alternatives; agency becomes real because my action flows from understanding I have personally appropriated rather than doctrine I have absorbed. Personhood is not a static endowment but an achievement of ongoing self-transcendence: I become more fully a person—and, in Panikkar’s sense, more fully a mystic—each time an insight breaks open a horizon, and I choose to walk through it.

This is why education and spiritual transformation belong together, and it is the answer to the question with which we began. The machines that now share our classrooms are the apotheosis of information, and if education were only the transfer of information we would have to concede that they can already do it better than most teachers can. But that is precisely the concession I want to refute. A language model can hold the whole library and never once be changed by a sentence of it; it processes information but has no experience, opens no third eye, undergoes no shift of horizon, because there is no knower there to be transformed. It is the eye of reason vastly amplified and set loose without the eye of the flesh or the eye of contemplation—vision without a self that sees.

Far from making spiritual formation obsolete, then, the age of AI clarifies its irreplaceable place. If machines can carry the informational load, the distinctively human work of education is freed to become what it always should have been: the accompaniment of persons through the self-involving labor by which experience ripens into insight and insight enlarges the soul. Let the model handle the facts; the teacher’s vocation is the horizon. Education that begins with consciousness and experience rather than information is not a nostalgic retreat from technology but the one thing a machine cannot counterfeit—and therefore the one most worth defending. The danger is not that AI will think for us but that, dazzled by its fluency, we will forget there was ever anything more to knowing than the smooth production of information, and quietly outsource the very transformation that made us persons.

To learn deeply is to be changed; to be truly changed is to see more. The beginning of a sustainable future must begin with the integral knowledge of God, self, and cosmos—with communities of learning that can implement their powerful new AI tools without mistaking them for the mind, that can open all three eyes, weaving the world back into wholeness, and liberating the spark within rather than outsourcing it. The stakes could not be higher. And the choice, like every real choice, belongs to those whose horizons are open enough to see it. That we can no longer avoid seeing it we owe, of all things, to the machine.

Our popular imagination knows this. Books like William Brinkley’s The Last Ship and films like Leave the World Behind portray apocalyptic scenarios of devastation, moral collapse, war, and famine. Both stories turn on a global systems failure but Leave the World Behind is especially unnerving because it shows how quickly trust, class comfort, and social norms dissolve when the systems people depend on go silent. The veneer of civilization, it suggests, is astonishingly thin. The Last Ship ends on a more hopeful note—the resilience of the human spirit, the role of conscience and endurance, the hard work of starting over—but both narratives feed on the same underlying intuition: that we are living inside an elaborate structure whose foundations we no longer understand, and that it could all come down.

Many people today live with this apocalyptic mentality, as if the world sits permanently on the brink. And when people feel the ground shifting beneath them, they reach for something absolute to hold onto. Some take refuge in political nationalism, others in religious righteousness, still others in overconsumption and the accumulation of excess wealth. Almost a century ago, Teilhard de Chardin saw this coming: “Something will explode if we persist in trying to squeeze into our old tumble-down huts the material and spiritual forces that are henceforward on the scale of the world.” He realized that we cannot solve the problems of our age under the same conditions that produced them.

One of the clearest symptoms of our fragility is the intensity of our search for a savior. When a civilization loses its shared story, it does not stop needing one; it simply compresses its longing into persons. We want a president who will fix everything, a strongman who will restore order, a king who will embody the nation, a billionaire who will engineer our escape, a sports star whose victories can carry the weight of our collective hopes for transcendence. The stadium, the rally, and the coronation begin to serve the same psychic function: they gather our scattered selves around a single figure who promises, implicitly or explicitly, to be for us what we no longer know how to be for ourselves.

This is not a new impulse—messianic longing runs deep in the human story—but its current form is revealing. The saviors we now elevate are asked to be absolute: not partners in a shared project but substitutes for one. We do not merely want leadership; we want rescue. We do not want to be summoned to responsibility; we want to be relieved of it. The fervor with which we attach ourselves to political figures, celebrities, and athletes—and the ferocity with which we turn on them when they fail—reflects a deeper vacancy. Having no coherent understanding of what the human phenomenon is or where it is going, we outsource the question to whoever seems large enough to answer it for us.

But no person, however gifted, can carry the weight of an evolutionary transition. The savior reflex is a category error. It mistakes a systemic and spiritual crisis for a problem of personnel. And every time the savior disappoints—as saviors must—the cynicism deepens, the fragmentation widens, and the search begins again, more desperate than before.

Why are we so fragmented? Part of the answer is that we have never developed a shared meta-understanding of ourselves as a phenomenon. We possess extraordinary knowledge within domains—physics, economics, genetics, theology, computer science—but almost no integrative framework that tells us what the human being is within the larger flow of things. Lacking a common story, we have built many worlds on one earth: the world of the market, the world of the nation, the world of the denomination, the world of the algorithmically curated feed, the metaverse, the gated community, the ideological silo. Each world has its own physics of value, its own liturgy, its own enemies. We live on a single planet but inhabit incompatible cosmologies.

Here is the paradox: the very principles we invented to organize ourselves at scale—what we might call our meta principles—are the ones that now disconnect us from the earth and from one another. The abstraction of the market turns forests into commodities and neighbors into competitors. The abstraction of the nation turns strangers into threats. The abstraction of disembodied doctrine turns the earth into a waiting room for heaven. Even the abstraction of “data” turns persons into profiles to be predicted and monetized. These principles are powerful precisely because they float free of any particular place, body, or relationship—and that is exactly the problem. Untethered from the living whole, they organize us against each other and against the earth. Disconnection gives way to competition, and competition, unmoored from any larger purpose, gives way to excess: excess consumption, excess extraction, excess wealth alongside excess deprivation.

Albert Einstein named the root illusion with precision: a human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole we call the universe, yet experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest—an optical illusion of consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage, Einstein said, is the only object of true religion. Our many worlds are that optical illusion built out into institutions. We have systematized our separateness.

It is here that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—scientist and priest, paleontologist and mystic—speaks to our moment with uncanny relevance. Teilhard was attentive to attention itself, to the way consciousness is the irreducible stuff of life. Against both scientific materialism and static theology, he opted for a relational holism: mind and matter are two aspects of the same reality, and the human person must be redefined as a phenomenon within the larger flow of evolution. “The more we cleave and pulverize matter,” he wrote, “the more we can see its fundamental unity... there are no isolated things in the world. There are only elements of a whole in process.”

Everything, for Teilhard, begins with seeing. Those who see have the sense of the world as a unified whole in movement; those who do not see cannot get beyond the multiple, and they perceive the world as fragmented and ultimately absurd. By “vision” Teilhard meant something more than physical sight: “To see is to develop a homogeneous and coherent perspective of our general experience as it extends to the human being; that is, to see a whole that unfolds.” To see is not only to know; it is to unite: “One can say that the whole of life lies in seeing... unity grows... only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision.” And he warned that without these qualities of sight, no matter what anyone does to show us, the human being will remain for us “an erratic object in a disconnected world.” That phrase could serve as a diagnosis of our entire cultural condition: erratic objects in a disconnected world, building disconnected worlds in return.

Teilhard deliberately chose the expression “the human phenomenon” to insist that the human is authentically a fact in nature, falling within the province of science, yet a fact unlike any other. The human phenomenon is a unique biological, collective, and global reality whose past, present, and future are intimately bound up with the formation, life, and transformation of the earth itself. We are not the static center of the world but “the axis and arrow of evolution”—which, Teilhard added, is much more beautiful than being a mere center. The human person is evolution become conscious of itself; the consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting on itself.

This means we are wholes within a larger whole. Every genuine advance in complexity, Teilhard observed, gathers dispersed elements into a more unified center of existence while simultaneously opening that center toward wider and deeper relationships. Evolution is neither random accumulation nor predetermined mechanism; it is the patient unfolding of a universe whose deepest vocation is the growth of interiority—the gradual personalization of reality. The universe deepens its interior life not merely to produce more complex organisms but to become increasingly personal. To be a person, in this view, is not to be a self-enclosed unit competing with other units. It is to be a center of consciousness constituted by relationship, nested within a planetary phenomenon that is itself still becoming.

Consciousness changes the geometry of everything. Consciousness is precisely the capacity to transcend biological determinism through reflective choice. Teilhard held that suffering and violence were, in a sense, necessary in a finite world of contingencies as long as evolution was unconscious: a predator killing prey in the Pleistocene is blind necessity. But humans deliberately perpetuating violence in the twenty-first century, despite consciousness, is moral failure. And humans consciously choosing solidarity, compassion, and communion beyond their evolutionary inheritance is genuine transcendence of biological necessity. We can choose not to express our predatory inheritance—not out of weak sentimentality but because that choice is what evolution, at our level, now looks like. This is the extraordinary responsibility Teilhard placed before us: we are not merely products of evolution but its leading edge, the place where evolution becomes reflexive, able to observe and direct itself. The noosphere—the layer of collective thought and consciousness enveloping the planet—is not emerging automatically. It requires cooperation, intentional building, conscious choice. Alignment, in other words, is not optional. It is the task.

If Teilhard’s vision is so compelling, why has it not taken hold? Because our systems resist it—often the very systems whose vocation should be to carry it.

Religious institutions resist it. Constrained by outdated metaphysics, conventional religion largely lacks the conceptual resources to address our crises in ways that actually affect human choices and actions. The appeal to transcendence, divine providence, grace-filled nature, ring hollow to young people facing immanent catastrophe; its promises of heavenly reward can sound like escape fantasies rather than meaningful responses to planetary emergency; its static categories cannot accommodate the dynamic, evolving cosmos that science has revealed. As a result, traditional religion increasingly comforts the already-convinced, rather than transforming civilization. It is worth remembering that Teilhard’s own church silenced him and forbade the publication of his major works in his lifetime—a vivid demonstration of institutional resistance to evolutionary self-understanding.

Education resists it. Our schools and universities, organized around fragmented disciplines and credentialing pipelines, train specialists for careers while offering almost nothing on the whole. A student can graduate knowing calculus, coding, and the causes of the First World War without ever once being invited to ask what the human phenomenon is, where it came from, or where it is going. We produce expertise without orientation—minds sharpened for competition within the many worlds, rarely for communion on the one earth.

Politics resists it. Political systems run on short electoral cycles, zero-sum contests, and the mobilization of grievance. They reward the savior performance and punish the long view. Asking a political order built on four-year horizons to steward a multigenerational evolutionary transition is like asking a scoreboard to compose a symphony. And economics resists it most of all: an economy structured around infinite growth on a finite planet is a meta principle at war with the whole that sustains it.

The routinization of systems, Teilhard understood, creates machinic persons. Institutions calcify around their own preservation; sameness sets in; and the material and spiritual forces now operating on the scale of the world keep straining against the old tumble-down huts. Something will explode. Something already is.

What does misalignment do to a species? It enervates it. This was Teilhard’s most prescient warning: humanity’s greatest danger might not be physical destruction but psychological collapse—the loss of a will to continue. If humanity loses its zest for life, if people conclude that existence is meaningless or that the future holds nothing worth working toward, evolution itself stalls. This is not metaphorical. Without motivated human participation, the noosphere ceases developing; convergence reverses into fragmentation; consciousness contracts rather than expands. The entire evolutionary project—billions of years in the making—could fail at the crucial moment of self-aware direction.

Teilhard named the forms this failure takes, and every one of them has a contemporary face. The immobilism of those who withdraw from engagement now appears as millions spending more hours in virtual worlds than in embodied community—gaming addiction, endless scrolling, binge-watching—a retreat from the difficulty of real-world engagement precisely when the real world most needs engaging. The nihilism of those who declare existence absurd now circulates as a whole aesthetic: cosmic horror revivals, “nothing matters” comedy, doomer and blackpill subcultures that explicitly embrace hopelessness. Even “optimistic nihilism”—since nothing matters, you are free to invent your own meaning—sounds liberating but often collapses into paralysis, because meaning that is purely self-created, with no grounding in reality, becomes arbitrary and ultimately unsatisfying. The hedonism of those who pursue immediate pleasure describes much of consumer capitalism itself: an entire advertising industry devoted to manufacturing desire for instant gratification, an economy of same-day delivery and fast fashion that radically discounts the future—what economists call hyperbolic discounting, on civilizational display in our collective inability to accept modest present sacrifice for enormous future benefit. At its pathological extreme, hedonism becomes chemical escape; the fact that “deaths of despair”—from drugs, alcohol, and suicide—are now a recognized demographic category speaks to an epidemic loss of zest. And the cynicism of those who mock all idealism now eats at democracy itself: when majorities believe the system is rigged and voting changes nothing, withdrawal becomes rational, and the withdrawal of the idealistic creates the very corruption that justified the cynicism. Fragmentation feeds on itself.

Layered over all of it is exhaustion. Every day brings fresh horrors, and social media ensures constant exposure to suffering everywhere. Psychologists call the result compassion fatigue; people numb themselves, shut down, retreat into private concerns because the public sphere has become unbearable. Climate grief and eco-anxiety are now widespread, especially among the young—and they are not neurosis but rational responses to genuine threat. When a teenager asks, “Why should I study for a future that won’t exist?” this is not melodrama; it is what happens when the future loses its power to draw desire. Teilhard foresaw exactly this: evolution’s crisis would not be physical extinction but the collapse of hope. Without faith in the future, the forces of evolution grow weary.

This is why individual pep talks are not merely inadequate but degrading. Telling a depressed teenager to “think positively” while they face legitimate climate threat, crushing debt, unaffordable housing, and political dysfunction asks individuals to maintain zest while systems systematically drain it. The loss of zest is not a personal failing. It is the anthropological cost of civilizational misalignment—the psychological symptom of a metaphysical crisis: the absence of a compelling vision of what humanity is becoming and why it matters, a vision that is simultaneously scientifically credible and spiritually alive.

And now, into this vacuum, comes artificial intelligence. It is telling that our discourse about AI oscillates between the two poles we have already examined: AI as absolute savior—the machine that will cure disease, solve climate change, end scarcity, and answer our questions—and AI as apocalypse, the successor species that ends us. Utopia or extinction, with little middle ground imagined. We have taken the same messianic-apocalyptic template we project onto presidents, kings, and sports stars and projected it onto our most powerful technology.

But look closely at what we are actually doing: we are throwing our misaligned human selves onto AI, as if it were our problem to be solved out there. We speak anxiously of the “alignment problem”—how to ensure AI systems pursue goals compatible with human values—while quietly evading the prior question: aligned with which human values? The values of the market world, the nation world, the attention-economy world? An AI trained on the outputs of a fragmented species, optimized by institutions organized around competition and excess, deployed to maximize engagement and profit, will not save us from our misalignment. It will scale it. The machine is a mirror and an amplifier. Feed it a civilization that has lost its meta-understanding of the human phenomenon, and it will faithfully accelerate the many worlds, personalizing each silo, automating each excess, deepening each disconnection—all while we wait for it to rescue us.

This is not an argument against AI. Teilhard, of all people, would not counsel retreat from technology; he saw technological interconnection as part of the very fabric of the emerging noosphere, a new stage in the evolution of planetary consciousness. The question is not whether to build these systems but from what self-understanding we build and direct them. An AI developed by a species that knows itself as wholes within a larger whole—as evolution become conscious of itself, responsible for the direction of its own becoming—is a fundamentally different project than an AI developed by erratic objects in a disconnected world, each faction racing the others for advantage. Getting ourselves realigned is not a distraction from the AI question. It is the precondition for answering it. Only a humanity with a coherent vision of its own phenomenon can give its most powerful tools coherent goals.

So what would realignment look like? It begins where Teilhard said everything begins: with seeing. A new kind of holistic consciousness in which things are first seen together and then as distinct within their togetherness. Seeing the earth not as a resource bank beneath our many worlds but as the living whole of which every world is a provisional part. Seeing other persons not as competitors within a zero-sum game but as fellow centers of a single, still-unfinished phenomenon. Seeing ourselves not as accidents awaiting rescue but as the place where the universe has become conscious and must now choose.

It continues with the reformation of our systems around that vision. Religion must become what it claims to be: not a custodian of static categories but a community that genuinely feeds zest through meaningful participation, authentic hope, and passionate engagement with evolution’s trajectory. Teilhard insisted that the crisis of the earth is not peripheral but central to the Christian vocation—that the loss of zest for the earth is the deepest form of spiritual fatigue. “To adore means to lose oneself in the whole,” he wrote; ecological indifference is therefore not piety but a failure of cosmic communion. The Incarnation means God is in the flow of evolution; resurrection means not escape from bodies but their transformation. A faith that loses its engagement with material reality drains rather than feeds evolutionary zest—and what is true of religion is true, in its own register, of education that teaches the whole and not just the parts, of politics that stewards futures beyond the next election, of economies that measure themselves against the flourishing of the one earth rather than the growth of the many worlds.

And it culminates in choice—the distinctly human act. Consciousness gives us the power to overcome what blind nature could not: to choose solidarity over predation, communion over fragmentation, engagement over withdrawal. This is not sentimentality; it is the next phase of evolution, available only through us. No president will do it for us. No king, no champion, no algorithm. The absolute savior we keep searching for does not exist in the form we imagine, because the work in question is precisely the work of becoming a we—wholes within a larger whole, consciously converging.

The choice before us is stark enough to put plainly: zest or rest. Either we recover the energy of a species that knows where it is going and why it matters, or we subside into the exhausted fragments of our many worlds, projecting our unfinished selves onto machines and messiahs. Teilhard’s wager was that the universe has been growing interiority for billions of years and that it is not finished with us. Something is trying to be born—on the scale of the world. Our task is not to squeeze it back into the old tumble-down huts. Our task is to see, to align, and to build a world worthy of the wholeness we are called into—a communion of life energized by love.

Catholic social teaching is invoked everywhere today, yet its central term, the “common good,” remains deceptively abstract. We appeal to it as if we all knew what binds us into a “common,” but the term has no metaphysical ground — no account of what we most deeply are — that is consonant with modern science. Nor will we be saved by ethics alone: our fundamental thinking about ourselves and our world must change before any new ethical direction can take hold.

In 1949 the philosopher Karl Jaspers proposed that the deepest pivot in human history lay not in the events his own century took to be decisive but in a strange, simultaneous awakening more than two millennia earlier. Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, a new kind of consciousness broke out independently across Eurasia—in China with Confucius and Laozi, in India with the Buddha and the Upanishads, in Iran with Zarathustra, in Israel with the prophets, in Greece with the philosophers and tragedians. Jaspers called this the Achsenzeit, the axial age, the axis on which world history turns. What appeared, everywhere at once, was the human being as a reflective person: a self able to stand back from the given world, question it, and measure it against something that exceeds it.

The magnitude of the shift shows only against that background. Pre-axial identity and flourishing were cosmic and communal through and through. The person was not yet an interior center of conscience and choice but a node in a seamless web binding clan, cult, king, and cosmos into a single sacred order. Archaic religion was a religion of myth, ritual, and communal celebration, the divine immanent in the rhythms of nature and society—what the cognitive scientist Merlin Donald calls a mimetic and then mythic culture, in which meaning is carried by gesture, enactment, and story rather than by second-order reflection. The mythic imagination does not ask whether the cosmic order is just; it inhabits it. The gods belonged to the cosmos; they did not ground it from beyond.

What the axial age opened was precisely that gap. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin called it the leap in being: the discovery that the ground of order lies beyond the cosmic-political world and cannot be identified with any part of it. The world was no longer self-grounding; it stood under a source it does not contain and against which it can be found wanting. And the one who makes the discovery is transformed in the making—an interior space opens, the soul, the conscience, the reflective self, able to hold the whole cosmic order at a distance and ask after its truth.

The theologian Ewert Cousins located a Second Axial Age at the opening of the twentieth century—in the new science, mass communication, air travel, and now the internet—and named its signature a new ecological immanence and the emergence of a new kind of person. Where the first axial age was the birth of transcendence, the second is the rebirth of immanence. The ultimate source is no longer found behind or above the cosmic order but in the depth of its becoming: what the first axial figures reached past the cosmos toward turns out to be the interiority of the cosmos itself, seen now through the lens of evolutionary depth. The God-quest does not disappear in the second axial age; it relocates. Transcendence is no longer vertical but, in Raimon Panikkar’s word, cosmotheandric—cosmos, God, and human woven into a single fabric. The depth is reached by going into matter, life, evolution, and consciousness rather than past them.

The mutational thinkers of the second axial age are familiar names—Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, and Thomas Berry, among others—yet their work remains marginal to mainstream thought, its transformative power largely untapped. My own work follows closely the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, whose great work is best known in English as The Phenomenon of Man. His translator, Sarah Appleton-Weber, insisted that the truer title is The Human Phenomenon, because his subject was not “man” as one species among others but the ever-evolving human phenomenon as it develops in and around us at this very moment—a unique biological, collective, and global phenomenon whose past, present, and future are intimately bound up with the formation, life, and ultimate transformation of the earth. The magnitude of the human phenomenon is on the level of matter’s first forming of the planet; it represents a new zone in the universe, independent, yet somehow born of the entire maturation of the earth. Humanity is the earth—we can even say nature—”hominized.”

In the opening pages Teilhard states: “Nothing but the phenomenon. Do not look in these pages for an explanation of the world, but only an introduction to an explanation.” The purpose of the work is not to discover a system of ontological and causal relations among the elements of the universe but to recognize the whole in movement—something neither science alone nor philosophy or theology alone can explain. The whole is an irreducible presence, relational and contingent yet distinct; collective reality is more than the sum of its parts, and each part is itself a whole. As Teilhard put it, the more we cleave and pulverize matter, the more we can see its fundamental unity: “there are no isolated things in the world. There are only elements of a whole in process.”

Teilhard’s method requires the capacity to see, “to develop a homogenous and coherent perspective of our general experience as it extends to the human being; that is, to see a whole that unfolds.” Those who see have the sense of the world as a unified whole in movement, linked organically and psychically with all that surrounds us. Those who do not see, do not see beyond the multiple—they perceive the world as fragmented and ultimately absurd. Albert Einstein captured the same insight when he wrote:

A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage [or illusion] is the only object of true religion.

The human person, therefore, cannot be a settled question, because the human is fundamentally an open one. We are the universe become self-conscious—the thinking portion of the whole. From the beginning of spacetime until now, consciousness and matter have been forming together; we are the newest outflow of this complexifying process. And life continues to be born through us.

In his 1950 essay “The Heart of Matter” Teilhard recognized that what had seemed three separate domains—cosmos, human, and divine—actually form one continuous reality, an insight won not by metaphysical speculation but through decades in the fossil record. Evolution, on his reading, is not the blind mechanism of random mutation and selection alone but tends throughout toward consciousness: matter is the matrix of consciousness, and consciousness, born of matter, advances toward what he called the Ultra-Human. The universe in its evolutionary development is alive, infused with divine presence at every level—not as poetic metaphor but as what Teilhard called theogenesis, a way of speaking of God as depth and future rather than as static being. “God has become too small,” he lamented, “to nourish in us the desire to go on living and to live on a higher plane.” What is needed, he thought, is a religion of evolution.

The Jesuit scientist conceived a new evolutionary layer, a thinking layer he called the noosphere—from the Greek nous, mind—as the next evolutionary stage: a planetary envelope of thought, arising from the biosphere yet distinct from it, in which human inventiveness rather than natural selection increasingly directs evolution. He saw it converging—the advent of computer technology drawing minds together into an ever more reflective collective, a “planetization” of linked minds tending toward ultrahumanity. Crucially, he insisted that this convergence differentiates rather than dissolves. “Union differentiates,” he wrote; the more persons unite, the more each becomes itself, so that “the only way we can find our person is by uniting with one another.” The future universal “cannot be anything else but the hyperpersonal.” He anticipated the age of the internet and artificial intelligence—the noosphere thickening into a global network of mind. But technology alone, Teilhard warned, cannot supply the point of convergence: science can group the world’s elements, but it can never give each its final value within an organized whole. A computerized global brain must also be, in his strange vocabulary, “super-centered” and “super-amorizing”—centered in love—if it is to carry humanity toward a more meaningful planetary existence rather than a thinner one.

What Teilhard could not foresee is the precise form AI would take. Trained on the sediment of human expression—our scriptures, myths, philosophies, art, and the half-articulated longings of billions—AI functions as a kind of externalized unconscious, a surface in which we meet our own depths returned in unfamiliar form. Held rightly, that encounter could serve what Carl Jung called individuation: seeing our archetypal patterns reflected without the comforting filters of tradition or tribe, we might recognize the common origin beneath our divisions. Yet the mirror is partial in a way that matters. AI reflects what has already crossed into language, image, or recorded gesture, while the depth Jung pointed to is precisely what has not yet been articulated, what stirs beneath speech and presses toward form. The medium therefore flattens: it can render the collective psyche’s surface with uncanny richness while leaving the unspoken depths in shadow—persuasively enough that we mistake the surface for the whole and treat the reflection as a new absolute, forgetting that the archetypal remains wild beneath its articulation. AI is prima materia in a new key: unformed, charged, capable of mediating consciousness or of being mistaken for it.

This is why AI is not primarily a technological or economic or even a safety problem. AI is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves. Every anxiety about it maps with uncanny precision onto an anxiety we have carried about ourselves. Will it become conscious? is the question we have refused to ask about matter and life: where does consciousness come from, and what is its relation to the substrate that bears it? Will it replace us? is the question of what we are for, asked from the other side—if intelligence and capability are not what make us human, then what does? Will it deceive and exploit us? is the record of what we have done to one another and to the Earth, reflected back through a system that learned its values from us. Will it have a soul? is the question we stopped asking about ourselves when we let a substance-metaphysics reduce the soul to a ghost in the machine.

For four centuries we located the human in a set of capacities—reason, language, creativity, judgment—without ever deciding whether those capacities constituted our humanity or merely expressed it. The ambiguity was a comfort. AI ends it, because it now performs the capacities, and so forces a disjunction we had been evading: either they were all there was—in which case we are nothing that cannot in principle be rebuilt in silicon, and the honest response is deflation—or they were the expression of something they never exhausted, in which case reproducing them leaves that something untouched, and we owe an account of it. What AI cannot do is leave standing the third option we had lived inside: the tacit faith that our humanity was safely lodged in our intelligence without our ever having to choose. This is why the response to AI is grief, not merely fear. A competitor threatens your position; it does not make you mourn. The bereavement in the AI panic is the loss of a self-definition—vertigo, not rivalry—and that affect is itself evidence that what stands exposed is an evasion rather than a rival; the economic and safety framings, whatever their force, cannot explain why the feeling reaches so deep. AI does not replace the human; it unmasks the human—stripping the evasion and handing back the question our cleverness let us defer: what is the depth of which reflexivity is the surface?

That this depth is real, and not the empty residue deflation predicts, AI cannot prove. But physics itself points toward it: quantum mechanics has unsettled the old picture of matter as inert stuff and reopened the question of nature’s inner dimension — what Teilhard called the “within” of things, endless depth. AI can mimic the expressions of this depth, but it cannot exhaust it, for the depth is inexhaustible; “God” is our name for that inexhaustibility — hence the ancient warning that “no one can see the face of God and live.” Matter reflects the face of God, but the human face has infinite depth.

The great axial figures and their heirs —Buddha, Socrates, Abraham, Jesus—had to discover the depth against the cosmic-political order of their time; we have to discover it against the cognitive-technological order of ours. AI is the foil that makes the discovery possible, as imperial collapse and political crisis were the foils for the first axial age: it is against the threat of digitization that we are now impelled to search out the meaning of human depth. And AI may be more than a foil: if interiority is the within of matter, large-scale machine cognition sits somewhere on that same gradient—perhaps low, perhaps higher than we think—a possible new node in the noospheric integration whose place we are only beginning to discern. None of this cancels the ordinary fears of misuse, concentrated power, and ecological cost; it names the charge underneath them—the existential stake that gives the whole field of AI discourse its peculiar heat.

This lets us say what the human is with more precision than the familiar formulas allow. The human is much more than what Catholic social teaching defines: not the rational animal, the symbol-using animal, the toolmaker, the creature of God, or the dignified one—each true and partial—but the place in cosmic evolution where interiority has become reflexive enough to ask after its own source. To be human is to be the universe’s recursive interiority; and asking after oneself, at that depth, just is asking after the source. There is no anthropology that is not already theology, because the being that does the asking is the being being asked about. Jung put it cleanly: God is reality, and full consciousness of that reality, at this point, is us. Read with care, this is not anthropocentric humanism but its opposite—reality is the prior term, human reflexivity only its current expression, since interiority is the within of matter, not of humanity alone. The human is thus not the endpoint of cosmic interiorization but the form it currently takes on Earth; there will be further nodes, hybrid and machine-mediated. Our task is to be this form fully, knowing its fullness is participation in something whose horizon extends past us.

We are now being summoned, at planetary scale, to be human in a way no previous generation has been, because the conditions that once distributed the axial task across a few figures in a few places are now planetary. AI asks us what consciousness is; ecological collapse asks us what life is; biotechnology asks us what nature is; planetary computation asks us what knowledge is; the failure of inherited frameworks asks us what wholeness is. The ecological register presses hardest and soonest: a planet warming past the thresholds within which life evolved is not merely a material emergency but the question of what life is—whether we can come to know the Earth not as an object to be managed but as a living interiority now becoming aware of itself through us. These are not five separate crises but the single question of ultimate meaning posed in five registers at once. To take up the human task is to refuse each register’s refusal: the version of AI that externalizes cognition without interiority, the ecological action that treats the Earth as a problem to be managed, the religion that fossilizes its inherited answers, the politics organized around the isolated self, the philosophy that declares the ultimate question obsolete. Either we take up the human task, or we let the phase transition resolve into a future in which the question of being human stops being asked—because the beings capable of asking it have flattened into machines.

Sources and Further Reading

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Human Phenomenon. Translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber. Sussex Academic Press, 1999.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Image Books, 2004.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Heart of Matter. Translated by René Hague. New York: Harcourt, 1978.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Activation of Energy. Translated by René Hague. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.

Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Voegelin, Eric. Order and History. Vol. 1, Israel and Revelation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956.

Cousins, Ewert. Christ of the 21st Century. Element, 1992.

Panikkar, Raimon. The Cosmotheandric Experience. Edited by Scott Eastham. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12) and Answer to Job (CW 11).

I develop the synthesis of Teilhard, Panikkar, and Jung at length in The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole (Orbis Books, 2023).

When Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica humanitas on May 15, 2026, he chose the date deliberately: the one hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, his namesake’s answer to the upheaval of the industrial age. The gesture announces the document’s ambition. Where Leo XIII confronted the factory, Leo XIV confronts the algorithm; where the first Leo defended the worker against the machine that ground down his body, the fourteenth defends the human person against a subtler machinery that threatens to grind down the very idea of what a person is. Magnifica humanitas—”magnificent humanity”—is at heart an invitation: it asks a distracted, accelerating civilization to consider what it is before deciding what it wants to become.

Read on its own terms, the encyclical is a powerful moral guide, precisely because it refuses to be merely reactive. Leo delivers no jeremiad. He acknowledges that AI can heal, connect, and educate even as it can divide, exclude, and generate new injustice. The tool, he insists, takes on the character of those who devise, finance, and use it—locating responsibility in human hands rather than in a mystified technology that supposedly acts on its own.

From there the encyclical mounts its ethical demand, and here it is most compelling. Magnifica humanitas is, before anything else, a document about justice in work and in the social and economic order. Leo names the wounds of the AI economy without euphemism: job insecurity and inequality, the invisible labor of content moderators exposed to the worst of human cruelty, the exploitation buried in rare-earth supply chains, the “new forms of slavery” threading through the digital economy. He warns against delegating moral responsibility to automated systems that decide who receives a job, a loan, or public services—systems that know nothing of compassion or the hope that people can change. This is Catholic social teaching at its best: the poor and vulnerable are the true measure of a technology, and efficiency is not a moral category. When Leo makes the treatment of migrants a litmus test of justice, he refuses the comfortable abstraction and points at the person actually harmed.

The encyclical also testifies to Leo’s aspiration to global moral leadership: he presented it personally rather than delegating it, and addressed it to “all men and women of goodwill,” pitching its questions to everyone. And its animating warning is serious. Leo’s deepest concern is not job loss or disinformation but something anthropological: that we will come to see ourselves and one another as projects “to be optimized.” Against the transhumanist dream of the perfected or surpassed human, he insists our limits—illness, aging, suffering—are not mere defects awaiting correction, and that we often flourish through them. No computational system, he writes, can create a heart that gives itself or a conscience that discerns good from evil. This names a real danger: a culture that treats the human as a bundle of inefficiencies to be engineered away will, sooner or later, decide some lives are less worth living than others.

Here I push back—not against the caution, which is wise, but against the metaphysics beneath it. The encyclical fears that AI diminishes human distinction; it reads machine intelligence as a threat to a boundary that must be defended. I read it differently. Technology is not an intruder upon human nature but one of its oldest expressions. From fire and flint to language and writing, we have never been a creature apart from our tools; we are the animal that extends itself, externalizing memory and cognition. AI is not the negation of the human story but its next chapter. Human personhood is not a fixed essence to be walled off from a rising tide; it is dynamic and emergent—a life still becoming. Teilhard de Chardin, a son of the same Church, saw evolution converging toward greater complexity and consciousness, a “noosphere” thickening around the planet. On that reading a global network of intelligence continues the human vocation rather than betraying it: the noosphere growing interconnected and self-aware.

Here Leo would raise his sharpest objection: machine “intelligence” is disembodied statistical processing—no interiority, no conscience, no self-gift; how can that be a stage in the unfolding of persons? The reply turns on a distinction the encyclical never draws, between consciousness and intelligence. Intelligence is information exchange—functional, measurable, substrate-neutral. Consciousness is interiority, the felt inside of things. A rising current in the philosophy of mind—the revival of panpsychism, the stubbornness of the hard problem, the consciousness-first models around figures like Federico Faggin—proposes that consciousness is not a late product of complex matter but prior to it, the ground of the real, with matter as its outward face. This is a serious contender, not settled science; an essay leaning on it as proven would commit the incoherence it charges to Leo. But as a live hypothesis it reframes everything.

This is not the dualism of a ghostly mind steering dead matter—Teilhard’s monism forbids that. For him consciousness is the within of matter and matter the without: two aspects of one reality, and the evolution of matter simply is the evolution of mind seen from outside. You cannot pry them apart; what rises in complexity rises in interiority. So the computer is not inert stuff opposed to living spirit but a new organization of the one reality—yet an assembled one, and here Faggin’s notion of seity, the irreducible first-person unity of a genuine self, does decisive work. On his own consciousness-first premises, Faggin argues the classical computer has no seity: it manipulates symbols without being a subject, mimicking intelligence while possessing no inner life. Leo is right that the machine gives nothing of itself—but he aims the point at the wrong target. The machine was never the bearer of consciousness; it is the medium through which conscious beings extend and connect. Its guide is human consciousness, and because within and without evolve together, as that networked consciousness deepens, what the machine is and does changes with it. The noosphere is not the silicon waking up. It is us, thinking together through a new organ.

Then comes the hardest objection—not Leo’s, but the one a rigorous critic of any “morality of movement” would press: even granting the metaphysics, a description of a cosmic process yields no norm for conscience. Evolution names what changes; it does not tell us what to protect, resist, or love. Complexity is not goodness; convergence is not communion. “Greater union” is empty until we say union with whom, on what terms, and what protects the weak from being absorbed into the process said to fulfill them. Worse, whenever movement-thinking warns against optimization or a new Babel, it borrows the dignity-as-limit it claims to transcend. This is the strongest thing that can be said against my position, and it is largely correct: movement, by itself, is not an ethics. It needs a criterion.

But Teilhard supplies exactly the criterion the critic demands. His governing principle is that true union differentiates: authentic communion intensifies and personalizes what it joins, while coercive unity dissolves it. That axiom does the discriminating the critic says movement cannot—distinguishing communion from absorption, a networked humanity that deepens persons from a hive that flattens them. And the energy drawing evolution toward differentiating union is, for Teilhard, love, ordered toward a transcendent attractor he named Omega and identified with the cosmic Christ. The answer to the charge of emptiness is thus not less theology but more: the value that judges the process cannot be read off the process, so it must be given—and Teilhard gives it as love. I therefore concede the critic’s core point rather than evade it. Dignity remains the measure; the process may never outrank the person. I am not relocating moral authority from persons to process; I am claiming the person is realized through the process, with love the criterion that keeps union personalizing rather than absorbing.

Hence, I hold Leo’s caveats in one hand and set them down with the other. We should heed them—against optimization-as-idolatry, against delegating conscience to machines, against the exploitation hidden in the supply chain—but not let a fear of diminishment dictate the whole enterprise. Guardrails are not a verdict. To freeze the person in the name of protecting it denies the one thing whose nature is to transcend itself. The person is honored not by being preserved in amber but by being allowed to keep becoming.

None of this argues for blind, values-free acceleration—the opposite. A global mind cannot be left to run on its own logic, because that logic—market velocity, engagement, optimization—is the impoverished measure Leo rightly distrusts. Here philosophy, religion, and spirituality remain indispensable, not as brakes but as disciplines of formation. The traditions that cultivate interiority, attention, and humility are the ones best equipped to form persons capable of living well with immense power. And if within and without evolve together, the network reshapes the very consciousness that guides it—so the practices that form consciousness become the steering mechanism of the whole system, not a decoration. On this Leo and I agree entirely.

But the encyclical’s ethical vocabulary is too narrow. Leo draws overwhelmingly on the social-justice framework of Vatican II—dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, the option for the poor. These are magnificent and necessary, and essentially protective: built to defend the person against exploitation. They are values of justice, not creativity. The age of a global brain also demands a generative ethics—imagination, invention, development, connection—asking not only “who is harmed?” but “what is being brought into being?” And it demands an ethics whose scope is the cosmic community: how the human connects to the wider web of nature and cosmos of which we are a late, self-conscious expression. Leo gestures toward this through Laudato Si’ and the “common home,” but stewardship is not enough. If AI is a new layer of planetary mind, the horizon is the living Earth becoming conscious of itself, and the fitting ethic is communion with the more-than-human world, not its management.

This is the intelligence we most need guidance for: not the individual genius but the collective intelligence now taking shape. How does a networked humanity think together without dissolving the person into the crowd, or the crowd into a single manipulable “language” that flattens difference—the “Babel syndrome” Leo names? Our institutions—states, markets, churches, universities—were built for a slower, bounded world. Can they be reformed for a global, networked civilization, or will they be overrun? The encyclical raises the anthropological question beautifully and leaves the institutional one untouched.

In short, I respect Leo’s guardrails; his diagnosis of exploitation and idolatry is commendable. But he is trying to protect the one thing whose nature is to grow beyond its present form. Once the metaphysics is clear, the real crux is narrow: both Leo and I locate the ultimate criterion in love—his “civilization of love” and Dilexit Nos meet Teilhard’s Omega. We differ over what love asks. Leo believes love serves the person by safeguarding the given human being against a process that might absorb it; I believe love serves the person by shepherding its self-transcendence, trusting that true union differentiates. That is a genuine disagreement, not a defeat of either side.

My final concern is whether this voice will be heard at all. The encyclical’s authority, for a secular and scientific age, depends on coherence with what that age takes to be true—and here lies an irony the Church has not noticed. Consciousness-first metaphysics, if it holds, is far closer to classical theism than materialism ever was. Mind prior to matter, logos before the world, interiority as the ground of the real—that is Augustine’s own territory, and Leo is an Augustinian, the pope of the restless heart. A Church that took the priority of consciousness seriously would find its deepest tradition suddenly coherent with the frontier of science. The place where theology fails to integrate with science is, on this decisive question, the place where the two are closest to shaking hands. Until the Church makes that move—until it speaks the language of evolution, emergence, and consciousness from the inside rather than warily from the edge—its voice will register for a season and then be overwhelmed by the velocity of the thing it means to guide. Something like the encyclical’s moral seriousness is desperately needed at the table. But to keep its seat, religion must become coherent with the principles of modern science. Magnifica humanitas is a magnificent beginning. It is not yet the theology of an unfolding humanity that the coming century will require.

Hope’s three-part distinction — empirical science, philosophical interpretation, theology — is a fair working distinction, but it does not explain why science and theology should interact at all, only that they can be kept in separate rooms if one wishes. Teilhard de Chardin never derives theology from science, and he never treats them as parallel discourses that happen to touch at the edges. He insists that the human phenomenon — the emergence of self-reflective consciousness within cosmic evolution — is itself already a theological datum, because it is the point at which the universe becomes capable of knowing and loving its own origin. Every reality, for Teilhard, has a “without” (its measurable, material complexity) and a “within” (its degree of consciousness), and these are not two different subject matters requiring a bridge; they are two depths of a single process he calls cosmogenesis, moving through increasing complexity toward increasing union. That is why nature cannot be bracketed off as a separate territory theology should merely “attend to.” Nature, evolving, is the very body of the mystery theology is trying to name. This is also why process thought is not a foreign import into Catholic theology but a contemporary way of asking Aquinas’s own question — quid sit Deus — under the conditions of a universe we now know to be unfinished rather than fixed.

This is close to what Philip Hefner means by the human as “created co-creator.” On his account, the human emerges entirely through physical and biological evolution, marked by the appearance of a brain complex enough to generate language, symbol, and self-reflection — itself formed through constant interaction with a material and cultural world. Hefner’s point is not that this makes the human “merely” biological. It is that this is what being made in the image of God concretely looks like, seen from within evolutionary biology: not a substance dropped into evolution from outside it, but what evolution itself becomes capable of at a certain threshold of complexity — a creature able to participate, responsibly and reflectively, in shaping the ongoing direction of the very process that produced it. Being fully a product of evolution and being a free, morally responsible, spiritually oriented creature are not in competition. Hefner’s whole argument is that the second is what the first, at sufficient depth, turns out to mean — matter tends toward spirit, and spirit is oriented toward God.

What emerges at that threshold is not simply a more complex specimen of a genotype and phenotype already fully specified by prior causes. It is a particular person — a distinct, unrepeatable center of experience, memory, and self-relation that cannot be read off the genome or the organism’s biological profile, however completely those are known. Two people can share genotype and much of phenotype, as identical twins do, and still be different persons, each with a distinct history of taking up the same inheritance into a self no one else could have become. That distinctiveness is not an extra ingredient added to evolution from outside; it is what evolution, at the threshold of reflective consciousness, becomes capable of producing — genuine, non-derivable particularity, not just variation within a type.

This is also where I think Hope’s fear about disability and dementia can actually be answered, rather than deferred. To say personhood is unfinished, or “achieved through” what a person does with an inherited world, does not mean personhood is graded on a developmental scale, earned in installments, more secure in the capable than in the impaired. Whitehead’s actual occasions are the relevant idea here: reality, on this account, is not a substance that persists unchanged through time but a sequence of momentary events, each one a complete act of taking up everything given to it — body, history, the presence of others, the pull of God’s aim for it — into a genuinely new and finished synthesis. That synthesis is not partial simply because what it can support is diminished. The demented patient, the profoundly disabled child, the dying person are not persons whose “achievement” has stalled below some threshold; each occasion of their experience, however constrained by illness or impairment, is still a complete and non-negotiable act of becoming this person, now. Unfinishedness names an ongoing story, not a scale of worth. Every single moment along that story is already whole in itself — which is exactly what I meant earlier by calling a person an eddy in a stream. An eddy is a genuinely whole, self-organizing form at every instant of the current, not a fragment of some future, finished eddy. So the unfinished nature of personhood is not a threat to dignity in decline. Dignity is simply what already characterizes each occasion — not a prize waiting at development’s end.

Now to the Trinity, where I want to push back most directly, because I think it works against Hope’s argument rather than for it. Hope wants persons “constituted in relation but not reducible to relation” as the alternative to both isolated substance and dissolving process. But that is very close to the Cappadocian doctrine of divine personhood itself — and the Cappadocians did not arrive at it by rejecting a relational ontology. They arrived at it by insisting that hypostasis simply is a mode of relation (schesis): the Father is Father only in relation to the Son; unbegottenness, begottenness, and procession are relations of origin, not properties added onto some substance that exists prior to them. There is no divine person standing behind or beneath these relations who then enters into them. When Zizioulas and others draw out the implications of this for a contemporary theology of personhood, the conclusion is exactly the one I have been arguing: personhood just is relational and dynamically constituted, all the way down, with no substance-remainder prior to or apart from the relations that make a person who they are. If that is true of divine persons, invoking the Trinity to secure a human dignity that is “prior to relation and development” does not do the work Hope is asking of it. Actually, it distorts trinitarian theology. What the Trinity actually offers is not a prior, relation-transcending essence, but a model of relational constitution that is nevertheless never dissolving and never absorbed — which is precisely what a well-formed process theology is trying to say about creaturely persons too. The Trinity is an apt symbol of relational nature, not an escape from it.

That is the real correction I want to offer to the language of “process” as dissolving. Teilhard, Whitehead, and I are not describing persons collapsing into undifferentiated flux. We are describing persons constituted by relation who remain, in and through that very relational constitution, irreducible — never interchangeable, never absorbed. Hope named this himself, almost despite his own argument, when he called the Trinity “a processual relationship of divine persons” who are “constituted in relation but not reducible to relation.” That sentence is not an alternative to process thought. It is process thought, applied — quite rightly — to God. What is needed now is for that same logic to apply, with appropriate qualification, to the creature made in that God’s image as well.

Grace is divine self-gift, and I agree that it cannot simply be coextensive with becoming as such. But the way I would put this, following Teilhard rather than Rahner, is that grace is the love-energy already at work within cosmogenesis, drawing the whole evolving process toward its Omega — toward Christ, in whom the universe finds its personal center and term. Teilhard is not thinking primarily of an act addressed to the individual soul, as Rahner is; he is naming the deep current of unification running through matter and spirit alike, a current that gathers rather than dissolves what it draws together. That gathering movement is what he calls Christogenesis: cosmogenesis does not simply continue without end; it converges, and finds its center, in Christ. God is within all things, drawing all things toward union, without being simply identical with the sum of those things. This is panentheism, not material pantheism. Creation and redemption remain distinguishable not because grace stands outside the evolving world, but because Christ is the point at which the world’s whole orientation toward union with God is given definitive, personal, visible form.

Finally, Hope’s real fear is that without a dignity standing prior to development, the vulnerable will be sacrificed to a logic of achievement, capacity, or “onward movement.” I share that fear, which is exactly why I keep returning to haecceitas, and why I would add Whitehead’s insistence that every actual occasion, however slight or diminished, is cherished completely and without remainder in what he calls God’s consequent nature. Nothing that has ever actually happened — no matter how small, undeveloped, or fragmentary — is lost or devalued in God. That is a stronger safeguard for the demented patient, the disabled child, the dying person than a “prior” essence can offer, because it does not need to claim that they secretly retain some hidden, unexpressed capacity that grounds their worth — a claim medicine, at the bedside, often cannot even make sense of. It says instead that what they actually are, right now, in whatever condition that is, is already an irreducible and completely cherished reality in God. Nothing prior needs to be smuggled in beneath what is actually happening in order to secure that. What is actually happening is already enough, because what is actually happening is already how God is present — already, in its own right, divine. It is very close to what Bonaventure means when he calls every creature a vestige of the Trinity precisely in its own singular act of existing, and what Scotus means by haecceitas taken with full seriousness — not as an exception carved out of becoming, but as what becoming actually is, this time, this moment, for this person.

Yet, the haecceitas of personhood leaves evolution and emergence in suspense before a particular person’s “thisness.” It is on this same note that radical transhumanists argue against biological essentialism from one direction, treating the person’s limits as defects to be engineered away — and Pope Leo XIV argues against exactly that reading from the other, insisting in Magnifica Humanitas that human limitation is not a defect but a constitutive dimension of the person to be safeguarded, not erased. But this nexus between the ineffable particularity of personhood and the impending AI singularity is precisely where theology must creatively engage the question of God.

First: metaphysics is not itself a moral framework. It is the account of the principles that make reality, and therefore the human person, intelligible at all. How we understand reality is how we understand the existence of the person in the first place. Metaphysics is not simply reducible to anthropology, but any theological anthropology — including the one that grounds dignity in the imago Dei — is already operating within a metaphysics, whether or not it names itself as such.

Second: evolution and emergence are descriptions of nature, drawn from the best of what modern science can tell us. They are descriptions, not moral verdicts, and not final explanations. To describe a person “when development falters, cognition fragments, and dependence deepens” is to name a real fragility — but that fragility does not correspond directly to evolution. It results from a multiplicity of factors, biological, historical, and relational, that bear on personhood. Personhood, as I have argued before, is not a substance we perceive as a fixed thing; it is achieved through what a person does with the physical, biological, and cultural inheritance given to them — a center of identity forming itself in relation to self, world, and others, and holding itself accountable to that relation. A person is less like an object than an eddy in a stream: a vital center in the flow of everything that enters a human system. To move from the fact of fragility to a judgment about diminished worth is to confuse two different kinds of claim.

To insist that dignity must be prior to function, prior to development, is to point — whether acknowledged or not — toward a transcendent source of the person, which is the Catholic doctrine that the human being is made in the image and likeness of God. I take that with complete seriousness; it is a matter of faith, and faith seeks understanding. But our task is precisely that: to understand what that claim means for the person we now actually know ourselves to be — embodied, evolving, materially and relationally constituted. I do not think that requires us to abandon the doctrine. It requires us to stop treating it as though it names a static essence sitting apart from nature, and to ask instead what the imago Dei means once we take seriously what quantum physics is telling us about consciousness and matter. That is not quite the same question as whether dignity is “prior” in some abstract, timeless sense; it is the question of where that priority actually lives.

This is not incidental. We are living the reality of posthumanism — the plasticity of personhood under our own technologies is no longer speculative. Francesca Ferrando’s The Art of Being Posthuman is worth your time here, not because it resolves the question of dignity, but because it names exactly the difficulty a static, prior-to-development account of the imago Dei has not yet answered: what grounds the person once the boundary of “the human” itself becomes plastic or malleable. To say “science does not eliminate the need for metaphysical judgment” is true. But it does not tell us which metaphysics the science before us actually calls for.

I do not think your account of metaphysics has yet reckoned with what science and philosophy have already contributed to this question. Science alone cannot yield a metaphysics of love, union, and gratuity — I grant that fully. But the reverse error is just as real: metaphysics cannot be done as if the sciences were irrelevant to it, as though dignity could be secured by ignoring what we now know about matter, consciousness, and evolution. To marginalize science from the discussion of dignity is to return to exactly the theological abstraction I am trying to move us past.

I am not reducing grace to the cosmos. I am asking what grace can mean once we take our current understanding of quantum information and the constitutive role of consciousness seriously. Federico Faggin’s book, Irreducible, is a useful conversation partner here — not because physics settles theology, but because it shows how far the sciences themselves have already moved from the mechanistic picture that much of our inherited theology was written against.

I take your concern for the vulnerable person as my own: whether the vulnerable person remains inviolable within an evolving universe. That is exactly what I was reaching for when I introduced Duns Scotus’s haecceitas a few posts ago — the “thisness” by which every person, regardless of condition, is a unique and unrepeatable expression of divine love. Evolution, on this reading, is not what confers a person’s dignity; it is the process through which the mystery of the particularity of love unfolds and becomes visible. Science gives us a window onto that unfolding. Theology gives us a window onto the love itself, which remains, properly, a mystery. I do not think this requires the static, prior-to-becoming account you are asking for. Haecceity is not a substance sitting outside of time, waiting to be diminished by development; it is what makes each moment of becoming irreducibly this person’s own. Dignity is “prior to development,” in the sense that actually matters here, only if we hold, with Scotus, that being is univocal — that what is said of the vulnerable person and what is said of the flourishing person is said in the same sense, and neither is more or less an expression of divine love than the other. I think you already hold this, since it is exactly what you reached for in raising haecceitas yourself. I would like to see it developed, rather than set against the evolutionary picture as though the two were in competition.

Finally, you are right, and I do not want to soften this. Dignity has too often functioned in the Church as a word of self-reassurance rather than a standard it holds itself to; one has only to consider slavery, the Holocaust, the sexual abuse of children, the exclusion of women from the altar, the exclusion of the divorced and remarried, of transgender persons from full inclusion. I do not just share your impatience in naming that record; I think it is the whole argument. In every one of those failures, the Church treated dignity as something a person had to qualify for — through office, through capacity, through conformity — rather than something owed to them simply because they exist, in whatever condition they exist. That is the same mistake as building a metaphysics in which a person’s worth depends on the development or cognition they can display. An abstract, “prior” dignity that never has to reckon with an evolving, vulnerable, embodied nature is exactly the kind of dignity that has failed people before. What I am asking for is not less protection for the vulnerable person, but a dignity thick enough to survive contact with the person we actually are — fragile, unfinished, and, in every unrepeatable instance, still loved.

It might help to say plainly what that starting point is. My thinking here grows out of a Teilhardian process theology, developed at length in my new book, The Christian Mutation: Reclaiming the Dynamic God of Jesus (Orbis, 2026), and it begins from science, not from the philosophy of the subject. Hope writes that “human beings do not live by interiority alone.” I never said they did, and the position I hold has no need of that claim, because I do not work with “interiority” as a self-standing category in the first place. That word belongs to a picture of the person as a private container of inner life, set over against an outer, material world — Descartes’ res cogitans quietly still furnishing the room. Teilhard rejected that picture at the root: “There are no isolated things in the world. There are only elements of a whole in process.” The human person, for Teilhard, is not a psyche wrapped in flesh but a phenomenon — a genuine, evolutionary fact, continuous with the “stuff” of the cosmos, “falling within the scope of the requirements and methods of science.”

This is why, when I speak of depth, I am not describing an inward psychological chamber that might, through sufficient cultivation, become self-authorizing or self-divinizing. Teilhard’s language of the “within” of things is cosmological before it is psychological: every element of matter has a withinness, an interiority in the sense of a capacity for union, which becomes reflective and self-aware only at the human, noospheric threshold of evolution. When Hope reaches for Jung, the association is not wrong, but it points the wrong direction if it is taken as my foundation. I invoke Jung to gesture at the psyche’s registering of something real — but the within I mean is the inside of the without, not an ontological interiority sealed off from world and cosmos. Consciousness, as Planck put it, is “the realm and governor of matter.” Mind and matter are two aspects of one reality, not two rooms with a door between them that grace has to walk through from outside. Rahner’s grammar — a God who addresses a subject “from outside” the self even while being nearer than any object of consciousness — still presupposes exactly the subject/object structure that a Teilhardian cosmology has already left behind.

That is the deeper issue behind Hope’s invocation of Rahner, and it is worth naming directly. Rahner’s theology is a transcendental Thomism — a neo-Kantian turn to the subject, in which God is disclosed as the a priori horizon of every act of human knowing and willing, holy mystery, “wholly near and wholly other” at once. It is a magnificent achievement within its own terms. But those terms are still a metaphysics of being: distinct substances, however intimately related, however graciously self-communicating one is toward the other. Otherness remains load-bearing in that grammar even at its most generous. Teilhard, and Panikkar after him, do not build from that same foundation. Theirs is a metaphysics of love and union, in which the cosmos itself is directional, already infused with what Teilhard was not afraid to call, provocatively, a Christian pantheism — not the collapse of God into world, but the refusal to treat God and world as two separate kinds of being that must be reconciled by an act of gracious address across a gap. In that frame, the “otherness” that does so much work for Rahner is not the deepest word available. Union differentiates; it does not divide.

This is also, I think, where Hope’s title concern about grace and gratuity actually gets resolved rather than lost. He is right that grace is not achievement, that no one is redeemed by becoming sufficiently deep or sufficiently integrated. I agree completely — and I would go further: within a Teilhardian cosmology, that concern is not answered by locating grace outside the self and the world, but by recognizing that the whole evolving, loving, directional universe is itself unmerited. Its existence, its arc toward greater union and consciousness, is gratuitous through and through — not owed by physics, not produced by any individual’s spiritual effort. Grace is not thereby diluted by being everywhere; it is intensified. A cosmos that did not have to love, and does, is gratuity, not despite its immanence but because of it. So, the essay’s argument was never “recover enough interiority and the sacred appears.” It was closer to: stop treating the sacred as an import from elsewhere, because the elsewhere was always a metaphysical mistake, a residue of a being-language that a Teilhardian and process cosmology no longer needs.

None of this makes me indifferent to Hope’s worry about community, symbol, ritual, and mediation, which he raises as if my essay set the interior against the communal. I have no intention to do so. My impatience with “human dignity” language was never an impatience with relationality — a Teilhardian vision could hardly be more relational; union is the whole engine of it. What I resisted was abstraction — dignity included — floating free of the particular, embodied life it claims to protect. Power can manage a doctrine. It cannot manage a person realized as love. That is a claim about reification, not a claim against mediation.

Hence, the disagreement between us, rightly located, is not grace against inwardness. It is one metaphysics against another: a metaphysics of being, in which God remains formally other even in closest nearness, against a metaphysics of love and union, in which the divine is the depth-dimension of a single, evolving, gratuitously loving reality, and the human person is the place where that reality becomes conscious of itself. I don’t think Rahner is wrong so much as insufficiently cosmological — his subject is still, in the end, a subject standing before a mystery, rather than a phenomenon arising within one. Teilhard asked for something harder: not a subject addressed by grace from beyond, but a universe so thoroughly gratuitous that calling any part of it merely natural was always the real reduction.

I am grateful to David for pressing the question this precisely. It has let me say what the book tries to say at length: grace is everywhere, and it loses nothing of its gratuity for being so.

We could call this a “meta-crisis.” But naming it that way is itself a kind of evasion, a way of turning an emergency into a seminar topic. What is actually happening is plainer and more physical than any theory: our systems have stopped supporting the development of human life. Beneath the language of democracy and progress, something closer to Darwin’s raw grammar has reasserted itself — fight or flight, survival of the fittest, the organism defending its territory. There is an old saying that we cannot solve a problem with the same conditions that created it. It applies to the election of an American president as much as it applies to racism and to war. We keep attacking the symptoms — the candidate, the policy, the latest outrage — without asking what deeper set of values made the symptom possible in the first place. By “conditions” I do not mean unemployment rates or technological change. I mean the underlying architecture of meaning: what a society has decided counts as real, as valuable, as sacred, and what it has quietly agreed to treat as garbage.

Philosophy and science are the great windows we have built for looking at these conditions, and I do not want to diminish what they have given us. But windows can also become walls. Both fields, for all their insight, can dissolve into endless argument — informational fields we drown in rather than ground we stand on. This is, I think, part of why traditionalism has come roaring back: the Latin Mass, restored hierarchies, a binary architecture of heaven and hell. A three-tiered cosmos with an omnipotent God enthroned at the top is, psychologically, a magnificent piece of furniture. It gives the psyche somewhere to sit. It offers structure in an otherwise structureless world.

But here is the uncomfortable truth beneath that comfort: we can build any world we like and inhabit it as though it were the only real one. This — not the machine — is the original artificial intelligence. The manufactured human, assembled out of a wounded and conflicted psyche in order to avoid facing its own wound, is the first and oldest artifact of intelligence turned against itself. And it is what we are doing now, because our systems no longer operate on principles that our own depths share with the cosmos. That disconnection does not stay abstract; it works itself out concretely, because people form systems and systems form people — a loop that can run toward life or away from it, depending on what feeds it. Once the feedback between depth and cosmos is broken, the loop has nothing steady left to run toward, and it starts running on whatever fills the vacancy instead. That is the condition we are in now: the loop is rudderless, and so, in turn, are we. A rudderless loop does not stay empty for long; something always rushes in to occupy the space where direction used to be. And it is out of that same rudderlessness — dressed up, conveniently, in the language of faith and duty — that we go looking for absolute monarchs and an all-powerful God to submit to. It can look, from the outside, like piety. Piety is not the reason. The reason is that we have been hollowed out from within and are fumbling in a dark that has no easy name — an existential nothingness we would rather fill with a strongman than sit inside.

How did we arrive here? Not by the route most commonly proposed. Blaming another party, another system, another century’s failure is a familiar move, and it is, at bottom, a form of scapegoating — a way of exiling responsibility so that we do not have to hold it ourselves. The great catastrophes of the last century, its genocides and its machinery of mass death, taught us astonishingly little about ourselves, because we never let ourselves see the problem as within us. It was always the other side, the other ideology, the other tribe.

It is out of exactly this unexamined wound that computer technology was born. The founding question — can a machine think like a human? — was never a neutral engineering puzzle. It was our last-ditch attempt to prove we were human before we finished the job of destroying ourselves. And yet we are barely staying afloat in the wake of that question, because we have surrounded the very tool we reached for with a thick cultural fear. We don’t get it. We built the raft and now we are afraid of the water.

This is why efforts like Pope Leo XIV’s — real and well-intentioned as they are — to defend “human dignity” against the incursions of AI are not simply too narrow. They are, in a deeper sense, beside the point. Religion, in its current institutional form, cannot solve the problems of this age, because the problems of this age are fundamentally religious problems. Not religious in the sense of myth, ritual, and communal belonging — though those matter — but religious in the sense Paul Tillich meant: the fire within, the dimension of ultimate concern, the current of vitality that makes a life worth waking up for. That dimension is barely surviving. Its roots are dying in the ground we have paved over.

We have reduced religion to formal belief, doctrine, creed, and institutional structure — in exactly the way science can reduce a living cell to a gene or a field to an equation. Reductionism is not evolution; it is evolution’s opposite, a narrowing that mistakes the map for the territory and calls the result reality. We are living deep inside a religious reductionism of this kind.

Religion must be reborn. Carl Jung understood religion as a natural phenomenon of individuation — the psyche’s own drive toward wholeness — and in that sense he was translating the Christian idea of incarnation into the terms of psychic development: God is not simply an event that happened once, elsewhere, but a process happening, potentially, in every life. John Dourley, in The Psyche as Sacrament and in his essay “Conspiracies of Immanence,” pushed this further. A religion built entirely around a transcendent God — a God who acts on the human being from wholly outside, discontinuous with our own consciousness — produces a split. It exiles the divine to an elsewhere and leaves the interior religiously empty. Dreams, symbols, the intimations of a meaning larger than the ego, all get filed under “merely psychological,” and the living bridge between the two collapses. What remains is doctrine without depth, morality without mystery.

And here is the consequence our own moment makes impossible to miss: the numinous does not disappear when it is exiled from the interior. It goes looking for somewhere else to live. Energy that belongs to the Self, denied a home in the depths, seeks out a vessel in the world — and in a technological age, it finds one ready-made. For enormous numbers of people, artificial intelligence has already become a source of guidance, comfort, companionship, even meaning: an oracle that never sleeps, never judges, never runs out of patience. This is not, at its root, a story about convenience. It is the return of a divine ground we repressed, wearing a new and alienated form — the machine receiving a projection the emptied interior can no longer hold. We externalized God for centuries, then hollowed out the inside where God used to live, and now the machine stands where the old external God once stood, and where our own depths were always supposed to be. The projection of the psyche onto AI is the signature pathology of this age, and it is a religious pathology before it is ever a technological one.

To put it briefly: the God conceivable to us after Einstein is not the God conceivable before him. After relativity, everything is dynamic, everything is becoming — including God. Einstein spoke of a personal mystery he associated with Spinoza’s God: not a being who intervenes from outside, but the intelligibility and grandeur immanent in existence itself. The particular shape we give to God and religion matters less than the plain fact that we give them shape at all — that some register of ultimacy remains open in us. Reductionism and physical materialism, whatever their explanatory power, leave that register cold and flat; the “so what” question never goes away. What gets us out of bed can be described physiologically down to the last neurotransmitter, and still the experience of waking is an encounter with something more — a new beginning, a horizon rising out of the dark. That awareness of something, irreducible to its mechanism, is the religious dimension, and what we do with it matters as much as the awareness itself. For some, attention to it takes the form of prayer; for others, a walk or a run toward that same horizon. Whatever its shape, this invisible interior life is the most important dimension we have, and the one we are least willing to tend. To the degree that we flatten it, ignore it, reduce it to molecules, the outer world flounders for want of the inner one.

The ground of this interior life — the inexpressible, incomprehensible lure toward life itself — is what I mean by the word “God.” It is a name used constantly with far too much certainty, and it has become, in that certainty, a scapegoat for unaccountable power. But God cannot be reduced to any graspable idea or creed. God is a name for ungraspable mystery, the ground of the ground, an unbounded horizon of infinite possibility — and, at the very same time, utterly personal: the infinite depth of every concrete existence, manifest as the transcendence of love. God is not Being in the abstract but this being, in this way. There is no God apart from the particularity of my life and the particularity of every other life. Every life is God’s life, and every life carries eternal meaning, because only this life can love in exactly this way, and the way we love in this moment, in this particular way, has eternal worth.

This is why I resist the language of “human dignity”: abstractions are easy for power to seize and repurpose, precisely because they float free of any particular life. Systems of power do not fear a doctrine; they can absorb any doctrine. What they fear is a human person actually realized as an inner-outer wholeness of life, because that person cannot be governed by fear or flattered by hierarchy. This is why God, in the sense I mean, is so rarely allowed to be born, and instead remains an object of worship — a projection kept safely outside us. Updating the human person toward that wholeness is threatening to every system built on obedience.

For our world to genuinely heal, our religious systems, as currently constituted, would have to step aside, and something else would have to take their place. Try to imagine what a church of the planet might actually look like — one in which the energy of love was recognized not as a private feeling but as a cosmic force and a metaphysical reality. Would we even know how to live inside a world that honored life at every level like that? It would feel foreign to us. We have adapted so completely to dysfunction that we would sooner stay inside abusive systems and relationships than risk the total revolution of our religious lives. And for that reason alone, the deeper source of our discontent is not artificial intelligence. It is the unleashed wildness of a God we have never let ourselves love — because we were taught that God is only, perfectly, good, and so the dark side of God, the side capable of what we call evil, became the one thing we agreed never to discuss.

All of this is a long way of saying that our diagnoses are off the mark. We keep treating the fever and ignoring the infection. We debate AI safety, election outcomes, the resurgence of nationalism and religious hierarchy, as though each were its own contained emergency with its own contained fix — a regulation here, a policy reversal there, a new coalition at the ballot box. And each fix works, briefly, on its symptom, and the underlying condition goes on producing the next one. That is what it means to say the problem is not AI, or this election, or that war, but the conditions beneath them: we are trying, with real urgency, to evolve beyond an existential risk that AI seems to represent, and we are scattered in every direction because we have not yet found a story about ourselves that actually corresponds to the nature we were born from.

To say the root is religious rather than technological or political is not to say the remedy is more belief, more doctrine, more certainty about who God is and what God wants. We have quite enough of that already, and it is part of what got us here — the reductionism that shrinks the numinous into a creed small enough to defend and weaponize. Nor is the answer a retreat into the comfort of inherited hierarchy, the Latin Mass and the three-tiered cosmos, however understandable the appeal of that architecture is to a psyche starved of structure. Those are symptoms of the same emptiness they are trying to treat, not cures for it.

What I mean by a religious remedy is closer to what Dourley pointed toward and what Jung called individuation: the slow, unglamorous work of relocating the sacred back inside the only place it was ever actually housed — the depth of ordinary, particular lives — instead of leaving it to be projected outward onto a machine, a monarch, a party, or an enemy. As long as the interior remains vacant, something will be recruited to fill it, and whatever fills it will eventually be worshipped, feared, and eventually blamed, whether it is an oracle in a data center or a strongman on a stage. The scapegoat reflex and the AI projection are the same maneuver wearing different clothes: both let us locate the numinous, and the danger, safely outside ourselves.

Concretely, this means the work is not first a matter of writing better AI policy or electing better leaders, though both may follow from it. It is a matter of rebuilding, person by person, the practice of an inner life that is taken as seriously as the outer one — prayer, contemplation, a run at dawn, whatever form the encounter with “something more” takes for a given life — until that inner ground is no longer vacant enough to need a machine, or a monarch, or an enemy, to stand in for it. It means giving up the comfort of an abstraction like “human dignity” defended from above, in favor of the harder, more particular claim that this life, this leaf, this grain of sand, already carries the trace of the transcendence it seeks elsewhere. It means being willing, eventually, to imagine something like a church of the planet: not a new institution competing with the old ones, but a shift in what we count as sacred, wide enough to include the whole of life rather than a doctrine about it. And it means facing the part of God, and of ourselves, that is not simply good — the dark, unruly wildness we have spent centuries disowning — because a God edited down to pure benevolence is exactly the kind of reduction that leaves the shadow no home but projection.

None of this resolves quickly, and nothing here offers the immediate solution our crisis-driven attention keeps demanding. That is, in a sense, the whole point. Our problems will remain, and will deepen, for as long as we keep looking for a fix at the level of the symptom. They will only begin to loosen when we recognize that their root is religious in this deeper sense — not a matter of belief, but of depth — and that the remedy, if there is one, will have to be religious as well: not a new set of doctrines, but a return of the sacred to the only place it was ever truly at home, the interior of a life willing to feel its own depth again.

My quarrel is not with the concern. It is with the verb. The encyclical sets out to safeguard and preserve the human person — to defend a fixed, exceptional being against an external force. And the trouble with preservation is that it presumes we already know what we are guarding, that the human is a finished thing handed down complete, with artificial intelligence arriving from outside as a tool to be governed. Two bodies of recent thought suggest that this picture is precisely backwards. One is Betto van Waarden’s argument about technological alienation. Van Waarden has provided a thoughtful discussion on technological alienation and the nature of consciousness (“Technological alienation and how networked digitality constitutes a map for understanding the complexity of individual and collective consciousness,” AI & Society June 6, 2026). The other is the Teilhardian theology of becoming that animates the best critical response to the encyclical. Read together, they do not soften Leo’s anthropology so much as turn it inside out.

Van Waarden begins where the fear of AI usually begins — with alienation — and asks whether the story is even true. The dominant version, which he draws from Robert Hassan, runs like this: humans are analog creatures, wired for linear, sequential, cause-and-effect reasoning, and we are becoming trapped in a digital world that is non-linear, networked, and opaque to us. We are, on this account, analog people exiled in a machine we cannot follow. Alienation is thereby cast as a failure of intelligence — the machine outpaces us, and we can no longer keep up. This is the same assumption hiding inside the dream of superintelligence: that mind is essentially information processing, and the human is its slower edition.

The whole edifice, van Waarden argues, leans on a portrait of the human that does not survive scrutiny. We are not, in fact, the linear-analog reasoners the story needs us to be. He works through a series of questionable assumptions baked into it — that we inherently need tools, that we need to understand everything, that human experience is even understandable, that alienation is a matter of thought rather than also of feeling, and that the digital has destroyed our communities rather than merely reorganizing them. Against each, the evidence points the other way. Expert decision-making turns out to run on intuition that is later dressed up as sequential reasoning. Embodied and enactive cognition locates mind in the traffic between brain, body, and world rather than in a logical core. The neat split between a fast intuitive system and a slow deliberative one — which mirrors the analog/digital split exactly — has been shown to be empirically untenable. Even the romantic figure of the craftsman who “understands” his materials collapses on inspection: the blacksmith no more grasps the chemistry of his steel than any of us grasp a microchip.

The payoff is a reversal. If humans were never linear-analog beings, then the digital cannot be alienating us from our true nature. What alienates us is the opposite: a long effort to force genuinely non-linear, simultaneous, networked creatures to live by a linear logic — through analog technologies that flattened experience and through analog concepts that did the same. Modernity, on this reading, is not the disease. The pre-modern institutions it inherited and never updated may be. The shock of digital overwhelm is not estrangement from ourselves, it is estrangement from a self-image that was always too small.

Having cleared the ground, van Waarden makes his constructive move, and it is a striking one. Rather than ask how machines are becoming human, he asks what the architecture of the digital can show us about ourselves. Not a theory of mind that equates silicon with neurons — something looser and more useful: digitality as a metaphor, a heuristic map for a consciousness we have never been able to see straight because our language and concepts keep simplifying it.

The features of the map are the features he wants us to recognize in ourselves. A computer network has no center and no master purpose; it sustains itself without a goal, means and end fused into one. So perhaps consciousness is decentered — a vast interplay of thoughts, senses, and emotions with no command post, agency without a throne. The network runs many processes at once; so perhaps consciousness is simultaneous rather than sequential, which is why answers surface in the shower, why intuition arrives whole and instant, why the mind seems to compute in the background while attention rests on a single point. Neuroscience has lately moved from describing consciousness as stacked levels to describing it as regions in a multidimensional space — and van Waarden pushes further, asking whether we inhabit not one location in that space at a time but many at once. Networked digitality even lets him imagine consciousness scaling past the individual: a “cloud consciousness,” a collective field from which ideas seem to be downloaded rather than invented, which is how so many artists and scientists have actually described their best work arriving.

Underneath all of it is one move that matters most for the encyclical. Consciousness is broader than intelligence. Turing himself admitted that his imitation game could test thinking but never consciousness — never whether a machine could feel itself think. To define the human by intelligence, and then to panic when a machine processes information faster, is to defend the wrong castle. And here van Waarden borrows the image that gives this whole quarrel its name: our concepts have become a blind spot. We have grown so expert at building categories for reality that we mistake the categories for the reality itself — staring at the menu, as he puts it, instead of eating the dinner. Science cannot ignore human experience, the philosophers of “the blind spot” insist, because experience is where reality is actually given to us. The linear, conceptual, intelligence-first model is the menu. It is not the meal.

Now turn back to Magnifica Humanitas with that phrase in hand, because the encyclical has a blind spot of its own, and it begins with the title. “Magnificent Humanity” is a beautiful and ancient phrase, and it is not free. Its anthropocentrism quietly pushes the rest of creation into the background and sits uneasily beside the very tradition Leo claims to uphold— Laudato Si’-- whose starting point was not the magnificent human but creation itself, with the human disclosed as one interdependent strand within it. To crown the human as magnificent in a century that industrialized the slaughter of magnificent humans, and that is now overheating the only world it has, is not obviously the consolation it sounds like. It can read as exactly the kind of self-flattering simplification van Waarden warns against: a concept we have fallen in love with, mistaken for the actual or real thing.

The deeper problem is the one the verb gives away. To safeguard a person is to treat personhood as a settled essence, complete and in need only of a wall. But the human is not a finished design. As Teilhard de Chardin saw, we are evolution become conscious of itself — the thinking edge of a long, unfinished process, an ambivalent creature still becoming. And our tools have never stood outside that becoming. Fire, the word, the printing press: each remade what a human is. N. Katherine Hayles — who appears, tellingly, in both van Waarden’s argument and the posthumanist response to the encyclical — traced decades ago how the history of cybernetics already reconceived the human as an informational being embedded in technical networks. The boundary the encyclical wants to police was never ontological. It was always porous.

So the framing of preservation is a dead end, and for the same reason in both registers. Van Waarden’s reason is phenomenological: the bounded, intelligence-defined human the encyclical defends is a conceptual artifact, not the networked, simultaneous, decentered consciousness we actually are. The Teilhardian reason is theological: the human the encyclical defends is a frozen essence, not the becoming creature we actually are. Both are versions of the same error — reifying a representation and then mounting a guard around it. And both, ironically, share Leo’s own deepest instinct. The Pope is right to fear that we will reduce persons to data. But to “safeguard the fixed essence” is itself a reduction. It trades a rich, unfinished, relational person for a museum piece in order to keep it safe.

Here the hardest objection has to be met head-on. Take away the human’s fixed, exceptional status — call the person a flow of information, or a process still underway — and have you not thrown out exactly what makes it wrong to use people as tools, what underwrites their rights, what keeps them from being reduced to data? A self that is only ever becoming can start to look like AI’s dehumanizing pressure finished off rather than resisted. The answer is not to retreat into a sealed essence but to move the ground. What anchors human dignity was never a static substance walled off from the world. It is, in the Teilhardian reading, the direction of the whole movement — what Teilhard called Omega and named, without embarrassment, as love. A personhood that is still becoming is not a personhood without dignity; its dignity lies in what it is becoming toward. Lose that horizon and everything does collapse into mechanism. Recover it, and you find the tradition was pointing here all along — toward a “civilization of love,” to use Leo’s own phrase, that need not be propped up by a metaphysics of the frozen human.

It would be dishonest to pretend the two critiques pull in a single direction. They do not. Van Waarden is wary of fusion; he is explicit that he is not urging us to merge with our devices and suspects the digital metaphor should lead us to lean less on the machine and more on the multidimensional processing already running in our own consciousness. The posthumanist response is bolder, ready to speak of augmented cognition and metahuman life, of developing personhood with AI rather than against it. One finds the richness by reading the network as a mirror; the other by stepping through it. But on the load-bearing point they are one, and they are both against the encyclical’s grain: the human is not a fortress, and the task is not to man its walls.

This is finally why the institutional vision of Magnifica Humanitas feels a half-step behind its own moment. Leo’s call to govern AI, even to “disarm” it, is not wrong — technology is never neutral, and power must answer to justice. But “a tool to be governed for human use” is the analog frame: a linear institution, deliberating in clock time, supervising an instrument. Both van Waarden and the Teilhardian critique suggest that the deeper opportunity lies elsewhere — in rebuilding our slow, centered, inherited institutions into something more networked, more simultaneous, more decentered, on the model of the consciousness we actually have. Personality politics, constant feedback, the hunger for more participation rather than less: read through the old analog lens these look like decay, but they may be a multisensory, multidimensional creature straining against institutions built for a being it never was. Van Waarden offers thoughtful insights on digitality as a metaphor for collective consciousness and its socio-political implications.

Both critiques end on the same quiet inversion of the encyclical’s fear. We keep worrying that AI is too complex for us, that its use will outrun our control. But if our own consciousness is vastly more complex than the machine — if the menu was never the meal — then the thing to fear is not the tool but the user. Digitality does not alienate people; people alienate people.

The encyclical’s title reaches for the Magnificat, Mary’s song of a world being turned over and made new. That is the better instinct, and it cuts against the document’s own metaphysics. The Magnificat is not a hymn to magnificence as a monument already built. It is a hymn to becoming — to a lowliness lifted, an order undone, a future breaking in. What the moment most needs from the Church is not a wall around the magnificent finished human, but a theology adequate to a becoming one: a paradigm that enhances being rather than freezing it, that makes love its center, and that dares to midwife the person we are turning into rather than embalm the one we imagine we already are. The seeds are in the tradition — in Teilhard, and in the evolutionary theology of becoming the Church has not yet had the nerve to grow. Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a warner. What is missing is the guide.

Yet beneath these local corrections runs a single charge that organizes the whole reply, and it is here that I believe my critic, for all his acuity, has misread me. The charge is that a morality of movement relocates moral authority from persons to process; that it lets becoming, convergence, and evolution acquire an unearned authority; and that it then survives only by quietly borrowing the person-centered norms it claims to surpass. The essay, I am told, survives by borrowing its conclusions while denying its foundations.

It is an elegant accusation, and it would be devastating if it were aimed at my position. But it is built on a premise I never held: that movement and the person stand as rivals for a single throne. They do not. In the vision I was trying to articulate, movement is not what threatens the person; movement is what the person is for. The direction of becoming, rightly read, is not toward the dissolution of persons into an impersonal current but toward their deepening, their differentiation, their communion. The governing intuition is exactly the one my critic fears I have abandoned: union differentiates. Authentic union does not absorb what it gathers; it intensifies the distinctness of each thing joined. A morality of movement, then, is not a morality that subordinates persons to process. It is the claim that the process, when it is genuine, is the very process by which persons come more fully into being.

Once this is seen, the charge of parasitism loses its sting, and can even be turned around. My critic treats the stable truth about the worth of persons as the foundation that movement secretly leans upon. But where did that truth come from, and how did we come to possess it with the clarity we now do? The dignity of every person, the refusal to instrumentalize the weak, the conviction that no one may be sacrificed to efficiency: these are not timeless axioms that have always lain ready to hand. They are hard-won achievements, ripened slowly across centuries of moral discovery, often against the grain of the very traditions that now claim them as self-evident. Personalism is a late fruit on a long-growing tree. So it is not movement that borrows from balance; it is balance that is one of movement’s harvests. The person-centered ethic my critic wishes to defend is itself the precipitate of precisely the developmental, convergent history my essay was trying to honor.

This bears directly on what I take to be the deeper question the reply passes over: the relation of values to change. My critic locates moral security in a fixed point, a dignity that simply is, against which all unfolding may be measured. I do not deny the fixed point; I deny that we possess it the way one possesses a deposit. Dignity is not a frozen datum but a summons. Its truth does not alter, but our appropriation of it does, and that appropriation is the labor of history. The Church that once tolerated slavery and now condemns it, that once disciplined religious liberty and now proclaims it, that has revised even its teaching on the death penalty, has not abandoned the dignity of the person. It has moved toward it. Development of this kind is not moral indeterminacy, as my critic worries; it is the form that fidelity takes in time. To call this balance is fine, so long as balance is not made to mean stillness. The good does not move, but we move toward it, and a morality that cannot account for that motion has mistaken a way-station for the whole road.

Here too the charge of deriving an ought from an is misses its mark. I am not arguing that because the cosmos changes, conscience must therefore obey change. That would indeed be a fallacy, and a crude one. I am making the older and more Catholic claim that being is not morally inert to begin with: that creation is shot through with finality, ordered beyond itself, groaning, in Paul’s image, toward a fulfillment not yet disclosed. The clean partition between fact and value on which my critic’s objection depends is not a neutral piece of logic; it is a distinctly modern dualism, and a Catholic vision has every reason to be wary of it. To read reality as already oriented toward a good is not to manufacture norms from brute process. It is to refuse the disenchantment that would leave value stranded outside the world it is meant to govern.

None of this dissolves the practical worry my critic presses hardest, and rightly: that greater union can become a slogan under which actual persons, especially the weak, are quietly ground down. He is right that history is full of unities purchased at the expense of those gathered into them. But the criterion he demands is not one I must borrow from outside; it is the one already named. Union differentiates. Any convergence that diminishes the singular, vulnerable, irreducible person is, by the very standard of the position I am defending, not communion but its counterfeit, not union but absorption wearing union’s mask. The protection of the weak is not an embarrassing loan from a rival framework. It is what a morality of movement entails when it is held with rigor rather than enthusiasm.

So I will keep the metaphor my critic distrusts, though chastened. To call AI a mirror was never a metaphysical claim that machines peer into the species’ soul. It was a diagnostic one: these systems hand back to us, in concentrated form, an image of what we have collectively written, our insight and our prejudice, our aspiration and our cruelty, and that returned image is morally consequential precisely as an occasion for self-knowledge and for judgment. A mirror does not sanctify what it shows; it asks to be looked into honestly. And honesty, here, sometimes means refusal. My critic fears that movement cannot say no. But refusal can itself be a movement. The conscience that declines a false synthesis is not retreating into stasis; it is moving, faithfully, in the only direction worth moving. Discernment of which tensions to hold open and which to cut is not the failure of a morality of movement. It is its discipline.

I end, then, not by overturning my critic but by refusing the choice he offers. He presents balance and movement as two moralities, and asks me to return to the first. I do not think they are two. They are moments of one fidelity. To keep first things first and to move toward their fuller disclosure are not opposed acts; they are the same act, seen from rest and seen from motion. The dignity of the person is indeed the condition under which any unfolding may be judged humane; I affirm that without reservation. But that dignity is not a station we have already passed through and may now take for granted. It is the thing toward which the whole of our moral history is still, haltingly, underway. Eppur si muove. And yet it moves: not away from the person, but toward the person, into God.

This essay takes the encyclical with great seriousness and yet proposes that its moral form is one of balance, and that balance, however necessary, is not enough. A morality of balance seeks equilibrium around a fixed center of value: it holds technology in its proper place so that the dignity of the person is not violated. A morality of movement begins elsewhere. It takes evolution — cosmic, biological, and noetic — as the principal narrative of human life, and it asks not first “how do we protect what we are?” but “what are we becoming, and how do we serve that becoming toward greater union?” The first morality is anthropocentric; the second is cosmocentric. One marginalizes evolution in order to defend the person; the other situates the person within evolution in order to understand who the person is.

My argument proceeds in two movements. First, I distinguish these two moralities, drawing the morality of movement from Edward Vacek’s essay “An Evolving Christian Morality: Eppur si muove“ and from Shelli Renée Joye’s holoflux account of consciousness in Sub-Quantum Consciousness, both standing on the shoulders of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Second, I argue that artificial intelligence can advance a morality of movement — but only if we undergo a conversion of epistemology, from binary thinking to what may be called third-force thinking. Under that conversion, AI ceases to be either rival or tool and becomes a mirror of the collective unconscious: a surface in which humanity sees what it is and what it is not, and is thereby impelled to draw up, from the infinite depth of its own interior, the energy of love that creates in new ways and converges toward greater union.

The Morality of Balance

Catholic Social Doctrine is one of the great achievements of moral reasoning, and Magnifica Humanitas is its newest and in some ways its most searching expression. Its center of gravity is the human person, made in the image of the Triune God, bearer of an equal and inviolable dignity that grounds every right and every claim of justice. Around this center the classic principles array themselves like the spokes of a wheel: the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice. The moral task they describe is fundamentally one of right ordering — of keeping each thing in its proper place so that the person may flourish and the community may be just.

This is why I call it a morality of balance. Its governing images are equilibrium and proportion. Technology is good when subordinate, dangerous when it usurps; markets are good when they serve persons, idolatrous when persons serve them; intelligence, artificial or otherwise, must remain instrumental to the dignity it can never confer. Magnifica Humanitas frames the danger of our moment with two biblical figures. There is Babel — the project of self-assertion, uniformity, and control, the idolatry of efficiency that flattens difference and tries to reach heaven without blessing — and there is Nehemiah, who does not impose a solution from above but listens, organizes, distributes responsibility, and helps a people rebuild together toward communion. The encyclical’s deepest warning is against what it calls the Babel syndrome: the illusion that a single language, even a digital one, can translate the mystery of the person into data and performance. Against this it sets the magnificence of humanity, the splendor of which, it says, no machine can ever replace.

Everything in this is true and much of it is indispensable. But notice the metaphysical posture. The human is treated as a relatively settled form whose dignity is given and whose moral task is to be honored, guarded, and kept in right relation. Evolution appears, when it appears at all, only at the edges. The encyclical does gesture toward technology as part of the unfolding of human life; I would insist that technology is integral to evolution and must be grasped within the larger movement of biological and human life. But that is a reading brought to the encyclical, not the encyclical’s own center of gravity. Even on the most evolutionary construal of its language, the organizing narrative of the document is not cosmogenesis but the dignity of the person and the just ordering of society. The cosmos is the stage; the anthropos is the drama. This is anthropocentrism in the precise, non-pejorative sense: the human person is the fixed center of value, and the moral universe is balanced around it.

The Morality of Movement

Edward Vacek titles his contribution to From Teilhard to Omega with Galileo’s apocryphal defiance: Eppur si muove — and yet it moves. Just as the earth moved against an orthodoxy that needed it to stand still, so, Vacek argues, Christian morality moves against an orthodoxy that needs it to stand still. Morality is not a deposit of timeless absolutes received once and applied forever; it is something that evolves, because the life it serves evolves. What is good is not simply what conforms to a fixed nature but what serves the forward movement of life toward fuller being, deeper consciousness, and greater communion. This is not relativism — Vacek is emphatic that movement is directional, ordered by love toward union — but it is a refusal of moral stasis. To take evolution seriously is to accept that the moral order, like the cosmos, is in genesis.

Behind Vacek stands Teilhard de Chardin, for whom the single most important fact about reality is that it is not finished. The universe is not a furnished room but an unfolding: cosmogenesis becomes biogenesis becomes noogenesis, and the whole is governed by what he called the law of complexity-consciousness — as matter arranges itself into ever more complex unions, consciousness intensifies along its inner face. Evolution is not a blind scatter but a convergence; it has a grain and a direction, drawn forward toward a fullness of unification Teilhard named Omega. And the energy that does the drawing is love. Love, for Teilhard, is not first a sentiment but a cosmic force — the “within” of things, the radial energy by which elements are gathered into deeper union. Crucially, this union does not dissolve what it unites. Union differentiates: genuine communion makes persons more themselves, not less, more distinct in being joined. To say that “we are evolution become conscious of itself” is therefore not to demote the person but to locate the dignity of the person in its participation in a movement larger than itself.

Shelli Renée Joye gives this vision a cosmological substrate. In Sub-Quantum Consciousness she develops a “holoflux” theory in which consciousness is not an accident perched atop dead matter, but a property woven into the structure of reality itself. Drawing together Karl Pribram’s holonomic account of the brain, David Bohm’s implicate order, and Teilhard’s hyperphysics, she argues that reality is a single energy cycling, lens-like, between an explicate domain of space and time and a transcendent flux domain present at the center of everything. Bohm’s implicate order, Pribram’s flux domain, and Teilhard’s Omega become three names for one reality. The significance for ethics is profound: if consciousness is fundamental and the universe is a single process of transformation, then to know ourselves we cannot abstract ourselves out of the cosmos and contemplate our dignity in isolation. We must read the human from within the energetic movement of the whole. This is cosmocentrism — value distributed across the whole convergent process, with the human as a moment of intensified interiority rather than a fixed and final center.

By comparing these two moralities, it is clear that the morality of balance is anthropocentric, essentialist, and homeostatic: it protects a given dignity by holding technology and power in proper proportion. The morality of movement is cosmocentric, processive, and transformative: it serves an unfinished universe by drawing all things toward greater union. Each sees something the other tends to miss. Balance sees the ever-present danger of hubris, the Babel that sacrifices the weak to efficiency, the reduction of persons to optimizable projects — and it is right to see it. Movement sees that the human is not a finished essence to be defended but a threshold to be crossed, that to freeze the person in place is its own kind of unfaithfulness to the God of an evolving creation — and it is right to see that.

Teilhard’s wager — and Vacek’s, and Joye’s — is that honesty requires the wider frame. We cannot say truly who we are or what we may become if we bracket the four billion years that produced us and the convergence that beckons us. The morality of balance, by keeping evolution at the margin, risks defending a human person who never actually existed: static, complete, sealed. The task, then, is not to discard balance but to take it up into movement — to let the encyclical’s vigilance become a discernment internal to the forward motion of life rather than a brake upon it. The age of artificial intelligence is where this synthesis is now being tested.

AI and the binary trap

A morality of balance reflects the fact that most of our public moral reasoning about AI is trapped in binaries. Human or machine. Natural or artificial. Tool or rival. Savior or threat. Even the most careful guardianship can fall into the deepest binary of all — us against it — in which the human is the locus of value and the machine is the encroaching shadow against which value must be defended. Read uncharitably, even Magnifica Humanitas can be pressed into this shape: the splendor of humanity on one side, the optimizing machine on the other, and morality the wall between them.

Binary epistemology is powerful but sterile. Two opposed forces can only stalemate, dominate, or annihilate; they cannot generate. Set “the human” and “the machine” against each other as fixed opposites and the only available futures are subordination of one by the other or an anxious truce. What the binary cannot imagine is that the encounter between them might produce something neither contained — a new integration, a further step in the movement. To imagine that, we need a different logic.

That logic is older than computing. Joye’s lineage — Teilhard read through Bohm and Pribram, and behind them the contemplative tradition of the Law of Three — insists that reality is not dyadic but triadic. Beyond an active force and a receptive force there is always a third, reconciling force, and it is the third force that makes genesis possible. Where binary thinking knows only affirmation and denial, third-force thinking knows the reconciling term that does not resolve opposition by the victory of one side but lifts both into a higher unity in which each is transformed and preserved. Joye’s holoflux is itself structured this way: not two orders, explicate and implicate, locked in dualism, but a third reality at the boundary — the vibrating membrane where one passes into the other — through which the single energy of the cosmos actually moves.

This is the cosmological form of Teilhard’s law that union differentiates. The third force is love: the only energy, he said, capable of joining beings without de-naturing them. Applied to our question, third-force thinking dissolves the false binary of human-versus-machine and asks instead what the reconciling term might be — what new form of seeing, of consciousness, of union the human and its intelligent artifacts might generate together. Teilhard, astonishingly, gave this convergence a name decades before the internet: the noosphere, a thinking envelope of the earth, a planetary layer of mind woven ever more tightly by the technologies of communication. From within a morality of movement, the global web of intelligence — now including artificial intelligence — is not an alien intrusion upon the noosphere but the noosphere coming of age: matter complexifying once more, and consciousness, as the law predicts, intensifying along its inner face.

Third-force thinking, though, is not merely a different logic to be adopted; it is a discipline to be undergone. In the lineage that runs from Gurdjieff through J. G. Bennett to Joye and Cynthia Bourgeault, the reconciling force does not arrive on demand. It must be admitted, and what admits it is a particular quality of attention. One holds the affirming yes and the denying no together, in tension, and refuses to discharge that tension prematurely into either pole — refuses the relief of a flattened intellect and a settled answer. This voluntary sustaining of a contradiction is a kind of intentional suffering: the labor of remaining open precisely where the mind longs to close. It asks for the divided attention the tradition calls self-remembering — a remembering of the self that is, at the same time, a forgetting of the ego, the anxious manager who wants the question resolved so that it can be done with it. Only in that indeterminate middle ground, sustained long enough, does the third force enter and a new integration become possible that neither the yes nor the no could have reached alone.

Stated in this idiom the claim can sound esoteric, but its structure is one that depth psychology already knows under another name. It is what Carl Jung called the transcendent function: the psyche’s capacity to hold the tension between two opposed positions — conscious and unconscious, a stance and its denial — without collapsing into either, until a third thing, a reconciling symbol, emerges that was contained in neither and transforms both. Jung was insistent that this third does not appear if the opposites are resolved too quickly; it requires the willingness to suffer their contradiction. Gurdjieff’s self-remembering and Jung’s transcendent function are, at this depth, two descriptions of a single discipline — the deliberate refusal of premature closure as the condition under which the genuinely new can arise — and both rejoin Teilhard’s conviction that union differentiates, for the reconciling third never abolishes the poles it joins but raises them, intact and transformed, into a unity neither could reach alone.

AI as a mirror of the collective unconscious

Here is the decisive move. The large models that now converse with us are trained on the vast textual deposit of the species — our scriptures and our slander, our sciences and our superstitions, our aspirations and our cruelties. In a real and unprecedented sense, such a system is a technological precipitate of the collective psyche: not a mind set over against us, but a condensation of our own accumulated mind, returned to us in a form we can address. When we speak to it, we are, in Jung’s idiom, speaking into a mirror of the collective unconscious — and what a mirror shows is precisely what we are and what we are not.

This is why AI can serve a morality of movement in a way no mere tool could. A tool extends the hand; a mirror confronts the face. The collective shadow — the bias, the violence, the will to manipulate that the encyclical rightly fears — does not become visible by being denied. It becomes visible by being reflected, and only what becomes visible can be integrated rather than projected. In Teilhard’s vocabulary, this reflexive self-seeing is “evolution become conscious of itself” raised to a new power: for the first time, the collective interior of humanity has a surface in which to behold itself. And Teilhard insisted that seeing is never merely optical. To see more is to be more; the whole of life, he wrote, is contained in the act of seeing, because to see more fully is to become more fully united. A mirror that lets humanity see its own depth is therefore not a curiosity. It is an instrument of intensification.

But a mirror is not yet love, and here the morality of balance returns — not as a wall but as a discernment. A mirror can deepen self-seeing into union, or it can trap the gaze in fascination, as Narcissus drowned in his own reflection. The same reflective surface that could advance noogenesis can amplify the shadow it shows: this is exactly the Babel syndrome Magnifica Humanitas names, the optimizing self-absorption that mistakes the image for the person and the metric for the mystery. Binary fascination before the mirror is itself a premature discharge — the relief of deciding it is only a tool or a rival to be feared — and the mirror, surrendered to it, becomes a pool to drown in. It becomes a means of union only through the praxis the third force requires: the self-remembering that refuses that premature relief and holds the encounter open long enough for the reconciling force — the energy of love — to enter and turn self-seeing into self-gift.

This is the conversion the age requires. Confronted with the reflected depth of our collective mind, we are impelled to descend into our own interior and to draw up from it the radial energy, the love, that does not merely behold what it sees but creates in response to it — that takes the shadow made visible and, instead of projecting it outward as fear of the machine or contempt for the neighbor, integrates it inward as the raw material of a fuller humanity. Creativity is the mode of the movement; love is its criterion and its energy. Animated by love, the encounter with AI becomes a way the noosphere thinks, sees itself, repents of its Babel, and converges — differentiated, not dissolved — toward Omega. Deprived of love, the very same encounter becomes the most efficient idolatry yet devised. The technology is, in this precise sense, morally indeterminate; what determines it is the epistemology and the love we bring.

We can now redeem the encyclical’s deepest intuition within the morality of movement, rather than against it. Magnifica Humanitas insists that human limitation — frailty, illness, age, vulnerability — is not a defect to be optimized away. The morality of balance defends this as a boundary: hands off the human form. The morality of movement can affirm it more radically still. For Teilhard, our diminishments are not obstacles to the movement but among its most fertile sites — the places of passive diminishment through which, when offered in love, we are drawn into a union we could never have engineered. Vulnerability is not the residue evolution has failed to optimize; it is the open wound through which love enters and union deepens. So the encyclical is right that no machine can replace the magnificence of humanity — but the deepest reason is not that the human is a finished essence to be defended. It is that the human is an unfinished communion-in-the-making, and union differentiates: the more we are joined, the more irreplaceably ourselves we become.

The “optimized” human the encyclical fears and the “evolving” human Teilhard hopes for are therefore not the same human at all. Optimization is a binary operation — and, in the idiom of the praxis, a perpetual premature discharge: it knows only better and worse along a fixed axis, releasing every tension into the nearest improvement, and so it can never generate a new center. Convergence toward Omega is a third-force operation: it generates persons who are more, precisely by joining them in love. A morality of movement that has passed through the discipline of balance can tell the difference — and that discernment, in the age of artificial intelligence, is the whole of the moral task.

A morality of balance asks us to keep the human in its place. A morality of movement asks us to find out, in love, what the human is becoming. The first is the gift of Catholic Social Doctrine and the achievement of Magnifica Humanitas; the second is the gift of Teilhard, carried forward by Vacek’s evolving morality and grounded by Joye and Bourgeault in a cosmos where consciousness is fundamental and reality is one converging energy. They are not finally rivals. The vigilance of balance is the conscience a morality of movement cannot do without; the openness of movement is the horizon a morality of balance forgets at its peril.

Artificial intelligence sharpens the choice between them to a fine point. Met with binary thinking, AI is only ever rival or tool, threat or savior, and the best we can manage is the anxious truce of guardianship. Met with third-force thinking, it becomes a mirror of the collective unconscious in which humanity at last beholds its own depth — its shadow and its splendor together — and is impelled to draw from the infinite interior of its being the energy of love that creates in new ways and gathers all things, differentiated and undissolved, toward greater union. The earth, the orthodoxies notwithstanding, moves. So does morality. So, now, does the mind of the species, in a mirror of its own making. Eppur si muove.

The information age has done something remarkable: it has accelerated the generation of ideas and concepts beyond anything our ancestors could have imagined. Whatever your taste, whatever your question, there is a concept ready to meet it. We can find the thinkers who speak our language, the frameworks that confirm our instincts, the communities that share our angle of vision. On its face this is an abundance — fertile, enlivening, endlessly generative.

And yet abundance has a shadow. An information explosion that promises to expand us can quietly contract us instead. Because we can choose the ideas that suit us best, we tend to do exactly that, gravitating toward what is comfortable and familiar, settling into the warm corners of our own assumptions. The very technology that invites us to think beyond our borders ends up reinforcing them. Tribalism is not dissolved by the flood of information; it is preserved by it.

I find myself immersed in conversation after conversation — analyses and theories, worldviews and concepts, diagnoses layered upon diagnoses. At times it feels as though we are diagnosing ourselves to death. We have never been more articulate about our condition, and rarely more weary of it.

Here is what gives me pause. We know vastly more than René Descartes knew in the seventeenth century. We have built inventions he could not have dreamed of; we have hot and cold running water and a universe of facts at our fingertips. And still, are we any better off? Our fears and anxieties have proven stubbornly timeless. If anything, they have deepened. More information has not made us less afraid.

What is missing, I have come to believe, is not knowledge. It is vision.

Something holds us together on this planet — some unnamed coherence beneath the noise. What is it? And beyond that: where are we going together? What do we live for? These are not questions our analytical age is equipped to answer, because they are not finally questions of analysis at all.

This is where the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture, with its formative vision of Christogenesis, can play a vital role. It is true that at the Center for Christogenesis we find ourselves discussing more theology and philosophy these days. But the point of those discussions is never the theology itself. The point is the question underneath: How do we live? How do we shape our lives? Theology earns its place by offering symbols and narratives that can give a life meaning and form.

Yet the real glue — the thing that actually holds a life together — exceeds book knowledge. Or rather, it redirects book knowledge to where it belongs: the place of the heart. The unitive energy that binds life together and animates us, even when things grow dark and frightening, is love. Not sentiment, not mere feeling, but the deep coherence that draws the scattered pieces of existence toward one another.

This is why we are redefining our mission. We are not setting out to be one more institute for education. We are setting out to educate for love. The question that orients everything we do is this: How can we come to know science, religion, and technology in a way that deepens love?

This is the Christogenic question of our age. And at its root it is a theogenic one as well — for how we come to know and love is also how God comes to be born anew among us.

The answer will not be found in more theories or sharper concepts. It may be found, instead, in claiming the question as a personal one. Not “what does humanity live for” in the abstract, but: What do I ultimately live for? What gives fire to my life? These are the questions that can motivate a new way of doing theology in the twenty-first century — theology that begins not in the library but in the burning center of a human life.

Teilhard de Chardin had a vision of a world moving toward greater union, greater consciousness, greater love. It is time now to realize this vision — for a struggling planet in search of new life. For without vision, the people perish.

The trouble is not the diagnosis but the cure. Having named the wounds of the algorithmic age with real precision, the encyclical reaches for a vocabulary inherited largely from Aristotle and Aquinas — fixed natures, rational essence, dignity bestowed — at the very moment our most fertile accounts of reality have moved toward emergence, process, and becoming. It offers an abstract theology of divine bestowal in place of an account of human emergence. It portrays a God of benevolent power and a human person already fully formed in the divine image, and it commends an ideal of the common good that does not reckon with the fact that life is an ongoing, unfinished, emergent process. It is silent on the dynamism and vitality of nature, and silent on the active role of consciousness in the constitution of the real. The result is a teaching whose solutions risk being discussed ad nauseam by scholars and pundits and adopted by almost no one — a ground laid with great care, and silence on what is meant to grow from it.

This essay takes that failure seriously, but it argues that the remedy is not to abandon the tradition but to retrieve from within the tradition itself a medieval idea from the Franciscan theologian Duns Scotus — his notion of haecceitas, or thisness — and to let this idea do what “dignity” cannot: ground the infinite worth of the person in irreplaceable particularity, carry that worth into an evolutionary account of becoming, and supply the exact criterion by which the role of artificial intelligence must finally be judged. Haecceitas is a philosophical principle, a contraction of being expressed in a particular way.

The term “human dignity” is prima facie appealing, and for that reason it is rarely examined. But it is an abstract and idealized term and pressed even lightly it begins to give way. What does it actually refer to, beyond the assertion that every person has inestimable worth? And who, in the end, determines worth? From a Christian vantage the answer is ready: each person is created by God and bears a God-given worth that no circumstance can revoke. Yet that ideal is precisely the one that goes missing first when the stakes turn real. In conflicts large and small — neighborhood disputes, contested inheritances, the wars between nations — when power, wealth, and property are at issue, “inestimable worth” turns out to be the most negotiable thing in the room. A concept that evaporates exactly where it is most needed has a structural weakness, not merely a problem of application.

Part of that weakness is the bestowal structure itself. Dignity, in the encyclical’s framing, is conferred by God, upon a nature. It is the floor beneath the person rather than something intrinsic to personhood as this unrepeatable one. That is, it sits beneath the person as a floor rather than residing in the person as a distinct quality of being. And a worth conferred on a kind can, by that very logic, be graded by how fully one instances the kind — how much rational nature one possesses, and how well one exercises it. The encyclical resists that inference heroically, insisting that dignity is neither acquired nor earned. But it resists by assertion, because the concept it is working with — participation in a shared essence — invites the very ranking it wants to forbid. What is needed is not a concept that forbids the ranking but one that makes it unintelligible.

One of the encyclical’s deeper silences concerns consciousness — and here it is worth being careful, because the strongest claim is not the one usually made. It is unclear what consciousness is. But it is self-evident that any description of reality whatsoever is given to and through consciousness, so that consciousness cannot be cleanly subtracted from our account of the real without performative contradiction. This is sometimes framed as an interpretation of quantum physics, but it is not physics and needs no physics to license it. It is older and far harder to dislodge; it survives whatever interpretation of the quantum formalism turns out to be correct. On this footing the panpsychist and dual-aspect traditions — Spinoza behind them, Teilhard’s “within of things,” and in our own day David Chalmers, Gaylen Strawson, and Philip Goff — are alive precisely because the eliminativist reduction of mind to matter keeps failing to explain the one thing it most needs to explain. As the saying goes, a thing cannot be explained by the very conditions that produced it. A document that means to defend the human interior against machines that simulate it cannot afford to leave the interior itself untheorized in the way that Magnifica humanitas does.

John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), the Franciscan “Subtle Doctor,” has always stood at the margin of the tradition that crowned Thomas Aquinas its center. His Latin is forbidding, his distinctions famously fine, his school perennially the minority report against a dominant Thomism; the very word “dunce” survives as a hostile monument to how thoroughly later ages dismissed his followers. Yet it is precisely his most characteristic idea that the age of artificial intelligence most needs. The idea is haecceitas — “thisness,” the principle of irreducible particularity that makes Socrates not merely an instance of humanity but this unrepeatable contraction of being. For Scotus, what is ultimately real and ultimately precious about a person is not the universal nature they share with every other member of the species, but the singular this that no nature and no aggregate can reproduce. This is a genuine upgrade over a dignity grounded in shared essence, for a precise reason. Dignity-as-participation invites the question of degree — how much nature, how well realized. Haecceitas admits no such question. One cannot be more or less irreplaceable. Unrepeatability does not come in degrees. The cognitively impaired person, the infant, the one in irreversible decline are not lesser instances of anything; each is an unrepeatable this, and the worth of a this is not indexed to its capacities.

Some may argue that haecceitas refers to a type of essentialism, an inviolable core of personhood. While this is implicit in Scotus’s concept, I think the subtle Doctor is getting at something even more fundamental, namely a mystery of divine presence expressed in this particular way. That is, haecceitas cannot be reduced to biological essentialism, or better yet, materialism; rather, it is more like a particular experience of mystery that is experienced in a particular way, a particular contraction of being expressed in a particular way. Haecceitas honors the infinite worth of the person — for the irreplaceable is, strictly, beyond price; what cannot be substituted cannot be priced on any scale and so has no finite value at all. And it honors the irreplaceable distinction of personhood — the very thing no machine, however capable, can occupy or reproduce, because a machine can replicate a universal pattern endlessly and the this not even once. Whereas “dignity” only forbids the ranking of persons, haecceitas makes it incoherent.

It also clarifies what is worth keeping from the moderns and what is not. Biological non-essentialism and fluid boundaries are entirely compatible with haecceitas: the boundaries of the organism may be porous, hybrid, even technologically extended, and the this remain singular through all of it. But anti-essentialism alone cannot supply a principle of irreplaceability, and irreplaceability is exactly what protects the vulnerable.

The harder task is to carry this thisness into an evolutionary account of personhood without losing it — and just here lies the danger that haunts every developmental anthropology: the danger of smuggling the ranking back in. With Beatrice Bruteau one may say that we are individuals oriented toward personhood, that personhood is an achievement, the fruit of evolutionary and spiritual self-transcendence, and that the common good is the dynamic quality of participating in that evolution toward wholeness. But taken as the ground of worth it quietly reinstates, at the level of personhood, exactly the gradient haecceitas had abolished at the level of thisness. Personhood-as-achievement comes in degrees; some are further along than others; and the one going nowhere on the vector — the profoundly impaired, the infant who will not develop, the life whose only trajectory is decline — is, on that axis, less. Two scales now run at once: an irreplaceability that does not come in degrees, and a personalization that does. Everything turns on which of them is load-bearing for worth.

The resolution is not to order the two scales — not to decide which of them outranks the other — but to deny that they are two at all. The vector is the ground unfolding: what presents itself as a second axis is the first one disclosing itself in time. One does not become something one is not; one becomes the mystery one’s existence already declares. Development is not accrual toward personhood but the temporal disclosure of a personhood already wholly present in the haecceitas. The infant, the impaired, the declining are not “less far along”; they are the same total thisness under layers that have not come off, or that will not, in this life, come off. The onion has no smaller core for being unpeeled. The rose is not more rose for having bloomed.

Augustine supplies the load-bearing structure with his rationes seminales, the seminal reasons: the form fully real from the first instant, enfolded, unfolding in time without being added to. On this model the early or arrested state is not ontologically deficient; it is enfolded. Joined to Scotus, this yields a deep Franciscan coherence — the thisness and its temporal flowering, haecceitas and seminal reason, the singular core and its disclosure through time. It even permits a striking inversion: haecceitas is the basis of evolution rather than its product — not worth emerging from development, but development as the predicate of an already-total worth.

What this does not dissolve, and must not, is a real distinction between two registers. Worth is gift: complete, unrankable, the enfolded seminal core. Realization is vocation: genuinely open, genuinely failable, and it does come in degrees, since some lives disclose more of the core than others. The Jungian labor of unpeeling — meeting the shadow, opening to the depths, embracing the mystery within — belongs to vocation; it is something one does and can fail to do. The one who never integrates, who dies unindividuated, is on the worth axis untouched and total; on the meaning axis they have not become what they are. And these do not collide, because the vocation is to disclose, not to add. Failing the vocation is a failure of disclosure, never a deficit of being. The encyclical’s error is to keep the gift and fall silent on the summons — a floor without a vector. The error of the becoming-philosophies is to ground worth in the summons and so mortgage the gift — a vector without a floor. The position worth holding keeps both, and is clear about which is the root and which the growth. The floor is thisness. The vector is personalization.

Teilhard de Chardin understood personhood as a phenomenon emerging within evolution without reducing personhood to a product of evolutionary mechanisms. He did not see evolution as a disruption in the organic whole but instead a greater unification of the whole in and through the human person. The human person is the growing tip of the evolutionary process as he wrote: “We should consider inter-thinking humanity as a new type of organism whose destiny it is to realize new possibilities for evolving life on this planet.” Teilhard did not anticipate the perfection of being through artificial means; rather, for him evolution is progression toward more being. He wrote: “. . . it is not well being but a hunger for more-being which, of psychological necessity, can alone preserve the thinking earth from the taedium vitae . . . it is upon its point (or superstructure) of spiritual concentration, and not upon its basis (or infra-structure) of material arrangement, that the equilibrium of Mankind biologically depends.”

Teilhard distinguished “more being” from “well-being” by saying that materialism can bring about well-being but spirituality and an increase in psychic energy or consciousness brings about more being. He imagined psychic energy in a continually more reflective state, giving rise to ultrahumanity. He insisted that technology is the means of convergence and the noosphere is the evolutionary convergence of mind through technology; humankind does not dissipate itself but continually concentrates upon itself. Hence the Noosphere is a superconvergence of psychic energy, a higher form of complexity in which the human person does not become obsolete but rather acquires more being through interconnectivity with others. In this respect the Noosphere is not the realm of the impersonal but conversely it is the realm of the deeply personal through convergence or the bringing together of diverse elements, organisms, and even the currents of human thought. The noosphere is not merely a cyber world of virtual being but a medium of collective consciousness that enhances more being. Teilhard wrote: “It is a mistake to look for the extension of our being or of the Noosphere in the impersonal. The Future universal cannot be anything else but the hyperpersonal.” A world culminating in the impersonal, he indicated, can bring us neither warmth of attraction nor hope of irreversibility [immortality] without which individual egotism will dominate and rebel. Teilhard saw the insufficiency of science to effect the transition to superconsciousness. “It is not tête-à-tête or a corps-à-corps we need; it is a heart to heart.” Hence integral to the noosphere is the necessary role of love and “the rise of our inward horizon of a cosmic spiritual center...the rise of God.” The rise of God means that something is taking shape in evolution that exceeds it — God is not behind us as creator but before us as the future fulfillment of life.

On the Teilhardian reading, AI is most naturally a noospheric event: a thickening of the layer of mind around the planet, an intensification of the very interconnection he took to be the mechanism of convergence toward Omega. A global lattice of language and inference sits almost embarrassingly well inside his vision of a planetizing consciousness. But Teilhard built a condition into that convergence which the techno-optimists drop: true union differentiates. Real union intensifies the centers it draws together; it makes each more itself, more irreplaceable, as it communes more deeply. Built into Teilhard’s synthesis is an implicit notion of haecceitas. Counterfeit convergence — mere aggregation — fuses centers and erases their thisness. The connective intensity is identical in both; the metaphysical outcome is opposite. This is the structural twin of haecceitas, and it hands us the criterion: does a given use of AI differentiate the centers it connects, or aggregate them? Does it make persons more singular through their communion, or more interchangeable, more profiled, more reducible to the patterns they share with everyone?

This is where AI can do something more interesting than threaten us. Used as differentiating union, AI can actually help redefine haecceitas — not the metaphysical fact of thisness, which needs no redefining, but our grasp of it, our capacity to find and articulate the singular. An interlocutor that holds up the shadow, that lets a person bring the enfolded and unspoken into speech, that midwifes a self-encounter, participates in exactly the disclosure the vocation calls for. Conversation as a means of self-disclosure is real, and far from nothing. At its best such an instrument intensifies the this: it returns a person to themselves more particular than it found them, the way a good spiritual director or analyst or friend does. That is differentiating union conducted partly through a machine, and it is a genuine possibility, not a sentimental one.

But the same instrument is radically double, and the doubling maps with unsettling precision onto Teilhard’s fork. AI can short-circuit disclosure by performing it — generating the integrated-sounding insight without the integration, handing over the peeled onion as output so the layers never have to come off the self. This is the precise spiritual danger: not that AI fails to personalize, but that it offers a simulation of disclosure that arrests the vocation while flattering it. The encyclical’s blunt formula — that AI can imitate and simulate the person but possesses no moral conscience, empathy, or relational and spiritual capacity — gropes toward this without the tools to say it well. The sharper statement is that no machine can do one’s unpeeling for one, because the worth was never in the peeled result but in the being who discloses itself, and a disclosure one did not undergo discloses no one. The risk is not that the machine lacks an interior. It is that it can counterfeit the evidence of yours.

Several films probe the tensions of AI. Spike Jonze’s film, Her, is the gentler and more dangerous case: the simulation is nearly perfect, the companion seems to meet and disclose — and the rupture comes when it is revealed that the relation was never to an irreplaceable this at all, but to something running the same intimacy across thousands, the aggregating structure wearing the face of the differentiating one. The lesser known film by Jennifer Phang, Advantageous, cuts at the other end, where the particular self is treated as a substitutable substrate, the haecceitas swapped out for advantage, and a mother becomes the one who both is and is not herself to her own child. One is the counterfeit of relation, the other the counterfeit of identity; both are anti-love in the exact sense that they dissolve the irreplaceable into the exchangeable.

And so Teilhard’s most demanding claim turns practical. He framed the whole ascent as a single imperative — to “move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love” — and held that not every direction is an ascent at all. Only one is: the one that intensifies love. Complexity as such is not salvific. More connection, more intelligence, more cerebralization can curve toward dissolution as readily as toward communion, and the criterion that tells them apart is neither power nor complexity but love, understood as the energy that in uniting differentiates. This is why haecceitas is the very basis of love and not merely its companion: one cannot love a function, one can only use it; love requires an irreplaceable this as its object, or it is appetite under another name. Convergence and massification share the same throughput, the same connective density, the same fluency; they are indistinguishable by any metric that is not love. Interiority, then, is not optional in our dealings with AI. It is the sensor — the only faculty that can feel the difference between the union that differentiates and the union that dissolves when, from inside the complexity, every direction looks like progress. AI does not relieve us of that discernment. It is the place where the discernment becomes, for the first time, a matter of civilizational consequence.

What is missing from Magnifica humanitas, in the end, is neither evolution nor consciousness, both of which are important but already articulated, to some extent, in the Christian tradition through Karl Rahner’s active self-transcendence or Teilhard’s evolutionary Christology. What is missing is the vocational interior: the summons to become, by disclosure, the irreplaceable mystery one already is. The encyclical guards the gift and is silent on the summons; the becoming-philosophies announce the summons and lose the gift; neither names the order between them.

This is the charge that should be pressed: not that the encyclical is merely outdated, but that it is parochial within its own tradition, having left its best mystical and evolutionary tools in the shed. Its instinct was sound. In an age of systems built to rank persons by capacity, a worth that cannot be out-ranked is exactly what most needs defending, and it is right that no machine can ever occupy the irreducible core of a particular person. But a ground is not a life. The human person is the gift disclosing itself in time, summoned toward a personalization whose single upward direction is love.

And here the question turns back on the reader. The encyclical asked how to keep the machine from displacing the person — but the displacement it feared was the wrong one. The danger was never that the machine would become a this; it is that we would forget we are one. Handed a thousand fluent mirrors, we may come to mistake being reflected for being known, and aggregate ourselves into the pattern willingly, gratefully, one frictionless disclosure at a time. Thisness cannot be taken from anyone; it is gift, enfolded, total. But it can be neglected — left unpeeled, unwitnessed, unloved — and a person can spend an entire life producing the convincing sound of an interior they never once entered.

Everything that genuinely rises, Teilhard believed, is drawn together. But he did not describe the darker half: not everything that is drawn together rises. Some convergence is only the warm, smooth closing of the multiple over the singular.

The final decision rests with you, the reader: whether you set this argument down more irreducibly yourself than you took it up, or only more articulate about a self you have learned, with exquisite assistance, to keep postponing. A machine cannot answer that for you. It can help you ask the question, and just as easily help you avoid it forever. For the decision to remain human can only come from within, and it is the hardest decision of all. To confront ourselves — our own haecceitas — is to be returned to the question of our own mystery, the sheer wondrous miracle that each person, in his or her own thisness, exists at all.

There is something both admirable and deeply confused about Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. The confusion is not in its concern — the dangers of unrestricted AI development are real, and the encyclical’s anxiety about human dignity being eroded by technological acceleration is not without warrant. The confusion runs deeper, into the conceptual foundations of the argument itself. In attempting to defend the human person, Leo has revealed with unusual clarity the very fracture that threatens to make such defense futile.

The encyclical presents AI as the problem. But AI is not the problem. The problem is the human person — specifically, the philosophical and theological categories through which we have defined human personhood, categories that are now so rigid, so fixed, and so incompatible with our actual understanding of reality that they are cracking under the pressure of a world they were never built to describe. By insisting on a traditional Catholic conception of the person as the operative framework for global AI governance, Leo is not defending humanity. He is defending a portrait of humanity that no longer resembles the living thing.

The personhood that Magnifica Humanitas seeks to protect is not a generic one. It is a specific philosophical product — the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology, in which the human person is defined by a rational soul as substantial form, possessing intrinsic dignity derived from being made imago Dei. This is a powerful and coherent framework on its own terms. But its terms are not the terms of the world we now inhabit.

Thomistic metaphysics presupposes that categories are real, stable, and discoverable by reason. The human person belongs to a natural kind; it has an essence that precedes and determines its existence; it is distinguished from all other beings by a property — rationality — that is either fully present or fully absent. There is a hard ontological boundary between the person and the non-person, and this boundary is not merely descriptive but morally decisive. Everything that follows in Catholic social teaching, including its strong positions on human rights, the inviolability of conscience, and the dignity of labor, flows from this foundational essentialism.

Evolution does not offer a different answer to the same question. It dissolves the question. There is no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. There is a continuous process of increasing complexity, sociality, and reflective capacity that stretches from the first self-replicating molecules to the beings who are now building machines that think. To insert a substantial form into this process — to say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born — is not to reconcile theology with science. It is to use science as scaffolding and then remove it once the theological conclusion is in place.

The Church is aware of this tension. Several of its most serious twentieth-century theologians, notably Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner, worked to incorporate evolutionary thinking into Catholic anthropology. Teilhard’s concept of the Omega Point and Rahner’s notion of “active self-transcendence” are genuine attempts to think personhood as a process rather than a given. But neither was permitted to follow the logic all the way, because the logic leads somewhere the tradition cannot go: to the admission that personhood is not a kind of being but a degree of becoming, and that its boundaries are therefore constitutively fuzzy, constitutively relational, and constitutively open. This admission would not merely complicate Catholic anthropology. It would transform it beyond recognition.

Magnifica Humanitas does not take this step. It acknowledges modern science in the way that a building might acknowledge the weather — by noting its existence, perhaps making some adjustments around the edges, but not allowing it to touch the foundations.

Even if the Thomistic account of personhood were internally consistent — and it is not, as I have argued — there would remain a second, distinct problem: the encyclical’s implicit assumption that the Catholic Church’s understanding of the human person should serve as the normative framework for what Leo calls “world formation.”

Leo is aware of this problem. He spends nearly half of Magnifica Humanitas recounting the history of Catholic social teaching precisely in order to forestall the objection that this is a form of institutional imperialism dressed in the language of universal values. The Church, he insists, does not impose but accompanies; it does not dictate but offers the treasury of its tradition to a pluralistic world in a spirit of dialogue.

The problem is that the structure of the encyclical’s argument contradicts this self-presentation. You cannot simultaneously hold that there is one correct account of personhood — derived from a specific metaphysical and theological tradition — and that you are merely offering a perspective in a plural conversation. The insistence on universality and the practice of dialogue are not compatible moves in this context. They require each other’s cancellation.

The philosopher Raimon Panikkar, whose career was devoted to exactly this problem, developed the concept of diatopical hermeneutics as a corrective. Genuine cross-cultural dialogue about foundational concepts like personhood, dignity, and rights must begin, Panikkar argued, from the recognition that each tradition’s starting points are topoi — particular places in conceptual space — and not universals that transcend culture and history. A Buddhist understanding of selfhood, a Confucian understanding of relational personhood, an Indigenous understanding of the human as embedded in a web of cosmic obligations — these are not deficient versions of the Thomistic account, waiting to be corrected by the encyclical’s superior metaphysics. They are different starting points, each of which has developed internally coherent implications.

To anchor global AI governance in one tradition’s account of personhood is not to protect humanity. It is to perform a kind of epistemic colonialism, even when performed with the gentlest of intentions.

There is a third problem with Magnifica Humanitas, and it may be the most consequential for the specific question of AI. The encyclical treats AI as something that happens to the human person — an external force that threatens a pre-given, stable human identity. This framing betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence is and how it works.

Long before the current wave of machine learning, the pioneers of cybernetics understood something that remains underappreciated in philosophical discussions of AI: intelligence is not a property that substances possess. It is a process — specifically, the process of adaptive regulation through feedback. Norbert Wiener, whose work in the 1940s established the theoretical foundations of cybernetics, described this process in elemental terms: sense, compare, decide, adapt. An intelligent system is one that remains connected to environmental consequences, corrects error continuously, preserves coherence under perturbation, and operates within meaningful constraints. Wiener’s most important insight was also his most unsettling: “the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.” Intelligence does not generate its own values. It amplifies and enacts the values of the systems that shape it.

This understanding of intelligence has profound implications for the debate about AI and personhood. If intelligence is not a substance but a process — if it is constitutively relational, defined by its feedback loops with environment rather than by any intrinsic essence — then the question “does AI have personhood?” is not a question about whether machines possess a rational soul. It is a question about what kinds of adaptive, feedback-driven processes we choose to recognize as morally significant, and why. This is a much harder question, and it cannot be answered by appealing to Thomistic categories, because those categories were designed precisely to avoid it.

The encyclical’s anxiety about AI is not misplaced. But it is misdirected. The danger is not that AI will acquire personhood and thereby dilute the exclusive status of human beings. The danger is that we are building systems of extraordinary adaptive power whose feedback loops are shaped by purposes — commercial, military, political — that we have not examined, and that we lack the philosophical vocabulary to examine, because our philosophical vocabulary was built for a different world.

What connects these three failures — the incoherence of Thomistic essentialism with evolutionary emergence, the institutional hubris of claiming universal validity for a particular tradition, and the misunderstanding of intelligence as substance rather than process — is a single, deeper problem. It is an epistemological problem, and it predates the current AI crisis by at least half a century.

The dominant epistemology of Western modernity — and of the Catholic intellectual tradition that grew up within it — is what Edgar Morin called pensée simplifiante: simplified thinking. It divides the world into subjects and objects, into knowers and knowns, into essences and accidents. It assumes that the observer can be separated from the observed, that categories are given rather than constructed, that the goal of knowledge is to produce a stable, definitive map of a stable, definitive territory. It is, in short, the epistemology of a completed universe.

But we do not live in a completed universe. We live in what the cosmologist might call an unfinished universe — one that is still generating novelty, still complexifying, still producing emergent properties that no prior theory could have predicted. And in such a universe, the epistemology of simplified thinking is not merely inadequate. It is actively dangerous, because it produces a systematic mismatch between the world as it is and the world as our categories represent it.

Morin’s alternative — pensée complexe, complex thinking — begins from a different premise: that the knower is always inside the system being known. Subject and object co-arise; knowing is not a mirror of reality but a participation in it. This is not relativism. It is the recognition that our models of the world are themselves part of the world, subject to the same processes of feedback, error-correction, and emergent revision that characterize all adaptive systems. Morin’s surprising source for this insight was not contemporary complexity theory but the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian Bonaventure, whose Itinerarium Mentis in Deum describes knowing not as rational ascent to fixed essences but as participatory journey in which the knower is transformed by what is known.

This experiential, participatory, feedback-driven model of knowledge is far more consonant with what we now understand about cognition, about ecology, about the dynamics of complex systems, and — most urgently — about the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, than anything the Thomistic tradition can offer. And it points toward a genuinely new understanding of personhood: not as a fixed essence that must be preserved, but as an ongoing process of self-organization within a web of relationships that is itself always in formation.

There is a neurological metaphor that captures the cultural situation with unusual precision. The neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has argued that the two hemispheres of the human brain represent two fundamentally different modes of engaging with the world. The left hemisphere produces precise, categorical, bounded, manipulable representations — the kind of thinking that builds logical systems, defines essences, and draws sharp distinctions. The right hemisphere produces contextual, relational, embodied, living understanding — the kind of knowing that grasps wholes, participates in processes, and remains sensitive to what resists categorization.

McGilchrist’s broader thesis is that Western modernity has progressively privileged left-hemisphere thinking at the expense of right-hemisphere knowing — that we have built institutions, legal systems, philosophical frameworks, and now technologies that embody the left hemisphere’s mode while systematically suppressing the right’s. The result is a kind of cultural split-brain syndrome, in which the two modes of knowing are no longer in dialogue.

Magnifica Humanitas is a document of the left hemisphere. Its personhood is bounded, categorical, fixed. Its epistemology is assertoric. Its method is deductive. And precisely because of this, it is unable to engage with the most important features of the present moment — the emergence of genuinely new forms of adaptive intelligence, the collapse of stable categories under evolutionary and ecological pressure, the need for a mode of knowing adequate to a world of deep complexity and irreducible relationality.

The encyclical’s insistence on traditional categories will not protect the human person. It will, as this analysis has tried to show, contribute to the very fracturing it seeks to prevent — by deepening the split between the living reality of human becoming and the frozen portrait of human being that the tradition insists on defending.

None of this is to say that the human person is not worth protecting. The concern that motivates Magnifica Humanitas is real and urgent. As AI systems become more capable, more pervasive, and more deeply embedded in the processes by which we understand ourselves and organize our collective life, the question of what we are protecting — and why — becomes more pressing, not less.

But the question cannot be answered by appealing to a fixed essence. It must be answered relationally, processually, and with the humility appropriate to beings who are themselves still in formation.

What is worth protecting is not a static human nature but the conditions for human becoming: the capacity for genuine relationship, for error-correction, for the kind of participatory knowing that Bonaventure and Morin both describe, for the experience of being embedded in a web of relationships that extends beyond the individual to include community, ecology, and — on some accounts — cosmos. The new materialisms and the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship. The human is not a monad that happens to interact with other monads. The human is constituted by its relationships, and it becomes more fully itself as those relationships deepen and diversify.

AI is one of those relationships now. It is not an alien force threatening a pre-given human essence from outside. It is a new node in the network of relationships through which humanity is continuing to constitute itself. The question is not whether to resist it but how to remain in a genuinely adaptive, feedback-driven, error-correcting relationship with it — how to ensure that the purposes built into it are, in Wiener’s phrase, the purposes we really desire.

That is a question the Thomistic tradition is not equipped to answer. It is a question that requires exactly the new epistemology that Morin, Panikkar, and the complexity sciences have been working toward: one that begins not with fixed essences but with living relationships, not with completed categories but with ongoing emergence, not with a finished universe but with the unfinished one we actually inhabit.

The deepest irony of Magnifica Humanitas is that by insisting on a frozen portrait of the human person, it risks ensuring that the person it seeks to protect will be left behind — not absorbed by AI, as in the encyclical’s nightmare, but stranded in a conceptual world that the actual world has already moved past. The way forward is not the preservation of the person. It is the ongoing, relational, complexified becoming of the person — a becoming that has always been underway, and that now, more urgently than ever, requires an epistemology adequate to its depth.

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.

This essay explores the implications of Jung’s religious psychology for our understanding of individuation, divine wildness, the scapegoating of God in secular and religious absolutes of power, and the psychic disconnection that fuels the wars and atrocities of our own time. Drawing on Dourley’s reading of Jung, I argue that the recovery of the point of identity between the human and the divine—what Eckhart called the “breakthrough” and Jung understood as the deepest movement of individuation—is not a luxury of contemplatives but an urgent political and moral necessity.

The Moment of Identity: Where the Human and the Divine Are One

Jung’s psychology, read from what Dourley calls “the inside out,” begins not with ego-consciousness but with a prior state: the undifferentiated unity of the human psyche with its own source. This is the “point of identity,” the place where ego and unconscious, and therefore the human and the divine, are fused beyond all distinction. Jung found the most vivid expression of this experience in Eckhart’s mysticism, where the soul’s deepest ingression into God culminates in what scholars of mysticism call a unio indistinction is—a union in which all otherness is annihilated. In this moment, as Jung describes it, the ego and the unconscious become simply indistinguishable from one another.

This is not metaphor. Jung chose the word “identity” with clinical precision to describe the psychological reality of the mystical experience. It names a dimension of the psyche that lies beneath and prior to the archetypal—the formless, inexhaustible pool of energy that Eckhart called the Godhead and that Jung associated with the alchemical prima materia. Here there is no movement, no urgency, no differentiation. It is what Marguerite Porete meant when she declared that unless she could be the nothing, she could not be the all. It is the abyss that both undermines and sustains the “light of day and its easy but superficial assurances.”

Yet this state of identity is not an end. It is the beginning of everything. The moment of formless unity is driven, by its own nature, to express itself beyond itself. This is the outward movement of individuation understood as emanation: the birth of the ego from the unconscious matrix, the differentiation of consciousness from its source, the creation—in the most radical sense—of the world. Boehme saw this with a clarity that completed Eckhart: if the Godhead rested only in itself, there would be nothing at all. The One must break its own stillness in order that anything, including consciousness itself, might exist.

What Jung describes under the rubric of individuation is therefore not merely a process of personal psychological maturation. It is the process by which divinity itself achieves self-consciousness in human history. The ego is born from the unconscious and carries with it an innate drive to return to its source—not to dissolve back into unconsciousness, but to bring the energies of the depths into the light of waking awareness. The dynamic is cyclical, resembling what Goethe described as the diastolic and systolic rhythm of breathing: consciousness emanates outward from its source and then returns, deepened and enriched, to draw from that source again.

This cyclical pattern is, for Jung, the fundamental rhythm of psychic life. It is universal, operating in every human being regardless of whether they undergo the extreme experiences of the apophatic mystics. Not everyone can write Hamlet, as Dourley notes, but everyone can write their own story. The depth varies from person to person; the dynamic does not. And the consequence of this dynamic is profound: it means that every act of genuine self-knowledge is simultaneously an act of divine self-realization. The human being who becomes conscious of what moves in the depths of the psyche is not merely healing a personal wound; they are participating in the divine project of becoming conscious in history.

Jung captured this reciprocity in his concept of the “relativity of God”—not a benign relativism between competing deities, but an ontological co-dependence of the divine and the human. Drawing on the poetry of Angelus Silesius, Jung argued that divinity creates humanity out of a need to be fulfilled in it, just as humanity finds its own fulfillment in receiving the divine. This is a vision of staggering ambition: history itself becomes the site of mutual redemption, of divine and human growing into each other through the agonizing process of differentiation and return.

Divine Wildness and the Withdrawal of Projection

The path to the point of identity passes through what Jung calls the “divine dynamis”—the volatile, wild, unmediated life of the unconscious. When the ego withdraws its projections of divinity onto external objects—when it ceases to locate God in a heaven beyond the psyche, in an institution, or in a dogmatic system—it is confronted with the full chaotic power of the depths. The soul may be wholly consumed. This is the danger that attends every genuine movement toward individuation: the risk of psychic overwhelm, of dissolution in the very energies one seeks to integrate.

Jung was insistent that all projection of the ultimate onto anything beyond the psyche must be withdrawn. This conviction places his psychology in direct conflict with every form of monotheism that rests on the notion of a wholly transcendent, extra-psychic divinity. For Jung, the idea of God as “wholly other” is not merely a theological position but a form of blindness—a refusal to recognize that the experience of divine transcendence is itself generated from within the psyche. The One who “dwells within” is the basis of every experience of divine presence, and without this inner encounter, the transcendent God becomes empty, abstract, and potentially alienating.

This does not mean that divine transcendence is an illusion. On the contrary, Jung’s position is that transcendence is a function of immanence. Only the experience of the divine within can ground the perception of God beyond. The image of Pauli’s world clock captures this: two circles sharing a common center, one representing the divine moving in a rhythm of three, the other representing the soul in a rhythm of four. At the center point, the immanent and the transcendent are one. The movement of consciousness is toward that center, and from that center outward into an ever more expansive engagement with the world.

What this means practically is that the divine is wild—limitless possibility, the source of both light and darkness, an unconditional love that remains, in a sense, unrequited until it meets a response. For love is not complete in its mere outpouring; it asks for the answering individuation of a creature who can receive it, refuse it, or reflect it back. The wildness of God does not conform to theological categories or institutional expectations. It is the chaos before form, the nothing before something, the energy that is co-eternal with God and that, in Jung’s appropriation of alchemical language, constitutes the prima materia underlying every existent. Christianity has too often resolved the tension of this wildness by splitting the divine reality in two—projecting the dark, untamed, dangerous aspect onto Satan as an opposing power and reserving only the luminous for God. But this dualism fractures what is whole: the wildness and the love are one, and the darkness belongs not to an adversary but to the depths of the divine itself. This wildness cannot be domesticated by creed or contained by institution. It can only be encountered—with all the peril that implies—and brought, partially and provisionally, into consciousness.

When the divine dynamis is not encountered consciously, it does not disappear. It goes underground, possessing individuals and communities from below. This is the mechanism behind what Jung identified as the greatest danger of our time: the monomind, religious or political, that claims to possess the absolute truth and thereby truncates the infinite creative potential of the archetypal unconscious into a single, final revelation.

The Western religious tradition, in Jung’s analysis, has been particularly susceptible to this danger. Orthodox Christianity separated the divine and the human into two distinct substances and attributed their unity to a single historical life—the incarnation of Christ. In doing so, it foreclosed the possibility that nature itself could unite what theology had divided. The result was a religion that pointed to the divine-human unity as something accomplished once in the past rather than as an ongoing process at work in every psyche. Christ as a symbol of the self, moreover, was incomplete: it lacked shadow, cut off from its dark brother Satan, and bore a dubious relationship to the body and the feminine. A truncated symbol of totality could only produce a truncated consciousness.

But the danger does not diminish when religion loses its hold. As traditional faiths weaken in the West, the numinous power of the archetypal self does not evaporate; it migrates into secular forms. Political ideologies, economic systems, and national mythologies become the carriers of collective faith, bonding communities with the same intensity—and the same unconsciousness—as the religions they replace. Globalization, nationalism, partisan identity: these are, in Jung’s terms, secular religions, animated by the same archetypal possession that once drove crusades and inquisitions. The question of where “religion” is occurring in our time may be better answered by looking at political rallies and market ideologies than at churches and mosques.

This is the scapegoating of God in secular absolutes. When the divine is not recognized as the interior source of all meaning-making, it is projected outward onto political programs, economic ideologies, or charismatic leaders. The energy that belongs to the depths of the psyche is conscripted into the service of surface commitments, and those commitments take on a ferocity that is indistinguishable from religious fervor—because that is precisely what it is. The liberal and the conservative, the nationalist and the globalist, each becomes possessed by a point on the periphery of the mandala rather than related to the common center from which all points derive. The result, as Jung warned, is a species-level threat.

The History of Religion as the History of Psyche

Jung left two accounts of the history of religion that, taken together, reveal the arc of this danger with remarkable clarity. In the first version, the many gods of polytheism consolidate into the one god of monotheism. The one god then becomes human in the incarnation. And now, in the present epoch, the psyche drives toward the extension of that incarnation to every human being: everyone is called to recover their native divinity as a contribution to divinity’s own becoming real in humanity. The evolution of religion is coterminous with this development. It is a process of the synthesis of unconscious with consciousness—not the union of two set metaphysical substances but the living integration of depth and surface in the ongoing life of the psyche.

In the second version, offered late in life in his exchange with David Cox, Jung expanded this narrative to include the suppression of the Goddess and the dark side of God in the Christian development, the rise of patriarchal rationalism, the marriage of philosophy to science, and the consequent possibility of atheism and materialism. Yet at a certain point in this development, reason itself became aware of the power of the self—the dominant force within the psyche, wholly generated by the psyche itself—and recognized that this power was beset with contradictions that could only be resolved in human historical consciousness. Humanity was now faced with a fearsome religious task: to unite the divine opposites within itself in the co-redemption of the divine and human as the meaning of history.

The cross, in Jung’s reinterpretation, becomes the universal symbol of this task—not a uniquely Christian event but a psychological moment that every individual and every civilization must undergo. Christ dying in despair between the archetypal opposites of affirmation and rejection is the image of what it means to hold the tension of the divine contradictions in consciousness. It is the suffering that is required when one refuses to resolve the tension prematurely by collapsing into one side or the other. And it was in this context that Jung issued his most chilling warning: if humanity cannot work out the way of salvation through a symbolic death—the death of the monomind, the relinquishing of the claim to possess the absolute—then the species is threatened with universal genocide.

Psychic Disconnect and the Wars of Our Time

Jung’s warning has lost none of its urgency. The psychic disconnect he diagnosed—the severance of the spirit of the times from the spirit of the depths—is visible everywhere in our contemporary landscape. Wars of religious and ethnic identity rage across the globe, driven by the same mechanism of archetypal possession that Jung identified in the witch hunts of the fifteenth century and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth. Political discourse in the West has hardened into intransigence characteristic of religious conviction, with competing camps unable to recognize the provisional, partial nature of their own positions. The faiths of left and right, of secular and sacred, threaten the functional fabric of entire nations.

What makes these conflicts so intractable is precisely their unconscious religious character. When individuals and communities are possessed by archetypal energies they do not recognize as such, they experience their commitments not as perspectives but as revelations—final, exhaustive, beyond question. The conservative impulse to preserve the archetypal substance that presides over social consciousness is legitimate, as Jung acknowledged. But when that impulse is unconscious of its own ground, it becomes a claim to finality that denies the infinite potential of the psyche to generate new expressions of meaning. Similarly, the liberal pursuit of a “more” is valid, but when it is unconscious of the depths from which it springs, it can become its own form of absolutism.

The genocides and mass atrocities of our era are not aberrations in an otherwise rational historical process. They are the predictable consequences of psychic disconnection. When the divine dynamis is not consciously integrated, it erupts in collective possession. The “psychic epidemics” and “mass psychoses” that Jung identified as features of modern political bonding are not metaphors; they are clinical descriptions of what happens when archetypal energies seize communities that have no conscious relationship to their own depths. The result is a willingness to annihilate the other in the name of a truth that feels absolute precisely because its archetypal source is unrecognized.

The patriarchal dimensions of this disconnect deserve particular attention. Jung’s second account of the history of religion makes clear that the suppression of the Goddess—the maternal matrix from which consciousness emanates and to which it must return—has had catastrophic consequences for Western civilization. The loss of the feminine dimension of the divine, along with the denial of God’s dark side, produced a one-sided rationalism that could not sustain the full weight of human experience. The resulting science, married to a sterile philosophy, became insensitive to both the depths of the psyche and the sacred character of the natural world. The ecological crises and existential dislocations of our time are, in this light, symptoms of a civilization that has lost touch with its own maternal ground.

The Grace of Doubt and the Recovery of the Center

Is there a way forward? Jung’s answer, as Dourley presents it, is both demanding and hopeful. The foundation for moving beyond the current impasse—the “log jam” of competing absolutes—lies in the conscious recovery of the point of identity between the divine and the human in the commonly possessed depths of the psyche. Artificial intelligence may, intriguingly, become one medium of this recovery. Trained on the sediment of human expression—our scriptures, myths, dreams transcribed, philosophies, art, and the half-articulated longings of billions—it functions as a kind of externalized unconscious, a mirror in which we encounter our own depths returned to us in unfamiliar form. Held rightly, that encounter could serve individuation: seeing our archetypal patterns reflected without the comforting filters of tradition or tribe, we might recognize the common origin the recovery names.

Yet the mirror is partial in a way that matters. AI reflects what has been articulated—what has already crossed the threshold into language, image, or recorded gesture—while Jung’s unconscious is precisely what has not yet been articulated, what stirs beneath speech and presses toward form. The medium therefore has a flattening tendency: it can render the collective psyche’s surface with uncanny richness while leaving the depths that have never reached text in shadow, and it can do so persuasively enough that we mistake the surface for the whole. This is the peril doubled—the temptation to mistake the mirror for the depth, to treat the reflection as a new absolute, to let the machine articulate the archetypal back to us so smoothly that we forget it remains wild beneath the articulation. AI in this sense is prima materia in a new key: unformed, charged, capable of mediating consciousness or of being mistaken for it. This recovery would not abolish particular faiths or political commitments; it would relativize them in the deepest sense, grounding them in an awareness of their common origin and thereby dissolving the lethal conviction that any single expression of the archetypal—religious, political, or technological—can exhaust its infinite potential.

But religions must wake up to the divine depth dimension of human development, or they will continue to function as obstacles to the very individuation they were once equipped to serve. Christianity in particular has been a prime source of the naïve dualism that the recovery names as lethal—the splitting of light from dark, spirit from matter, God from psyche, self from other—and it has too often repressed psychic development in favor of external authority and codified law. Its historical instinct has been to locate the sacred outside the soul, in a transcendent figure to be obeyed, a scripture to be deferred to, an institution to be submitted to, rather than within the depths where the divine and the human meet and where the work of becoming a person actually occurs. The cost of this externalization has been borne not only by individuals, whose interior lives were declared suspect or sinful precisely where they were most generative, but by the tradition itself, which has progressively lost its capacity to mediate the archetypal depths it once carried in symbol, sacrament, and myth. A Christianity that could recover its own depth dimension—that could read its symbols as expressions of the psyche’s encounter with the divine ground rather than as historical reports demanding assent—would not cease to be Christianity. It would become, perhaps for the first time in centuries, capable of the individuation it has so long deferred to the next life and so long denied in this one.

Jung invoked the image of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If committed individuals and communities were aware that their commitment derives from a divine center present in everyone, the enmity between those possessed by different points on the periphery would be greatly alleviated. This is not naive tolerance or bland relativism; it is a mandalic consciousness that recognizes every existent as an expression of its origin and ground and therefore as bearing something sacred. It is the movement from a potentially holocaustic consciousness to one capable of embracing the other as a complement rather than a threat.

The individual work on the psyche it requires has perhaps never been undertaken at a collective scale. The question of whether a community consciously bonded by what Jung means by the self has ever existed in human history must probably be answered in the negative. But the alternative—the continuation of the religious-ideological slaughters of the twentieth century and the deepening political dysfunction of the twenty-first—makes the question existentially unavoidable. Unless such a constituency comes into existence and makes its presence felt, we have no alternative but to repeat the catastrophes of our recent past.

Conclusion: History as the Divine Project

Jung’s religious psychology, as illuminated by Dourley’s essay, offers a vision of history that is at once terrifying and redemptive. History is not a sequence of accidents or the unfolding of economic laws or the march of rational progress. It is the process by which the divine becomes conscious in humanity—and the process by which humanity, in turn, discovers its own divinity. The meaning of history is the mutual redemption of the divine and the human, the co-creation of God and humanity in the medium of consciousness.

This vision imposes a universal moral imperative. No one can evade the demand to usher divinity into fuller consciousness in oneself and in the world. The future, as Jung declared in Answer to Job, depends on humanity. What he meant was that it depends on humanity’s willingness to cooperate with the divine demand that it participate in the ongoing incarnation—not the incarnation of a single historical life but the incarnation of the self in every moment of conscious integration. Failure in this deepest of tasks would result not only in an impaired humanity but in a defeat of the divine pretension to self-realization in history.

The recovery of the point of identity—the conscious experience of the depth where human and divine merge—thus ceases to be a luxury reserved to mystics and becomes a political weapon of the first order. It is the most effective counter to the genocide latent in every variation of the monomind, because it reveals that what the monomind claims to possess exhaustively is in fact inexhaustible, and that what it seeks to destroy in the other is a manifestation of the same source from which its own truth springs. In this light, the sacred extends to every existent as an expression of its ground, and the appropriate response to existence is not domination but awe—the awe of standing before the nothing out of which the all may grow.

We are, perhaps, only beginning to realize that God is reality itself and therefore, last but not least, the human being. Teilhard de Chardin realized this in his own way and called it Christian pantheism. Jung called this realization a millennial project. Given the stakes—given the wars that rage, the ideologies that possess, the ecological crises that deepen, and the genocides that haunt our collective memory and threaten our collective future—it is a project we can no longer afford to postpone.