Does ‘Humanness’ Evolve’?
Seán O’Conaill questions Ilia Delio’s evolutionary critique of Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica Humanitas’
“The most revealing word in Magnifica Humanitas is a verb: remain. ‘Our duty in the age of AI,’ Leo writes, ‘is to remain profoundly human.’ The governing images — for example, Babel set against Jerusalem — are images of protection, of guarding a grandeur already given. The encyclical understands the human person as a finished essence, dignified from outside, to be preserved against a technological force that threatens to dissolve it…
“Teilhard offers not a rival Christianity but a more adequate one — adequate to evolution, to the shadow, and to the machinic world humanity now inhabits. His Christ is not the guardian of a fixed human essence but the Omega toward whom complexity and consciousness are drawn in love. His noosphere is the emerging medium of the communion the person was made for. And his finitude — accepted, loved, carried through — is the same finitude Leo rightly defends, but freed from the anxiety of a God who stands guard outside and given back to the Ground that sustains us from within.
“The question Magnifica Humanitas poses is the right one: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? The answer it gives — remain — is too small for the tradition it invokes and too small for the moment it addresses.”
(Ilia Delio in “Teilhard de Chardin points to what Pope Leo missed in ‘Magnifica Humanitas’” in the National Catholic Reporter, June 8th 2026)
Magnifica Humanitas has been generally well received by Christian commentators. I was therefore startled by the assessment I have excerpted above – one that mixes faint praise with radical criticism. Ilia Delio seems to argue in the National Catholic Reporter that the metaphysics and anthropology of the encyclical are out of date because they do not take sufficient account of man as an evolving creature and of the God who guides this process of ‘becoming’ from ‘within’. The church needs instead, she argues, to embrace the evolutionary metaphysics and anthropology of Teilhard de Chardin.
My first reaction to this was that Delio makes far too much of Leo’s use of the word ‘remain’ in the sentence she quotes. Throughout the encyclical it is a humanness transformed by relationship with Christ that the pope is defending. He is obviously not telling all of us to ‘remain as you are’ but to be in constant deepening conversion. His use of ‘remain’ is not a command to stand still in spiritual terms but to safeguard from technological hubris the humanity that technology, when overvalued or misused, may threaten – a humanity that becomes complete – often through the experience of limitation or ‘suffering’ – in union with Christ.
Is ‘Humanness’ Still Evolving?
Beyond that, what exactly is Ilia Delio saying about what it is to be human? Is it that ‘humanness’ – the essence of what it is to be human – is also still evolving? If that is the case it must follow that humans of the Christian past could not become as human as can we ourselves, and that we ourselves must in turn fall short of the greater humanness that humans of the future will be capable of achieving. Is this indeed what she is arguing? If so is that not necessarily spiritually deflating for all of us, condemned as we are to just one life in a historical continuum with no certain duration, and therefore to a humanness that cannot compare to what humanness will become in future eras?
Does it not also make an even more insoluble puzzle of the Incarnation – the ‘making flesh’ of the Son of God at a specific moment in human history? If the humanity of those who listened to Jesus, and who founded the Christian tradition, could not as fully rise to his challenge to be ‘fully human’ as later generations, why should there ever have been an Incarnation then, or at any particular point, rather than – always – later?
Surely on the contrary the Incarnation, the historical insertion of Jesus the Christ, was instead a divine statement that the fullness of what it is to be human was historically determined at that point, and that however we now evolve (technologically or in any other respect), we could not at any point in the future become more human than we already can become, in our own time, in prayerful union with Christ? Is that not how we should understand Jesus the Christ as the Omega point of history, as well as the Alpha point?
If not, if humanness is to become something other than it could become for the disciples of Jesus’ time, for the Christians of every era since – and for ourselves – then the Omega point of history in the future and the Jesus of the Gospels are not the same and the Jesus of history must also be understood as having lacked in humanness whatever the evolutionary process has in store for us.
That cannot make any sense. As we cannot change for the better except in relationship with the Jesus whom we know from the Gospels, it follows that humanness also – whatever the technological era – cannot evolve into a humanness that is essentially different from the humanness we find there in Him. To argue otherwise is to make evolving technology – and not the Jesus of the Gospels – the determinant of what we, as humans, are to become.
I do not know how Teilhard de Chardin reconciled his understanding of an ever-evolving humanity with the challenge that comes to us to change from the ‘low tech’ Jesus of history – who does not himself change. Ilia Delio makes me wonder if Teilhard ever did.
Not for nothing does Pope Leo raise the question of what it is to be human. I am far from convinced that Ilia Delio gives us a more satisfactory answer than ‘Magnifica Humanitas’.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
The perfectibility of humanity was the creed of Rousseau, Kant, Godwin, Shelley, and it was resisted by church figures such as Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, who condemned Rousseau’s Emile at the same time as the Parlement of Paris and the authorities in Geneva. Though he had a persecution complex, he really was persecuted. Kant had only one portrait in his house, Rousseau’s, and legend has it that he missed his daily walk only once, when reading Emile. Of course, none of these brilliant thinkers were naive and they keyed progress to enlightened human behaviour.
Leo XIV calls himself a son of St Augustine, and the great weapon against progressives and perfectibilists was Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin. The idea that humans could make themselves more perfect smacked of Pelagianism. The hostility to the progressive thinking was more on the basis of Original Sin than on that of the idea the human nature must have been complete in Jesus’s time — a new idea to me — did Sean think it up?
I would say that the historical Jesus and the Gospels are a seed that is capable of stupendous further growth. Jesus’s discourse on the kingdom of God points in that direction, though out of date in some respects (as in the case of the imminent parousia) and needing to be supplemented under the influence of the Spirit and the Risen Christ (as the Last Discourse in the Fourth Gospel says). It’s enough for Jesus to be a real human being for his human life, death and resurrection to qualify him as saviour of the world. The unfolding of the Christ-event is concretely historical, “it rides time like riding a river” as G. M. Hopkins says.
The Catholic Church made a great concession to progressivism in Rerum Novarum, which sees the promise of improvement brought by modern industry. Vatican II in Gaudium et Spes strikes a note that is much more in accord with progressive thinking than earlier attitudes. Teilhard said that the world listens to those who give it the most hope-filled message. His message burst onto the public stage after his death in the years of Vatican II. His book Le phénomène humain is said to be the best-selling French book of all time.
Human consciousness, which is a thrilling emergence in the trajectory of Evolution, is intrinsically developmental, in the sense that it grows increasingly complex and integrates more and more knowledge and insight. Also it changes immensely — modern literature since Kafka has not only reflected but shaped the changing nature of human consciousness and existence. Is this an evolution for the better? Certainly we now have unprecedented possibilities and potential. But at the moment we are more anxious about preserving human freedom and dignity, building a more just world, surviving physically. Thinking about “the Christ that is to be” (for which Romans 8 might be an inspiration) seems beyond our reach just now. The optimism of the 1960s tends to be dismissed as an illusion.