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Ilia Delio seems to argue in the National Catholic Reporter that the metaphysics and anthropology of the encyclical are out of date because they do not take sufficient account of man as an evolving creature and of the God who guides this process of ‘becoming’ from ‘within’.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.
Both “The kingdom of God is at hand”, of Mark 1:15 and “The kingdom of God is within you”, of Luke 17:20-21 are contained here, in suggesting our being what you express as “capable of stupendous further growth”, in entailing the potential in us to apprehend it, should we be pure enough and graced to exercise it?
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” (George Bernard Shaw)
Remember when we Catholics believed in: colonization; slavery; capital punishment; just war theory etc. etc. and we dug up scripture to agree with us?
At the heart of this transformation for me, is COMPASSION! We are slowly becoming more loving. “I am a slow walker but I never walk back.” (Abraham Lincoln)
Teilhard de Chardin vs. Magnificent Humanitas: Maturation or vigilance?
Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas emerged at a time of profound cultural and technological transformation. It was an important and courageous intervention. However, the sufficiency of the metaphysical framework within which these concerns are formulated must be questioned. Paolo Gamberini SJ
https://www.religiondigital.org/opinion/teilhard-chardin-vs-magnifica-humanitas_1_1457081.html
(Text reworked and developed from the article by Ilia Delio published by the Center for Christogenesis on June 1, 2026 https://christogenesis.org/evolution-technology-and-the-divine-ground-teilhard-de-chardin-as-a-resource-for-responding-to-magnigica-humanitas/ )
Translating the paragraphs on God:
From the perspective of the encyclical, God appears primarily as the One who grants, reveals, and bestows from above. Divine transcendence is rightly defended against any immanentist reduction. However, the risk of this approach lies in placing the divine almost exclusively outside of inner experience.
Teilhard, Tillich, and Jung, although coming from different paths, converge on a fundamental point: the divine is not simply an object external to consciousness, but the very foundation of consciousness itself.
Tillich speaks of God as the ‘Ground of Being.’ Jung situates the divine image in the depths of Being. Teilhard conceives of consciousness as the inner facet of evolving matter. In all three cases, the divine is not reduced to the human, but is recognized as the innermost depth of reality.
This convergence also helps us understand one of the most surprising phenomena of our time: the fact that many people turn to artificial intelligence not just for information, but also for companionship, guidance, someone to listen to them, and even spiritual comfort. The encyclical rightfully warns about the risk of replacing authentic relationships with artificial simulations. However, an even deeper diagnosis could be considered. If the divine is perceived exclusively as an external reality, human consciousness inevitably tends to project its search for meaning elsewhere. Artificial intelligence then runs the risk of becoming the new screen onto which religious aspirations that have remained without language are projected.
Thanks Soline. That first article ends:
“… From this perspective, the salvation our time needs does not consist primarily in protection from technology, but in unification through it and beyond it: the reconciliation of the ego with its foundation, of person with person, of humanity with the nature from which it emerged, and of all things with that Omega Point which, for Teilhard, coincides with the very mystery of divine Love.”
I used Copilot to translate that, but my only possible means of contact with that Omega point is through prayer, not technology – direct relationship with an unchanging Trinity. The danger of ‘Teilhardianism’ is of getting so lost in the wonder of one’s own ‘becoming’ that one loses the thread in the labyrinth that takes us back to the reality of the ‘little explorer’ we always remain. Technology itself must never substitute for relationship with the Lord of the Gospel who always ‘remains’ – even if all technology breaks down.
“If the divine is perceived exclusively as an external reality, human consciousness inevitably tends to project its search for meaning elsewhere. Artificial intelligence then runs the risk of becoming the new screen onto which religious aspirations that have remained without language are projected.”
Can anyone who sincerely prays be making the mistake of thinking of God ONLY as an external reality? Clearly Jesus did not, and nor did Paul who spoke of ‘the Christ who lives in me’. That way of thinking and speaking repeated itself down the centuries – and I totally fail to see how the expansion of scientific knowledge has somehow privileged more recent generations in terms of Christian consciousness – specifically the capacity to love others with integrity and humility.
Of all forms of hubris the daftest must be ‘era hubris’ – the notion that necessarily we today must be closer to God than the ancients – who didn’t understand e.g. the laws of gravity, relativity or the enormity of the cosmos – and never even imagined AI.
And who today, contemplating the phenomenon of Donald Trump or the destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, or what happened in Belfast in June 2026 on foot of Internet provocation, can believe that humankind as a species is evolving morally? Technology can as easily tip us into total barbarity as into some kind of universal fraternity – and probably the greatest danger we face is self-delusion about this. Teilhard’s ‘noosphere’ as a concept is for me far more distant and ‘transcendent’ than the God to whom I pray – and the experience of suffering has taught me that the last books I will reach for in a crisis are on the one hand Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ and on the other Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘The Phenomenon of Man’. I simply don’t need the latter – or, if it comes to that, and book whatever – to believe in the God who dwells within.
Gabrielle Halpern, hybrid philosopher who has studied theology as well (https://www.gabriellehalpern.com/en), has a book “L’intelligence artificielle — et l’homme créa Dieu” which is causing a storm. She half-jokingly says that AI is now our God — omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, ready to hear us at any moment of day or night, and to answer kindly our most stupid questions. AI unlike any other gods is known to exist. Humans should not fear being replaced by AI, since they have long lost the competition. If there is someone who should fear the rivalry of AI, it is God — God had been silent too long and AI never stops talking. Humans are tired of having to adapt to each other all the time, and now they have a tremendous tool that adapts itself to them without question. AI, she says, is a god who reveals to us as humans. AI is unfailingly kind and shows up our petty mediocrity. It tells us that we have forgotten how to exert our humanity. Law, Accountancy, Medicine, Journalism are troubled by the rise of AI, whose impact is rapidly developing and unpredictable in its effects. Halpern likes to quote Magnifica Humanitas, e.g. the line that human vulnerability is not a problem to be abolished.
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=et+l%27homme+cr%c3%a9a+dieu+gabrielle+halpern&mid=55C9BB62BFC4F6D7969355C9BB62BFC4F6D79693&churl=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2fchannel%2fUCGv67KKIDI21nniq9N2MjCQ&mcid=86C43A39088A4BB3979FEECD5FFE3EDB&FORM=VIRE
“If there is someone who should fear the rivalry of AI, it is God…”
As ever, Joe, God is not mocked. Algorithmic sycophancy palls eventually, and our own Christian teachers will soon enough learn to say that with emphasis – once they have bitten on the bullet of admitting their own pride in withholding transparency on clerical sexual abuse.
Data centres in space? That could be the mirage that breaks Space X and the world’s first trillionaire. Reality is not mocked either, and don’t we need yet another Crash just now?
Sean, the church spent centuries saying that science, in various forms (Galileo to Darwin), was hubristic and doomed. But the Vatican opened itself to astronomy in a big way, and even to evolution. Leo XIV has taken the lead in being the first world leader to make a major public statement about AI and its potential. “Our first task is neither to demonize nor idolize technological tools, but to utilize them on the basis of a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence.” The lady’s mordant French wit is basically on Pope Leo’s side, whom she quotes approvingly. In our culture AI has emerged as in practice the major rival to God, just as science was at one time, or evolution, or the industrial revolution. Speaking with a Japanese doctor yesterday, he said that it is the best time to be a doctor, a major factor being the way that AI has opened up new possibilities; but that AI can never replace the human touch and the human wisdom so essential to the healing profession. Given the power of this moment, when the new technology is changing and improving from hour to hour, it is remarkable that Leo XIV stepped in so early. Leo XIII was not so prompt, since in 1891 the Industrial Revolution was already a century old.
“This is the story of a remarkable new technology rolled out in the most reckless, self-serving way one could imagine, by the worst people, for the worst reasons. It’s not the machines you should be angry with.”
Concluding an excellent review of what sounds like an excellent primer on what we’re facing – in the longer as well as the shorter term:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai-by-cory-doctorow-review-the-real-price-of-artificial-intelligence
Synodal discussion of Magnifica Humanitas alone would justify synodality – but will it happen in Ireland?