NCR Online – Ilia Delio: Teilhard de Chardin points to what Pope Leo missed in ‘Magnifica Humanitas’
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a moment of genuine civilizational urgency. Its concern for human dignity, its alarm at the displacement of labor, its refusal to treat artificial intelligence as a neutral instrument — all of these are worthy moral interventions. The encyclical asks the right questions.
Yet a reading alongside Teilhard de Chardin’s ultrahumanism, and the theological tradition running through Carl Jung and Paul Tillich, suggests that the encyclical’s answers are constrained by a metaphysics no longer equal to the evolutionary world it seeks to address.
This essay does not dismiss Leo’s concerns; it argues that Teilhard provides a more adequate — and ultimately more hopeful — theological grammar for engaging AI, one that honors the church’s deepest instincts about the divine-human relationship while refusing to set evolution and grace in opposition.
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.
Leo builds carefully on the tradition of imago Dei, on the relational anthropology of the Trinity, on integral ecology extended into the digital sphere. Against the transhumanist fantasy of escaping weakness, he makes finitude the very medium of love and openness to God. This is the wisdom of the cross, and it is right.
Not sure if this is what’s needed. I asked copilot why Magnifica humanitas feels so flat and inelegant, compared with Pacem in terris, Ecclesiam suam, Populorum progressio, Ut unum sint, Evangelii gaudium and I got a long and detailed answer, which was a lesson in Latin style! The machine also agreed with me that titles should not be propositions and that Deus caritas est was a bad title from that point of view, as I suppose Dilexit nos and Dilexi te are. But the church which inflicted on us a perfectly monstrous mistranslation of the Roman Missal in English cannot be expected to have elegant language.