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.
It was rather the clarity of meaning in Magnifica Humanitas that struck me, Joe, rather than any ‘inelegance’ of language.
Take this sentence in 118: “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.”
How exactly could that be more elegant without substituting abstract Latinisms ab initio, e.g. for ‘limit’ and ‘old age’? If you are talking about syntax, is there a clearer alternative?
Later in the paragraph Leo shows that he knows the word ‘finitude’ but if he had not first used ‘limit’ – and then given concrete examples – such as ‘old age’ instead of ‘seniority’ – might the paragraph not have gained elegance by losing clarity for the reader?
Personally I don’t think I have ever read a clearer summary exposition of the basic principles of Catholic social teaching. That is not to damn elegance but to ask if it should be a priority in a document intended first of all not only to communicate but to animate?
Sean, it was the TITLE of the Encyclical I faulted for inelegance. As the TITLE of any work is what is most widely read, this is a serious issue. The title will float around for a long time, like Humani generis, Mater et magistra, Humanae vitae, and the mythical Onus iamdudum intolerabile. Please ask Copilot what makes the title unsatisfactory.
Of course the encyclical contains good stuff — I pointed the same region of it that you pick up. But I think it is a stretch to praise the long resume of church social doctrine as a luminous synthesis. It is more a chronological laundry list of the encyclicals since Leo XIII, which celebrate one another in an incestuous manner, with very little if any dialogue with the many prophetic Catholic writers on social justice. Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum itself is elegantly titled but is it not turgidly written, though he was a pope who tried to make the clergy pursue literary studies? Pope Francis was perhaps the most dialogal encyclicalist we have had, citing writers of the most unexpected kind, such as Hölderlin. Leo XIV is very Vaticanocentric in his references, despite alleged synodality. Does he refer to ANY modern philosophers or ethicist or literary writers or AI researchers (even though some were present at the presentation event), or any contemporary theologians by name, or any non‑Catholic authors? In this regard he seems to be reversing the openness of his predececessor. (BTW, Dilexit nos and Dilexi te are incredibly expanded laundry lists, even if the material is less familiar.)
The church is in a state of Stockholm Syndrome in regard to the horrible language inflicted on it in the English liturgy, for that, I would not use the word “inelegance” but “illiteracy”.
PREFACE OF EASTER I
It is truly right and just,
our duty and our salvation,
at all times to ACCLAIM you, O Lord, but
ABOVE ALL to LAUD YOU YET MORE GLORIOIUSLY,
when Christ our Passover has been sacrificed.
For he is the true Lamb who has taken away the sins of the world;
by dying he has destroyed our death,
and by rising, restored our life.
Therefore, OVERCOME WITH PASCHAL JOY, every land,
every people exults in your praise and EVEN the heavenly Powers,
with the angelic hosts,
sing together the unending hymn of your glory,
as they ACCLAIM
By the way, elegance goes hand in hand with clarity in Latin (and also in English, as in the case of our most elegant Christian writer, J. H. Newman, steeped in Cicero and Jane Austen), and it serves “not only to communicate but to animate” whereas the inelegance of the current English liturgy not only fails to communicate but it also fails to animate. It has robbed us to the First and Fourth Eucharistic Prayers–which I used to use often, but now cannot; the First, the Roman Canon, was very well translated before the massive abuse of the new translations, and there was a booklet explaining every single translation choice in the c.1970 translation.
In the Renaissance there was a huge effort to boost the elegantia of Latin, with the result that John Calvin is probably not only the most luminous intellectually but the most radiant stylistically of Christian writers (in French as well). Newman accorded the palm to Athanasius and Jerome among patristic writers. Athanasius, like Calvin and Newman, wrote only to express what he wanted to say, which is the source of true elegance.
When the church throws away the beauty of its language it will be bitten in the posterior (as elegance bids me call it). Droves drift to the Traditional Latin Mass because they cannot bear the linguistic dreck foisted on them. And true communication in synodal symphony yields to the old barren dogmatic insistence and to the aridity of canon law bureaucracy.
CAVEAT EMPTOR!
oops, I see 4 references that reach beyond the Vatican enclave: Guardini, n. 120; Frankl. n. 133; Arendt, n. 143; Tolkien, n. 187. But what are these amid the incredible deluge of papal references in the 224 notes? How does this autoreferential excess communicate and animate?
“For Teilhard, it is the deepening of the interior life that technology must serve and cannot replace.”
The essence of Ilia Delio’s article for me is that God is within and when we befriend and develop this relationship, we will no longer have the need to look outside for other gods, including Ai.