The Machine Doesn’t Have the Last Word: Rahner, Merton, and the Soul of Artificial Intelligence
*A See–Judge–Act Reflection on* Magnifica Humanitas
The Machine Doesn’t Have the Last Word: Rahner, Merton, and the Soul of Artificial Intelligence
*A See–Judge–Act Reflection on* Magnifica Humanitas
There is something almost head-scratching about a papal encyclical on artificial intelligence — the oldest institution in Western civilization issuing formal teaching on the newest technology in human history. But *Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence* is not a panic document, and it deserves more than a quick scroll and a dismissal. Beneath its technical concerns about algorithmic bias, labor displacement, and weaponized disinformation lies a much older question: *What does it mean to be human, and can anything take that from us?*
That question deserves theologians with deep roots. Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton — the German Jesuit who remapped Catholic anthropology from the inside, and the Kentucky monk who turned his hermitage into a window onto the world — are two of the best conversation partners we have for sitting with it. Neither of them knew the internet, let alone large language models. But both of them knew something more important: they knew the shape of the temptation we face whenever a powerful new system offers to do our thinking for us.
SEE: What Is Actually Happening?
Before we judge or act, we have to look honestly at what is in front of us.
AI is not one thing. It is a family of technologies — machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, predictive analytics — that share a common logic: pattern recognition at scale. These systems have become woven into the texture of everyday life faster than any previous technology. They curate what news you read, score your creditworthiness, assess your job application, translate your words, write your emails, and increasingly inform decisions about your medical treatment, your parole hearing, and your children’s school placement.
*Magnifica Humanitas* notices this panorama and identifies several genuinely serious concerns: the concentration of AI power in a small number of corporations and states; the erosion of privacy through mass surveillance; the manipulation of public opinion through algorithmically personalized misinformation; the precarity of labor in an economy where automation threatens not only factory workers but knowledge workers; and the risk that AI systems will simply encode and amplify the biases of the societies that built them — especially toward the poor, the marginalized, and the Global South.
None of this is hysteria. It is a reasonable description of what is already happening. And the encyclical is right to name it.
But — and this is where Rahner and Merton become essential — none of it means that *AI is the problem*. The problem is older, and it lives closer to home.
JUDGE: What Does Faith Say About This?
Rahner: The Person Is Never Finished
Karl Rahner spent his career insisting on something that sounds simple but has enormous consequences: the human being is not a fixed essence but a dynamic, historical becoming. We are not objects that happen to think. We are subjects — always in motion, always exceeding ourselves, always oriented toward what Rahner called the *Heilige Geheimnis*, the Holy Mystery — a horizon that recedes every time we approach it.
He named this capacity *active self-transcendence*: the structural restlessness of the human spirit that drives us beyond any given state of knowledge, freedom, or love toward something more. Even a mundane act like learning something new is, in Rahner’s framework, a small enactment of transcendence — the self going beyond where it was. As he put it simply, “Learning always involves self-transcendence.”
This anthropology has two important implications for AI.
First, AI has no intrinsic power to abolish human transcendence. It is a tool — sophisticated, consequential, even dangerous when misused, but still a tool. It cannot close the horizon. It cannot reach into the space between the human spirit and the Holy Mystery and fill it with silicon. What it *can* do is make it easier for us to live *as if* that space did not exist — to accept a flattened, manageable, computable version of ourselves and call it enough.
Second, this means the real theological question is not “What is AI doing to us?” but “What are we allowing AI to do to us?” Rahner’s framework turns our gaze back to the human agent from the machine. The encyclical’s worry that AI reduces persons to “data profiles” and “risk scores” is, in Rahner’s idiom, a worry about *habituated self-diminishment* — a way of living that trains us to forget our own depth. The danger is not the algorithm. The danger is our consent to its definitions.
There is another Rahnerian angle worth adding that the encyclical gestures toward but does not fully develop: his theology of *grace in history*. For Rahner, the Spirit of God is not hovering above history, descending occasionally in approved moments. Grace is the very atmosphere of history — active in struggle, in solidarity, in the resistance of the oppressed, in the inarticulate longing for justice. This means the people organizing to regulate AI, the workers fighting for fair treatment in gig economies, the journalists exposing algorithmic discrimination — these are not merely secular actors. They are, in Rahner’s sense, sites where grace is at work in the world. The encyclical’s concern for labor and justice is not a distraction from theology. It *is* theology.
Rahner’s notion of the *anonymous Christian* extends this further — though it needs careful handling. His core intuition, which matters here, is that God’s self-communication is universally operative: that the human capacity for self-transcendence is not a monopoly of any tradition. Buddhist mindfulness, Confucian ritual, Indigenous reciprocity with the land — these are not deficient approximations of a Western metaphysics waiting to be corrected. They are distinct, culturally specific ways of living the same fundamental dynamism. What AI threatens, on this reading, is not only a single philosophical definition of the person. It is the *plurality* of ways of being human — the many disciplines of attention and relation that different traditions have cultivated — that a globalized technocratic monoculture is increasingly crowding out.
Merton: The Idol and the False Self
Thomas Merton arrives at the same concern from a different direction, and with more fire.
Merton was not hostile to technology in principle. He typed on a typewriter, corresponded prolifically by mail, used a mimeograph machine, and was genuinely curious about the modern world even from his hermitage at Gethsemani. But he was uncompromising about a particular spiritual danger that technology concentrates: the danger of the *false self*.
For Merton, the false self is not evil in a dramatic sense. It is simply the self that has been constructed around the need for approval, security, power, and image — the self that derives its sense of reality from what it can control and be seen to accomplish. The false self is not a villain. It is an exhausted performance. And Merton saw that modern technology, by amplifying our capacity for production, speed, control, and self-presentation, could become an engine for the false self’s project.
His warning in *Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander* is worth sitting with: our “fantastic progress” risks becoming “an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration” if we do not learn how to live with it. AI intensifies this risk to a degree Merton could not have imagined. A technology that curates your information environment to maximize your engagement, that reflects your preferences back to you in an endless personalized mirror, that offers to produce text and thought and creativity on your behalf — this is, in Merton’s terms, a machine exquisitely designed to service the false self.
But Merton would not stop there, and neither should we. He was equally insistent that beneath the false self — beneath all the noise, performance, and distraction — there remains what he called the *le point vierge*, the virgin point: an inviolable center of the person where “our whole being is silent and attentive.” This is not a romanticized inner room available only to monks. It is the irreducible depth of every human person — the place where you are, as Merton famously wrote in *New Seeds of Contemplation*, “not the soul they think you are.” It is the ground of the true self, and no algorithm can reach it.
The encyclical’s anxiety about AI-driven manipulation of information and the surveillance economy reads, in Merton’s register, as an anxiety that our technological systems are systematically steering us *away* from that center. They are not evil for being machines. They become dangerous when we let them set the terms of what is real, when we accept their measurements as our definition, when we live — as the forest does not live — entirely on the surface.
Merton’s late engagement with Buddhism is also relevant here, and not incidentally. In his dialogues with D.T. Suzuki and his growing attention to Zen, he found what he described as a profound solidarity beneath apparent doctrinal difference: both Christian contemplation and Zen practice were, at their depth, disciplines of *seeing through* the illusions of the ego-self. The Zen practitioner’s liberation from the grasping, constructing self and the Christian contemplative’s kenotic self-emptying before God were, for Merton, pointing toward the same open space. A world of AI — which is, among other things, a machine for constructing and flattering the ego — is precisely the world that needs these disciplines.
Rahner and Merton Together
What happens when you read these two figures alongside each other?
Rahner gives us the *structure* of the problem: the human person is a transcending subject, history is the site of grace, and AI becomes dangerous when it habituates us to deny our own transcendence. Merton gives us the *existential weight* of the problem: the false self is seductive, contemplation is the antidote, and we need to know from the inside what it feels like to refuse the machine’s definitions.
They also share something easily missed: a refusal of dualism. Neither Rahner nor Merton is anti-world or anti-technology. Rahner is explicit that the human vocation involves historical making — that we are called to build the world. Despite the hermitage, Merton maintained a vast correspondence and wrote about politics, race, nuclear weapons, and Vietnam. The response to AI is not withdrawal. It is *discernment* — the practiced capacity to ask, in each concrete situation: does this use of this tool help me become more fully human, or does it help me forget that I am?
ACT: What Are We Called To Do?
In the end, *Magnifica Humanitas* will be judged less by its analysis of AI than by whether it helps the Church — and the wider world — remember the depth of the human. AI is not the problem. The problem is forgetting who we are and who we are becoming in a world that finds it increasingly easy to confuse calculation with wisdom and prediction with destiny.
Rahner’s language of active self-transcendence reminds us that the human person is always *on the way* — a history-making subject whose freedom is ordered toward an unfathomable mystery that no system can contain or close. Merton’s language of the true and false self reminds us that this journey is never abstract but always contested: between contemplative attention and idolatrous distraction, between communion and control.
The real danger is not intelligent machines but unintelligent hearts — hearts that accept as normal a world in which persons are reduced to risk scores, workers to optimization problems, and entire peoples to data points in someone else’s model.
This is where the plural anthropologies Rahner gestures toward and Merton actively inhabited become indispensable. Buddhist teachings on non-substantial selfhood — the radical deconstruction of the grasping, controlling ego that Zen practice pursues — offer a powerful counter to the hypertrophied individual for whom AI is just one more instrument of mastery. Confucian understandings of personhood as constituted by ritually mediated relationships resist the atomism that technocratic systems presuppose. Indigenous cosmologies that locate the human within a web of obligations to land, ancestors, and other-than-human kin offer a vision of the person that no algorithm can adequately model — because these traditions insist, in different idioms, that the person is never simply a node of preferences to be optimized. The person is a *relation*, embedded in webs of grace and obligation that exceed calculation.
These are not failed attempts at Thomism. They are alternative disciplines of attention — different grammars of the same human mystery that *Magnifica Humanitas* seeks to defend against technocratic reduction. And they converge, across their differences, on something Merton kept trying to say: that the deepest resistance to the machine’s reductions is not a better argument but a different quality of presence — the presence of someone who knows, from practice, that there is more to reality than what can be measured.
A Mertonian call to contemplation, then, is not an escape from the world of AI. It is a summons to inhabit that world differently — to bring to it the kind of attention that can see through the mirror of the false self, that can receive the other not as data but as mystery, that can stand in the forest of being and, when the imagination is finally silent, let the forest speak.
Only from that quiet center can we discern which uses of AI genuinely serve *magnificent humanity* — and which merely magnify our refusal of it.
Questions for Further Reflection
1. Rahner argues that the human person is constituted by a restless movement toward Holy Mystery — a movement no system can finalize. How do you experience this dynamic in your own life, and do you think AI makes it harder or easier to live from that depth?
2. Merton distinguishes sharply between the true self and the false self. In what ways might our use of social media, AI tools, and digital systems be servicing the false self — and what would it look like to use these same tools from the true self instead?
3. The encyclical worries that AI concentrates power and amplifies existing injustice. If grace is at work *in* history as Rahner insists, where do you see the Spirit active in current struggles over algorithmic accountability, workers’ rights, and data sovereignty?
4. Buddhist, Confucian, and Indigenous traditions offer distinct ways of understanding the person as relational, embedded, non-substantial, and obligated to the more-than-human world. How might these perspectives correct or enrich the way *Magnifica Humanitas* frames human dignity?
5. Merton believed contemplation is not a retreat from the world but the most radical form of resistance to its idols. What would a genuinely contemplative approach to AI look like in daily life — not as abstinence, but as a different quality of attention?
*This reflection uses the See–Judge–Act method developed in Catholic Social Teaching as a framework for theological discernment of contemporary experience.*