Opinion: ‘With his encyclical, Léon returns to the roots of Christian anthropology to offer an analysis of absolute modernity’

It is “on the forgotten shore where the thought of measure was born” that Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical “finds its deepest roots”, writes Ghazi Ben Ahmed, founder of the Mediterranean Development Initiative and a scientific collaborator at the ULB. With this text, the Pope summons Saint Augustine to the bedside of the twenty-first century.

By the theological intensity and urgency of its cry, the new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas already establishes itself as a pivotal text. Faced with the res novae of our age — the advent of artificial intelligence, the temptation of transhumanism, and the dematerialisation of consciousness — the Supreme Pontiff does not adopt the posture of a technical censor. As a great heir to Saint Augustine, he returns to the sources of Christian anthropology in order to offer a diagnosis of absolute modernity.

Behind the concepts of algorithms and robotics, it is the gigantic shadow of the Bishop of Hippo that looms over every line of this text. But this genius has a face, and that face is Mediterranean: it is from Carthage — that long-forgotten African shore, cradle of the thought of measure against excess — that Augustine learns to doubt before he hopes, to understand limitation as the condition of greatness. The Pope does not merely quote Augustine; he thinks with him. And in order to disarm the traps of contemporary technonarcissism, it is once again from this deep Mediterranean that the light reaches him.

Babel 2.0: The Resurgence of the Libido Dominandi

From the very introduction, the framework is established: humanity hesitates between “erecting a new Tower of Babel or building the holy city”. Here we find ourselves once again plunged into the heart of the masterful dialectic of The City of God.
For Saint Augustine, human history is the theatre of a struggle between two loves: love of self unto contempt of God, and love of God unto contempt of self. By transposing this myth into the digital age, the Pope brilliantly identifies the secret engine of the technocratic paradigm: the temptation of self-sufficiency, the dream of a technical power capable of abolishing the creaturely condition of lack; the madness of mastery, with AI erected not as an instrument of emancipation but as an instrument of control and pure performance.

What the text calls the “culture of power” is nothing other than the Augustinian libido dominandi — that passion for domination which today dresses itself in lines of code and delegates to machines the power over life and death.

“There is no algorithm capable of making war morally acceptable” — Magnifica Humanitas, Chapter V — an echo of Augustine’s words: “Take away justice, and what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?”

The Praise of Limitation in the Face of the Posthuman Mirage

The most audacious contribution of the encyclical lies in its rehabilitation of human vulnerability. Where the prophets of Silicon Valley see the biological body as a defect to be corrected, the Pope reminds us that the human being does not flourish in spite of limitation, but often through it.

This thought was not born in a Cambridge laboratory, nor in a Palo Alto start-up. It was born on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Carthage, that metropolis of the ancient world, was the place where the tension between the hybris of power and the wisdom of finitude was first forged. Augustine was both its heir and the one who transcended it. By stressing that AIs “do not live through experience, possess no body, know neither joy nor pain”, the Pope draws an impassable anthropological boundary: the machine calculates; only the human being experiences meaning.

This is precisely what the Mare Nostrum has always known: that greatness is not measured by the power of armies or the sophistication of tools, but by the capacity to inhabit one’s own finitude with lucidity. From Clitomachus to Augustine, from Carthage to Hippo, this African shore of the Mediterranean forged a thought of measure that neither conquering Rome nor triumphant Silicon Valley has ever managed to produce.

The Great Return to Inwardness

In an age of absolute externalisation — where our memories are archived in the cloud and our decisions entrusted to command prompts — Magnifica Humanitas concludes with a fervent call to divine indwelling. To invite humanity to rediscover the place “where God desires to dwell” is to reactivate the most famous secret of the Confessions: Tu eras interior intimo meo — “you were more inward to me than my innermost self”.

This formula is not the conclusion of a mystic withdrawn from the world. It is the culmination of a life that began amid the agitation of Carthage, passed through doubt and excess, and ultimately found in embraced limitation the path to truth. It is from this Mediterranean experience — made of crossings, ruptures, and intense flashes of light against the backdrop of the sea — that Augustine still speaks, through the encyclical, to our disoriented century.

Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas is not a text of retreat, but a compass of hope. By summoning the wisdom of the son of Carthage, Leo XIV reminds us that the true magnificence of the human being will never be measured by the power of his servers, but by his capacity to remain human, fragile, and profoundly connected to the other.

Faced with the dizzying promises of artificial intelligence, the two shores of the Mediterranean may be rediscovering that they share the same anxiety and the same hope. For in the face of the technological powers reshaping our human condition, no civilisation will make the crossing alone. Faced with the desert of silicon, it is once again from this African shore of the Mediterranean — where Augustine learned to doubt before he hoped — that the light we need reaches us.