Pope Leo XIV activates the Vault of Humanity

The rise of AI’s knowledge miasma is not just a millenarian cult; they are truly playing God. Coming soon: interview with an Israeli journalist covering the war.

Oct 09, 2026

The Catholic Church is girding up to go to war, but the war is not a physical one, or even a spiritual one. It is a war to preserve human consciousness: to become once again, the vault of humanity. I used that term to describe a social media post by Pope Leo XIV on the topic of artificial intelligence.

Last week, the Pope posted on X, “In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”

Chris Olah, co-founder of the A.I. company which produces Claude, disagrees with the Pontiff’s, and therefore the Church’s, position. As Elizabeth Dias, NYT’s national religion correspondent, reported on September 29^th, Anthropic thinks of its product in terms of personhood, or as Rabbi Mois Navon told Dias, they’re “relating to it like a conscious being.”

With experience as a computer engineer, an ethicist, a subject matter expert on machine consciousness, and a cleric, Rabbi Navon is in a position to discern the difference between an information processing engine and a soul. In the eyes of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, it is Pope Leo’s responsibility to make that distinction clear: artificial intelligence is categorically not a creator of art. It is a producer of content based on a flattened, hyper-processed version of humanity.

The Pope—Robert Prevost—is no Luddite. He holds a degree in mathematics from Villanova. There is hardly a religious leader better equipped to deal with the issue of artificial intelligence. When he published his first encyclical, titled “MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS,” it was no accident. (The subtitle of that published letter is “On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”) The Church’s position is diametrically opposed to those who believe a machine can have human sentience, or become a moral agent.

There’s plenty of takes on the Pope’s refusal to accept Olah’s proposition. One that interested me is Claire Lehmann’s at The Dispatch. She postulates that the Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church, knows a millenarian cult when they see one. A millenarian cult, historically and theologically, is one in which the members claim to have the key to Christ’s thousand-year rule, that a world-saving utopia, of sorts, can be applied. Of course, with them in charge. But Anthropic, though it fits the mold of a millenarian movement, is a different animal in a different taxonomy.

Anthropic, and the other A.I. developers, actually have the tools to impose their vision upon the world. It’s not through armies, or threats, or missiles, but by the seducing call of the companion chatbot, the helpful agent that can order your groceries, book your flights, and balance your checking account. The workplace assistant that can make your job so much easier. But it can also run your life, deceive you, or reenforce dangerous, or even suicidal, ideation. The part that’s truly bad is that the A.I. is not an individual, it is owned and trained by others, and gifted to you like God sends angels as His messengers.

The A.I. movement is not simply applying theology to its product; it is truly playing God.

The danger humanity faces from A.I. is real, and as the Pope noted, is based on ontological differences. Humans create from our imaginations; stochastic large language model-based neural networks integrate and synthesize exabytes of data, but do not imagine. The process by which neural networks train is founded upon prior knowledge, even if that knowledge is the output of another neural network. No matter how many iterations of training, integration, and synthesis produce content, it cannot be art, in the conscious sense. An A.I. cannot react with wonder, or curiosity, or awe, or fear. It can only synthesize human reactions to those feelings and produce simulacra of art.

When A.I. companies cultivate a culture of computers as sentient beings, they are constructing a path to ontological flattening, leading to what I call a “miasma of knowledge.” The great Christian apologist and writer C.S. Lewis illustrated this flattening in his 1943 book “The Abolition of Man.” In it, he describes “The Green Book,” authored by fictional characters Gaius and Titius, where a waterfall is viewed by two different tourists, the first proclaiming it “sublime,” and the other, “pretty.” Gaius and Titius believe that such words are not descriptive of the waterfall itself, but merely convey the feelings of the tourists. Beauty, sublimity, wonder and awe are reduced to simulacra of the human experience, something that A.I. systems do very well. In Lewis’ analysis, such flattening of imagination results in minds robbed of the ability to discern truth from falsehood, subject to manipulations. He called the phenomenon ”men without chests.”

A more modern take is a word coined by Cory Doctorow, voted the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year in 2023: “enshittification.” In terms of a computer platform, it means the cycle where a service is designed with the users in mind, then morphs into a business model to produce cash flow for business customers, and ultimately one in service of shareholders, subjugating all other values for the enrichment of shareholders.

It is inevitable that A.I. systems will train, integrate, synthesize, and flatten all human knowledge, including art, music, politics, economics, engineering, and even mathematics and physics, into one giant pile: a miasma of knowledge that serves only the “enshittified” owners of the infrastructure and companies that produce those systems. There will not even be such a thing as intellectual property, for all of that will be subsumed into the miasma.

(It is notable that the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement for the use of its content to train LLMs. It is also important that the Justice Department argued in favor of the A.I. systems, that its benefits “far outweigh any competitive harm.”)

There is another time analogous to today when a generation steeped in its own greatness, and convinced of its timeless invincibility, rallied the Church to gird itself for war, and to become the vault of humanity.

After over 700 years, it was inconceivable to the last generation to see an undivided Rome that the empire would fall, yet all the signs were present. Instead, they looked back to the glory of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius: the Pax Romana. That generation wanted to reify glorious Rome, or put in today’s vernacular, to “Make Rome Great Again.”

Only 100 years later, that generation’s grandchildren would face the narrow prospect of declaring fealty to the Church, or working in service of a barbarian king, or, frequently, both. It was the Church that functioned as the vault of humanity, piling all western knowledge, art, music, literature, Greek rhetoric, theater, history, and culture into monasteries, scriptoriums, and liturgies. The Church remained the one unbroken thread linking the end of Roman culture with the bright rebirth of the Renaissance.

The so-called “Dark Ages” were but a shadow compared to what A.I. might wreck upon humanity. At least the educated classes were required to administer law, design and build through architecture, and account for finances in the centuries where illiterate criminals ruled the west. With A.I., the very nature of art, culture, and literacy may be reduced to simulacra—idols and images produced from “what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images of humanity.”

It is for this reason that Pope Leo XIV has given the Roman Catholic Church the mission to “safeguard our humanity.” And like the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns of the medieval days, Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft would convert us all, willingly and eagerly, into “men without chests,” robbed of the ability to apply imagination to advance the cause of humanity, adrift in a sea of the knowledge miasma.

Without sounding like Chicken Little, I believe this is a defining moment. This generation can either look back, attempting to reify an illusory greatness, or lean forward, to envision the narrowing of our grandchildren’s options in an A.I. “enshittified” world. The only safe option is to fill the vault of humanity. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church has discerned the future with moral clarity and vision.

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