{This article, addressing Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence, will be presented in two parts; the first part, below, proposes a Christian understanding of word and language by which to evaluate the moral and philosophical implications of the use of AI writing, especially as regards spiritual matters.]
What then are we, when our voice of perennial truth is not the fount of Wisdom nor the outpourings of the Holy Spirit, but the ever-dripping tepid tap of ChatGPT, Claude or others of their LLM ilk?
We write to this question with urgency, as we encounter AI-generated spiritual content on an ever more frequent basis. That sacred topics should set the bar higher for integrity seems so intuitive, that the need to offer an apologia for authenticity grieves us. But here we stand, at what can rightly be called “an epochal change,” to use the words of Pope Francis.
The Church harbors no luddite antagonism towards technological development. Much to the contrary, such innovation reflects the creative potential of the human person, itself grounded in our imaging of the divine Creator. Abstract and theoretical worlds, such as literary fiction and mathematics, exist alongside the natural world and serve in their own ways to further the human project. Diagnostic and analytical applications of AI are poised to open up new vistas in various fields; this is exciting.
However, as stated in Antiqua et Nova, the 2025 DDF document on artificial intelligence, “technological products reflect the worldview of their developers, owners, users, and regulators, and have the power to ‘shape the world and engage consciences on the level of values.’” The newest Doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman, wrote that conscience is “the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.” If consciences are being influenced and values determined and instilled at the speed of light across a global monoculture, we do well to step back and humanize the choices we are making, while it remains under our disposal to do so. Most especially, if we are truly committed to following and echoing the voice of Christ in our spiritual and/or liturgical works, we must take serious cognizance of the issue of LLMs.[1]
We were startled to see accounts of “personal” reflections, histories of trauma and crisis, even eulogies, employing fully generated text – and frankly horrified to see such material presented as original, yet testing as 100% AI-generated on the most reliable AI checkers (as we have). The communications theorist (and Catholic convert) Marshall McLuhan was known for having popularized the saying, “the medium is the message”; how a thought or experience is expressed superdetermines at once its content and the way in which it is apprehended. When the content in question is fundamentally spiritual, we contend that language cannot be outsourced, above all for us who profess the religion of the Logos. Word can never be dispensable nor accidental, least of all for a Christian.
Christian thought considers the intellectual faculties of the human person within the framework of an integral anthropology that views the human being as essentially embodied. In the human person, spirit and matter “are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.” In other words, the soul is not merely the immaterial “part” of the person contained within the body, nor is the body an outer shell housing an intangible “core.” Rather, the entire human person is simultaneously both material and spiritual.
But this leads us to two further questions: What is a person? And: What is spirit? Taking as our guide Richard of St. Victor, a person is “the incommunicably proper existence of a spiritual nature.” Thus, we see immediately that absolutely no one and nothing else can participate directly in my person; there is, in the strict sense, no connaturality when it comes to the depths of my being. I alone am left to disclose them (however partially) or let them remain opaque. Spirit, in contrast, “is itself in transcending itself, in looking toward the other and in looking back upon itself” – as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger cites the words of 20th century philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius. To be person, to bear a unique, non-transferable signature of self-directing existence with all of the inherent spirituality which that implies, means to be driven to self-disclosure as relationality. And here, Antiqua et Nova shores us up: “The Christian tradition has come to understand the human person as a being consisting of both body and soul—deeply connected to this world and yet transcending it.” Personhood means the very act of pushing past the limits, boundaries and interests of the self, into an interpersonal communion grounded in the Trinity. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes in The Feast of Faith, “man’s identity is not simply in himself but outside himself, which is why he can only ever attain it by ‘transcendence’.”
This transcendence is fundamentally dialogical. My personhood cannot be extracted from without; I must freely give it, and so fulfill that demand of self-donation by which alone my “I” is realized. To employ language is to make manifest the mental concept, the “inner word” which is the secret of the heart. Thomas, on how the very angels communicate:
But because truth is the light of the intellect, and God Himself is the rule of all truth; the manifestation of what is conceived by the mind, as depending on the primary truth, is both speech and enlightenment.
For each of us, truth is a journey, the working-out of the ongoing unabating living encounter with being that cannot be cheapened into propositional correspondences or coherences. Further, truth is not something static, but rests on the freely willed disclosure of what is essentially personal; truth is a Person.
Our human speech derives of God’s, who is Himself dialogue; who is Word, according to the most all-encompassing, eternal sense. Again, from Feast of Faith:
His nature is to speak, to hear, to reply, as we see particularly in Johannine theology, where Son and Spirit are described in terms of pure “hearing”; they speak in response to what they have first heard.
Just as we break past the limits of our individual human nature through transcendence via dialogue, the divine streams forth from its own in an inverse fashion:
This is what the Incarnation of the Logos means: he who is speech, Word, Logos, in God and to God, participates in human speech. This has a reciprocal effect, involving man in God’s own internal speech.
The dignity of this is inestimable:
As a result of the Incarnation, human speech has become a component in divine speech; it had been taken up, unconfusedly and inseparably, into that speech which is God’s inner nature.
This happens, of course, only through identification with Christ and in Christ – but still, is this not awe-inspiring? Does it not rend one apart, to consider that our language has been appropriated to the divine nature? We cannot say that we, as a species, bear enough mindfulness of the destiny, power and potential of the words we say. We would hesitate to delegate this to a technology that operates by way of statistical inference. My deepest self cannot be inferred or predicted; subjectivity remains ever mysterious, even to its principal. An LLM has no coherent, integrative interior principle and thus has nothing to offer of itself – indeed, it has no self to offer.
The perennial tradition is word-centered, in every way. The move from mythology to religio vera, i.e., the conjoining of religion to the philosophical quest for truth, has involved millennia of capturing and honing a terminology, which has in its turn driven Christian thought: form, matter, nature, substance, accident, person, etc. Just as music depends on precision in rhythm, harmony and pitch, traditional academic theology is largely reducible to an ever-deepening mastery in defining and using the aforementioned (and other like) concepts. To name something is to own it, in a certain sense; more so than the conclusions you reach, your respect for and consistent use of these terms will be the long and short of your theological acumen. The formulas promulgated by councils throughout the centuries are only as good as the definitions on which they rest; to say, for instance, that Christ has two natures in one Person can have only as much merit as the definitions of “nature” and “person” presumed. It is worth bearing in mind that the Great Schism occurred over a single conjunctive particle of speech. Again from Antiqua et Nova: “This innate drive toward the pursuit of truth is especially evident in the distinctly human capacities for semantic understanding and creativity.” Increasingly, however, we see unappetizing salads of words – say, “grace” or “nature” – where ordinary usage is conflated with precise theological language and thus nothing means anything at all, actually fostering an ever more pervasive ignorance of the hard-fought terminological canon.
As for AI, it not only defies but actually inverts the tradition, proceeding not by logical deduction but by probabilistic induction. The deepest cut, however, is that AI cannot proceed by the cardinal principle of analogy. In the metaphysical order, everything hinges on the simultaneous fluid ontological relatedness and unrelatedness of all things. Being is not the widest genus, but rather a mystery in which difference participates as surely as sameness, where analogy spans infinite gaps like an unbroken gossamer thread.
Finally, as regards Christian spirituality, Scriptural and mystical texts employ a multiplicity of literary styles and figurative devices. They can be read only by conjoining to the literal (once it has been rightly identified) a number of other simultaneously obtaining, indispensable templates of understanding proper to the tradition. Only an ensouled being has the interiority to hold all of this and move within it, much less to express it appropriately in language.
[1] Uses which are accidentally “religious” – pertaining to demographics, bookkeeping or the maintenance of physical plant, say – are an altogether different matter.
Image: ChatGPT, AI-generated.
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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