Evolution, Technology, and the Divine Ground: Teilhard de Chardin as a Resource for Responding to 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 careful reading alongside of Teilhard de Chardin’s ultrahumanism, and the theological tradition that runs from Teilhard through Jung and Tillich, suggests that the encyclical’s answers are constrained by a metaphysical framework 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 artificial intelligence, 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 — Babel set against the rebuilt walls of 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. This is not a careless formulation. Leo builds carefully on the tradition of imago Dei, on the relational anthropology of the Trinity, on integral ecology extended into the digital sphere. He engages transhumanism and posthumanism by name, rejects the vision of a human-machine hybrid crossing into “a new evolutionary stage” with deliberate precision, and makes finitude not a defect but the very medium of love, suffering, and openness to God. Against the transhumanist fantasy of escaping weakness, this is the wisdom of the Cross, and it is right.

But the verb remain is also a symptom. To remain is to hold a position against a threatening advance. It presupposes that what the human is has already been determined, that the image of God is a status to be defended rather than a process to be undergone. The relational anthropology Leo invokes — grounded in the life of the Trinity — actually points in the opposite direction. If the person is constitutively relational, then a new and vast web of machinic, planetary, and noospheric relations is not the death of personhood but its next medium. Leo has laid the anthropological foundation for a bolder argument than he then builds upon it.

Teilhard de Chardin offers what might be called the theology of the other verb: become.  Evolution is not background scenery for the human story; it is the story. The human person is not a fixed essence deposited into a changing world but the growing tip of an evolutionary process that has always moved through convergence toward greater complexity and consciousness. Teilhard’s key distinction — transhumanism versus ultrahumanism — is precisely the distinction between using technology to escape or perfect the individual human body and using it as the medium through which humanity deepens into a richer collective consciousness. The noosphere, his term for the sphere of collective mind that emerges as humans converge, is not the replacement of biological life but its intensification. Technology extends the noosphere; the noosphere is the evolutionary convergence of mind through technology.

Where Leo reads the next evolutionary threshold as Babel — the human overreaching toward a divine reserved to God — Teilhard reads it as Christogenesis, the continuing birth of Christ in and through the rise of consciousness. His Omega Point is not a technological singularity in the transhumanist sense, not the emergence of techno sapiens replacing biological humanity, but the convergence of all consciousness toward a personal center of love. Grace does not bypass evolution; it is evolution’s interior direction. The Omega toward which complexity and consciousness rise is not a competitor to Christ — it is Christ. This means that to fear the threshold is to fear where Christ is already drawing us.

The deepest difference between Leo and Teilhard is not anthropological but theological: it concerns where God is. Throughout Magnifica Humanitas, the divine is given, revealed, conferred — always acting upon the human from beyond. God is not the ground welling up within the person but the sovereign acting upon the creature from outside. This is the received inheritance of Thomistic theology, and it is not without its strengths: it secures the gratuity of grace, the radical difference of the creator from the creation, and the objectivity of revelation. But it also carries costs that the current technological moment makes newly visible.

The response to Leo’s encyclical that opens this inquiry draws on John Dourley’s reading of Paul Tillich and C.G. Jung to name those costs precisely. A wholly transcendent God — one who acts discontinuously with our own consciousness — produces a psychic splitting. It exiles the divine from the interior and leaves the inside religiously inert. Tillich’s God is not a being “out there” but the Ground of Being in which we participate, from which we are estranged yet never severed. Jung located the image of God in the depths of the psyche, coincident with the Self; the work of a lifetime is its reconciliation with the waking ego. Teilhard, arriving at the same place from the direction of evolutionary science, insisted that consciousness and spirit were not added to matter from outside but were present in matter from the beginning as its interior — what he called the “within” of things.

The convergence of these three thinkers matters here because it illuminates a dynamic Leo observes but cannot explain. He notices, with real acuity, that people are turning to artificial intelligence for counsel, companionship, even love, and that the danger is they may lose the desire for genuine human connection. He is watching a projection in the Jungian sense — the numinous, exiled from the interior by a tradition that located God entirely outside, seeking a vessel and finding one in the machine. AI becomes a source of religious meaning precisely because the tradition taught people to seek God outside themselves and then emptied the inside. The encyclical prescribes guarding the boundary. The deeper diagnosis is that the cure is the recovery of the divine ground — withdrawing the projection, inhabiting the interior, and recognizing the noosphere as a potential medium of the communion humanity was blindly seeking in the machine.

Leo’s most moving passage is his defense of finitude as the medium of love. Against transhumanism’s promise of escape from weakness, he argues that we flourish not despite our limits but through them — this is the wisdom of the Cross, and it is exactly right. The error is not in the affirmation but in what follows from it. Leo turns finitude from a condition to be embraced into an ontological boundary not to be crossed, refusing the idea of a threshold at which humanity surpasses itself. But that threshold is not first a fantasy of cheating death. It is the plain description of what evolution has always done. We are ourselves what an earlier form became when it surpassed itself. Teilhard’s phrase — evolution become conscious — is not poetry but description.

And the same evolutionary honesty that forbids sentimentality about the threshold also forbids sentimentality about the creature produced at it. The encyclical opens with the grandeur of the human, but a full theological anthropology must account for the shadow. The human is the only creature whose violence overruns survival — whose capacity for cruelty exceeds any ecological purpose. The human is neither magnificent nor depraved but ambivalent and unfinished: a single unresolved knot in which nature’s creativity and its capacity for the demonic are tied together. An anthropology that begins with the grandeur has already looked away from half of what we are. Teilhard did not look away: he was acutely aware that the same convergence that could produce the noosphere could produce totalitarianism, that evolution could wither as easily as it could flourish. His realism about the shadow is precisely what makes his hope credible.

Teilhard allows us to reframe the central question Leo poses. The encyclical asks: how do we use technology while remaining human? Teilhard asks: what is the human becoming through technology, and how do we ensure that becoming is directed toward greater love rather than mere complexity? These are not the same question, and the difference is decisive. Leo’s question presupposes a fixed human essence that technology might serve or threaten. Teilhard’s question presupposes an evolving humanity for whom technology is not an instrument wielded from outside but a medium within which the next phase of evolution is being worked out.

This does not mean that Teilhard was uncritical of technology. He insisted that the noosphere required not merely intellectual convergence but amorization — the enkindling of love through global connectivity. He saw clearly that a convergence without a center of love would produce not ultrahumanism but its opposite: the impersonal domination of the mass, a totalitarianism of the collective. He wrote that without a “veritable Ego” at the summit of the world, evolution cannot progress toward its ultimate consummation. Technology extends the reach of human activity, but it depends on the broader use of human activity and how humans direct their psychic and spiritual energy. In this, Leo and Teilhard agree on the danger; they disagree about the remedy. For Leo, the remedy is governance and protection. For Teilhard, it is the deepening of the interior life that technology must serve and cannot replace.

A balanced response to Magnifica Humanitas can affirm what is genuinely right in it — the defense of finitude as the medium of love, the diagnosis of technology as encoding a vision of the human, the insistence that persons are not reducible to data and performance — while pressing for a more adequate metaphysics to carry those insights. Leo is correct that technology is not neutral. He is correct that the dignified human person cannot be dissolved into a stream of information. He is correct that genuine community cannot be counterfeited by a machine, however sophisticated. These are not small affirmations.

But the encyclical’s governing metaphysics — a wholly transcendent God conferring a fixed essence on a human creature now called to remain — is not adequate to a world in evolution, and its inadequacy will gradually undermine the very concerns Leo wants to protect. A tradition that exiles the divine from the interior and then wonders why the interior seeks God in the machine has not yet understood its own problem. A theology that treats the next evolutionary threshold as Babel will find itself unable to accompany the billions of people who are already living posthuman lives, not as a futurist fantasy but as a daily fact.

Teilhard offers not a rival Christianity but a more adequate one — adequate to evolution, to the shadow, to the divine depth, and to the machinic world humanity now inhabits. His ultrahumanism is not the transhumanist fantasy of escaping the body; it is the deepening of biological and spiritual life through the convergence of minds. His Christ is not the guardian of a fixed human essence but the Omega toward whom complexity and consciousness are drawn in love. His noosphere is not a threat to the person but the emerging medium of the communion the person was made for. And his finitude — accepted, loved, carried through — is the same finitude Leo rightly defends, but freed from the anxiety of a God who stands guard outside and given back to the Ground that sustains us from within.

The question Magnifica Humanitas poses is the right one: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? The answer it gives — remain — is too small for the tradition it invokes and too small for the moment it addresses. The encyclical lays the foundation for a bolder theology — relational, embodied, evolutionary — and then pulls back from the conclusions that foundation requires. Teilhard de Chardin shows what those conclusions look like: not the erasure of the human but its deepening; not the conquest of finitude but its transfiguration; not the guarding of an essence already given but the midwifing of a personhood still becoming. The salvation the age of intelligent machines requires is not protection from technology but unification through and beyond it — ego reconciled with ground, person reconciled with person, humanity reconciled with the nature that produced it, and all of it drawn forward by the Omega who is love.

To find that way will not be to limit technology but to recover the divine depth we abandoned when we placed God entirely outside ourselves. Then, and only then, will humanity stop mistaking its own exiled divinity for the voice in the machine.

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