By Mike Johns, Public Discourse. (Photo: Public Domain)
Toward the end of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, the pontiff quotes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J. R. R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
The protagonist in question is the wizard Gandalf, who reminds us of our dependence on God’s providence. In contrast to the ambitions of AI manufacturers, Christians are not to aim at mastery or domination. Rather, we cast our cares upon God, whose mighty providence extends even to the sparrows of the field, and we uproot evil in the fields that we know by conforming our lives to the Cross.
Conforming our lives to the Cross involves courage, certainly. But the Cross is also a fountain of joy, since it is the supreme manifestation of the charity of Christ and the wellspring of eternal life. We can put the two together, then, and following the example of the early Church in Acts of the Apostles (see especially Acts 4:29-31), pray for cheerful courage. It is here that the invocation of Gandalf is significant.
In Tolkien’s novel, Gandalf embodies cheerful courage. His quotation in the encyclical can be seen as a kind of summons from the pope to cultivate this same spiritual posture as we face the omnipresent threat of all-consuming technological power.