We are waiting, not for Godot, but for a new, and doubtless very different, St. Antony of Padua.
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Fadi Chehadé: AI and Peacebuilding
I was glad to be present this last weekend when Fadi Chehadé gave his keynote address at the Focolare Movement’s Hearth for the Human Family which was hosted by Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. Chehadé’s topic was “Peacebuilding in the Age of Rapid Digital Advancement: Can We Keep Up?”
Without trying to summarize the whole immense worth of Chehadé’s talk, I’d like to touch on a couple key moments in it. Considered through the lens of St. Francis of Assisi’s famous letter to Antony of Padua, these touchstones bring out certain aspects of a wise educational and Christian formational paradigm for moving into the future in our lately AI-transformed context. While this view’s Franciscan and Chiara Lubich/Focolare accents ring audibly, this is yet one which this author thinks has some universal value (as audacious as that is to say) despite, or because of, its humble simplicity and provinciality.
First touchstone: Chehadé at one moment presented a picture of the hierarchical supervention of newer computer capacities over older ones: decades ago the buzzword was “data,” then it was “information.” The access to information through search engines is predicated on the availability of data, but it is a higher and supervening operation. Chehade thinks that AI and the algorithms are now giving us something more like knowledge, with capacities akin to logical and reasoning capacities. This capacity supervenes over the information capacities in something like the way those information capacities supervene over the earlier foundational data capacities.
My own brief gloss on this would be to say that: AI prosthetically extends human logical and discursive reasoning capacity in something like the way physical books, physical libraries, and the Google search engine prosthetically extend human capacity for memory.
Yet, and here we come to the second touchstone I’d like to use from Chehadé’s talk: these reasoning, logical, knowledge capacities Chehadé identifies in AI do not equate to or pass over into wisdom. Interacting heavily with AI in his work, Chehadé is decidedly not among those who believe that these machines are sentient or that they can cross over into the space of wisdom. His call was for humans – who do have the capacity for agency, genuine wisdom, and spiritual maturity – to accept and use these new tools, which are so disruptive in so many ways (and in particular ways for education), with good motivations, and wisdom, and for the common good.
Chehadé shared a powerful anecdote that vividly brings out the import of this second touchstone. Chehadé’s company arranged for him to eat dinner with an AI-generated Nelson Mandela. Visually and in terms of knowledge, the AI Mandela was extraordinarily impressive. It looked and spoke like Mandela, and deftly engaged in conversation with an expert deployment of Nelson’s thought, speaking, writing, and the history in which he was involved. Not only that: AI Mandela knew about and could apply its way of thinking to current events as well: Chehadé asked it about prospects for peace in Gaza today, and it knew all about Gaza.
Yet, when Chehadé was asked about the impact of AI Mandela, and the worth of the tool for peace in Gaza today, Chehadé’s response was clear and unequivocal. AI Mandela was not the personal presence of Nelson Mandela. Chehadé had not had dinner or conversed with the man who so powerfully worked for peace in South Africa. The great president and witness was not at dinner. AI Mandela lacked wisdom.
After AI: St. Francis and the Spirit of Prayer and Devotion
Let’s bring into our reflections St. Francis’s oft-cited, or fated, letter to St. Antony of Padua, an early Franciscan of considerable theological gifting.
I, Brother Francis, send greetings to you, Brother Anthony, my theological superior. I am pleased that you are now teaching sacred theology to our brothers providing one thing: As it says in our Rule, please see that you do not squelch the spirit of prayer and devotion in them as they undertake studies of this kind.*
This rule might be called “fated” because it warrants theological study, which accelerates difficult-to-bear tensions within the Franciscan order. And yet, St. Francis’ note seems to mean, just as surely, that theological study is not anathema for true followers of St. Francis – so long as “the spirit of prayer and devotion” is not squelched in those engaging such study.
St. Francis is surely not wrong to worry. St. Francis is concerned that the access to certain forms of textual power (as we can say post Foucault, without being blind to the limits of such a rendering**) might diminish the imperative to pray and do good. The worldliness and privilege of education and books have their allure, early and late – as does the promise of power and prestige to be garnered by harnessing AI in our own day. When books are a higher priority than lepers, knowledge and abstract essences displace persons and particulars as the existential path of discipleship.
Hugh of St. Victor had worried similarly in the previous century. In his Didascalicon, a text written to teach Hugh’s way of reading in all the arts and disciplines as a way of transformation in divine Wisdom, Hugh writes:
It is necessary that the student beginning to advance along this road [to the heavenly homeland] learn in the books he reads not only to be inspired by the outward appearance of their literary expression but also by the imitation of their virtues, so that he might take pleasure not so much in the dignity or arrangement of words as in the beauty of truth. Such a student should also know that it is not conducive to his object that, seized and carried away by an inane desire for knowledge, he should carefully inquire into obscure and profound writings in which his mind is more preoccupied than edified, lest reading alone hold him in such bondage that he is entirely prevented for performing good works (Didascalicon 5.7).
Much like St. Francis will warn that certain kinds of study can squelch the spirit of prayer and devotion, so Hugh here warns against two dangers of study: that one’s mind be caught up merely in the external aesthetics of stylish writing and fail to imitate the virtues depicted; and that one might become preoccupied in speculative mental games and so cease doing good works. Hugh notably associates “the beauty of truth” with the actual performance of good works, active love, kindness in a rich and thick sense.
For Hugh as for other Victorine & Franciscan luminaries, authentic wisdom, whether in God or in creatures, is fully realized only when and because (as is always the case in God) it inclines to the doing of good.
This Victorine-Franciscan sensibility with a pedigree including both Hugh of St. Victor and St. Francis comes into play in the early Franciscans’ definition of theology itself. According to the Summa Halensis, the foundational summa for Parisian and especially Franciscan theological culture composed in Paris mainly from the mid 1230s to the mid 1240s, theology “perfects the soul by way of affection, moving it toward the good through the principles of fear and love” and is hence appropriately called “wisdom.”*** St. Bonaventure and others will continue to defend this Victorine and Franciscan view that the study of theology, which itself should flow from and be imbued with a spirit of prayer and devotion, grows the soul in wisdom and leads one to the actual doing of good, and to becoming good.
The Victorine-Franciscan tradition’s ways of understanding the spiritual and affective dimensions of theological study offer us apt insight in our present moment, in which Fadi Chehadé argues that AI can bear good fruit when employed wisely, for good ends. How much then should AI be embraced and employed by those formed by ongoing immersion in the spirit of prayer and devotion? St. Francis’ exhortation to St. Antony rings in our time more loudly than ever, for the tool of AI is more powerful than the alluring textual tools of Francis’ time.
What about the use of AI in the discipline of theology itself? Theology, as the early Franciscans saw it, is wisdom properly speaking, in a way other disciplines may not be. Will the use of AI tools subvert or thwart the theologians’ becoming good and wise? It need not, it seems to me, if the wisdom of Hugh and St. Francis is seriously heeded. I am not suggesting that theologians neglect learning to speak and write and reason for themselves, as undergraduates may be tempted to do. Yet various of the scholarly functions in which theologians engage may be aided by the power of a reasoning assistant. AI is a prosthetic extension of one’s intellectual agency, but the wisdom must be supplied by the theologian – as must the actual good works which are the goal of discursive study in the first place.
Might we think of AI as a reasoning assistant – a handmaid, if you will, in something like the way the medieval Christian scholastics in the 13th century spoke of philosophy being theology’s handmaid? I have to say that I am not in love with this idea, but it bears meditation. The way in which philosophy was hashed out and commonly defined as theology’s “handmaid” was in vogue at the same time in which scholastics in Paris were grappling with and assimilating the fuller collection of Aristotle’s works, which are nothing if not tools for increasing one’s reasoning capacity. Perhaps the thought that AI tools may function in a somehow analogous way is not too wide of the mark. But the understanding of AI as a prosthetic extension of the intellect’s reasoning capacities seems to me both more accurate and more necessary to say.
In closing, St. Francis’ emphasis on prayer and devotion as the imbuing principle of theology, and Hugh and the Summa Halensis’ understandings of theology as the cultivation of divine wisdom teleologically ordered to the doing of good, should be underscored as we think of our work with AI. There will be a greater temptation than ever to merely exult in logical virtuosity and hyperproduction of content (at which AI will dominate). Theologians need to embrace the charge given by St. Antony of Padua and the wise guidance of Hugh of St. Victor in order to cultivate themselves and others as persons of heroic moral worth and courage. It requires personal presence and decisive action governed by wisdom for Nelson Mandela to be a person of peace in South Africa, and for St. Francis to sigh for ecstatic peace and preach the gospel to the Sultan.
It is only such a person, and no machine, who is able in the words of Chiara Lubich to “be the first to love.”
* Jon M. Sweeney, The Complete St. Francis: His Life, The Complete Writings, and the Little Flowers, 236.
** As has been well noted, the limits of Foucault’s genealogical power analyses are identical to their glory in their limited sphere: it studies power, more and less indiscreetly. Victorine-Franciscan thinkers will recognize that power is only the first transcendental in a triad which culminates in the kindness (benignitas) or goodness (bonitas) or love (caritas) toward which power is, when rightly ordered, always ordered, e.g., the Victorine power-wisdom-kindness or Bonaventure’s power-wisdom-goodness triads. And this all entails at least two things: First, that the truest, deepest and most enduring power is active existing goodness: the sacrificial kindness that is love-in-act, the work of the resurrection in our lives. Second, a power analysis can always be refined – integrated within Wisdom – even as it is itself differentiated on the basis of kindness-love and re-ordered toward the same.
*** A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis, 57.