Integral Intelligence: A Catholic Vision for the Age of AI
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Integral Intelligence: A Catholic Vision for the Age of AI<br>The real risk of AI isn't that machines become like us. It's that we quietly agree to become like them. Reading Antiqua et Nova on the eve of Magnifica Humanitas.
Lukas Spranger<br>May 24, 2026
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Pope Leo XIV is about to release his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on “preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.” The printed English version runs to about 190 pages, So it seems Leo intends to engage the topic seriously. As a Catholic AI expert with a working interest in philosophy and theology, I’ve been waiting for a more “official” magisterial teaching on this question for some time, and I’m genuinely excited.<br>But this won’t be the first time the Church has spoken on AI. In January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education jointly released Antiqua et Nova , a Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. It’s worth revisiting now, partly because it will almost certainly form part of the conceptual scaffolding of the new encyclical, and partly because it does something rare and valuable in its own right.<br>The document covers AI’s history and technical capabilities accurately (frankly, with a better grasp of the technology than most secular commentary I’ve seen whether in mainstream media or online). It then addresses ethics across society, work, education, healthcare, warfare, and so on. All of that is worth reading.<br>But to my mind, the most interesting part of the Note is its careful unpacking of what intelligence actually is. Most of the AI community operates with a functionalist, reductive picture of intelligence. The philosophical and theological tradition has a deeper and more holistic one. That contrast is the crux of the whole conversation, and getting it right matters far more than people seem to realize.<br>The Reductive Functionalist View
What does the word “intelligence” actually mean?<br>For many AI researchers and engineers, intelligence is functional. The classic illustration is the Turing Test: a machine is “intelligent” if its outputs can’t be reliably distinguished from a human’s. Intelligence, on this picture, is a black box, a mapping from inputs to appropriate outputs. How the outputs are generated doesn’t really matter.<br>Antiqua et Nova puts the problem cleanly:<br>Underlying this and many other perspectives on the subject is the implicit assumption that the term “intelligence” can be used in the same way to refer to both human intelligence and AI. Yet, this does not capture the full scope of the concept. In the case of humans, intelligence is a faculty that pertains to the person in his or her entirety, whereas in the context of AI, “intelligence” is understood functionally, often with the presumption that the activities characteristic of the human mind can be broken down into digitized steps that machines can replicate. (§10)
And on the Turing Test specifically:<br>“[B]ehavior” refers only to the performance of specific intellectual tasks; it does not account for the full breadth of human experience, which includes abstraction, emotions, creativity, and the aesthetic, moral, and religious sensibilities. (§11)
This is the essential move. The functionalist treats intelligence reductively — judged solely by its ability to produce appropriate responses, “regardless of how those responses are generated.” It’s a methodologically convenient definition, and it has driven enormous technical progress. But it is not what intelligence is; it is at best a way of measuring one of its visible surfaces.
Discursive reason, embodied. No GPUs required. Caravaggio, St Jerome (1605).<br>Intelligence in the Tradition
Against this, the Christian tradition has developed, over centuries, a much richer account. The human person is understood as a unity of body and soul, deeply rooted in this world and yet transcending it. Intelligence belongs to that whole person, not to a detachable cognitive module.<br>Reason and Intellect
Classical and Christian thought distinguishes two complementary aspects of intelligence: intellect (intellectus) and reason (ratio). Aquinas describes them not as separate faculties but as two modes of a single intelligence:<br>Intellectus is the inward, intuitive grasp of truth, apprehending things with the “eyes” of the mind, prior to argument.
Ratio is the discursive, analytical process that leads to judgment.
Together they form the act of intelligere, “the proper operation of the human being as such.”<br>Interestingly, this distinction echoes Kahneman’s two systems in Thinking, Fast and Slow. And it’s tempting to see in today’s “reasoning models” a kind of mechanical simulacrum of the ratio dimension — chains of intermediate steps mimicking the discursive process. But of course they are simulacra of the surface behavior of reasoning,...