Not About AI – The Catholic Thing

Much is already being written at the moment about AI and the suitable Catholic response to it. So this column will not be about AI.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov has been driven, by his revulsion to evil in the world, to “rebellion” against God, and perhaps to the edge of insanity. He has written a poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” which he recounts to his brother, the devout (if perhaps a bit naïve) Alyosha.

The poem is set “in Spain, in Seville, in the most horrible time of the Inquisition, when fires blazed every day to the glory of God.” Ivan does not admire Western rationalism and science, nor the Roman Church.

After centuries of pleading from Christians, Christ has appeared in Seville, and he is immediately recognized by all. “All” includes the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, the aged Jesuit responsible for determining which heretics will be turned over to civil authorities for immolation. Just after Christ had raised a girl from the dead on the steps of the Seville cathedral, the Grand Inquisitor orders his arrest and confinement.

Ivan paints the people of Seville as “so tamed, submissive, and tremblingly obedient to his will” that the Grand Inquisitor can lead the Savior to prison without protest. He enjoys a totalitarian grip on the people, who will not oppose him even in the presence of the One they know to be Christ.

The Inquisitor proceeds to interrogate his prisoner, though the interrogation turns out to be a monologue of recrimination aimed at the silent man of sorrows. “You may as well not come at all now, or at least don’t interfere with us for the time being.” 

The Inquisitor’s case against Christ centers around the question of human freedom and our capacity to endure it. Christ, claims the Inquisitor, often said that he wanted to make men free. “But we have finally finished this work in your name. For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished and well finished.” The Inquisitor doesn’t want any disruptions to his work, not even from the One in whose name he conducts it.

“These people [in Seville] are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet.” He and his colleagues “have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy.” 

Such is the usual trade-off proposed by totalitarians: hand us your freedom, and we’ll secure your happiness in peace and safety.

This happiness does not consist in the Aristotelian and Catholic understanding of the human telos as contemplation of the divine, an activity of soul in accord with virtue. It’s rather a version of pleasure-seeking, with material needs met and no need for difficult choices. No inconvenience, just pacified ease and comfort.

The Inquisitor sees in the three temptations of Christ “three questions [in which] everything was so precisely divined and foretold, and has proved to be so completely true, that to add to them or subtract anything from them is impossible.” In answering those questions as He did, Christ chose freedom over obedience to the “dread and intelligent spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-being.”

But in offering such a possibility of freedom to humanity, Christ erred, charges the Inquisitor. He greatly overestimated the goodness of humans and our ability to live with the true freedom that He proposed for us. Humans “in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend [such freedom], which they dread and fear.”

Science, says this Jesuit-turned-follower of the “dread spirit,” will first reenact the project of the Tower of Babel, which will again fail to deliver on its promises to meet all human needs. Then, the Inquisitor says, people will turn to himself and those like him who will govern them in what will replace Christ’s church. “No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but in the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: Better that you enslave us, but feed us.”

We cannot have both bread and freedom, because we refuse to share. Better to forego freedom, to avoid making choices and cultivating virtue through adversity, all for an uncertain and merely free future. Better to cease to be the human created in God’s image, to give up hope of deification and union with God as true happiness.

The few who will then be the ruling elite or vanguard will be the only ones who suffer under this final arrangement, for they will know that they are deceiving the masses. “This deceit will constitute our suffering.” The masses will submit for a “quiet, humble happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures.” 

Those so ruled “will have no secrets from us. We will allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children – all depending on their obedience – and they will submit to us gladly and joyfully. . . .And everyone will be happy.”

Dostoevsky was writing into the teeth of modern science and its political variant, socialism, which promised heaven on earth, a heaven whose only responsibility was obedience. These forces responded not just to the weak human inclination to find freedom burdensome, but also to the human hope for a universal material and political solution to the problems of the human condition, and to the evil that pushed Ivan to despair.

Dostoevsky knew that no such magical solution can allow us to be free without suffering.

St. Augustine knew that, too. He distinguishes in the City of God between those who love earthly comforts and would eagerly accept technologies or universal political systems that erase our freedom, and those who turn their love to eternal Good, embrace their freedom, and choose the suffering path to the full magnificence of their humanity.

It’s not a new choice. It just keeps coming back.