History Is Not Inevitable
A Lonerganian reading of Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
A white paper discusses artificial intelligence as a problem to be managed. Leo XIV writes about it as history. Read Magnifica Humanitas once for its policy and you will find the expected furniture: work, truth, education, war, surveillance, accountability, the dignity of the person, the common good.[1] Read it a second time for its grammar and you will find something older and stranger underneath. The Pope tells us plainly that the issues of AI are not limited to regulation;[2] he is reading the present moment as history — and the account of history he assumes, whether or not he has ever opened the books, is recognizably the one Bernard Lonergan spent a career building.
I am not claiming that the encyclical quotes Lonergan, or that its drafters studied him. My claim is structural. Magnifica Humanitas presupposes a particular theory of what history is and of how it goes well or badly, and that theory meets Lonergan’s at the joints. Both treat history as the cumulative public deposit of human knowing and choosing. Both locate progress in the authentic exercise of intelligence and decline in its corruption by bias. Both insist that decline yields only to conversion, never to technique alone. And both refuse the one consolation our moment most craves: the belief that what is happening to us is simply happening, that the arc is fixed, that we are passengers.
History, for both, is the world that meaning makes. The chronicle — the dated sequence that hardens into a textbook — is the surface. Underneath runs the real process: an insight, once had, becomes a sentence, then a practice, then an institution; a bias, once indulged, becomes a habit, then a policy, then a structure that outlives everyone who consented to it. History is what accumulates when acts of understanding and acts of evasion are poured, day after day, into the common life.[3] This is why artificial intelligence is, at bottom, not a technological question. It is a question about what we are doing with meaning — and meaning, for Lonergan and for the Church, is the very stuff of which the human world is built.
What history is made of
Let me start where Lonergan starts, with an act so ordinary we rarely notice it: the moment of getting it. A student stares at a cartwheel and a definition of the circle until, suddenly, the two click — the locus of coplanar points equidistant from a center, and the wheel as its rough approximation. Lonergan calls that click insight, and he opens Insight with Archimedes leaping from the bath, because he means to spend eight hundred pages helping us realize the operations we perform to get there.[4] The data is the wheel. The concept is the definition. The insight is the act in between, the grasp that makes the concept worth forming at all. From it proceeds what the Medievals called the inner word — the verbum, the understanding’s own expression of what one has grasped. Lonergan recovered that doctrine from Aquinas in his Verbum studies, and it turns out to be the hinge on which this whole essay swings: in the human case, the word that comes out is the expression of an understanding that went in.
Knowing, on this account, is a structure rather than a glance — experience, understanding, judgment — and Lonergan adds a fourth tier above it: deliberation, decision, the responsible choice of what is worth doing. We experience a situation, we ask what it means, we ask whether our answer is so, and then we ask what we are going to do about it.[5] Each level takes up and completes the one beneath. None can be skipped without cost. A man who decides without judging is reckless; a man who judges without understanding is credulous; a man who claims to understand without attending to the data is a fraud, however fluent.
Lonergan’s universe matches his account of the mind. He calls it emergent probability: the successive realization of a conditioned series of schemes of recurrence.[6] Schemes are loops that persist — the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, a functioning market, a working liturgy — each one setting up conditions for the next, each one emerging not by necessity but as the probabilities ripen. The result, in a phrase from Insight I have never been able to improve, is a dynamism “upwardly but indeterminately directed.”[7] Open at the top. Conditioned but not scripted. Free but not arbitrary. History is the stretch of that world where the schemes of recurrence include schools and lawcourts and supply chains, and where the operative variable is no longer blind probability but human freedom — attentive or distracted, intelligent or lazy, reasonable or willful, responsible or evasive.
Progress and decline follow from this naturally. Lonergan states the structure twice over a career: progress proceeds from subjects who hold to the transcendental precepts — be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible — and decline sets in through inattention, oversight, unreasonableness, and irresponsibility.[8] What corrupts the precepts is bias, the four key ones are dramatic, individual, group, and general. Dramatic bias edits out of consciousness what we cannot bear to know about ourselves. Individual bias is plain egoism. Group bias serves the tribe and starves any insight that would threaten its advantage. General bias — the most dangerous because the most respectable — is the standing preference of common sense for the practical, the immediate, the short-term, over the long-range understanding that theory alone supplies.[9]
General bias drives what Lonergan calls the longer cycle of decline, and it deserves dwelling on, because it is the precise shape of the danger the encyclical is straining to articulate. The longer cycle arrives not as villainy but as reasonableness. Each step is practical. The harm is downstream, or theoretical, or borne by people not in the room. The objection takes too long to explain. The quarter has already closed. And so the further pertinent questions — Lonergan’s exact phrase for the questions a situation raises but that we decline to ask — go unasked, not once but cumulatively, until the unasked questions have built a world.[10] He calls the result the social surd: a residue immanent in the social facts, not intelligible, yet impossible to abstract from if one means to take the facts as they are.[11] Every actor stays locally reasonable while the whole goes quietly insane. Decline, crucially, looks like progress while it is happening. The dashboards are green. The pilot succeeded. Only later, when the surd has hardened into stone, does anyone tally the cost.
The machine in the realm of meaning
Place artificial intelligence inside that picture, and the encyclical’s intuition becomes a thesis.
Every earlier tool extended the body. The lever lengthened the arm; the wheel spared the back; the bicycle, as I am fond of pointing out, extends the leg, and the workshop extends the hand. For judgment and decision — for the acts by which we weigh whether something is so and whether it is worth doing — no tool has ever offered an extension at all, because those acts are the irreducible work of a responsible Subject. What is new about the large language model is the human region it has entered. It produces outer words — text, summary, classification, recommendation, the plausible paragraph — shaped exactly as the expressions of understanding are shaped. And the outer word is the native medium of meaning, the very stuff Lonergan says the human world is made from. For the first time we have built a tool that works not on matter but on sense.
Here the Verbum doctrine does its work. The machine produces the outer word with no inner word behind it. It has been trained on the expression of countless acts of human understanding — every sentence in its corpus was once the expression of someone’s insight — and it has learned to continue the pattern with uncanny fidelity. But no insight occurs in it. No cartwheel resolves into a circle behind the screen. No question is being answered, because none was asked; nothing is being affirmed, because there is no one to assert the virtually unconditioned to be affirmed. I have taken to calling these systems the most extraordinary libraries or patterners of experience ever assembled: they store and recombine the products of insight on a scale no library ever dreamed of, and they perform no insight whatever. The fluency is readily apparent. The understanding is borrowed, and it is borrowed from us.
This is exactly why AI belongs to the philosophy of history rather than merely to the philosophy of technology. Whatever participates in meaning participates in progress and decline. A shovel cannot deepen the longer cycle, because a shovel cannot offer you a plausible reason not to ask the further pertinent question. A model can. It can hand you, instantly and in confident prose, the answer that lets the meeting move on. It can make general bias frictionless.
Read against this background, the encyclical’s governing image stops being decorative. Leo sets the Tower of Babel against the rebuilt Jerusalem of Nehemiah, and what he says about Babel is what Lonergan says about the longer cycle.[12] The builders of Babel are formidable, not incompetent — one language, one technology, one direction, a coordinated and ambitious project any venture committee would fund. Their disorder is no skills gap. It is a love disordered into self-assertion and a horizon narrowed until only the practical questions survive: how to build, how to scale, how to make a name. The questions Babel will not ask are Lonergan’s further pertinent questions in biblical dress. What is the tower for? Who is made invisible by its success? What is lost when unity is purchased as uniformity? Leo gives the pathology a name, the “Babel syndrome,” and lists its symptoms: the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, the neutralization of difference, the pretense that a single digital language can translate the mystery of a person into data and performance.[13] A Lonerganian could not write a tighter description of group and general bias building a world.
It matters that the encyclical’s own diagnostic vocabulary is borrowed. When Leo articulates the danger, he reaches for Romano Guardini — “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well” — and for the “technocratic paradigm” of Francis’s Laudato Si’: the tendency to let efficiency, control, and profit become the standard by which everything is judged, until technology “begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded.”[14] These are the right descriptive words. What they do not supply is the explanatory mechanism. Guardini observes that power has outrun formation; Francis observes that the paradigm spreads. Neither tells you why a civilization, full of intelligent and well-meaning people, should reliably fail to ask the questions it most needs to ask. That is the gap Lonergan fills, and it is the reason this is a Lonerganian reading rather than merely another theology of decline. The longer cycle is the answer to Guardini’s observation. General bias is the answer to Francis’s. The encyclical has the symptoms exactly right and reaches, without citing it, for Lonergan’s etiology.
There is a deeper understanding available here, and it comes from the part of Insight I worried over as a student and have never stopped using. Lonergan distinguishes a body from a thing. A body is an “already out there now real,” whatever is registered by merely looking. A thing is a “unity, identity, whole” — the full intelligible reality that only experience, understanding, and judgment can reach, and that no finite set of questions ever exhausts.[15] The mug on my desk is a body to a glance and a thing to inquiry: where its clay was dug, who threw it, how it holds heat, why I reach for it on certain mornings and not others. To treat a thing as a mere body is to stop asking the further pertinent questions about it — and Lonergan’s most chilling examples are the ones in which the thing is a person. The machinery of the camps ran on the reclassification of persons as bodies, as problems with throughput. Every reduction of a human being to a profile, a score, a conversion rate, a risk class repeats that move in a minor and bureaucratic key.
This is the metaphysical nerve of the encyclical’s insistence that technology is never neutral. Leo’s reason is that a tool takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it; and the characteristic he fears most is the technocratic reflex that measures a person by output — “having more” mistaken for “being more,” worth assigned to whoever proves more efficient or effective.[16] Put it in Lonergan’s idiom: a system built to model persons as bodies, as bundles of features optimized toward an objective, will reliably suppress the further pertinent questions that would disclose them as things. It will be most efficient precisely where it is least attentive. The machine hates no one; that is not where the danger lies. The danger is that it makes the refusal to ask effortless, and dresses that refusal in the prestige of the technical.
The encyclical’s anxiety about accountability lands in the same place. Leo keeps returning to the worry that no one will be answerable — that decisions touching employment, access to services, the management of data will issue from systems no affected person can see, contest, or understand — and he ties subsidiarity directly to transparency, independent checks, and avenues of recourse.[17] Lonergan already had the word for the failure. It is the social surd in its purest contemporary form: the model recommended, the dashboard showed, the vendor certified, the policy complied, the human in the loop signed where the form required a signature. Each clause is locally true. Together they compose a sentence in which no subject can be found. A civilization that loses the ability to locate responsibility has not grown more sophisticated. It has lost the thread that makes justice possible, since justice finally requires that some actual person remain answerable to some actual face.
Why the remedy is conversion
The longer cycle has a maddening property: more of the intelligence that produced it will not reverse it, because the bias driving it is precisely a bias against the higher viewpoint that would correct it. General bias does not merely make mistakes; it resents the theory that would name them as mistakes. You cannot consult your way out of a surd your consulting helped build.
Lonergan’s name for what is needed is cosmopolis, and he is careful about what it excludes — neither class nor state, and emphatically not a police force.[18] It is a cultural function rather than an institution: the long memory and the higher standpoint that can recover the timely, fruitful ideas short-term interest keeps shelving, and hold them up until a culture is ready to act. Magnifica Humanitas never uses the word, and Catholic Social Doctrine is not cosmopolis in Lonergan’s technical sense. Yet in this encyclical it performs a cosmopolis-shaped office. It widens the horizon the technocratic paradigm has narrowed. It makes the invisible person visible. It asks the long-range questions the quarter suppresses. It refuses to let intelligence collapse into power. And it measures progress against a standard the market does not set: the dignity of the person and the common good.
What such a function asks of actual people, Lonergan called conversion, and he distinguished three.[19] They translate into this age almost without remainder.
Intellectual conversion is the discovery that knowing is not looking — that understanding is an act one performs, not an image one receives. Its discipline among fluent machines is the refusal to mistake the outer word for the inner one: to feel the difference between a paragraph that has helped me understand and a paragraph that has merely spared me the labor of understanding, and to want the first even when the second is free.
Moral conversion is the shift Lonergan describes as the change of criterion from satisfactions to values, from what gratifies me or advantages my group to what is genuinely worth doing. Markets, speed, and ambition all survive it. What changes is that they go on trial before a higher court, and the verdict is allowed to run against them.
Religious conversion, for Lonergan, is a total being-in-love that reorders the whole horizon of a life.[20] Leo articulates the same fork in older language: his chapter is titled “Two cities and two loves,” and behind it stands Augustine, whose restless heart the Pope quotes on the encyclical’s first page.[21] Babel is the city built by love of self; Jerusalem is the city built by love of God and neighbor. Nehemiah rebuilds the wall by prayer, by inspection, by assigning each family its own section, by repairing relationships before stone. That is recovery in Lonergan’s exact sense: the slow re-emergence of schemes of recurrence ordered by a love that asks the further pertinent questions instead of suppressing them, rather than any nostalgic return to a pre-technological garden.
It is no accident that the encyclical answers transhumanism with the Incarnation. Leo refuses to treat the limits and weakness of humanity as an error to be corrected, and he articulates this deceit directly: the technology that promises to free us from all weakness, the endless “upgrades,” the fantasy of self-assertion without finitude.[22] His reply is that God saved us not by escaping the flesh but by assuming it, entering the very conditions the optimizers would engineer away.[23] Lonergan would add that those conditions are the medium of the human good rather than obstacles to it: the concrete subject who experiences, understands, judges, and decides is an embodied subject, and the limits are the place where love becomes something more than a sentiment. A humanity that engineers away its finitude does not ascend. It forgets the address at which love could find it.
The wager of an open world
Which returns us to the title, and to the wager the encyclical and the philosopher are jointly making.
Were history a chronicle, its trajectory would be a fact to be reported, and our only task would be to read the trend lines and adjust. But history is the human stretch of an emergent probability that is upwardly but indeterminately directed, and the decisive variable in it is freedom. Decline is genuinely probable under conditions of bias; Lonergan never pretended otherwise, and neither does Leo. Probable, though, is not necessary. The realm of what we consciously grasp and deliberately choose can expand. Better questions can be asked. The surd can be, in places, redeemed. This is the precise content of the claim that history is not inevitable: things are not settled, and they wait on what we understand and what we love. The argument promises nothing about whether things will go well.
Two postures forfeit that freedom in advance, and the age offers both on easy terms. Panic reads the trend lines and concludes that everything human is already lost; it has surrendered hope. Inevitability reads the same lines and concludes that adaptation is the only adult response; it has surrendered freedom and called the surrender maturity. They are mirror images, and a Catholic owes allegiance to neither. What is owed instead is the harder thing Leo asks for and Lonergan describes: discernment with courage. Build what genuinely serves persons. Refuse what should not be built. Restrain power where it needs restraining. Repair what has been harmed. Keep the further pertinent questions open, especially the ones the machine is so good at closing. Form children who can tell understanding from its imitation. Keep some actual person answerable at the point where power touches a life.
Leo ends not with a tower but with a building site. He calls our moment exactly that — a “construction site” — and asks us to be builders of communion rather than architects of Babel, promising that the rejected stones, the poor and the sick and the migrant, will become the cornerstone.[24] The image is tangible. The concrete is still wet. The blueprints are being redrawn while it sets. The work is differentiated and unglamorous and shared, and the people likeliest to live with the consequences are, as always, consulted last.
Lonergan gives us the reason this building site matters: meaning becomes a world, and the world we are pouring now will outlast our intentions for it. Leo gives us the reason it is not yet decided: an upwardly directed world stays open at the top, and grace works there. He puts the whole of it in a single pastoral sentence — true progress, he writes, always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen, and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.[25] Read it slowly and it is Lonergan’s four levels in the order of love: attend, understand, judge, decide. Progress will take intelligence. Decline will take intelligence too, and put it to worse use. Recovery will take conversion. The rest is the patience of the wall rather than the spectacle of the tower — slow, accountable, hopeful work, answerable to the dignity of the person and the purposes of God.
The site is open. We are already on it. The only question Leo leaves us, and Lonergan with him, is which city we will build. Let us be weavers of hope.
[1] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (15 May 2026), at vatican.va. Cited hereafter by paragraph (§). References to Lonergan are to the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto): Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (CWL 3) and Method in Theology (CWL 14); the Verbum studies are collected as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (CWL 2).
[2] Magnifica Humanitas, §5: regulation is necessary but “the issue is not limited to regulation,” since what is finally in question is who holds technological power and how it is used.
[3] For the claim that the human world is constituted by meaning and that judgment reaches “what really is so,” see Method in Theology (CWL 14), 28–34, 75–77.
[4] Insight (CWL 3), ch. 1, “Elements,” opening with the “Dramatic Instance” of Archimedes. Insight is the act that grounds conception and judgment, irreducible to either the data or the concept.
[5] The four levels of intentional consciousness — experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding — are set out in Method in Theology (CWL 14), 9, and the corresponding precepts at 20–21.
[6] Insight (CWL 3), ch. 4; the formula “a conditioned series of schemes of recurrence” realized “in accord with successive schedules of probabilities” is developed at 140–151 and contrasted with Darwinism at 156.
[7] Insight (CWL 3), 470 and 654–655, where the “upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism” names the principle of finality in proportionate being. History is the level of that dynamism at which the operative factor is human freedom.
[8] Method in Theology (CWL 14), 52–54: “Progress proceeds from originating value, from subjects being their true selves by observing the transcendental precepts.” Decline and alienation follow from their disregard.
[9] Insight (CWL 3), ch. 7, “Common Sense as Object”: individual bias (244–247), group bias (247–250), general bias (250–251). Dramatic bias is treated in ch. 6.
[10] Insight (CWL 3), ch. 10, on reflective understanding and the self-correcting process of learning: an insight is correct when there are no further pertinent questions, and Lonergan notes the “common dishonesty in refusing to acknowledge the effective pertinence of further pertinent questions.”
[11] Insight (CWL 3), 254–256: the social surd is the residue that “is immanent in the social facts,” “is not intelligible,” yet “cannot be abstracted from if one is to consider the facts as in fact they are.”
[12] Magnifica Humanitas, §§7–10 (the two biblical images) and §90 (the two building projects framed as the great “construction sites” of the era).
[13] Magnifica Humanitas, §10: the “Babel syndrome” is “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
[14] Magnifica Humanitas, §92 (the technocratic paradigm, citing Laudato Si’: when technology “becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded”) and §93 (Guardini, The End of the Modern World: “Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well”).
[15] Insight (CWL 3), ch. 8, “Things”: the thing as “unity, identity, whole” (270–271) and the “body” as the “already out there now real” of extroverted, biological consciousness (275–277). Lonergan’s canon: “the real is the verified.”
[16] Magnifica Humanitas, §9 (“technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”), §94 (“having more” without “being more”), and §51 (the “particularly insidious” ideology that “every person must earn or justify his or her own worth,” assigning greater value to the more efficient, reducing persons to “a means of achieving results”).
[17] Magnifica Humanitas, §71: in the digital revolution the highest power is not the State but major technological actors, so subsidiarity “requires that such processes not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner,” including “independent checks, transparency regarding algorithms, equitable access to data and avenues for recourse.” Cf. §80 on opaque algorithms that “perpetuate prejudice and discrimination.”
[18] Insight (CWL 3), ch. 7, 263–267: “what is necessary is a cosmopolis that is neither class nor state… too universal to be bribed, too impalpable to be forced, too effective to be ignored”; and “cosmopolis is not a police force.”
[19] Method in Theology (CWL 14), 223–228 (within the chapter on Dialectic): intellectual conversion as the elimination of “the myth… that knowing is like looking” (223); moral conversion as the change of criterion “from satisfactions to values” (225); religious conversion as “a total being-in-love” (226–228).
[20] Method in Theology (CWL 14), 101–105: religious experience as “being in love in an unrestricted fashion,” the fulfilment of the capacity for self-transcendence.
[21] Magnifica Humanitas, ch. 3, the section “Two cities and two loves,” and §11, quoting Augustine, Confessions I.1: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” The two-cities, two-loves figure is Augustine’s own (City of God XIV.28).
[22] Magnifica Humanitas, §12 (“building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected”; against “a technology that promises to free us from all weakness” and “unlimited ‘upgrades’”) and the ch. 3 section “Underlying narratives: transhumanism and posthumanism.”
[23] Magnifica Humanitas, §1 and §49, citing Gaudium et Spes, §22: “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”
[24] Magnifica Humanitas, §16: “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time… the task that stands before us is that of being builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel,” and the “rejected stones — the poor, the sick, the migrants and the least among us — will become the cornerstone” (cf. Ps 118:22).
[25] Magnifica Humanitas, §15: “True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”