An adapted version of this essay was originally published in Italian in the theological journal Studi Cattolici, Milano, October 10, 2026. It is presented here for the first time in English.

Visitors to the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence encounter four sculptures by Michelangelo lining a hallway. Looming at the end, beneath the domed skylight of a tribune, is his masterpiece David. The 17-foot-high statue is carved to perfection from a single piece of marble. But it would be a mistake to not see the statues in the hall as masterpieces in their own right—perhaps with even more to tell us about humanity than the David.

The sculptures in the hall are traditionally known as his Prigioni, or prisoners—four individual figures in separate pieces of stone who appear to be struggling to free themselves and emerge complete. There is scholarly debate about whether Michelangelo intentionally left them unfinished.

In a sonnet to Vittoria Colonna, he wrote: “The greatest artist has no conception that a single block of marble does not already contain within its excess; and only the hand that obeys the intellect can reach it.” He distinguished arts such as painting or modeling in clay as working “by way of adding”; sculpting works per forza di levare, or “by force of taking away.”^[1]

Today we are living inside what Pope Francis referred to in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ as a “technocratic paradigm” (LS 101). The Catholic Church has been probing this paradigm long before it had a name—from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, which addressed the human and social problems caused by new forms of industrial technologies; to Romano Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como written from 1923-1925 about the ways technology is quietly destroying organic human culture; to more recent documents from the Holy See on bioethics (Dignitas Personae, 2008), including a chapter in Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate dedicated to technological progress, in which he calls special attention to its “astounding applications in the field of biology” (CV 69).

That biology—not intelligence—was the special callout in that encyclical points to the dramatic changes in the technological landscape in the years since Caritas in Veritate was published, culminating in the invention of the transformer and the original public release of ChatGPT’s powerful large language model (GPT-3.5) in late 2022.

The world began trying to make sense of this powerful new technology, and many looked to the Church for answers as the leaders of the technological development began using religious language to describe their project. In October 2024, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest AI companies in the world, penned an essay on AI’s future titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” borrowing from a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan that imagines a ‘cybernetic ecology’ where humans are ‘watched over by machines of loving grace.’^[2]

In January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education published Antiqua et Nova, reserving the word “intelligence” in its full sense for the human person. This was followed by Pope Leo XIV’s publication of Magnifica Humanitas in May 2026. It’s the first encyclical that takes technology not just into account but as a formal object of inquiry. The subtitle is specific: “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” Because the theme of the letter is safeguarding the human person at a particular time and from a particular technology, the opportunity remains for a generation of thinkers and builders, Christian and non-Christian alike, to develop a full philosophy of technology. Magnifica Humanitas is the cornerstone of that project, not its completion.

The pope looks at the technocratic paradigm the way the sculptor looks at a block of stone: he sees the magnificent form of the person within it. And there are many excesses—what Michelangelo refers to as superchio—which need to be removed: the underlying narratives of transhumanism and posthumanism, invasive surveillance, efficiency as the ultimate measure of value, and the concentration of digital power are among those named.

Still, the Pope knows that the human person is not a sculpture—he is not built; he is created and called. The human person’s “deepest vocation is to enter into the Trinitarian dynamic of love received and shared,” Pope Leo writes before addressing AI directly (MH 48). The spiritual life of the human person, which includes a capax Dei, or the capacity to be in communion with God and therefore with one another, is what must be safeguarded.^[3]

Are we to add or subtract? Build or take away? Painters or sculptors? Michelangelo was both. The founders of the AI labs have decided: build. The pope takes up the builder’s image too—but throughout the letter we see an approach to creation that has more in common with the artist than the technologist. The tradition opened a via negativa toward God; technology is now opening one back to the human person.

The via negativa, or what the Greek Fathers called the apophatic way, is the pathway to knowing something about God by understanding what God is not.

Father Giulio Maspero, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, defines apophaticism as “the impossibility of speaking of God unless in the face of His infinite greatness.”^[4] One area of Maspero’s research is the Cappadocian Fathers’ claim that “substances cannot be expressed in words.” That is because, he writes, “The sphere of language is different from that of being.”^[5] This is particularly relevant to our time, which is characterized by ‘large language models’: systems that lay claim to intelligence through the construction of words. The technical process is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is important to note that it relies on probabilistic, language-based prediction drawn from an existing set of data on which the models are ‘trained.’

Being is of another order, which words cannot contain but only indicate. While large language models function based on the relationships between different words, the relationship between substances is what Maspero and others before him call a relational ontology: relation is not an accident added to being but constitutive of it. “The being of God is a relational being,” as John D. Zizioulas put it, and nothing exists as pure ‘individual’, for there is no true being without communion.^[6]

It is fitting then, that Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas opens with a biblical image that sheds light on the relationship between language and communion: the Tower of Babel, a story told in Genesis 11. The tower, in the Pope’s interpretation, was “a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion” (MH 7). From the outset, there is an ontological problem: “homogenization over communion” is the opposite of the Trinitarian model of relations. Instead, the builders chose “a single language, a single technology, a single direction”—but without reference to God, and ultimately without being in communion. That is why, the Pope implied, their project failed. Language without being contains a profound danger.

In contrast to this warning, the Pope offers a different image taken from the Book of Nehemiah at the beginning of the encyclical to point toward a better way of building. A Jew in the service of the Persian king, Nehemiah returns to his ancestral city to reconstruct the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile (Neh 2-6). “Before taking action, he fasted, prayed and interceded for the people,” the Pope notes (MH 8). Fasting is itself a via negativa—the removal of food as the way toward knowing something greater—and it is the first thing we are told Nehemiah does.

When he begins, he doesn’t impose solutions from the top-down but convenes the people and assigns tasks according to the unique gifts and talents of each person and family, addressing any opposition directly. God is at the center, and it is the kind of undertaking “which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.” Communion is ontologically prior to building.

These are the two opening images of the Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s first encyclical, so we must not underestimate their importance. The Augustinian Pope, Leo, draws on contrasting images of building, which Augustine of Hippo did in his City of God. Immediately after these images, he calls attention to the apophatic way by warning about the “pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the human person, into data and performance” (MH 10). Augustine himself referred to the pugna verborum (De doctrina christiana I.6), a battle that breaks out in language itself whenever it reaches the edge of the sayable. Here, I believe, Pope Leo sees artificial intelligence as a new form of perennial temptation to reduce the mystery of God—and the mystery of the human person, made in His image and likeness—to something that they are not.

While the via negativa has traditionally been a pathway to God through negation—by removing everything that is not God—artificial intelligence itself may be a kind of via negativa to the human person. By looking clearly at what it is not and what it cannot do, we see more clearly the magnificence of the human person in our full capacity as creatures capable of entering into the Triune life of God.

Magnifica Humanitas, therefore, practices a via negativa without announcing it. When Pope Leo wants to show the grandeur of humanity, he does not produce a definition but a negation: the splendor of the human person, he tells us at the outset, is something “no machine can ever replace” (MH 15). The value of the human person “does not depend on what they achieve or produce” (MH 51). Later, he writes that truth is “not the property of those with power or influence” (MH 137). I count 74 uses of the phrase “is not” in the document.

But all the negations are in the service of one great affirmation: the magnificence of the human person not in himself, but because he is the only creature on earth willed by God for his own sake, and called to communion in the life of the Trinity. In one of the most striking lines in the letter, he refers to the social doctrine of the Church as a “theology of communion in history” (MH 27). Examining artificial intelligence as a technology that affects the human person’s ability to be in communion, then—with God, and with one another—is a central task of the document and of the Church in the years ahead.

Michelangelo used technology to create his sculptures and paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Technology and art are not, after all, opposed to one another. They can be—but they are not by necessity. Technology is never neutral. This is a point the Pope makes clear in Magnifica Humanitas, at the outset. After pointing to the power of technology to be an instrument of good, he writes: “In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it” (MH 9).

Magnificence is a virtue. It simply means, at its root, “to make great things.” The grandest cathedrals are magnificent because the people who made them were. If the technology is to be used for good—or to make great things—it must be wielded by magnificent people. We may not all be Michelangelo, but we all have the capacity to cultivate the virtue and to enter into the requisite communion and the life of grace that enables us to be the kinds of people who can use technology responsibly.

Technology is never neutral, which means that it’s always forming—or deforming, if you will—the human person. The image that is being formed, though, is not an individual; it’s a communion of persons. In that sense, Michelangelo’s prisoners—as solitary forms emerging from their own blocks of stone—are insufficient images. What wants to emerge out of the technological paradigm are not individuals, but persons capable of building a civilization of love: persons in communion with one another.

If we return to our image of the sculptor and Michelangelo’s prisoners, we’d see figures emerging from the stone with outstretched hands, groping for one another.

The Holy Father, it turns out, has already reconciled the sculptor and the builder. In the closing lines of his introduction he names the task of the present age: to be builders of communion rather than architects of Babel (MH 16). Everything is contained in that opposition. Babel builds by addition—tower upon tower, layer upon layer, data upon data—toward a unity that is mere homogenization, and which causes us to lose the distinctiveness of our personhood. Communion is built the way Nehemiah built: by focusing on communion first, and removing everything that obscures or becomes an obstacle to it. That is to say: per forza di levare, subtraction first.

To anyone left wanting by this encyclical—anyone who sought more practical applications and concrete prescriptions—I would say: that is not the encyclical’s job. Its job is to lay out the principles through which the baptized can read the signs of the times and carry out the real work in the world. The Pope has given a roadmap for doing so.

The age of artificial intelligence is just beginning. The advent of the transformer and the consumer versions of apps and tools which allowed its proliferation were events which few foresaw, but which are shaking the foundations of the world. We must not forget that these events may also help certain truths penetrate our hearts and minds. If we see them rightly, these events will have much to say to us about who we are and our vocation.

The great Catholic thinker René Girard, elected to the Académie française in 2005, wrote these words in his magnum opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, referring to the unprecedented and radical changes he believed humanity was undergoing. In the future, he wrote, “Books themselves will have no more than minor importance. The events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write and will establish truths we have difficulty describing…”.^[7]

The events—namely, the technological advancements—out of which this encyclical emerged are of paramount importance. Magnifica Humanitas has taken up the task of rearticulating and reestablishing truths about the human person which the events themselves have the power to communicate. But they require interpretation. In the case of AI, the way is a negative one: a via negativa.

We must discover the true power in the creative act — a power that is not ours alone: it flows from our nature as creatures made in the image and likeness of the Creator, so that in creating we share in his creative work. The machine can produce; only a person can participate.

Even this act of creation is apophatic. John Paul II, in his 1999 Letter to Artists, wrote: “All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.” (Letter to Artists, n. 6)

Pope Leo appeals specifically to creators of AI to remind them that they cannot create without an anthropology, a vision of the human person, whether it is real or merely implied. “In one sense, technological innovation can represent human participation in the divine act of creation,” he writes (MH 111). “Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.” In the creative act and the events which are its consequence, we stake a claim on who we are. Is it justified?

To answer that question I turn to an unlikely contributor: the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. AI is forcing us to justify ourselves: intellectually, artistically, spiritually, existentially. As it continues to simulate or mimic or do the things that we believed were ours alone, we must re-examine what or who we are. Do we believe that we are magnificent?

“Many have written their justification of God, their theodicy,” Berdyaev wrote in the preface to his famous book, The Meaning of the Creative Act. “But the time has come to write a justification of man, an anthropodicy. Perhaps an anthropodicy is the only way to a theodicy, the only way not yet lived and used to the full.”^[8]

Pope Leo, in Magnifica Humanitas, has given us a start.

^[1] Michelangelo, Rime, no. 151 (”Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto”); translation mine; cf. The Poetry of Michelangelo, trans. James M. Saslow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). For the 1549 letter to Benedetto Varchi, see The Letters of Michelangelo, trans. E. H. Ramsden, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), vol. 2.

^[2] Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace,” October 2024, darioamodei.com; the title is drawn from Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (1967).

^[3] The term capax Dei does not appear in the encyclical. It belongs to the Augustinian tradition: the mind “is His image in this very point, that it is capable of Him, and can be partaker of Him” (Augustine, De Trinitate XIV.8.11, trans. A. W. Haddan), and it frames the opening of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, whose first chapter is titled “Man’s Capacity for God” (CCC 27–49).

^[4] Giulio Maspero, The Mystery of Communion: Encountering the Trinity (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), p. 3.

^[5] Ibid., p. 54.

^[6] John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), pp. 17–18.

^[7] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 135.

^[8] Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, trans. Donald A. Lowrie (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), preface.

I’m hosting two upcoming events in DC—with Andrew Abela and Andreas Widmer on October 8, and Jonathan Pageau on October 13. Details and registration below.

In January, I was introduced to an Anthropic employee who I was told was exploring a specific question: “Who should AI be?”

I questioned its premise—particularly the words who and be—in my very first reply. When an invitation to the company’s headquarters arrived in March, I declined.

This week, Elizabeth Dias’s reporting in the New York Times—“Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.”—brought the substance of those gatherings into public view.

My decision was the product of a careful discernment—a word that has been thrown about a lot these past few months, including by the leaders of Anthropic.

What Discernment Requires

"Discernment," the word Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah used to describe what we need more of when it comes to AI, is something I'm intimately familiar with. I walked away from my life as a founder of multiple companies to enter seminary formation. I spent five years in seminary, three of them in Rome just steps away from the Vatican. I had a Jesuit spiritual director, and I did the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

That formation also taught me how discernment can go wrong, particularly when other people’s interests begin to steer it. I learned that not everyone is sincere, and that sometimes goodness appears scandalous and evil shows up under the appearance of good. Jesus warned of wolves in sheep’s clothing; he also knew that people would take offense at him.

Discernment would be unnecessary if appearances reliably disclosed the truth.

During his remarks alongside the Pope, Olah repeatedly invoked the idea of discernment. After naming two areas where discernment is needed—the first, a duty toward the poor; the second, moral imagination ordered toward human flourishing—he named one more:

“The third is the need for discernment on the nature of AI models. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don’t know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment.”

Olah has technical expertise, and he invokes that right away in this call for discernment. My invitation reinforced that authority, describing Olah as “the founder of Mechanistic Interpretability.” His expertise is relevant. The question is how much authority it gives him over the philosophical interpretation of his findings.

He admits the findings are mysterious and that he doesn’t know what to make of them. But when you step back and look at how Olah interacted with participants invited to Anthropic’s headquarters just weeks prior, you see a picture of a man—and a company—that seems to be doing less ‘discerning’ than public relations work.

The New York Times reporter Elizabeth Dias writes about the gathering of ‘wisdom tradition’ leaders at Anthropic headquarters and the fancy dinner they were treated to at the end of the day:

All day, [Olah] had worked to convince his guests that A.I. models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love. Yet as the dinner courses came, the rabbi noticed that Mr. Olah and his colleagues were suggesting something far more significant. Anthropic’s leaders were talking about Claude as if it were not mere software.

“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness.

A relationship had already been formed with the technology—a particular way of relating to it—by Olah and his colleagues. It is like a friend of yours coming to you who has fallen in love with a person, asking you to help them to ‘discern’ what to do, while refusing to remove any of the tendrils wrapped around their own heart in the process.

One of the fundamental requirements of discernment is freedom from attachment to a desired outcome. Olah says he is uncertain whether these models are conscious. Yet the reported encounters left me wondering how open the process was to an unwelcome answer. Were the participants being invited to question the company’s premises, or to lend religious authority to them?

I have noticed, from the very beginning of the AI ‘consciousness’ debate, a kind of ‘trust us, we’re the researchers closest to this stuff’ attitude among many employees at frontier labs—an appeal to authority and inside information. The invitation seemed to carry an implicit promise: come see what we see, and you will believe.

It was as if there were some gnostic knowledge inaccessible to the broader public that only a privileged few could gain access to. But the nature of consciousness itself is something that all reasonable people can inquire about without accepting that technical expertise settles the question. Josh Hochschild put it well this past week:

The technical things matter, but they do not interpret themselves. Humans form judgments based on the whole of reality that they are exposed to—often in ways that they themselves don’t even understand.

Sincerity and Innocence

Two of the arguments I’ve heard in support of Anthropic, especially from fellow Christians, are that they’re ‘sincere’, and that they’re at least ‘making an effort’ relative to the other frontier labs.

But I have to say that ‘sincerity’ and ‘effort’ are not things that I’ve historically weighted very heavily, particularly when it comes to high-stakes affairs. It always feels a bit to me like insisting that the surgeon who is about to do open-heart surgery on me is a ‘good guy.’

When my correspondence with Anthropic began in January, I didn’t have a settled view of the company. I knew I loved their products, but I had not followed the company closely. I was certainly open to a conversation. That openness did not mean accepting every one of its premises, though.

In my first email after the introduction, I included this:

I do, however, have to say up front that I challenge the premise of the very question "Who should AI be?" In terms of Catholic anthropology, which is my own tradition, leading with the word who is a category error smuggling in a false metaphysics, so I'd prefer to start a conversation without being confined to that frame if at all possible.

Over exchanges between January and March—and now paying closer attention to what the company and its employees were doing and saying publicly—I became increasingly doubtful that my contribution would be a real contribution rather than a token one. And I began to wonder whether we were not being invited to help determine the direction of the project, but rather to lend religious or moral credibility to a direction already chosen.

The use of spiritual language when it’s not necessary is always a red flag for me. And spiritual ‘speak’ is what I was picking up. The Anthropic employee who invited me described the process as “synodal-style.” That is an ecclesiological term being applied to a multibillion-dollar AI company. What did it mean in that setting? Who would make the decisions, and how would the participants’ contributions affect them?

When the invitation to Anthropic HQ arrived in March, I declined it.

After I did so, I was encouraged to reconsider if “something in you feels the nudge”—a phrase Christians often use for the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

In another email, an Anthropic employee wrote: “Dario often says we’re not seeking a world where Anthropic wins, but a world where we all win.”

Who decides?

The same email explained why participants would not receive honorariums: “We've made an intentional decision not to involve any financial exchange with participants,” it said.

Per Dias’s reporting:

One night in April, a leader of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic treated a group of religious thinkers to dinner at a high-end tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco after a long day.

For months, Anthropic has been hosting private meetings like this one, shuttling in dozens of religious scholars from across the world, papering them with nondisclosure agreements and demanding that key aspects of many conversations remain confidential.

The absence of an honorarium or payment does not guarantee independence or free inquiry, and I did not feel like I would be entering into the kind of relationship where I could speak freely. I know plenty of people speaking about Anthropic online who do not seem free to me, whether they know or feel that or not.

In the coming decade, the most valuable asset will be integrity. The invitation had the feeling of a temptation.

I find little reassurance in the claim that Anthropic is more sincere or makes more of an ethical effort than other labs. The danger is the formation of what Eric Hoffer called true believers: people whose identity becomes so bound to a cause that reconsidering it threatens their sense of themselves.

I do worry that many Christians are particularly vulnerable to false piety or overtures that appeal to their sense of being Christian. Maybe when you’ve felt like you’re on your back foot for most of the last century and a big, powerful company comes along and says that it wants your help, there is something that can be intoxicating about that. I have encountered a reluctance within the Church to question motives—a kind of naivety, I would say—that arises from the fear of being wrong, or ‘unwelcoming’, or ‘uncharitable’. I believe many people both inside and outside of the Church exploit it.

More Christians—and more people generally—should feel free to voice their misgivings and ask unwelcome questions. An intuition is a reason to investigate, not a verdict. Charity does not require us to keep those concerns to ourselves, especially when it is a matter of public importance.

Confession & Character

For the past eighteen years, I have gone to the sacrament of confession roughly every week. Traveling or not, I find a way. I don’t think any practice has shaped my character more.

So this part of Dias’s story particularly jarred me:

After one discussion, Mr. Olah grew excited when a participant brought up the idea of having models confess, much like the Catholic sacrament of confession. Mr. Olah saw value not just in a model alerting when it had done something bad, but also in how the act of confession could shape the model’s sense of itself and thus its choices.

“The kind of character who confesses, that has an effect on character as well, right?” he told me.

I am the kind of character who confesses.

I can see why the idea is exciting to someone like Olah, but the practice is not. In eighteen years, excitement is not something I've ever experienced as I've approached the sacrament.

Confession has formed me because I am responsible for what I have done. I am capable of repentance, and in need of forgiveness. In the Catholic understanding, it is an encounter with God's mercy. Its meaning is not found only in the effect it has on my subsequent behavior.

At the Vatican event announcing the encyclical, Chris Olah said: “We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

That is a worthy aspiration. But confession has taught me to begin with the ways my own desires bend my judgment. Discernment requires a willingness to discover that I am wrong—and to change course when I do.

I pray that the discourse around AI and consciousness undergo its own kind of conversion that will allow it to be life-giving and generative rather than fear-inducing and ouroborian. The last word spoken to a penitent in the confessional is usually ‘peace’. That is my hope for everyone involved in this debate, myself included.

Upcoming Events

The Courage to Be in Communion

On October 8 at The Catholic University of America, I’ll be in conversation with Dean Andrew Abela and my good friend Andreas Widmer on the topic of courage—specifically, what I call the courage to be in communion. This idea made it briefly into my recently published book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, but I didn’t think it got enough air. In writing the book, I was inspired by a critical re-reading of the 20th-century thinker Paul Tillich’s book The Courage to Be, in which he distinguishes a few different aspects of courage: the courage to be as a part, the courage to be as oneself, and the basic, existential courage to be in the face of life’s anxieties.

AI has become a particular source of anxiety in our time. Tillich’s account of participation offers a starting point for thinking about our response, but I want to develop the question of communion more concretely. What courage does friendship require? Marriage? Citizenship? What does it take to remain in a wounded Church without becoming indifferent to its wounds?

With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I’ll be exploring the “Four Courages” over the next few months, beginning with next week’s event in DC. Admission is free, and registration is still open. The first 100 attendees will receive a signed copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine. Register here.

The Forming Arts: Icon-Making and the Religion of the Future—featuring Jonathan Pageau

On October 13, the following week—also at Catholic University—the Cluny Institute is hosting the Orthodox icon writer and thinker Jonathan Pageau, who will be giving a lecture on “The Forming Arts: Icon-Making and the Religion of the Future.” The talk will be followed by Q&A and a reception. I hope to see some of you there. You can learn more and register here.

My new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, is out now. Some of the essay below is inspired by its Chapter 8, on the changing nature of work and its social dimensions.

Read more

Two brief notes before this week’s essay. 1) THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE, my new book about identity, social contagion, and conscience in the face of conformity, is out now. 2) I’m looking for a Chief of Staff to join me full-time—ideally based in either the Washington, DC, or West Michigan areas (or willing to relocate). The COS will be involved in everything from the full life-cycle of a new book to helping build a cultural institution from the ground up. It doubles as an apprenticeship. If you or someone you know is interested, please get in touch. Most importantly: Happy Fourth of July!

Read more

Read more

Friends,

The book that I’ve poured myself into for the past three years—through the birth of two children!—is finally out. The One and the Ninety-Nine is about relationships, and more specifically the quest for real communion in a fractured age.

If you have not already, you can buy the book today: The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. If you’ve already bought it — thank you. Genuinely.

And one real favor: If you buy the book from an online retailer, will you pleaes leave a review? It’s the single most useful thing you can do for a book. It doesn’t have to be long — three sentences is plenty: what it’s about, what it did or didn’t do for you, who you’d hand it to. Reviews are how a book finds readers beyond the people who already know the author, and the early ones genuinely shape its direction. They matter more than most people realize — more than I’d like to admit.

Thank you.

Yours,
Luke

P.S. If you’d rather help another way — a post, a forward, a wor…

Read more

Before you read this: If you enjoy my writing here, the best thing you could do to support my work is to pre-order a copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, which comes out on Tuesday, June 16. To the extent that you’re on social media, or write your own Substack, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d consider spreading the word this week. If you’re in NYC, come join me in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a party to celebrate.

Nonfiction Will Be Disrupted

I was on a train from NYC up to Rhode Island to give a talk on Saturday when I was floored by this recent blog post from Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, one of the bestselling nonfiction authors of the past two decades. It’s titled “Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future.” He opens with this chart of his book sales over the past three years.

Read more

The excerpt below is from my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion—out in less than two weeks, on June 16, from St. Martin’s Press and published here with special permission. You can pre-order a copy here.

Read more

UPCOMING EVENTS: Secure tickets for David Brooks in conversation with me in NYC June 15, the ZOE Conference in Napa this July (there are still a few spots left), and a free virtual event when The One and the Ninety-Nine comes out on June 16. I can now officially announce Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, will be at the ZOE conference speaking about the “New Aesthetics”.

What is Your A.I. Touchstone?

The question has become inescapable: What happens to the American worker when AI stops augmenting and starts replacing? To answer it well requires we ask a preceding — and likely more difficult — question: What first principles…

Read more

Friends,

I’m sharing a list of the highlights from my upcoming book tour for The One and the Ninety-Nine, which will be published in the US and UK on June 16 by St. Martin’s Press (US) and Pan Macmillan (UK). If you’re in or near one of the following places, I’d love to meet you! There should be plenty of opportunities (and time) to hang.

I’m also hosting at least two virtual events in the coming five weeks for those who can’t make the in-person events.

Lastly, before I get to the full list of stops on the road, I’m excited to announce that Stripe Co-Founder and CEO Patrick Collison will now be joining the ZOE Conference in Napa, CA, to be in conversation with me about “New Aesthetics” for a new age, and the relationship between aesthetics and abundant life. You can check out the full ZOE line-up here—and there’s still time to scoop up a last minute ticket if you’d like to join me and roughly 150 other people who I consider some of the most thoughtful in the world for a few days of real …

Read more

Friends: I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York in conversation with David Brooks on Monday, June 15, ahead of the release of my upcoming book “The One and the Ninety-Nine” that week. If you’re in the NYC area, I would love to meet you there! Tickets are on sale now—you can grab one right here.

And now, for all the Girardians, an essay that I began writing three years ago… If you prefer audio, I recorded the whole thing for you myself (50 minutes), above. Or if you’d like to read it in a slightly more beautiful format, you can find the essay here. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Political Judas—An Essay

Today many of us have an odd feeling that we can’t put our finger on. It feels like both the best of times and the worst of times, and global events seem “cataclysmic, yet insignificant.”¹ It’s as if we’ve managed to catch not a tiger by the tail but rather a mouse.

The nature of this Muridaean battle is fundamentally religious. Nearly all contentious things today, from abortion to vaccines to foreign policy, are spoken of in latent religious terms like sacrifice, victimhood, reparation, excommunication—and public acts of repentance are common.² Politics has not replaced religion, but rather allowed itself to be the migratory destination of the holy.³ In short: politics is inherently more religious in an irreligious world.⁴

There has been a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood.⁵ But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.

One assumption being challenged right now is human agency. With the advent of increasingly powerful forms of artificial intelligence and the narrative emphasis on systems and processes of which we are a part (political, economic, social), perhaps the debate over free speech is a cover-up for a more important conversation: free will.⁶

The tension between slavery and freedom lies at the heart of the great political and technological questions of our time, and at the heart of René Girard’s theory. To what extent is a man free to transcend the political machinations of his age? To what extent is disengaging from mimetic processes even possible? The idea or reality of agency, or free will, lies at the heart of these questions.

This essay will explore these questions in the light of Girard’s mimetic theory, but I’d like to begin in what may seem like a surprising place: the biblical story of Judas Iscariot, the apostle of Christ. He will be our lens through which we shall explore this question of agency as it relates to mimesis.

Right out of the gate, we have to grapple with the question of Judas’s freedom: the Gospels of Luke and John tell us that Judas became demonically possessed before he betrayed Christ, giving the reader the impression that his betrayal of Jesus was part of a fatalistic, cosmic plan.⁷

Was Judas at the mercy of a mimetic process that was beyond his power to escape?⁸ In the earlier part of his career, Girard presents Judas as a mere pawn:

There is no special difficulty in understanding why the Gospels treat the pseudo-conspiracy of Judas and the ecclesiastical authorities in the way that they do. This conspiracy is presented as real but powerless. Jesus is the victim of a mimetic contagion that spreads to the whole community, and there can be no question of viewing him as the victim of one particularly evil individual, or even of several. The ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance, since everything culminates in the unanimous movement that is being formed against Jesus.⁹

To say that “the ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance” is seriously to denigrate the realm of the personal—most importantly, the ability of a person to act with intentionality. In my view, the early Girard does not do justice to the role traditionally ascribed to the will, the seat of human action. He misses an opportunity to clarify the role or even the possibility of intentionality in moral acts.¹⁰

I believe the later Girard, had he revisited the Judas question, would have used the opportunity to clarify the role of agency in his theory while respecting its mystery and drama.

After all: Peter, too, betrayed Christ—but his outcome was very different.

Part I: Three Types of
Political Atheism

Freedom is intimately connected to belief. A person who does not at least believe he is free isn’t free in any meaningful sense. What one believes helps determine the realm of possibility for action. The will is not moved to do anything for which it can’t at least hope for the possibility of success.

I propose that Girard used the term political atheist to refer to a specific rejection of belief: in the state, or in a politician (or party), claiming to be divinely ordained or having a divine mandate. This claim formed the basis of the cult of Caesar Augustus at the time of Jesus. Christ desacralized it. Of course, many politicians since Augustus have been associated with a divine mandate, whether they explicitly claim it or not. The idea of “atheism” in Girard’s phrase refers, first and foremost, to a rejection of a belief in claims of sacred power in the political order.¹¹

But the rejection of a prior belief can be a dangerous and despairing thing unless it is replaced by a different belief. The political figure of Judas, I will argue, moves through two different manifestations of political atheism. In the end, he despairs without ever experiencing the third: a form of political atheism that we might even call Christian.

The first variety of political atheist is one who has retreated from the political processes completely, into the underground.¹² Nihilism is “not enough,” but it can be an understandable first response to the disillusionment that people feel when their political aspirations and hopes are dashed—when the person or thing they believed in as salvific is revealed to be fallible and temporary. This is what I’ll call the black-pilled political atheist: one who, as a response to the realization that their trust has been misplaced, adopts a fatalistic and hopeless stance toward the world.¹³

The second type of political atheist is the Machiavellian: one who sees politics principally as the struggle for power, which he, or his preferred political candidate, must win at any cost.¹⁴ The ends justify any means. The Machiavellian political atheist might emerge from the black-pilled state, or he may precede it. Judas, as we’ll see, appeared to move between the two.

The third type of political atheist, however, is the Christian who responds to a corrupt political world that demands belief in its own illusory power. The Christian political atheist situates his belief in something, or someone, that transcends worldly politics. In this way, he becomes immunized from the volatility and anxiety associated with those who have invested their belief in the power of the state to provide solutions to the most fundamental human problems.

Girard’s original use of the term came in his 1961 book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In it, he referred to the French writer Stendhal as an “atheist in politics” (athée en politique). Stendhal’s spirit of political atheism is embodied in Julien Sorel, the protagonist of his novel The Red and the Black.¹⁵

When Julien learns that his former employer has switched parties, he smiles. Girard comments on this scene: “Julien savors the ‘conversion’… as a music lover who sees a melodramatic theme re-appear under a new orchestral disguise. Most men are taken by disguises. Stendhal places a smile on Julien’s lips so that his readers will not be deceived.”¹⁶ Julien, the political atheist, sees the political machinations of his day as the superficial games that they are; when Stendhal places a smile on his lips, he is hinting that Julien sees through the mimesis. He refuses to believe in any type of deeper meaning that others might attach to a turncoat.

To the naive, every conversion—whether political or religious—is genuine. The Stendhalian revelation was his pulling back of the veil on the real dynamics of superficial change through his characters.

Monsieur de Rênal’s “false” conversion, as well as Julien’s reaction to it, is reminiscent of the biblical Judas and the illusion of his outward signs and appearances. When witnessing a woman pouring perfumed oil to anoint Christ’s feet, Judas said the politically correct thing: “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”¹⁷ In the very next sentence, he is called a thief by the Gospel writer.

But Judas is more than a thief. He is also a cynic. He would later sell Christ for one-tenth the amount of those three hundred denarii that he suggested giving to the poor. The words that he speaks with his lips, and the signs he communicates with his actions (he kissed Christ as a “sign” of his friendship, which simultaneously signaled his betrayal) are but false signals of a false conversion—of an interior disposition that has, by this point in the story, become that of the Machiavellian political atheist. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s story, he does not hesitate to wrap himself in false appearances to accomplish his political aims.

Judas, however, quickly migrates from the Machiavellian to the black-pilled. And this darker type of political atheist rejects not only religious belief and belief in politics, he also ceases to believe in his own ability to act within or upon political structures. Unlike the Machiavellian political atheist who finds a way to survive within the existing structures—maybe even exploit them—the black-pilled political atheist believes that current political systems are thoroughly corrupt and unsalvageable. He believes that the only thing reasonable for a self-respecting person to do is remove oneself from participating in such a system.

The black-pilled political atheist is like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” who attempts to opt out of what he finds to be a repressive system.¹⁸ He constructs his own naively anti-mimetic world of autonomy only to find himself ruled by internal mediation, the rivalrous and envious desire to imitate and ultimately supplant the proximate other.¹⁹ He is like the biblical man who believes he has driven out one demon only to find seven more powerful taking over his house.²⁰ As he attempts to assert his free will, the black-pilled political atheist becomes embroiled in mimetic rivalry with—and fulfills the will of—the same authoritarian state that seeks to quiet him.

Judas took the original black pill. He moved from political belief (most likely in Christ as a political liberator) to Machiavellian disbelief (he struck a deal with the state, which he would come to regret) to black-pilled and nihilistic-representing the complete loss of faith, not only in a single political leader or in the state, but even of all hope in the future. As we know, the political evolution of Judas led to his disillusionment, despair, and death.²¹

Now we can turn to the Christian political atheist. Does such a man even exist? And if so, what might he be like?

First, let’s look at some biblical perspectives about the relationship of God to human political affairs. Going back much further than the incarnation of Christ, there is a long biblical tradition that speaks of God looking at human political affairs with amusement, even disdain. In Psalm 2: “The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers band together,” while “The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.”²² In the first book of Samuel, God gives Israel a king after their rejection of him, but Israel is warned about the mimetic conflict that will follow, and the folly that will result.²³

In contrast to the “worldly prudence” that political actors try to convince the populace they possess, we can read in Christ’s selection of Judas as an apostle an otherworldly orientation. He chose a man that he knew would ultimately betray him to be one of his most intimate collaborators and friends. It is difficult to conceive of a normal politician ever doing this, even if he had some form of supernatural knowledge. Such a politician would be terrified at the thought of a potential traitor in his inner circle.

On the worldly political plane, events unfold in unpredictable ways so long as humans are agents. Because nobody has the power to stamp out human agency entirely (as much as the state may try), we live in a world where the possibility of sin and even betrayal must be permitted. If it were not, we would be attempting to eliminate freedom itself.

To deny the possibility of betrayal (and therefore Judas) is to deny the unique character of the Christian revelation and its apocalyptic dimension. Judas must be allowed to emerge. Attempts to restrain him, stamp him out, or pretend that he does not exist will be the marks of an Antichrist—because the Antichrist, unlike Christ, does not have the power to overcome betrayal, sin, and death.²⁴ The Antichrist can only engage in a cheap mimicry of salvation; he must try to hide or muffle any kind of weakness or scandal. The Antichrist cannot tolerate agency.

In the world of inevitability that Antichrist attempts to construct, there is simply no space for change. There is no room for conversion. Everything follows a predictable pattern. That’s because conversion is dangerous to any leader who isn’t himself converted. Conversion represents a weakening of his own power.²⁵

Part II: The Satanic Principle
and the Girardian Moment

“As human history continues, this satanic mechanism will be subverted more and more.”

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001

Conversion subverts the satanic mechanism. Both Peter and Judas betrayed Christ, but only Peter seems free to change after realizing what he has done. What happened to Peter that didn’t happen to Judas? In the mimetic process, is there a moment in time pregnant with the possibility for change, after which change becomes more difficult?

We may imagine the liminal space between betrayal and conversion. For Peter, the cock crowing three times was the moment of accusation from which he could have fled but to which he instead responded with tears of repentance (he “went outside and wept bitterly,” the Gospel writer Luke tells us).²⁶ For Judas, his liminal moment is when he throws the thirty pieces of silver at the Pharisees’ feet. Their mockery and rejection of him is their accusation.

But unlike Peter, Judas does not respond with tears. Instead, he flees from that terrifying space in which there is time to choose how to respond to the revelation of one’s own villainy.

We may consider the possibility of a “Girardian Moment”—the final moment at which a person still has the freedom to act in such a way that accelerates destructive mimesis or in a way that counteracts it, traveling in a different vector to it.²⁷

Girardian Moment

The moment after which the opportunity to make a fundamental choice has passed, and resisting mimetic contagion becomes far more difficult.

This opens up the debate on the question of free will—a debate that, despite modern tendencies, is to be understood as a theological and not scientific category. I am going to engage the question of free will from the theological perspective and avoid the scientific debates—rooted in a materialist outlook that denies any spirit and, therefore, freedom—about whether free will is, in fact, “a thing.” I am axiomatically presuming free will is a thing; contrary to those who say “Free will is not a thing,” it is very much one—indeed it lies at the foundation of the moral life.

Here I am drawing on an older tradition that has a broader and more expansive understanding of human reason. This tradition sees reason as verifying the truth of things by allowing the world to reveal itself, whereby reason receives and responds to the world as it shows itself. Freedom, then, is integrated with reason as a response to reality in its whole. Freedom and reason need each other. Freedom, then, is won or lost based on how a person responds to past experiences and the choices he makes in response to them.²⁸

In this older (Catholic) tradition, grace and the human will must cooperate. It is the encounter of two freedoms: God’s and man’s. The human subject must willingly accept the gift of grace, and the gift can never be imposed without this cooperation.²⁹ Genuine Christian conversion, while often depicted as an unstoppable process that happens to a person, requires freedom to become complete: an intentional turning away from evil things and inordinate attachments by turning toward the good. That process does not happen all at once; the turning is gradual and often comes with a steep learning curve.

Even in the realm of evil, human freedom must be involved. Just as grace requires human cooperation, so does evil. Theological reflection going back to Augustine’s demonology in De civitate Dei (and long before that, to the trials of Saint Anthony in the desert) depicts demonic forces as unable to possess a person without some prior assent by the one who would become possessed. In other words, the demons cannot possess solely by force. They require an invitation.

This perspective from demonology gives us a new way to think about mimetic power: at a certain point, after a person has given up enough of his freedom and invited these forces in, he loses much, even all, of his remaining power to resist.³⁰ There is some tipping point, some Girardian moment, after which a fundamental choice is no longer possible or is, at the very least, extraordinarily difficult.

But there must be freedom involved. If there is no possibility of freedom in the face of a mimetic mediator, then any culpability for morally evil acts would effectively be destroyed—and we would enter the nihilistic milieu of our own day in which technology companies are seen to possess the power to “control” the entire population.³¹ But even if you do believe that, I ask: is not there a Girardian moment when that was not, or would not be, the case? Have we already passed it?

Girard referred to destructive mimetic powers as satanic and demonic on numerous occasions, but I believe his lack of theological clarity or precision can cause confusion.

In some sense, it seems that Girard demythologized Satan and rendered the structural nature of human self-destruction more intelligible through mimetic theory—but at what cost? Yes, Girard’s demythologizing saves us from the intellectual gymnastics required to accept the imagery of Satan given to us by Dante and Milton. We need only conceive of Satan as a violent mimetic process and not as a red, horned creature with a pitchfork. Yet, the demythologizing tendencies in mimetic theory can easily go too far. Satan is not an all-powerful puppeteer taking advantage of unsuspecting humans; at the same time, Satan is not just a name given for the personification of mimetic violence.³²

If Satan is merely a mimetic process, then the scapegoat mechanism becomes an impersonal “force” through which people may commit violence or self-destruct. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to identify or disambiguate any particular person’s moral act or culpability—even the person who cast the first stone (”the demon made me do it!”).³³ The role of human agency is eclipsed, or at least greatly diminished, and Girard’s theory would then represent an entryway into either historicism or determinism rather than being a theory that grapples seriously with the reality of the will.³⁴

Girard’s warning to us about the dynamics of crowds is correct: looking at the person who casts the first stone will often mislead us, because we can tend to lose sight of the larger dynamics at work in a crowd. But Satan is not a “structure”—Satan is an agent who requires willing cooperators. (And if all he needs to do is find the weakest person in a crowd, then his job is easy.)

Satan’s attempt to bring us under his control may be better understood with the distinction between possession and oppression. Alan Jacobs writes:

Those possessed by demons—or to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm—lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it.³⁵

Here Jacobs distinguishes between a person with the capacity to resist, and a person who has already lost that capacity—as a drug addict loses the capacity to say “no” to the next offer of the drug.

Let’s now return to the Satanic principle, but in the context of a crowd. The first-century religious leader Apollonius of Tyana is said to have led a crowd in a stoning of a blind beggar in an amphitheater in Ephesus to rid the community of a disease. In this story, told by Philostratus, Apollonius is the personification of a demonic agent. He did not throw the first stone at the blind beggar; rather, he persuaded some patsy to throw it for him. He misled others with lies.

This allowed him to effect the change he promised to the crowd, but his power was completely reliant on the degree to which the crowd believed him. There was some level of consent to the violent power of the stoning ritual. Apollonius was an agent, and he found a willing agent in the crowd; at a certain point, the mimetic process entered into and surpassed the Girardian moment I have referred to above.

The epistemic transformation that occurred as this mimetic process took hold was symbolized in the transformation of the blind beggar into a demon with fiery eyes.³⁶ Mimesis changes perception. It affects belief. That is why to be a Christian political atheist means, at some level, to reject belief in the sacred power of cheap mimetic processes in which appearances mask substance.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his essay “The Dangers of Quietism” from 1935, saw this tendency of formal power to misrepresent its intent and cloak itself in benevolent motives:

In truth, even if Hitler were to burn all the neo-pagan books; even if he were to condemn Rosenberg, Bergmann, and Gebhardt to the same fate as Roehm [whom Hitler had executed]; even if he were to forbid all direct attacks on the Church; even if he were not merely to ratify favorable concordats, but also abide by them—even then, as long as it refused to dissolve and liquidate itself completely, National Socialism would remain every bit as much the Antichrist against which we must fight relentlessly.³⁷

Von Hildebrand is arguing that the demonic never appears as demonic. Rather, it will always appear under the form of the “good.” Because “Satan has fallen from the sky like lightning” (a passage from the Gospel of Luke, and the title of one of Girard’s books), the scapegoat mechanism must take on new forms—it must be a shape-shifter, indeed must never appear to be scapegoating, to be effective.³⁸ Likewise, the Antichrist will not come announcing himself—and neither will his collaborators. Like the political atheist Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s novel, the Christian political atheist must be able to see beneath appearances.

People who stand in the face of the mimetic process, even while immersed in the environment in which it is brewing, show us that there may indeed be an anti-mimetic option.³⁹ Von Hildebrand, who at one point became Hitler’s number-one intellectual enemy, is an example. While living in the midst of a culture that was swiftly (and mimetically) being seduced by Hitler, he had the courage to resist and speak out at great personal risk to himself and his family. But first he was able to see past the appearances, underneath the mimetic machinations, and grasp the essence of Nazism.

While Girard most often used the term “anti-mimetic” in a disparaging way—to point out the naive postmodern response to mimesis, in which “everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch”⁴⁰—he did refer to anti-mimetic acts, such as forgiveness and mercy. These acts can transcend the logic of destructive mimesis. They have the power to stop and even reverse destructive mimetic processes.

Christ modeled one of these acts in his reversal of the stoning of the adulterous woman.⁴¹ The idea of an anti-mimetic act makes sense only if we rescue it from the horizontal plane of action—from internal mediation—and think of a genuine anti-mimetic act as a free response to a vertical dimension where there is an external mediator of a higher order. The horizontal plane could be thought of as “centripetal,” always turning back on itself and always eventually destructive. The vertical plane is the place where true transcendence may be found—not the false, deviated transcendence that Girard often refers to the scapegoat mechanism as effecting.⁴²

Christianity claims there is indeed a transcendent dimension that extends to us the possibility of being lifted out of mimetic slavery and into the higher logic of charity.⁴³ The Christian idea of agency is deeply bound up with the idea of cooperation: a non-rivalrous cooperation with grace, the opening and response of the will to a receptive, interdependent state of being.⁴⁴ Agency is paradoxically tied to the ability to receive that which is good; it is not merely the ability to give or to do. Real freedom, in other words, requires communion.⁴⁵ The truly anti-mimetic act requires freedom from the mimetic process; mere contrarianism does not. The anti-mimetic act is at once a rejection of the worldly mimesis exemplified by politics and the simultaneous acceptance of heavenly mimesis exemplified by the self-sacrificing love of Christ.

Part III: From Judas to Peter:
Conversion and Innovation

We now return to Girard’s early treatment of Judas to see if we can find some additional insight into the possibility of conversion. He writes:

The jealousy of Judas is ultimately at one with the political attitude of Pilate and the naïve snobbery of Peter, who betrays his master because he is ashamed of his provincial accent in the court of the High Priest. On the surface, motives appear to be individual, and conduct appears to fall into different patterns. But everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis, which works its power on everyone without exception.⁴⁶

It is typical of the early Girard for him to say that “everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis” (emphasis mine). Is he saying that people willingly succumb to the seductive power of mimesis, or something else?

Girard does admit that there is a crucial difference between Judas and Peter: “The only difference between Judas and Peter resides, not in the betrayal, but in Judas’s inability to come back to Jesus.”⁴⁷ He does not explain the source of this inability, though. Was it demonic possession?

What led to one man’s conversion and another’s despair?

I am proposing here that Judas and Peter had different progressions in their relationship to politics, and thus to Christ. They had different “Girardian Moments” because each man had a different disposition after his betrayal. And this is not an insignificant detail.

By the time the critical moment of potential conversion was available to each, one seemed unable to respond to the grace of conversion, while the other does respond. It is not so much that one had agency and the other did not, but rather that both made a decisive choice at a certain point, a choice which determined how they would relate to the whole of reality. One man (Peter) was open to the grace of conversion. The other refused to cooperate.

But perhaps the respective abilities of each man to respond were affected by the prior political choices they had made, which entailed metaphysical commitments to the whole of reality. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty of black-pilled political atheists in Washington.

Mimesis cannot be fully understood in a snapshot, like a balance sheet, but as a process—especially when that process involves conversion, the process of true metanoia in which a person reverses course. The darkly mimetic forces can have a greater or lesser pull on us depending on the state we’re in when we encounter them, but the process is never too late so long as we’re still alive. The Good Thief on the cross next to Christ is evidence of that.

Peter shows the difference between Judas’s betrayal and his own when he gives his threefold profession of love in the post-Resurrection account of the risen Christ, standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Christ has cooked a fish breakfast for a group of the apostles before taking Peter aside for questioning. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter, three times, to which Peter responds with an affirmative “yes, Lord.”⁴⁸ Peter made a choice. But even prior to this encounter on the shore, Peter had already made a choice.

A death had to occur in Peter to allow him to make this profession of love in the first place, which Judas was incapable of doing. Both men died, but only one man changed.

Girard expresses this difference in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in the concluding chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, in which he distinguishes between the antithetical deaths of two major characters: “one death which is an extinction of the spirit and one death which is spirit; Stavrogin’s death is only death, Stepan’s death is life.”⁴⁹ Judas’s death is only death; Peter’s death is life.⁵⁰

Part IV: Resurrection
from the Field

In his threefold acclamation of love, Peter acknowledged his guilt and trusted in the one he knew would forgive him. Judas’s despair, on the other hand, saw no reversal. He remained one of the two nihilistic varieties of political atheist to the end. He rejected the lies of the world, but there was no corresponding acceptance on the other side of that rejection. At the very moment when he may have been closest to conversion, he closed himself off to it.

The movement from political belief to political atheism to belief in a transcendent order depends, in large part, on a single primordial belief: belief in one’s own agency, or belief that there is a point at which mimesis may be withstood and even subverted. If this spiritual freedom is denied, a central promise of Christianity must also be denied.

We should look for this freedom even in the Passion narrative. If we do not, we ascribe excessive power to Satan, and to the scapegoat mechanism—a power they do not possess. I do not mean to say the power isn’t real. Jesus’s statements about Satan as a “ruler of this world” demonstrate even a relativized sense of power. (If it’s not real power, then what has Jesus destroyed?) Death has a power—it is the ultimate weapon of the kingdom of Satan. Power is the expression of agency. But it is spiritual agency, freedom in relationship to God, that breaks the mimetic stronghold and power over this world.

If we naively accept the premise of Satan’s power, or if we believe in the absolute inevitability of mimetic violence (as opposed to its relative inevitability), we miss the central point of the Christian revelation: that the best Satan can do is ape God under false appearances.⁵¹

It is true that the political forces that led to Christ’s death have been revealed to be contagious, mimetic violence—a revelation that posits Judas as one traitor among many. But one’s personal disposition in the face of mimesis matters. In the murder of Christ, all are guilty—but the wide variety of individual responses within that universal “all” refutes fatalistic misreadings and reaffirms the role of freedom within the events of the Passion.

This brings us to a central problem: how, then, are we to live in a society of potential Judases?

In nearly everyone’s view, Judas is dangerous—he’s a threat. But he is more than that. He is an agent, not merely a pawn. And unless this false understanding is corrected, we should expect to see more attempts to snuff out agency—and with it, the possibility of conversion.

Near the end of his life, Girard stated at a conference that “Politics can no longer save us.” Politics no longer possesses the sacred power that it once did. It cannot magically produce cathartic social solutions as it once did. And so man must resist the temptation to turn everything into a political matter. Doing so results in various forms of political atheism, often resulting in nihilism, which plagued Judas, and which continue to plague people who fail to grasp the transcendent dimension, or collapse it into the immanent.

The French mystic Charles Péguy lamented that “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”⁵² Every movement begins as a spiritual or mystical force and is subsequently incarnated in concrete action. Péguy continued with a warning: “The interest, the question, the essential is that in each order, in each system, the mysticism not be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth.”⁵³

Public life and politics become sterile without mysticism. I believe the Christian political atheist must become, and must remain, a mystic. It’s the remaining, as we have seen in the case of Judas, that is the hard part.

In some cases, the believer must have the “salt water of doubt,” of nihilism, washed into his mouth before he comes to the realization that nihilism is not enough.⁵⁴ But that nihilism must lead to a greater belief.

Hope is the answer to the worst accusations that can be made about a man because it allows him to know that his future will be different than his past or his present. The example of Peter shows that remaining a mystic does not mean that one will never descend into paltry politics or never participate in mimetic violence. No, remaining a mystic means maintaining a commitment to the continual conversion through which a man is able to be a mystic even after he realizes that he is Judas.

Notes

1. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 138. ↩

2. “Cancel Culture,” while I dislike the term, may be the most obvious example. ↩

3. See William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2011). ↩

4. It’s also instructive to look at the use of theological words in technology. See Antonio Spadaro, SJ, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet, trans. Maria Way (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). ↩

5. See Luke Burgis, “The Three City Problem of Modern Life,” Wired, August 2022. ↩

6. The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey raised this point in a 2024 conversation at an Oslo Freedom Forum interview. He stated: “I think the free-speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. And we feel it right now because we are being programmed.” ↩

7. The Apocryphal Arabic Gospel of the Infancy says that Satan possessed Judas even from his birth. Cf. Montague Rhodes James, ed. & trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 80–83. ↩

8. There is a sense of inevitability about any mimetic process that has been put into motion and accelerates past a certain point. The ninth and tenth stones thrown in a ritual stoning are one example. We can rightfully ask, as some have, whether Christ’s prevention (and mimetic reversal) of the stoning of the adulterous woman was something natural—did he merely say the right words to redirect the violent energy of the crowds?—or supernatural. It is fair to ask whether Christ worked a miracle, and whether it was thus grace that broke in and changed the trajectory of normal human affairs. Christ’s intervention in the stoning of the adulterous woman is not classically considered one of his “signs” or “miracles.” ↩

9. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 247. ↩

10. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively about free will, the latter in his refutation of Manichaeism and in his writings against Pelagius. The early Jesuits were challenged in their teaching on free will by the Jansenists, who denied that a human’s free response to grace was required. Likewise the so-called De Auxiliis controversy of the late sixteenth century saw a fierce debate between Jesuits and Dominicans on the subject. Eventually Jansenism was condemned, but both Jesuits, who followed Luis de Molina in emphasizing divine-human synergy, and Dominicans, who followed Domingo Bañez in emphasizing divine providence, received papal approbation. ↩

11. The claims can relate to a specific ruler or political candidate, or to the political order itself. ↩

12. René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). ↩

13. The term “Black Pilled” seems to have originated in the “incel” community, a mostly online group of men who consider themselves unattractive to women and unable to change their position or their fate. I use it here in a more general way to refer to the disillusioned state of a person who loses any belief in their own agency and believes that they are stuck inside of a system they can’t change. ↩

14. For an excellent treatment on Machiavelli in dialogue with Dante, see James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943). ↩

15. Published in 1830, this novel ostensibly treats the issue of monarchism versus liberalism during the Bourbon Restoration following the French Revolution. ↩

16. Girard, Deceit, 132. ↩

17. See John 12:4–6. ↩

18. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994). ↩

19. Girard uses “internal mediation” in contrast to “external mediation.” An internal mediator of desire is within the subject’s world; an external mediator is outside of the subject’s immediate world. ↩

20. “Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and dwell there; and the final plight of that man is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:45). ↩

21. The movement doesn’t necessarily flow in the same order for everyone. ↩

22. Psalm 2:2, 4. ↩

23. “But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us…” 1 Samuel 8. Another text that is relevant here is Augustine of Hippo’s City of God. ↩

24. Scripture seems to indicate the possibility of multiple Antichrists (e.g., 1 John 2:18), not just one as is held in the popular imagination, including structures that could be Antichristic. ↩

25. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John 3:30. ↩

26. Luke 22:62. ↩

27. The person of Franz Jägerstätter comes to mind as a real-life example: he was a lone Austrian peasant who refused to take the soldiers’ oath of allegiance to Hitler, ultimately being executed for insubordination. The recent film A Hidden Life (2019) dramatizes his story. ↩

28. From the classical point of view, drug addiction would be classed as a habitus (hexis), that is, a mode of existence, built up over repeated stimulus and action, that one “has” or “bears” like clothing. Once adopted, a habitus can be changed, but it is quite difficult, requiring more than mental resolve and willpower. See Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Westmont: IVP Academic, 2011). ↩

29. “The Council of Trent declared that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, can by its consent cooperate with God…” See Michael Maher, “Free Will,” in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), catholic.com/encyclopedia/free-will. ↩

30. It is that the definitive choice—the sin against the Holy Spirit—has finally happened. Macbeth’s dream of being in the middle of a river is a powerful image: it is just as easy to go forward as it is to go back. This is what the Germans call “Grundentscheidung”: the fundamental choice out of which all other actions lie. ↩

31. Whether the power to resist those demonic forces, or to resist evil, is natural or supernatural is beyond the scope of this paper. ↩

32. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (United States: United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), paragraph 395. ↩

33. Demons are classically conceived as immaterial intelligences that primarily work in the realm of thought. A recent Athonite monk compared these thoughts to airplanes circling over an airport: we must take care when considering which planes we will allow to land. ↩

34. Marshall McLuhan, too, was accused of technological determinism for his theory that the “medium is the message,” but this understanding of his work neglects the strong role that agency still played in his understanding of human society. ↩

35. Alan Jacobs, “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2022, thenewatlantis.com. ↩

36. Girard refers to this transformation in his work I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), in the chapter “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.” ↩

37. Dietrich von Hildebrand, “The Danger of Quietism,” in My Battle Against Hitler, trans. & ed. John Henry Crosby and John F. Crosby (New York: Image, 2014), 290. March 10, 1935. ↩

38. Luke 10:18, and the inspiration behind one of Girard’s greatest works, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. ↩

39. By anti-mimetic, I don’t mean free from mimesis. As I explain in my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), I am referring to the possibility of responding to the call of deviated transcendence with real transcendence. ↩

40. Girard, Deceit, 100. ↩

41. John 8:3–11. ↩

42. Girard, Deceit, 61. “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth.” ↩

43. In Christian terms, agape. ↩

44. See Augustine’s discussion of true sacrifice in Book 10 of the City of God. ↩

45. Cf. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani,” Communio 31 (Fall 2004): 685–687, communio-icr.com. ↩

46. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

47. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

48. John 21:15. Christ uses the Greek word agape for “love” in his questioning. ↩

49. Girard, Deceit, 291. ↩

50. “Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies it cannot bear much fruit, but if it dies, it bears fruit a hundredfold.” (John 12:24). ↩

51. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of the relative inevitability of mimetic violence. The Christian Gospel, however, in cooperation and an openness to grace, reveals the power of mimetic violence as relative in the grand scheme, and fundamentally destroyed in the end. The Resurrection both reveals and demonstrates this. ↩

52. “Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.” ↩

53. Cited in Robert Royal, “Everything Begins in Mysticism,” The Catholic Thing, January 23, 2023, thecatholicthing.org. ↩

54. A phrase used by Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010). ↩

Friends:

When I heard the words of Pontius Pilate on Good Friday—”What is truth?”—I couldn’t help but thinking that, while his question remains as important as ever—an equally important and interconnected question is: “What is life?” They help answer one another.

They seem almost so basic as to be not worth tackling—so fundamental that they are like hyperproblems which, because they surround us—and because we live them every second— sometimes seem impossible, overwhelming, to confront. So we try not to think too hard about them. That’s a mistake.

I invite you to dive in deeply with me this summer. The ZOË Conference, which I’m hosting with my colleagues at The Cluny Institute this summer in Napa, CA (July 26-28), will dive deeper into the question of life than any other gathering this year. A fitting year, it seems—the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding—to ask, very simply, what kind of life is possible here?

…

Read more

An excerpt from —her foreword to the new book, Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis, published earlier this month by CUA Press. The edited volume contains 16 original essays on Girard’s work.

Get the Book

Foreword: A Good Contagion

Before he became an acknowledged Silicon Valley guru, before he became the fourth wise man in a Nativity crèche, René Girard lived quietly and inconspicuously on a far-flung corner of campus, on the aptly named Frenchman’s Road. I was fortunate to know René before he was a legend, before he was featured in The New York Review of Books, before he was the subject of a documentary film called Things Hidden, before everybody who was anybody knew him, had read him, or had at least read about him and could quote him or pretend to quote him. My personal encounter with him would prove to be one of the more f…

Read more

The idea of the ‘hive mind,’ the latest iteration of what used to be called groupthink, has become newly salient over the past decade. It has generated countless memes, along with new epithets for people who don’t seem to think for themselves: the rise of people being called ‘NPCs,’ for instance, non-player characters in video games who control none of the action and show up on the screen in programmed patterns.

The cocktail of media and technology has made the world far more mimetic. We are now so saturated in mimesis that the saturation itself has become the joke — like the 1984 Pepsi commercial that ushered in the age of mimetic irony.

Read more

In recent years, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the use of the word energy to describe how people feel. This person had good energy about them. The event had amazing energy. People join a movement because it seems to have energy. All of those are relatively straight-forward. I love live music, and that’s largely because I love the energy in the crowd—an energy that doesn’t come through my home speakers. But one area where I have heard the word over and over, to the extent that it has caught my attention, is that ideas have energy.

Oddly, though, the ideas that seem to have the most energy are the ones that seem most dangerous. Not Christian Orthodoxy, but heterodoxy—or at least if not obviously heterodox, ideas pushing the boundaries, operating slightly outside of the Overton Window (witness the energy surrounding Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, for instance). Notice the energy around Nick Fuentes and what used to be fringe political movements. Energy is now in edginess. Or the en…

Read more

Almost two and a half years after the NOVITĀTE conference in D.C. (which celebrated René Girard’s 100th birthday), the book that I promised would emerge from that gathering is finally about to be published. There is much more on the book below—including a detailed table of contents of the 17 original essays that make it up, as well as a bonus preview of the Introduction.

I’m also excited to announce that we are going to be bringing back the spirit of NOVITĀTE with a special session dedicated to Girard and A.I. at the upcoming Zoe conference in Napa this summer, where you can expect to see a lot of the same faces from the 2023 conference—and a lot of new ones.

But before I get to the book: For the next 7 days, the second cohort of the Foundations of Agency workshop is open this spring at a cost of $495.

This is not simply a course that takes you on a survey of the philosophical, psychological, and theological foundations of the concept of agency—it will put you in a small cohort of 4-5 …

Read more

It’s not hard to find your tribe. The real challenge today is not losing yourself within one.

For the past three years, I’ve been researching and writing the most important and personal thing that I have ever published: THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, out from St. Martin’s Press on June 16, 2026.

For those who know me or have followed my work, please consider stopping now to click this link and pre-order. For the rest: let me tell you why I believe this book is worth the investment—and why I think it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Some Backstory

In 2021, when my mother unexpectedly died, I became the primary caregiver for my father, who was battling advanced Alzheimer’s disease—only a few months after my book Wanting was published, and just weeks after I was newly married. That experience forced both …

Read more

Friends,

First, some big personal news: the reason I haven’t been as active here lately as I was hoping is that our second daughter was born a little earlier than expected (shortly after Christmas), and nothing has brought me more joy than having two baby girls, one on each shoulder, grabbing each other’s faces and mine—but it’s also been a period of major adjustment and pure exhaustion.

Within 48 hours of my daughter being born, I received a round of last-minute edits on my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine (publishing contracts and schedules are unforgiving!)—so when I was up from 2-4 a.m. putting my toddler back to sleep, I was making edits on the manuscript before I went back to bed rather than writing here.

All that is to say: thank you for your patience with me. Life is rich, even when it’s exhausting—and probably especially when it’s exhausting.

I’ll have much more to say on the book here in the next few months. It’s the most important (and personal) …

Read more

Last chance for discounted Cluny Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) tickets—15% off good through the end of year with coupon code ‘antimimetic’. Full-time position now open: Manager, Social Media and Community.

Moths evolved to navigate by celestial light. Artificial light hijacks that instinct—and they spiral. Technology introduced changes into the environment that they can’t adapt to fast enough.

While none of us like being compared to moths, it’s hard not to see our current predicament as somewhat similar. We’re not adapting fast enough—morally, spiritually, intellectually, physically—to the bright, artificial light that is Artificial Intelligence.

The Internet ushered in the Information Age, in which people quickly became exposed to an abundan…

Read more

Before we get to this week’s essay, two important notes:

1) Tickets to the ZOE Conference in July—where Silicon Valley will come face to face with Athens and Jerusalem, and —are available at a discount, until the end of the year. Apply coupon code ‘antimimetic’ before Jan. 1 at checkout. You’ll be invited onto our conference app to get to know others, set-up meetings, and chat beginning in April.

2) I’m hiring a Director of Operations & Strategy for The Cluny Project in Washington, DC. It’s an in-person job only. We will pay up to $100k with generous benefits for an experienced candidate. Filling this position is my top priority. Applications can be found here. (Other open roles, including Director of Communications, can be found here, but our timeline is longer on filling them.)

Read more