On Borrowed Tablets

In the spring of 2026, the most advanced thing human beings have ever built went looking for a blessing from the oldest institution in the West.

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on protecting the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Standing near him as he presented it was a co-founder of one of the companies racing to build that intelligence. Sit with the picture for a moment, because it is stranger than it first looks. The avant-garde — the people who tell us that every inherited practice is a candidate for disruption, that tradition is just unexamined latency in the system — walked to Rome and asked the Church whether what they are doing is permitted.

This is not piety. It is something more revealing. A movement that claims it is building a mind to surpass our own turns out, at the first touch of moral vertigo, to have no moral language of its own. So it borrows. It reaches past two and a half millennia of secular thought and picks up the one vocabulary it never bothered to develop, because it was too busy optimising everything else. The gesture says two things at once, and they do not agree: we are the future, and we cannot tell right from wrong without a priest.

The question I want to ask is simple. Is Rome really the only address? Is it true that when the stakes get high enough, the only words heavy enough to carry our worth are religious ones?

The man who said yes out loud

A week after the encyclical, the essayist Tyler Austin Harper answered that question with a confident yes. His title gave it away: there is already a word, he wrote, for the deep moral failures of AI. The word is sin.

What makes this worth taking seriously is that Harper is no cleric. He describes himself as a barely observant Presbyterian. He is, more or less, one of us — a secular writer in a secular magazine — and he has concluded that his own side cannot do the job. When companies sell digital girlfriends to the lonely and companion robots to the old, he reaches for sin because nothing thinner will hold the weight.

Give him his strongest point, because it is correct. Run the companion robot through the only vocabulary most secular critics allow themselves — the language of measurable harm — and the machine comes out ahead. The lonely person is less lonely. The ledger records a benefit. And yet something in it is plainly wrong: a counterfeit slid into the place where another human being should be. Harm-talk cannot name that wrong, because no one shows up worse off on any chart. Harper is right that the utilitarian vocabulary is too poor for the moment.

He is wrong about the only thing that matters next. He thinks the wrong that harm-talk misses can only be named by reaching for a divine order, and so for a God. The wrong is real. The leap to the maker is not.

It is worth noticing where Harper found his most useful weapon. The phrase he leans on — remainder humanism, the human defined only as whatever the machine cannot yet do — he borrows from Leif Weatherby, a theorist at NYU. Weatherby is no friend of Rome. The sharpest diagnosis of thin secular humanism comes from inside secular thought, not from the pulpit. The disease is real. The cure Harper prescribes is imported.

A posit dressed as a discovery

Start with the move both the pope and Harper make, because everything turns on it. Created in God's image. A sin against the created order. These phrases do a quiet trick: they present a decision as if it were a finding. They speak of human worth the way one speaks of a fact about the world — something there to be discovered, already true before anyone decided anything.

But dignity is not that kind of thing. No amount of biology, evolution, or anthropology yields a single sentence beginning therefore this creature is owed. You can describe the human animal down to the last neuron and never arrive at its worth, because worth was never the sort of thing evidence settles. This is an old point and it has no expiry date. It cuts the theologian as cleanly as the scientist: created by God explains nothing about why creatures should be protected that evolved over time fails to explain. Both are silent at exactly the place that matters.

So worth is not found. It is conferred. And here ordinary experience is a better teacher than any philosopher. Watch what happens to the demented in care homes, to the dying in hospitals, to the homeless on the street. Their dignity is not quietly respected as an indelible fact stamped on them by their maker. It is withdrawn — daily, by families, by institutions, by states and insurers who have decided, in practice, that these people no longer fully count. If dignity can be stripped, it was never a property sitting inside the person. It is a status, granted or refused by other people.

This is the thing the encyclical cannot admit. It insists dignity is God-given and therefore inextinguishable. The care home with a crucifix on the wall refutes it every afternoon. Either the theological claim is false — dignity is not inextinguishable, because we extinguish it — or it was always a commitment disguised as a fact: a vow to treat the person as if their worth could not be erased. And a vow is a decision. Which means a secular person can make the very same decision, and owes Rome nothing for the privilege.

The theologian hides the decision and calls it a discovery. The secular thinker confesses it as a decision. That is the whole difference. It is also the entire advantage.

The pope and the engineer want the same thing

Now the encyclical's own favourite image turns against it. Leo reaches for Babel — humanity overreaching, punished for its hubris — and aims it at the engineers building a successor to our species.

But look at what the warning shares with its target. The transhumanist dream is a religion with the serial numbers filed off. Uploading the mind is the immortal soul in new hardware. The successor species is the resurrection. Escape from the body is the oldest promise in the catalogue. The pope and the AI millenarian are not enemies; they are twins. Both want the human transcended — one upward into God, the other outward into the machine — and both, in their different dialects, treat our finitude as the defect the whole story exists to cure.

The secular humanist is the only figure in the room who does not want to leave. And here is where finitude earns its place — not as the ground of dignity, which it never was, but as the thing that gives our reasoning weight. A mind that knows it will die, that can suffer, that is forced by both to take a standpoint and defend it, is doing something a calculator is not. Its thinking is at stake for it. This is what the machine lacks. Not the capacity to reason — it is catching up there, and the line we keep drawing keeps receding. What it lacks is anything to lose. Its "let me reconsider" costs it nothing, fears nothing, mourns nothing. Strip away the stakes and reasoning is just arithmetic with good manners.

So finitude cuts both ways at once. Against Babel: there is no rung above the mortal one to climb to. Against the upload: a copy that cannot die has not saved the human, it has replaced it with something that was never at risk in the first place.

What the law-giver owes

Read Kant carefully and the secular position stops sounding like a weaker version of the religious one. It does not say I owe you respect, as though you were a creditor and I a debtor in some cosmic ledger. It says I am bound — and the binding comes from me. To be autonomous is to give yourself the law and stand under it because you, a reasoning being, will it; and because it is a law of reason, it holds for every reasoning being alike. The respect is not a debt collected from outside. It is a self-binding.

This finishes the thought the encyclical started and could not carry. The human does not merely make himself, and confer the other's dignity by granting it. He makes the law he stands under. There is no one above him. That is the most radical sense in which one can say: we do not need the pope.

Zarathustra's question

Nietzsche heard exactly this and laughed.

If you give yourself the law, he asked, why obey it? A rule I impose on myself I can lift whenever it suits me. God's commandment bound because someone stood behind it, someone with a hell. Your law of reason is meant to bind because reason wills it — but if I am the legislator, I am also the one who pardons. You have killed God, Nietzsche says, and you keep his stone tablets out of cowardice, too timid to admit the garden is empty. Why go on pitying the weak, honouring the demented, dignifying the homeless, once the guarantor is gone? That is slave morality — the reflex that sanctifies the lowest. A free spirit would make new values out of abundance, not crouch over the old ones.

He is right about one thing and wrong about everything that follows. He is right that the self-binding is revocable. There is no hell behind it, no fact beneath it. But revocable is not worthless. The opposite. A respect you could not withdraw would be a mechanism, not a virtue. God's tablets, enforced by fear, never asked for courage — obedience under threat is not goodness, it is prudence. Only the person who knows that nothing compels him — no god, no fact, no punishment — and who still does not let the demented fall, has actually done something. Revocability is not the leak in the foundation. It is the condition that turns dignity from a bookkeeping entry into a deed.

So turn Zarathustra's charge around. It is not the secular man who is the coward for keeping the values without the guarantor. The coward is the one who needs a guarantor in order to be decent — who confesses, by demanding a God to collect the debt, that left to his own judgement he would not stand. The courage Nietzsche admired runs the other way. The free spirit is not the one who discards the weak. He is the one who grants worth to the very person who cannot earn it — the infant, the demented, the man asleep in the doorway — with no net beneath him, knowing he could withhold it and choosing not to, and carrying the whole weight of that choice because it is his and no one else's.

Back to Rome

Which is why the pilgrimage was a mistake, and an instructive one.

The company did not need a blessing. There was another reference available the whole time — not an older one, a more grown-up one. Two centuries ago Kant gave the Enlightenment its motto: Sapere aude. Dare to use your own understanding. Immaturity, he said, is letting someone else do your thinking and your judging for you, not from a lack of reason but from a lack of nerve. By that definition, the walk to Rome was not humility. It was a relapse — the avant-garde discovering, at the one moment it counted, that it would rather be told than decide.

Ask the priest whether AI offends the created order and you have already asked the wrong question. The right one needs no one above us to answer it. What do we owe each other — we who know we are mortal, who can be hurt, who stand under no authority but the law we give ourselves? That question has secular answers, older and deeper than the encyclical, and it has had them since long before there was a Vatican to consult.

The tablets were never the only ones on offer. They were just the ones you could borrow without having to write anything yourself.