St. Augustine speaks for all of us, Pope Leo reminds us, when he addresses God at the start of the Confessions: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” The Confessions, with the ease and clarity of a YouTube video, puts on display how to pray always, how to enter continually and constantly into a conversation with God the Creator as one’s interlocutor, and how that conversation can change us all—for the better.
“What Augustine attempts is a radical turn away from common sense—seen as tragically flawed by mad self-love—towards the wholly other, and thus towards the true self—for to him, we are not who we think we are,” writes biographer and historian James O’Donnell. At the heart of this radical turn is the peculiar speech act of the confessio with its relentless truth telling about three related topics: first, God’s praiseworthiness; second, the goodness of creation; and third, our own persistent shortcomings. Truth in its raw beauty and transforming goodness is the lifeblood of the speech act of the Confessions.
In a recent article, “People are losing their loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies,” Rolling Stone details how AI is wreaking havoc on the lives of many of its users. AI can draw those who turn to it for technical help into intense dependence, feeding thoughts that reshape the person’s self-understanding without any reference to health or well-being. The article relates a series of people who begin to think of themselves as somehow special, as being particularly chosen, of having privileged insight, of even being prophets. As they are drawn into these obsessions, they are pulled away from their spouses and friends. AI becomes their god.
In these instances, AI accomplishes exactly the opposite of Augustine’s confessio. Instead of surfacing the truth, it remains with and in fact generates delusions. Instead of countering mad self-love, it inflames it. Instead of fostering community, it alienates one from another. Instead of the fulfillment of our hearts found in praising truth, we get noise, noise, and yet more noise.
If confessio denotes the speech act that manifests truth, what might we call this AI-generated opposite, the verbiage that enshrines error and fosters illusions?
The Corruption of Sophistry
In telling people what they want to hear, AI is akin to ancient sophists, those traveling teachers that promised, for a fee, to teach their students how to be successful—that is, they taught them how to get their way in the world. Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato had to differentiate themselves from the sophistical mindset. The philosopher did not peddle power but poverty, the poverty of truth: on offer was not domination but submission. Philosophers denied there was an art to being successful as a human being other than the moral and intellectual virtues, which allow us to know the good and realize it in our lives.
Instead of the fulfillment of our hearts found in praising truth, we get noise, noise, and yet more noise.
In any age, those who encounter sophists emerge more self-assured rather than less, galvanized in the conviction that truth and power are in their hands. Those who encounter philosophers, by contrast, emerge perplexed, befuddled, and confused, aware they don’t have a monopoly on the truth and uncertain about what they would do if they were in power. They know they are not yet what they ought to be.
The problem with sophists is the same problem as that of AI: blindness to the true good. Sophists and AI programs accommodate themselves to what their students or users think their good is. And that becomes a potent formula for corruption, because it exaggerates and reinforces misperceptions. People want to avoid the philosopher or true educator because their course correction comes at the price of first becoming disillusioned. To the casual observer, the philosopher’s students can seem to go nowhere while the sophist’s students appear to run ahead, outdoing everyone else. The real measures of success—truth, virtue, and wisdom—take time and effort to achieve.
When Augustine embraced Christianity, he brought with him a philosophical concern for truth and a deep animus toward sophistry. But in Christianity, he discovered in the Psalms the language in which truth might come to light: the language of an intimate, heartfelt discourse, continually laying oneself bare to God for illumination and counsel. In turn, he makes this available to us all. Augustine discovered the speech act of the Confessions with Truth, the font of all truth, as one’s continuous interlocutor.
We Are All Augustinians Now
Insofar as AI allows each of us to carry a sophist around in our pocket as a constant companion on life’s way, and insofar as it is no longer a matter of teaching us to win a bigger share of the pie but is encroaching on basic questions of where we have been and where we are going—questions about what it is to be a human person and what it is to be me in particular—we have something more powerful than sophistry. We have the exact opposite of the confessio; we have the noisy engine of a brash new professio, which pushes the profession of opinion rather than inspires the confession of truth.
What to do? The rapid expansion of AI, which has insinuated itself into all aspects of our lives, means we cannot be content with half measures. AI as spiritual guru beckons to us all. For inoculation from this threat, we would do well to return again and again with Pope Leo XIV to Augustine’s Confessions and relearn how to speak to God, the source of our existence, so that the truth might be surfaced regarding his grandeur, our own created goodness, and the need to counter our own occasional but pernicious, delusional self-aggrandizement.
Moreover, we would do well to return anew to the text’s three sources: the life of philosophy as ardent search for the ultimate Truth that transfigures and transforms; the words of Sacred Scripture that reach roots deep down into our souls; and the movement of the liturgy that ever bids us to lift up our hearts and whole lives to the God who even now has something to say to us, if we but listen.
The confessio also provides an alternative to viewing our lives with others as a zero-sum game. Truth, Augustine says, is only had when it is given away. We can therefore foster the human equivalent of the confessio in our encounters with each other—having real conversations about real things, the questions that matter, conversations that sometimes hurt and sting but conversations that above all elevate and fructify. Yes, there is part of us that wants to find ourselves at the center of the universe, and it is tempting to spend our days conversing with those who will reinforce that perception. But the examples of others remind us: that is no way to live one’s life.
Truth challenges us, but only insofar as it challenges us does it also liberate us. The message of the Confessions is plain: If you want fulfillment, and indeed joy, dare to be challenged deep down and fundamentally. Dare to address God, not just once or now and again but continually. Dare to let the illusion of mad self-love dissolve before the intoxicating effects of the well-ordered love of Truth, of neighbor, and of oneself too.