An AI encyclical with an unexpected literary signal
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence was always going to draw scrutiny. The letter, titled Magnifica humanitas, deals with what the pope calls safeguarding the human person in the age of AI and warns about a technocratic logic that can reduce both creation and human beings to instruments of efficiency. That argument alone would have made the text significant.
What turned it into a wider cultural moment was an unexpected citation: J.R.R. Tolkien. In invoking Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, Leo did more than sprinkle a famous literary name into a theological document. He placed a moral frame around AI that cuts sharply against the self-image cultivated by some of the industry’s most influential figures.
The critique is about power, not only tools
Leo’s encyclical, as reported by Wired, continues a theme he has emphasized through his first year as pope: skepticism toward the idea that technical capability automatically justifies its own expansion. He explicitly warns against the “growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm” and ties the AI moment to earlier forms of upheaval associated with the Industrial Revolution.
The comparison matters because it shifts the debate away from product novelty and toward labor, dignity and political power. That lineage also echoes Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical defended workers’ rights amid industrial transformation. In effect, Leo XIV is arguing that AI should not be judged only by what it can optimize, but by what it reorganizes in human life.
That is already a challenge to the dominant rhetoric around frontier AI, which often presents speed, scale and capability growth as inherently civilizational goods. The encyclical questions whether the underlying incentives are actually oriented toward human flourishing or toward concentration of profit and control.
Why Tolkien lands so sharply
The Tolkien reference gives that critique a cultural edge. Leo quotes Gandalf on the limits of mastery and the duty to act well within one’s own time and place. In context, the citation underlines restraint, stewardship and moral responsibility rather than domination.
That reading stands in tension with the way some powerful technology figures have publicly aligned themselves with Tolkien imagery. As Wired notes, Peter Thiel named Palantir after a seeing stone used in the saga, while Elon Musk has also drawn on the mythology. Critics have long argued that such invocations often strip Tolkien’s work of its anti-power sensibility and recast it as branding for elite ambition.
Leo’s use of Tolkien does the opposite. It pulls the story back toward humility, service and resistance to the corruptions that accompany power. Whether intentionally or not, it makes the church’s AI warning legible within a broader fight over who gets to define the meaning of technological progress.
A religious text enters the secular AI argument
Religious interventions in technology debates are easy to underestimate, especially in a field dominated by engineers, investors and policymakers. But this encyclical enters a live argument about whether AI should be governed mainly as an engine of innovation or as a force with deep implications for labor, culture and human agency.
By framing AI in terms of human dignity, Leo is insisting that the conversation cannot be exhausted by performance benchmarks or claims about future cures and efficiency gains. The encyclical is asking what kind of social order is being built around these systems and who becomes expendable within it.
That gives the document relevance beyond Catholic audiences. The language of “technocratic paradigm” resonates because it names something many critics of the AI boom already suspect: that the technology is not emerging into a neutral world, but into institutions already inclined to measure value through speed, scale and extraction.
Why this moment matters
The most interesting thing about Leo’s intervention is not that a pope cited fantasy literature. It is that the citation worked. It connected a dense ethical argument to a symbolic universe that many technology leaders already borrow from, then flipped the moral reading against them.
In doing so, the encyclical broadened the cultural vocabulary available to AI skeptics. It suggested that the deepest concerns about AI are not only technical or economic. They are civilizational in the older sense of the word, involving character, stewardship, limits and the refusal to confuse capability with wisdom.
That does not settle the AI debate, and the encyclical is unlikely to change the course of major labs on its own. But it does show that criticism of the industry is no longer confined to regulation papers and labor complaints. It is being articulated through theology, literary tradition and long-standing arguments about what happens when systems built for efficiency begin to redefine the human beings inside them.
This article is based on reporting by Wired. Read the original article.
Originally published on wired.com
