An AI in the City of God
April 11, 2023·205 comments
God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.
Augustine of Hippo, City of God (c. 415 AD)
And by hands, of course, St. Augustine means our minds. Our minds are too full to receive the gifts we are given.
Like generative AI.
Augustine wrote City of God from his bishopric in North Africa after the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 AD. It's a tougher read than his far more personal Confessions, but the basic idea is that there are two worlds that exist simultaneously here on Earth: there's the City of Man - the physical instantiation of society, typically corrupt, always decaying, ruled by utterly fallible men and the evil they do - and the City of God - a society that lives in our hearts, incorruptible and timeless, less ruled than inspired by the illumination of the Divine.
This joy in God is not like any pleasure found in physical or intellectual satisfaction. Nor is it such as a friend experiences in the presence of a friend. But, if we are to use any such analogy, it is more like the eye rejoicing in light.
The eye rejoicing in light. What a perfect phrase for the human mind's response to discovery and new knowledge!
Augustine's writings were some of the first in the Christian tradition to wrestle deeply with why an omnipotent God of good allows the persistence of evil and why really bad things happen to good people at scale. His answers - original sin, free will as God's vital gift, the abiding strength of epistemic communities of men and women of good will and faith - are foundational to the past 1,600 years of Western thought.
The City of Man is a community of implacable obligation that exists in the physical world wherever humans gather as a society. You are born into the City of Man, you will live out your life in the City of Man, you will enjoy what you can and you will suffer what you must in the City of Man, and you will die in the City of Man.
The City of Man IS. The City of Man is inexorable, literally "that which cannot be prayed away" in the original Latin.
The City of God, on the other hand, is prayed into being. The City of God is a community of choice that exists across time and space wherever humans of good will (full hearts) and a common endeavor of truth-seeking (clear eyes) come together in faith.
Must this faith be Augustine's faith in the God of Abraham and His Son? Nope. At least not as I mean the City of God, which admittedly is more as metaphor than I expect Augustine meant it! My goal isn't to trivialize Augustine's beautiful concept (on the contrary), but I believe that the City of God can be manifested in a high school football team a la Friday Night Lights just as powerfully as in a monastery of Benedictine monks. I believe that a Walt Whitman poem is as revealing of the transcendental divine as any passage in the Bible. I don't share Augustine's faith. We don't mean exactly the same thing when we write "the City of God". But in my heart of hearts I know that we share a similar eye rejoicing in the light.
I think that all humans with a transcendental faith - a belief in a literally (super)human power of good that exists above, below and beyond the world that we know but acts within the world we know through its inspiration of human hearts and minds trapped in the world that we know - can reside in the City of God, even if they don't mean the same thing when they write the word "God". Christianity is a transcendental faith, as is Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and most of the great religions of the world.
As is my faith in the Spirit of Man.
What do I mean by the Spirit of Man? Maybe the simplest way to describe my faith is that I believe there is an arc and arrow to human history, an arc and arrow that goes fitfully up and to the right, propelled by the core small-l liberal virtue of a timeless autonomy of the individual human mind and the core small-c conservative virtue of a social human connectedness anchored in time.
To be honest, most of the time I feel like such a sucker for believing in the Spirit of Man.
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