Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas frames the age of artificial intelligence as a civilizational construction site in which humanity must choose between constructing Babel and rebuilding Jerusalem. This white paper offers a Maturana-informed, life-coherent reading of that architecture. It argues that the AI crisis reveals a broader institutional danger: word, doctrine, code, system, authority, reputation, profit, or power can become detached from embodied life. When this occurs, living persons are subordinated to abstraction. When the correction occurs, institutional claims become flesh as mercy, justice, mutual legitimacy, repentance, and shared repair.
By life-coherence, this paper means the alignment of persons, institutions, technologies, and systems with the preservation, restoration, and expansion of life-capacity across embodied, relational, social, ecological, and spiritual dimensions. The paper uses the Catholic case — especially Magnifica Humanitas, Catholic Social Doctrine, and the encyclical’s treatment of slavery — as a paradigmatic example of how organized religion can become either life-coherent or life-blind. It does not claim to offer a comprehensive comparative study of religion, but it suggests that the argument may apply analogically to other traditions and institutions.
The paper’s central question is Maturanan: What way of living does this institution conserve? Drawing on Maturana’s biology of cognition and biology of love, the paper interprets institutions as conserving patterns of coexistence. Babel names any institutional pattern that conserves control without communion; Nehemiah names shared repair in living relation. This distinction applies to AI because AI is not a living observer or moral subject, but it can become a moral environment when institutions delegate classification, visibility, prediction, decision-making, and authority to non-living systems.
The paper also offers a careful life-coherent reading of the Christian phrase “the Word became flesh.” It does not deny the ontological priority of the Logos in Christian confession. Rather, it argues that the Logos is epistemically accessible to human beings through embodied life, historical relation, vulnerability, and love. The Word becomes flesh when truth becomes mercy, doctrine becomes justice, authority becomes service, and memory becomes repentance.
Finally, the paper treats the encyclical’s slavery passage as an ethical hinge. Without flattening the historical specificity and bodily horror of chattel slavery, it argues that the passage reveals the danger of institutional delay, moral blindness, and legitimized domination. The encyclical’s extension of the universal destination of goods to algorithms, platforms, technological infrastructure, and data then opens the way toward a digital civil commons. The paper concludes that religion is life-coherent when its word becomes flesh, technology is life-coherent when its code remains answerable to flesh, and civilization is life-coherent when power becomes service.