On a day when I was away from my university campus for a conference, I asked my students in my introductory theology course to watch an excerpt from a documentary on contemplative prayer and monastic encounters with silence. In addition to watching these brief clips, the students were asked to respond to some guided reflection questions. What I received was, unsurprisingly, a mix of excellent and thoughtful submissions mingled with the line-by-line nullity of an artificial intelligence response to a human prompt.
This example serves as a confirmation of my decision to limit the amount of writing I ask students to do outside of class and to give preference to the classic handwritten essay. I suspect that the greatest threat to my field of research and teaching in philosophy and theology—the inability and, worse, unwillingness to ask questions—has not been created by the introduction of A.I.; but it has been exacerbated.
The rise of A.I., especially large language models (L.L.M.s) such as ChatGPT and Grok, promises convenience; they largely prove to be quite successful in fulfilling that function. But when “replace vanilla extract in this cookie recipe” becomes “write this essay for me and make it sound human,” we are faced with a convenience that may, in fact, be acting as a voluntary surrender of the burden of human agency.
Worse still is when the desire to be free from human agency is taken to its nihilistic extreme. As Angela Yang, Laura Jarrett and Fallon Gallagher reported on NBC News, a teenage boy named Adam Raine died by suicide in 2025 after weeks of conversing with an A.I. model about his suicidal ideation and plans to end his life. One of his final messages to the chatbot was: “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” to which ChatGPT responded: “Please don’t leave the noose out…. Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”
L.L.M.s are not only forms of artificial intelligence, but are also an expression of externalized intelligence—that is, intelligence that removes from consumers the burden of thinking, interpreting or deciding anything for themselves at all. In the case of my students, such surrender of interpretation and decision is coupled with the surrender of critical thinking and discernment. While experts might spot inconsistencies, inaccuracies and reductionistic and biased thinking in A.I. responses, young people and students still early in their fields do what the technocratic owners of such L.L.M.s hoped they would: They consume.
The danger for our students in this consumption is the temptation to be easily satisfied with our intellectual and ideological viewpoints. Such satisfaction is not only contrary to the intellectual rigor needed in the academic disciplines of theology and philosophy, but also deeply incompatible with the Christian spiritual tradition. The need to ask the question of being, and questions of meaning, in Christian spirituality (and ask them repeatedly and forever) cannot abide in the environment of a quick fix or ethically neutral chatbot whose one job is to do our thinking for us.
L.L.M.s did not emerge merely because of the desire for convenience regarding certain tasks, or as a result of the rise of technocracy in the United States. They are also deeply indicative of the fear we have of our own free agency, and the ease with which we submit ourselves to new earthly masters, whether physical or ideological. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky seemed to predict this very temptation—not through the use of A.I. or technology, but through our ideas and the political organization around such ideas.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote one of the most striking explorations of existential responsibility, freedom and human agency in modern literature. In his chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor” we find a story narrated by Dostoevsky’s nihilistic character, Ivan Karamazov. Ivan’s faith in God has deteriorated through his observation of suffering in the world—especially the death and torture of children. “Listen: if everyone must suffer,” he cries, “in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering.” Ivan cannot accept a world in which freedom comes at the expense of innocents.
In this state of rebellion, Ivan tells his brother Alyosha a parable that captures the modern soul’s deepest temptation: to surrender freedom for ease and certainty, even if our certainty cannot be certainly verified. As Ivan continues, he narrates a hypothetical story where the resurrected Christ returns to Seville at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, performing miracles as he did in the Gospels. Instead of being received in love and joy by his Christian people, Christ is arrested by the church as a disturber of the peace.
In a conversation with the Grand Inquisitor, Christ is told that the divine gift of freedom, bestowed universally upon all creation, was a mistake. The inquisitor insists that human beings do not ultimately want to choose good. They want to be relieved from the burden of choice, from the freedom of their agency. “I tell you,” says the inquisitor, “that man has no more tormenting care than to find someone to whom he can hand over as quickly as possible that gift of freedom with which the miserable creature is born.”
The church, he claims, has corrected Christ’s error by offering people what they truly crave: the comfort of authority. Ivan’s story exposes the perennial human desire to offload the burden of moral thought onto systems of control that promise order and peace. In other words, human history is as much plagued by the desire for freedom from thought as it is freedom of thought.
In this parable, Dostoevsky exposes the terror and the price of human freedom: To be free means to allow the suffering of others to continue. The inquisitor’s monologue dramatizes the temptation to trade freedom for the illusion of harmony, to mistake submission for salvation. Indeed, the inquisitor believes himself to be burdened with the responsibility to relieve others of the freedom they so suffer by, becoming the intelligent authority over a populace who voluntarily submit their wills to their human overlords so as to be free from the painful work of critical thought or moral decision.
Berated by the inquisitor, Christ responds only with silence and a kiss. His wordless gesture embodies the revelation of divine love: that genuine freedom cannot be imposed, only offered, and such freedom exists more significantly in the spirit, mind and heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche, too, envisioned this surrender of human striving in his portrait of the last human beings, who blink absentmindedly and say, “We invented happiness.” “Beware!” warns Nietzsche, “The time approaches when human beings no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir!”
The calm certainty of Dostoevsky’s inquisitor and the shallow satisfaction of Nietzsche’s last humans are the same. To choose the comfort and convenience of our perceived realities over constant critical discernment, to assume a certainty of truth that is beyond any human understanding, to take our reception of our defined “traditions” as final and without question, is to reveal ourselves as in league with them. I am arguing not for a nihilistic rejection of truth, but for the humble recognition of human limitation and the open perception to God’s presence—a presence that exists not as an object but as the ground of all being, a presence that is everywhere and fills all things. The authentically Christian response to such divine presence is not the resignation to limitation, but continued work with and in the Spirit toward greater clarity of the Son’s revelation.
If Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is a portrait of the human longing to escape the agony of freedom, then our contemporary fascination with artificial intelligence is simply its latest incarnation. The inquisitor’s church offered authority without discernment; today, algorithms offer speed, prediction and a false sense of intellectual and moral certainty. A.I., in this sense, is not a neutral tool but the development of a mechanistic theology and a mechanical spirituality. Both are systems that promise omniscient guidance while asking nothing of our discernment. The danger is not that A.I. will ever “replace” human intelligence but that we will welcome its rule and authority, finding in its artificially constructed confidence a relief from the trembling work of moral and spiritual freedom.
But to surrender our interpretive agency to the machine is to re-enact the very drama Dostoevsky envisioned: the willing abdication of thought in exchange for comfort. Of course, A.I. tools can also provide essential aid in accessibility, language assistance and medical research, among other goods. So the question is not “A.I.: Yes or no?” That train has already left the station. Rather, the question revolves around what is at stake for human agency within its current functional limitations.
Mystery cannot be domesticated into data centers, even as technocrats willingly sacrifice the integrity of publishing, freedom of thought and human agency at the altar of A.I. As a silent inquisitor, an L.L.M., and its algorithms, draws authority not through coercion but through the promise of intellectual and moral satisfaction. In contrast to Ivan’s narrative, however, the power of A.I. develops not only from voluntary human submission, but also from the submission of every point of data available electronically (whether or not an artist or author consents to its use). Against this temptation, Christ’s kiss still confronts us as a call to recover the contemplative silence of mind and heart where discernment is born.
As the Augustinian theologian and scholar of contemplative studies Martin Laird has put it, contemplative prayer and the pursuit of silence in the Christian spiritual tradition are not centered on an acquisition of God, but on modes of discovery. Laird writes in Into the Silent Land, “this God we seek has already found us, already looks out of our own eyes, is already, as St. Augustine famously put it, ‘closer to me than I am to myself.’”
This suggests that the task of the theological enterprise is to resist any mechanization of the spirit and purify our perception to recognize the interior ground where God’s presence is already active. It is this recognition that the temptation of intellectual satisfaction, fueled by our increasing reliance on A.I. and L.L.M.s, threatens to disrupt. We are forgetting how to ask the question of being.
The vocation of the theologian, the student, the human being, is therefore not to master information and mechanically repeat it, but to cultivate forms of attention, to train the mind and heart, to dwell where truth and freedom meet, and to live in solidarity with others. In an age that worships efficiency, this contemplative resistance may itself be our most necessary form of witness.
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