Life and Death in AI

In a life of reading, there are special times of wonder and delight. Books come into your hands that address your central concerns and discuss matters you’ve long pondered. But they do so in fresh and unexpected ways. I’m reading one now: Climbers, a novel by M. John Harrison. As I read, I experience again my lifelong passion for rock climbing in sentences and images that manifest an unnerving and disorienting beauty, which is very much how one can feel on a rockface or mountainside. Marvelous.

The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster by Ross McCullough is another such book. McCullough is a theology professor, and his concerns run down a path similar to mine: How can we sustain Christian orthodoxy and faithful practice in the face of the dissolving forces of modernity? And like most of us, he worries about new technologies, epitomized by, but by no means limited to, artificial intelligence. How shall we live in a digitized world?

In academic terms, one might label The Body of This Death a study in theological anthropology, or perhaps Christian metaphysics. But it is foolish to ascribe academic labels to McCullough’s book, for it is a work of the imagination too inventive and wide-ranging and colored with human emotion to fit into ready categories.

The opening “Note to the Reader” is credited to Vincent Hermès, who lives sometime in the future: a “New Common Era.” A punctilious scholar, he has come into possession of varying sources that have preserved the correspondence of a certain Archbishop of Lancaster, indeed, the last one. Additional evidence survived within “the decaying digital infrastructure of the last century.” Hermès must apply the best text-critical techniques to produce what we are about to read, and he supplies explanatory footnotes throughout, some of which are delightful inside jokes for McCullough’s fellow academics.

The archbishop lives in something like the Universal and Homogeneous State foretold by Alexandre Kojève. It is a world in which disruptive human passions have been domesticated by “immersive reality,” a technologically-generated simulation of life. McCullough evokes the gnostic promise of transhumanism, a freedom from the body altogether, culminating in freedom from death. But the results are not very appealing. Like so much in this digital future, the vaunted technology has glitches and breakdowns. In any event, most people are satisfied with simulated pleasures, experiences, relationships, and adventures. They palliate and distract. The prevailing condition is one of “akratic Gnosticism,” a desire to cast off the limits of our created condition—but not completely. (Akratic is the adjectival form of akrasia, the Greek word for weakness of will.) The upshot is a thin and placid life without the troubles of living. This spiritual perversion makes the majority docile to the Empire of Simulation.

The letters begin with the deaths of Harry and Judith, once the archbishop’s close friends but from whom his duties have distanced him. There is grief, but in the turn of events, it falls upon the archbishop to take in Felicity, their young daughter and his goddaughter. Felicity’s entry into his life is a blessing under the shadow of death, for he comes to love her. But she is killed by a radical Islamic group that is in rebellion against the simulated world—a terrible irony, given the archbishop’s quiet and inward, but firm, rebellion. The authorities sense his disloyalty. He must be “re-educated,” which means being subjected to “transfiguration,” the ersatz transhumanist salvation promised by complete digitization.

On his way to this fate, the archbishop writes letters that are rich in wisdom and insight. On a pleasure of prayer: “the relief of not thinking about yourself.” On the temptation to use AI to maintain a simulation of our loved ones who have died: “The obscenity here is to treat the deceased as annihilated or unavailable, as needing to be replaced by simulation rather than addressed in a new way [in prayer].” On the peril posed by ardent liberals: “They seek to make their liberalism a dominant ideology and not just one option among many—to undermine as much as possible the chance that we might choose not to value choice in the way that they do.” On the wiles of the devil: “In iconographic ages, the devil is happy to set up false images to draw our worship to himself; in iconoclastic ages, he is even happier to cast down the idols to prevent any worship at all.” On the agonies that paralyze the soul: “Adversity can strip the wings off time and make her crawl—one of those strange hidden approaches that suffering makes to eternity.”

Although it’s impossible to epitomize their content, there is a leitmotif to the letters. The archbishop often returns to the anchoring realities of life: death, suffering, love, and friendship. He also clarifies the spiritual materialism of Christianity. In a letter to his inquisitors, who live in the immersive reality rife with accusations and reported “facts”—not unlike today’s social media—the archbishop reverses the logic of simulation: “Just as there are images that all but eclipse the archetype, so there are images all but eclipsed by [God]. The priest in persona Christi is perhaps the chief among them.” We cannot manipulate images and conjure God; but God has chosen to come to us in our world of signification: words and roles, laws and institutions. Even in the Empire of Simulation, he can find us, seize us, and make us his own.

Perhaps I am being too optimistic. The archbishop’s digital message to his captured goddaughter before her execution is cryptic, as it must be, for all is surveilled. He conveys just a few words: One thing is needful. Yet the book ends with the archbishop technologically “corrected,” which is to say, “transfigured” into the sensorium of silicon. Is he, unlike his goddaughter, denied death’s power to seal his faith? 

I can’t answer that question. I can only urge readers to buy the book and read the archbishop’s last entry, his letter to death, which begins, “My dear Asterion.” It, like the entire book, is a profound meditation on the spiritual labyrinth our technologies are constructing and the Minotaur within who threatens to eat our flesh.