In two speeches over the weekend, Pope Leo XIV reminded Vatican watchers of three things: There is an Augustinian sitting on the See of Peter; he is a man of powerfully incisive and thoroughly formed understanding; and, we still do not know very much about how he intends to govern.
Take the remarks Leo made to participants in a meeting of the International Catholic Legislators Network, regarding the need for human intelligence before and behind artificial intelligence. They show that Leo does not wear his learning on his sleeve, but his erudition is as unmistakably lofty as it is deliberately inconspicuous.
“Dear friends,” Leo told the lawmakers on Friday, “the world does not need an artificial intelligence that diminishes humanity; rather, it needs human intelligence enlightened by wisdom, political authority guided by conscience and technological innovation directed by charity.”
“Only then will artificial intelligence become not a rival to humanity,” the pontiff said, “but a servant of the common good.”
Augustinian subtext
Those lines were a nutshell statement of Leo’s whole political philosophy, rooted in his anthropology, both of which are thoroughly Augustinian. Leo XIV is an Augustinian, after all, whatever else he is or may be.
In the lines, there is also a subtext of spiritual warfare – distinguishable in abstraction but inseparable in reality – also rooted in the Augustinian worldview.
“Without charity,” St. Augustine wrote in Book IX of his City of God, “knowledge does no good, but inflates a man or magnifies him with an empty windiness.”
The great bishop and Doctor of the Church would go on to say that knowledge without charity is the property of demons.
Though I can’t be sure he was thinking of that when he wrote his remarks, it is the sort of thing the Augustinian knows deep down, even and especially when he isn’t thinking about it. In any case, one can almost hear it in the way Leo articulated the fundamental question the AI revolution poses, with palpable urgency for us all.
“Does technology help people to become more fraternal and responsible toward themselves and toward one another?” Leo asked.
“In this regard,” he said, “the principles of the Church’s social doctrine – the inviolable dignity of every person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity and solidarity – provide the sure criteria for discernment.”
That’s a lot to chew on.
Hobbesianism and Augustinianism
On Saturday, Leo XIV spoke to the Captains Regent and legislators of the Republic of San Marino, a micro-state on the Italian peninsula, which has existed continuously since the fourth century.
The Captains Regent are chosen from a legislative body of 60 to serve six-month terms in largely symbolic leadership of the city-state and its 35 thousand citizens.
Founded by Saints Marinus and Leo – stonemasons from Dalmatia, according to tradition – who fled the last great Roman persecution of the Christian faithful and lived as hermits before taking Holy Orders, San Marino is the oldest continuously existing republic in the world.
Leo used the occasion to place a disagreement with the anthropology and worldview of Thomas Hobbes, a thinker recognized across the whole spectrum of learned political opinion – whether approvingly or disapprovingly – as central to the whole project of political modernity.
Hobbes used to be required reading in undergraduate survey courses, but relatively few people have so much as heard of him these days. That’s too bad, because the ideas he articulated are very much alive in contemporary politics and culture.
Though Leo did not mention Hobbes by name, he took issue with the (in)famous political theorist, who (in)famously described human nature as being at war with itself, and human beings outside political society – in the state of nature – as being at war with each other, and political societies as being in a state of nature toward one another.
Hobbes also argued that liberty belongs to republics, not to citizens.
“Liberty,” Hobbes wrote in Chapter XXI of his Leviathan, “is not the liberty of particular men; but the liberty of the commonwealth,” i.e., the republic (by which Hobbes meant any political society, however constituted). “There is written on the turrets of the [Italian] city of Lucca,” Hobbes offered by way of example, “the word LIBERTAS.”
“[Y]et no man can thence infer,” Hobbes continued, “that a particular man has more liberty, or immunity from the service of the commonwealth there, than in Constantinople,” then ruled by Ottoman despots. “Whether a commonwealth be monarchical, or popular,” he wrote, “the freedom is still the same.”
Contrast that view with the one Leo offered, instead, to the governors and citizens of San Marino on Saturday.
“Throughout its long history,” Leo told the Sanmarinesi, “your Republic has kept ever-relevant the words that might be described as the spiritual testament of its Founder: Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine, the essence of which is clearly captured in the motto, Libertas.”
“A single word, yet one of such profound significance,” Leo said. “In the context of the history of a people and a state,” Leo said, “it certainly expresses the aspiration for self-determination and independence from other political authorities.”
“[A]t the same time,” Leo said, “Libertas signifies much more.”
“First of all,” Leo said on Saturday, “I wish to emphasize that there is no true civil liberty without personal liberty – that is, without respect for and the promotion of the dignity of the human person, of which liberty is an essential component.”
“Ultimately,” he said, “this liberty is bestowed and guaranteed by God, whose voice resonates within the conscience of every human being.”
Leo, in other words, offered an alternative to the Hobbesian vision that permeates politics and culture, an alternative rooted in history and clear-eyed regarding human nature that is ultimately the work of God.
A matter of citizenship
Early in his pontificate, Leo offered some autobiographical remarks to the corps of diplomats accredited to the Holy See, in which he described his own story as “that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate.”
“All of us, in the course of our lives, can find ourselves healthy or sick, employed or unemployed, living in our native land or in a foreign country, yet our dignity always remains unchanged,” Leo told the diplomats on May 16, 2025, “it is the dignity of a creature willed and loved by God.”
“Citizen” is another term crackling with Augustinian incident (one about which I had a lot more to say in my book on the challenges facing the current pontificate).
“There is a city of God,” Augustine wrote in Book XI of the City of God, “and its Founder has inspired us with a love which makes us covet its citizenship.”
The desire for perfect friendship with God and all our fellows in happy eternity is one that lives in the human heart (yet another term with special significance in an Augustinian register), and baptism is the efficacious sign and promise of citizenship in that city.
There is also an “earthly city” – the City of Pride – founded not on friendship but on fratricide, ultimately on Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel.
Far too frequently, St. Augustine’s City of God – the concept articulated in the work of the same name – is confused or conflated with Church, while the Earthly City is confused of conflated with the prevailing political order, however constituted.
Though I would not argue the point here, there is more than a little to suggest there is a distinctly Hobbesian element to that misreading, at least as it occurs these days.
St. Augustine understood the City of God to be on pilgrimage in the world, and he understood the Church – the visible Church – to be the sign of that City’s pilgrim presence on Earth in history.
Nevertheless, there is no single political society – not even the Rome of the Pagans – as may be identified simply with Earthly City.
In history, political orders come and go. Political societies form, develop, change, decline, decay, pass away, and then new ones take their place.
It bears mention here, that Christians in Saint Augustine’s day faced a charge not entirely unlike one levied against Christians and Christianity in our own: That Christian religion cannot sustain the morals of a republic.
In Augustine’s day – which, it also bears mention – turned out to be the waning decades of Roman imperial power in the West, the Roman republic was the order of the day.
St. Augustine’s City of God really was a refutation of the charge levied against Christians and Christianity in his day, one based on a real appreciation of Roman history from which the great saint articulated a general theory of order that informs politics down to the present.
Even if Leo XIV wasn’t thinking explicitly of all that when he drafted his weekend speeches, all that is still part of the spiritual, intellectual, and political heft that come with being Augustinian.
Having an Augustinian like Leo XIV in the papal office, well, it is still going to take some getting used to.
There’s no real telling – not yet, at any rate – what difference any of that will make when it comes to Leo’s governing the Church, but it is a lens through which to read this pontificate as it continues to unfold.
That’s not nothing.
