The Soul and the Machine: Catholic Social Teaching, Marshall McLuhan, and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This article advances a theologically grounded account of artificial intelligence by reading Catholic social teaching through the media theory of Marshall McLuhan. It offers a distinctive contribution: a clarification of the Catholic anthropology of the soul and an account of presence as the irreducible human dimension that AI cannot replicate. Drawing on Thomistic anthropology, McLuhan’s distinction between percepts and concepts, and his theory of formal causality, the article argues that AI operates as a medium that reshapes the conditions under which embodied, relational, God-oriented knowing is possible. From Popes Leo XIII to Francis to Leo XIV, the Church has insisted that the soul, the substantial form of the human person, oriented toward truth and love, cannot be subordinated to technological logic. McLuhan’s concept of formal causality explains why: The form of a medium shapes perception more profoundly than its content, restructuring the conditions under which wisdom is possible.