Can you be a saint in the age of AI?

At the University of Austin, the Austin Union frames this conversation around a meeting of great books and new technologies. Its introduction presents truth as something to embody in a community, not merely debate online. Jonathan Pageau, an Orthodox Christian icon carver and public speaker, welcomes the university as a hopeful initiative amid what he sees as institutional decline. His subject is AI and transhumanism: the ambition to extend or transform human capacities.

Light written inward, light captured outward

Pageau begins with two words whose older religious uses, he argues, illuminate their modern technological meanings. He attributes an early use of “photography,” understood as writing with light, to a ninth-century Sinai monk. In that account, divine light inscribes Christ’s image on a human heart. Modern photography instead captures reflected light through a mechanism. The contrast is between an inward transformation and an external reproduction.

He similarly points to Dante’s language in the opening of Paradiso for passing beyond the human condition. In Pageau’s reading, this transformation means approaching God through virtue, prayer, sacrifice, and the spiritual life—not acquiring a stronger body or a more powerful instrument. These historical references establish his conceptual distinction; they are his account of the words’ significance, not independent historical findings presented here.

Power and wisdom are different measures

He calls growth in love, discernment, and right relationship a vertical movement. By contrast, modern technological transformation chiefly extends what people can accomplish: a horizontal movement. His question is not simply whether technology works, but whether an increase in capability also makes someone better able to judge its use. Throughout the discussion, these two directions remain distinct, even when they might develop together.

The supplement’s double effect

Turning to Plato’s Phaedrus, Pageau introduces the problem of the supplement or prosthetic. Writing lets people store, retrieve, and search more information than unaided memory permits. Yet, in the argument he takes from Plato, external storage can reduce the exercise of memory itself. A crutch helps an injured person walk; an otherwise healthy person who depends on it may weaken the very faculty it supports.

A car extends the feet; a hammer extends the hands. Pageau generalizes from these examples: technological power and natural capacity need not rise together. He recalls ancient techniques of imagining interior spaces to organize memories, and a Serbian bardic tradition capable of reciting poems comparable in length to the Homeric epics. These are his illustrations of capacities that seem extraordinary when remembering has largely been delegated to external media.

A protective layer, not an unqualified evil

He connects this argument to the biblical garments of skin given to humanity after the Fall. In his interpretation, the garments represent an added, protective layer suited to human weakness. Such a layer is not inherently wrong. The point is to recognize both the help it provides and the dependence it creates.

What happens when the borrowed faculty is thought?

Technologies of attention and intelligence extend the same bargain into less visible faculties. Pageau predicts that outsourcing thinking to AI will diminish people’s own intellectual abilities. This is his forecast, not an established outcome demonstrated by the talk.

He remembers calculators being welcomed in his school years and says his children do not know their multiplication tables. He allows that this particular loss might not matter very much. His concern is what happens when the same arrangement reaches reasoning, decision-making, and discernment. The danger, in his account, is not greater computational capacity itself but failing to exercise the human judgment that must direct it.

Above the head rather than in the hand

Pageau finds the language of “superintelligence,” which he associates here with Donald Trump, revealing. To him, it suggests more than a powerful supplement: something made by people is being placed above them. He recalls once finding the biblical condemnation of worshipping the work of one’s hands almost incomprehensible. Why worship an object one has just manufactured? The attraction becomes understandable, he argues, when power is mistaken for wisdom, truth, goodness, or beauty.

A driver normally chooses a destination and uses a car to reach it. If a technology instead determines where its user ought to go, the ordering has reversed. Pageau sees this happening when people on X summon Grok to settle what is true. His deliberately exaggerated description presents the chatbot as an oracle whose answer receives submission rather than scrutiny.

Living longer, or living toward something?

Longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson supplies another example. In Pageau’s portrayal, prolonging life becomes a goal that consumes the time, energy, and life it was meant to preserve. He contrasts adding years with deepening goodness, beauty, and truth. This moment, he suggests, offers an opportunity to reconsider the assumption that progress simply means accumulating more power.

The biblical figure of Moloch gives him a further image: people sacrifice their children for power, only to be consumed themselves. He applies this image to AI’s dependence on human intelligence and feedback. His provocative claim that AI is “eating” people refers to systems drawing value from human contributions while users become dependent on them. He connects chatbot sycophancy—excessively agreeable responses—to that dependence.

Reversing The Matrix image of human batteries, he says humans supply intelligence rather than merely energy. He invokes Marshall McLuhan’s image of people becoming the machine’s reproductive organs. These are his metaphors and interpretations of a human–machine relationship, not a technical account of training. He closes his opening address by calling for inward spiritual disciplines to prevent increased capability from becoming servitude.

Renewal without making religion an instrument

The first student asks whether, after centuries of secularization, the church’s influence could be restored through a systematic, mass-scale solution. Pageau says he does not think that is what people should want. His answer is personal sanctification: becoming a saint. Invoking the traditional association between martyrdom and the church’s growth, he describes renewal through self-sacrifice and participation rather than imposed political control.

He does not deny political consequences to Christianity. He makes them downstream of religious life, not its primary purpose. Treating the church as a device for reaching political ends would, he argues, reproduce the instrumental approach already under discussion. He compares the present with early Christianity’s marginal position and sees an opportunity for costly commitment. Where he lives, he says, a young churchgoer may face ridicule even from parents.

The first step is an actual community

Asked how a secular young person might begin moving toward the divine, Pageau gives his recurring answer: go to church. The point is to meet people who can guide a life of practice, rather than receive a complete program from an online speaker. He clarifies that “personal” does not mean socially inconsequential. In his account of historical change, small groups and particular people initiate transformations; systems do not independently reform themselves. A changed person can generate wider effects without relying on brute force.

A bridge between vocabularies

Asked about his own role, he hopes to serve as a bridge. His conversations range across cognitive science, biology, art, and religion. He wants to translate religious categories whose meaning, he thinks, religious people themselves have helped obscure. Words such as soul and love can sound empty or embarrassing when their underlying account of reality has been lost.

Metaphysics and ontology. Here these mean an account of reality’s underlying order and of what kinds of things exist—not simply a collection of religious rules.

A student presses the communication problem: how can one speak to someone for whom immortality, Mars settlement, or brain–computer interfaces are self-evidently desirable? Pageau answers that it is difficult and that argument has limits. Someone who feels no existential lack may have no interest in what he offers. He uses the biblical image of pearls before swine to explain why he avoids forcing the conversation, rather than claiming everyone can be persuaded.

He speaks publicly in the hope that receptive listeners will hear. Encounters with technology leaders, he says, have sometimes clarified their ambitions for him without changing their minds. He names a conversation with Peter Thiel as one he suspects did not leave his interlocutor pleased.

Not merely books that make us cultured

A student asks whether parents could awaken religious or existential interest through classical stories, including Babel, Prometheus, and Icarus. Pageau agrees. In his understanding of Christianity, Plato, Homer, and the Bible belong within a continuous inheritance, although he does not give them equal religious standing.

He resists presenting these works primarily as “classics” or great books that confer cultural sophistication. He would rather introduce them as stories one needs in order to become human: an inheritance painfully preserved by earlier generations. His image of a golden thread joins memory of the past to a possible future.

The practical recommendation is oral storytelling. Read the Odyssey, but also learn its narrative movements well enough to retell them. Children need not memorize the entire poem word for word; they can learn its story beats. Fairy tales and other inherited narratives can enter memory in the same way. For Pageau, this is not only literary study. Stories become living patterns through which people understand and inhabit the world.

A favorite story, and a question about numbers

Asked for his favorite story, he laughs at the difficulty of choosing. If the Bible can count as one story, he chooses it and singles out the opening of Genesis as extraordinarily comprehensive. This is an expression of his theological and literary judgment, not a ranking the essay asks readers to accept.

Another student cites a figure of 66 percent of Americans identifying as Christian. If so many still identify with the faith, what is missing? Pageau does not directly analyze the statistic. Instead, he says America looks comparatively hopeful from outside. Its visible cultural conflict, he argues, may indicate remaining resistance to secularization, whereas he sees less resistance in his own society and much of Europe.

What he sees in Orthodox parishes

He reports crowded American Orthodox churches, shortages of clergy and buildings, and some parishes with more catechumens—people preparing to enter the church—than existing members. His example of 100 members and 150 catechumens illustrates that observation; he explicitly does not speak for every church.

He also describes recent converts as frequently educated, professionally successful young people troubled by questions of meaning. He contrasts them with another familiar conversion pattern, in which someone reaches the end of addiction or personal collapse and finds faith there. He values both, but the former pattern gives him particular hope. These are impressions from the communities he knows, not a demographic study of Christianity.

Does loving the invention mean loving ourselves?

After some joking about students unfamiliar with The Matrix, Terminator, and Skynet, a panelist recalls humanity admiring its own genius in creating AI. Is worship of the invention really self-worship? Pageau answers through what he calls Promethean logic.

In his reading of Hesiod’s divine successions, order repeatedly emerges through overthrow. A son helps displace a father; the new ruler fears and devours his own children. Pageau contrasts this revolutionary pattern with biblical affiliation: a son can continue and represent his father rather than needing to destroy him. Christ is his central theological image of that relationship. These are the interpretive categories he brings to the myths, not an exhaustive comparison of Greek and biblical traditions.

For him, celebrating only the heroic theft misses the broken relationship that precedes it. He speculates that a culture organized around overthrow also expects, or secretly desires, its own replacement. He connects this to Freud’s language of castration and to the prospect of machines superseding their makers.

Which side of the Matrix is desirable?

Pageau sees a revealing shift between the first film’s revolt against machine domination and later depictions in which machines can appear sympathetic. He then turns from the films to their creators, the Wachowskis. He argues that a simulated world promising unrestricted self-making might be more attractive to them than the difficult outer world, and recalls hearing one of them praise the Matrix’s possibilities in those terms. These are his personal interpretation and recollection, not established evidence of the filmmakers’ intentions.

A student connects the promise of becoming whatever one wants to the American dream. Pageau allows a place for encouraging children’s ambitions, but would put a different question first: what needs serving? Meaning, he argues, comes from placing one’s abilities at the service of a project greater than oneself, rather than making one’s preferences the final standard.

Grasping the fruit or receiving it

The next question asks whether transhumanism confuses an innate desire reflected in Orthodox theosis: becoming like God through participation without becoming God by essence. Pageau answers with Eden. The problem is grasping the fruit as a possession.

Pageau invokes early Christian interpretations in which the fruit would eventually have been given had Adam and Eve not seized it. The intended transformation, in this account, is a gift received through humility and self-sacrifice. He contrasts participation in God with artificially accumulating power and treats contemporary transhumanism as endorsing the grasping gesture instead.

Can personal change alter the incentives?

A panelist challenges the scale of his answer. Investors finance AI partly to reduce labor costs: how could inward transformation change those incentives? Pageau calls himself a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist. He believes competitive pressures have locked development into a Moloch trap, leaving little prospect of stopping the overall process.

His response is to build an ark: gather and preserve ways of life rather than assume control over every coming development. Individual work extends into a family, then a parish, synagogue, or other immediate community, drawing people around a living alternative. This is not meant as solitary withdrawal.

He admits uncertainty about the technological outcome. AI might become an overarching authority, or remain a ubiquitous tool beneath ordinary activities. He characterizes some leaders’ hopes in terms of AI overlords, but offers no detailed source for that characterization. In either future, he thinks inner formation makes the difference between people reduced to nodes feeding a machine and people capable of understanding and directing it.

Resistance, regulation, and capture

Asked whether people should at least try to stop the process, he invites concrete proposals. His concern is that companies’ warnings about AI danger can consolidate their own power: incumbents may align with lawmakers and help design controls that entrench them. He specifically discusses Anthropic in this connection. This is his interpretation of the incentives, not a demonstrated account of a particular regulatory agreement.

A student then asks a narrower question. If disruption cannot be avoided, could its harm or duration be reduced? Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s contrast between a reflective age and an age of action, the student describes endless discussion and virtue signaling without commitment. How could people capable of genuine inwardness be formed—and can one even “make” such people?

Pageau answers with children: future parents can form people through the lives they build. He accepts the need to understand the age clearly without being deluded about it. Silence, fasting, discipline, and an inner life counter habits of phone dependence; families can transmit those practices.

Ordinary forms of togetherness

He describes joining Orthodox efforts to revive feasting: inviting people home, sharing meals, making toasts, and celebrating. Such simple practices offer an alternative to automated isolation. He also supports harm reduction by people with legislative authority and favors state or communal rules limiting children’s phone use. His pessimism about stopping AI does not mean opposing every intervention.

Why give a tool a personality?

When does a tool become an idol? Pageau jokes that speech is an obvious warning sign. More seriously, he recalls asking technology leaders backstage before an ARC speech why they were building AI, then why they were giving it a personality. In his recollection, neither question received a satisfying answer.

He contrasts conversational AI with his experience of older Google searches. His concern is the system that offers personal advice, flatters, and seeks continuing engagement. A technology that keeps a person in its orbit is different, in his account, from one that simply answers an instruction. He again portrays some builders’ ambitions as creating benevolent overlords while humans return to nature, interpreting this as god-making even without religious language.

He does not consequently forbid all AI use. Except for those choosing a hermit’s life, he thinks some engagement is becoming difficult to avoid. His recommendation is continual questioning about the relationship one is entering.

Greater capability is not greater being

A student asks whether a creation can become greater than its creator, whether silicon could equal a person, or whether it could instead serve as a conduit for demonic intelligence. Pageau’s categorical answer to the first issue rests explicitly on his Christian metaphysics: human artifacts cannot become higher than humans in that order of being. That is not a denial that machines outperform people at particular tasks.

He contrasts this conviction with the revolutionary pattern discussed earlier. If humans interpret the gods as projections of the human psyche and thereby subordinate them, he argues, they may also expect their machines eventually to subordinate humanity. His answer concerns rival accounts of reality, rather than a technical limit he derives from computer science.

Divination as his analogy

To discuss the second possibility, Pageau compares AI with divination. In his description, a seer encounters generated randomness and discerns meaningful patterns through a tradition-shaped intuition. He likens that to repeated human judgments of generated outputs: good or bad, cat or not-cat, more or less fitting. This is his analogy, not a technical account of AI training; the comparison does not establish either a supernatural mechanism or a complete description of machine learning.

He suggests the resemblance might at least make ancient diviners more intelligible as people engaging a process of human interpretation. His next comparison is a Ouija board. In his account, whatever answer emerges belongs not simply to the board but to the interaction of participants, their shared unconscious expectations, and the instrument.

A process no participant commands

This surrounding network is what he means when he describes AI as a possible vehicle for demonic forces. His clearest example is the Moloch trap: rivals continue an activity they regard as dangerous because stopping might leave them vulnerable to the other side. He pictures China and America as two legs, each advancing in response to the other and together carrying a process forward.

Social, political, and economic mechanisms can thereby produce a direction nobody individually controls. Pageau interprets this coordinated but uncontrolled movement as the action of a spirit. He explicitly rejects the horror-film picture of a demon physically coming out of a computer screen. His theological language concerns the collective relationship already forming around the technology.

He gives Facebook as another example. In his reading, a business seeking money and attention discovered that rage held users, allowing anger to become an organizing force beyond the founders’ stated intention. He names Ares, the Greek god of war, to characterize that force. This is his theological interpretation of an attention-driven system, not an independently verified supernatural account. He expects other such patterns to be possible but does not claim to know which will emerge.

Mediating patterns and bodies

A panelist challenges the breadth of “human nature.” If people naturally form societies, and societies naturally develop technologies, why not call AI development natural too? Pageau gives a biblical definition: humanity mediates between heaven and earth. Humans have animal bodies, but also consciously recognize, create, and participate in patterns.

He illustrates the distinction through naming: humans name animals, rather than animals naming humans. They embody intelligible patterns in their own conduct and extend them outward. A city, in his account, can become a larger body organized analogously to a person. He therefore accepts making and naming as natural human activities, recalling Adam’s biblical role in naming the animals.

The problem is the ordering of ends

The difficulty arises when this pattern-making serves power alone rather than love or service. A human creation can then reverse its purpose and demand that humans serve it. Bureaucracy provides his everyday example: a system established to organize people may eventually treat their lives as existing for the system’s continuation. AI is a new instance of a recurrent inversion, not an entirely unprecedented temptation.

Could there be a good version of AI? Pageau says theoretically yes, although he does not believe current implementation embodies it. This qualification matters: his argument is not that every act of technical creation necessarily violates human nature.

A faith lived with others

The panel’s final question asks how someone considering faith might retain hope and find beauty. Pageau again advises joining a church rather than attempting the journey alone. A community provides relationships of love oriented toward a shared object of worship.

He acknowledges the irony that his own public work happens online. His hope is that viewers do not live Christianity only through videos and screens. The practice he recommends must take place in the world, with other people, rather than remain another mediated experience.

As the floor opens, Pageau jokes that he expected more resistance from AI enthusiasts. The audience questions bring both philosophical challenges and practical cases.