Between Data and Doxology: An Anthropological, Epistemological, and Contemplative Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into daily life poses a challenge that is simultaneously anthropological, theological, and moral. Drawing on patristic and ascetic sources alongside contemporary cognitive science, this paper argues that AI does not merely reshape behaviour but structurally undermines the conditions necessary for contemplative life and the soul's ordered orientation toward truth, reality, and union with God. Cognitive offloading, digital amnesia, “clip thinking,” and the erosion of embodied multisensory perception do not leave the inner life untouched; they degrade the very faculties through which watchfulness, discernment, and prayer are exercised. Surveillance capitalism further compounds this harm by commodifying attention and dissolving the relational depth on which authentic personhood depends. The result is a morally weakened human being through the quiet attrition of capacities which Christian traditions have always regarded as constitutive of the image of God. Yet the paper does not end in diagnosis. It argues that genuine hope exists, but that hope requires a two-tiered response: macro-level regulatory and ecclesial frameworks that constrain AI's most corrosive deployments, and secondly, a renewed pastoral theology capable of accompanying persons navigating digital fragmentation toward reintegration and healing.