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AI and Transcendence

AI and Transcendence

Last updated on: May 14, 2026 at 6:06 am by Vance Morgan

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AI and Transcendence 2026-05-13T14:43:28-04:00 Vance Morgan

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Two weeks ago, I set the stage for my next several posts by engaging with a lecture by Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan on the topic “Ethics, AI, and Human Flourishing.” During that lecture she introduces a framework for thinking about AI in the context of Christian values and virtue ethics that goes by the acronym “DELTA,” as described in the following short video:

Last Wednesday I focused on the third letter in the DELTA acronym: “L” is for Love. Today’s letter: “T” is for Transcendence.

Meghan Sullivan spends the least amount of time in her talk on transcendence, but I would argue that it might be the most important of the five DELTA issues to considering human beings in relation to AI. It is in a careful engagement with transcendence that the irreducible differences between human beings and artificial intellgence become, for me at least, most evident.

A good place to start is with the ancient philosopher Protagoras’ claim that human beings “are the measure of all things,” a pithy expression of our human tendency to believe that we are the center of everything and the primary arbiters and deciders of what is valuable, important, and good. Transcendence points us toward an important response: Protagoras was wrong. We are wrong. When Hamlet tells his friend that “there are more things in heaven and in earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy,” he’s setting the stage for a consideration of transcendence. We are not the measure of all things,

Many people, understandably, think of God-related issues when they think of transcendence, of passages from scripture such as toward the end of Job when God blows Job’s complaints away with several chapters of illustrations that “I’m God, and you’re not!” But for me the best way to touch transcendence is through engaging with the natural world, a place where we immediately encounter beauty, violence, mystery, otherness, and constant reminders that we live a world that we did not create, a reality that is given to us. As a woman once said to Annie Dillard, ” “Seem like we’re just set down here,and don’t nobody know why.”

Since the Enlightenment, reason and rationality have most often been identified as the capacities which make human beings unique among creatures. Logic, creativity, and productivity are addditionally characteristic of human specialness. One of the challenges of emerging AI is that artifical intelligence appears to not only be capable of all of the above, but by most measures is better at them (or will be in the near future) than we are. Here is where a certain amount of humility is useful, not only in order to recognize our relative insignificance in the larger reality in which we find ourselves, but also in opening ourselves to just how wild and wonderful that larger reality is.

Annie Dillard is one of the best observers of the natural world of her generation. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she writes that “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery,” noting frequently that we often run headlong into the limits of our reason and logic when paying the slightest attention to the beauty and mystery of nature.

“Nature,” said Thoreau in his journal, “is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work.” The creator, I would add, churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care. This is the point . . . Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.

Dillard recommends developing the capacity to see things for what they are rather than as we expect or want them to be. This is a useful excercise in de-centering, since “I have often noticed that even a few minutes of self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.” The more we turn our attention outward, the more we recognize our own insignificance in the face of a world that appears to have no regard for our rational expectations or limits. We learn that “Knowledge does not vanquish mystery, or obscure its distant lights.” Encountering the limits of our capacities opens the door to the wonder of transcendence.

Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribbon of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small . . . It occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. . . . not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or to its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity, for which I would die, and I shall . . .

In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, the narrator and main character, Reverand Ames, is getting older (actually he’s only a few years older than I am now) and frequently has transcendence on his mind.

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. . . . Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who has the courage to see it?

Whether we like it or not, human beings will continue to coexist with fast-developing AI. I suggest that embracing transcendence, an attunement to what is other and greater than oneself, will remain an important and significant difference between what we are and what we create. What is it that connects us to what is greater than us? I turn once again to Reverand Ames.

A candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning . . . It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence.

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