The Tower, the Bread and the Stone

There are, in the history of ideas, appointments that no one has arranged and that no one misses. In May 2026, in his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV opens his reflection on artificial intelligence with an image three thousand years old: the Tower of Babel. One hundred and forty-six years earlier, in an imaginary cell in Seville, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor promised the Christ returned to earth that humanity would one day rebuild that very tower, and that it would be he, the Inquisitor, who completed it.

The two texts do not speak of the same era, nor of the same builders, nor quite of the same God. And yet they describe, with troubling precision, the same building site.

One language, one technology, one direction

Let us first reread Genesis, which is brief, as definitive things tend to be. The men of the plain of Shinar are not impious in the ordinary sense: they are engineers. They have invented the brick, they have a project, a schedule, and above all an irreproachable marketing pitch: let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered. The tower is not built against God out of wickedness; it is built without him, out of prudence. It is a security infrastructure.

Leo XIV reads this account as a pontiff of the twenty-first century: what troubles him about Babel is not the height of the tower but the uniformity of the site. « One language, one technology, one direction », he writes, and one could be reading the description of a foundation model trained on the entirety of the web. The sin of Babel, in the encyclical, is homogenisation passing itself off as communion, the pretension of a single language, be it digital, « capable of translating everything, even the mystery of the person, into data and performance ». The confusion of tongues, in this reading, is not first of all a punishment: it is a recall to the order of the real. Diversity was the original project; uniformity was the usurpation.

Bread first, freedom later

Dostoevsky, for his part, is interested not in the tower's architecture but in its financing. In the legend told by Ivan Karamazov, the Inquisitor rereads the three temptations in the desert and dwells on the first: turn these stones into bread. Christ refused, in the name of freedom: man does not live by bread alone. A fatal error, sneers the old man. For the centuries will pass, and human science will proclaim that there is no crime, only the hungry; and in place of the temple the Tower of Babel will rise once more. Then comes the sentence that makes one dizzy: this tower, men will not know how to finish on their own. He who feeds them will complete it for them.

In other words: Babel is not imposed, Babel is subscribed to. Men, exhausted by the burden of their own freedom, by that duty to judge, to choose and to err, will come of their own accord to lay it at the feet of whoever offers them three things: miracle, mystery and authority. In exchange they will be guaranteed bread, answers, and that particular form of happiness which consists in no longer having to decide anything. The Inquisitor does not take himself for a tyrant. He takes himself for a philanthropist. Therein lies the whole cruelty of the text: the tower is built out of love for mankind, or at least out of what its architects call by that name.

The irony of the building site

And here a gentle, almost affectionate irony deserves to be savoured, for it instructs more than it accuses.

In Dostoevsky, the architect of Babel is the Church. It is the Cardinal of Seville who promises to complete the tower, in Christ's name and against him. In Leo XIV, it is the Church that denounces the tower and proposes the alternative. One might see a contradiction there; it is fairer to see a lesson learned. An institution that has read, truly read, the Grand Inquisitor knows that the Babelian temptation does not camp on the other side of the border: it lodges in every house powerful enough to feed the crowds. The encyclical acknowledges this, moreover, with rare candour, devoting an entire passage to the Church's own examination of conscience. Leo XIV writes after Dostoevsky, and it shows: he knows that Babel can be built with the best intentions in the world, and even with the best verses.

But the irony has a second edge, turned this time towards our present. Listen to the great artificial intelligence laboratories speak: it is a matter of democratising knowledge, of benefiting all humanity, of delivering us from thankless tasks, from disease, perhaps from death. Feed them first. The vocabulary is exactly the Inquisitor's, sincere no doubt, as his was. We are offered the miracle (machines that speak), the mystery (no one truly knows how they work, not even their creators, a fact the encyclical notes with disarming honesty) and the authority (the impression of objectivity in the generated answer). The old cardinal's three pillars, gathered into a conversational interface. Only the stake is missing, and even then: we have the terms of service.

That a few dozen people, concentrating the planet's data, computing power and capital, should decide the morality to be inscribed in these systems, there is something that would have drawn a sad smile from the old man of Seville. He at least claimed the burden; our new benefactors bill it by subscription. « A more moral AI is of no use if that morality is decided by a handful of people », writes the pope.

The Inquisitor could not have put it better. He would simply have added: and that is precisely why the handful shall be us.

Nehemiah, or the other building site

If the article stopped there, it would be nothing but an elegant and sterile play of mirrors. But the two texts, each in its own way, refuse to let the tower have the last word.

Dostoevsky answers with a gesture: Christ, who has not uttered a word throughout the entire indictment, kisses the old man on his bloodless lips. That kiss is not an argument: it is the refusal of the very ground on which the Inquisitor has set the debate. Freedom is not demonstrated, it is given; any discursive defence of freedom that claimed to compel assent would betray itself. The kiss says: I will not buy you, not even with good reasons.

Leo XIV, as a pastor and not a novelist, answers with a method: Nehemiah. Faced with Jerusalem in ruins, Nehemiah convenes no consortium, raises no funds, promises no disruption. He prays, he listens, he examines the rubble in silence, then he entrusts to each family a section of wall. The city is reborn not through the genius of one but through the responsibility of all: priests, craftsmen, women, the young, each on their own stretch of rampart. Where Babel demanded a single language, Jerusalem rebuilds itself in the plurality of voices, ordered not by uniformity but by communion, which is not the same thing, and all the difference in the world lies in that nuance.

Knowledge as a common good

Let us finally bring the two answers together, for they converge more than it appears. Christ's kiss and Nehemiah's building site say the same thing in two forms: truth, knowledge, intelligence are not commodities of which a few may hold the monopoly in exchange for bread. The encyclical states it in the language of social doctrine: the universal destination of goods, which held yesterday for land and water, holds today for algorithms, data, models. What millions of human lives have produced, our texts, our images, our conversations, of which these systems are quite literally kneaded, cannot be fenced off for the sole profit of those who had the means to harvest it.

It is not a matter of refusing the tower of technology. Both texts guard against this, and the encyclical says so explicitly: the choice is not between yes and no to technology, but between two ways of building. The question is whether intelligence, artificial or not, will be a shared good like language itself, which no one owns and which everyone enriches, or a captive rent defended by a few oligopolies which, like the Inquisitor, will swear to us hand on heart that they think of nothing but our happiness.

Dostoevsky taught us to distrust those who would carry our freedom in our place. Leo XIV reminds us that there is an alternative to sheer refusal: for each to take up their own section of wall. Researchers who publish their work, developers of open models, teachers who train for discernment rather than delegation, lawmakers who demand transparency, ordinary users who keep the habit of thinking before asking, all masons of one and the same rampart, whose solidity lies precisely in the fact that no single hand holds it alone.

The Tower of Babel promised to touch the sky and produced nothing but confusion. Nehemiah's wall promised only to protect a city, and it still stands in our memory. Perhaps that is the shared lesson of the novelist and the pope: the constructions that last are not the tallest, but the most widely shared. And if the age of artificial intelligence must be built, let it be built like Jerusalem, stone by stone, family by family, in the noisy and fruitful plurality of tongues that Babel had sought to abolish.