The Pope Named the Problem This Week. The Greek Word He Was Pointing At Changes Everything

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]For the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, a pope is releasing an encyclical on artificial intelligence.

[00:00:07]Pope Leo the 14th titled his accompanying message to the world, Preserving Human Voices and Faces.

[00:00:13]Listen to his opening line carefully.

[00:00:16]Faces and voices are sacred. God, who created us in his image and likeness, gave them to us.

[00:00:23]>> [snorts] >> He is quoting Genesis chapter 1. He is pointing at a Greek word, and he does not say the word because the encyclical is not a Bible study. It is a pastoral document. But, here is the question the encyclical does not answer.

[00:00:38]Do we actually know what that word means? Not what tradition says. Not what your translation says. What the Greek actually says. The word is eikon. It is the word behind image in Colossians chapter 1:15, where Christ is called the eikon of the invisible God.

[00:00:57]It is the word behind image in 2 Corinthians chapter 3:18, where Paul says you are being transformed into the same eikon. And it is the word Revelation chapter 13 uses for the image of the beast. Break eikon open, and you do not find a picture. You do not find a portrait. You find a mechanism, something alive and directional, something the pope is pointing at right now. In the language of pastoral concern that the Greek has been explaining for 2,000 years. In the language of anthropology, what you behold you become. The Greek has always known this, and it is far more uncomfortable than anything the encyclical can say in a single document.

[00:01:41]To understand what is actually at stake here, you need to step out of the 21st century entirely. It is the year 50 AD in Colossae, a small city in western Turkey sitting in a narrow valley with two wealthier more powerful cities pressing in on either side.

[00:02:00]You are a wool dyer. The trade district is where you spend most of your working hours and the trade district is full of images, not digital ones, carved ones, painted ones, stamped ones. The face of the emperor pressed into every coin that changes hands between you and your customers. The carved image of a local deity above the entrance to the guild hall where craftsmen gather. A painted portrait of a patron watching over the market stall where you negotiate the price of your dyed clothes.

[00:02:30]You are not thinking about these images.

[00:02:33]That is the point. You move through them the way a person moves through weather, ambient, constant, unremarkable. You have been looking at them every day conducting your business in their visual presence, absorbing the faces of the powerful into your peripheral vision without one stopping to ask what repeated exposure to a face does to a person's sense of whose authority is final. 135 years before you were born on the other side of the Mediterranean, a Roman emperor died and a new one rose.

[00:03:05]The new emperor had his own face stamped on coins, carved into column capitals, painted on public walls.

[00:03:12]The old faces did not disappear overnight. They were gradually replaced and the people living through that transition barely noticed because the mechanism of image and authority works exactly the same way regardless of whose face was on the coin.

[00:03:29]Pope Leo the 14th invoked the same dynamic this week. He said the industrial revolution of Leo the 13th's day posed the same questions to human dignity that artificial intelligence poses now. The workers of 1891 were being asked to subordinate their humanity to the logic of industrial machinery. The question Leo the 14th answered with the Ramon was whose image does a human being actually bear?

[00:03:56]Is it the factories? Is it the markets?

[00:03:59]Or is it something older and more stubbornly resident than any system can override?

[00:04:05]Then a letter arrives in Colossae.

[00:04:08]It has been read aloud in your gathering three times already. It comes from a man named Paul and he uses a word that is going to crack your working assumptions about what an image actually is.

[00:04:20]The letter says that Christ is the icon of the invisible God. Not a symbol, not a religious portrait. The complete undistorted radiation of what God actually is expressed in a human body that walked on actual roads in actual dust. And then Paul says something that should stop the world dead cold.

[00:04:41]He says that you the person who has been passing imperial coinage all day through fingers that absorb the face of Caesar without a single conscious thought are being renewed in knowledge according to the icon of your creator. Being renewed, present tense, ongoing process.

[00:05:00]Whether you noticed or not. Now, we can open the word itself. And what you find there is going to press on something most Bible readers have never considered. The root of icon is the verb eiko, meaning to be like, to resemble, to derive from. And the ancient world understood something about images that the modern world has almost completely forgotten and cannot quite manage to stay ignorant of. When a Roman emperor sent his icon into a province, a portrait bust, a stamped profile, a painted face on the wall of the administrative building, that image was not decorative. It was a legal presence.

[00:05:39]To honor the image was to acknowledge the emperor's authority in that space.

[00:05:44]To insult the image was to insult the emperor himself. The image was understood to carry real weight because it shared in the reality of what it represented. This is not ancient naivety. It is a recognition of something the modern world has tried to outgrow and cannot manage.

[00:06:00]Images form the people who look at them.

[00:06:03]Pope Leo the XIV writing this week put it this way. By simulating human voices, faces, emotions, and relationships, artificial intelligence not only interferes with information equal systems, it encroaches upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships. He called the challenge not technological but anthropological.

[00:06:25]He is right, and the Greek word is why.

[00:06:28]The biblical thread starts not in Revelation chapter 13 but in Genesis chapter 1.

[00:06:33]The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that Paul and John quote from, uses icon in Genesis chapter 1 verse 26.

[00:06:42]Let us make humanity in our image, according to our likeness, not as a picture, as a function, and as a derivation.

[00:06:51]To be made in the icon of God is to be made as the living representative presence of God in the world he made.

[00:06:58]The way a king's portrait carried his authority into provinces where the king himself could not be. Humanity was designed to carry the character and presence of God into the creation. The image bearer is the means by which the invisible becomes visible in the material world. That is the original scene. Hold it. Every other use of this word in the New Testament is either a restoration of it or account of it of it.

[00:07:23]Move forward to Colossians chapter 1 verse 15. Paul writes that Christ is the icon of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

[00:07:33]This is not decoration. This is the theological center of the whole letter.

[00:07:38]Christ is not approximately like God, not symbolically representative of God.

[00:07:43]He is the complete undistorted, fully functioning icon, the unbroken image bearer, the visible form through which the invisible God is finally, accurately, completely made known. When you see Jesus, you are seeing what a human being in full correspondence with God actually looks like. And then, Colossians chapter 3 verse 10, "The new self is being renewed in knowledge according to the icon of his creator."

[00:08:11]The process that was damaged in Genesis is being reversed in Christ. The distorted image is being restored.

[00:08:18]Through encounter with the true icon, you are being formed back toward what you were originally made to be.

[00:08:23]But, 2 Corinthians chapter 3 verse 18 is where Paul makes the mechanism explicit.

[00:08:29]And this is the verse that most of the conversation about artificial intelligence and identity and image is not quoting. "We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same icon, from one degree of glory to another."

[00:08:47]Let's look at the structure of that sentence. Beholding, then being transformed into the same image. The mechanism is sustained gaze.

[00:08:56]What you look at with an unveiled face, without the veil of distraction or the half attention of someone scrolling past, you gradually begin to reflect.

[00:09:06]Not immediately, not because you decided to.

[00:09:09]The transformation runs in the direction of the gaze. Paul is not speaking metaphorically about religious inspiration.

[00:09:18]He is describing how image-bearing creatures actually function. Do you see what this changes? This is not a warning about a future technology. This is an anthropological description of how you already work.

[00:09:31]Romans chapter 1 shows the same mechanism running in the opposite direction.

[00:09:36]Paul describes what happens when people suppress the truth about God. They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for equines, images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

[00:09:50]They made images of smaller things and turned their gaze toward them.

[00:09:54]And then Paul describes the result. Not as punishment imposed from outside, but as the logical consequence of the mechanism itself. Thinking became futile, hearts darkened, the capacity for clear moral reasoning began to fail.

[00:10:10]They became like what they gazed at. Not suddenly, through the long daily unremarkable practice of beholding. Pope Leo the 14th described it this way.

[00:10:20]We substitute relationships with artificial intelligence systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made in our image and likeness.

[00:10:33]We are thus robbed of the opportunity to encounter others who are always different from our self.

[00:10:39]A world of mirrors. Everything made in our own image and likeness.

[00:10:44]He is describing Romans chapter 1 in the language of media theory. When the system reflects only what you already are, your preferences, your history, your tribal signals, it is not forming you toward God. It is forming you toward yourself. And a person formed in the image of themselves is not the same thing as a person formed in the image of God. Psalm 115 said it first, and more bluntly than any commentary since. Those who make the idols become like them.

[00:11:16]So do all who trust in them. Eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, a heart that has lost the capacity to ask whether there is a lie in its own hand.

[00:11:27]Isaiah chapter 44 provides the anti-pattern in a form too precise to pass over. A craftsman cuts down a tree.

[00:11:36]He uses half the wood for fire, roasts his meat, warms himself, is satisfied. With the other half, he carves an image, falls before it, and says, "Save me, for you are my god."

[00:11:49]Isaiah's response is devastating. A deluded heart has led him astray. He cannot deliver himself or say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?"

[00:11:59]He cannot see it, not because he's unintelligent, because the mechanism has already done its work.

[00:12:06]He shaped the image, and then by the same process running in reverse, the image shaped him. He made something with his hands and gave his gaze to it, and somewhere in that process, the capacity to stand back and see clearly was quietly eroded. Now, carry all of that into Revelation chapter 13 and watch what John does with it.

[00:12:29]The beast tries this, the whole earth follows, and then the earth is told to make an icon of the beast and to worship it.

[00:12:37]John is constructing a deliberate counterfeit of Genesis chapter 1 and Colossians chapter 1. God makes humanity in his icon. The beast demands an icon be made for it. God breathes life into his icon. The false [clears throat] prophet gives breath to the beast's icon so that it can speak. Christ is the icon of the invisible god, the true image.

[00:13:01]The beast has its own icon, its own visible claim to ultimate authority.

[00:13:07]And what happens to those who give their gaze to the beast's icon?

[00:13:11]The same mechanism runs. They become, by degrees, like the thing they behold.

[00:13:17]This is the question nobody's asking about artificial intelligence. Not what can it do, but what does sustained gaze at a system that mirrors you back to yourself do to a person over time. Now, the weight of all of that has to land somewhere and this is where it lands. Pope Leo the 14th is not a historical figure. He's a former mathematics major.

[00:13:40]A man who understands statistical models from the inside. When he writes that artificial intelligence systems that present statistical probability as knowledge are at best offering approximations of the truth which are sometimes outright delusions. He is not performing pastoral concern. He is making a precise observation about the epistemic structure of large language models. And when he says the challenge is not technological but anthropological, he is saying what Paul said in Romans chapter 1.

[00:14:12]The problem is not the tool. The problem is what image-bearing creatures do when they are surrounded by mirrors.

[00:14:19]The reason a pope has to release an encyclical about this in 2026 is the same reason Paul had to write to Colossae in 50 AD.

[00:14:29]The ambient images are doing their work.

[00:14:31]The coins are passing through hands. The Guildhall portrait is in the peripheral vision. The algorithm is curating the feed and no one is stopping to ask what the daily unremarkable practice of beholding is doing to their sense of whose authority is final. John knew this, which is why the most important icon in Revelation is not in chapter 13.

[00:14:53]It is the one in chapter 1. The first vision John receives is not the beast.

[00:14:59]It is the risen Christ.

[00:15:01]White hair like wool like snow. Eyes like a flame of fire. Feet like burnished bronze refined in a furnace. A voice like the sound of many waters. A face that shines like the sun in full strength.

[00:15:15]John, who leaned against Jesus at the Last Supper, who stood at the foot of the cross, who ran to the empty tomb, He falls at the feet of this vision as though dead. And Jesus touches him and says, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last and the living one. I died and behold, I am alive forevermore."

[00:15:36]This is the acorn revelation asks you to keep before yourself not the beast system, not its image, not the elaborate calendar of marks and economic structures. The book opens with the living Christ. And its whole argument is that what you behold in the sustained and unveiled gaze of worship, you begin to reflect. The verdict is this. The question is not what the Pope said on a Thursday in May.

[00:16:04]The question is what acorn has been forming you quietly, incrementally, through a thousand ordinary days in which the screen you reach for first, the voice you trust most, the feed that has been curating your sense of what is possible.

[00:16:18]These are doing the same work that images have always done. They are shaping you toward what you keep looking at.

[00:16:25]Pope Leo called the challenge anthropological.

[00:16:28]Paul called it a mechanism of transformation. Isaiah called it a deluded heart that cannot see the line in its own hand. What they are all pointing at is the same thing. The image in front of your face every ordinary day is forming you, not dramatically, not with your permission.

[00:16:46]Whose face has been most present before your eyes this week? Not in the moments when you are being intentional, in the commute, in the first 5 minutes of the morning before you chose carefully, in the background of the afternoon when the feed was just running. What voice has been filling the space of your attention with its interpretation of what is real? The wool dyer in Colossae passed the emperor's face on coins a hundred times a day without once asking what the repeated encounter was is to his sense of whose authority was final. The craftsman in Isaiah had been sitting by his fire and shaping his idol for so long that the distinction between creator and creation had quietly dissolved. What is the icon that has been most present before your eyes this week?

[00:17:32]Not what you would choose in a reflective moment.

[00:17:35]What has actually been there?

[00:17:37]All that do not theologize past it. Do not explain it away with right doctrinal positions.

[00:17:44]Just hold what has actually been in front of your face. This is where the word turns toward you, not as a warning, but as a reminder of something you were before the gaze had been running in any direction at all.

[00:17:57]You were made as the icon of God before any performance, before any record of which direction your gaze had been running, before the fall had done its work or the restoration had begun.

[00:18:10]This was true of you. You were made to be the visible form through which an invisible God makes himself known in the world. The image was not destroyed by what we turned it toward. It was distorted, cracked, diminished. And the one who is the true icon of the invisible God came not to write off the distorted image, but to restore it. He does this through the same mechanism that distorted it, sustained beholding, not of a platform, not of a feed, not of a system that holds itself out as final through its apparent intelligence and reach, but of a face that was struck, a form that was broken, a body that went into the ground and came out of it, changed in a way that no algorithm has ever managed to replicate or predict.

[00:18:57]The promise of 2 Corinthians chapter 3 is that the gaze, sustained and unveiled, is already doing something, even in a week that felt more like noise than formation.

[00:19:09]Even when your gaze has been split between the right direction and a dozen other things competing for it.

[00:19:15]You are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. The mechanism is not waiting for you to have it completely sorted.

[00:19:26]Here is what I want in the comments if you don't mind.

[00:19:29]One honest sentence. Not what you should say. Not a theological position about whose screen has the problem. What icon has actually been most present before your eyes in the ordinary days of this week.

[00:19:41]What face has filled the most space? One sentence. That is where the real conversation starts. If the Pros Kuneo video and this one said something to you together, share them as a pair. The bow and the image it bends toward belong in the same conversation. Subscribe if you want to keep going deeper.

[00:20:00]Revelation was not written to make you afraid of a political moment or a paper document or an artificial intelligence system. It was written to fix your gaze on the one whose icon you bear. So that when all the other images in the room press for your attention, you already know whose face you belong to.