To Think Things through to the End

By Christopher Blum

“It could be said that present-day man does not think things through to the end.”¹ Karol Cardinal Wojtyla delivered that fine bit of understatement in 1976, at the outset of the spiritual conferences he gave to the Roman Curia that Lent. At the time, his primary concern seems to have been the tendency of secular men and women to falter in the search for truth, for, as Archbishop of Krakow, he was daily confronted by the doctrinaire atheism of the Eastern bloc. Yet he was also aware of the typical dynamic of experimental science wherever practiced, for he asked whether “human knowledge [has] chosen to branch off laterally along a minor road” instead of choosing to look “for a foothold in knowledge of him whom the book of Wisdom proclaims as the Creator.”²

Two decades later, when as Pope John Paul II he wrote the prologue to Fides et Ratio, his stated concern had shifted in a subtle but important way. Although still troubled that “the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected” in favor of the useful knowledge that comes from experimental science and technological innovation, now he noted that the problem was not merely one of motive, but also one caused by the sheer volume of the knowledge produced:

It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being.³

The pope’s central observation, captured by the phrase “the weight of so much knowledge,” has to do with the phenomenology of our knowing. Do we experience the use of our minds as a kind of freedom, as an experience of play, and, consequently, as a source of joy? Or, to the contrary, would we say that the time we spend thinking is mainly burdensome to us because made up of a series of tasks to complete under deadlines and other constraints?

If we are inclined to give the second answer, then we are likely to find attractive the suite of technologies known as artificial intelligence. For whatever else they may prove to be, these technologies present themselves today as labor-saving devices for the work of our minds. They may indeed make some of our burdens lighter. But just how easy will be their yoke?

The Attraction of Artificial Intelligence

We have all seen the promises; here it is in the version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader: “This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant.” Artificial Intelligence can provide us summaries of long documents or complex datasets and translate from a bewildering array of languages, among many other functions. Yet the most beguiling ability of large-language model tools is that they are able to help us with our writing projects. And for many of us today, those writing projects are miserable drudgery. What could be a more frustrating task than trying to stay ahead of the pack in the work of search-engine optimization? If ChatGPT can write a draft email or webpage with the most up-to-date SEO terms, who would not want to have its help? Yet creative writing has always been a difficult work. It is good for us to be reminded of that perennial truth today. Consider, as witness, these words from the introduction to Peter Mark Roget’s original Thesaurus, the first edition of which was published as long ago as 1852.

It is to those who are . . . painfully groping their way and struggling with the difficulties of composition, that this Work professes to hold out a helping hand. The assistance it gives is that of furnishing on every topic a copious store of words and phrases, adapted to express all the recognizable shades and modifications of the general idea under which those words and phrases are arranged. The inquirer can readily select, out of the ample collection spread out before his eyes in the following pages, those expressions which are best suited to his purpose, and which might not have occurred to him without such assistance.⁴

“Painfully groping their way” toward the right word and “struggling with the difficulties of composition”: whose own experience as a writer is any different? Who would not at least be tempted by a tool, such as a thesaurus, that promises more efficient and more effective work? From the perspective of Roget’s Thesaurus, the temptation to let the bot write the first draft of our next quarterly report does not seem so very new or alarming.

Why should we not let it write that draft? We do have more edifying and important things to do with our minds, after all. Sustained deliberation with colleagues, deep conversations with a true friend, or prayer: these are all worthier uses of our mental energy. Why should we not let the bot free up our minds for those thoughts that are more for their own sake?

Intellectual Virtue

To be sure, the initial answer may consist largely in such recommendations as, “Yes, by all means use the bot, provided you then really do use your additional free time to think deeply,” and “Sure, so long as you remember that the bot does not do reliably good work and needs to be subject to your judgment.” On further consideration, however, we will want to ask the all-important question of whether we are planning to have recourse to the bot regularly. What would be at stake in that case is not the question of right use in the here and now, but the question of the formation of our character. Repeated actions build and destroy habits, and not just in our sense appetites and wills, but also in our intellects.

Good intellectual habits—also known as intellectual virtues—were arguably the primary target of St. John Paul II’s prologue to Fides et Ratio (hereafter FR). As Alasdair MacIntyre observed in one of his commentaries on the text, the encyclical follows Aquinas in seeing the search for truth as not only a “perfecting [of] theories” but also, and crucially, a “perfecting of the minds of the enquirers, of the theorists.”⁵ John Paul II himself used the language of intellectual virtue when he declared that his purpose in writing was “to offer some reflections on the path which leads to true wisdom.”⁶ Wisdom, understood as the habitual possession of the knowledge of God as first cause and final end of all that exists, emerges in his presentation as a composite excellence involving several different dispositions or habits of mind. First, there is wonder, the capacity to admire and to be astonished by the world in which we find ourselves (see FR #4). Then, there is the habit of asking questions, especially the most “fundamental” questions (FR#1), such as the “radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God” (FR #5). As those questions begin to find answers, there is a third quality of mind that can be developed with the help of teachers and fellow inquirers, described by the philosopher-Pope as “a rigorous mode of thought” characterized by “the logical coherence of the affirmations made and the organic unity of their content” (FR #4). Then, there is the fruit of all this philosophical inquiry and study, which is the “indispensable help” that it provides Christians to understand their faith and “for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it” (FR #5).

For the person struggling to meet his or her deadline, this prospect of intellectual ascent may be dizzying. St. John Paul II had enough experience as a philosophy instructor to know that the call would seem imposing to many, and so he wrote with the warmth of the pastor when he shared his desire to “restore” in today’s Catholics “a genuine trust in their capacity to know” (FR #6). Yet he did not shrink from pointing out the cost of attaining wisdom and also, once attained, the strict duty to pass it on to others. Soberly observing that “many people stumble through life to the very edge of the abyss without knowing where they are going,” he put at least some of the blame on those of us who do know: “At times, this happens because those whose vocation it is to give cultural expression to their thinking no longer look to truth, preferring quick success to the toil of patient enquiry into what makes life worth living” (FR #6).

And here we find the question of our intellectual character neatly posed: do we commonly, repeatedly, habitually prefer “quick success” to “the toil of patient enquiry”? If so, then there is a real danger for our minds. For the habits of the wise man or woman are built up slowly and with difficulty over years of study and reflection. If we sense ourselves to be still needing to gain such habits, then to adopt the shortcuts offered by artificial intelligence threatens to undermine our mental discipline and our ability to profit from serious studies.

A Ready Answer

The possession of moral virtue allows a person to accomplish good human actions reliably, effectively, and with some measure of ease and joy. The truly patient man or woman, for instance, endures difficult moments in everyday life with a consistent calm and peace that is habitual in the best sense of the word. Such a person finds it easy to leave the hard word unsaid and rejoices interiorly to preserve charity in the face of annoyances of every kind. Something similar happens in the case of intellectual virtue. As John Paul II affirmed, “all that is the object of our knowledge becomes a part of our life” (FR #1). This insight is maximally true with regard to the knowledge of God that we enjoy by faith. As Thomas à Kempis said, “the man to whom all things are one, who refers everything to One, and who sees everything as in One, is enabled to remain steadfast in heart, and abide at peace with God.”⁷ And when faith is improved by study—philosophical, biblical, and theological—the result is more than just the enjoyment of interior peace for the individual Christian, it is also a readiness to share that wisdom with others. St. Gregory the Great illustrated that readiness by the example of the divine command to provide the Ark of the Covenant with the means to carry it forth at any moment:

It is certainly necessary that those who execute the office of preaching do not regress in their study of sacred writ. It is for this reason that the bars are ordered to be always in the rings, so that when it is time to carry the Ark, there should be no delay for inserting them. That is to say, when a pastor is asked about a spiritual matter by a layperson, it would be disgraceful for him to have to learn the answer, when he should have been prepared to solve the question. So let the bars “remain in the rings,” so that teachers, ever meditating in their hearts on the sacred Scriptures, may lift the Ark of the Covenant without delay, which is to say, so that they may teach without delay what is necessary.⁸

Here we find a sufficient answer to the deeper question about the tools of artificial intelligence that we are being invited to use today, that is, to the question of their habitual use. And that answer is that it would indeed be disgraceful for a Christian to rely upon such a tool to the detriment of his or her own habit of thinking things through to the end and readiness to testify to the moral beauty of the Gospel and to the truth of the Church’s teaching. What we need now, as the power of these new technologies daily increases, is the firm commitment to cooperate with God’s grace in the labor of study and reflection that results in our very minds taking on the shape of Divine Truth.

Christopher Blum is Professor of Philosophy at the Augustine Institute. He has edited two volumes of meditations drawn from Newman’s sermons, Waiting for Christ and The Tears of Christ, both published by the Augustine Institute. He will be teaching a course on Newman in the Augustine Institute’s Verbum Domini Seminars for the continuing education of priests in Summer 2026.

1. Karol Wojtyla, A Sign of Contradiction (1976; Providence, Rhode Island: Cluny Media, 2021), p. 12.

2. Ibid, p. 12.

3. St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1998, Vatican.va, #5.

4. Peter Mark Roget, Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition (first edition, 1852; revised edition, London: Longmans, 1869), page xiv.

5. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Philosophy recalled to its tasks: a Thomistic reading of Fides et Ratio,” in MacIntyre, The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 186.

6. St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, #6. Subsequent references to Fides et Ratio will be made parenthetically in the text.

7. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Leo Sherley-Price (London: Penguin, 1952), I.3, p. 30.

8. St. Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, translated by George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), pages 84-85.