The Spiritual Life of AI, as Imagined by Way of R. S. Thomas

The scene captured by R. S. Thomas in his poem “The Empty Church” is, in one sense, deeply familiar. It describes a spiritually vacated religious sanctuary and a speaker distraught at God’s absence: “He will not come any more // to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still / striking my prayers on a stone / heart?” Not for nothing is Thomas known as the poet of Holy Saturday, the day, notes one critic, when “all speech about God and his engagement with humanity is brought to nothing.”

In another sense, however, the poem paints a different picture, this one about spiritual life in the age of artificial intelligence—or, perhaps, the spiritual life of artificial intelligence. I say this because “The Empty Church” is also meditation not so much on silence as on noise: existential mimicry, vacuous angst, broken music. In this latter sense, the poem’s search is less for God than for the poet’s own substantive being, which has gone missing. In its place we find the simulacrum of a poet. The clue here is found in the structure of the poem, an unrhymed, hobbled, all but dysfunctional Petrarchan sonnet: fourteen lines divided into the distinctive structure of octet (8 lines) and sestet (6 lines), though without the standard rhyme scheme and volta (or turn) in which the second stanza resolves the problem raised in the first. Where Petrarchan sonnet conventions create meaning through their form alone, effectuating a kind of harmonious unconscious through rhyme and reason, “The Empty Church” evacuates that form. It is not so much a sonnet as its stilted simulation. Hence, the poem’s ultimate hope for presence, for “the shadow / of someone greater than [the speaker] can understand,” is for the one—not (only) God, but the poet—who might complete the poetic task, who might “finish” the sonnet. But in this poem, that poet is missing.

I will invoke this poem as a way to illustrate scholarship by theorists and historians who describe the emergence of AI as a post-World War Two effort to mitigate the effects of trauma. The aim, these scholars contend, was to create “neural networks” that could bolster faulty (even broken) human decision-making. In “The Empty Church,” the traumatic incident that generates the poem is the disappearance of God. In response, we find a would-be sonnet that should generate the effects of closure and thus restore something like the possibility of divine communion. But instead, and like neural networks that develop their own pathologies, the poem exacerbates the problem by generating noise in its own fractured sonnet. Hence, the poem effectively obscures the poet. A kind of bardic ChaptGPT, the poem spins lines of verse, but it is not able to manufacture the poetry—the Petrarchan sonnet—it seeks to deploy. In this way, “The Empty Church” serves as an allegory of the spiritual life of artificial intelligence—the text-generating search for a (human) creator that in turn seeks its (divine) Creator. The spiritual quest of AI reveals itself to be a weakened imitation of our own.

Author bio: Matthew Wickman is Professor of English, Founding Director (Emeritus) of the BYU Humanities Center, and Associate Coordinator of the Faith and Imagination Institute at Brigham Young University, Utah. He is the author of three books, most recently the spiritual memoir _Life to the Whole Being_, and he hosts the ecumenical podcast _Faith and Imagination_.