“Magnifica Humanitas” and the Carthaginian compass facing the silicon desert

Even before Rome, it is Carthage that offers one of the keys to understanding "Magnifica Humanitas". Not the Carthage of the Punic Wars, but the city that became the capital of Roman Africa: a crossroads of peoples and ideas, where the cultural environment of the young Augustine took shape. It is on this forgotten shore that a crucial question takes shape: what role should power play when humankind creates tools capable of transforming its own condition?

Magnifica Humanitas, the document in which Leo XIV reflects on the anthropological challenges of artificial intelligence, does not reject progress. The issue is not the technology itself, but the desire that drives it. What happens when man-made tools seem to want to redefine humanity itself? The reference to Augustine opens up a perspective that predates the digital revolution. It can be read as a revival of a wisdom born in Roman Africa, where the classical tradition encountered Christianity and gave rise to a reflection on desire, freedom and limits. Carthage was one of the great intellectual centres of late antiquity. From Tertullian to Cyprian, and on to Augustine, this African school developed a vision of humanity in which greatness did not lie in domination, but in the order of desires. It is this legacy that allows us to read "Magnifica Humanitas" as a response to the new technological Babel. The echo of "The City of God" is evident. The narrative is permeated by two orientations of the heart: the love that seeks salvation in its own strength, and that which recognises a greater order. Technology becomes dangerous when it claims to be a promise of absolute liberation. This is what Augustine called "libido dominandi": the will to dominate that drives humankind to seek the eradication of all limits. The crisis of the algorithmic age is also a crisis of love. For Augustine, man is first and foremost a being who loves. When efficiency, speed and performance become absolute criteria, what cannot be calculated is lost: anticipation, memory, contemplation. The machine processes data, but knows neither joy, pain nor hope. It simulates responses; it does not inhabit an existence. Human beings do not become more human by eliminating fragility, but by recognising that it is precisely in finitude that freedom manifests itself. This is why the Christian perspective opposes the posthuman dream: the body is not a prison, but the place of relationship. The same risk is evident today in the externalisation of inner life. Memory, decisions and relationships are progressively entrusted to digital systems. Thus the Confessions are once again highly relevant: ‘You were within me, and I was outside myself’. Inner life is not an escape from the world, but the condition for inhabiting it with discernment. Viewed from this perspective, the compass of "Magnifica Humanitas" points not only towards Hippo, but also towards Carthage: towards that African tradition which taught Augustine that civilisation is not measured by the power it accumulates, but by the order of love it is able to preserve. In the silicon desert, the compass continues to point towards Carthage. From that African shore springs a tradition that today belongs to the whole Mediterranean and binds the destinies of its two shores. The challenge is a shared one: to safeguard a vision of humanity that no algorithm can ever replace. The future will depend less on what machines are capable of doing than on what we choose to love.