A Soyinkian Reading of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
Pope Leo XIV has given the age of artificial intelligence its first great theological image. In Magnifica Humanitas the encyclical sets two building sites against each other. There is Babel, the tower raised so that men might make a name for themselves, the monument to efficiency. And there is the city where God and humanity dwell together, the Jerusalem of Nehemiah, rebuilt by many hands in patient and distributed labour. The document says technology is never neutral because it takes on the character of the hands that devise, finance, regulate and use it. Then it asks us to choose.
It is a beautiful image to be taken seriously before refusing it. The binary learned from Augustine to see the world as two cities and the soul as the ground they fight over. Read from inside another cosmos, the choice between Babel and Jerusalem says less about technology than about the mind that drew it. So I want to read the encyclical from somewhere the Vatican press office is unlikely to look: Ogun’s workshop.
My text is Wole Soyinka’s Myth, Literature and the African World, the slim and fascinating book drawn from his Cambridge lectures. Its argument is that the African world carries a metaphysics of its own, coherent and complete, owing nothing to European validation. His ambition runs past celebrating African difference. He wants to show that a Yoruba account of being can interrogate the European one as an equal. That is the posture I borrow in carrying it to Rome.
At the centre of that account stands Ogun, and in the essay “The Fourth Stage,” Soyinka gives him his fullest reading. Ogun is the god of iron and the forge, of war and the road, of the hunt and the binding oath, and the patron of poets. In Soyinka’s words he is “a totality of the Dionysian, Apollonian and Promethean virtues,” the three Greek principles European thought has always held apart, here gathered into one body. He is maker and ruiner together, the master craftsman who is also the drunkard that kills his own, a reluctant king happiest left alone at his anvil. Yoruba worship keeps the contradiction whole: one god holding creation and slaughter in the same hands, with no second self to carry off the blame.
The myth beneath the reading is a story about the first technology. The gods and human beings once lived together, until the two worlds were torn apart and a vast chaotic gulf opened between them, the abyss of transition, the fourth realm that lies between the dead, the living and the unborn. The gods longed to cross and could not. The barrier broke every attempt. Then Ogun, with an instrument “forged from the ore of mountain-wombs,” the first tool, hacked a path through the chaos and called the rest to follow him across. He became the first to conquer transition, the god who made the road on which everything else could travel.
Made king of Ire against his own wishes, Ogun went to war, and during a lull the trickster Esu left him a gourd of palm wine. He drained it, and in the drunken battle that followed he lost the power to tell his men from the enemy and cut down both. The praise singers keep the memory unsoftened: Ogun kills on the right and kills on the left. The toolmaker and the slaughterer arrive in one body, moved by one will. Soyinka’s Ogun is the recognition, very old and unmistakably African, that the creature who forges the road to its salvation forges, in the same stroke, the instrument of its slaughter.
Bring this god into the room where the encyclical is read. Magnifica Humanitas asks whether artificial intelligence is Babel or Jerusalem and offers the turning of the work toward God as the way to redeem the tool. Ogun knows no second city to flee to and no reorientation that cleanses the forge. The road and the massacre leave the same furnace. You cannot keep the instrument that crosses the abyss and strip out its power to kill. It is one instrument and one will. The four hands the encyclical keeps separate, the ones that devise and finance and regulate and use, Ogun closes into a single fist. The danger in our machines sits closer than Babel. It lives in the maker, in the thing inside the culture that is known and still not mastered. A theology of artificial intelligence that began here would put down the question of which city to build and raise a harder one: whether we are grown enough to carry what we forge.
Soyinka saw the modern reach of the god early. In his long poem, Idanre, he laid Ogun along the electrical pylons, present in the current and the high wires, the metallic lord threaded through the infrastructure that now hums beneath everything we build. It costs little effort to find him again in the silicon and the cooling halls of the data centres. He was always the god of whatever we forge and cannot wholly command, which is the nearest thing to an honest definition of the machine now being raised in California and Shenzhen.
None of this is proof, and the frame carries costs that Soyinka’s admirers seldom confess. This “Yoruba worldview” is heavily Soyinka’s own making. He shaped his Ogun in argument with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and the criticism of G. Wilson Knight, and the anthropologists who gathered the Ogun traditions in the field, Sandra Barnes among them, record a god messier than the tragic philosopher required. Paulin Hountondji’s charge against ethnophilosophy lands here: a single anonymous “African worldview,” systematised by one luminous mind, can freeze a living plurality into myth. I will not pretend the charge misses. But watch what it does to the contest rather than to my side of it alone. The City of God is also the work of one luminous mind, of Augustine, reading scripture through Plato and Roman law, pressing centuries of inheritance into a binary that later came to look eternal. Two made things, then, not a cosmos against a doctrine. And once both are admitted to be constructions, the question stops being which one is authentically African or authentically Christian. It becomes which made thing tells the truth about tools. There I think Ogun has the better of it, because he refuses the second city, and the refusal is the honest part. Which does not make him safe.
In his Ogun Abibiman poem, Soyinka summoned this same god to bless a war of liberation, and the god came gladly. A metaphysics in which the maker is a tragic hero crossing the abyss can dignify the carnage rather than restrain it, consecrating the very Prometheanism the encyclical dreads. Read this essay to those training a frontier model in a server hall outside Austin and they may hear flattery: that their recklessness is tragic, their road the only road across. Augustine at least hands them a brake. Two-cities means one of them is wrong, and a man can be told he is building the wrong one. Ogun hands him catharsis, which on a Tuesday, with the loss curve still falling, may be worse than nothing. I cannot fully answer this. The most I can say is that Ogun names the danger in the right place even when he supplies no cure for it, and a true diagnosis left untreated is still closer to honesty than a cure aimed at the wrong sickness.
I am bringing Ogun to Rome as a peer, a cosmology that stands on its own ground and owes the encyclical no deference. Soyinka wanted exactly that for Africa, a seat at the table of first questions rather than a chair in the corridor. Magnifica Humanitas presents Augustine’s two cities as if they were the grammar of every human meeting with its own power. They are one grammar, formed in one tradition, and a great one. There is another, older than Augustine, in which the toolmaker and the destroyer are the same dark god, and the single road across the abyss is the one we forge ourselves, carrying the cutlass that saves and the cutlass that kills.
The encyclical asks which city we are building. Ogun asks whether that was the right question. The cutlass is one blade.
