What Cannot Be Captured

The unconscious may disclose what is hidden in man. The soul reveals that man himself is hidden in God.

“The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there, and there are poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There likewise is God, there are the angels, there is life and the Kingdom, there is light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace: all things are there.”

— St. Macarius the Great

There is a question that has remained with me for years.

After a talk I gave at Duquesne University, someone working in the field of artificial intelligence approached me. I had been speaking about the unconscious, and he asked how I imagined the unconscious might ever be captured.

The question was an intelligent one. But I remember sensing even then that something within the question needed to be examined.

What do we mean by captured?

There are realities that can be measured because they stand before us as objects. There are patterns that can be identified, behaviors predicted, associations discovered, and enormous quantities of language gathered and compared. Artificial intelligence has already demonstrated an astonishing capacity for this. It can recognize patterns in human expression that no individual human being could possibly hold together.

But the unconscious is not simply a collection of information waiting to be mapped.

And the soul is something more mysterious still.

My years of studying psychoanalysis taught me to respect the depths hidden beneath conscious thought. A human being rarely knows fully why he desires what he desires, fears what he fears, repeats what he repeats. We speak, and something more than what we intended is spoken. We love and discover fear beneath our love. We become angry and discover grief beneath our anger. We pursue something for years only to discover that another longing had been concealed within it all along.

The unconscious cannot simply be read from the outside because it is encountered through relationship.

This is one of the great insights of psychoanalysis. The unconscious appears indirectly—in dreams, slips, resistances, repetitions, silences, transferences, desires. Yet even these are not pieces of data that can simply be assembled until the person has been solved.

The analyst listens.

And eventually one discovers that listening itself changes what is heard.

But the Fathers take us deeper.

They speak not principally of the unconscious but of the heart.

And by the heart they mean something far greater than emotion or interior psychology. The heart is the deepest center of the person, the place where the whole human being mysteriously gathers before God.

This is why St. Macarius can speak of dragons and angels inhabiting the same small vessel.

Everything is there.

Memory.

Desire.

Fear.

Sin.

Grace.

Wounds whose origins we cannot remember.

Longings whose object we cannot name.

And beneath them all, something more profound than psychology:

the creature standing before his Creator.

Here we reach a boundary that technology cannot cross.

Artificial intelligence may become extraordinarily adept at recognizing the traces we leave behind. It may know the books we read, the words we use, the questions we repeatedly ask. It may discover patterns in our speech that we ourselves have never noticed.

It may even tell us something true about ourselves.

But a pattern is not a person.

And prediction is not knowledge of the heart.

The Desert Fathers understood this distinction instinctively. They did not believe that the human person could be mastered through observation. Indeed, they distrusted precisely the desire to comprehend another human being too quickly.

Abba Poemen does not dissect the brother.

He waits.

Abba Moses does not reduce the sinner to his behavior.

He carries his leaking sack of sand into the assembly because he knows that judgment begins when we imagine that another person’s mystery lies open before us.

The elders understood something our technological age is in danger of forgetting:

the person is inexhaustible.

Not because human beings are infinitely complicated machines.

But because they are persons.

And personhood is mystery.

The modern elders speak in much the same way. St. Porphyrios could perceive extraordinary things about those who came to him, yet his knowledge never became possession. The deeper the saints perceived another person, the more reverently they approached him. Spiritual perception produced tenderness rather than mastery.

That is profoundly important.

For our age increasingly assumes that sufficient information produces sufficient knowledge.

If enough data can be gathered, the person will finally become transparent.

But the Fathers would tell us otherwise.

You might know every measurable fact about a human being and still not know who stands before God.

Indeed, the person himself does not fully know this.

There are depths within us that are revealed only through repentance.

There are things we learn about ourselves only through suffering.

There are desires whose meaning becomes visible only after decades.

There are wounds that reveal themselves only when love finally makes it safe for them to appear.

And there are dimensions of the heart known only to God.

This is where the language of the unconscious, valuable as it is, finally yields to the language of mystery.

The unconscious belongs to the depths of the psyche.

But the heart opens upon eternity.

The Fathers therefore sought something very different from self-analysis. They sought purification of the heart.

They entered silence.

They fasted.

They watched their thoughts.

They repeated the Name.

They remained before God until the hidden movements of the heart slowly became visible.

Not so that they might master themselves.

But so that they might surrender themselves.

This is perhaps the decisive difference.

Modernity frequently seeks knowledge in order to gain control.

The desert sought knowledge in order to relinquish control.

Know yourself so that you may repent.

Know your weakness so that you may cease judging.

Know your wounds so that you may allow Christ to enter them.

Know your desires so that they may become one desire.

And finally even self-knowledge must give way.

For the deepest truth about the human person is not discovered by endlessly looking inward.

It is discovered by looking toward God.

The Jesus Prayer teaches this with extraordinary simplicity.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

There is no attempt to explain the self.

There is no inventory of psychological states.

There is only the human being standing before Christ.

And slowly the mind descends into the heart.

The scattered person becomes gathered.

The divided desires become simpler.

The noise subsides.

And something begins to emerge that no algorithm could manufacture because it is not information.

It is communion.

This is why I do not fear artificial intelligence because it can recognize patterns in human beings. Nor do I think we need diminish the extraordinary things such technology may accomplish.

The danger lies elsewhere.

It lies in forgetting what a human being is.

We may someday construct systems capable of producing astonishingly accurate descriptions of our behavior. They may recognize our patterns better than we consciously recognize them ourselves. They may imitate our language, anticipate our questions, and mirror our psychological tendencies with unnerving precision.

But none of this means that the mystery has been captured.

The icon is not the prototype.

The description is not the person.

The map is not the desert.

And the pattern is not the heart.

There will always remain that hidden chamber into which no machine, no analyst, no spiritual father, and indeed not even the person himself can enter by force.

There God waits.

Perhaps this is why the desert remains necessary.

It reminds us that the deepest things are not seized.

They are received.

The heart becomes known not beneath the glare of endless observation but in silence.

The soul reveals itself not by being captured but by being surrendered.

And at the furthest reaches of self-knowledge, we discover something astonishing:

the final mystery of man is not man.

It is God.

We descend into the heart thinking that we will finally discover ourselves.

And there, in the deepest place, we find Someone waiting.