In a previous post, I argued that Magnifica Humanitas treats human finitude as formative.1 Everything that appears as a limit today “tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship” (§118), yet the encyclical’s own observations show AI environments eroding the conditions for that formation. The post closed with a question: How can we tell a formative limit from a removable inefficiency?
The encyclical itself holds the two commitments that make this question hard, in the same paragraph. “While it is right to strive to alleviate the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude” (§118). Alleviate, and also acknowledge. Discernment is how we honor both. The encyclical does not gather its criteria in one place, but they are present. This post gathers them.
Three Marks of a Formative Limit
The first mark is that a formative limit opens to relationship. Reading stories to a child is slow, and the slowness is not overhead; it is the relationship. Such gestures, the encyclical says, “train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention” (§114), to see the other “as a face not merely as a function” (§114). It is within our limitations that we “tangibly experience the closeness of others” (§119). That same passage counts among what finds a place within our limitations “spiritual experience and the worship of God” (§119): the relationship a limit opens to is with one another and ultimately with God. And the mark holds in both directions. Learning to receive care forms a person as much as learning to give it. A formative limit binds persons to one another. An inefficiency merely delays an outcome that no one shares.
The second mark is that a formative limit is where a capacity is learned. The ability to care “is learned and mastered through lived experience” (§114). The desire to ask questions “bears fruit only over time,” and, the encyclical adds through Plato, understanding is kindled “by engaging in discussion with others, ‘striking upon’ ideas and experiences together like flint” (§140). “Authentic, critical and creative thought” develops through “the essential exercise of research, reflection and discernment” that an incessant flow of information can replace (§146). The limit is the practice site. Remove the practice, and the capacity does not form.
The third mark is that a formative limit can change the person. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change” (§128). We carry lessons “that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments,” and only through the interplay of these elements do “the wonders of the soul occur within us” (§120). The chance to fail and be changed is a mark of formation, not a malfunction.
The marks are easiest to see working together. Waiting with a grieving friend carries all three: it binds you to the friend, it forms patience and presence, and it can change you. Waiting on hold carries none, and neither does re-entering data a machine already holds; both may be removed without loss. Drafting one’s own words through the slow work of reflection falls between, carrying the second and third. In a letter to a friend, the same slow drafting can carry the first as well: words known to be one’s own are an act of honesty toward the one who reads them. The more marks a limit bears, the stronger its claim to protection.
Writing with AI poses the same question, not a new one. Where the struggle to articulate still happens, in wrestling a machine’s suggestions into words one can own, the formative limit is kept. Where finished words simply replace the struggle, the limit has been optimized away.
What unites the three marks is the encyclical’s picture of the person: one who recognizes a face rather than a function, who grows in care and in wisdom, and whose change is maturation rather than mere alteration. Read against that picture, the marks resist counterfeits. Hazing binds people together, teaches them something, and changes them; yet it bears none of the three marks, because it functionalizes the very persons it binds.
Not Every Limit Forms
The marks cut both ways, and the encyclical says as much. It names limits that deform rather than form: workers forced “to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work,” de-skilled by a pace that “can erode workers’ sense of agency” (§150, quoting Antiqua et Nova); minors exposed to manipulation and to business models “that monetize attention and time” (§142); exclusion and the concentration of power throughout.
There are three kinds of limit, then, not only two. Formative limits, which the marks identify and which deserve protection. Removable inefficiencies, which may be optimized away freely. And harmful limits, which the social teaching has always worked to remove, and nothing here softens that agenda.
These kinds classify the claims limits make on us, not the limits themselves. Illness, an example the encyclical itself uses, makes two claims at once: it is suffering we rightly strive to alleviate, and it can be a reality through which a person matures. The striving itself bears the marks: caring for the sick binds, forms, and changes the one who cares, so alleviating suffering does not empty the world of formative limits. Which claim governs varies with intensity, person, and circumstance; and settling it takes two different kinds of work. Recognizing a harmful limit is the work of moral judgment; exploitation is not weighed against formation but ended. The remaining choice runs between goods: the good of a practice that forms persons, and the good of time and effort freed for other service of the common good. Choosing between goods is the proper work of discernment, and that weighing can go wrong in either direction.
The optimization default performs neither kind of work; it treats every limit as a removable inefficiency. The encyclical states the danger itself: “a technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can, however unintentionally, become an obstacle to change and growth” (§128). However unintentionally: no one has to intend the erosion.
The marks also guard against the opposite error: treating every hardship as spiritually productive. A limit that isolates rather than opens to relationship, that builds no capacity, and that grinds a person down rather than changing them bears no mark at all. Discernment protects against both mistakes.
Who Applies the Marks
The marks resist automation by their nature. Whether a limit opens to relationship or builds a capacity shows itself “only over time” and in discussion with others (§140). No metric applies them; communities do. Nor do communities apply them from nothing: tradition is the repository of that slow knowledge, gathered often across generations and carrying forward which limits have proven formative, so that the questions can be asked in advance. The encyclical makes this a task of education itself: educating people about AI “involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used” (§140).
The encyclical points to the sites of this discernment. Families, schools, and policy-makers form an alliance over young people’s digital environments (§142). Educators establish “rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis,” without which “inner freedom may be compromised” (§146). Workplaces “design systems that are centered on the human person and not solely on performance” (§150). Each is a place where the three marks can be asked as questions before the optimization is installed, not after the capacity is gone.
One caution about power belongs here. The marks are most trustworthy when a community applies them to practices it shares, and most suspect when the strong prescribe formative hardship that only the weak must live with. Workers de-skilled by machine-paced systems were not being formed but used; the remedy is systems centered on the human person rather than on performance alone. And care exists first for the one cared for. Slowness kept for the carer’s formation, at the cost of the person needing care, treats a face as a function. The caution runs in both directions: withholding a tool that would truly serve one’s students or patients, in order to preserve a practice for one’s own sake, fails the same way.
The first post’s caution returns here. A community can only protect formative limits it still recognizes. Asking of any limit whether it opens to relationship, forms a capacity, and can change a person is itself one of the practices that keeps the recognition alive, the kind of shared deliberation that, in the encyclical’s image, strikes ideas together like flint until understanding is kindled (§140).
Conclusion
The encyclical’s two commitments, to alleviate suffering and to refuse the reduction of every limit to a defect, are not a contradiction but a twofold task. Judgment ends the limits that harm; discernment weighs the goods that remain; and the encyclical supplies the marks for that discernment. A limit that opens to relationship, forms a capacity, and can change the person deserves protection. A limit that isolates, deforms, or merely delays does not. The marks have their own limit. They weigh practices one at a time, but some formation belongs to the rhythm of an environment as a whole. A thousand small frictions can each bear no mark, and yet removing them all leaves an environment with no waiting anywhere. That environmental form of the question is the one that remains from the first post: how formation can happen in communities where AI increasingly mediates how we perceive, deliberate, and act. That remains for the next post in this series.
References
- Mark Graves, “Formed Through Limitation: Amplifying Magnifica Humanitas,” AI and Faith (June 25, 2026). https://aiandfaith.org/insights/formed-magnifica-humanitas/ ↑
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
