In the summer of 1830, Joseph Smith began work on what he referred to as one of the three branches of his prophetic calling: a new translation of the Old and New Testaments. By November, John Whitmer was transcribing Joseph’s dictation, and he recorded these words known to us as Moses 6:6-7.
A book of remembrance was kept in … the Language of Adam for it was given unto as many as called upon God to write with the finger of inspiration and by them their children were taught to read and write having a language which was pure and undefiled now this was in the beginning which shall be in the end of the world”
The syntax is a little ambiguous. The question is, what does the “this” refer to? What was in the beginning and will be in the end of the world?
Eighteen months later, John Whitmer took up his pen again as Joseph made revisions to his earlier edits of Genesis. Coming to Moses 6, Joseph added a word which clarifies the vague demonstrative pronoun, “this.” His amendment reads this way: “[Adam’s] children” had “a language which was pure and undefiled. Now this…priesthood which was in the beginning shall be in the end.”
Whether the textual pairing of language and priesthood is meant as a doctrinal pairing I can’t say. However, the textual pairing is certainly richly suggestive. For priesthood, like the conception of language I want to outline today, brings two concepts into juxtaposition: love and presence. When we talk about the eternal priesthood, the priesthood of the temple and sacramentalism, the priesthood associated with Elijah the prophet, we are specifically invoking a power that turns children’s hearts to their fathers and fathers’ hearts to their children, binding them in love. Priesthood functions to conquer distance, to bridge both space and time and bring us back into one another’s presence, into communion and mutual encounter. So does love; and so, I want to argue, does language. Language is how finite individuals, bounded as we are by material shape and form and exteriors, encounter each other to constitute mutual presence, mutual encounter. This function—or at least this aspiration—of language may be why the book of Moses suggests pure language is a priesthood.
I hope to make clear today what I believe to be non-replicable about language understood in this way, as essential to our divinely authored humanity, and essential to the kind of knowledge of which organized intelligence is capable.
So what I am not doing today is to belabor the dangers of a culture overly reliant upon social media, technology, or artificial intelligence. I think those dangers to human thriving and human community are by now more than apparent to all. The benefits available via artificial intelligence are undeniable as well.
I want instead to propose a reinvigorated explication of the divinely human as our best defense against the indubitable assaults on humanity that over-reliance on technology already portend. And I want to frame that defense as intrinsic to the Latter-day Saint understanding of two dimensions of our humanity, in particular. What is special about human language? How is that language tied to love? And I want to suggest how LDS doctrine can help us articulate, celebrate, and preserve a sacred understanding of these two aspects of our humanity
That takes us back to Moses 6. Why was a paramount impulse in the Restoration—as in many traditions outside our own, this ever-present dream of an Adamic language. And how does AI move us toward or away from the capabilities of language in its most human—and I would say, in its most sacral—dimension?
Nothing is more fundamental to human nature, to human intelligence, than for one human intelligence to willingly enter into relation with another human being or beings.
In the great intercessory prayer, Jesus prays that his disciples “may be one, as we are one” (John 17:11). The Trinity has long served Christians as the model of perfect, loving community. Latter-day Saints are often quite comfortable with the general consensus that we are not Trinitarians. And admittedly we are not in the classically theistic sense. Yet the doctrine does have something to teach us. The medieval theologian Richard of St Victor (ca. 1100–1173) believed the trinity was logically necessary to love’s fullest expression. Love must be interpersonal by definition, he reasoned, so there must be at least two persons in relationship. However, in order for those two persons to be united in a shared outgoing of their love, they must have in common a third object to love jointly. Hence a necessary third person completes the divine loving community. We experience this truth at the simplest level when we say to a loved one, oh look at that shooting star! Oh, yes, I see it; isn’t that beautiful. Or with heightened significance, it is the shared love of two parents for a child that fosters a stronger bond of love between those two. The shared gaze of two parents upon a newborn that constitutes annew level of shared love that replicates the love found it St Victor’s Trinity. Two persons can love reciprocally. A community requires more than two, however, to make possible the fullest achievement of love: shared loving of the other. this is the interpersonal love that the trinity enacts. This is the aspiration Jesus bequeaths to his disciples in the prayer John records.
Paul referred to Christian communities as a “colony of heaven,” and there is more than metaphorical significance to the term. The community that followers of Christ constitute is not an incidental feature of the path of discipleship. It is the very constituting of that kingdom of heaven that many Christians have misconstrued to be the reward at the end.
Now several important insights derive from St Victor’s proposition. 1) Love can only exist interpersonally, and 2) it attains its highest expression in a community. And 3) a community consists of more than two persons.
But relationship has two prerequisites: boundedness, and a way across that boundedness. Love and language are implicated in both: Finitude and physicality are not obstacles to love—they are its precondition.
“The longing for relation” of which the mystic Martin Buber wrote, the “arrow of love” described in the Song of Songs, moves us feelingly in the direction of an imagined physical form. Love is the conquest of distance—and we calibrate love by the distance that embodied persons manage to elide. The language of affection and disaffection rely upon metaphors of special proximity: we feel “close” to someone of whom we are particularly fond, while one whose affection has waned has grown “distant.” The command to love one’s “neighbor” is rooted in the nearness that genuine charity creates—which Jesus recognizes by challenging his hearers to the more strenuous demand of becoming effectual neighbors to those separated from us by cultural or physical distance.
Some conceptions of romantic love—and some of divine union—imagine a blurring of identity, a merging into shared oneness as the ultimate consummation. However, the premium that Christianity places on embodiment (as evident in human creation and the Incarnation alike) should dispel that impulse so rooted in dreams of mystical union and romantic yearning alike. God did not conceal his divinity and majesty in a derivative material form. The Incarnation, John insisted time and again, was God’s living witness that the fullest, most perfect, most complete version of the divine IS the fleshly, material, embodied form, who weeps, eats bread, laughs, hungers, suffers, and washes his friends’ feet. (That mistake about condescension threw Christianity off course seventeen centuries ago and we repeat it at our peril).
“We enjoy being present to others,” writes Stephen Webb with counterintuitive insight, “because we take pleasure in the way that other bodies resist us and only gradually receive us. … Matter … is the means by which we come to know ourselves by engaging true otherness.”
Any love that is other than narcissistic love recognizes, celebrates, and reverences distinctness and difference from the other. Emmanuel Levinas captures the gravity of this misapprehension: “Communication [and a fortiori love] if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings.” John Durham Peters’ commentary on that insight deserves ample quoting:
The body is our existence, not our container. … The body is not a vehicle to be cast off, it is in part the homeland to which we are traveling. … That any achievement of communion consists in a concert of differences is a blessing rather than a curse. … To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body. … The paradox of love is its concrete boundedness and the universality of its demands. Because we can share our mortal time and touch only with some and not all, presence becomes the closest thing there is to a bridge across the chasm.
The boundedness of our body, and perhaps of God’s, is the essential precondition for whatever bridges of love we construct.
Let me push that possibility about God’s boundedness further:
Ian McGilchrist relates how the physicist Leo Szilard announced to his fellow physicist Hans Bethe that he planned to start keeping a diary.
“‘I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.’ ‘Don’t you think God knows the facts? ’ Bethe asked. ‘Yes’, said Szilard. ‘He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.’”
I love that story, in part because I think as Latter-day Saints we can detect a Restoration truth behind the wry humor.
The philosophical tradition, especially before Kant, and classical theism generally, presuppose that human embodiment, sensory mechanisms, situatedness in space and time, place limits on omniscience (whether the omniscience attributed to God or to a suprahuman technology, such as AI or ASI). The problem with this perennial misguided dream is that there is no such thing—even for God—as a “view from nowhere,” in Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase. Teppo Fellin makes the argument that it is in fact a particular perspective that actually constitutes, rather than delimits, knowledge. All “organisms operate in their own ‘Umwelt’ and surrounding. … Perception and vision are species-specific, directed, and expressive,” not “singular, linear, representative, and objective.” There is no “unique, all-seeing vantage point for perception. … Perception necessarily originates from a perspective, or point of view.” All perception, in other words, is “[directed] perception.” And as Mark Johnson convincingly illustrates, “any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world.”
Those “imaginative structures” are primarily the metaphors by which we constitute as well as communicate meaning—metaphors that turn out to “make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience of the world.” The Objectivist orientation according to which there is a correct “‘God’s-Eye-View’ of what the world is really like” is no longer tenable. Innumerable ways in which we unself-consciously organize experience derive from bodily immersion in a physical universe. We think of quantity in terms of verticality (more is always up); even things that are not spatial are “in” or “out” (I let my breath out, but I also leave details out). Force, containment, linearity, balance and a thousand other schemata derive from our bodily experience and shape how we make meaning. “The body,” it turns out, “is in the mind.” Or as Ian McGilchrist summarizes, “All meaning arises from personal experience in the body…. The meaning of language [in particular] begins and ends in the body – where it ‘cashes out’ in experience.”
But doesn’t language bypass the body? Isn’t language precisely the mechanism by which bodily situatedness is overcome, transcended? That is a widespread view, represented by the physicist David Deutsch who writes that “we only ever experience symbols.” My view, to paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, is that this statement is so absurd that it doesn’t even rise to the level of being wrong. To think such a thing is to miss the import of the Incarnation—and of our incarnation. There merest experience of the color red gives the lie to the phantasy that we have our being in a world of symbols only. One can exhaust the million words in the English language and never come within a light year of describing what it is to experience the red of a glowing coal. It is not the insufficiency of vocabulary that falls short, or the limitations of grammar that fail. The problem is in mistaking of what language does.
Physicists and biologists and neuroscientists and a good number of philosophers are converging on the recognition that reality—at its most fundamental level—is encounter; it is experiential, relational. “Sensible things” constitute “the only reality” we can actually know, wrote William James. “Process must be… fundamental” write John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson. Consciousness is irreducible and was present before matter, writes Colin McGinn; it is not emergent insists Edwin Schrödinger. Niels Bohr said physics properly aspires to track relations, not a supposed real essence; And so forth. What these statements have in common is the primacy of experienced reality over supposedly abstract unembodied truths that can be apprehended independently of the way our minds half-perceive and half create the world in a process of interaction. It is getting harder and harder to sustain the mechanistic, objectivist, materialist view of human identity or the cosmos. “Direct experience is … the only knowledge we ever fully have,” writes Bryan Magee.
So we have two general possibilities at hand. We are always at one remove from reality, and signs and texts and data transfers are the nearest we can get to it. In this view, language is a mere “instrument to encode information.” Or we can see in language a higher task of “bring[ing] about revelation-and-connection” in Charles Taylor’s optimistic vision. In this view, language has the power to fulfill our primal yearning for “Cosmic connection.” George Steiner’s magnificent book, Real Presences, is a prolonged defense of that latter idea ((as well as a rebuttal to the ethical nihilism of poststructuralism generally). Language, he writes,—that is, human language, like human intelligence generally—presupposes a real presence behind it: the birthing of relation, comic connection, a kind of priesthood of interconnection.
We can reduce language to verbal signs, or to data and simulacrums of experience: but language in its most fundamental dimension is the portal to encounter, not an endless play of signs. This premise is what Steiner calls “a wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, …which is to say … we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, [in] a wager on transcendence. This wager …predicates the presence of a realness, of a ‘substantiation’ (the theological reach of this word is obvious) within language and form.” That’s a complicated claim: let me try to illustrate.
We see the best example of what Steiner is saying in the case of scripture. And at this point I am going to rely upon a source often quoted by Elder Neal Maxwell: the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer. Some Christians, he notes, see scripture as simply the historical reactions—inspired or otherwise--of certain individuals to the fact of Christ. Others take the words of scripture themselves as constituting the truth behind the deeds and teachings. However, both of these positions would fail the test of how scripture grounds a living faith. Scripture is more than a set of propositions, or the record of past reactions to a set of propositions. Scripture must be the occasion for our own encounter with a living Christ. That is the principal function and majesty of scripture. Any reduction to historical artifact or a data stream makes of scripture just one more historical chronicle. And any substitution of the text for Christ himself is idolatry. Scripture—and perhaps this is what Joseph was reaching toward in the book of Moses with relating a pure language to priesthood—scripture is not a series of symbols we subject to textual decoding. Scripture is, ideally, the erasure of distance, a revelatory holy of holies in which we encounter the presence of God like a burning bush. Or as the theologian George Tyrell wrote, “Revelation is not a statement but a showing.” (I am reminded by his language of the fact that what I consider the greatest religious text outside the canonical works is the visionary account of the medieval nun Julian of Norwich, who called her work “the showings of Jesus Christ.)
Steiners point, I believe, is that scripture is just a limit case of language. “Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis,” a wager on transcendence.
Literature and art more generally come closest to the limit case of scripture. This is because as with scripture, there is no “aboutness” in art. You can’t say what Beethoven’s fifth symphony is “about,” and you can say what a peom is about only in the most trivial sense. This is one of the monstrous fallacies of our day, a truth that is disappearing in the rush toward AI, and the operations by which intelligence and language alike are being trivialized and redefined as mechanisms of information rather than mediums of love and presence. Let me illustrate with a personal example if I may.
When I was sixteen, the first religious experience of which I have memory was reading a classic which this generation knows only as a musical. You remember the setting? A convict, now an escaped criminal, has stolen silver from a bishop’s palace. He doesn’t make it far before he is apprehended. He is dragged to the scene of the crime, so that the bishop can confirm his ownership of the stolen goods. I quote from the text:
“The door opened…. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes. The other was Jean Valjean.” The bishop advanced to the group “as quickly as his great age permitted. ‘Ah! Here you are! He exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. ‘I am glad to see you. [But] how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with the forks and spoons [I gave you]?’ Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.
…The gendarme retired…The bishop drew near to the convict and said, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belove to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you, …and give it to God.”
Jean Valjean was no more bewildered in that moment that I. I was … ambushed. That is my word for the suddenness with which I experienced the same moment of grace, as did Jean Valjean.
No master plots or Wikipedia entry or second-hand experience of my encounter would have been more than a desiccated skin of the original, living entity that we call Les Miserable. (I had a comparable experience at the same age, reading Paradise Lost: but don’t wait for the musical!) As McGilchrist summarizes, “The work of art exists precisely to get beyond representation, to presence.” If you paraphrase a poem, you can capture everything—except the poem.
Language, like scripture, does not exist primarily to convey information. It can do so only as a pale derivative of its principal function of registering the particularity of experience and bringing disparate consciousnesses into relation. It is a substitute—but never an adequate substitute—for experience or relationship. Consider for a moment the telling fact that, from an evolutionary point of view, poetry, music, art in general, have no purpose. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby direct the center for evolutionary psychology at UC Santa Barbara. They find themselves stumped in making sense of the humanities.
“Almost all the phenomena that are central to the humanities are puzzling anomalies from an evolutionary perspective…. In order to navigate the world successfully, one needs accurate information. Survival depends on it.” And yet, they note, the arts are foundational to all culture. Why? Maybe Star Trek’s character “Seven-of-Nine” got it right. Survival is not enough. Survival, proficiency, competence—these are far from enough. The highest purposes of language lie elsewhere.
Marilynne Robinson reminds us that “Humanists [and the term is not limited to English majors] are the curators, in their own persons, of …, language, …, and thought. The argument everywhere now is that the purpose of should be the training of workers for the future economy. So the variety of learning offered should be curtailed and the richness of any student’s education should be depleted, to produce globally a Benthamite uniformity of aspiration and competence?”
What we want to want, what desires and ends we cultivate, depend upon our hierarchies of values. And those values are reflected in what McGilchrist calls our hierarchies of attention. What do we attend to primarily?
Perhaps the problem we should be debating is not so much when or whether AI will emulate human intelligence—but to what extent our ideal of intelligence—and certainly our educational ideals—are already emulating AI. Human intelligence depends upon human ways of constructing “hierarchies of attention.
The task of the humanities is to challenge and refine and inspire the best, the most morally and aesthetically and spiritually edifying hierarchies of attention.
That means we show preference for some kinds of experience over other kinds of experience, and some kinds of knowing over other kinds of knowing.
Most languages convey, in this regard, what English does not. Saber vs. conocer, or Wissen vs. kennen. The first is a merely propositional knowledge. Data-driven knowledge. The second is experiential knowledge; The knowledge of personal encounter and presence. This difference seems implicit in Christ’s words that many who claim to know Christ, never knew Christ. McGilchrist captures this difference powerfully in his description of left brain thinking as analytic, syntax oriented, linear and logical, in sum the left brain MAPS reality, RE-Presents reality at one remove. And right brain thinking is organic, wholistic, gestalt-driven, value-informed, meaning driven, and as such it puts us in communion WITH reality; in McGilchrist’s language, it PRESENCES reality. Our society is at present obsessed with the first. Educational systems universally have reoriented around left-brain ways of engaging the world. The Humanities presented a counterbalancing influence which is fast fading.
“this overconfidence in the left hemisphere point of view on the world has twice before heralded the demise of a civilization, and I believe it is doing so for the third time as you read these words.” He words sound overly dramatic, but I share his concern
Yuval Harari ends his ambitious history of the world, Sapiens, with this warning:
the real question facing us is … ‘What do we want to want?’… Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
Can I put this in entirely different language? I have tried to make a foundational argument for the following principle: To paraphrase Michael Gazzaniga, we need to make the humanities the baking soda, not the frosting, of our educational systems. Obviously, education in or outside church institutions needs to be by accomplished through reason and faith, study occurring against a background of discipleship, scripture study, prayer and service. Equally obviously, one can hope, educational institutions will fulfill their educational purposes as institutions of learning—which means they cannot abdicate their responsibility to be stewards over the vital humanistic component of education. Neither can educators responsibly concede an ever-increasing dominion to AI approaches, believing that prayer and scriptures will compensate for the deficit.
This address was originally delivered at Organized Intelligence on November 4th, 2025.
