In early May 2026, Ralston College convened renowned thinkers and scholars for a symposium entitled AI and the Battle for the Soul.
This day-long engagement directly addressed the most pressing questions raised by technological advancement, education, and ultimately, civilization itself. Following Dr Iain McGilchrist’s opening lecture, Jonathan Pageau delivered the symposium’s second address: Whom Does AI Serve? Sacrifice in a Digital Age.
Through his work as an Orthodox iconographer, writer, and symbolic thinker, Jonathan Pageau has devoted much of his life to exploring the enduring patterns of myth and the interpretative structures through which human beings understand reality. Drawing on Scripture, ancient mythology, and poetry, he argues that the questions raised by AI directly concern human purpose and meaning. In this lecture, he asks the fundamental question: Who, or what, does AI serve?
Through the stories of Prometheus, the Holy Grail, Moloch, and the Tower of Babel, Pageau makes the case that the questions raised by artificial intelligence go well beyond technological capability alone. Instead, they concern the ends toward which technological power is directed, the sacrifices such pursuits inevitably entail, and what our inventions ultimately reveal about ourselves. By recovering the symbolic imagination through which earlier generations understood the nature of power and purpose, he calls on us to recognize the moral and spiritual consequences of the civilization we are creating through them.
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