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Thomas Aquinas, Artificial Intelligence, and AI-Generated Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2025
Abstract
This article explores how AI-generated music challenges traditional theological understandings of creativity, spirituality, and the soul. By engaging the theological traditions of analogy and participation developed by Thomas Aquinas, Thomas de Vio Cajetan, and Francisco Suárez, this article reconsiders whether AI-generated music generates emotions and spiritual significances in listeners and whether it might disclose something meaningful about the nature of divine creativity. Rather than arguing AI music is either a technological innovation or artistic threat, this article suggests various frameworks of analogy, participation, and pneumatology to create a better theological discernment on how divine creativity works through secondary causes within creation. The exploration concludes in proposing a ‘theology of digital transcendence’ – a framework for understanding how computational creativity participates in the broader economy of divine creation.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
References
1 Marius Dorobantu, ‘Artificial Intelligence as a Testing Ground for Key Theological Questions’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 57, no. 4 (December 2022), 984.
2 Antje Jackelén, ‘Technology, Theology, and Spirituality in the Digital Age’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 56, no. 1 (March 2021), 7–9.
3 Adam Eric Berkowitz, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Musicking: A Philosophical Inquiry’, Music Perception, 41, no. 5 (2024), 394.
4 Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard M. Isaacson, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 5–7.
5 Berkowitz, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Musicking’, 395.
6 Ting Guo, ‘Spirituality as Reconceptualisation of the Self: Alan Turing and His Pioneering Ideas on Artificial Intelligence’, Culture and Religion, 16, no. 3 (2015), 273.
7 Ibid., 274. Guo is here explicating Eddington’s view rather than making her own philosophical claim. The passage follows Guo’s explanation: ‘Eddington explains that in order to understand the physical world through physics and mathematics, it must be translated into pointers and indicators, such as measurements and abstract models. We are then able to deduce, calculate and extrapolate. However, Eddington argued that this only gives us an understanding of those pointers and indicators, not of the physical world itself’. See Eddington, NOPW, 256–8.
8 Berkowitz, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Musicking’, 396–397.
9 Ibid., 394.
10 Ibid., 396.
11 Scott H. Hawley, ‘Challenges for an Ontology of Artificial Intelligence’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 71, no. 2 (June 2019), 87.
12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 13, a. 5.
13 Ibid., I, q. 13, a. 5, co.
14 See Thomas de Vio Cajetan, De Nominum Analogia, ed. P. N. Zammit (Rome: Angelicum, 1934); for contemporary analysis, see Cajetan Cuddy OP, ‘Note: The Thomist Tradition and the Problems of Analogy—to Be a Thomist’, To Be a Thomist, 26 July 2024, https://www.athomist.com/articles/thomist-tradition-and-problems-of-analogy.14 Andrew Davison, ‘Machine Learning and Theological Traditions of Analogy’, Modern Theology, 37, no. 2 (2021), 263.
15 The discussion of Cajetan’s concept of ‘improper proportionality’ draws on Cajetan Cuddy OP, ‘Note: The Thomist Tradition and the Problems of Analogy—to Be a Thomist,’ To Be a Thomist, July 26, 2024, https://www.athomist.com/articles/thomist-tradition-and-problems-of-analogy. As Andrew Davison notes, this view of analogy ‘makes weak claims ... because metaphor rests as much (or more) on the ingenuity of the speaker as on a reality shared between the matters that are compared.’ Andrew Davison, “Machine Learning and Theological Traditions of Analogy,” Modern Theology 37, no. 2 (2021): 263.
16 Ibid., 265.
17 Ibid., 268.
18 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 44, a. 1.
19 Summa Theologiae, I, q. 44, a. 1
20 Ibid., I, q. 2, a. 3, co.
21 Ibid.
22 Patrick Xavier Gardner, ‘The Metaphysics of Meaning: Aquinas and the Meaning of Life’, New Blackfriars, 105 (2024), 411.
23 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei, trans. by English Dominican Fathers (Westminster: The Newman Press, 1952), 3.15.
24 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. by Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, W. Edmund Thirlkel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), II.14.8.
25 Edmund Michael Lazzari, ‘AI/ML Chatbots’ Souls, or Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye’, New Blackfriars, 105, no. 1 (2024), 47-60.
26 Ibid., 56-57. Lazzari writes: ‘For St. Thomas, all material beings are compositions of matter and form... Through investigation, human beings mentally abstract the form from its particular matter in the being and know the abstracted form (which St. Thomas calls the ‘intelligible species’) in the mind... It is precisely because of the abstraction from particular matter and the knowledge of the immaterial abstracted intelligible species that St. Thomas argues that human beings have immaterial souls.’
27 Ibid., 56. Lazzari adopts Emily Bender’s characterization of AI systems as ‘stochastic parrots’ that produce ‘statistically likely strings of texts’ without genuine predication. See Emily M. Bender et al., ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’ FAccT (2021): 610-23.
28 Mark Coeckelbergh, ‘The Spirit in the Network: Models for Spirituality in a Technological Culture’, Zygon, 45, no. 4 (2010), 957–978.
29 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 105, a. 5.
30 Lazzari, ‘AI/ML Chatbots’ Souls’, 58–59.
31 Lluís Oviedo, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Theology: Looking for a Positive—But Not Uncritical—Reception’, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 57, no. 4 (December 2022), 939, 949.
32 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 14, a. 8, co.
33 Ibid.; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 44, a. 3, co.
34 Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 97–124.
35 Lazzari, ‘AI/ML Chatbots’ Souls’, 56–58.
36 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 45, a. 5, co. 35
37 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 5.1; cf. Summa Theologiae I, q. 44, a. 3; De veritate 2.1, ad. 6. See Gardner, ‘The Metaphysics of Meaning’, 412–414.
38 Selcuk Acar, ‘Creativity Assessment, Research, and Practice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’, Creativity Research Journal, 37, no. 2 (2025), 181–187.
39 Sacrosanctum Concilium, §112; Edward Foley, Ritual Music: Studies in Liturgical Musicology (Beltsville, MD: Pastoral Press, 1995), pp. 45–67.
40 Michael Stephen Burdett, ‘Proximate and Ultimate Concerns in Christian Ethical Responses to Artificial Intelligence’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 36, no. 3 (2023), 638–639.
41 Karla Ortiz, testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee <https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023-07-12_pm_-_testimony_-_ortiz.pdf> [accessed 12 July 2023]
42 Burdett, ‘Proximate and Ultimate Concerns’, 637.
43 Lazzari, ‘AI/ML Chatbots’ Souls’, 58–59.
44 Lanre Bakare, ‘An AI-generated band got 1 m plays on Spotify. Now music insiders say listeners should be warned’, The Guardian <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/an-ai-generated-band-got-1m-plays-on-spotify-now-music-insiders-say-listeners-should-be-warned> [accessed 14 July 2025]
45 Ibid.
46 Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, trans. Zachary Hayes (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1997), n. 12, p. 49.
47 Jackelén, ‘Technology, Theology, and Spirituality in the Digital Age’, 16–17.