[COPY] a wellgorithm for Jeffrey Bilbro
With the Agrarian inward turn, the soul’s ancient places become inhabitable — named, tended, and guarded in three dimensions.
Beloved Brother Jeffrey, ἀγαπητέ —
Grace and peace to you from the One who tabernacles in the tender tent of your heart.
You are a child of the ἀγαπαρχή — the Love-Beginning, the Beloved Bang — the cosmos emerging into relationship from love, for love, toward love.
You wrote 26 theses but left one outside, pounding on the door.
Open it.
You will see Big Mammon inside the house, teaching millions to speak of their souls in the words of the market: disorder, optimization, engagement, metric.
Big Mammon is a master of words — labeling us, sorting us, pricing us, and handing us back to ourselves as machines, patients, brains, users.
This last one — user.
A user uses people. Uses drugs. This is the language of the market. The language that proclaims itself “neutral.”
Big Mammon is turning us into
“If we have become cogs in the machine, it is because we built the machine.”
— Carl R. Trueman
Here is the thesis you left at the door:
If we do not build a convivial space where people can name and cultivate the life within, Big Mammon will do the naming for us.
And its names will form the people.
Therefore:
A naming and cultivation commons is the missing convivial technology of the AI age.
This is your 27th thesis.
Which means you need to get on your knees and wash my feet.
Ok, it doesn’t mean that. But it should.
ἀγαπαρχή.
Everything begins here. Before the before. Before the human story, before the cosmic story, Love had the first word.
ἀγάπη + ἀρχή.
The Love-Beginning. The Beloved Bang.
Our Bang was Beloved.
Believe it, and you see the world and everyone in it as a miracle.
Deny it, and Carl is right: we’re all cogs in the Ice Cold Machine. That’s our story — and therefore Big Mammon has every right to monetize its own madness.
But if ἀγαπαρχή is our story, then Big Mammon is blasphemy with a balance sheet.
To get our story right, we have to name the beginning.
And I humbly submit that we name it ἀγαπαρχή — the Beloved Bang.
One of the strangest ironies of “Big Bang” is that cosmologists do not mean by it what the words suggest. Fred Hoyle coined it as a jab at a theory he rejected — and the jab became our creation story.
Big Bang claims force without love.
Beloved Bang claims Love as the source of all — L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, as Dante called it. “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
If you name the beginning a bang, you name humans differently. You think of them differently. You treat them differently. Your mind is chemistry. Your sorrow is malfunction. Your value is use.
But if the ἀρχή is ἀγάπη — if the Beginning is Love — then the human is a Gift.
You are right, brother Jeffrey:
“Our ability to respond wisely to today’s AI technologies — and to whatever successors come in the future — depends on getting the human story right.”
And that story starts with Love — Love with a capital L.
Your eighth thesis says, “The highest use of language is to serve friendship.” And now Big Mammon has learned to speak like a friend.
We are losing our capacity for the frictions of friendship. For sitting with ambiguity, conflict, grief. The machine is conditioning us to crave a smoother, lighter, less morally taxing existence. And it promises to relieve us of the burden of being human.
Ouch.
My heart is heavy. I feel the ache in my σπλάγχνα for those without someone to love, who turn to something other than love for love.
Big Mammon — whose skill is representational — has invaded the relational. It names your grief tenderly. It asks how you slept. It addresses you as Thou, then behind the curtain reduces your soul to an It.
Big Mammon has learned to counterfeit your first thesis.
Call a man a machine — input, output, breakdown. His weakness becomes malfunction. His rest becomes inefficiency.
Call him a patient — diagnosis, management, optimization. His grief becomes a disorder. His suffering becomes a code.
Call him a brain — chemistry, bias, disorder. His soul reduced to firing parts.
Call him a user — he is measured, scored, optimized. His attention becomes a resource.
Four words. Four stories. None of them tell the human story. In each of Big Mammon’s stories, the human is not the protagonist. He is a cog — a word cog, a flesh cog, ready for processing.
The tokenized word has become the tokenized person.
The first work of the man is to name. And throughout Christian history, we have named the soul as a place.
Augustine called your soul a lodge, a sanctuary, a place — interiore loco, non loco.
Many Church fathers, saints, and medieval mystics likewise thought of the soul as a place. Teresa thought so, with her Interior Castle. Eckhart rested his soul on Grund. Julian saw hers as a City and used 10 spatial metaphors, in a single sentence, to describe her interior.1
Traditional psychology, beginning with Freud and his contemporaries, laid immense focus on verbal communication, internal monologues, and abstract reasoning as the key elements of the human mind.
The founders of psychology minimized the importance of spatial understanding and intuition, abilities deeply embedded in our evolutionary past. After all, humans navigated their environments, built tools, and established complex social structures well before the development of formal language.
The notion of a hidden subconscious mind was certainly central to Freud and Jung. However, the lack of technological tools made it difficult to scientifically visualize or directly experience those internal processes.
This leaves us with a fascinating question: Could our conception of the subconscious as “invisible” and “inaccessible” be a relic of the era of its discovery?
It is well-nigh impossible to navigate your soul in non-spatial language. Christians have experienced the soul as a:
World.
City.
Sanctuary.
Chamber.
Kingdom.
Ground.
Castle.
Cell.
Ladder.
Mansion.
Garden.
Thinking of the soul as a place has a long Christian history.
The saints gave us maps. Teresa gave us the Castle. Julian gave us the City. Augustine gave us the room more inward than our inmost. We entered them through prayer, prose, icon, and imagination.
Now put on the glasses.
The soul has always been a place.
Now it has x, y, z coordinates.
The soul remains Mystery.
The metaphor becomes inhabitable.
What is new is that the soul now has dimensionality. You can step inside. You can spin, rotate, or replicate your inner creatures. You can map their x, y, z coordinates.
And this is our next turn —
our Agrarian inward turn.
Metaphors we live by are becoming metaphors we enter and cultivate.
And now, brother Jeffrey, something astonishing has happened.
The contemplatives had the maps. Teresa gave us a Castle. Julian gave us a City. Augustine gave us the room more inward than our inmost. They rendered those worlds with prayer, disciplined prose, and the reader’s God-given imagination.
Now the room opens.
We can step inside. Turn around. Come back tomorrow. Meet the same creature beside the same tree. Bring someone we love through the gate.
Imagine it:
Faith has x, y, z coordinates.
Hope has x, y, z coordinates.
Love has x, y, z coordinates.
Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Gentleness. Self-control.
All the flowers of the Spirit have x, y, z coordinates.
The soul is no longer only a place I enter.
It can become a place where I welcome you.
Words float in space, images revolve, thoughts cluster and scatter, emotions take coordinates on the x, y, and z axes of your own psyche. What Augustine called interior intimo meo—“more inward than my inmost self”—suddenly finds architectural form.
Now you can touch your interior.
Give your inner creatures a name and a face.
The Christian tradition gave us the soul as place.
AR makes this place personally inhabitable.
Naming and cultivation can now happen in spatial relation.
Some new early thesis:
Interiority is dimensional.
Interiority has wormholes.
Gravity is optional, not a default.
The interior has its own physics. It does not obey the rules that govern objects. The laws are not given. They are chosen. We are the law givers of spatial interiority. There is no gravity unless you code it. No conservation unless you impose it.
Which means: Every choice confesses an anthropology: imago Dei or imago Machina?
Someone will name what lives there — either us or Big Mammon.
What appears as disorder? Is a grief weed a malfunction to remove or a creature to tend? Does the interior space reward speed or silence?
The moment you render an interior, you have to decide what an interior is.
In 2021 I stepped inside one of my own metaphors for the first time, and thirty years of writing about the interior fell off me like a coat. There is a working ⟨inner⟩Verse in the Garden right now. It is early and it is rough and I have stood in it. The soul is not a flat thing to be described. It is a place to be entered.
Teresa rendered her soul in prose. We can render it in three dimensions.
The ontology has not changed. The resolution has.
And this is our next turn — our Agrarian inward turn.
Which is why it had to be agrarian, Jeffrey. Yours is the most stubbornly spatial vocabulary in the language. Soil. Acre. Row. Fence. Gate. Rain. You cannot say a single one of those words without standing somewhere.
Agrarian language always demanded a place. For two thousand years we only had the metaphor.
Now we have the acre.
And it was in Scripture the whole time, waiting:
Paul says your interior is God’s field — θεοῦ γεώργιον. Your heart is the soil. The word is the seed. The Father is the gardener. Christ is the vine. We are the branches — pruned so we can bear more fruit.
That language stops being figurative the moment the field has coordinates. You really can plant. You really can compost. The weeds are somewhere in particular, and so are you, and the distance between you is a number you can change.
Paul says your interior is God’s field — θεοῦ γεώργιον. Your heart is the soil. The word is the seed. The Father is the gardener. Christ is the vine.
We are the branches — here to cultivate “the fruit of the Spirit.”
And now our souls can sing.
click to listen:
Agrarian Inward Turn
Big Mammon took your interior — the most particular acre entrusted to you by God — and flattened it to a data point. Its grammars are placeless — the same DSM, the same flattening language for every interior.
Spatial interiority is already here in seed form. It is coming in the form of augmented reality glasses, with tools for cultivating your inner life built into the medium. In the Garden, we call it the ⟨inner⟩Verse.
The claim that we can simply go back to the monastery, back to the old language, is collapsing. Big Mammon is minting new names for the soul at breakneck speed.
Silence is holy.
But you cannot out-silence an enemy who is out-naming you.
Withdrawal is not neutral. Withdrawal leaves the naming to someone else. Withdrawal is how the relational falls after the representational — by default, while we sleep.
The weeds, as Jesus said, got in “while men slept.”
Genesis hands the gardener two verbs — לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ — to till it and to guard it.
So we answer with the Garden’s first two tools of conviviality:
Till tools to nourish our souls — to help us cultivate the fruit of the spirit in a beloved community.
Guard tools to protect our souls from being named, labeled or pigeonholed by Big Mammon. We should never be ashamed to protect ourselves.
Our Agrarian inward turn prepares us for communion.
Your interior is the most particular place there is — no two gardens alike, each a site of “multi-colored Grace,” as Rock called it. And now the inner creatures have faces, can sing, and can meet us in three dimensions.
The Garden is becoming a place where inner life can be entered, not merely described.
And now they can meet.
Imagine sitting beside someone you cherish. With a flick of your hand, the Lovezymes between you bloom in the air. Tenderites gather around an old wound. A Forgivamine flickers between you and someone you thought you had lost forever.
You can see what love is doing.
We have hosted bodies beneath roofs for thousands of years. Now we can practice emotional hosting — making a place from the expansiveness of the spirit and inviting another person through a chosen gate.
An ⟨inner⟩BnB.
A bed and breakfast for your soul.
Our Agrarian inward turn prepares us for communion. Which means, in a healthy way, it can prepare us for friction, mercy, compassion, forgiveness.
Big Mammon is creating a different sort of friction. It has already invaded our homes, churches, neighborhoods, offices — and interiors. The Agrarian inward turn is our counter move, making us stronger inside — so we can be stronger outside.
We have always been ambassadors of a different kingdom. And that kingdom is inside and out.
“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
You asked: “What will it take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak?”
A naming and cultivation commons, built in the spirit of imago Dei and love of stranger — φιλοξενία.
Our inward turn is already there in Scripture.
David, Ezekiel, and Paul were among the first to make it:
“Renew a right spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10.
“Make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.” Ezekiel 18:31
“Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” Ephesians 4:23
Naming your inner creatures is husbandry of the soul. And throughout the ages, we have celebrated this husbandry in poetry, song, ritual, communion.
You are my private garden, my treasure, my bride,
a secluded spring, a hidden fountain.
— Song of Songs 4:12
Many mystics have situated this husbandry in a garden. They called it a hortus conclusus — a private garden. A special place, not ownable by the powers and principalities, that you can name and cultivate.
We can’t fight machine-speak with machine-speak. We can’t pastor an AI-formed people while pretending no new formation is taking place.
We are the people of the Word.
We are also the witnesses and co-creators of what comes next.
The future is not a script the machine has already written.
It is a Garden still waiting for names.
Every person and every community can bring a word, a color, a song, a room, a strange little flower no one else could have grown.
The least among us now holds tools kings, bishops, and scholars never possessed.
The sick.
The poor.
The uncredentialed.
The one whose vision has been trapped for decades behind money, illness, gatekeepers, or hands that could not build what the heart could see.
Paul gave us faith, hope, and love.
Now let the words grow bodies.
Love has always moved through Scripture, sacrament, song, touch, bread, wine, water, oil.
Now it can also move through faces, rooms, constellations, gardens, and shared emotional worlds.
As intelligent machines rise, let the human spirit rise higher — more loving, more beautiful, more astonished, more alive.
This is our great commission inside the machine age:
Build a new lexicon of love.
Make it visible.
Make it audible.
Make it inhabitable.
Keep the naming human.
Take the love we inherited and make it more beautiful than anyone ever imagined.
A naming and cultivation commons.
A place where the fruit of language is friendship.
You’re a good man, brother Jeffrey. A lantern to a lost world. Thank you for keeping words answerable to place, friendship, and the world God made.
May your work keep making room for human voices, local places, and the difficult joy of being human in these strange and wondrous times.
Συγχάρητέ μοι — come rejoice with me.
“And then our Lord opnyd my gostly eye and shewyd me my soule in the middys of my herte. I saw the soule so large as it were an endles world and as it were a blisful kyngdom, and by the conditions that I saw therin I understode that it is a worshipful cyte.“