Is Peter Thiel the target of Pope Leo's Gandalf quote? An investigation.

Nobody was surprised that Pope Leo XIV cited well-known saints and previous pontiffs in his first encyclical, or papal letter of spiritual guidance, “Magnifica humanitas,” released Monday.But the name that immediately jumped out to many readers is one synonymous with high fantasy literature: J.R.R. Tolkien, the Catholic author of The Lord of the Rings.Leo’s letter is concerned with “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” a major theme of his first year as leader of the Catholic Church. Drawing from his predecessor, Pope Francis, he warns of “the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm,” one capable of “reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” He again compares the rise of AI to the Industrial Revolution that spanned from the mid-18th century to the beginning of the 20th, alluding to the teachings of his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who in his own 1891 encyclical asserted the importance of workers’ rights and dignity during a time of technological upheaval and burgeoning capitalist empire.The lengthy text further solidifies Leo’s stance as an AI skeptic. But the Tolkien nod is particularly salient given some backward interpretations of Middle-earth mythology by right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, which have long been ridiculed by other Lord of the Rings fans. One might even think Leo is trolling. (The Vatican did not immediately return a request for comment.)Clearly, the pope is somewhat concerned about the motives of tech oligarchs racing to develop artificial general intelligence that surpasses human capabilities. Do they really dream of using this tool to cure diseases and solve climate change, or are they building engines of limitless profit and cultural dominance? It’s when he addresses our personal responsibility in challenging such dark forces that Leo borrows an insight from Tolkien’s famous wizard, Gandalf: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”That lesson is miles away from what Musk and Thiel apparently see in Tolkien’s masterpiece.Thiel named his data analytics firm Palantir, after the crystal ball used as a spying device by the traitorous wizard Saruman in the saga; he reportedly calls his venture capital firm, the Founders Fund, “the precious,” which is what the twisted and covetous character Gollum calls the One Ring, a magical means of totalitarian power. Almost anyone who encounters Tolkien (or adaptations of his work) can see that he was writing about the corrupting effect of such power—in the novels, the temptation to rule inevitably undoes anyone who succumbs to it—yet Thiel seems to revel in the same possibilities of authoritarian control and omniscience as the villains.Musk, for his part, has suggested that Tolkien’s epic can be read as an anti-immigration, build-the-wall parable: “When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away,” he posted on X in October. “They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor.” He offered this simply inaccurate recollection of Lord of the Rings as a defense of Islamophpbic far-right UK agitator Tommy Robinson.In fact, Tolkien’s depictions of marauding armies pillaging the land were inspired by the horrors of militarization and industrialization—two phenomena that the English of Tolkien’s generation were more than familiar with. His experience of mechanized horrors in World War I is widely understood as crucial inspiration for Saruman’s campaign of death, which relied upon the destruction of an ancient forest for fuel and the slave labor of brutalized orcs.If anythin

Gandalf means me Parsing a papal proclamation. Credit: Getty Images I’m not suggesting that a man like Pope Leo—the Vicar of Christ, the Bishop of Rome, the Servant of the Servants of God—would stoop to anything quite so base as “trolling” the onetime PayPal co-founder and current Antichrist alarmist Peter Thiel. But I’m also not not suggesting it, if you see what I mean. How else to explain the novel appearance of Gandalf—yes, the pipe-smoking wizard!—in the pages of one of Catholicism’s most important documents, a major papal encyclical about AI and technology? Perhaps Leo, who was born and raised in Chicago before spending decades in Peru, is simply a big J.R.R. Tolkien buff who can’t get enough of magic rings, Eldar lore, and tricksy little hobbitses. Or perhaps Leo is sending a message. In his new encyclical, released yesterday, Leo quotes one literary character in the entire 40,000-word document. It’s Gandalf, doling out some of his wisdom in a scene from Return of the King: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” Leo connects this speech with the “civilization of love” that he calls for in the document, stressing (as Tolkien did) the importance of “small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” The Gandalf quote, innocuous on its own, feels more pointed when you realize how Tolkien is valorized (Valar-ized?) in conservative tech circles today. Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful people in such circles—and he is a Tolkien fanboy in the worst way. Fellowship of the bling As far back as 2012, people were running articles on how “Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, is a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of fantasy books.” Business Insider noted that “Thiel’s inner circle seems well aware of his fondness for Tolkien’s world of elves and magic. One source who claims to be close to Thiel says there’s an in-joke about his venture-capital firm, the Founders Fund, being nicknamed ‘The Precious.’” Thiel has named many of his companies after Tolkien’s world. He co-founded the AI-focused Palantir. He launched Mithril Capital Management. He co-founded the fintech venture capital firm Valar Ventures. He has other companies named Rivendell One and Lembas LLC. Thiel protégés include current US Vice President J.D. Vance, who has called Tolkien his favorite author and who once founded a venture capital firm called Narya (one of the Elvish rings of power). Palmer Luckey, who launched his own Tolkien-themed tech/defense startup called Anduril, is also “launching a new digital bank with backing from Peter Thiel,” Fortune reported last year. The bank’s name? Erebor, naturally, another name for the Lonely Mountain, where Smaug slept atop piles of gold in The Hobbit. Thiel and his circle like a good fantasy story. So what? According to The New York Times, even the current leader of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, used to cosplay Tolkien characters and attend “Hobbit Camps,” where she “sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.” But Thiel isn’t just one more investor with a Tolkien fetish. He has also been proclaiming a fairly idiosyncratic version of Christianity for years. His message has recently taken the form of a multi-night, four-lecture series about the looming dangers of “the Antichrist,” a figure drawn from the Book of Revelation who opposes everything Jesus stood for. And he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the Pope. The Antichrist loves peace and safety Thiel’s Antichrist tour has taken him around the world, including Rome, where earlier this year the Associated Press said that Thiel’s “invitation-only conference” became “so controversial that the Catholic universities initially associated with it have all denied offi