Book Review

Prayers of a civilised rationalist

What I believe

Sir Anthony Kenny is a favoured son of the Establishment, formerly master of a great Oxford college, President of the British Academy, laden with distinctions and honorary degrees. But he was born outside the circle of privilege, the pre-war child of a broken marriage, raised by his Liverpool Catholic mother. In 1949 he was sent to the English College in Rome to study for the priesthood: after ordination in 1955 he went to Oxford to do a DPhil. In 1963, convinced that the religious claims of Christianity could not be rationally sustained, he left the priesthood and launched on what was to prove an enormously distinguished career as a philosopher.

Kenny was trained in scholastic philosophy before the Second Vatican Council, and though he now rejects religious faith and proclaims himself an agnostic, he would still, I think, count himself an Aristotelian, even a Thomist. As he makes clear in these fascinating essays on his central convictions, he has, like his teacher Bernard Lonergan, spent a lifetime "reaching up to the mind of St Thomas". Influences on his efforts to combine appreciation of the genius of Thomas with the techniques of modern philosophy included Herbert McCabe and Peter Geach, but above all Geach's wife, the late Elizabeth Anscombe, who helped Kenny to a fuller understanding of the greatness of Wittgenstein. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for someone with this intellectual pedigree, many of his deepest convictions on truth, morals and the proper ordering of society will resonate with Catholics: if not quite an anonymous Christian, Kenny reads at times like an honorary Dominican.

This affinity is evident in his distaste for some fashionable intellectual trends. He has a low opinion of the work of Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, in which "argumentation is replaced with devices such as puns, jokes, sneers and incantations". He detests even more the brashness of modern atheism, which, he considers, "makes a much stronger claim than theism does, because the atheist says 'no matter what definition you choose, "God exists" is always false', whereas the theist more modestly claims that there is some definition which will make 'God exists' true". Kenny believes, in fact, that neither claim can be substantiated, and the true "default position" is and ought to be agnosticism. Hence he offers one chapter headed "Why I am not an atheist", and two headed "why I am not a theist". He rejects as invalid all the traditional proofs of God's existence, and finds the idea of eternal life, which he understands as life going on and on, decidedly unappealing. But he has little time for the cocksure claims of neo-Darwinian atheists who imagine science can "explain the entire cosmos", but who fail to address three genuine puzzles: the origin of language, the origin of life and the origin of the universe. God may not be the compelling answer to the question "Why does anything exist?", but if the universe ever began (as proponents of the Big Bang theory claim that it did), then "it seems perverse simply to shrug one's shoulders and decline to seek any explanation".

The extent and limits of Kenny's affinities with current Catholic thinking emerge especially clearly in the field of morality. He rejects the utilitarian and consequentialist assumptions that underlie much contemporary ethical thinking. Murder and adultery are always wrong, whatever their consequences, actual or intended. Like Aquinas, he favours a morality based on the practice of the virtues as a means to human flourishing. Hence, although he argues that sexual ethics should be constructed round love, not procreation, he nevertheless considers that a rational sexual ethic cannot altogether ignore the biological functions of sex. He reminds us that moralists have always drawn parallels between the ethics of sex and the ethics of food and drink, and that nowadays "the moral evaluation of eating behaviour is more closely linked to its biological efficiency than ever in the past". By contrast, sexuality is generally considered a matter of purely private choice, and "the moral disapproval that once attached to sexual activity that did not contribute to the propagation of the race seems to have evaporated". It is almost "as if temperance was a corset which must be tightened at one point if it is to be let out at another". Because of the link between sex and procreation, Kenny believes exclusive homosexual orientation to be a "double disability", preventing homosexuals from combining sexual pleasure with procreative function, and depriving them of the possibility of combining intimate sexual union with the diversity of experience of the two sexes. Hence, though he is in favour of giving equal esteem and financial benefits to same-sex relationships, he is opposed to gay "marriage", homosexual proselytising, and the creation of a homosexual culture.

In an extended discussion of the ethics of abortion Kenny makes clear that he does not accept the Church's current view that the foetus must be accorded the full rights of a human person from the first moment of conception. This is not, he thinks, a traditional Christian position. Aquinas, for example, put "ensoulment" at about 40 days after conception, and dated the personhood of the foetus from that point. In the light of current scientific knowledge, Kenny places the key moment of individuation earlier, at about 14 days, up to which point the embryo is capable of dividing and developing as two or more human individuals. This would make possible the use or rejection of pre-individuation embryos for a sufficient cause, such as in vitro treatment for a childless couple, but he emphasises that setting the moment of individuation at 14 days cuts two ways. If the embryo up to that time, though worthy of respect and protection, is not an individual human being, equally after that time we must acknowledge that it is, and hence "late abortion is indeed homicide".

This is all very civilised, and Catholics will welcome even the partial support of so respected a thinker for positions which in our culture are always contentious and often dismissed out of hand. Similarly, Kenny rejects the legitimacy of suicide and "assisted dying", in part because in his experience the "grief and misery" that follow such suicides always hugely outweigh whatever benefits it was imagined they would bring. In a rather startling aside he expresses the hope that he will never be tempted to suicide "and pray that if I do I will be given the strength to resist it".

It is good to know that Kenny still sometimes prays, and it would be impertinent to scrutinise that impulse too closely. Yet so rational a man must surely ask himself what sort of a being must that God be who can even be imagined as hearing the prayers of humanity at the end of its tether, and who might respond with strength against temptation. For prayer to have any meaning, the pray-er must surely, if only momentarily, abandon the enigmatic blank of agnosticism, and reach out towards the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jesus. And such a God, holy and ardent for love as the great monotheisms have conceived him, can hardly be satisfied with the civilised indifference to his being which Sir Anthony thinks the "default position" for rational humanity.

Elsewhere in his book Kenny questions the force of Pascal's famous "wager" as an adequate justification of the rationality of religious commitment. But the man who says a prayer has laid a bet.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...