Michael Morton reviews Christianity in Review: A History of the Faith in 50 Books by Anthony Kenny. Darton, Longman and Todd (London 2015). Hbk. 256 pages. £14.99.
To review a book that itself consists of reviews is something of a paradox – a second-order review of reviews. But Anthony Kenny attempts to present a coherent, although very selective, account of Christian thinking by means of fifty book reviews that he himself has written over the past 50 years or so in a variety of journals. The book is divided into seven sections: five of which deal with a discrete period of Christian history and two with contemporary problems – the existence of God and modern moral theology. Kenny provides a short introduction to each section (and they give the impression of being written in some haste). Unusually, there are errors – he refers to Augustinian monks (when they are friars) and uses, as many do these days, the term ‘the Vatican’ as a metonymy for the Papacy and the Roman Curia. Some periods of history, notably the 17th and 18th centuries, are very lightly touched upon, but the mediaeval period with St Thomas Aquinas to the fore, is given a welcome prominence. For many British philosophers tend to dismiss the Middle Ages and scholasticism as a period dominated by religion and concerned only with ‘sterile logic-chopping’, as Bryan Magee once put it. He has six reviews to offer about the works of Aquinas, but he also introduces St Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus, who are also much neglected these days in university faculties. One of Kenny’s best books for me was his account of his preparation for and eventual resignation from the Roman Catholic priesthood, The Path from Rome, which he wrote in 1986. There you find the origin of his interest in the philosophy and theology of the Schoolmen, which he was taught as ‘Neo-Scholasticism’ in the Gregorian University in Rome during the 1950s. I was there exactly 20 years later when little had changed and the syllabus would, almost of necessity, drive you to go to another university to study philosophy all over again. (Which we both did.) Two of his longest reviews look at contemporary theologians – Hans Küng and Herbert McCabe OP, a Dominican friar who died in 2001 and who was considered something of a maverick in the closed-in world of Catholic academia in England. Kenny admires his notion of God, no longer the God of the philosophers whom mediaeval thinkers tried to drag into existence through logical necessity, but an examination of how God can love humanity. McCabe pointed to the centrality of the Incarnation wherein the believer really can take part in the love between the Father and the incarnate Son of God. Hans Küng, by contrast, Kenny treats very harshly. He reviews Küng’s memoirs of 2008 as being self-advertising and contemptuous of his colleagues at Tübingen University and elsewhere. Küng portrays them, says Kenny, as inferior thinkers and writers to himself with venal ambitions. It is too hard on Küng. He has been unfairly treated, not only by those former colleagues at Tübingen, including Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), but also by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Kenny claims that if Küng had left the Church he would have lost the celebrity status he relishes and disappeared without trace. In fact, Hans Küng has now become the enfant terrible of Catholic theologians on no more evidence than some well-written books that offer a critique of Catholic teaching (on papal infallibility, for example), which is always a dangerous thing to do. Celebrity status, like high office in the Church, comes from compliance and orthodoxy. Kenny is in better form in the penultimate section dealing with the existence of God. He shows his excellent philosophical competence plus his agnostic stance by demonstrating in the works selected that, overall, atheists have failed to provide a convincing account of the origin of life in the universe, whilst theists have as yet failed to present a coherent concept of an extra-cosmic intelligence. But to return to my paradox, this is a book not only to dip into pleasurably but actually a reason to return to the books that Kenny has reviewed and see if his account is true and accurate. And that is something that he would approve of entirely.
Michael Morton is the parish priest of St Winefride’s Catholic Church, Sandbach, Cheshire. He is a former SOF trustee.