FOR a former priest who has officially been excommunicated, Sir Anthony Kenny is remarkably friendly towards the Roman Catholic Church.
Only last November the former Master of Balliol and Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, even travelled to Rome to join seven classmates from the Pontifical Gregorian University to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their ordination.
“I’ve never liked people who have been priests or nuns who then spend a lot of time denouncing the Church,” Kenny says after lunch in Balliol’s Senior Common Room. “In the same way, I don’t like people who’ve been divorced telling you how awful their first wife was. It reflects badly on you if the institution or person you wanted to devote your life to was so horrible that no sane person could have done so.”
The question arises as Kenny’s fondness for Christianity is much evident in his new book, What I Believe. After an autobiographical beginning, Kenny guides the reader down the philosophical paths which lead him to state: “Why I am not an atheist”, but also “Why I am not a theist”, before final chapters in which he explains his personal beliefs about issues including abortion, patriotism, war and happiness.
“Part of the point of the book was to show that there was a relationship between fairly abstract items in philosophy, such as the choice between consequentialism, absolutism and utilitarianism, and actual decisions,” he says. “So the first part is meant to be setting out the philosophical issues of religion and morality, and the second half is what conclusions I personally draw within the framework of these ideas.”
Kenny became a Fellow and tutor of Balliol in 1963, having left the priesthood after two years as a curate in Liverpool, his birthplace. A condition of his proceeding to a doctorate at the Gregorian University (he had already passed the exams) was that he take an oath declaring that it was possible to demonstrate the existence of God.
Increasingly doubtful about attaching meaning to any statements about God at all, let alone proving his existence, Kenny obtained permission to return to the lay state. He was not, however, released from his vow of celibacy, and so was automatically excommunicated when he married in 1965.
At this time, he says, moral philosophy was too divorced from practical decision-making. “People would be lecturing on the nature of evaluative language and whether there was a logic of imperatives. You wouldn’t get people lecturing on the rights and wrongs of war and things like that. I think that was a rather jejune period in moral philosophy.”
Kenny speaks approvingly of a greater engagement in the practical over the past 20 years. “There’s no point in getting deeply involved in philosophy,” he says, “unless one is able to communicate to a general public that the issues of philosophy are so fundamental and so applicable that the point of it is lost if no practical application is made of it. Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and ethics; these are disciplines which by their nature impinge on the practical.”
But this does not mean he is enthusiastic about the vogue for blurring the boundaries between philosophy and science. The first, he says, is concerned with “understanding” and the second with “the acquisition of information”.
“If one is going to get the relation between the mind and the brain right,” he explains, “one has to have a clear idea of what ‘the mind’ is. Many people working in this area just assume that they already know, and have made no philosophical reflection on what we actually mean by the words in which we describe our mental states and activities.”
Although Kenny is primarily a historian of philosophy, one area in which he has specialised is free will and determinism, and the arguments for and against the existence of God. In 1969 his book The Five Ways claimed that all Aquinas’s proofs for God’s existence failed.
As Wilde Lecturer at Oxford between 1969 and 1972, Kenny argued that if God is omniscient, determinism must be true, but if God is not to be blamed for human evil, determinism must be false; therefore the traditional omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent God cannot exist.
But he is an agnostic rather than an atheist. “The reason that I’m agnostic,” he says, “is that the Argument from Design seems to be quite strong in pointing to the need for some extra-cosmic intelligence. On the other hand, the broadly Wittgensteinian view that I have of the nature of the mind and intelligence makes it seem impossible that there could be an intelligence that wasn’t expressed in the behaviour of some finite body. So those seem to me to be the Scylla and Charybdis, as it were.”
Kenny’s position of not knowing is far from the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. But he still describes faith as a “vice” in his new book.
“It’s credulity,” he says. “In Aristotelian terms, rationality is a virtue and credulity is a vice. I think that my Catholic friends would be more rational, and in that sense better off, if they didn’t have the beliefs that they have. But if one only had friends who had no vices . . .” He chuckles.
Despite his agnosticism, Kenny is still very attached to his former faith. In What I Believe he thanks “the Christian communities who have allowed me to join in their worship without acknowledging their authority”.
“I don’t think that as an agnostic one wants to jettison a whole religious tradition that has offered so much to literature and art and philosophy,” he says. “One could take the traditional statements about God and the history of salvation not as a literal narrative but as forms of poetry.”
He acknowledges that this would not satisfy a believer — “but I don’t think it’s a great downgrading of the value of religion, because I think framing one’s life within a poetic narrative is important”.
At the end of our discussion he draws my attention to what he calls a “backhanded compliment” offered to him by Dawkins.
“In one of his books he was describing religion as a virus. And as an example of how virulent it was, he said: ‘Take the example of Anthony Kenny, who is intelligent and a decent sort of person. Yet it took him 35 years to get rid of this particular disease’.”
He chuckles again. If religion is a virus, I don’t think it is one that has entirely left the body of Sir Anthony Kenny; and he seems quite content to remain its host.
What I Believe by Anthony Kenny (Continuum, £14.99) is available from Times BooksFirst at £13.49 with free p&p. Call 0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.
