The recent encomium on Anthony Kenny – former priest turned agnostic philosopher – struck me as disconcerting. The title of the reflection is indicative: “The Last Grand Master from a Grander Age”.
True enough, Kenny had a grandiloquent way with words, writing clearly and precisely. And write he did. His accolades, awards and appointments, his books, articles and monographs are too numerous to mention. His reported intelligence, work ethic and concise writing style legendary. As the obituarist says:
Among Kenny’s many Oxford positions, he was master of Balliol (1978–89), one of the oldest colleges in the university and in the English-speaking world; pro-vice-chancellor of the university (1984–2001); curator of the Bodleian Library (1985–88); warden of Rhodes House (1989–99); and professorial and then emeritus fellow of St. John’s College (1989–2026).
Whew. As the saying goes, he had it all – yet what was it all for? Like his master Ludwig Wittgenstein, to what did his myriads of words point? Without God, how can there be any universal truth, or any philosophy that leads us to the truth, and not just to words referring to words, in a hall of mirrors? The Catechism warns:
Agnosticism can sometimes include a certain search for God, but it can equally express indifferentism, a flight from the ultimate question of existence, and a sluggish moral conscience. Agnosticism is all too often equivalent to practical atheism. (2128)
The problem is that Anthony Kenny had in his earlier years, apparently, already found God and the fullness of the Faith. He already ‘had it all’, ordained a priest in 1955, but sought a return to the lay-state in 1963, which was granted. He was, however, still bound to his promise of celibacy – something not often enforced nowadays after laicization, as far as I know. That nor the ensuing excommunication didn’t’ stop him marrying – or at least attempting marriage.
Was it all to justify this? Or something deeper that prompted his apostasy? Kenny’s philosophy apparently contained many elements of truth, much rigour, but never really got to the Truth. He bit the hand of the Church that had fed him. Dr. Kenny may have been ‘against abortion’, as the author says, but he believed in contraception, which, as Pope John Paul II declared, is an inexorable gateway to abortion (cf., Evangelium Vitae, #13).
On what else was Dr. Kenny so fundamentally wrong?
Most of us come nowhere near his accomplishments, but I couldn’t help pondering Christ’s warning, reiterated by Thomas More to Richard Rich, what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world…
I won’t complete the phrase, for I don’t know the state of his soul, especially as Dr. Kenny has now received his definitive judgement from God.
One wonders the effect he had on his numerous readers and students. Kenney’s many gifts, talents and industriousness would simply compound the whatever scandal there be, for his charism for teaching and writing would no longer ‘magnify the Lord’. Subtle and insidious error is usually worse than the open and manifest variety.
One wonders what Anthony Kenney might have been had he not made shipwreck of his Faith (1 Tim 1:19). Perhaps not as famous or accoladed, and it is unlikely he would have received those positions at Oxford as a faithful Catholic witnessing to the truth. But one never knows; maybe he would have had all that, as well as the real treasure, the pearl of great price which, from the look of things, he rejected. We can only hope that such a tragedy was somehow thwarted, and that in his last moments he remembered the warning from the Letter to the Hebrews: without faith, it is impossible to please God (11:6). Would that he, along with us all, cried out with the father of the possessed boy in the Gospel of Saint Mark: ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’. (9:24).
Dr. Kenny may not have believed in God, but God believed in him. Such agnosticism is never reciprocal. To paraphrase Padre Pio, the renowned professor certainly believes in God now, whatever his eternal fate. May that same God have mercy on his soul.
