Abstract
I confess that I opened this book with some scepticism. Subtitled ‘A History of the Faith in Fifty Books’, how could even Anthony Kenny get 50 books into less than 300 pages? What he did was to reprint 50 of his own book reviews in various periodicals over a period of more than 50 years. He arranged in chronological order the topics of the books he reviewed, from books about the early Church to books about contemporary theological problems, and added short introductory comments to each main historical period. My scepticism was allayed. He has managed to review books by major authors which have some very interesting things to say about Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformation, Newman, modern naturalism, apologetics and moral theology. His reviews are courteous, gently humorous, filled with insight and with a quiet but incisively cutting criticism that provokes rethinking but never evokes contempt.
He is respectful of Aristotle, seeing humans as rational animals, and not enamoured of anything that smacks of Cartesian dualism. He is sympathetic to the Aristotelian idea of purpose without design and unimpressed by rational arguments for God or for a designing Mind. He is agnostic about the concept of God, to the extent of not being sure that the idea really makes sense. His love of, and expertise in, philosophy is everywhere apparent, as is an endearingly nostalgic feeling for Christian faith. Yet there are many sorts of philosophy that he thinks go well beyond the bounds of common sense, and he deems it proper for a rational person to remain agnostic about most Christian claims.
These views are never obtrusive, and the book provides one of the shortest and most reliable responses to Christian attempts at rationality through the ages that I have seen. It is slightly odd to review someone else’s reviews, but if I were asked for a Christian response then it would first of all be of gratitude for such an illuminating and incisive tour of our intellectual history. Then I might dare to suggest that maybe, just maybe, there are more imaginative possibilities for thinking about the nature of mind than either Aristotle or Descartes envisaged. With due regard for the limitations of the human mind, one might think that agnosticism and sturdy common sense may be one of those limitations. Human minds may not be discrete substances, but why should there not be minds that know and act without being embodied as human minds are? Even one absolute Mind that is prior, in the order of being, to any physical expression?
And do we have to prove that it is so? Or is it permissible to have a passionate commitment to beliefs that are objectively uncertain yet evaluatively imperative? Perhaps the commitment to rationality and the respect for personal being which this book so well displays is itself a step beyond what either common sense or purely naturalistic science might suggest, a step towards the existence of transcendent value. But such quasi-Platonic speculations need the scrutiny of a sensitive and critical quasi-Aristotelian. And that is what this stimulating little book provides.