John Kenney, Saint Augustine and the Meaning of Life
Really big questions are John Kenney’s specialty.
“I often tell students that my field of philosophical theology asks really big questions that you ask yourself on occasions in life when you’re pulled up short and you have to think hard about the meaning of life and the nature of reality: is there a God, are human beings immortal, is there a foundation for goodness, is there an answer to the problem of evil?” said Kenney.
Kenney tells students they’d do well to take his class and face the big “meaning of life” questions while in college, since life always compels engagement of such questions sooner or later, usually sooner. “I want to catalyze that moment of serious reflection,” he said.
“My goal is to allow students to appreciate the richness and the fundamental meaning of the thinking of figures like St. Augustine, and then it’s up to them to let the spirit move them,” he said. “But I want them to really ponder these ideas and push back from the superficial ways that students approach religion from contemporary culture.”
Kenney has written two new books, one for scholars and one for the general public, in which he tries to understand two interrelated phenomena: First, how does the concept of monotheism emerge and develop in late antiquity, when we suddenly move apparently out of the context of Greco-Roman polytheism to the emergence of what becomes Western monotheism? And secondly, to then understand how Christianity develops its version of this thinking, since it has a unique understanding of a single God.
Kenney said his recent books can be understood as a “prequel” to St. Augustine’s Confessions, “an effort to study the same set of issues, but in writings we have of Augustine before the Confessions about his life from 352 to 387, before his conversion and baptism, which were initial efforts to explain what’s going on in his life and thinking.”
Kenney said the more scholarly of his two new books, Contemplation and Classical Christianity (to be published by Oxford Press) tries to explain “who Augustine was from the very beginning,” namely (in Kenney’s view), one who believed that “the human soul was not intrinsically divine and any capacity it has to associate with the divine through inner contemplation must be supplied to it by divine grace.”
Kenney’s second, “more accessible” book, One God: How Classical Theism Emerged, as “an effort to pull together some of these same thoughts, for the educated person who’s curious about some of these things.” Its publisher is Crossroads, the American affiliate of the German-Catholic publishing house Herder & Herder.
Because of his book research, Kenney is able to invite his Saint Michael’s students to enter the intriguing scholarly debate on Augustine and monotheism personally. “It’s a chance for them to break out of the molds of received Christianity and go back to these exciting movements, to see them afresh, to see what was at stake and how things were expressed, freeing them from categories of contemporary cultural appropriation,” he said.
Augustine, said Kenney, is a great “hook” for students and readers, “sort of a unique figure who gives us an insider’s guide to this adoption of monotheism. :
—Mark Tarnacki
