James kennan sj sarajevo jul 2018.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 27, 2022: In the new 2022 book A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (Paulist Press), the prolific American Jesuit moral theologian James F. Keenan (born in 1953) of Boston College, who "has edited or written twenty-five books and published over three hundred essays, articles, and reviews in over twenty-five international journals" (according to the book's back cover), does not tell us when and where he was born and raised.
Instead, Keenan picks up the story of his adult life in 1981, after he "had been a Jesuit for eleven years" - one year before his ordination as a Jesuit priest (p. xi). In 1982, he "went to the Gregorian University in Rome to study the tradition of moral theology" (p. xix). There Josef Fuchs (1912-2005) served as the directors of Keenan's doctoral dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas (p. xix). In 1987, he began teaching" (p. xx). But Keenan does not tell us what the specific focus of his doctoral dissertation was.
Now, Keenan does say, "I am ready to share this first attempt of my understanding of the tradition that I have been so interested in knowing" (p. xvii). He notes that "the very word tradition comes from the Latin trader, 'to deliver, hand over, or bring forth.' In a word, the tradition is something that you pass on, but as you do, it has to be adaptable, able to address what it will encounter in the future" (pp. xv-xvi). Keenan's words "this first attempt" seem to suggest to me that he envisions making further attempts in the future. In Keenan's "Notes" (pp. 339-419), he cites so many of his own publications that it does not seem unlikely to me that he will publish further on the history of moral theology in the future.
Keenan also says that "we can be assisted in living the moral life as Roman Catholics by appreciating the developments of the tradition. And therein hopefully by understanding the rich and complex ways that our predecessors pursued and lived the moral life, we might also, like them, understand the call to 'Go and do likewise' [Luke 10:37]" (p. xvii).
Keenan's understanding of Catholic tradition calls to my mind T. S. Eliot's famous 1919 essay about the tradition of poetry titled "Tradition and the Individual Talent." However, in the context of the Roman Catholic Church, the individual talent refers to the individual practicing Catholic who is trying to live the moral life.
Eliot's famous 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is reprinted, and helpfully annotated, in volume 2 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, covering the years 1919 to 1926, edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Johns Hopkins University Press; and Faber and Faber, 2021, pp. 105-114; "Notes," pp. 112-114).
Now, in Keenan's Chapter One (pp. 3-34), he has a fascinating discussion of Paul the Apostle (pp. 9-13). In it, Keenan discusses Paul's Letter to the Romans, especially Romans 12:1-11. Keenan says, Paul speaks only to those who are like him, children of the new creation. He presents his argument to us waiting for our assent. He is constantly appealing to an internal recognition within us of what it means to be in the new creation; he engages us, expecting an experiential affirmation that what he proposes is necessarily true. What he declares to be our condition begs for our confirmation; his claims are not simply stand-alone statements of fact. . . . Rather his proposals are always submitted for our 'Amen.' . . . Moreover, as readers of Paul, we should realize that when we say 'Amen,' we say it in conscience. There [in conscience] we testify to the Lordship of Jesus and there we stand in solidarity with him. For Paul, conscience is where experience and authority meet; from experience, we encounter the authority of conscience as a way of recognizing and testifying to the truth in love. In fact, just as Paul waits for us to respond in conscience to his testimony that Jesus is Lord, so too today we see how in Christian theology the conscience recognizes the call to understand and witness to the truth. The centrality of the personal conscience as the place for hearing the call to respond [with 'Amen' to Paul] has had, as we will see, a long history in the church" (pp. 11-12). Keenan then proceeds to discuss Romans 14:1 - 15:13.
But I want to call attention here to what Keenan accentuates as conscience as the inner psycho-dynamism that spurs the faithful Christian to respond "Amen" to Paul. Without naming conscience specifically, or naming anything else specifically, as the inner psycho-dynamism that is involved in eliciting an "Amen" response, the Dutch Jesuit theologian Frans Jozef van Beeck (1930-2011) explores the psycho-dynamics of Christology for Christian believers in his 600-page book Christ Proclaimed: Christology as Rhetoric (Paulist Press, 1979).
Now, in Keenan's Chapter Two (pp. 35-68), he discusses St. Augustine's ethics, with special attention to interiority and the end of ethics (pp. 61-64). For Augustine, the end of ethics is happiness. But "[f]or Augustine, happiness is not found in the external goods that contemporary utilitarians or hedonists seek," says Keenan, "but rather in an internal experience of peace, order, and love" (pp. 61-62).
"For Augustine, happiness is a sense of human flourishment and well-being, a sense of the right realization of humanity, that is, a sense of completion in the nature of what it means to be human. This is the notion of the end for Augustine as well as for Aristotle and Aquinas. For Augustine, the life of happiness is the good to be loved for its own sake . . . and as Christians, God is our happiness. . . . In God is our hope and in God we will rest" (p. 62).
Keenan also says, "The nature of happiness and the means for attaining it differentiate Aristotle from Augustine. For Augustine, happiness is contemplating God and it is attained by the great work of sanctification and justification. These two features are frequently mentioned by most commentators, but a third difference is found in Augustine's interest in interiority. For Aristotle, the end is found in the flourishment of the community of the polis; for Augustine, the end has a deep resonance with the interior well-being of the person where peace, order, and love are attained through Christ" (p. 62).
"The accent on interiority does not deny the communal nature of happiness; for Augustine, happiness is found in the kingdom . . . the call to happiness in God is for all human beings, and the common good is always preferable to the private good. . . . Still, happiness is an encounter of God within ourselves, for God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. . . . God then is not something or someone in addition to the human. God is the beginning and the end of the person and of humanity as a whole. For Augustine, we cannot understand the human being in its origins, nature, and destiny, apart from God" (p. 62; each ellipsis that I have inserted here represents my omission of Keenan's parenthetical documentation to Augustine's publications).
"For this reason, then, the order of charity, that is, the order of the triple love command (for god, self, and neighbor) depends on the issue of interiority and closeness. . . . This order of charity becomes the norm in the scholastic tradition" (p. 62) - of which Thomas Aquinas was a part.
In my estimate, Keenan could also have strengthened his cogent discussion of St. Augustine and interiority (pp. 61-64) by adding a reference to Philip Cary's book Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford University Press, 2000).
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