Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine by John Peter Kenney (review)

John Peter Kenney has contributed this incisive monograph with a twofold aim: “to retrieve conceptions of contemplation found in the early texts of St Augustine and then to consider them in reference to Augustine’s classic depiction in the Confessions” (viii). As in his previous work, Kenney here eschews “common-core theories” from psychological models constructed to describe the vast array of reported mystical experience in the world’s religions. Instead, he seeks to read Augustine on his own terms. In so doing, Kenney pays attention to how Augustine debates with opponents, such as the Manichaeans, the “contradictores” within the Christian fold who rejected Augustine’s “transcendentalism,” and most especially the Platonists. Contemplation and Classical Christianity demonstrates how Augustine both relies upon insights from “the books of the Platonists” and moves past their failings to develop the key features of his distinctive understanding of divine transcendence and presence to the soul.

To set the stage, Kenney’s first of five chapters studies contemplation and pagan monotheism, with particular attention to Plotinus’s teaching of the soul’s descent into materiality through tolma, that irrational act of audacity, and its ascent through its own native capacity for union with the One. Whereas ascetical practices, the pursuit of virtues, and meditation play essential roles in Plotinian contemplation, what Kenney most emphasizes is apophasis. Having laid this groundwork, Kenney goes on to elucidate Augustine’s ambivalence towards Platonism.

The second and third chapters overlap with each other in that both consider Augustine’s time at Cassiciacum. Kenney highlights the disjuncture between Augustine and the “books of the Platonists,” such as in Augustine’s not relying on “Plotinus’ apophatic theology of the One, nor on his ramified theory of divine transcendence” (42). The author also maps the descriptions of contemplation at Cassiciacum on to Augustine’s retrospective look to Cassiciacum from the Confessions and finds a fundamental consistency in such key areas as “a priori knowledge of God through interior cognition”; the complete transcendence of God from the mind and the world as we know it; the importance of purgation from vice; and the absolute necessity of divine agency to guide and sustain the soul (90). Two salient and interrelated aspects of rejecting Plotinian theory are also deepened by the time of the retrospection. In the Confessions, Augustine stresses, more than in the earliest texts, “the soul’s removal from the transcendence of the divine” and the powerlessness of the soul on its own to return to God (91).

The fourth chapter examines Augustine’s early Catholic treatises, subdivided into three periods: those written after his baptism while he was still in Italy, the monastic texts of North Africa, and then the ecclesiastical texts after his ordination. Kenney shows how Augustine comes to a quite different understanding from the Platonists of the soul. Aided by his meditation on the Scriptures, Augustine is convinced that the soul simply does not have the native power to ascend but is completely dependent upon the grace of God.

In the fifth chapter, we find that Augustine’s early writings on contemplation culminate in Book 9 of the Confessions and the subsequent books, which provide the intellectual support for defending the brief mutual ascent at Ostia of Augustine and his uneducated saintly mother, Monica, to the heavenly Jerusalem. As a “martyr” (for staying in Ambrose’s church when under imperial military threat), Monica appears as “a paradigm of unlearned wisdom acquired by grace” (152). She comes to represent Augustine’s new articulation of contemplation—in striking contrast to Plotinus—of what it means to ascend to the heaven of heaven by the grace of the infinite and uncreated God, who beckons the humble in this life to enjoy that immediate awareness forever.

Kenney does not intend to portray “the historical Augustine” or to chart the influences on Augustine—and certainly not to become mired in age-old controversies about Augustine’s relation to Platonism (ix...