The Ecumenical Orthodoxy of a Dominican
Scribe of the Kingdom: Essays on Theology and Culture
by Aidan Nichols, O.P.
London: Sheed & Ward, 1994.
(2 volumes; £24.95 apiece, cloth)
reviewed by William M. Klimon
The British Dominican Fr. Aidan Nichols seems to show up everywhere. He has published more than a dozen fascinating books in the past 15 years. He is an advisor to serious periodicals like Communio and Eastern Churches Journal. And he has undertaken teaching and pastoral duties in Britain, Norway, and Rome.
The publishing house of Sheed & Ward (London) has taken twenty-four of his essays, published and unpublished, from over the last ten years, and produced a rich collection. It is unfortunate that this two-volume set is so expensive: the truly catholic range of its subject matter makes it noteworthy for the ecumenically orthodox readers of Touchstone.
This collection begins with “A Dominican’s Story,” the tale of Fr. Nichols’s intellectual journey. It starts with his discovery, as a boy, of sacramental and iconographic Christianity at an Orthodox church in Geneva, Switzerland. Fr. Nichols writes, “Had I known of an Orthodox parish, I should probably have become Orthodox myself.”
Instead he was drawn to the Lancastrian Catholicism of his native northern England. It took him several years of prayer and study to move from the untutored Anglicanism of his youth to the Roman Catholic Church in 1966 immediately after Vatican II. It is no small irony that so many of the errant theologians who have bedeviled the Roman Catholic authorities in recent years received their formation and education long before the Council. They are themselves in a very real way “pre-conciliar,” to use the now standard term of opprobrium. In contrast, there are more and more churchmen who are legitimate products of the post-conciliar Church and are its true fruit. Fr. Nichols is surely one of their leaders.
After a brief trial with the Benedictines and a typical academic idyll at Oxford, Fr. Nichols serendipitously made his way to the English Dominicans, where he remains today at Blackfriars, Cambridge. His education both before and after he entered the Order of Preachers was under a formidable host of “ecumenically orthodox” scholars—Henry Chadwick, Bishop Kallistos Ware, and Oxford Dominicans like Gervase Mathew and Simon Tugwell—and their ecumenical dimension is clearly reflected in his writings. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s he published prolifically on a wide range of topics historical and theological. But as “A Dominican’s Story” points out, much of this work was ad hoc, related to controversies of the moment, or occasioned by other duties and responsibilities. What binds them together is his commitment to, and application of, what he calls “Intelligent Conservatism as an Ecclesial Stance.”
Taking as his text, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt. 13:52), Fr. Nichols suggests a theological approach that, while seeming so truly evangelical and thus natural for all churchmen, would surely alter the face of contemporary theology were it to be widely implemented. This approach includes at least three elements, namely:
• openness to the new and faithfulness to the old, while being “conscious of the predominantly future-oriented quality of present-day world society …[and] therefore, particularly concerned to maintain fidelity, in the name of Christ, to what has been received from the past”;
• fidelity to the revealed Word of God as the standard by which everything is to be judged; and
• reverence for the “sensibility” or “style” in which that divine revelation has been handed down.
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