Apologia

Aidan Nichols has been contributing to theological literature since the early 1980s. Now in his seventy-fifth year, he looks back not only on his writings but on the long arc of life from which they arose. Though nominally Anglican in childhood, his earliest sense of the transcendent came through an encounter with God in nature. A pivotal experience in a Russian Orthodox church in Geneva led him to become a confessing Christian.

Orphaned as a teenager, Nichols returned home and journeyed from Anglo-Catholicism into the Roman Catholic Church—a path that eventually guided him to religious life and priesthood. After studying Modern History at Oxford, he went on to live and work in a wide range of settings: Scotland, Norway, Rome, France, Ethiopia, Jamaica, England, and the United States.

Over decades of writing, he has drawn from Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican sources, producing a substantial body of work that engages theology, culture, and the search for unity. His thought has been shaped above all by two towering influences: St. Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

For Nichols, the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were years of harmony and encouragement. Under their successor, he has faced greater challenges—both theoretical and practical—and here he reflects frankly on those difficulties and his efforts to find a theologically coherent way forward. He concludes with a set of proposals aimed at strengthening and enriching the life of the Church in the years to come.