Aidan Nichols

Hans Urs von Balthasar is widely recognized as perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. No writer has better revealed the spiritual greatness of the revelation to which the art of the church and the historic liturgies bear witness. Yet students and nonspecialist readers often find Balthasar daunting and difficult. This volume is the ideal introduction to his work. It unlocks the treasure of his theology by focusing on the beautiful, the good, and the true. These are ...

The horror presented by the increasing institutionalisation of abortion in contemporary society poses some of the strongest moral and theological questions of our time. Moral reason convinces the Catholic Church of the intrinsic evil of abortion, but so too do the witness of the Scriptures and the divine revelation of redemption.The innocent suffering of children killed in the womb raises fundamental questions. Here are the reflections of a group of distinguished theologians who met at the Ab...

In the last century the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius gave to Russian Orthodoxy an opportunity, in a sustained encounter with the Christian West, to speak with a voice never heard as powerfully before in the western world, and from the date of its foundation in 1928, the Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, later Sobornost, sought to strike a good balance between Western and Eastern contributions to Christian thought. It provided an ecumenical encounter principally be...

Aidan Nichols has been contributing to theological literature since the beginning of the 1980s.Now in his seventy-fifth year, he looks back not only at his writings but at the three-quarters of a century of life from which they came. He explains how, despite a nominally Anglican background, his early sense of the transcendent was really of God in nature. Only through an experience in the Russian church in Geneva did he become a confessing Christian.Back home, where he was left a teenage orpha...

Maximus the Confessor (580-662), giant among early Byzantine theologians, stands at the summit of the Greek patristic tradition. He is spokesman of the Greek-speaking ""East"" in something of the way Thomas Aquinas came to speak for the Latin ""West."" His extreme importance as a spiritual writer is evidenced by the huge space assigned to him in the Philokalia. Believing in the intimate link between dogma and prayer, Maximus opposed the heresies of his day with his own unmatched synthesis of ...

When in 1993 Aidan Nichols revived the long-dormant idea of an Anglican Uniate Church, united with the See of Peter but not absorbed, the reaction of many was incredulity. The ideal of modern Ecumenism was, surely, the corporate reunification of entire Communions. This he roundly declared to be unrealistic, for the Protestant and Liberal elements in Anglican history (and Anglicanism's present reality) could never be digested by Roman stomachs. What was feasible was, rather, the reconciliation...

A lively debate continues in the Roman Catholic Church about the character of the teaching provided by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Did it represent a decisive rupture with previous doctrine, or the continuation of its earlier message under new conditions? Much depends on whether the Council texts are read in the light of subsequent events, which shook and sometimes smashed the life, worship and devotion of traditional Catholicism - rather than considered for themselves, in their o...

Drawing on Evangelical and Catholic exegetes, Church Fathers, and the ancient liturgies as well as later theological masters, Deep Mysteries shows how the events of the life of Jesus Christ have causal power to enter human existence now. History, metaphysics, and worshipful meditation are joined together herein.

Thomas Aquinas is one of the great figures in western thought, whose ideas continue to excert a powerful influence on theologians, contemporary writers and thinkers of very different backgrounds and traditions. This book is a lively and authoritative introduction to Aquinas, his life and thought and shows why many see him as a vital partner in contemporary debate about the future of Christianity.

About the Contributor(s): Aidan Nichols, OP, is a member of the Dominican community at Blackfriers, Cambridge, and the author of numerous books on Eastern and Western theology and Church history.This item is ReturnableAdditional Information BISAC Categories:- Religion | Christianity | Catholic - General- Religion | Christian Theology | History- Religion | Christianity | HistoryINGRAM Categories:- Religious Orientation | ChristianDewey: 282Features: Bibliography , Index , Table of ContentsPhys...

What sacred images should surround the faithful at worship and be available to them for instruction, in meditation and in prayer? This historical study is driven by questions of catechetical, doctrinal and liturgical urgency. Aidan Nichols, one of the most respected and prolific Catholic writers of our time, has investigated the relation between Christianity and the visual arts in a number of books covering the history of Christian art from its beginnings through to the partial triumph of the...

This book explores the Liturgy as the manifestation by cultic signs of Christian revelation, the 'setting' of the Liturgy in terms of architectural space, iconography and music, and the poetic response which the revelation the Liturgy carries can produce. The conclusion offers a synthetic statement of the unity of religion, cosmology and art. Aidan Nichols makes the case for Christianity's capacity to inspire high culture - both in principle and through well-chosen historical examples which d...

"You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love, lovely like Jerusalem." -- Song of SongsThe highly regarded spiritual writer and theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P. presents an overview of the Old Testament by showing what it is and its relationship to the New Testament. He explains that it is essential for one to be familiar with the Old Testament in order to understand properly, and in a deeper way, the richness and message of the New. In particular, Fr. Nichols shows how important it is to grasp tha...

Following his acclaimedThe Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide Through Balthasar's Aesthetics, No Bloodless Myth by Aidan Nichols summarizes and illuminates the five-volume series Theo-Drama, which develops the heart of Balthasar's ...Show MoreThis item is ReturnableAdditional Information BISAC Categories:- Religion | Christian Theology | General- Religion | PhilosophyLC Subjects:-Balthasar, Hans Urs von -Religion and dramaINGRAM Categories:- Religious Orientation | Catholic- Religious Orientation ...

Redeeming Beauty explores the richness of orthodox Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, in matters of 'sacral aesthetics' - a term used to denote the foundations, production and experience of religiously relevant beauty. Aidan Nichols investigates five principal themes: the foundation of beauty in the natural order through divine creative action; explicitly 'evangelical' beauty as a quality of biblical revelation and notably at its climax in Christ; the legitimacy of making and vene...

Return of the White Canons tells the little-known story of the valiant attempts by Canons Regular of Prémontré (Premonstratensians or 'Norbertines') to restore the fortunes of their Order, once widespread in England and, to a lesser extent, Scotland, in Queen Victoria's Britain.With new archival research in France and Belgium, as well as in the United Kingdom, this is a narrative much of whose detail has not been recorded before.Aidan Nichols gives a brief overview of the Order's twelfth-cent...

Novelist Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) left a mark on twentieth-century literature, not only in her homeland of Norway, but across the West. Her painterly eye for the Scandinavian countryside, her uncompromising emotional realism, her concrete sense of history, her bold vision of woman and man--these won her such acclaim that she received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, not long after the publication of her epic historical novel, Kristin Lavransdatter. During World War II, she loudly opposed...

The Art of God Incarnate proposes that visual art is a good way to think of how the incarnation--the central truth-claim of Christianity--can be said to reveal the divine. In the book of Genesis, the human being, fresh from the hands of the Creator, is the image of God in the temple of the world. In an environment of distorted images the prophets sought to make visible by symbolic gestures the divine attitude toward Israel, as well as looking forward to a new divine intervention to redeem his...

About the Contributor(s): Aidan Nichols, OP, is a member of the Dominican community at Blackfriers, Cambridge, and the author of numerous books on Eastern and Western theology and Church history.This item is ReturnableAdditional Information BISAC Categories:- Religion | Christianity | Catholic - General- Religion | Christian Theology | History- Religion | Christianity | HistoryINGRAM Categories:- Religious Orientation | Catholic- Religious Orientation | ChristianDewey: 282Features: Bibliograp...

This is the first comprehensive study of the theological significance of Paul Claudel, a poet frequently cited by literary-minded theologians in Europe and theologically-minded poets (such as von Balthasar, de Lubac and Eliot). His writing combines cosmology and history, Bible and metaphysics, liturgy and the drama of human personality. His work, which continues to arouse discussion in France, was acclaimed in his lifetime as the 'summa poetica' of a new Dante. Aidan Nichols' study demonstrat...

An exemplary summary of the state of Catholic theology and what appears to be its future.This historical treatment of Catholic theology looks not to the content of that theology but rather to the form in which that content is contained and how ...Show MoreThis item is ReturnableAdditional Information BISAC Categories:- Religion | Christian Theology | General- Religion | Christianity | Catholic - GeneralLC Subjects:-Catholic Church -Doctrines-History -Theology, DoctrinalINGRAM Categories:- The...

"The Singing-Masters: Church Fathers from Greek East and Latin West" by Aidan Nichols offers a passionate account of the theological achievements of eighteen Church Fathers. The selection includes ten from the Greek East and eight from the Latin West, figures who have been authoritative for Catholic doctrine or influential in Church life. Nichols provides a dramatic, humanized account of patristic thought, enriched with biographical details and a serious discussion of their theological doctri...

This book is an introduction to the personality and thought of the founder of Russian sophiology, the philosophy and theology of 'wisdom', Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ëv. Seen as the single most important philosopher Russia has as yet produced, there has been an explosion of interest in, and writing about, Solov'ëv since the ending of Soviet period constraints in the later 1980s. From the closing years of the twentieth century there has also been an unexpected outbreak of 'philo-sophiology' in ...

This accessible little book is a study of spiritual theology, and so a reflection on the spiritual life as found in Christianity. Christian spirituality embodies in personal living the biblical revelation received in the Church of the Fathers and transmitted to its successors in every age. Like everything else in Christian doctrine and practice, Christian spirituality depends on Scripture and Tradition--the two intrinsically inter-related ways in which that revelation is communicated. Using a...

The author at the centre of this study, Russian priest-theologian Nikolai Nikolaevich Afanas'ev, was perhaps the most influential thinker about the Church Russia has produced. In Aidan Nichols's careful evaluation, he emerges as a key figure in the rapprochement of Christian East and West, and most notably of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Nichols illustrates how Afanas'ev has been influential in two key respects: first of all in his conviction that the Eucharist constitutes the foundati...

The Year of Consecrated Life has given all Catholics the opportunity to celebrate and reflect on those living out the witness of consecration in the Church-but what is the Religious Life? In this small book Fr Aidan Nichols, OP provides a succinct introduction, showing how Religious Life emerged from the Gospels in the Apostolic Age, and then developed in the world of the Fathers of the Church in Egypt, in Palestine, Syria and Cappadocia and then in the Latin West-through St Augustine, St Joh...

Sergei Bulgakov, born in Russia in 1871, was one of the principal Eastern theologians of the twentieth century. At the age of thirty he was appointed professor of political economy at the University of Kiev. After a crisis of faith, Bulgakov declared himself an unbeliever in 1888, but in a slow process he moved from Marxism to Idealism, and then from Idealism to a rediscovered Orthodoxy. By the time of the two Revolutions of 1917, Bulgakov was one of the best known Orthodox theologians in Rus...