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 orphan, he moved from Anglo-Catholicism into the Roman Catholic Church. After reading Modern History at Oxford, that led by a natural progression to becoming a Religious and a priest. In this book Nichols describes the wide variety of situations in which he has lived in Scotland, Norway, Rome, France, Ethiopia, and Jamaica, as well as England and the United States. Over the years, drawing on not only Catholic but also Orthodox and Anglican sources, he has produced a small library of books, touching on many areas of theology and culture while also seeking, at different times, to bind them together into a coherent unity, inspired by, principally, two great giants: Thomas Aquinas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. For Aidan Nichols, the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were a halcyon time. Things have been more difficult under the successor to these popes. He explains the problems he has encountered, both theoretical and practical, and his search for a resolution that is satisfactory both theologically and autobiographically. He ends his apologia with a raft of proposals for the stabilization and enrichment of ecclesial life in the decades to come.
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240810 Apologia: A Memoir by Aidan Nichols
This book will have limited appeal to those outside of a narrow category, namely those Catholics who are wondering where their church is heading. Yet, I found the story that Aidan Nichols tells about his life to be generally interesting as a window into the life of obedient, non-radical Catholics since 1960.
Aidan Nichols was born in 1948 to an Anglican family. After a visit to an Orthodox church where he was moved by the sublime beauty of more liturgical churches, he entered the Catholic Church as a teenager, over the vehement objections of family and the threat that there would be an interruption of his conditional baptism by the police. Nichols had decided to enter a religious life. Eventually, he selected the Dominicans – the Order of Preachers (“OP”) – as fitting his interest in liturgy and scholarship.
Nichols' life thereafter consisted of teaching and writing. His bibliography is extensive and well-received.
Most of the book follows Nichols' life as a world-travelling educator and writer. The memoir drops names like a rainstorm. As a student, Nichols knew Herbert McCabe, Kallistos Ware, Yves Congar, and Richard John Neuhas. These are important names to those who read theology, but may be unknow to the public.
Nichols provides several revealing anecdotes abut some these figures. He says that Herbert McCabe – a leading Thomistic thinker of the last 50 years – combined Irish Nationalism with Marxism. Apparently, this combination was quite common and explains the Marxist orientation of the provisional IRA. Nichols shares an anecdote about the foundation of Communio Review as a counterweight to the Marxist/Leftist Concilio Review. Yves Congar never jumped from Concilio to Communio because Concilio would be so much worse without him.
Toward the end of the book, Nichols moves into the papacy of Pope Francis. It is fair to say that he is very concerned about the direction the Catholic Church is being taken under Francis. Nichols signed the statements objecting to the 2016 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the 2019 Abu Dhabi Declaration made between the Roman pontiff and the Grand Iman of the Al-Azhar. Nichols views both as undercutting the clawing back of Catholic theology from the “relativistic fog” that had penetrated Catholic thinking. Nichols extols “richness” and “clarity.” Richness is found in the multiple strains of thinking that fund Catholic thinking, including, in his experience, Anglican and Orthodox thinking. “Clarity” means consistency in thought, not only across geography but across time. His thinking has led him to the understanding that the meaning of the expression “The Roman See is judged by no one” is that Rome is the final appeal in canonical matters but does not refer to doctrinal matter.
Nichols was also concerned about the Pachamama affair where an Earth Mother goddess idol was introduced into a South American papal ceremony. Nichols reasonably points out that this affair was exploited by South American Protestants to undermine the Catholic Church. The affair was a scandal and dispirited the faithful and encouraged anti-Catholics.
In short, Nichols became a critic of the papacy. This was a surprising development for him since he was best known for his book on the theology of Benedict XVI.
The Catholic hierarchy has been strangely unable to control priests and bishops who advocate the normalization same-sex ceremonies, Marxism, or feminism, but against Catholics who advocate, well, Catholicism, the Church is quite effective. Nichols has been made to withdraw from teaching assignments and official positions in the Dominican Order. When he decided to join the Norbertine monastery in Orange County, the local bishop issued a prohibition preventing Nichols from teaching anyone within the local diocese. The express concern was that Nichols might become a lightning rod for opponents of Francis.
Concerning the Norbertine Order, Nichols provides interesting background information on the 11th Century St. Norbert, who founded the Order of Premonstratensian. He also provides information on the order, which has had ps and down, and eventually founded a monastery in California when refugees from Communist Hungary escaped Hungary and left for more congenial environments.
Nichols is an educated, erudite man. His memoir captures the last 60 years of Catholic confusion and ebbs and flows.
