Searching for Sacred Images

Aidan Nichols is a prolific fellow, as we have long known. Just a couple of weeks ago I featured his new book on sophiology, and now we have another devoted to iconography, a topic of perennial interest to Christians both East and West: In Search of the Sacred Image (Gracewing, 2020), 288pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

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 Modernist movement in the 1950s. Now he looks in detail at the development of spiritual art in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He traces how in Russia the great tradition of classical iconography from the mediaeval period came to be preserved, paradoxically as a result of its very persecution, and then rediscovered. Simultaneously, artists in Western Europe were re-appraising the so-called 'Primitive' artists of mediaeval Italy, Flanders and Byzantium, while in Britain the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood revolutionized art and aesthetics. This fascinating study of these parallel movements sheds new light on the spiritual art of the period. More importantly, it asks us to look again at that art and its role in divine revelation, to see what riches are there and what lessons may be learned for a reinvigorated sacred art today.

The Sophiology Man

The English Dominican Aidan Nichols long ago emerged as one of the most serious Latin interlocutors with and scholars of the Christian East. More than thirty years ago now, he began this exploration with his Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas'ev (1893-1966), drawing on a figure who even today still retains great power and promise and relevance, especially in the area of ecclesiology. I drew on Afanasiev extensively in my book last year, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power.

That is not to say that all of Nichols' works have been problem-free. His first edition of Rome and the Eastern Churches was a mess, riddled with errors of all sorts. But the second edition was a welcome new version free of the problems of the original.

Nichols is certainly prolific, and here I have noted just a fraction of his books on Eastern themes and figures. He has yet another book out this year on a figure who continues to haunt many Western theologians and ecumenists: Aidan Nichols, The Sophiology Man. The Work of Vladimir Solov'ëv (Gracewing, 2020), 178pp.

About this new book we are told:

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 the West, to which his philosophical endeavours are highly relevant.

 After an early 'theosophical' stage where his interests were concentrated on an 'integral' or 'holistic' grasp of the true, and a middle 'theocratic' period when his mind was concentrated on how to achieve, for Christendom and global society, the common good, Solov'ëv moved into a late 'theurgical' phase dominated by such themes as nature, art and love (though the good and the true were not forgotten). These topics could perhaps be summed up as anterooms of the third of the great 'transcendentals' of Christian Scholasticism: namely, the beautiful. Solov'ëv did not leave behind a fully coherent body of reflection on the 'Lady' Wisdom celebrated in such sapiential books of the Old Testament as Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon--the 'Sophia' that gives 'sophiology' its name--but Aidan Nichols helps to make his sophianic doctrine, drawn from sources that were a mixture of Christian and Jewish, both traditional and esoteric, intelligible to the reader. He also gives an account of Solov'ëv as an early 'ecumenist', concerned with the reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches - and indeed with the reunion of Christians all round. At the end of his life, his many-sided intellectual, ecclesiastical, political, moral, and aesthetic enterprise metamorphosed into the belief that only divine intervention, in the form of the Parousia of Christ, will ever resolve the myopia, lethargy, folly and other evils of homo sapiens on this planet. Among those evils he identified one attempted 'final solution' --a globalist utopia organized without reference to the incarnate God. It is perhaps his most pertinent word to people today.

On the History of Sobornost (the Journal)

A new book by the Dominican scholar Aidan Nichols is always worth paying attention to. He is easily in the top tier of serious and worthwhile Roman Catholic theologians today, but what sets him apart still further is his life-long scholarly study of the Christian East in a number of books (on, e.g., Maximus the Confessor, or Vladimir Lossky, or Rome's relationship to the Eastern Churches, inter alia), a discussion usually marked by careful, sober assessment untainted by either polemics or romanticism.

All those hallmarks look to be present in his newest book, an historical study of a journal I have read for many years, but always with an inchoate sense that there was something a bit peculiar about it, that its internal tensions were rather volatile, and that it could not quite figure out who it was or what it was attempting to do. Nichols has turned his skills to telling this history of engagement-cum-conflict in Alban and Sergius: The Story of a Journal (Gracewing, 2018), 528pp.

About this book we are told the following by the publisher:

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 between the exiled Orthodox intelligentsia of the Russian diaspora and the Catholic party of the Church of England, but also on occasion with Presbyterians, Methodists and other Protestants.

In this fascinating account of the work and mission of Sobornost, Aidan Nichols shows how this was to change significantly as the Western tradition began to be seen as taking too many wrong turnings to be a reliable guide for Christian theology at large, and he divides this study into two parts: the first forty years of the journal as a time of encounter more or less on equal terms, and the last fifty years where the meeting of East and West would be increasingly on the East's terms--and, in another striking development, this meant the Greek East rather than the Russian. This process of transformation was only gradual, but by the start of the twenty-first century, Sobornost was fast becoming, especially through its mediation of modern Greek philosophy, theology and spirituality, as well as the more traditional discipline of Byzantine studies, a largely monophonic voice for Orthodoxy in the West. This was a far cry from its origins, even if that voice was also much needed in an often disoriented English, European and North American Christianity. Throughout its history, Sobornost has been invaluable for Western readers in the provision of information about the Eastern Churches, and especially the Byzantine or Chalcedonian Orthodox--always the more important part of both Fellowship and journal. A definitive role for the present and for the future, as they both celebrate their 90th anniversary.

On the Life of Vladimir Lossky

I have elsewhere described the English Dominican Aidan Nichols as the most perceptive and sympathetic Roman Catholic theologian live today writing about the Christian East, as he has been doing for decades now. One of his earliest such studies, published by Cambridge in 1989, remains in print today as Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas'ev (1893-1966).

His 1990 book (updated and much improved in 2010, as noted here), Rome and the Eastern Churches is perhaps the most sober look at ecumenical relations, including the plight of Eastern Catholics in-between Roman Catholics and Orthodox. I demurred slightly from his conclusions about the "eschatological" nature of Orthodox-Catholic unity which I thought perhaps overly pessimistic, but perhaps not given where things stand today, not least with the Russians.

His recent biography of Adrian Fortescue, whom I discussed here, offers tantalizing glimpses into the rapier-witted scholar, whose droll and acerbic correspondence I really hope to see some day published in full.

His 1993 book, Byzantine Gospel, was the first in a very long series of books at the end of the last century and start of the present one to focus on Maximus the Confessor, about whom much has been published, as I have noted on here many times.

His 2005 book, Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov, bore a preface from another leading English scholar of Russian Orthodoxy, Rowan Williams.

Along the way he has also written books about iconography, liturgy, beauty, and aesthetics; and covered all those topics, and much else besides, in his 1999 book Christendom Awake, which calls for Orthodox-Catholic unity so that the former may help the latter by reintroducing to the weakened Western Church a more robust sense of monasticism, asceticism, and liturgical mysticism, inter alia.

As if the foregoing were not enough, he has also written a number of studies of the lives of such giants as Chesterton, Aquinas, and others, including Bulgakov, as noted above.

Now he has turned his attention to another outsized figure of Russian Orthodoxy in the 20th century, Vladimir Lossky, on whom Nichols has focused his latest book: Mystical Theologian: The Work of Vladimir Lossky (Gracewing, 2017).

Given the prolific prominence and astute judgments of the author, and given the equal but different prominence of the subject, Lossky, this is a book to which attention must be paid.

About this book we are told:

Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky, born in 1903, was not only seminal in the development of Orthodox theology in its Diaspora after the Russian Revolution, and a major figure in twentieth-century European theological history, but also one of those whose work can inspire a serious Christian life. This book is not so much preoccupied by 'placing' Lossky within the world of patristic scholarship or the history of Russian religious thought, but rather, on Lossky's substantive spiritual teaching - and, accordingly, that of the teachers, especially ancient and mediaeval, he commended. Its principal intention is of communicating this teaching.

The title echoes Lossky's own in his best known book, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, a work choc-A-bloc with doctrinal reflection. However it concentrates perhaps more on his final, posthumously published, lecture course, Theologie dogmatique. Born in Wilhelmine Germany, brought up in Tsarist Russia, educated at universities in St Petersburg, Prague and Paris, deeply influenced by early study of the writings of the mediaeval Latin West, and living and working in France, Vladimir Lossky was ideally placed to provide a link between Orthodoxy and the Christian West. To go deep into Lossky, cordial concern for the spiritual and intellectual concern for the propositional must walk hand in hand. The consequent initiation into the depths of divine revelation Lossky can supply will be likely to profit in both heart and mind anyone who hears his message and seeks in coherent fashion to put it into effect.

A Word from Adrian Fortescue

I was invited to be keynote lecturer at the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary's annual conference this past weekend at the lovely Catholic college in Newburgh, NY.

I chose as my topic a question that has long perturbed me: why did Pope Pius IX feel he had the right to proceed with a unilateral dogmatic declaration in 1854 concerning the conception of the Theotokos when:

a) no pope before had dared to dream of doing such a thing; and
b) no dogmatic crisis--whether in Mariology or theology proper in the strict sense--was at hand, and thus the old rule of "nothing is defined until it is denied" was not applicable.

Various traditions and scholars agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus no obvious dogmatic or theological reason to proceed with a definition. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, in several places between 1981 and 2004 (helpfully studied in Studying Mary: The Virgin Mary in Anglican and Catholic Theology and Devotion) agreed that the Immaculate Conception arose when there was no crisis to hand.

The great Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov says the same thing, rather wearily and acerbically, in his book The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God. And even conservative Catholic scholars such as Sr. Sara Butler agree that there was no crisis to hand, and thus the justification for a definition must be sought on quite other than theological grounds.

The short answer I proffered, drawing on an article I published last year (“Sovereignty, Politics, and the Church: Joseph de Maistre’s Legacy for Catholic and Orthodox Ecclesiology,” Pro Ecclesia 24 [2015]: 366-389), was that the French Revolution, combined with widespread revolutionary turmoil in 1848, led the pope to realize that there was a crisis to hand, a crisis centred precisely on papal power in the temporal realm, which was rapidly coming to a disastrous end, and therefore some new modus operandi in the world and Church must be sought. Thus we see 1854 as the beginning of the popes as global teachers, a notion well described by the irreplaceable studies of Eamon Duffy and Owen Chadwick.

It would, of course, be too much of a stretch, especially in a short lecture, to suggest there is a direct route between 1854 and 2016, but I did sketch out enough evidence, I thought, to indicate some highly probable links between the 1854 definition, the 1950 definition of the Assumption by another pope named Pius, and also the burgeoning papacy commenting on everything under the sun and inserting itself into all manner of thing well and truly beyond its brief. This problem began with Pius IX in 1854, increased under Leo XIII, and then became more and more acute with every pope from him to the current incumbent of the Roman bishopric who seems to have missed all the warnings in the Apophthegmata Patrum about the importance of bridling one's tongue lest that organ become a σκάνδαλον to the brethren.

Then, for effect on a hot summer evening after three days of a conference, I threw in some spicy bits at the end calling for an overhaul of the papacy to prevent any future popes not only from proceeding with unilateral dogmatic definitions, but also from hosting flying press conferences, having Twitter accounts, giving interviews to anyone for any reason about any topic, and much else besides. I concluded with an especially bon mot from Adrian Fortescue, the English priest-scholar and Orientalist whose views on the papacy were much more acerbic, and much more polemically conveyed, than anything I have ever done in, e.g., my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy. (It seems a great pity that many of his choicest phrases are to be found in his correspondence, very little of which seems to have been published except in excerpts here and there--as in Aidan Nichols intellectual biography, The Latin Clerk: The Life, Work and Travels of Adrian Fortescue.)

Writing--note well--in 1920, Fortescue, a stout defender of the papacy and Church in other contexts, was forced to admit, “I wish to goodness that the pope would never speak at all except when he means to define ex cathedra. Then we should know where we are.”

To which let all the weary brethren say: Amen, Amen!

Papal Reform in Service to the Gospel

In the late 1990s a book was published by the prolific and erudite English Dominican Aidan Nichols whose argument about Orthodox-Catholic unity has long stayed with me, and deeply influenced me when, just over a decade ago, I began my doctoral program that led to a dissertation which more recently was turned into a book, Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity,

That book of mine was influenced by Nichols' Christendom Awake: On Re-Energizing the Church in Culture. In that book, Nicholas suggests that the Catholic Church, greatly weakened by the post-conciliar experience, very much needed unity with Orthodoxy not only for its own sake, and for the sake of the fulfillment of the gospel, but also for the ballast that Orthodoxy could provide to the Catholic Church, particularly in the areas of liturgy, monasticism, and asceticism. Once united, the Catholic-Orthodox Church would be vastly stronger than either "lung" separated from the other, and as a result could turn from ecclesiological issues to re-evangelizing an increasingly rebarbative world.

I mention this bit of intellectual genealogy only so that you will understand my amazement at the new document released today by Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, which you may read here on the Vatican website (PDF). I'm not claiming the pope has read Nicholas (possible) or me (entirely unlikely), and I'm not done reading it yet (for all the hype about a new style, he has, alas, held to the old-style prolixity of John Paul II with a document clocking in at 224pp--oy!) but there are at least two paragraphs that, verily I say unto you, jumped off the page and made me more than a little amazed at how much they accord with what Nichols suggested and I expanded upon at length. (These are not, of course, entirely surprising given that they are in accord with other recent papal utterances on the topic, as I noted here.):

"Nor do I believe that the papal magisterium should be expected to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world. It is not advisable for the Pope to take the place of local Bishops in the discernment of every issue which arises in their territory. In this sense, I am conscious of the need to promote a sound 'decentralization'" (no. 16).

This is followed some time later by a longer and even blunter paragraph which references Ut Unum Sint on which my own book was based:

Since I am called to put into practice what I ask of others, I too must think about a conversion of the papacy. It is my duty, as the Bishop of Rome, to be open to suggestions which can help make the exercise of my ministry more faithful to the meaning which Jesus Christ wished to give it and to the present needs of evangelization. Pope John Paul II asked for help in finding 'a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation'. We have made little progress in this regard. The papacy and the central structures of the universal Church also need to hear the call to pastoral conversion. The Second Vatican Council stated that, like the ancient patriarchal Churches, episcopal conferences are in a position 'to contribute in many and fruitful ways to the concrete realization of the collegial spirit'. Yet this desire has not been fully realized, since a juridical status of episcopal conferences which would see them as subjects of specific attributions, including genuine doctrinal authority, has not yet been sufficiently elaborated. Excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach.

Ecclesiology is not, or should not be, ultimately about constant self-referential fussing over who gets the cushiest chair or the biggest hat. The story of the rebuke of the libido dominandi of the sons of Zebedee (Mark 10:35-45) should ring loudly and constantly in the ears of every churchman and ecclesiologist. The point of working for unity--the same point of this encyclical--is so that we can all stop focusing on ourselves and instead focus on bringing the world to Christ, who summed it up best: "that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me" (John 17:21).

Who Does He Think He Is?

Catholic University of America Press sent me their catalogue last week, and there are many interesting entries in it, not the least of which is this book forthcoming in the spring of 2013: Paul McPartlan,  A Service of Love: Papal Primacy, the Eucharist, and Church Unity (Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 120pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

A crucial topic in Catholic-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue is the nature and exercise of universal primacy in the church. In 1995, Pope John Paul II expressed the hope that pastors and theologians of both churches might seek ways in which the papal ministry could accomplish "a service of love recognized by all concerned" (Ut Unum Sint). In this short and penetrating study, Paul McPartlan, a member of the international Roman Catholic-Orthodox theological dialogue, presents a proposal, carefully argued both historically and theologically, for a primacy exercising a service of love in a reconciled church, West and East.

McPartlan builds on the substantial foundation already laid in the dialogue for an understanding of the church in terms of the Eucharist. Eucharistic ecclesiology has been one of the most remarkable developments in the theological renewal of recent decades. Drawing particularly on scriptural and patristic teaching, it offers a highly promising framework for resolving this most sensitive and difficult of issues -- recognizing the bishop of Rome as the focal point and servant of the Eucharistic communion among bishops. Vatican II directed that those working for reconciliation between Catholics and Orthodox pay close attention to the relationships that pertained between the Eastern churches and the see of Rome before the split of 1054. McPartlan seeks to do just that, notably incorporating the teaching of the council on the role of the papacy to craft a proposal that may commend itself to Catholics and to Orthodox.

McPartlan seems to be going over territory I covered in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity (UND Press, 2011) though I have never seen my treatment as definitive, and have always been open to others. My whole point has been to find a way for Orthodoxy and Catholicism to renew the communion which already exists between them while each enriches the other as Aidan Nichols callled for in his Christendom Awake: On Re-Energizing the Church in Culture (Eerdmams, 1999).

Aidan Nichols on Being Lost in Wonder

As I noted previously, the prolific English Dominican Aidan Nichols is no stranger to Eastern Christianity, having authored significant and important studies (including the one I discuss here), such as Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship, Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology, and Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanasiev.

Now he has come out with a collection that looks at the relationship between Christianity and the arts, including iconography, especially in a Russian context (treated in his ninth chapter): Lost in Wonder: Essays on Liturgy and the Arts (Ashgate, 2011), 194pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

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 draw on the best in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.