Dialogue with a Dominican
An Interview with Aidan Nichols, O. P.
Aidan Nichols, O.P., one of England’s most accomplished and lucid theological writers, is the prior of the Dominican community at Blackfriars, Cambridge.
He is the author of numerous works of theology and church history, including Theology in the Russian Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Rome and the Eastern Churches (The Liturgical Press, 1992), and two books on the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Word Has Been Abroad (Catholic University of America Press, 1998) and No Bloodless Myth (Catholic University of America Press, 2000).
In his 1999 Eerdmans book, Christendom Awake: On Reenergizing the Church in Culture, Fr. Nichols addresses how the recovery of the Church’s traditional mission can reenergize its witness in such areas as philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, the family, economics, relations between the sexes, and politics.
The interview with Fr. Nichols was conducted by editors James M. Kushiner and David Mills at Blackfriars in July 1998 and was edited and slightly revised this year.
Touchstone: Thank you for meeting with us. We have enjoyed our visits to Oxford and Cambridge.
Aidan Nichols (AN): Have you come across the Radical Orthodoxy movement during your visit to England?
Not yet.
AN: The Institute of Radical Orthodoxy is the brainchild of three Anglicans: John Milbank, who is moving from Cambridge to the University of Virginia; and two other people from Cambridge: Graham Ward, the Dean of Peterhouse, who is going to Manchester; and Catherine Pickstock, who is a Fellow of Emmanuel College. They have formed a definite school that has disciples.
Their line is that postmodernism is the natural result of the way that Western philosophy has developed. That is to say, the postmodernist critique of Western philosophy is irrefutable in terms of what it is attacking, but postmodernism itself is nothing but nihilism dressed up in fancy clothes. And therefore, the only remedy is the Holy Trinity!
They basically argue that all of the errors or false directions or insoluble problems in the Western philosophical tradition stem from misunderstandings of theology and of revelation. The only remedy is to go back to the source by renewal of a revelatory mode of thinking, which has the Holy Trinity as its center. That is the basic idea, roughly speaking, of Radical Orthodoxy, as I understand it.
James M. Kushiner is the Director of Publications for The Fellowship of St. James and the former Executive Editor of Touchstone.
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