The theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose genius is now generally recognized, has its origins in his early investigations of philosophy and the arts, which this book lays out in full for the first time. This book will enable English-speaking readers for the first time to come to terms with Balthasar's relation to European - especially German - philosophy and literature. It is the only way readers can gain a comprehensive overview of a huge and complex output crucial to his later work. Aidan Nichols is a Dominican of Blackfriars Cambridge who has published some thirty books in various areas of historical and dogmatic theology.

Scattering the Seed: A Guide Through Balthasar's Early Writings on Philosophy and the Arts (Introduction to Hans Urs Von Balthasar)

Religion & Spirituality

Nichols, OP Aidan

Religious Studies

T&T Clark

Following his acclaimed Guide Through Balthasar's Aesthetics, Aidan Nichols summarizes and illuminates the five volume series Theo-Drama, which develops the heart of Balthasar's theological theory - his exploration of the Good and of the dramatic interplay of finite and infinite freedom. Theo-Drama builds upon the earlier achievement of The Glory of the Lord and transcends it, opening up new horizons for theological and cultural reflection in the twenty-first century. Aidan Nichols' succinct commentary enables the reader to grasp the main themes of one of the most important theological works in several generations. Introduction

No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar's Dramatics

Christian Books & Bibles

T&T Clark International

This study completes Aidan Nichols' presentation of the great theological trilogy of Hans Urs von Balthasar. His interpretative summary of Balthasar's logic considers the way in which the early volume The Truth of the World points forward to the theological aesthetics and dramatics and also how Theo-Logic's concluding volumes pick up the themes of the The Glory of the Lord and Theo-Drama. The author looks particularly at how Balthasar relates revelation of divine beauty and divine goodness to the unfolding of divine truth.

Say it is Pentecost Balthasar's Logic: A Guide Through Balthasar's Logic

Bloomsbury T&T Clark

The Kingdom of God is like an intergalactic starship in constant orbit around the earth. No on can see it, but its tremendous power is available at all times to anyone who is dedicated to its transcendent message. With this splendid metaphor, Maloney launches into an engaging study of the Gospel of Mark. He argues forcefully that the key theme of the book is eschatology (death and resurrection) and his argument goes against the grain of the majority of Markan scholars who contend that the themes of the Gospel are discipleship and the Messianic secret. Maloney asserts that Markan scholars have so often missed this point because of their location in the First World. They lack the cultural orientation to understand the force of Mark's message about the coming Kingdom of God. Thus, traditional interpretations of Mark have emphasized a privatization of morality among Christians and a lack of concern for the well-being of the worldwide human community. The remedy for such a reading of Mark is to read it through the eyes of the people whose experience is most like that of Mark's original audience. Maloney uses the insights of Latin American biblical interpreters and the results of social science research into the first-century Mediterranean world to provide a fresh and provocative reading of Mark's gospel. Elliott C. Maloney, O.S.B. is Professor of New Testament Studies and Biblical Languages at Saint Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a member of the Religious Studies Faculty at Saint Vincent College, and the author of Semitic Interference in Marcan Syntax.

Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology

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 it is expressed. Faithful to Catholic teaching yet critical, discerning yet impartial, Nichols offers this introduction to dogmatic theology, with the firm belief that dogmatics are the center of theology, and that any theological discipline which cuts itself off from these heartlands does so at its own peril. For it is in dogmatics that theology is in touch with the heart of revelation, and only by virtue of the quality of its contact with that revelation is thinking Christian at all. Though comprehensive and far-reaching, this work is not beyond the understanding of people just commencing a study of theology. It makes an excellent text for study groups.

The Shape of Catholic Theology: An Introduction to Its Sources, Principles, and History

Liturgical Press

Over the course of a distinguished theological career, Aidan Nichols has produced an array of masterful contributions to the fields of systematic theology, ecclesiology, theological aesthetics, ecumenism, liturgy, and Scripture. Now, inChalice of God, he attempts to synthesize a lifetime of research, teaching, and scholarly reflection in a book that is both rigorously academic and intensely personal. This is Nichols' theological manifesto for the twenty-first century.
Drawing together the insights of high scholasticism, the mid-twentieth-century ressourcement movement, a holistic reading of Scripture typical of the best patristic exegesis, and the liturgical tradition and iconography of both East and West, he presents a sound architecture for contemporary Catholic theology. Chalice of God promises to enrich and challenge those who engage in the enterprise of theology for years to come.

Chalice of God: A Systematic Theology in Outline

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 Russia. In 1918 he was ordained priest, and fled Moscow in danger of imminent arrest. Arriving in Paris in 1925 he was to live and work there until his death in 1944, his life inextricably bound up with the Russian theological institute, Saint-Serge, of which he was a founder member and subsequent professor, rector and dean. In this timely work, Aidan Nichols introduces the life and work of Bulgakov and provides a systematic presentation of his dogmatic theology. 'The present book has appeared at exactly the right moment. Alike in Russia and in the West, we are witnessing a veritable "Bulgakov renaissance" . . . this is the first comprehensive and systematic survey of his theology in English.' Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia 'As research on Bulgakov by Catholics and Protestants as well as Orthodox grows in volume, it is a great help to have this authoritative, comprehensive guide. I hope it will encourage further study and assimilation of one of the most searching and moving as well as one of the most complex of modern theological minds.' Dr Rowan Williams, Archibshop of Canterbury Aidan Nichols, OP, is an English Dominican of Blackfriars, Cambridge. He has written thirty books, chiefly on aspects of Catholic theology and theological history, but also on Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism.

Wisdom from Above

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Gracewing

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'&#65533;v. Seen as the single most important philosopher Russia has as yet produced, there has been an explosion of interest in, and writing about, Solov'&#65533;v 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'&#65533;v 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'&#65533;v 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'&#65533;v 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.

The Sophiology Man. The Work of Vladimir Solov'ëv

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 John Cassian, St Benedict and in the Medieval period St Thomas Aquinas. Roots on which all Religious Life in the modern world draws. There is no forest of trees called 'the Religious Orders of the Catholic Church'. There is only one tree with many branches. The tree is the monastic estate, the branches are the diverse forms of life the members of that estate can take up, combined with the different missions in the Church to which they can be mandated. This has wide-ranging consequences, not least for the later Religious Orders and Congregations, and the most recent 'new movements' of the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, some of which have groups of ascetics at their heart. All need to recover the great lines of monastic spirituality as the common basis of their call in the Church. That is so notwithstanding the specificities of emphasis of this or that founder or the particularities of function they envisaged for their Institute. They should be seen as a single body with a shared contemplative spirit

What is the Religious Life? From the Gospels to Aquinas

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-à-bloc with doctrinal reflection. However it concentrates perhaps more on his final, posthumously published, lecture course, Théologie 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.

Mystical Theologian: The Work of Vladimir Lossky

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