Abstract
Although Aidan Nichols is a Dominican friar and a theologian firmly within the Western theological tradition, throughout his career he has written on many topics of Eastern theology in a balanced and unromantic way. This volume is written on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Fellowship of Alban and Sergius (1928–2018).
This Fellowship was founded to give the Russian Orthodox community, and particularly the Russian Orthodox intelligentsia who found themselves as exiles after the Russian Revolution, a place where they could encounter Western Christians on the level of academic theology. Its main interlocutor was the High Church party within the Church of England. One of the main activities of the Fellowship was ‘the Journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, later Sobornost, [which] sought to strike a good balance between Western and Eastern contributions to Christian thought’ (p. ix).
This work is a history of the Fellowship and its activities through the prism of its journal, which provides an accessible printed record and Nichols recognizes that from very early on ‘the Journal contributed to forming the mind of the Fellowship’ (p. 25). For its first seven years the Journal provided an opportunity not simply for theological conversation between East and West, but also a place for elements of High Church Anglicanism to express themselves theologically.
1935 saw a rebirth of the Journal with its renaming as Sobornost (a Russian word that is hard to translate adequately into English, but which could be rendered as Catholicity on ‘conciliarness’). The new name coincided with a recalibration of the Journal’s focus and the next 50 years witnessed a concentration on Russian theology (as opposed to an earlier ecumenical focus that on the Orthodox side was not exclusively Russian). But the Journal was still a place for dialogue between East and West. If Nichols considers the first 40 years of the Journal to be a witness to a time of dialogue, he considers the last 50 years of the Journal as being a time when it concentrated on being a voice for Orthodoxy. In this time the Journal developed again and shed some of its Russian exclusiveness, so that modern Greek thought came to be expressed in its pages, although in recent years the influence of Greek and Byzantine philosophy and theology on the Journal risk overshadowing other traditions within Orthodoxy.
At over 500 pages the book may seem to be rather long. However, it does trace virtually a century of engagement between East and West. It covers nearly all issues of importance in both theological and ecumenical dialogue in that time. The book itself is well edited and produced. Readers might find the second last chapter to be particularly interesting as it traces the rise of ‘Green Orthodoxy’ as ‘an example of “looking ahead”—for the good of man in the cosmos’ (p. 431). For those interested in ecumenical dialogue today, the book sets the scene and allows readers to continue the business of ecumenism building on the achievements of earlier dialogue. It is also a good resource for Westerners who desire to breath with the ‘two lungs’ of the Church. Recovering our Eastern heritage is not simply a matter of decorating Western churches with some icons or buying rose incense, it is a serious endeavour that requires serious study of academic work such as this volume that Nichols has provided us with.