preface to volume ii: Theology

Special Assistant to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

Kallistos [Timothy] Ware (1934–2022) was arguably the most renowned and popular Orthodox Christian theologian in recent decades. A convert to the Orthodox faith, he was elected and ordained bishop, subsequently elevated to metropolitan, of the titular see of Diokleia (an ancient and Byzantine city in Phrygia, Asia Minor), and was widely considered the most prolific and proficient communicator of Patristic theology and Orthodox spirituality in my generation. 

For more than thirty years, until retiring 2001, he taught at the University of Oxford in England, where I spent three years (1980–1983) attending every single class and listening to every single sermon of then Fr. Kallistos, while also spending substantial time with him at his home (for academic tutorials and personal visitations) but also at conferences, accompanied on road-trips by such scholars as Fr. John Meyendorff, Fr. Alexander Schmemann, and Dr. David Balfour, both in Oxford as well as other cities (such as London and Birmingham) or pilgrimages (such as Walsingham and Iona) throughout the United Kingdom.

Metropolitan Kallistos was an assiduous scholar, a punctilious lecturer, a meticulous writer, and a conscientious adviser. The world will remember him as the author of The Orthodox Church, still the quintessential introduction to the Orthodox Church, and its companion, The Orthodox Way. But he is also the translator, with Mother Mary of the Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Veil in France, of The Festal Menaion and The Lenten Triodion, completed in 1969 and 1977, respectively, which have proved to be fundamental and influential service books for the Orthodox liturgical cycle. 

In addition to his teaching and translations, Kallistos served as parish priest at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation in Oxford that also housed the Russian Orthodox congregation at the time. I vividly remember the Sundays divided into chant predominantly in Greek, Slavonic, and English by rotation—unlike anything I had ever experienced and much like the ideal parish I envisaged. Indeed, what drew me, and arguably many others, to the university town and parish in Oxford was the rare combination of the scholarly and spiritual, of patristic literature and profound liturgy that the Metropolitan combined. To a young student of theology, it seemed to me that this was an exceptional model of Orthodox Christianity as a living and life-changing tradition.

Moreover, the Metropolitan’s unique and provocative combination of scholarship and spirituality was a powerful influence. Comfortable serving at the altar as researching in the Bodleian Library, Kallistos was as much on fire delivering a sermon on a solemn Holy Week service or a regular Sunday liturgy as he was delivering a lecture on the desert fathers or the Palamite controversy. And he will doubtless be remembered far beyond Oxford, or even Orthodoxy. He was as confident debating with Anglican and Catholic clerics or theologians as he was among Greek, Russian, Serbian, and Romanian Orthodox thinkers. He was long-time editor (with George Every and John Saward) of the pioneering journal Eastern Churches Review as well as life-long advocate (with the likes of Fr. Lev Gillet) of ecumenical, and especially Anglican-Orthodox, relations.  Most notably, he served as joint president of the international commissions for Orthodox-Anglican and vice-chairman of the Orthodox-Roman Catholic dialogue, and—despite personal concerns and reservations, which he expressed in interviews and recordings—he nonetheless promoted and participated in the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church held in Crete in 2016.

With this background and breadth, Metropolitan Kallistos was capable of advocating, informing, and criticizing trends and developments in the Orthodox Church, Greek and Russian alike. He was also humble enough to recognize his limitations and miscalculations. For instance, in the first chapter of this volume, he accepts and admits that the 2007 Document of Ravenna “on Communion, Conciliarity and Authority,” which bothered some theologians in the Slavic tradition because it highlighted the authenticity of a universal primacy, was in fact sound:

The Ravenna Document said, “The fact of primacy at the universal level is accepted by both East and West.” And it was also accepted that the center for universal primacy is Rome—that may seem obvious to Catholics, but it has often been denied by the Orthodox. I find it very significant that the Orthodox present at Ravenna—the Russian Church was in fact absent, but that was over quite different questions; the problems in Estonia were what kept them away—I find it very significant that this general statement accepting the principle of universal primacy was endorsed unanimously by the Orthodox as well as the Catholics. (59)

The truth is that, while Orthodox theologians sometimes only present a caricature of the Roman Catholic understanding of papal primacy, the understanding of primacy as limited to a single authority or individual is frequently the image presented in the Orthodox function of hierarchy and exercise of synodality! 

Moreover, Kallistos encouraged discussion of women’s ordination along with dispassionate conversation on gender and sexuality—both of course to the rancorous disapproval of the usual suspects. The chapter in this volume (Part 3) about Jesus Christ evaluates the doctrine of the Incarnation in the light of terminology related to gender, such Christ as Second Adam and the Word incarnate as anthropos. Likewise, the Metropolitan endorsed an Orthodox ecological doctrine as fundamentally and essentially rooted in the dogma of creation and incarnation (tangentially raised in Part 4, Lectures 3–4 herewith).

Jack Figel has rendered a fitting tribute to the late Metropolitan Kallistos and an immense contribution to the theological world by video-recording and then transcribing these lectures. This invaluable service brings me back to the classrooms of Examination Schools on High Street and the library of St. Gregory House on Canterbury Road. The latter contains the personal books of Derwas Chitty (1901–1971), who was Metropolitan Kallistos’s academic supervisor, as well as the rare books belonging to the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, all of which render it a significant research site for Patristic, Byzantine, and Syriac studies. I can almost hear Fr. Kallistos delivering his vibrant and colorful lectures—I still recall his systematic lessons about the Christology of Nestorius and Cyril, and the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon!—all carefully crafted in his characteristic style and speckled with his distinctive humor. His jokes were memorable and recurring:

I remember when I had to give my first lecture at Oxford; the day before, someone else had been giving his first lecture, and he thought he had prepared enough to last an hour, but he read it so quickly that he finished in 20 minutes. Now, what he should have done would have been to start all over again, because the audience had understood nothing. But instead, he looked up and said, I’m sorry, I have nothing more to say, and he rushed out. But in his confusion, he didn’t take the door out of the lecture hall, but he shut himself in a broom cupboard, with no handle on the inside—and in a humiliating manner, he had to be let out by his audience. So, I’ve always been concerned not to suffer his terrible fate and not end up shut in a broom cupboard. (178)

The addresses contained in this volume consider the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, as well as the teachings about the Church and the feasts of the Mother of God. They explore the early apostolic and later patristic classics, while also examining the more recent theological thought of Orthodox theology and spirituality, as these are developed in Russian and Greek sources. Kallistos had a natural gift of weaving together the writing of Nicholas Kabasilas and John of Kronstadt, Nikolas Afanasiev and John Zizioulas, Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky, into a single tapestry and was both engaging and educational. By the same token, he would comfortably incorporate Latin sources, like Augustine of Hippo or Thomas Aquinas, but also Hildegard of Bingen and Richard of St. Victor, while also readily citing literary texts, like J.R.R. Tolkien, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He provides comparison with and criticism of Western theologians, like Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and John Macquarrie.

But above all, Kallistos turns to and quotes from the writers of The Philokalia, while always emphasizing the priority of silence in theology (see Part 4, Lecture 2 of this volume) and the centrality of the Jesus Prayer (Part 4, Lecture 3). With Gerald Palmer and Philip Sherrard, he edited the complete text of The Philokalia, a collection of writings by early church and Orthodox mystics. In 1995, Denise Sherrard wrote to tell me that her husband completed the draft of the translation only weeks prior to his repose. For his part, the Metropolitan finished with the final proofs of the fifth and final volume just weeks before he died.

Beyond the historical and theoretical, Kallistos was also concerned about the ecclesiastical and ecumenical dimension of what he studied and taught. Whether referring to the Church or the Holy Trinity, Kallistos underlines the sacramental and mystical dimensions of doctrine, which “isn’t just speculation, a philosophical theory, [but] something that we live through our prayer.” (74)

I never stopped being his student. He was supportive at every new dimension and turn of my ministry and teaching. He guided and read everything that I wrote over the last thirty years, which included preparing—when already quite ill—the foreword to my latest publication on the fifth-century elders from Gaza, Barsanuphius and John, whose letters he introduced me to as his student. I was delighted to dedicate that book to him; and I was elated when he held it in his hands only days before surrendering his spirit to the Lord.