preface to volume v: spirituality

Archbishop Emeritus of Canterbury

St. John’s gospel tells us, in one of those haunting details that are so typical of this text, that Jesus’ tunic was “seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom” (Jn 19.23). It has often been seen as an image of the unity of the Church of Christ; but it is also surely a symbol of the Gospel itself, the gift of Christ’s life to us. The Holy Spirit does not communicate with us in chapters or episodes or isolated fragments of information to be synthesized, but by sharing with us the indivisible life of God the Son. So it is that authentic Christian teaching is always going to be “woven in one piece”—not a matter of jostling specialisms, but a witness to the integrity of the gift Christ gives us. Theology, liturgy, “spirituality”—all belong together.

It is this integration that countless people have discovered in the life of the Eastern Christian Churches; and it is this that characterizes so very clearly the teaching and witness of Metropolitan Kallistos.  It is no accident that in the addresses here collected, he constantly uses the narrative of St. Seraphim of Sarov as a point of reference to describe and illuminate the nature of Christian growth: we do not deal in theories, but in the embodied living-out of an embodied Gospel.  When Metropolitan Kallistos outlines the main features of Seraphim’s life of prayer and discipleship, he is in fact sketching the outline of Christian doctrine itself—our incorporation into the Son’s relation to the Father, our fellowship with and dependence upon the prayers of the Mother of God and the saints, the new humanity that is created in us and sustained in us by the Eucharist, the pervasiveness of the joy of the Resurrection in our encounter with others, the sovereign creativity of the Holy Spirit in shaping us in Christ’s likeness, and much more.  Throughout these talks, the fusion of theology with reflection upon the life of holiness is always in evidence.

Metropolitan Kallistos was a formidably learned scholar of the early Church, whose exposition of patristic teaching in his university lectures was famously lucid and compelling. At the same time, as we see here, he was a vivid, witty, engaging teacher in a non-academic setting, capable of bringing intensely alive the mysteries of the new life in Christ and the deep meaning of the sacramental Body in ways that connected with the experience of Orthodox parishioners in Britain and North America—and of very many non-Orthodox as well. He gives advice that is both profound and commonsensical about participation in the liturgy (with an echo of unregenerate Anglican enthusiasm perhaps, he recommends more congregational singing) and commitment to regular sacramental confession. His addresses for parish audiences are a master-class in pastoral communication. For his friends, it was no surprise to see the number of entirely non-academic laypeople from the Oxford parishes and elsewhere who attended his funeral and spoke so warmly of his regular ministry as their pastor and teacher.

The reflections in these talks about learning to pray and to grow in holiness very naturally return repeatedly to the theme of the work of the Spirit.  St. Seraphim had famously said that the goal of Christian life was the acquiring of the Spirit.  But this is not a programme for some kind of individual refinement of a “spiritual life” separate from the communal action of the Body of Christ.  The Spirit creates communion; the Spirit constantly transfigures ‘I’ into ‘we’ and ‘then’ into ‘now’, as Metropolitan Kallistos so wonderfully explains. All Christian prayer is “the work of the communion of saints.” As he allows, practice may vary across the ages—he notes the paradox that Seraphim, emphatically someone who set the Eucharist at the heart of everything and whose vision of the advent of Christ with his angels during the Eucharistic liturgy was so significant for him, did not himself celebrate the Eucharist at all in his later life, and spent long periods without communicating. 

But (while we are not going to solve the mystery of how the saints behave) there is at least some hint here that Seraphim – like some of the early Desert Fathers—had been drawn so closely in to the mystery of the transfiguration of all things in Christ that the sacramental enactment of this might have seemed like a candle in the full light of day, almost overwhelmed by the sense of an eschatological glory and joy that had become all-pervading. To understand this is emphatically not to minimize the necessity of that sacramental embodiment: it is rather to grasp what the sacrament is a sacrament of, and why it is therefore so essential an aspect of our practice as we seek to live here and now in the light of heaven.

Metropolitan Kallistos always seemed to speak from the very heart of a unified Christian sensibility. He had no doubt that the Orthodox way (the title of one of his books) was ultimately the way in which the integrity, the seamlessness, of Christian truth was most perfectly apprehended.  But—as his autobiographical meditations show —he was securely enough rooted in his adopted confession to feel no need for polemic against other Christian confessions.  He happily draws on Anglican writers like Charles Williams and Roman Catholics like Baron von Hugel, and his own long involvement in ecumenical dialogue tells its own story. The integrity of his commitment to Orthodoxy was never in doubt; at times, he could surprise his non-Orthodox interlocutors by a quite rigorist approach to some questions. But he never regarded his Orthodox identity—any more than his monastic identity—as something to be anxiously reasserted all the time in order to put others in their place. He simply knew how to live in that life-giving centre and to communicate in abundance the life received there.

His memory will be alive and at work for many years yet; we shall continue to be massively in his debt for his magisterial surveys of the central doctrinal truths of historic faith.  But perhaps this volume brings us closest to the inner life of a very reserved and diffident man who was so deeply overtaken and transformed by the exuberance of the Paschal gift and the light of the Spirit. We see in these pages a great deal about how he learned to be the teacher and disciple that he was; and we learn with and from him, by God’s grace.  Eternal memory!