Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia was the Eastern Orthodox Church’s most familiar voice in the English-speaking world for six decades. His death at the age of 87 has deprived the Catholic Church of a constant yet critical (and thus true) friend on the path to recovering the unity between the churches.
Born to an Anglican family in Bath in 1934, Timothy Richard Ware received his education at Westminster School before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his studies in Classics garnered him a double first. He encountered the Russian Orthodox Church in its exile while still at school; at Oxford, where he also read Theology, he was influenced by figures from pre-revolutionary Russia, notably Nicolas Zernov and Archimandrite Nicholas Gibbes, the former tutor to the children of the last Tsar. Ware’s brilliance in Greek took him deep into the Church Fathers and early ascetics, notably the fifth-century St Mark the Monk, on whom he wrote his doctoral thesis.
It was in the spirituality and liturgy of the exiled Russian Church, however, that he recognised an authentic vessel of the theological and spiritual world of ancient faith in the present moment. He became a great interpreter of Orthodoxy, also promoting the outstanding scholars from Russia settled in Paris – notably Vladimir Lossky, Fr Georges Florovsky and to an extent Fr Sergius Bulgakov – whose “neo-Patristic synthesis” had renewed Orthodox dogmatic, liturgical and spiritual theology in the 20th century, through “re-receiving” the Fathers and the distinctively Eastern Orthodox ascetical tradition, especially the teaching of St Gregory Palamas.
In 1958, Ware was received into the Greek Orthodox Church at St Sophia’s Cathedral in London, although he chose for his spiritual father a Russian priest. In 1963 he produced The Orthodox Church, which he kept revising to ensure that it remains one of the best introductions to the faith, life and worship of Orthodoxy. He was ordained a deacon two years later, and from 1966 (and for 35 years afterwards) he held the post of Spalding Lecturer on Eastern Orthodox Studies at Oxford University in succession to Nicolas Zernov. In due course tonsured as a monk with the name Kallistos, in the same year he was ordained priest and charged with establishing a Greek Orthodox parish in the city.
Generations of students, including future clergy of the Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox and Free Churches, together with the wider Christian community, benefited from Kallistos’s lectures, talks and tutorials on the Fathers and Orthodox spirituality. The resonance of his voice, his humour and his precise diction matched a clarity and warmth of presentation that went beyond teaching to the constant evangelisation of his hearers. His consecration as Bishop of Diokleia in 1982 extended his influence nationally and internationally; Archbishop Nikitas of Thyateira remarked at Kallistos’s funeral that he belonged not only to the Greek Orthodox Church but to all.
The inspiration of sobornost, in which the Church’s unity and harmony is not merely an ideal but a practical reality (established not by Church jurisdiction but by entering together into the Holy Mysteries), lay behind Kallistos’s dedication to ecumenism as a thus realistic prospect. He saw his Anglicanism, then, not as negated by entry into the Orthodox Church but fulfilled. Likewise, as a long-serving member of the Joint International Theological Commission between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, he rejoiced that in the 2016 Chieti Statement on Primacy and Synodality in the Church, the Catholic participants agreed that the exercise of primacy at the universal level by the pope without prejudice to the regional primacy preserved in the Orthodox Church, as in the first millennium before the Great Schism, provided a basis for the restoration of communion. In 2012 he co-founded a Catholic-Orthodox Pastoral Consultation in England, pursuing dialogue through addressing the practical concerns of the lives of the faithful. He lived to see the completion of its first phase.
Some have said that Kallistos was not typically Orthodox, as if he were characteristically Anglican. Rather than embrace Orthodoxy as something exotic, he internalised it and found it true of the faith of an English Christian. Thus, for many, the most treasured legacy is his work on the translation of the treasury of hymns from the Eastern Church, evocative of the English traditional religious register, in The Lenten Triodion and The Festal Menaion. A companion volume to The Orthodox Church explored in depth but with no less clarity and simplicity the Orthodox tradition of prayer in The Orthodox Way; before his death he was also able to complete the final volume of the Philokalia, a collection of guidance on contemplative prayer from Orthodox spiritual masters from the fourth to the 15th century.
Kallistos lamented that he would not see the recent sharp divisions of the Orthodox Church over matters of jurisdiction repaired through the depth of fellowship among the Churches in faith and communion which he had for so long promoted. Yet, as Dr Brandon Gallaher has observed, he was Orthodoxy’s first universal teacher of the global age and his books and teaching, together with a host of video talks, will ensure that he will still instruct us in the way towards sobornost and the union of all in Christ.
Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia (Dr Timothy Ware), 1934-2022
Image caption: Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, speaking at Ascension Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Oakland, California, on Saturday, February 23d, 2008. (Credit: Narsil; Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)
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