‘We of the East’—by way of obituary for Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (1934-2022)
The former Timothy, by then Archimandrite (i.e., priest-monk) Kallistos Ware, was one of the more colourful figures in the small but self-important world of Oxford theology back in my undergraduate days. One could hardly miss him in the early 1970s as he wandered into town from the home he shared with his parents and sister in North Oxford, cassock-clad, often sporting an icon, bearded and with his long dark hair in a pony tail.
I was neither electrified nor put off by the patristics course offered by the long-serving Spalding Lecturer for Eastern Orthodox Studies, and recall the lucidity and simplicity of his presentation of the subject-matter. Ware never sought to intimidate by his learning. And truly, the Greek Fathers were for him the name of the game. Ware took over the lectureship that he occupied until reaching retirement age from the lay Russian exile, Nicholas Zernov, who, with his wife, Militza, was a prominent figure among the Orthodox exiles who established a functioning church in a downstairs room of a large house on Canterbury Road. Worshippers might bump into Prince Michael Romanov from time to time, or into a sister of Boris Pasternak whose married name was Slater. I almost took lodgings with Mrs Slater during my final year, but backed out after considering the implications of the deep layers of dust on the banister of her stairs. During my Oxford years I sometimes headed to Saturday Vespers, which Fr Kallistos could convincingly and impressively lead in both Greek and Church Slavonic, and more than once took in a Divine Liturgy. While the female scion of a distinguished Anglican dynasty of clerics and theologians swiftly became Orthodox, and as doctoral student Rowan Williams played a leading role in the Anglican-Orthodox Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, I never felt the mysterious pull of the East, even though I was duly impressed by the beautiful chant hailing the Blessed Virgin Mary as higher than the Cherubim and more glorious than the Seraphim: if this is not the sober truth, then I struggle to locate any veracity in the Christian religion as a whole.
As a former Anglican of the upper classes who stumbled into an Orthodox service by mistake at 17 and then stunned his contemporaries by actually becoming Orthodox at 22 after graduating with a dazzling Double First from Magdalen College, during the years when he and I overlapped at Oxford Timothy aka Kallistos Ware was still an ecclesial odd man out, a rare and eccentric exception to the prevailingly Anglican rule. Many of us students regarded him as a faintly comic, actually sometimes hilarious figure who would preach at College Sunday Evensong before dining at high table, catching undergraduate attention from his unfamiliar attire. On one such occasion at Keble College he lifted both hands from pulpit or lectern as he swung from side to side intoning, ‘We of the East.’ Who are you kidding, Timothy, thought we giggling students who had heard that he was born in Bath and grew up in Southend. That said, a quotation he made from St Irenaeus that evening has stuck with me.
Two interactions, the one more remote the other more direct, with the late Metropolitan Kallistos stick with me.
At an evening meeting of some theological society or other, presided over by a doctoral student who was a member of the famous Torrance dynasty of Edinburgh, Fr Kallistos delivered a paper (duly published, if I am not mistaken, in the journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius), entitled ‘Origen: the Case for Universalism Reconsidered.’ I recall his joke, which I repeated from the pulpit this past Sunday, of the Anglican Evangelical hellfire preacher who terrified his congregation with threats of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. ‘But I have no teeth,’ screeched an old woman in the front pew. Nothing daunted, the preacher immediately assured her, ‘Teeth, Madam, will be provided.’ Young Mr or Revd Torrance countered the delightfully whimsical presentation with some solid objections, but I recall his buttering up Fr Kallistos with the overdone flattering congeniality that is such a mark of Oxbridge academic life. Noting that J. N. D. Kelly had famously described Eutyches as an ‘aged and muddle-headed archimandrite,’ Torrance performed an osculatory gesture on Kallistos’ rear end by hailing him as a ‘youthful and clear-headed archimandrite.’
On one of my own walks into the city centre from lodgings in North Oxford, I once bumped into Fr Kallistos who pleasantly conversed with the socially inept undergraduate that I was in those far-off days. At that point the thought of some day quitting ecclesia Anglicana had not crossed my mind, so I chimed in by remarking how wonderful it was that, back in 1922, the Oecumenical Patriarchate had recognized the validity of Anglican Orders. My walking companion let out a most mischievous chuckle and informed me that the fine print of the declaration in question allowed that Anglican Orders are as valid as Roman Catholic Orders. While able to picture the Devil entering into heavenly glory after aeons of torment, the late Metropolitan was an uncompromising ecclesiologist of unrelenting clarity.
As old age drew on, Bishop, Archbishop, and then Metropolitan Kallistos, whose home monastery was located on the Isle of Patmos, had become one of England’s national treasures. Nor was he, as an Orthodox convert and hierarch, any longer a fish out of water in his native land. Someone was just telling me how Orthodoxy is the fastest growing branch of Christianity in the United Kingdom, a fact Kallistos himself explained by pointing out that Orthodox worship and doctrine are constants rather than changing features of church life, in which respect We of the East differ greatly from Most of Us in the West.
The one occasion when I was massively impacted by the public performance of an international-level Orthodox theologian of renown was when I formed part of a panel responding to a presentation made in the Senate Room of Brock University by the late Fr Thomas Hopko of St Vladimir’s Seminary. Hopko knew his material inside out and from back to front, argued cogently without notes, and signaled respect to his ecumenical interlocutors. I recall how, when the topic of papal infallibility arose, Hopko crisply remarked, ‘No one ever is.’
Even the redoubtable Fr Hopko has not yet sold me on the claims of the East, but today I remember the late Metropolitan Kallistos with a certain fondness and gladly pray the Requiescat in pace on his behalf. Pastors, seminarians, and erudite laypeople of our confession should be grateful for the lucid account of his adopted religion given in the famous Pelican paperback The Orthodox Church, and those wanting to know what makes Orthodoxy tick should pick up his The Orthodox Way, a beautiful little book that has not a little truth and wisdom to impart to Us of the West.