Kallistos Ware (1934-2022)

Bath, Westminster School, and a soul enamoured of the Desert Fathers

Timothy Ware was born on 11 September 1934 in Bath, Somerset, into an Anglican family of evangelical sensibility^[1]. A brilliant pupil, he was admitted to Westminster School, one of London's great public schools, where, by his own later account, reading at the age of sixteen the works of the medievalist Helen Waddell on the Egyptian Desert Fathers exerted an immediate attraction upon him^[2]. This early taste for asceticism and the prayer of silence — the very prayer the Philokalia would later gather under his translator's pen — already announced, in the Anglican schoolboy, a sensibility that post-war Anglicanism did not entirely satisfy.

He continued his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained a double first — the highest honours — in Classics, then followed two years of theology^[3][4]. It was this solid classical and patristic formation, acquired in one of England's most prestigious colleges, that would later allow him to read in the Greek text the Fathers he would translate.

The decisive encounter at Saint Philip's, London

The turning point of his life came one evening, while he was still a Westminster schoolboy: out of curiosity, he pushed open the door of Saint Philip's, a Russian Orthodox church in central London, now demolished, during a vigil service^[5]. He himself recounted, decades later, the striking impression of this first encounter with the Byzantine liturgy:

"As my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the first thing that caught my attention was an absence [...] I felt that the church, so far from being empty, was full — full of countless unseen worshipers." — Kallistos Ware (then Timothy Ware), Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church^[6]

In it he perceived what the envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kiev had themselves reported, ten centuries earlier, of the liturgy of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: the sense of having touched "heaven on earth"^[7]. This intuition of an unseen assembly overflowing the small visible community of the faithful would remain, throughout his life, one of the central themes of his teaching on the Orthodox liturgy as an icon of the Kingdom.

"This is my home" — six years of maturing

The Saint Philip's experience did not lead Timothy Ware to an immediate conversion. It would take him nearly six years of attendance, reading and reflection before his formal reception in 1958^[8][9]. But the inner conviction imposed itself from that very first evening:

"This is where I belong; I have come home." — Kallistos Ware, Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church^[10]

"I did not find Orthodoxy archaic, foreign or exotic. To me it was nothing other than simple Christianity." — Kallistos Ware, Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church^[11]

Yet he never repudiated his Anglican formation, to which he paid tribute until the end of his life:

"I shall never cease to be sincerely grateful for my Anglican upbringing. Never would I want to engage in negative polemic against the communion where I first came to know Christ as my Saviour." — Kallistos Ware, quoted in Premier Christianity, September 2022^[12]

For him, the passage to Orthodoxy was not a repudiation but a deepening: conversion is to Christ^[13], ecclesial communion being only the place where that conversion finds its sacramental fullness. A bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in London, Bishop James (Virvos) of Apamea, even tried to dissuade him and urged him to remain Anglican^[14] — a sign that young Ware's step had nothing of a superficial enthusiasm encouraged by the local Orthodox clergy.

Reception into the Orthodox Church (April 1958)

It was finally in April 1958, at the age of twenty-three, that Timothy Ware was formally received into the Orthodox Church: having already received a Trinitarian baptism in the Church of England, he was not rebaptised but chrismated, in the Greek Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Bayswater (London), by Bishop James (Virvos) of Apamea^[15] — the bishop who, previously, had tried to dissuade him and hold him back in Anglicanism. He joined the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople^[16][17] — the same jurisdiction as that of Bartholomew I, whose Ignispedia portrait traces a contemporary journey.

Monastic tonsure and the name of Kallistos (1966)

After his reception, the young convert spent some six months in a monastery of the Russian Church Outside Russia in Canada^[18][19], before finding his true spiritual home on the Greek island of Patmos, at the monastery of Saint John the Theologian — the very place where tradition locates the reception of the Apocalypse by the apostle John. It was there that in 1966 he received monastic tonsure and the name of Kallistos, in honour of the 14th-century Byzantine hesychast theologian Kallistos Xanthopoulos^[20][21]. That same year he was ordained priest by the Ecumenical Patriarchate^[22].

Hegumen Amphilochios and the spiritual school of Patmos

On Patmos, Kallistos formed a filial affection for Hegumen Amphilochios Makris (1889-1970), who would later become a venerated figure of contemporary Greek spirituality and was canonised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2018^[23]. Kallistos Ware himself recounted, in later lectures and writings, the decisive influence of this spiritual father on his own practice of prayer and his sense of spiritual fatherhood — the very fatherhood he would later exercise at Oxford over generations of students^[24].

Spalding Lecturer: thirty-five years of teaching at Oxford

Back in England, Father Kallistos succeeded Nicolas Zernov in 1966 as Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford, a post he would hold for thirty-five years, until 2001^[25][26]. In 1970 he was admitted as a Fellow of Pembroke College^[27][28]. In parallel he served as priest to the Greek and Russian parishes of Oxford and became the spiritual father of the town's small Orthodox community, in particular the Greek Orthodox parish of the Annunciation^[29][30].

It was in this twofold office — academic and pastoral — that Kallistos Ware exercised most of his influence: over the decades, whole generations of American, Greek, Romanian, Serbian and English doctoral students came to be formed by him, several of whom would become leading Orthodox theologians, in close connection with figures such as Fathers John Meyendorff and Alexander Schmemann of Saint Vladimir's Institute in the United States^[31]. After his retirement from Oxford he also taught at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge from 1999 to 2019^[32].

"Gandalf": the beloved master of several generations

His silhouette — long white beard, monastic habit, discreet humour — earned him, among his Oxford students, the affectionate nickname of "Gandalf the Great"^[33]. His colleagues remembered an outstanding teacher:

"An excellent lecturer in the best Oxford tradition, seasoning erudition with humour." — a colleague's testimony quoted in the Church Times obituary, 2 September 2022^[34]

Far from a distant scholar, Kallistos Ware combined academic rigour with pastoral attentiveness: it is precisely this alliance that explains why his books, written for the general public as much as for the university, had such resonance.

The Orthodox Church (1963): the gateway

Published in 1963 when he was still a layman, The Orthodox Church (Penguin Books) became, through its successive reissues (1993, 2015), the reference book in English for discovering the history, doctrine and liturgical life of the Orthodox Church^[35][36]. After his death the Orthodox Church in America would call it "essential" reading, "in particular for seekers after truth"^[37]. Few university textbooks can claim to have introduced, to an entire English-speaking public, a Christian tradition long little known in the West.

The Orthodox Way (1979): a theology of the heart

Where The Orthodox Church expounds history and doctrine, The Orthodox Way (1979, Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press) unfolds a true spiritual theology: prayer, the Trinitarian mystery, deification (theosis), the meaning of suffering and death in the light of the Resurrection. The book, structured as accessible doctrinal meditations, became in its turn a classic of Orthodox spiritual literature, translated into many languages^[38].

Translating the Philokalia, the Lenten Triodion and the Festal Menaion

Kallistos Ware's most lasting contribution to Western knowledge of Eastern spirituality remains his work as a translator. With G. E. H. Palmer and Philip Sherrard, he translated into English the whole of the Philokalia — the monumental anthology of ascetic and mystical texts compiled in the 18th century by Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Saint Macarius of Corinth, including texts attributed to the Desert Fathers and to Saint John Climacus — whose five English volumes appeared between 1979 and 2023, the last volume appearing posthumously^[39][40]. With the nun Mother Mary, he also translated the Festal Menaion (The Festal Menaion, 1969) and the Lenten Triodion (The Lenten Triodion, 1978), the two great liturgical collections of the Byzantine movable cycle^[41][42].

This work of translation made accessible to Catholic readers themselves a considerable part of the spiritual treasure of hesychasm — the prayer of the heart, watchfulness (nepsis), the theology of the uncreated light developed by Gregory Palamas — without which the Catholic theology of grace and contemplation would have found it harder to converse with its Eastern sister.

The 1982 consecration: the title of Diokleia

In 1982, Kallistos was consecrated to the episcopate as an auxiliary bishop, with the honorary title of Bishop of Diokleia (in Phrygia), within the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain of the Ecumenical Patriarchate^[43][44]. This consecration made him, according to his Saint Vladimir's Seminary obituary — the only open source found in support of this claim —, the first Englishman consecrated bishop in the Orthodox Church since the Great Schism of 1054^[45] — a highly symbolic fact for the history of the Great Schism of the East and its slow healing.

Elevation to metropolitan (2007)

On 30 March 2007, the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate elevated the titular diocese of Diokleia to the rank of metropolis, and Kallistos became titular Metropolitan of Diokleia^[46]. He would keep this title until his death in 2022, continuing to exercise his episcopal ministry in an essentially honorary and pastoral manner, without a territorial jurisdiction of his own — a situation typical of the titular bishops whom the Catholic Church too counts among her auxiliary or emeritus bishops.

The Anglican-Orthodox dialogue: Moscow (1976) and Dublin (1984)

Well before his episcopal consecration, Archimandrite Kallistos took an active part in the Anglican-Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission, whose work (1973-1976) resulted in the Moscow Statement (1976) on the knowledge of God, the authority of Scripture and Tradition, the authority of the councils and the question of the Filioque^[47]. He published the annotated edition of it with the Reverend Colin Davey^[48]. Eight years later, the same commission produced the Dublin Statement (1984), devoted to the mystery of the Church, the Trinity and the place of worship in tradition^[49]. This work of doctrinal dialogue between Anglicans and Orthodox would remain one of the constants of his scholarly life, alongside the dialogue with Rome.

The Catholic-Orthodox joint commission and the Chieti declaration (2016)

Kallistos Ware was also, for many years, a member of the international joint commission for theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church^[50] — he is listed by name among the Orthodox members of the 14th plenary session of Chieti^[51]. It was in this capacity that, according to his Catholic Herald obituary, he welcomed, in September 2016, the document known as the Chieti declaration — Synodality and Primacy in the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church — which explores how Roman primacy and Orthodox synodality might be combined, at the local, regional and universal levels, in the light of the common practice of the first ten centuries^[52].

"[A] constant but critical — and therefore true — [friend]" of the Catholic Church in the search for Christian unity, in the phrase taken up about him by the Catholic Herald^[53].

The 2012 Catholic-Orthodox pastoral consultation

In the early 2010s, he helped launch in England a Catholic-Orthodox pastoral consultation, whose object was no longer the abstract theology of the international commissions, but the concrete questions touching the daily life of the faithful of both confessions living side by side — mixed marriages, catechesis, pastoral care of Orthodox migrants in Western lands^[54][55]. Sponsored by the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius — of which he was Orthodox co-chair and patron — and the Society of St John Chrysostom, this consultation held its first meeting in Oxford in February 2014, after nearly two years of preparation^[56]. This grassroots initiative, less spectacular than the great theological declarations, illustrates a constant conviction in him: Christian unity is built in lived charity too, not only in learned commissions.

What a Catholic can recognise in Kallistos Ware

For a Catholic reader, the figure of Kallistos Ware deserves sincere respect on several precise points. First, his very conversion, recounted with such frankness, testifies to the power of attraction exercised, upon a sincerely seeking soul, by the liturgy and the undivided Tradition of the first seven councils — the very Tradition Catholics and Orthodox profess in common. Next, his tireless work as a translator allowed generations of French- and English-speaking Catholics to taste, through the Philokalia, a theology of prayer and deification (theosis) that profoundly meets the Catholic theology of sanctifying grace and transforming union taught by the mystics of the West. Finally, his decades-long commitment to theological dialogue — Anglican-Orthodox then Catholic-Orthodox — and his welcome of the Chieti text show a man unsatisfied with separation, who worked, in his measure, to close the wound of 1054.

This respect does not, however, prevent recognising, with the same honesty, that Kallistos Ware remained firmly attached to the Orthodox ecclesiology of a primacy of honour (primus inter pares) and to the rejection of the universal jurisdiction and pontifical infallibility as defined by the First Vatican Council — the same fundamental divergence as that set out regarding Bartholomew I of Constantinople. On this structuring point, his assent to the Chieti text remained a shared step of method, not a recognition of the Roman primacy as Rome professes it.

"An essentially open question": the debate on women's ordination

From the late 1990s, Kallistos Ware took a stand, cautiously but firmly, in favour of reopening the debate on the priestly ordination of women in the Orthodox Church. In an essay entitled Man, Woman and the Priesthood of Christ — a revised version of a 1978 text, reprinted in the collective volume Women and the Priesthood edited by Thomas Hopko (1999) —, then in 2000 in a work co-written with the French theologian Élisabeth Behr-Sigel, The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church (World Council of Churches, Geneva), he called the question an "essentially open" one, judging that it called for renewed theological examination rather than immediate closure in the name of custom alone^[57][58].

This position, a minority one within the Orthodox episcopate, never led him to ordain or support any effective ordination of women priests — the Orthodox Church has to this day known no female priestly ordination — but it sufficed to set him clearly apart from the Catholic magisterial line, where Pope John Paul II, in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), declared that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment must be definitively held by all the faithful — a question which the Catholic Magisterium precisely does not consider open to fresh theological examination.

"Dare we hope for the salvation of all?": Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac the Syrian

In 1998, Kallistos Ware published a resounding essay, Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?, reprinted in 2000 in the first volume of his collected works, The Inner Kingdom^[59]. In it he examines the position of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac the Syrian on apocatastasis — the final restoration of all things in God — and maintains that a qualified hope for the salvation of all, detached from Origenist speculations on the pre-existence of souls and the precosmic fall, remains compatible with strict Orthodoxy, since Saint Gregory of Nyssa himself, never anathematised by the Church, maintained this hope to the end^[60].

Catholic teaching likewise allows us to hope — without ever affirming it as certain — that all men may be saved: the Catechism recalls that "The Church prays that no one should be lost" (CCC § 1058), and a Catholic theologian as respected as Hans Urs von Balthasar defended, in Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? (1988), a thesis of comparable inspiration. But the Church clearly distinguishes this prayerful hope from apocatastasis in the strict Origenist sense — the doctrinal certainty that hell will finally be emptied of every damned soul, demons included — whose excesses were condemned by a synod gathered at Constantinople in 543 under the emperor Justinian, whose doctrinal authority was subsequently taken up in the later conciliar tradition^[61]. Origen himself, whose work remains immense and partly receivable, saw his boldest speculations on this point set aside by the Church, precisely to preserve the gravity of the Last Judgment and the human freedom to refuse God to the end. Kallistos Ware's nuance — hope, not certainty — thus meets, on this precise point, a line which the Catholic Church herself recognises as legitimate, on condition that hope is never turned into an assured doctrine of universal salvation.

The 2018 controversy on the pastoral accompaniment of homosexual persons

In 2018, Kallistos Ware signed the foreword to an issue of the journal The Wheel devoted to Christian anthropology and sexuality, Being Human: Embodiment and Anthropology^[62]. In it he wrote:

"Homosexual orientation, we would say, is indeed contrary to God's plan for humankind [...] But homosexual men and women are not personally guilty of their orientation, because this is not something they have chosen." — Kallistos Ware, foreword, The Wheel, no. 13/14, spring-summer 2018^[63]

He then put, in the form of questions, several objections to current pastoral practice, notably on the differentiated treatment given to the homosexual faithful engaged in a stable and faithful relationship as against one whose sexual life is casual and uncommitted^[64], and called for the Church to "enquire more rigorously into the reasons" grounding the traditional teaching^[65]. This text, republished in late 2019 and widely commented, aroused lively controversy within Orthodoxy itself: the Orthodox Life review reproached him for introducing a harmful pastoral ambiguity where the traditional teaching requires clarity, and for understating the fact that celibacy, far from being an exceptional burden reserved for homosexual persons alone, remains a path proposed to every unmarried Christian^[66].

Catholic teaching, formulated with precision in the Catechism, makes the same distinction of principle between inclination and act — "this inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial" (CCC § 2358) and calls for respect, compassion and sensitivity towards the persons concerned — but it maintains without ambiguity that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered" and "contrary to the natural law" (CCC § 2357), and that chastity, including through continence, remains the path proposed to every Christian living outside marriage (CCC § 2359), without distinguishing according to whether the relationship is stable and affectively committed or not. For the full development of this teaching, see What does the Church say about homosexuality? and Is the Church homophobic?.

A Catholic view: recognising what is admirable, naming what is wrong

What strikes one, on examining these three cases, is that Kallistos Ware never claimed unilaterally to change his Church's doctrine: on women's ordination as on sexuality, he posed questions, called for a theological re-examination, without ever claiming to hold a new constituted doctrine or encouraging disobedience to the canons in force. It is precisely this play of the theological question, left open by a scholar without personally binding magisterium, that allowed these debates to flourish within Orthodoxy — a Church which, as the case of Bartholomew I facing the Ukrainian crisis shows elsewhere, has no single instance capable of settling an internal theological controversy swiftly and definitively.

The Catholic Church, by contrast, has settled these three questions with the clarity conferred precisely by the Petrine charism of strengthening the brethren in the faith (Lk 22:32): priestly ordination is definitively reserved to men (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 1994), hope for universal salvation remains permitted but never assured as doctrine (CCC § 1058), and the teaching on chastity clearly distinguishes inclination — never guilty in itself — from the act, whose nature remains fixed by the natural law (CCC §§ 2357-2359). A Catholic can thus admire, in Kallistos Ware, the honesty of a scholar who refused facility and the premature closure of theological debate — while observing that this same freedom to question, proper to an ecclesiology without a binding universal magisterium, produced in him positions which the Catholic Church has precisely the mission to settle and to guard.

Oxford, 24 August 2022

Kallistos Ware died at his Oxford home in the night of 24 August 2022, at the age of 87, after several years of declining health^[67][68]. He was buried in Wolvercote cemetery, Oxford, on 1 September 2022^[69]. His death drew tributes from across the Orthodox world — the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Orthodox Church in America, Saint Vladimir's Seminary, the Church of Romania — but also from Catholic and Anglican institutions, a sign of the truly ecumenical breadth of his influence^[70][71][72].

Two posthumous works appeared in 2025: the second volume of his collected works, In the Image of the Father, and a volume of personal reminiscences, Reminiscences and Recollections^[73] — a sign that his work continued, three years after his death, to be edited and handed on.

A bridge between East and West

Kallistos Ware will remain in history as the theologian who did most, in the English language, to make Orthodoxy known beyond its traditional lands — without ever ceasing to present himself, in his own words, as having become not less English, but more genuinely English^[74] in embracing Orthodoxy. Translator of the Philokalia, author of two classics still reprinted, patient artisan of dialogue with Canterbury then with Rome, he embodies in his own way the question posed by the case of Bartholomew I: can a Church, without a visible principle of doctrinal unity, contain within itself debates as lively as those he himself opened, without ever managing to settle them? The Catholic who closes this portrait keeps of Kallistos Ware a twofold and truthful image: that of an admirable teacher and bridge between two Christian worlds, and that of a theologian whose bold strokes recall, by contrast, why the Catholic Church holds so fast to her unified magisterium.

The figure of Kallistos Ware is illuminated by the history of the separation between East and West and by the hesychast spirituality he helped to make known.

• On another great contemporary artisan of dialogue with Rome: Bartholomew I of Constantinople (1940-).
• On the founding rupture between Rome and Constantinople: The Great Schism of the East (1054).
• On the theology of the uncreated light and the hesychasm documented by the Philokalia: Gregory Palamas.
• On one of the Fathers whose thought nourishes the debate on universal hope: Origen and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.
• On the Catholic answer to Eastern objections: Responses to Orthodox objections and What does the Church say about Orthodox Christians?.
• On the full Catholic teaching on the questions reopened by Kallistos Ware: What does the Church say about homosexuality? and Is the Church homophobic?.