01 — From Timothy to Kallistos

Timothy Richard Ware was born into an Anglican family in Bath in 1934, educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, and walked by accident into a Russian vigil service in the summer of 1952 at the age of seventeen. He waited nearly six years before being received. This section covers the formation and the decision, and corrects the widely circulated but false account of how the reception took place.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

What This Section Covers

  • Anglican Boyhood and Oxford — Bath, Westminster School, the Franciscans, Magdalen and the double first, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and the afternoon at St Philip’s, Buckingham Palace Road.
  • The Reception of 1958 — the six-year wait, the deliberate choice of jurisdiction, the deliberate refusal of ROCOR, the chrismation at St Sophia, Bayswater, and the correction of the false “14 April / Ennismore Gardens / baptism” version.

The Bare Facts

  • Born Timothy Richard Ware, 11 September 1934, Bath, Somerset, into an Anglican family (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022; OrthodoxWiki, “Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia”).
  • Westminster School, London, on a King’s Scholarship; he recalled the choral services in Westminster Abbey and the St Edward the Confessor procession with lasting affection (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000).
  • Magdalen College, Oxford — four years of Classics (Literae Humaniores), then two further years of Theology; a double first. “Incidentally, I never went to an Anglican theological college, nor was I ordained in the Church of England” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).
  • Summer 1952, aged seventeen — the vigil at St Philip’s, Buckingham Palace Road, the Russian parish’s leased Anglican building. The building was demolished about four years later; the Russian congregation moved to Ennismore Gardens.
  • 1954 — first visit to Greece; Mistra, not Sparta, converted him to Byzantium.
  • August 1956 — Fr Lev Gillet’s definition of an Orthodox at the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius conference, which Ware calls “a critical turning-point.”
  • Pascha 1957 — his last Anglican communion, never repeated.
  • Bright Friday 1958 — chrismated by Bishop James (Iakovos Virvos) of Apamea at the Greek Cathedral of St Sophia, Bayswater.
  • 1966 — tonsured a monk with the name Kallistos, and ordained priest by Metropolitan Athenagoras II of Thyateira (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).

A Note on the Sources for This Section

This is the best-documented part of Ware’s life, because he wrote it himself, at length, and in print. “Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church” is a twenty-four-page autobiographical essay published as chapter 1 of The Inner Kingdom (SVS Press, 2000), and originally in Thomas Doulis’s 1996 convert anthology. Where the essay and a secondary source disagree, this section follows the essay and flags the disagreement.

That matters here more than usual. The single most-repeated claim about Ware’s reception — the date, the rite, and the church — is wrong in all three particulars in the version that dominates search results. See The Reception of 1958 for the [Corrected: ...] note.

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos. “Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 1–24. (The primary source for this section throughout.)
  • Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022.
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia.” (Birth date and place; Westminster and Magdalen; the double first.)