Anglican Boyhood and Oxford

Timothy Ware’s road to Orthodoxy began not with a book or an argument but with an afternoon: walking down Buckingham Palace Road in the summer of 1952, aged seventeen, he pushed open the door of a dilapidated Gothic church with a brass plate reading “Russian Church,” and came out convinced he had found where he belonged. This file covers the Anglican formation that preceded that afternoon, the afternoon itself in his own words, and the six Oxford years in which the conviction was tested.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Bath, Westminster, and an Anglican Inheritance

Timothy Richard Ware was born on 11 September 1934 in Bath, Somerset, into an Anglican family (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022). He went as a King’s Scholar to Westminster School in London, where the daily geography of his religious life was the Abbey next door. He never repudiated it. Writing more than forty years later as an Orthodox bishop, he was explicit:

“I shall never cease to be sincerely grateful for my Anglican upbringing. Never would I wish to engage in negative polemic against the communion where I first came to know Christ as my Savior. I remember with lasting happiness the beauty of the choral services in Westminster Abbey which I attended while a boy at Westminster School, and in particular I recall the great procession with cross, candles and banners at the Sung Eucharist on the feast of St Edward the Confessor.” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000)

Two other Anglican debts he named specifically. From the Anglican Franciscans of the Society of St Saint Francis — he mentions Fr Algy Robertson, the Father Guardian, and “his young disciple Brother Peter” — he “learnt the place of mission within the Christian life and the value of sacramental confession” (ibid.). And from Helen Waddell’s The Desert Fathers, which he read at sixteen, came a fascination with Eastern monastic history that never left him and that would eventually take him to Patmos (ibid.; see Section 03).

He had also, by seventeen, become a pacifist — a commitment he mentions in passing when explaining why the Kievan Passion-Bearers Boris and Gleb appealed to him so strongly: “for I had been a pacifist since the age of seventeen” (ibid.). It is a small detail, but it is one of the few pieces of evidence about the young Ware’s convictions that does not come filtered through the later theologian.

Ware’s later summary of his own trajectory is worth registering before the story proper begins, because it governs everything that follows: “I shall always regard my decision to embrace Orthodoxy as the crowning fulfillment of all that was best in my Anglican experience; as an affirmation, not a repudiation” (ibid.).

The Vigil at St Philip’s, Buckingham Palace Road

The decisive event is dated by Ware himself to a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1952. He was walking near Victoria Station:

“I was walking along Buckingham Palace Road, close to Victoria Station in central London, when I passed a nineteenth-century Gothic church, large and somewhat dilapidated, that I had never noticed before. There was no proper notice-board outside it — public relations have never been the strong point of Orthodoxy in the Western world! — but I recall that there was a brass plate which simply said ‘Russian Church.’” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”)

The building was St Philip’s, Buckingham Palace Road, an Anglican church leased to the Russian Orthodox parish in London. Inside, Ware’s first impression was of an absence — “no pews, no chairs in neat rows” — and then, abruptly, of the opposite:

“My initial impression of an absence was now replaced, with a sudden rush, by an overwhelming sense of presence. I felt that the church, so far from being empty, was full — full of countless unseen worshipers, surrounding me on every side.” (ibid.)

Years later, reading the envoys’ report in the Russian Primary Chronicle — “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth” — he “started with amazement,” because “such exactly had been my own experience at the Russian Vigil Service in St Philip’s, Buckingham Palace Road” (ibid., quoting the Chronicle, trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, 1953).

Two further details he thought worth recording. He had no idea how long he had been inside — “It might have been only twenty minutes, it might have been two hours” — and when he stepped out, “the roar of the London traffic engulfed me all at once like a huge wave,” which he had not heard at all. And the service was entirely in Slavonic, so that “with my conscious brain I could understand not a single word.” Yet he left saying to himself “with a clear sense of conviction: This is where I belong; I have come home” (ibid.).

He drew a methodological conclusion from this that shaped his whole career as an explainer of Orthodoxy: “I am grateful that my initial contact with Orthodoxy was not through reading books, nor yet through meeting members of the Orthodox Church in a social context, but through attending an act of worship… Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second” (ibid.). Anyone who wonders why The Orthodox Way begins where it begins, or why the liturgical chapters of The Orthodox Church carry the weight they do, has the answer here (see Section 02).

A note on the building. Ware adds parenthetically that “the church, incidentally, has long since disappeared; it was demolished about four years after my visit” (ibid.). St Philip’s, Buckingham Palace Road was demolished in 1956; the Russian congregation moved to the former All Saints, Ennismore Gardens. This is the origin of a persistent confusion: because the Russian parish that Ware first encountered later occupied Ennismore Gardens, secondary accounts have relocated his 1952 visit — and, more damagingly, his 1958 reception — to that building. Neither relocation is correct (see The Reception of 1958).

Oxford: Classics, Theology, and the Russian Émigrés

Ware went up to Oxford — Magdalen College — shortly after the vigil at St Philip’s. His own description of the course is compact: “For four years I studied Classics — ancient Greek and Latin, with some modern philosophy — and then I stayed on at the university for two further years of theology” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”). He took a double first (OrthodoxWiki, “Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia”). The Classical training is not incidental to what he became: he notes that when the moment came to choose a jurisdiction, “As a Classicist, I had a good working knowledge of New Testament and Byzantine Greek, whereas at that time I had not studied Church Slavonic” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”). The Greek was already there; it is why the Philokalia and the Triodion were later possible (see Section 05).

At Oxford he met the Russian emigration at first hand. He names three encounters:

Nicolas Zernov, University Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture, and his wife Militza, whose “generous hospitality” and “exhilarating and unpredictable conversations” Ware remembered with pleasure.
Fr (later Archbishop) Basil Krivocheine, who served the small Russian chapel in Oxford and was then preparing his critical edition of the Catecheses of St Symeon the New Theologian. “A new world opened up before me as I heard him read St Symeon’s description of his visions of the divine and uncreated Light, and I began to appreciate the central place assigned in Orthodoxy to the mystery of Christ’s Transfiguration” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).
The Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, which he joined under the influence of his school friend Donald (A. M.) Allchin. At its summer conferences he heard Archbishop Michael Ramsey, Fr Derwas Chitty and Professor H. A. Hodges — all Anglicans who “regarded Orthodoxy as the integral fullness of the Christian tradition, to which Anglicanism needed to return” (ibid.).

The Fellowship deserves emphasis, because it is a thread that runs from 1950s undergraduate to the Sobornost editorship and the Anglican–Orthodox dialogue of his episcopate (see The Ecumenical Work). It was also, ironically, the place where his Anglican position collapsed: it was at the Fellowship’s August 1956 summer conference that Fr Lev Gillet gave the definition of an Orthodox that Ware calls “a critical turning-point” (see The Reception of 1958).

The Reading That Formed Him

Ware’s account of his reading in these years is unusually specific, and it explains why his mature theology looks the way it does. His “early contacts with the Orthodox world were for the most part Russian” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”). He names:

G. P. Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality; Stephen Graham, With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem; Iulia de Beausobre’s Flame in the Snow on St Seraphim of Sarov.
Alexis Khomiakov’s “The Church is One” — “a crucial landmark in my journey,” in which he found “verbally expressed, that vision of the communion of saints which I had first experienced as a living reality at the Russian church in London.” He notes that he “came to recognize the limitations of Khomiakov’s Slavophil ecclesiology” later, “but at the time he provided me with exactly what I needed” (ibid.).
Georges Florovsky’s “Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church” (in E. L. Mascall, ed., The Church of God, SPCK, 1934), of which Ware wrote: “Throughout my later life I have constantly returned to this article, which says far more in twenty-one pages than most authors manage to say in whole volumes” (ibid.; see Georges Florovsky).
Vladimir Lossky, both The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church and the short introductory note in which Lossky argues that non-Orthodox communities “still retain a certain link with the unique and life-giving center.” Ware says of this position: “on Lossky’s view, which I willingly made my own, non-Orthodox communities continue in varying degrees to participate in the Church’s life of grace. Yet it still remains true that, while these non-Orthodox communities possess part of the saving and life-giving truth, in Orthodoxy alone is the fullness of that truth to be found” (ibid.; see Vladimir Lossky).

That last sentence is worth marking, because Ware’s ecclesiological position was fixed by 1958 and did not subsequently move: Orthodoxy is the true Church and possesses the fullness, but “it does not have an exclusive monopoly of the truth,” and “I have never been convinced by the rigorist claim that sacramental life and the grace of the Holy Spirit can exist only within the visible limits of the Orthodox Church” (ibid.). Every later controversy about his ecumenism, and every traditionalist objection to his handling of the heterodox, is an argument with this paragraph (see Section 08).

Greece supplied the counterweight to the Russians. On his first visit in 1954 he went as a Classicist, intending to see “the Acropolis, Olympia, Delphi and Knossos,” and objected when his companions put Sparta on the itinerary. What they were actually taking him to was the Byzantine city of Mistra, three miles further on — “streets, palaces, monasteries, many-domed churches — all set against the spectacular back-drop of the snow-covered Taygetus range.” Looking at the frescoes, “like W. B. Yeats I found in them ‘the singing-masters of my soul’” (ibid.).

What Held Him Back

Ware was clear that “In retrospect it is clear to me that my mind was already made up on that summer afternoon in 1952. Before being actually received, however, I waited for nearly six years” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”). The reasons for the wait are set out in the next file, but they are worth naming here because they were largely put to him by Orthodox rather than by Anglicans. His English friends warned him he would be “a lifelong eccentric.” The Orthodox he consulted — including the Greek assistant bishop in London — “likewise offered me little encouragement,” and directed his attention “to the historical shortcomings of the Orthodox Church, as well as to the particular difficulties it confronts in the Western world” (ibid.). The road out of Anglicanism ran, in his case, straight through Orthodox discouragement.

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. (All quotations of Ware in this file are from this essay. First published as “Strange Yet Familiar” in Thomas Doulis, ed., Towards the Authentic Church, Minneapolis: Light and Life, 1996.)
Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (Birth date, place, and Anglican family.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia.” (Westminster School on a scholarship; Magdalen College; the double first in Classics with Theology.)
Khomiakov, Alexis. “The Church is One.” In W. J. Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years. London: Eastern Church Association, 1895. (Quoted by Ware at 193–94, 211, 222.)
Florovsky, Georges. “Sobornost: the Catholicity of the Church.” In E. L. Mascall, ed., The Church of God: An Anglo-Russian Symposium by Members of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. London: SPCK, 1934, 51–74. (Quoted by Ware at 55, 59, 65, 67, 73.)
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. London: James Clarke, 1957. (Quoted by Ware at 9 and 245–46.)
The Russian Primary Chronicle, trans. S. H. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. (The envoys’ report, quoted by Ware.)
Waddell, Helen. The Desert Fathers. London: Constable, 1936. (Read by Ware at sixteen, per his own account.)