02 — The Orthodox Church and The Orthodox Way

Two short books, sixteen years apart, did more to shape the English-speaking world’s understanding of Orthodoxy than any other publications of the twentieth century. The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1963) was written by a twenty-eight-year-old layman five years after his own reception; The Orthodox Way (1979) was written by a priest-monk and is a different kind of book entirely. This section treats each on its own terms.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

What This Section Covers

• The Orthodox Church (1963) — the Pelican paperback, its structure, its extraordinary reach, its author’s youth, and the successive revisions of 1964, 1993 and 2015.
• The Orthodox Way (1979) — the smaller and, on Ware’s own implicit reckoning, the better book: a mystagogy rather than a survey.

The Bare Facts

• The Orthodox Church, by Timothy Ware, Pelican Books (Penguin), first published 30 June 1963, price 6s.; reprinted with revisions 1964; new edition, Penguin, 1993; third revised edition, Penguin, October 2015 (368 pp., ISBN 9780141980638). Reviewed on publication in Theology 66 (1963) by Philip Cousins.
• Ware was born 11 September 1934, so he was twenty-eight at publication and had been Orthodox for five years.
• The book was published under the name Timothy Ware and has continued to appear under that name on the cover after his 1966 tonsure, which is why “Timothy Ware” and “Kallistos Ware” are frequently catalogued as separate authors.
• The Orthodox Way, by Kallistos Ware, first published Oxford: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1979; reprinted 1981, 1986; revised edition, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995; still in print from SVS Press (Classics Series vol. 2).

Why Two Books and Not a System

Ware never wrote a systematic theology, and these two books are the reason the omission was tolerable. Between them they cover the ground a systematics would cover — history, doctrine, worship, the spiritual life — but they do it in two different registers, neither of which is systematic. The Orthodox Church is a survey addressed from outside: it assumes a reader who knows nothing, and it explains. The Orthodox Way is a catechesis addressed from inside: it assumes a reader who wants to pray, and it leads. The first made Orthodoxy intelligible in English; the second made it inhabitable.

Ware’s own account of why he wrote as he did is indirect but clear enough. His first contact with Orthodoxy was an act of worship, not a book, and he drew the lesson that “Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000; see Anglican Boyhood and Oxford). Both books enact that priority — the 1963 survey by giving liturgy and sacrament a weight that a Western handbook would have given to dogmatic definition, the 1979 book by structuring itself around the Christian’s ascent rather than around a list of topics.

A Note on the Revisions

The Orthodox Church has appeared in three substantially different states — 1963 (with the lightly revised 1964 reprint), 1993, and 2015 — and the differences between them are not trivial. Some are simple updating (the collapse of communism, the state of Athos, new canonizations); some are changes of judgment, and those have been the subject of a detailed published critique. Because that critique is an intra-Orthodox dispute rather than a matter of bibliography, it is handled in the §4.2 section: see The Revisions Between Editions.

See Also

• Section 01 — From Timothy to Kallistos — the conversion that the 1963 book digests
• Section 04 — Oxford and the Teaching Life — the post he took up three years after the book appeared
• Section 06 — His Theology — where the positions sketched in these books are developed
• Section 08 — The Contested Questions — the edition-to-edition revisions and their critics
• Section 09 — Legacy and Assessment — what these two books actually accomplished

References

• Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Pelican/Penguin Books, 1963; reprinted with revisions 1964; new edition, 1993; third revised edition, London: Penguin, 2015.
• Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Oxford: A. R. Mowbray, 1979; revised edition, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995.
• 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.
• Cousins, Philip. Review of The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware. Theology 66 (1963).
• Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72. (On the 1963/1993 differences; treated in Section 08.)