The Orthodox Church (1963)

A Pelican paperback written by a twenty-eight-year-old Oxford graduate five years after his own reception into the Church became, and for sixty years remained, the standard English introduction to Orthodoxy — the book handed to inquirers, set on university reading lists, and translated across Europe and the Americas. This file treats the book itself: its origin, its two-part structure, what it does well, the price of its brevity, and the three states of its text.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Book and Its Occasion

The Orthodox Church was published by Pelican Books — Penguin’s non-fiction imprint — on 30 June 1963, priced at six shillings, under the name Timothy Ware. Its author had been born on 11 September 1934 and received into the Orthodox Church at Pascha 1958; he was therefore twenty-eight years old and five years Orthodox. He was not yet a monk, not yet a priest, not yet the Spalding Lecturer, and had not yet published his doctoral work on Eustratios Argenti, which appeared from the Clarendon Press the following year (Ware, Eustratios Argenti, Oxford, 1964; see The Spalding Lectureship).

The precise circumstances of the commission are not documented in any source consulted for this file, and no claim is made about them here. What is documented is the immediate reception: the book was reviewed in Theology in its year of publication alongside A. M. Allchin’s The Dialogue of East and West in Christendom (Cousins, review, Theology 66 [1963]) — Allchin being the school friend who had drawn Ware into the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius a decade earlier (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000).

The Pelican format explains much about the book. It was a cheap mass-market paperback in a series designed to give the general reader a competent survey of a subject in under 400 pages. It was not, and was never meant to be, a scholarly monograph. It was meant to be the book you could buy in a railway bookstall, and it was.

Structure: History, Then Faith and Worship

The book falls into two parts of roughly equal length. Part I is a narrative history of the Orthodox Church from the apostolic period to the twentieth century: the age of the Ecumenical Councils, the estrangement and schism between East and West, the conversion of the Slavs, the Church under Islam, the Russian Church, the Church under communism, and the diaspora. Part II is a thematic exposition of Orthodox faith and worship: Holy Tradition, God and man, the Church and its structures, the Church of the sacraments, the Church of prayer, and Orthodoxy’s relation to other Christians (structure per Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church,” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72, which follows the book’s own divisions).

Several features of the design proved unusually durable:

History first. Ware refused to present Orthodoxy as a set of doctrines that could be compared item by item with Roman Catholic or Protestant doctrines. He presented it first as a history — which meant the reader met the Fathers, the Councils, the Turkish yoke and the martyrs before meeting a single distinctive dogma. Non-Orthodox readers repeatedly report that this is what made the book work on them.
Liturgy and prayer given structural weight. The chapters on the sacraments and on prayer are not appendices to a doctrinal core; they carry the same weight as the chapter on Tradition. This reflects Ware’s settled conviction that “Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”).
The distinctives placed last. The filioque, the papacy, and the relation to other Christians come at the end, after the reader has been given a positive account of Orthodoxy on its own terms (see Filioque).

Some of the book’s most-quoted formulations come from Part II. On Tradition, Ware wrote that “true Orthodox fidelity to the past must always be a creative fidelity,” insisting that Tradition is “a life, a personal encounter with Christ in the Holy Spirit” and not “a parrot-like repetition of traditional formulae” (1963, 206, as quoted by Patapios; see Holy Tradition). On the filioque, he argued that the double procession “confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead,” and that in consequence the Spirit tends to fade into the background in Western theology, so that “the Church has come to be regarded too much as an institution of this world, governed in terms of earthly power and jurisdiction” (1963, 222–23, as quoted by Patapios). And on the schism itself, a sentence retained in both major editions: “The Greek east and the Latin west needed and still need one another. For both parties the great schism has proved a great tragedy” (quoted by Patapios from both editions; see The Great Schism).

What the Book Accomplished

Three claims about the book’s effect can be made without exaggeration.

It created a common vocabulary. Before 1963, English-language accounts of Orthodoxy were either missionary-Anglican, antiquarian, or written by émigrés for émigrés. After 1963, the English-speaking Orthodox and the English-speaking non-Orthodox who were interested in Orthodoxy had a shared reference text. Terms that are now standard in English — theosis, sobornost, the essence/energies distinction, the “royal priesthood” of the laity — reached most English readers through this book or through works that assumed it.

It made conversion imaginable. The book was written by a convert, in English, for readers who had not been born into Orthodoxy, and it did not treat the reader’s Western Christian formation as an embarrassment. Obituaries and tributes routinely name it as the proximate cause of individual receptions into the Church; the phrase used in one of them — “the evangelical ‘convert’ to Orthodoxy was a father in the faith to many” — captures the pattern (Downes, Premier Christianity, 2022). This is also the source of the standard criticism of Ware’s manner, treated in The Great Explainer.

It became the default. Its own publisher’s jacket claim that it “has become established throughout the English-speaking world as the standard introduction to the Orthodox Church” was quoted back at it by a hostile reviewer who nevertheless conceded the point: “As ‘the standard introduction’ to Orthodoxy, it is to be found in almost any academic or public library, and certainly in any decent bookstore” (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique,” 39ff.). The same reviewer concluded, after seventy pages of objections: “In spite of the foregoing comments, we are still able to recommend this book… Nothing better, unfortunately, is currently available in English” (ibid.).

The Price of Brevity

The book’s compression is its most obvious limitation and Ware knew it. A single Pelican volume covering two millennia of history plus a full dogmatic and liturgical exposition cannot do any of it at depth. Three consequences are worth naming, because they recur in the critical literature:

The history leans on Western scholarship. Patapios’s central methodological objection is that the historical narrative is written “from the outside,” reproducing “the hackneyed and jaundiced assessments of the Christian East so typical of Western Church histories,” rather than through “the prism of the consensus Patrum” (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique”). Whether this is a fault or a feature depends on what the book is for; a book designed to be intelligible to a Western reader will necessarily engage Western historiography.
Individual judgments are compressed to the point of unfairness. Patapios’s example is the treatment of St Cyril of Alexandria, whom the book describes as having “bribed the Court heavily and terrorized the city of Ephesus with a private army of monks” (1963, 44; 1993, 36) — a characterization Patapios regards as unsupported and which post-dates the more sympathetic reassessment of Cyril in John McGuckin’s St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy (Leiden: Brill, 1994).
It does not replace the sources. Ware’s own habit as a teacher was to send students to the Fathers and to the Philokalia, not to his own summary; the translations he spent his working life on are the practical expression of that (see Section 05).

The Three States of the Text

Anyone citing “Ware, The Orthodox Church” needs to say which one.

State	Details
First edition, 1963	Harmondsworth: Pelican/Penguin. Published 30 June 1963. Reprinted with revisions in 1964, and thereafter numerous times with minor revisions.
New edition, 1993	Harmondsworth: Penguin. A substantially reworked text with an expanded and updated bibliography, reflecting the collapse of communism, the revival of monasticism, and — more controversially — changed judgments on the Unia, the filioque, and the sack of 1204.
Third revised edition, 2015	London: Penguin, October 2015, 368 pp., ISBN 9780141980638, subtitled An Introduction to Eastern Christianity. Described by the publisher as fully updated and revised, with updated treatment of the Ecumenical Councils, sacraments, free will, purgatory, the papacy, and relations between the Orthodox Churches.

The 1993 revision is where the substantive changes cluster, and it drew a book-length published response. Because that response is an intra-Orthodox argument about Ware’s own judgments rather than a bibliographical matter, it is set out under METHODOLOGY §4.2 in The Revisions Between Editions.

[Disputed: what the 2015 third edition changed relative to 1993. The publisher's description names updated coverage of the Councils, sacraments, free will, purgatory, the papacy, and inter-Orthodox relations, but no detailed scholarly comparison of the 1993 and 2015 texts was located for this file. Users needing the specific differences should collate the two editions directly rather than rely on any summary, including this one.]

References

Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books (Penguin), 1963 (published 30 June 1963; reprinted with revisions 1964); new edition, Penguin, 1993; third revised edition, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, London: Penguin, October 2015, 368 pp., ISBN 9780141980638.
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
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.
Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72. (The most detailed published collation of the 1963 and 1993 texts; all page-paired quotations of Ware in this file are as reproduced there.)
Cousins, Philip. Review of The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware and The Dialogue of East and West in Christendom, ed. A. M. Allchin. Theology 66 (1963).
Downes, Greg. “Kallistos Ware (1934–2022): The evangelical ‘convert’ to Orthodoxy was a father in the faith to many.” Premier Christianity, 2022.
McGuckin, John. St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. (Cited by Patapios against Ware’s characterization of Cyril.)