The Orthodox Way (1979)
Sixteen years after the Pelican survey, Ware wrote a second and much shorter book — a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue, each named for an aspect of God — which is not a survey at all but a catechesis on the Christian life. Where The Orthodox Church explains Orthodoxy to an outsider, The Orthodox Way walks a reader through it. It is the book most likely to be pressed into the hands of an inquirer today, and the one Ware’s admirers most often name as his best.
Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Publication
The Orthodox Way was first published in 1979 by A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd of Oxford, with reprints in 1981 and 1986. A revised edition appeared from St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Crestwood, NY) in 1995, and that is the text now in general circulation; SVS Press has kept it in print, latterly as volume 2 of its Classics Series. The repository’s other files cite the 1995 revised edition throughout (see, e.g., the references in Prayer Rule).
The author is named as Kallistos Ware — not “Timothy Ware.” By 1979 he had been a monk and priest for thirteen years and Spalding Lecturer for thirteen; the change of name on the title page marks a real change in the kind of book being written.
Structure: The Creed as an Itinerary
The book’s plan is its argument. Ware takes the sequence of the Creed and turns it into a road:
| Prologue | Signposts on the Way |
| 1 | God as Mystery |
| 2 | God as Trinity |
| 3 | God as Creator |
| 4 | God as Man |
| 5 | God as Spirit |
| 6 | God as Prayer |
| Epilogue | God as Eternity |
The pattern is easy to miss and, once seen, hard to unsee. Chapters 2 through 5 are the Creed — Father, creation, Incarnation, Holy Spirit — but the sequence is bracketed at the front by apophaticism (God as Mystery) and at the back by prayer and eschatology (God as Prayer, God as Eternity). Doctrine is thus enclosed within unknowing at one end and worship at the other. This is not decoration; it is Ware’s whole theological method compressed into a table of contents. He held that “Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000), and here he built a book that says so structurally.
The opening chapter states the governing principle directly. In its most quoted sentence, Ware writes that “it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1995, 14). [Disputed: the page reference. The sentence is universally attributed to *The Orthodox Way* and is quoted at p. 14 of the 1995 revised edition in the standard quotation databases; the pagination of the 1979 Mowbray edition differs and has not been collated here.]
That sentence is the hinge between this book and its predecessor. The Orthodox Church is a book of answers. The Orthodox Way is a book about why the answers are not the point.
What Kind of Book It Is
Three things distinguish it from the 1963 volume.
It is addressed to a practitioner, not a spectator. The 1963 book explains what Orthodox believe. The 1979 book is written in the first person plural and assumes the reader intends to live it: the chapters on the Spirit and on prayer treat repentance, the sacraments, the community, and the Jesus Prayer as things the reader will do (see The Jesus Prayer and Jesus Prayer).
It is dense with the Fathers and with modern Orthodox writers. Ware’s method throughout is to state a theme briefly in his own words and then let the tradition speak — the Cappadocians, Maximus, Isaac the Syrian, Symeon the New Theologian, Palamas, and among the moderns Lossky, Florovsky, Bulgakov’s critics and successors, and the Russian and Greek elders. The book functions in practice as an anthology with commentary, which is precisely how Ware also worked as a translator (see Section 05 and The Philokalia).
It carries the theology that Section 06 treats. Theosis, personhood, the essence–energies distinction, and the eschatological reserve that would later become “Dare we hope for the salvation of all?” are all present here in compressed form (see Theosis, Personhood and the Human Person, Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All, and Theosis).
Reception
The Orthodox Way has had a quieter public life than The Orthodox Church and, arguably, a deeper one. It has not been the subject of a detailed hostile collation in the way the 1993 revision of the earlier book was, and its central positions — that theology terminates in wonder, that dogma exists for the sake of prayer, that the Christian life is a road and not a position — are not among the contested points of Ware’s corpus. Where his critics have engaged it, the objections have tended to be the same objections raised against his manner generally: that the irenic tone underplays the sharpness of Orthodoxy’s difference from Western Christianity (see The Great Explainer and Section 08).
Its practical standing is best measured by its use. It is the standard text for parish inquirers’ classes and catechumenate programs across the English-speaking Orthodox world, and it is on more Orthodox reading lists than any other single modern book except its own predecessor. In this repository it is cited as a doctrinal and spiritual authority in files ranging from prayer and asceticism to Trinitarian theology.
A Note on What It Is Not
The Orthodox Way is not a dogmatic manual and does not attempt completeness. It says almost nothing about canon law, little about church history, and nothing about the jurisdictional questions that occupy the last third of The Orthodox Church. Readers who need those should go to the earlier book, or past both to the sources. Ware himself would have sent them past both: the point of his life’s translating labor was that the English reader should not have to stop at Ware (see Section 05).
See Also
- The Orthodox Church (1963) — the survey this book is not
- Theosis, Personhood and the Human Person — the doctrine at the center of this book
- The English Philokalia — the anthology method, at scale
- The Jesus Prayer — treated in chapter 6
- Theosis — the repository’s doctrinal treatment
- Holy Trinity — chapter 2’s subject
References
- Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Oxford: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1979; reprinted 1981, 1986. Revised edition, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995; reissued in the SVS Press Classics Series (vol. 2).
- 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. (“Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second.”)
- Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963; new edition 1993; third revised edition 2015.