03 — Patmos and the Monastic Vocation

Eight years after his reception, in 1966, Timothy Ware became a monk of the Monastery of St John the Theologian on Patmos and took the name Kallistos. He was tonsured in the Aegean and spent the next fifty-five years in Oxford; the two facts have to be held together, because the second is unintelligible without the first. This section covers the tonsure and the elder who formed him.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

What This Section Covers

  • Tonsure at Patmos, 1966 — the monastery, the name, the diaconate of 1965 and the priesthood of 1966, and the peculiar shape of a monastic life lived almost entirely away from the monastery.
  • Elder Amphilochios and the Trees — Amphilochios Makris (1889–1970), the geronta of Patmos, Ware’s spiritual father and the subject of his most valuable firsthand testimony; and the tree-planting that made both of them famous.

The Bare Facts

  • The monastery: the Holy Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos — the fortress-monastery founded in 1088 above the Cave of the Apocalypse.
  • 1965 — ordained deacon (Greek Orthodox Community of the Holy Trinity, Oxford, “Metropolitan Kallistos [1934–2022]”).
  • 1966 — tonsured a monk with the name Kallistos, in honor of St Kallistos Xanthopoulos, and ordained priest by Metropolitan (later Archbishop) Athenagoras II of Thyateira (OrthodoxWiki, “Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia”; Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000, for the ordaining hierarch).
  • The elder: Amphilochios Makris (1889–1970), glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 29 August 2018 — “the geronta or ‘elder’ on the island of Patmos when I first stayed there” (Ware, “Through Creation to the Creator”; see St. Amphilochios of Patmos).
  • The same year, 1966, he became Spalding Lecturer at Oxford and founding priest of the Greek Orthodox parish of the Holy Trinity there — so that the monastic profession and the academic-parochial career began simultaneously (see Section 04).

Why This Section Comes Before Oxford

It is easy, reading the obituaries, to take Ware for an academic who happened to be a bishop. The chronology says otherwise: he was a monk before he was a lecturer, by a matter of months, and he remained formally a monk of Patmos for the rest of his life. His translating work is Philokalic and hesychast; his best-known essay on spiritual direction is a portrait of a Greek elder he knew personally; the theology treated in Section 06 is a monastic theology of deification and prayer. The Aegean root is not decorative.

It is also a real limitation on how far the monastic label can be pressed. Ware did not live in his monastery. He lived in Oxford, in a parish house, teaching undergraduates and editing journals, for five and a half decades. Whatever else his monasticism was, it was not a monasticism of stability in place — a point taken up honestly in Tonsure at Patmos, 1966 and again in Assessment.

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.
  • Ware, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. “Through Creation to the Creator.” Third Marco Pallis Memorial Lecture, London, 1996; published London: Friends of the Centre, 1997 (as Through the Creation to the Creator, ISBN 0-9531698-0-4); reproduced by the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, In Communion.
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia.” (Tonsure at the Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos; the name Kallistos in honor of St Kallistos Xanthopoulos.)
  • Greek Orthodox Community of the Holy Trinity, Oxford. “Metropolitan Kallistos (1934–2022).” (Deacon 1965; priest and tonsure 1966; founding priest of the Oxford parish 1966–2001.)