Tonsure at Patmos, 1966

In 1966 Timothy Ware was tonsured a monk of the Holy Monastery of St John the Theologian on Patmos, taking the name Kallistos, and was ordained to the priesthood in the same year. In the same year he became Spalding Lecturer at Oxford and founding priest of the Greek parish there. This file sets out what is documented about the tonsure and ordinations, what the name signifies, and the honest problem of a monastic profession lived out almost entirely away from the monastery.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Approach to Patmos

The monastic interest came first and came early. Ware read Helen Waddell’s The Desert Fathers at sixteen, “and from that moment I was fascinated by the monastic history of the Christian East”; part of the appeal of the Russian Church Abroad, when he was choosing a jurisdiction, was that “most of the monasteries in the Orthodox emigration belonged to the Russian Church in Exile” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000; see The Reception of 1958).

After his reception in 1958 he traveled widely in the Orthodox world. Reference accounts record extended time at Patmos, at Jerusalem, and on Mount Athos, and English Wikipedia adds that as a layman he spent some six months at a Russian Orthodox monastery in Canada (OrthodoxWiki, “Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia”; Wikipedia, “Kallistos Ware”; ROCOR Studies, “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia and the Russian Church Abroad,” 6 March 2009, which places him at a monastery in the Montreal area from November 1963). [Disputed: the identity, jurisdiction and exact dates of the Canadian monastery. Wikipedia gives "six months at a Russian Orthodox monastery in Canada"; ROCOR Studies places the visit in November 1963 in the Montreal area. Neither is corroborated here from a primary source, and the two accounts have not been reconciled.]

Patmos is the one that took. By his own account, when he “first stayed there” the elder of the island was Fr Amphilochios Makris — which places his first stay before Amphilochios’s death in 1970, and the surrounding evidence places it in the 1960s (Ware, “Through Creation to the Creator,” 1996; see Elder Amphilochios and the Trees).

The Tonsure and the Name

Ware was tonsured a monk of the Holy Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos, in 1966, receiving the name Kallistos in honor of St Kallistos Xanthopoulos (OrthodoxWiki, “Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia”; the Patmos monastery is likewise given as the place of his monastic profession in Wikipedia and in the obituary literature).

The name is not incidental. Kallistos and Ignatios Xanthopoulos are the fourteenth-century hesychast authors of the long “Century” of directions to hesychasts that stands among the late texts of the Philokalia — which is to say that the monk Kallistos took his name from a Philokalia author roughly a decade before he began publishing the English Philokalia with Palmer and Sherrard (see The English Philokalia and The Philokalia). One tribute noted the aptness of the name in another register: “In ancient Greek ‘Kallistos’ means something like ‘the most beautiful’ or ‘the best’… How apposite the name was” (Oldmeadow, “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware [1934–2022]: A Sketch,” Sacred Web).

Deacon 1965, Priest 1966

The Oxford parish he founded gives the sequence: ordained deacon in 1965; in 1966 “ordained to the priesthood and tonsured as a monk, taking the name Kallistos” (Greek Orthodox Community of the Holy Trinity, Oxford, “Metropolitan Kallistos [1934–2022]”).

For the ordaining hierarch, Ware is his own source. Recalling Bishop James’s warning of 1958 — “Please understand that we would never, under any circumstances, ordain you to the priesthood; we need only Greeks” — he wrote: “In fact I was ordained priest in 1966, eight years after my reception, by Metropolitan (later Archbishop) Athenagoras II of Thyateira, who had arrived in Britain in 1963/64” (Ware, “Strange Yet Familiar”). The remark is characteristic: he records the earlier refusal without rancor and treats his own ordination as a matter of divine rather than institutional arrangement — “I was content to leave my future in the hands of God.”

[Disputed: whether the priestly ordination took place on Patmos or in Britain. ROCOR Studies describes Ware as "having been ordained on Patmos in 1966" under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Ware's own account names Metropolitan Athenagoras II of Thyateira, whose see was Britain, as the ordaining hierarch, and does not say where the service took place. The collection follows Ware for the ordaining bishop and leaves the location unresolved; the tonsure at the Patmos monastery is separately attested and is not in question.]

A Monk in Oxford

1966 is a remarkable year in this life. In it Ware was tonsured a monk, ordained a priest, appointed Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford, and given the task of establishing the Greek Orthodox parish of the Holy Trinity in Oxford, which he then served as its priest until 2001 (Greek Orthodox Community of the Holy Trinity, Oxford; Ware, contributor’s note, The Wheel 13/14 [Spring/Summer 2018], 10; see The Spalding Lectureship).

The result was a monastic life of an unusual shape, and it should be described plainly rather than smoothed over. Ware was a professed monk of a Greek island monastery who lived for fifty-five years in an English university town, holding an academic post, serving a parish, editing journals, and — from 1982 — exercising an episcopal office. He was not resident in his monastery, did not share its daily cycle, and was not under its abbot’s immediate direction.

Two things can be said about this without special pleading, and both belong in an honest account.

First, it is not anomalous in Orthodox practice. The Orthodox tradition has always ordained monks to serve outside their monasteries, and the episcopate is drawn from the monastic ranks by canonical requirement; a hierarch is a monk who does not live in his monastery. Ware’s situation was the normal situation of an Orthodox bishop, arrived at eighteen years early. The diaspora added a further pressure: an English-speaking Orthodox clergy had to be built out of the few available men, and Ware was, by 1966, conspicuously available.

Second, it has a cost, and Ware’s critics have named it. The monastic formation of an Athonite or Patmian monk is a long submission to a common life under an elder; a monk who is tonsured and then immediately posted to a lectureship has had the tonsure without much of the formation. Traditionalist critics of Ware have connected this to what they see as an over-adaptation to Western academic and ecumenical habits (see The Revisions Between Editions). Ware’s own writings supply the counter-evidence — a lifelong attachment to hesychast prayer, the Philokalia, the Jesus Prayer and the figure of the elder — but the tension is real and is not resolved here (see Assessment).

What is not in dispute is that the monastic identity stuck to him. He signed the 1969 Festal Menaion as Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans., The Festal Menaion, London: Faber & Faber, 1969; see The Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion), and every subsequent title he bore — Archimandrite, Bishop, Metropolitan — was one that presupposed the tonsure of 1966.

What the Monastic Vocation Contributed to the Work

Three things in Ware’s corpus are directly traceable to Patmos and the Greek monastic world rather than to Oxford.

The translations are monastic texts. The Philokalia, the Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion are the working books of a monastery. A layman scholar might have translated them; a monk chose them (see Section 05).
The doctrine of the spiritual father. Ware’s essay “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity” (The Inner Kingdom, 2000) is the standard English treatment of the geron/starets, and its living illustration is Amphilochios of Patmos — a man Ware knew, not a figure from a book.
The centrality of prayer over system. Ware’s refusal to write a systematic theology, and his insistence in The Orthodox Way that God is “the cause of our wonder” rather than “the object of our knowledge,” are recognizably the instincts of the hesychast tradition rather than of the seminar room (see The Orthodox Way (1979)).

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. (Waddell and the desert fathers; Bishop James’s warning; ordination by Metropolitan Athenagoras II of Thyateira in 1966.)
Ware, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. “Through Creation to the Creator.” Third Marco Pallis Memorial Lecture, London, 1996; published London: Friends of the Centre, 1997. (“Fr. Amphilochios, the geronta… when I first stayed there.”)
OrthodoxWiki. “Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia.” (Tonsure at the Monastery of St John the Theologian, Patmos, 1966; the name 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 1966–2001.)
ROCOR Studies. “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia and the Russian Church Abroad.” 6 March 2009. (The Canadian monastery; the statement that he was ordained on Patmos, recorded here as disputed.)
Oldmeadow, Harry. “Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (1934–2022): A Sketch.” Sacred Web. (On the aptness of the monastic name.)
Mary, Mother, and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans. The Festal Menaion. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The title-page style “Archimandrite Kallistos Ware.”)
Ware, Kallistos. Contributor’s note. The Wheel 13/14 (Spring/Summer 2018), 10. (Spalding Lecturer 1966–2001.)