The Great Explainer

More than any other figure, Ware taught the English-speaking world what Orthodoxy is. He did it through two books, sixty years of lecturing, and a manner that combined precision with warmth and an almost complete absence of polemic. This file treats the vocation itself — the gift of explanation — together with his role in the convert movement in Britain and North America and the criticism that the gift attracted.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Vocation

There is a kind of theological work that consists not in original construction but in making a tradition intelligible from outside it without falsifying it from inside it. It is harder than it looks. The temptations are apologetic inflation on one side and a flattening simplification on the other, and most of the twentieth-century literature of religious introduction fell into one or the other. Ware did neither, sustainedly, for six decades, in a tradition that had almost no prior literature of this kind in English.

The preconditions were unusual and probably not repeatable. He was a native English speaker with a classical education good enough for a double first at Oxford, who came to Orthodoxy from outside as an adult and therefore knew exactly what an outsider does not know; who then spent years inside Greek monastic life and could speak of the tradition from the inside; who was a working academic historian of the post-Byzantine Church; and who was also a parish priest, and later a bishop, dealing with actual inquirers. He knew the questions because they had been his own, and he knew the answers in Greek.

The Manner

Ware’s lecturing style is one of the most consistently attested things about him. He spoke without notes, in complete and shapely sentences, with a fund of stories, and with a comic timing that people remembered decades later — the notice at the end of the platform at Oxford Station standing in for the limits of theology; the aside that “God has children, but he has no grandchildren” (The Orthodox Way, Prologue, 8); the Turgenev line about the heart of another being a dark forest, deployed to open a discussion of the hardest pastoral question of his last years (The Wheel 13/14 [2018], 6). Oxford students knew him, affectionately, as “Gandalf the Great” — the long white beard, the black monastic rason, the sense of a figure who had come from somewhere older (Greg Downes, “Kallistos Ware (1934–2022): The evangelical ‘convert’ to Orthodoxy was a father in the faith to many,” Premier Christianity, 2022).

The pastoral manner was of a piece with it. Downes records the way Ware corrected people — “with grace and humour” — and the same obituary emphasizes that he was for very many people “a father in the faith” rather than merely an author (Downes, Premier Christianity, 2022). He answered letters. He received visitors. He preached in a parish for over half a century. The absence of grandeur is part of the record.

He was also, notably, unpolemical. In an Orthodox world with a large appetite for controversy, Ware wrote almost no attack literature. When he disagreed — with Origen, with C. S. Lewis, with contributors to a volume he was introducing — he said so in a sentence and moved on. This is one reason his books travelled: they gave the reader nothing to fight about that was not already the actual subject.

The Convert Movement

Ware was himself a convert — received in 1958 from an evangelical Anglican background (see The Reception of 1958) — and the two books he wrote became the standard instruments of conversion in the Anglophone world for two generations. In Britain, the period of his ministry saw the reception of a substantial number of Anglicans into Orthodoxy, including a wave in the 1990s connected with the Church of England’s 1992 decision to ordain women; in North America, The Orthodox Church was the book handed to nearly every inquirer in nearly every parish for decades, and the Antiochian and OCA convert movements of the 1980s and 1990s ran largely on it.

Ware’s own attitude to the word “convert” was cool. He resisted the term, insisting that “conversion is to Christ” rather than to a denomination, and he retained an explicit gratitude for the tradition he had left: “I shall never cease to be sincerely grateful for my Anglican upbringing” (quoted in Downes, Premier Christianity, 2022). That posture — grateful rather than repudiating — is one of the more distinctive things about him, and it stands in some contrast to the style of convert apologetics that his own books helped to make possible.

[Disputed: Ware's responsibility for the character of the Anglophone convert movement. (a) One line of assessment, common in obituaries and in academic tributes, holds that Ware's non-polemical, historically informed presentation was a moderating and civilizing influence on a movement that could otherwise have been far more sectarian, and that he is the reason a generation of English-speaking converts met Orthodoxy first as a tradition rather than as a grievance (Gallaher, "True Man," *Public Orthodoxy*, 2022; Downes, *Premier Christianity*, 2022). (b) A contrary line, voiced in traditionalist Orthodox circles in Britain and North America, holds that his irenic presentation — particularly of Western Christianity and of the ecumenical movement — understated the real distance between Orthodoxy and the confessions his readers were leaving, and produced converts with an insufficiently sharp sense of that distance. The collection reports both readings and adjudicates neither.]

What He Did Not Do

It is worth marking the limits of the vocation, because they explain some of the criticism. Ware did not found a school; there is no “Warean” theology in the sense that there is a Losskian or a Zizioulian one. He did not produce a systematic work. He did not lead a jurisdiction, build an institution of his own, or leave a monastery behind him. His archdiocese was titular and his flock was, in the ordinary sense, other people’s.

What he did instead was to stand at the door for sixty years and explain, patiently and accurately, what was inside. Whether that is a lesser vocation than the others is a real question, and this collection does not pretend to settle it (see Assessment). What is not in question is that in the English language, in the twentieth century, nobody else did it remotely as well.

See Also

• The Spalding Lectureship — the academic post and the students
• The Orthodox Church (1963) — the book that did most of this work
• The Orthodox Way (1979) — the second book, and the more personal one
• The Reception of 1958 — his own conversion
• The Most-Cited Modern Authority — the measurable trace of the explaining
• Orthodoxy in America — the American context of the convert movement

References

• Downes, Greg. “Kallistos Ware (1934–2022): The evangelical ‘convert’ to Orthodoxy was a father in the faith to many.” Premier Christianity, 2022. (The evangelical Anglican upbringing; the conversion at sixteen; the visit to St Philip’s; “Gandalf the Great”; “Conversion is to Christ”; “I shall never cease to be sincerely grateful for my Anglican upbringing”; the Oxford parish of the Annunciation; correction “with grace and humour.”)
• Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (Ware’s role in establishing Orthodox Christian Studies as an academic field; his students; the tensions his later positions caused.)
• Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Oxford: A. R. Mowbray, 1979 (SVS Press reprint, 1986). (“No one can be a Christian at second hand. God has children, but he has no grandchildren,” Prologue, 8.)
• Ware, Kallistos. “Foreword.” The Wheel 13/14 (Spring/Summer 2018), 6–10. (The Turgenev opening.)
• Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin, 1st ed. 1963; rev. eds. 1993, 2015.