The Spalding Lectureship

From 1966 to his retirement in 2001, Ware held the Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford — thirty-five years in a post that, largely because of him, became the effective centre of Orthodox theological study in the English-speaking academy. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, taught into his eighties at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, and left a body of doctoral and undergraduate students that his colleagues numbered in the thousands.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Post

The Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Studies was established at Oxford through the Spalding Trust, the endowment founded by H. N. Spalding for the comparative study of religions. Ware was appointed to it in 1966 — the same year he was tonsured a monk and ordained priest — and held it for thirty-five years until his retirement in 2001 (Kallistos Ware, contributor’s note, The Wheel 13/14 [Spring/Summer 2018], 10: “From 1966 until his retirement in 2001, he was Spalding Lecturer of Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford”). He was also a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and after retirement an Emeritus Fellow.

[Disputed: the date of the Pembroke fellowship. Sources give 1970 and 1979; the discrepancy appears in reference works and has not been resolved here from a primary university source. The fact of the fellowship is not in doubt and is independently attested in this repository (see god-history-and-dialectic, on Ware as "himself a fellow of Pembroke").]

Two things should be said about the post to keep it in proportion. First, it was a lectureship, not a chair: Ware was never Regius Professor of Divinity or the holder of any of Oxford’s great theological chairs, and his institutional position was modest relative to his fame. Second, and against that, it was for much of his tenure the only established post in Eastern Orthodox studies in a major British university, so that in practice the Spalding Lecturer was the discipline in Britain. Brandon Gallaher has argued that Ware “helped to create the formal academic area of Orthodox Christian Studies” and moved Orthodoxy in the Western academy from the status of something exotic and oriental to that of a universal Christian tradition (Gallaher, “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022).

The Scholar

Ware’s doctoral work was on the eighteenth-century Greek lay theologian Eustratios Argenti, and it produced his first book: Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). It is a genuinely technical monograph — a study of a polemicist of the Ottoman period, the reception of converts, the rebaptism controversy of 1755, and the sacramental theology of the Greek Church under Turkish rule — and it is worth naming because it is unlike everything that made him famous. Whatever else Ware was, he began as a working historian of the post-Byzantine Greek Church.

His scholarly output thereafter ran chiefly to essays and to introductions. Several remain standard: “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer: Diadochus, Gaza, Sinai,” in The Study of Spirituality (London: SPCK, 1986); “The Debate about Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977); “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence–Energies Distinction,” Eastern Churches Review 7 (1975); “The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity,” Sobornost 8:2 (1986); and the long introduction to the Classics of Western Spirituality translation of St John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), whose threefold division of the thirty Steps and whose case for the “long chronology” of Climacus’s dates are followed in this repository (see St John Climacus). He was for many years an editor of Eastern Churches Review and its successor Sobornost, the journal of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius.

He did not, however, write the large monographs that an academic career of that length would normally produce. His Collected Works gather essays; the two books everyone knows are introductions; the great labour of his middle years went into translation. This is a real feature of the record and any assessment must reckon with it (see Assessment).

The Students

Ware supervised graduate students for three and a half decades and lectured to undergraduates for the same period, and by the end of his life the alumni of his teaching included a substantial share of the Orthodox theologians and hierarchs working in English. Gallaher, himself among them, writes that his formal students “count in the thousands” and that they include numerous prominent Orthodox theologians and church leaders (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022).

One case is documented within this repository. Joseph P. Farrell took an Oxford doctorate in patristics in Ware’s orbit; his thesis was published as Free Choice in St Maximus the Confessor (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1989) with a foreword by Timothy Ware (see God, History, and Dialectic, where a [Disputed:] note records that whether Ware was the formal doctoral supervisor is not documented).

After retiring from Oxford in 2001, Ware did not stop teaching. He lectured at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge from 1999 to 2019 and chaired its board (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 2022; and Ware’s own contributor’s note in The Wheel 13/14 [2018], 10, listing his continuing involvement with the Institute, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and the Friends of Mount Athos).

Oxford as a Place

For fifty-six years Ware’s life was contained within a few square miles. He read Classics and Theology at Magdalen; he taught in the Faculty of Theology; he was a Fellow of Pembroke; from 1966 he served the Greek Orthodox parish of the Holy Trinity and the Annunciation in Oxford, where he remained the resident pastoral presence for decades even after becoming a bishop; he died in Oxford on 24 August 2022 and was buried at Wolvercote Cemetery. The joke about theologians and the notice at the end of the platform at Oxford Station, in “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?”, is the joke of a man who had been catching the same train for thirty years (Ware, “Dare We Hope,” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000, 215).

That stability is part of the explanation of his influence. He was findable. Generations of students, pilgrims, journalists, converts and clergy knew where he was and that he would answer.

See Also

• The Great Explainer — his manner as lecturer and pastor, and the convert movement
• The Orthodox Church (1963) — the book written while he was still a graduate student
• The Translator — where much of his working time went
• Bishop and Pastor — Diokleia, Thyateira, and the Oxford parish
• Assessment — the question of what he did and did not write
• God, History, and Dialectic — a doctoral student’s work with Ware’s foreword
• St John Climacus — Ware’s introduction to the Ladder

References

• Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. (His first book and doctoral work.)
• Ware, Kallistos. Contributor’s note. The Wheel 13/14 (Spring/Summer 2018), 10. (Primary attestation of the Spalding Lectureship dates 1966–2001, the 1966 tonsure and ordination, the 1982 consecration, and his continuing involvement with the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and the Friends of Mount Athos.)
• Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022. (The claim that Ware helped create the academic field of Orthodox Christian Studies; the number of his students; his teaching at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, 1999–2019.)
• Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
• Ware, Kallistos. “The Debate about Palamism.” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977); “God Hidden and Revealed.” Eastern Churches Review 7 (1975); “The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity.” Sobornost 8:2 (1986), 6–23; “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer: Diadochus, Gaza, Sinai.” In The Study of Spirituality, ed. Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright and Edward Yarnold. London: SPCK, 1986.
• Farrell, Joseph P. Free Choice in St Maximus the Confessor. Foreword by Timothy Ware. South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1989.
• Ware, Kallistos. “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 193–215.