Theosis, Personhood, and the Human Person

Ware was not a system-builder, and he never wrote a dogmatics; his theology is carried in a short book, a long series of essays, and thousands of lectures. Its recurring centre is the human person — made in the image of a Trinity that is communion, called to become by grace what God is by nature, mediating between the noetic and material creation, and finding its fulfilment in the prayer of the heart. This file sets out those themes as he stated them, and marks where he is transmitting the tradition and where he is arguing his own case.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

A Theology Without a System

Ware left no Dogmatics. Compared with Fr Dumitru Stăniloae’s three volumes or Fr John Meyendorff’s Byzantine Theology, his theological corpus is a small book, a large body of essays, forewords, encyclopedia entries and lectures, and the introductions to the texts he translated. The essays were gathered late: The Inner Kingdom appeared as the first volume of his Collected Works (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), with further volumes following, the last of them posthumously.

The absence of a system is not accidental. The Orthodox Way opens with a citation of Fr Georges Florovsky: “The Church gives us not a system, but a key; not a plan of God’s City, but the means of entering it. Perhaps someone will lose his way because he has no plan. But all that he will see, he will see without a mediator, he will see it directly, it will be real for him; while he who has studied only the plan risks remaining outside and not really finding anything” (quoted at Ware, The Orthodox Way, Prologue, 7; the edition consulted is the St Vladimir’s Seminary Press reprint, Crestwood, NY, 1986, of the Mowbray first edition, Oxford, 1979). Ware chose the key over the plan. What he offers instead of a system is a set of load-bearing convictions returned to again and again.

The Way, and Experience

The programmatic theme of The Orthodox Way is that Christianity is a path walked, not a theory held. Ware takes his title from the earliest name for the faith in Acts — “the Way” (Acts 19:23; 24:22) — and opens with the saying of the recluse whom St Sarapion the Sindonite found in her one small room in Rome: “I am not sitting. I am on a journey” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, Prologue, 7). From this he draws the imperative that runs through his whole authorship: “Each is called to verify for himself what he has been taught, each is required to re-live the Tradition he has received.” He quotes St Philaret of Moscow — “The Creed does not belong to you unless you have lived it” — and adds a line that became one of his most-repeated: “No one can be a Christian at second hand. God has children, but he has no grandchildren” (ibid., 8).

Tradition, on this account, is not the acceptance of formulae inherited from past generations but “the ever-new” life of the Spirit in the Church now (ibid., 9; see Holy Tradition). The stress on personal verification is characteristically his, and it is what made his books usable by readers with no inherited Orthodox culture — which is to say, by converts.

Apophaticism and the Essence–Energies Distinction

Ware’s first chapter is “God as Mystery,” and his theology is apophatic before it is anything else: God is unknowable in His essence and truly knowable in His energies. He states the Palamite distinction with unusual compression: “the energies signify the whole God as he is in action. God in his entirety is completely present in each of his divine energies. Thus the essence–energies distinction is a way of stating simultaneously that the whole God is inaccessible, and that the whole God in his outgoing love has rendered himself accessible to man” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 1, 28–29).

He then draws out the consequence that matters to him most. The distinction is what makes deification sayable without pantheism: “we are able to affirm the possibility of a direct or mystical union between man and God — what the Greek Fathers term the theosis of man, his ‘deification’ — but at the same time we exclude any pantheistic identification between the two: for man participates in the energies of God, not in the essence. There is union, but not fusion or confusion. Although ‘oned’ with the divine, man still remains man; he is not swallowed up or annihilated, but between him and God there continues always to exist an ‘I–Thou’ relationship of person to person” (ibid., 29). The closing formula — union that leaves the person more, not less, himself — is the axis on which everything else in his theology turns. He summarizes the apophatic way with a phrase that recurs in his lectures: God is “beyond and above all that we can think or express, yet closer to us than our own heart” (ibid., 29).

Ware wrote separately and at length on this in “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence–Energies Distinction” (Eastern Churches Review 7 [1975]), and he was among the participants in the twentieth-century debate over Palamism, surveyed in his “The Debate about Palamism” (Eastern Churches Review 9 [1977]). On the doctrine itself, see St Gregory Palamas and Theosis.

The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity

Ware’s fullest statement on personhood is the essay “The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity” (Sobornost [incorporating Eastern Churches Review] 8:2 [1986], 6–23). Its thesis is that because God is not a solitary monad but a communion of three persons in eternal mutual love, the human being made in that image is constituted by relationship: to be a person is to be in communion, and a human being in isolation is not fully a person at all.

The same conviction appears in the Wheel foreword of his last years, where he glossed it with two aphorisms: the ancient Unus Christianus, nullus Christianus — “one Christian, isolated from other Christians, excluded from the communion of the Church, is no Christian at all” — extended by his own coinage, “Una persona, nulla persona: one person, subsisting alone, lacking any bond of fellowship with others, is not a real person. Personhood is social, or it is nothing” (Ware, “Foreword,” The Wheel 13/14 [Spring/Summer 2018], 7). He noted there that the Greek word for person, prosōpon, means literally “face” or “countenance”: “I can only become an authentic person if I ‘face’ others, looking into their eyes and letting them look into mine” (ibid., 7).

He also insisted on the unfinished character of personhood — that the human being is not a fixed datum but a task: “Humanness is not just a ‘given,’ a fixed and accomplished fact, but it is a project, an as yet uncompleted task. We are to say not ‘I am human,’ but ‘I have yet to become human’” (ibid., 7, citing 1 John 3:2 and Gabriel Marcel’s Homo Viator). He held, further, that personhood cannot be exhaustively defined at all: “we can provide an ostensive definition, pointing to what is meant and indicated by ‘being a person,’ but we cannot offer a systematic and exhaustive description” (ibid., 6).

Ware’s personalism belongs to a wider twentieth-century Orthodox current that includes Vladimir Lossky, Fr Sophrony’s “hypostatic principle,” Metropolitan John Zizioulas, and Christos Yannaras. Ware read and used them all; he is not, in this area, an originator so much as a synthesizer with an exceptional gift for statement (see Vladimir Lossky, John Zizioulas, Christos Yannaras, and St Sophrony of Essex).

Microcosm and Mediator: The Body and the Creation

Following St Maximus the Confessor, Ware gives the human being a cosmic office. Because man participates in both the noetic and the material realms, “he is an image or mirror of the whole creation, imago mundi, a ‘little universe’ or microcosm. All created things have their meeting-place in him” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 3, 63). And because he is microcosm, he is also mediator: “It is his God-given task to reconcile and harmonize the noetic and the material realms, to bring them to unity, to spiritualize the material, and to render manifest all the latent capacities of the created order… As microcosm, then, man is the one in whom the world is summed up; as mediator, he is the one through whom the world is offered back to God” (ibid., 63–64).

From this follows Ware’s insistent anti-dualism about the body. If man “were just a soul dwelling temporarily in a body… if his body were no part of his true self, but only a piece of clothing which he will eventually lay aside, or a prison from which he is seeking to escape — then man could not properly act as mediator” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 3, 64, citing 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 and Romans 12:1). He developed the theme in the essay “‘My Helper and My Enemy’: The Body in Greek Christianity” and in the lecture “Glorify God with Your Body,” and it is the same conviction that underlies his lifelong interest in the created order and in the ecological question — the interest he traced back to his elder on Patmos (see Elder Amphilochios and the Trees).

Christ, and Deification as “Christification”

Ware’s soteriology is the classical Athanasian exchange, stated in the idiom of participation. “Christ shares in our death, and we share in his life; he ‘empties himself’ and we are ‘exalted’ (Phil. 2:5–9). God’s descent makes possible man’s ascent” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 4, 98), and he quotes St Maximus: “Ineffably the infinite limits itself, while the finite is expanded to the measure of the infinite” (ibid., 98).

The formulation he made his own is that deification is christification: “God’s Incarnation opens the way to man’s deification. To be deified is, more specifically, to be ‘christified’: the divine likeness that we are called to attain is the likeness of Christ. It is through Jesus the God-man that we men are ‘ingodded’, ‘divinized’, made ‘sharers in the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4). By assuming our humanity, Christ who is Son of God by nature has made us sons of God by grace. In him we are ‘adopted’ by God the Father, becoming sons-in-the-Son” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 4, 99).

He drew from this the standard Orthodox critique of a merely juridical soteriology and set it out at popular length in How Are We Saved? The Understanding of Salvation in the Orthodox Tradition (Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing, 1996) — a short book that treats salvation as healing and participation rather than as the satisfaction of a debt (see Soteriology).

The Prayer of the Heart

The practical terminus of Ware’s theology is the Jesus Prayer, on which he was one of the twentieth century’s principal expositors in English. His short book The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: SLG Press, 1974; rev. ed. 1986) — published, characteristically, by the press of an Anglican religious community — became the standard modern introduction.

Two emphases are his. First, the Prayer is not a technique and not a mantra: it is the invocation of a named Person, inseparable from faith in who that Person is, and its repetition is the repetition of a relationship (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974, where the contrast with mantra and yoga is drawn explicitly). Second, it has a Trinitarian and christological structure — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God” is the Nicene confession compressed, and “have mercy on me, a sinner” is the publican’s cry: the Prayer holds together the two poles of glory and compunction (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 4, on the two “poles” of the Jesus Prayer).

He set out the classical progression soberly: “Normally three levels or degrees are distinguished in the saying of the Jesus Prayer. It starts as ‘prayer of the lips’, oral prayer. Then it grows more inward, becoming ‘prayer of the intellect’, mental prayer. Finally the intellect ‘descends’ into the heart and is united with it, and so the prayer becomes ‘prayer of the heart’ or, more exactly, ‘prayer of the intellect in the heart’. At this level it becomes prayer of the whole person — no longer something that we think or say, but something that we are: for the ultimate purpose of the spiritual Way is not just a person who says prayers from time to time, but a person who is prayer all the time” (Ware, The Orthodox Way, ch. 6, 164–65).

He also did the historical work: “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), and “The Jesus Prayer in St Gregory of Sinai” (Eastern Churches Review 4 [1972]) remain standard scholarly references for the question of who first attests what (see The Jesus Prayer).

The Spiritual Father

A final theme, and one of his most influential essays, is the geron or starets. “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity” (in The Inner Kingdom, Collected Works vol. 1, Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000) argues that the spiritual father is not an institution of the canons but a charismatic figure whose authority rests on the gift of discernment and on love, and whose office is to bear the burden of another and to set free rather than to dominate. The essay is also, in passing, a primary historical source: it contains Ware’s firsthand portrait of Elder Amphilochios Makris of Patmos, his own spiritual father (see Elder Amphilochios and the Trees, and St Amphilochios of Patmos).

What Is His Own, and What Is Not

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the distinction should be stated plainly. The apophatic way, the essence–energies distinction, deification, the microcosm-and-mediator anthropology, and the theology of the Jesus Prayer are not Ware’s theses: they are the teaching of the Church and of the Fathers, and Ware presents them as such. What is his own is the statement — the ordering, the compression, the choice of image, the aphorism — together with a small number of genuinely argued positions, of which the eschatological hope of “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” is the most significant, and the later positions treated in The Contested Questions the most disputed. The repository’s own settled judgement, expressed elsewhere, is that “Ware’s role is best described not as theological development but as transmission and popularization” (see St Silouan the Athonite: Influence on Theology). That judgement is defensible, and Ware would have been unlikely to resent it; it should not, however, be allowed to obscure that his transmission was itself an act of theological judgement, exercised at very high quality over sixty years.

References

Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Oxford: A. R. Mowbray, 1979; reprinted Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986 (the edition consulted, with the pagination of the first edition); rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. (Prologue, “Signposts on the Way”; ch. 1 “God as Mystery”; ch. 3 “God as Creator”; ch. 4 “God as Man”; ch. 6 “God as Prayer.”)
Ware, Kallistos. “The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity.” Sobornost (incorporating Eastern Churches Review) 8:2 (1986), 6–23.
Ware, Kallistos. The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (Includes “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity” and “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?”, 193–215.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974; rev. ed. 1986.
Ware, Kallistos. How Are We Saved? The Understanding of Salvation in the Orthodox Tradition. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing, 1996.
Ware, Kallistos. “God Hidden and Revealed: The Apophatic Way and the Essence–Energies Distinction.” Eastern Churches Review 7 (1975).
Ware, Kallistos. “The Debate about Palamism.” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977).
Ware, Kallistos. “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.
Ware, Kallistos. “The Jesus Prayer in St Gregory of Sinai.” Eastern Churches Review 4 (1972).
Ware, Kallistos. “Foreword.” The Wheel 13/14 (Spring/Summer 2018), 6–10. (Cited here only for its statements on personhood; the contested material in the same text is treated in section 08.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Ware’s place among twentieth-century Orthodox theologians.)
Scripture: Acts 19:23; 24:22; Romans 12:1; 1 Corinthians 6:19–20; Philippians 2:5–9; 1 John 3:2; 2 Peter 1:4.