The Revisions Between Editions

Between the 1963 and 1993 texts of The Orthodox Church, Ware changed a number of substantive historical and theological judgments — on the sack of Constantinople in 1204, on the Union of Brest, on the filioque, on Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy and the 1927 declaration, and on Mount Athos. The changes were collated in detail by a hostile Orthodox reviewer, Hieromonk Patapios, whose seventy-page critique is the principal published evidence for what actually differs between the editions. This file reports the documented differences and both readings of them, and adjudicates neither.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Source of the Comparison

The only detailed published collation of the two editions located for this file is Hieromonk Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church,” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72, a long review-essay written from the standpoint of the Greek Old Calendarist movement (its author writes as “we, as Old Calendarists” and defends “an ecclesiology of resistance and ‘walling-off’”).

Two things must be said about using it as a source, and both are said openly.

It is partisan, and it is outside the canonical Orthodox Churches. Patapios writes from a body not in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate whose bishop Ware was. His theological premises — that the heterodox have no grace in their sacraments, that ecumenical participation is per se hazardous, that the Roman see’s “very claim to Apostolic Succession” is “a dead letter” — are not the premises of the Churches to which this repository’s readers belong. Where he argues theology, the reader should weigh the argument on its merits and note its provenance.

Its collation is nonetheless usable. Patapios reads both editions side by side and cites both by page. His page-paired quotations are checkable against the printed books, and no other source consulted supplies comparable detail. This file uses him for what the two texts say and reports his evaluations as his.

He is also, notably, not a wholesale opponent. He opens by saying he is “grateful to Bishop Kallistos for having written this book,” calls him “a Christian gentleman of the highest caliber and an Orthodox scholar who has done much to make our Faith better known in the West,” notes that “we may admit that there is no better overview of the Orthodox Church than this one,” and concludes: “In spite of the foregoing comments, we are still able to recommend this book” (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique”). He also credits Ware with real improvements in the new edition, and with fairness toward the Old Calendarists and the Russian Church Abroad — “Nowhere does he call us ‘schismatics’ or ‘heretics’” — quoting Ware’s commendation of ROCOR for “preserving with loving faithfulness the ascetic, monastic and liturgical traditions of Orthodox Russia,” a spirituality “of which western Orthodoxy stands greatly in need” (1993, 177, as quoted by Patapios).

The States of the Text

1963 — first edition, Pelican/Penguin; reprinted with revisions in 1964, and thereafter numerous times with minor revisions.
1993 — a “brand new edition” (Patapios’s phrase), Penguin, with an expanded and updated bibliography.
2015 — third revised edition, Penguin. No detailed published comparison of 1993 with 2015 was located; see the note in The Orthodox Church (1963).

The Documented Changes

Improvements Patapios credits

Three additions in 1993 he calls “very welcome”: the mention of the newly glorified St Nicholas Planas of Athens in the section on the Church of Greece; a discussion of the Ustaše atrocities against the Serbs in the Second World War, absent from 1963; and the placing of St Nikodemos the Hagiorite in the context of the Kollyvades fathers, which the earlier edition had failed to do (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique”). He also notes that a claim about St Epiphanius tearing down a curtain bearing an image of Christ — which he regards as spurious — was deleted in 1993.

1204: material dropped

The 1993 text retains “three appalling days of pillage” (1963, 69; 1993, 60) but drops the 1963 references to “the wanton and systematic sacrilege of the Crusaders,” to the prostitutes placed on the Patriarch’s throne in Hagia Sophia, and to Ware’s own rhetorical question, “Can we wonder if the Greeks after 1204 also looked on the Latins as profani?” (1963, 69) (Patapios, “A Traditionalist Critique”; see The Great Schism).

Patapios speculates that Ware “wished to avoid causing offense to non-Orthodox readers… with the thought that such unpleasant recollections might not serve the cause of rapprochement,” and answers: “would this cause not, in the end, be better served by an honest admission of past injustices?” Ware gives no stated reason for the excision; the reasoning is Patapios’s inference and is reported as such.

The Union of Brest: the largest single change

This is the change Patapios treats at greatest length. In 1963 Ware wrote that the Orthodox bishops in Poland-Lithuania under Catholic kings “were usually courtiers wholly lacking in spiritual qualities and incapable of providing any inspiring leadership” (1963, 104), described secret Jesuit negotiations with them, recorded that the Orthodox who resisted were “severely persecuted” (1963, 105), and summarized: “The tale of the Uniate movement in Poland makes sorrowful reading: the Jesuits began by using deceit, and ended by resorting to violence” (1963, 105).

In 1993, per Patapios: the courtier-bishops are “sometimes” rather than “usually” lacking in spiritual qualities; the Jesuit negotiations are no longer mentioned; and Ware instead writes that “a Romeward movement developed among the eastern Christians of the Ukraine towards the end of the sixteenth century” (1993, 95). The repression of the Orthodox is still acknowledged but not detailed. Patapios’s verdict — “the revised version is truly a capitulation to Roman Catholic propaganda” — is his own and is not adopted here; the textual difference he reports is the substantive point.

The filioque: “hawks” and “doves”

In 1963 Ware set out the Orthodox objection directly: the double procession “confuses the persons, and destroys the proper balance between unity and diversity in the Godhead,” and the resulting subordination of the Spirit means that in the West “the Church has come to be regarded too much as an institution of this world, governed in terms of earthly power and jurisdiction” (1963, 222–23).

In 1993 he substantially rewrote the section, dividing Orthodox theologians into “hawks” — those who follow St Photios and St Mark of Ephesus “in regarding the doctrine of the Double Procession as a heresy that produces a fatal distortion in the western doctrine of God as Trinity” (1993, 213), with Lossky named as a leading modern example — and “doves,” who regard it as a theologoumenon “capable of being interpreted in an Orthodox way” (1993, 213) while deploring Rome’s unilateral insertion.

Patapios makes two objections: that the political metaphor is unsuitable for a doctrinal question, and that Ware, while not formally aligning himself, presents the position of his own first edition as the “hawkish” one and thereby distances himself from it — “Perhaps he, too, was a ‘hawk’ in his younger days, but has now become more irenic in his views.” He also disputes on historical grounds the “dovish” claim, reported by Ware, that “It is only in this century that Orthodox writers have seen such a close link between the doctrine of the Double Procession and the doctrine of the Church” (1993, 216), citing Palamas’s First Apodictic Discourse against it (see Filioque and St. Gregory Palamas).

Metropolitan Peter and the 1927 declaration

In 1963 Ware stated that Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsy was “chief among the opponents of the 1927 declaration” of Metropolitan Sergius and refused to accept it to the end of his life (1963, 163). In 1993 the same passage reads: “it was rumored that even the Patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Peter, was opposed to the 1927 declaration, but it is impossible to be sure of this” (1993, 154).

Patapios asks what new evidence produced the change and does not know. He nonetheless credits Ware with retaining the substance of the anti-Sergianist judgment, quoting from the 1993 text: “what saved the Church was not the leadership of Sergius, but an historical accident — the war — and also, more fundamentally, the faithful endurance of the believing Russian people” (1993, 156) (see The New Martyrs of Russia).

Athos, and other updatings

The 1963 edition was pessimistic about the future of Mount Athos, then inhabited largely by a small and aging population; the 1993 edition records the monastic revival from the 1970s and speaks of a “springtime,” naming the abbots who led it. Patapios accepts the substance while arguing that the picture is incomplete (see Mount Athos).

Terminology

Two terminological changes Patapios treats as ideological: chapter 11, “God and Man” in 1963, becomes “God and Humankind” in 1993; and the “Monophysites” and “Nestorians” of 1963 become the “Non-Chalcedonians” and “the Church of the East.” Ware’s reasons are not stated in the text. The second change tracks a general shift in scholarly usage during the same three decades and is now standard in academic writing; the first tracks a general shift in English-language usage. Whether either shift is ideological, and whether that would be a fault, is exactly the question at issue between Ware and his critic, and it is left open here.

The Two Readings (§4.2)

The critical reading. Ware’s judgments moved in a consistently irenic direction on precisely those points where Orthodox history bears hardest on Rome and the West — 1204, the Unia, the filioque — and the movement tracks his growing ecumenical involvement and his change of ecclesiastical position. Patapios states this explicitly: “These flaws in many instances parallel his change in ecclesiastical allegiance.” His aggravating circumstance is Ware’s office: “he is a Bishop, and as such he has a grave responsibility not only to uphold, but also to teach, the Orthodox Faith,” and a scholar “whose writings command great prestige… should, therefore, exercise the utmost caution in presenting his views on any given topic.”

The defending reading. A scholar who revises a book after thirty years is doing what scholars are supposed to do, and Patapios concedes the principle twice: “It goes without saying that Bishop Kallistos is perfectly entitled to amend his own work as he sees fit” and “he is perfectly free to make whatever changes he wishes in the light of further reading and reflection.” Several of the changes are straightforwardly better history — the Kollyvades context for Nikodemos, the deletion of the Epiphanius story, the addition of the Ustaše. The filioque rewriting reports an actual division among Orthodox theologians that had become impossible to ignore by 1993, and reporting it is not the same as endorsing the “dovish” side. And the changed treatment of Metropolitan Peter is a retreat into agnosticism about a disputed point of Soviet-era history, which is the direction that better documentation usually pushes a careful historian.

What is not in dispute. The differences between the texts are real and are documented by page. No source consulted alleges that Ware misrepresented the Church’s dogma in either edition, and Patapios does not allege it; his charge is one of emphasis, omission, and tone. And whatever the merits, an intra-Orthodox argument conducted between an Ecumenical Patriarchate bishop and an Old Calendarist hieromonk is not a neutral adjudication of the record.

The collection takes no position. It records that the 1963 and 1993 texts differ substantively at the points named; that Ware never publicly explained the changes in any source located here; and that the question of what the changes mean is contested.

[Disputed: Ware's reasons for each revision. No statement by Ware explaining the specific changes between the 1963 and 1993 editions was located. All explanations offered in the literature — including every explanation in Patapios's critique — are inferences by others.]

References

Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Pelican/Penguin, 1963 (reprinted with revisions 1964); new edition, Penguin, 1993; third revised edition, Penguin, 2015. (All page-paired quotations below are as reproduced in Patapios.)
Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72. (The collation of the two editions; all evaluative judgments attributed to him are his.)
Gregory Palamas, St. First Apodictic Discourse on the Procession of the Holy Spirit. (Cited by Patapios against Ware’s report of the “dovish” position.)
McGuckin, John. St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. (Cited by Patapios on Ware’s treatment of St Cyril, which is unchanged between editions.)