Assessment

A deliberately provisional weighing of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, offered less than four years after his death: what can be said now with confidence, what the contested questions are and why they are not settled here, the real limitations of the achievement, and the specific things that will have to happen before a verdict is possible.

Tradition: Orthodox (Britain; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Why This File Is Provisional

The repository’s methodology asks that a collection be honest about the confidence level of its claims, and its practice for figures still within living memory is to offer assessment as the judgment of a moment close to the events rather than as a settled conclusion (the model is St. Joseph the Hesychast, whose collection says the same of a saint glorified in 2020).

Ware died on 24 August 2022. Four things follow.

The witnesses are alive. His students, colleagues, parishioners, fellow translators, and the clergy who attacked his 2018 foreword are almost all living. Their testimony has not been collected, sifted, or weighed against itself.

The primary sources are still arriving. Reminiscences and Recollections — assembled from sessions Dimitri Conomos recorded with him between 2011 and 2016 — appeared only in 2025 (SVS Press). It has not been examined for this collection. Any assessment written before that book has been absorbed is an assessment written without the subject’s own retrospective testimony.

The controversies are open. The questions in Section 08 are being argued now, by people with commitments and constituencies. How the Orthodox Church eventually settles them will determine, more than anything else, whether Ware is remembered as a faithful pastor asking necessary questions or as the point at which a drift began.

The most important thing he did may be uncountable. A very large part of Ware’s actual work was bringing individuals into the Church and teaching them to pray. Nothing in the citation record captures it.

Nothing below is offered as final.

What Can Be Said With Confidence Now

Three claims seem safe against any plausible future revision.

He gave the English language an Orthodox vocabulary it did not have. Before 1963 an English speaker who wanted to understand Orthodoxy had no adequate single volume. After 1963 the standard introduction existed, and it is still in print in a third edition sixty years later. This is a fact about the language, not an evaluation of the man (see The Orthodox Church (1963)).

The translations will outlast everything else. The Faber Philokalia, the Festal Menaion and the Lenten Triodion put the Church’s ascetic and liturgical texts into English at a level of quality that has not been superseded. Books of interpretation date; service books and the Philokalia do not. If a single item of Ware’s work survives to 2200, it will be a translation (see Section 05).

His testimony about Elder Amphilochios is irreplaceable. A sober, critical Oxford academic left a firsthand portrait of a man who was glorified as a saint forty-eight years after his death. Nothing can substitute for that (see Elder Amphilochios and the Trees).

The Real Limitations

An honest assessment has to state the limitations without treating them as accusations.

He wrote no major work. Thirty-five years in an Oxford post produced a doctoral monograph (1964), two short popular books, a large body of translation, and a scattering of essays — many of them brilliant, none of them a summa. He never wrote the systematic theology, the history of Byzantine spirituality, or the study of the Turkish-era Church that the Argenti book seemed to promise. His own section of this collection puts it accurately: he “never wrote the systematic work an academic career of that length would ordinarily produce” (see The Spalding Lectureship).

He held a small institutional position and left no institutional legacy. A lectureship, not a chair; a titular see, not a diocese; a parish, not a seminary. Nothing structural in British or world Orthodoxy depends on a decision he made. Against this stands the fact that the Spalding post was, for most of his tenure, the discipline itself in Britain, and that the field grew around him.

The monastic profession sat oddly with the life. He was tonsured on Patmos in 1966 and lived the next fifty-five years in Oxford. That is a canonically ordinary situation for a hierarch and an unusual one for a monk, and it is fair to ask what monastic formation a man receives who is tonsured and then immediately posted to a university (see Tonsure at Patmos, 1966).

The irenic manner has a cost, and his critics identify it correctly even where they overstate it. A style built for explanation to outsiders will tend to soften the edges of a claim, and Patapios’s collation shows that over thirty years some edges were in fact softened in print (see The Revisions Between Editions). Whether that is accommodation or maturity is precisely what is in dispute.

The blind spots were not all on one side. Gallaher — sympathetic, not hostile — identifies a reluctance to confront nationalism and corruption in the Moscow Patriarchate, attributed to gratitude for the Russian Church’s post-Soviet recovery and to personal friendships (Gallaher, “True Man,” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022). This is worth holding beside the traditionalist charge of over-accommodation to the West, because the two criticisms point in opposite directions and cannot both be the whole story.

The Contested Questions, and Why They Are Not Settled Here

The three disputes of Section 08 — the edition revisions, the ordination question, the 2018 foreword — are not adjudicated in this collection, and the refusal is a methodological commitment rather than evasion (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

What can be said about them at this distance is limited but not nothing.

On the edition revisions: the textual differences are documented and real; Ware never publicly explained them; every account of his motives is someone else’s inference.
On the ordination question: his actual published position — not persuaded by the arguments for, no longer persuaded by the arguments against, therefore treat it as open — is more cautious than either his advocates or his critics represent it. That much is verifiable now. Whether treating the question as open was itself an error is a theological judgment this collection does not make.
On the 2018 foreword: his printed text affirms the Church’s teaching on same-sex acts and expressly declines to propose setting it aside, while naming three pastoral anomalies as questions. That much is verifiable now. Whether the questions, asked by a bishop, functioned as permissions — which is the substance of Fr John Cox’s argument — is a judgment about consequences that only time can supply.

A fourth point should be added, because it is often lost. On the question where Ware is most often accused of heterodoxy — universal salvation — his own text is the most restrained thing written on the subject in modern English Orthodoxy: “Our belief in human freedom means that we have no right to categorically affirm, ‘All must be saved.’ But our faith in God’s love makes us dare to hope that all will be saved” (Ware, “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?” in The Inner Kingdom, 2000, 215; see Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All). A man who put up a sign reading “Theologians must not proceed beyond this point” is not a man careless of limits — which makes the accusation of carelessness on other fronts harder to sustain, and correspondingly makes the fronts where he did press forward more interesting.

Two Readings of the Whole

At this distance the field divides into two coherent readings, and both are held by serious Orthodox.

The receiving reading. Ware did for the English-speaking world what Florovsky and Lossky did for the French: he made Orthodoxy sayable in a foreign tongue without deforming it. He translated the sources so that his readers would not need him. He held the Church’s exclusive claim and refused the rigorist corollary, which is the position of the Church’s own practice in receiving converts. He asked hard questions late in life, in a journal, in his own name, with the teaching stated and the questions marked as questions. Gallaher’s formula — “Orthodoxy’s first universal teacher of the global age” — is the strong form of this reading.

The critical reading. A theology built for explanation to outsiders will drift toward what outsiders can accept, and thirty years of revisions show the drift in print. An office that confers authority without responsibility — a titular bishop with a worldwide readership and no flock to answer for — is a dangerous place from which to open settled questions. And the specific fronts on which Ware opened them are exactly the fronts on which Western Christianity had already moved. Patapios’s formula — “his change of jurisdiction, combined with the passing of time… has influenced his presentation of Orthodoxy, and perhaps not always… for the better” — is the measured form of this reading.

The collection does not choose. It notes that the first reading is held by most of the Orthodox academic world and by the Ecumenical Patriarchate that appointed him; that the second is held by traditionalist Orthodox in Britain, Greece and North America and, in part, by clergy well within the canonical Churches; and that the two readings disagree about values, not about facts.

What Would Settle It

Four things, none of which has happened.

A critical reading of Reminiscences and Recollections (2025) against the published corpus, to establish what Ware himself thought he had done.
A scholarly collation of all three editions of The Orthodox Church, by someone without a stake in the outcome, replacing a partisan review-essay as the only detailed comparison available.
The resolution, or hardening, of the disputes of Section 08 by the Orthodox Churches themselves. Ware’s late questions will be read entirely differently depending on how those questions are answered.
A generation’s distance. The people currently assessing Ware mostly loved him or fought him. Neither is a vantage point.

A Closing Note on Register

One thing is worth saying that does not fit under any heading. Almost every witness, including the hostile ones, describes the same man. Patapios, mid-critique, calls him “a Christian gentleman of the highest caliber.” The Anglican–Orthodox commission recorded that he served “with outstanding theological wisdom and with great joy and humor.” The OCA called him “a beloved spiritual father.” His own account of Elder Amphilochios — gentleness, humor, warmth, “tranquil yet triumphant joy” — is the description his own students give of him.

That convergence is not an argument about any contested question, and it should not be used as one. But it is a fact about the man, it is unusually well attested for a modern figure, and an assessment that omitted it would be less accurate than one that includes it.

References

Ware, Kallistos. “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All? Origen, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Isaac the Syrian.” In The Inner Kingdom. Collected Works, vol. 1. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, 193–215.
Ware, Kallistos. Reminiscences and Recollections. Ed. Dimitri Conomos, Graham Speake and Walker Thompson. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2025.
Gallaher, Brandon. “True Man: Kallistos of Oxford as Orthodoxy’s First Universal Teacher of the Global Age.” Public Orthodoxy, 6 September 2022.
Patapios, Hieromonk. “A Traditionalist Critique of The Orthodox Church.” Orthodox Tradition XVI, no. 1, 39–72.
Cox, John, Fr. “Anatomy of a Foreword: Metr. Kallistos on Sexual Morality.” Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Ancient Faith Blogs, 16 June 2018.
International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. Statement following the death of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, 26 August 2022.
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia,” 2022.
Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos. “The Spiritual Guide in Orthodox Christianity.” In The Inner Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The description of Amphilochios that his own students apply to him.)