Canon Hugh Wybrew writes:
WITH the death of Metropolitan Kallistos on 24 August, a couple of weeks before his 88th birthday, the Orthodox Church has lost one of its best theologians and pastors, and Oxford a distinguished scholar and teacher.
Close contemporaries, Timothy Ware and I first met at Oxford, when I was an undergraduate and he a graduate student. He had come to Magdalen College from Westminster School, and had graduated in both classics and theology. He was then a traditionally minded Anglican. But his experience of Orthodox worship in a Russian Orthodox church in London so impressed him that, at the age of 24, he was received into the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira & Great Britain.
Timothy the layman soon became Kallistos the monk, and spent time at the monastery of St John the Theologian, on Patmos. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1966, and served in the Greek Orthodox parish of the Annunciation, in Oxford. In the same year, he was appointed Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies, in the University of Oxford, where he taught for the next 35 years. He was an excellent lecturer in the best Oxford manner, seasoning scholarship with humour, and supervised many doctoral theses. In the parish, he was appreciated as a spiritual father, and attracted converts.
While still a layman, he had published in 1963 The Orthodox Church, of which a revised edition was published in 1993. It is still regarded as one of the best introductions to Orthodoxy, and was followed by The Orthodox Way, a no less clear and concise account of Orthodox spirituality. With Mother Mary, he published English translations of liturgical texts in The Lenten Triodion and The Festal Menaion, and wrote many articles for various journals. With others, he worked for many years on an English translation of the Philokalia, of which four of the five volumes have already been published.
In 1970, he was elected a Fellow of Pembroke College, where he enjoyed Oxford’s collegiate life, and his colleagues enjoyed his wisdom and wit. He kept his connection with the college after he retired as a Fellow, preaching occasionally in chapel.
The present Chaplain, the Revd Dr Andrew Teal, has said that the students loved him, and called him Gandalf. They were particularly impressed by his emphasis on green pastoral theology on Patmos: trees planted after confession meant that it was re-forested after the devastation of the Second World War.
Dr Teal recalls this conversation with the Bishop, combining humour with spiritual direction, when he was driving him to his clinic: “K: ‘Is this a new vehicle?’ A: ‘No, it’s my old one. I love it.’ K: ‘Love it, Father?! One can only love persons. You may love your car, but your BMW does not love you!’”
Bishop Kallistos never lost a certain affection for the Anglican Church in which he had grown up. Among his many other ecumenical commitments, he was a member of the Anglican-Orthodox international theological dialogue, and, in 2017, was awarded the Lambeth Cross for Ecumenism by the Archbishop of Canterbury for his outstanding contribution to the dialogue. He was an enthusiastic member of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, founded in 1928 to foster mutual understanding between Anglicans and Orthodox, and he was a trustee of the two ecumenical houses founded by Nicholas and Militsa Zernov, the House of St Gregory and St Macrina and the House of St Theosevia.
As a senior Greek Orthodox bishop, he could on occasion stand on his dignity. But not far beneath his episcopal exterior — he was never seen in public without his monastic habit — there lurked an English Oxford don. Among the stories that he enjoyed telling, one related how he once fell asleep during a sermon, and woke up to discover that he was himself the preacher.
Metropolitan Kallistos has been a major figure not only in the Orthodox Church, but more widely in English-speaking Christianity. He has helped many to a greater understanding of the Orthodox Christian tradition, and made an important contribution to its scholarly study. He has now, as the Orthodox say, “reposed in the Lord”. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
