Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. A personal note

I first met Father Kallistos, as he then was, in Oxford. That he was a priest at all was something of an achievement, since he’d been told on his reception into the Orthodox Church that there was no prospect of ordination. I had gone up to read Russian and German, but since both my wife and I were in the Army, there was no possibility for me to go to spend a term in Soviet Russia, as the other undergraduates did. I had heard that there was a Russian parish and we investigated it in the hope of making friends with Russian speakers. There were only two problems with this plan. The first was that the Russians were all aristocratic emigres and scholars, so they spoke English better than I did. The second was that the Russian parish shared premises with a Greek parish and the first Sunday we attended the service happened to be in Greek. The priest who served both parishes was Kallistos.

We became interested in Orthodoxy and Father Kallistos agreed to instruct us. This would normally have taken about a year, but because it was likely that I’d be posted abroad after Finals, he very generously sacrificed much of his time so that we could be received into the Church and parish life in good time.

One of my earliest memories of him was at Vespers, one Saturday evening. The next day was to be a Greek Sunday, but for some reason there was no choir. Father Kallistos therefore had to read the troparia himself. Since there were no Greeks present, he sang in English (not in one of the eight modes, but what he himself called the ‘ninth noise’). It was ever so slightly less fluent that one would have expected, but then I realized that he was providing a simultaneous translation. This is a formidable task. The view of translators is that interpreters simply say the first thing that comes into their head; they, on the other hand claim that we’re pedantic and spend too much time making distinctions where there are no differences. It’s very rare to come across anyone who can perform both tasks, especially if they’re not naturally bi-lingual, but Kallistos managed it.

He was, of course, a brilliant mind and a formidable scholar. The two things don’t necessarily go together. He obtained a double first in Classics and also read theology. By natural progression he was appointed to a Readership and then elected a Fellow of Pembroke College. Of which more later.

He then began his double life, though in fact it was one. On the one hand he was a very devout Orthodox Christian. His writings and his devotion to the translation of Patristic and other texts make this abundantly clear. But he was also a very urbane Oxford don, a man entirely at home in the Senior Common Room. He wore his learning lightly, but could always be relied on for sound advice. I was once asked to translate a book by a Greek hierarch whom I didn’t know, so I got in touch with Bishop Kallistos, as he’d become in the interim, and his opinion was: ‘I suspect there’ll be a lot of knowledge, but not much wisdom’. This was said without any animus whatsoever; he was simply being honest. On another occasion, I was translating a text and had a strong feeling that the author was under constraint to reflect the views of his -very exalted- superior. ‘Ah yes,’ said Kallistos, ‘the hand is Esau’s but the voice is Jacob’s’.

But the most enduring memories my wife and I have of him are to do with the fact that he was such good company. Of course, he could command the attention of a room when he was lecturing or giving a talk, but when he relaxed in a more intimate setting he was utterly charming. After we moved to a village, now a suburb, outside Thessaloniki, he would occasionally come and stay with us on his way to Mount Athos or to a speaking engagement. It was always a delight. On one occasion he arrived when the wisteria on the balcony was in full leaf and declared: ‘How very bosky’. Ever a man for le mot juste.

He also had a fund of appalling jokes, one of which he told at dinner one evening. It involved a Greek tailor who was visited by another Greek who had a pair of torn trousers. The tailor said ‘Euripides?’. The man replied ‘Eumenides?’. At which point he gazed sheepishly at his plate and said: ‘Oh dear, I suppose I shan’t be invited back’. On the same occasion, what he called the ‘refreshments’ had been flowing freely and, at the end of the meal, we brought in the cheese board. ‘Oh, good’, he said, ‘blotting paper’.

He will be remembered for a variety of reasons: his scholarship, his administrative skills in chairing the committees and boards of certain institutions with which he was associated and for his pastoral efforts as priest and confessor. But always with fondness. Not for nothing was he often referred to as ‘Special K’.

His last days were spent at home. He was very quiet and in some pain which was relieved by medication, though this took its toll in other ways. Then, on Tuesday 23 August, he had an unexpected visitor who made him smile for the first time in a while: his old friend and former student from Pembroke, Metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeyev) of Budapest and Hungary, whose doctoral thesis Kallistos had supervised.  (Metropolitan Ilarion had obtained a visa at short notice, but had there been any difficulty he could, one imagines, have appealed to the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, another alumnus of Pembroke!). They spoke for a while and Metropolitan Ilarion read to him. And then, in his room, Metropolitan Ilarion celebrated the Divine Liturgy and Metropolitan Kallistos received Holy Communion. He departed this life at one o’clock on the morning of August 24. May he rest with the saints and may he be kept in eternal memory.

He explicitly did not want to be buried in London, because as he said he was an Oxford man. On August 31, his body will be taken to the Russian parish church of Saint Nicholas where a panikhida will be sung, while on the next day, September 1, a memorial service will take place in the Greek parish church of the Holy Trinity. Because neither of these churches can hold anything like the numbers of people who will be attending, the funeral service will be held in the Oratory church of Saint Aloysius, whose incumbent, the Very Reverend Nicholas Edmonds-Smith, has always been on good terms with the Orthodox community. Plans are being made to stream the service live, and if they come to fruition we will publish the details on Pemptousia.